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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."
There won't be a Microsoft of Linux until Microsoft decide to release a Linux distribution of their own, which is extremely unlikely to happen. Ever.
what exactly is Microsoft(TM) the microsoft of?
It's like slashdot's turned into some sort of linux site.
No Apple stories in three days
This is a tragedy!1!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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.
What exactly does "the Microsoft of ..." mean? Does it mean you own IP rights to all of your major product lines? Does it mean you are the driving force behind the look and feel of your products? Does it mean you are the only one who decides what features go into your product? Or does it simply mean you have the biggest share of your particular product?
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
It depends on what part of Microsoft you are comparing it to. If you are talking about their monopoly, probably not. However, if you are talking about their operating system loaded with a bunch of crap, ultra-slow, difficult to use, full of bugs, prone to viruses, then yes, there can definitely be a Microsoft of Linux. I think there already are a couple, but I'll leave the naming of names to others.
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.
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.)
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).
I use Ubuntu Linux on a casual basis. It's nice; 90% the apps I could want, works with 100% of my hardware; no real complaints there.
However, I believe I could sum up my feeling on this subject by outlining a common issue I run into...
A classic conversation could be something like (not reproduced exactly):
Me: "How do I get my back/forward mouse buttons to work in Firefox (like it does in Windows)?"
Friend: "Er, what distro are you running again?"
Me: "Ubuntu...whatever the latest is"
Friend: "Ah. I don't know that one too well...try editing the X-config files"
Me: "Ah, that big scary file that if you screw up renders the pretty GUI bit useless?"
Friend: "yep."
Me: "Well, never mind. I'll pass."
I mean, just give me the one control-panel for crying out loud?! As much as I appreciate the freedom that comes with linux, sometimes it's just not just not worth the hassle! Maybe I'm not l337 enough when it comes to Linux, but I happen to also like standardisation when it comes to some things; system configuration being one of them.
So there you go. Rantings of a Windows boy. Maybe one day I'll "make the switch", but not until I get my god-forsaken 5 mouse-buttons working without manually having to edit random config-files.
Apart from that, it's all dandy! Thanks for listening.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Or is it just a kernel that was inserted into an OS that already existed for years prior?
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
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.