Slashdot Mirror
There Is No 'Microsoft of Linux'?
SDenmark writes "Linux Format has an interview with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, the director of Linux and OSS marketing at Novell. Asked if any company can become the 'Microsoft of Linux', Greg responds "Well, if we ever woke up one day and said 'Wow, Novell is the Microsoft of Linux' or 'Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux', then the Linux movement would be over." Is he right -- is the open source world free from such possibilities? Greg also discusses the internal Novell migration to Linux."
I'd say that it depends on the definition of "Microsoft" in the context of "The Microsoft of Linux". The answer is yes and no, depending on what's being asked.
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
Well, it depends what you mean by "Microsoft of Linux".
:: Microsoft:bar
Essentially, the problem with this is its an analogy with too many unspecified terms
foo:Linux
There is no way to know what "the Microsoft of Linux" is supposed to mean.
Asked if any company can become the 'Microsoft of Linux', Greg responds "Well, if we ever woke up one day and said 'Wow, Novell is the Microsoft of Linux' or 'Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux', then the Linux movement would be over." Is he right -- is the open source world free from such possibilities?
Linux is only a subset of what open source has to offer. There's much more to open-source than Linux. A pedantic note, maybe, but I'm tired of the "open source = linux" thinking that pervades the business realm and even leaks over into the IT realm.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
A linux company can certainly become huge, like Microsoft. But they'll never get the same level of control. One vendor can remain far ahead of the rest on features and support, but a competitor can easily appear with a completely compatible product.
The only issue would be for proprietary software sold on top of Linux. That would hinder competition. But there will probably never be a proprietary killer app only distributed by one linux vendor on their own distro. And even if there was competitors today will be quick to create a similar application. Today it's not like the environment Microsoft grew up in.
Developers: We can use your help.
If any company starts making enough money by selling Linux distributions, that's not an indication that the movement is "over." It's an indication that the movement is "complete."
By calling somebody "the Microsoft of Linux", perhaps they mean that one vendor is dominant enough to dictate industry standard practices, such as it once seemed would be the case with the Red Hat package manager. While it would certainly be possible for somebody to come along and push things in a certain direction, standards-breaking usually works against your best interests.
Besides, the Linux desktop revolution is pretty much over anyway, isn't it? The vast majority of those who want a *nixy desktop can just buy a Mac these days. There will still be a large cult of die-hards runing Gentoo as their day-in and day-out personal workstation OS, just as there were those in the late 90's who would cling for dear life to their OS/2 and Amiga boxen, but it seems like it's been a couple years since there has been any real appearance of growing momentum behind putting Linux on everybody's desk.
Linux these days is an incredibly well-respected enterprise OS... to the point that it has driven several "real" POSIX-compliant Unices out of existance. But as a desktop solution, it never really advanced beyond the playgrounds of serious geeks, and it doesn't really look to me like it ever will.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Really, because I tend to think of IBM as the Microsoft of Linux. Or maybe the McDonalds of Linux. In any event, they've got the problem solved: There's not much money to be made in putting together a distro. On the other hand, they're raking it in on hardware and services.
Not to point a finger at RedHat... Hell, why not... Anyway I felt RedHat was moving to a point where I felt it was pulling too many proprietary stunts (the updater, the "enterprise" crap, the fragmenting with Fedora, etc) so I switched to Debian. [Disclaimer: this is not a denouncement of RedHat, this was my personal choice, RedHat is still cool, but my leanings are to Debian right now]
I don't know when or how, but if Debian ever starts to lose the balance I like, I'll just switch to Gentoo, or something. Or my own distro, or whatever.
It's not like we're literally going to wake up one day to find that the Kerel has been made proprietary and all the software we use will suddenly become closed source.
Microsoft of Linux as an analogy does not work.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
It's not going to happen. Microsoft manages to keep its position by keeping the barriers to entry high through a bunch of approaches: aggressive marketing, bundling, tying, loss leaders, proprietary formats and APIs, and monopolistic practices.
Open source is about keeping barriers to entry low. If a Linux company had 90% of the market, it would be because 90% of the market actually chose them freely, and they'd only keep that market share as long as they did a good job because anybody can take the system, fork it, and compete.
(I know that Microsoft advocates often argue that people chose Microsoft freely, too, but it's clear that that's not the whole truth. The great majority of their users probably doesn't have a choice, either because they don't know anything else, or because they are locked in in some way.)
The fact of the matter is that Linux is already spread too thin for something like this to happen. Most people who use Linux are pretty much computer geeks. Not many Joe Smiths use Linux. As of right now, Novell and RedHat are big players in the industry. But there are so many popular distrobutions such as Ubuntu or Mepis that are run by a small group of individuals and there usage is just as high.
Even if we assume that Linux did hit it big and average people began adopting it; because it's open source, there isn't a whole lot that a company could do to really come on top that another company or individual couldn't mimick by looking at the source. And with things like the Portland project keeping these top distrobutions compatible, choosing a distrobution will remain a personal choice of the user and not a decision based upon a single central company. In a sense, the OS market would be like the desktop hardware market. You have Dell, Emachines, HP and there isn't one company that has 90% market share on the desktop market such as MS does in the OS arena. Novell, RedHat and others will eventually find a balance and attract their own audience of users.
Right... and Apple was never going to switch to Intel...
There's no money on the desktop. Despite all the talk here of how onerous the "MS Tax" is, the size of their market allows them to undercut their competitors.
RedHat (and SuSE) are both focusing on enterprise deployments in traditional Unix shops, which is smart because they can charge a lot of money and still come out as the cheap option. The companies that focus on desktop Linux end up burning through their capital and becoming one sacraficial lamb after another. (Yes this will happen to Ubuntu eventually as well.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Microsoft is the microsoft of software, obviously. What does it mean to be the "microsoft" of something, though? I think it means to provide a very specific service: hiding complexity. I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's analysis of what the Windows startup routine looks like to the user, as against that of Linux. If you're used to a blue screen that says "Here comes Windows! Aren't you happy?" then the screen output while Linux starts up is going to look broken.
What would it mean to hide the complexity of Linux? Ubuntu, Linspire, et. al. sorta do this, but note:
Hidden Linux is not Linux. It's very nature is to be transparent. Linspire and Ubuntu are still Linuces b/c it is still possible to get in there and fiddle with the code. What they hide (or rather, de-emphasize) is simply the 'invitation' to come in and fiddle.
So if being-microsoft means "making it easy to do the lowest-common-denominator things with software" then there will be one of those for Linux.
But if it means "achieving the above by limiting what the user can do, and what she can modify" there cannot be one.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Not true at all.
Linux is a kernel. There's absolutely nothing stopping a large company from putting a proprietary desktop on top, maybe an active directory server, some nice business friendly stuff and selling it as a specific version. Other distributions would either have to (a) ship the proprietary binaries, or (b) try to copy them (quite a difficult task - look at how long samba has been going and it still has issues).
There isn't now but if a huge concern like dell just stopped farting around and just picked a distro and made dang sure that the printers they bundled or offered for it worked and the monitors were adjusted correctly and the video and sound cards worked out of the box correctly, etc on Linux, that particular distro would start to become the really big dog. I know I would be tempted to get a bundle at a reasonable cost whenever I went to upgrade if the thing worked 100% out of the box, no tweaking needed, and was in the low cost affordable range, to support the notion.
If the games makers saw that dell was serious you would see a lot more linux ports. If the other peripheral vendors saw that Dell was serious you would see drivers that actually worked for most add on doo dads, and etc.
You would have to see them on the shelves right next to similar versions with windows at a *lower* price. They would have to have them prominently displayed on their website, and be more than two token models.
Something like that would work. Waiting for the community to elect a distro "winner" will never ever happen,it just won't, the vast majority of people out in the real world will always just use whatever OS comes pre installed for them whether they purchase it themselves or get it as a gift or get it assigned at work. that's just how it goes now.. And I dare anyone to dispute that assertion.
So, it really is up to the big vendors now. They need to make an executive decision on the matter. And linux being linux I actually don't care which distro they pick, I have come to the conclusion there isn't a whole hell of a lot of differences out there now. You can pick any of the top ten or 20 currently running distro favs and make them work. The differences have gotten to the point that it is minor now.
In short, there will never be a "Microsoft of Linux" because the two ideas aren't even comparable. Microsoft is a corporation and Linux is an OS. Since Linux inherently exists in opposition to closed source software products developed by companies such as Microsoft, I don't see a comparison. Furthermore, Linux is just an OS, it's not the Open Source movement, which would only be the other possible comparison to Microsoft. That is, Microsoft is this huge international corporation with dozens of widely used closed source products. The Open Source movement is a international movement with thousands of widely used open source products. The main difference between the two is where the control of the product lies. Microsoft controls every aspect of each of their products. Open Source software control is mostly decentralized. And, if a product reaches a point where there is too much control and not enough freedom with that product, a new open product is generated. Case in point, RedHat was free, and then became commercialized. However, Fedora was the offshoot.
You need to go back to school, since when does a desktop environment have a kernel? Your desktop environment is based on Microsoft Foundation Classes, but rest assured it is an operating system. If it weren't it would need one to operate. You cannot run KDE or GNOME without an underlying OS. Window's is an operating system an overview of the windows kernel architecture proves you are confused.
Personally, I use XFCE. Faster than any windows installation I've ever seen. :-P
Back in the day, when Red Hat was just talkng about going public, I always wondered why Microsoft never did a port of MS office to the LINUX/UNIX Patform. They did it for MAC and figured they had enough R&D money to be present on every OS of the day. I even thought "MS Linux" was just around the corner. I figured Bill Gates would be everywhere to take advantage of innovation from wherever it would emerge.
Sigh....
Linux Users... Rebel Scum!
--Fan of the Evil Empire
This BS again.
"touching up" the desktop side of things isn't the point. Never really was.
This is the "Caldera Fallacy". The main problem that Linux faces against Windows is that it doesn't have all of the 3rd parties that support Windows doing the same for Linux. A prettier wifi configurator isn't going to help so long as the wifi drivers aren't there to begin with.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It depends on who you are really.
If you're a hardware manufacturer, the relevant part of Windows is the OS. If you are an app developer, you are likely only interested in the API's. These aren't particularly OS specific as evidenced by WABI, Merge and Wine.
To most end users, Windows is more like Java than the Linux kernel.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why would they use the Linux kernel when the BSD kernel has a much better license from their perspective?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Will there be a Microsoft of Linux? That depends on your point of view. Is the "MoL" the company or the distributer of software? For the prior, I can not see any company behind any Linux distribution going out to crush any other distribution just because they can or to make billions more dollars. The "distributer of software" could be split up as the "distributer of operating systems" or the "distributer of general software." The latter, there will never be a MoL as that is against open source and all it stands for. For the prior, the closest there will be to a MoL is a dominant distribution. Red Hat was there a few years ago, with as I understood it approximately 80% of the installs Red Hat. I do not know where that stands now. And that is why there can not be a MoL any more then there will be a "Microsoft of Ice Cream": No one knows what flavor the public will be hungry for next.
I'm a BBS orphan in a blogging world.
Spoken as a true GNU/RMS zealot. Linux is *not* a kernel. It was one in 1991, today it is a system, composed by a kernel and a huge lot of applications and drivers that were laboriously adapted to run around that kernel.
To all the people who think Linux is just a kernel, I say, have you ever tried to migrate a large application, let's say, from HP-UX running csh to AIX running ksh? I have and I know how hard it can be. If it were easy, then why do configure files in automake routinely top one megabyte in size? Now try to migrate every one of the 17828 packages that are available in the standard Ubuntu repositories to some other kernel. Not to mention all the device drivers that have been built in the last 15 years to get hardware to run in that kernel.
No, Linux is not a "kernel". Linux is an Operating System, composed of many different parts. One of those parts is the kernel, another is a set of device drivers, another is the user command shell, etc.
OK, sorry about the rant, I guess I have seen too many Debian user lists... Anyhow, I do agree with you when you say that "There's absolutely nothing stopping a large company from putting a proprietary desktop on to". This fact is evident when you consider that there are several different desktops that run on Linux: Kde, Gnome, WindowMaker, etc. So, why not the Microsoft desktop, with DirectX? After all, the final "X" is already there to prove it's a Unix thing!
Firstly, you could try running a version of Linux that's less than 3 years old, but as the comparison to the now 5 years old XP will be made, I'll grant you that one.
Mostly though, you should understand that compiling programs from source is simply a stupid idea in both Linux AND Windows. No one in their right mind would try to manually compile Firefox for Windows and then try to sort out dependency issues by hand - unless they specifically wanted to spend the time you obviously don't want to spend (neither do I, for the record).
In Windows, you'd download a binary installer, which contains what you need in order to run Firefox. Guess what? The exact same creature exists in Linux. For your RedHat system, it's called an RPM. No unzipping, no untarring. You install software in the exact same way that you would in Windows - either double clicking what you've downloaded, and letting the system handle it all, or you go through a control panel type applet (in Linux, this is your package manager).
You can whine about the "usual replies" all you like, but the fact is, if you can't install Firefox on any recent (last few years) Linux system, you're going out of your way to do something wrong. RPM/APT/YUM/whatever work for major software. They also work for very obscure packages only 5 people on the planet use. You *might* have to play around with source/dependencies if you're trying to run Joe Bob's Personal Fun Program, but again, guess what? Software like this exists for Windows too. Source only, and here's a how-to for compiling it, and here's how you resolve DLL requirements.
I've never seen anyone run into a "graphics lib" requirement for Firefox that hasn't been handled in the background by the package manager, unless they're a) running Gentoo, or b) trying to prove a point that "Linux is hard" by intentionally doing things the wrong way.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
> I think what you want to be is, in effect, like Switzerland - you want to be the people of unquestionable integrity.
Ahh yes. The unquestionable integrity of hidden bank accounts, tax shelters, war profiteering and Nazi gold. What a jackass.
I read every RH related comment roughly as "See what we want to do is be *exactly* like Red Hat, all the while bashing Red Hat" (e.g. "influence but not own Linux, switch to Gnome default, Burlington Coat Factory customer references" etc).
Also, I doubt there's any such public proclamation of Red Hat aspiring to be the M$ of Linux that meant "the unstoppable soul swallowing juggernaut whore goddess". They probably meant "successful". And analysts need a metaphor of success, so they don't have to think so hard.
These guys should worry about being the "Novell of Linux", whatever that is beyond a cautionary tale, But it will at least be *their* tale.