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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."
what exactly is Microsoft(TM) the microsoft of?
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.
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
Perhaps not... but once upon a time, Microsoft did sell its own variant of Unix.
#include ".signature"
And then old Bill will stand up. He'll look at all the Linux distributions spread out before him, he'll take out his wallet, and he'll say "Say, who would like be an exclusive parter with Microsoft?". And Linspire's hand will shoot up, waving back and forth wildly.
Linspire will still be a separate company -- well, a wholly owned subsidiary of MS. That will be the case just to keep that nasty GPL and FOSS legal stuff sandboxed away from all the proprietary code MS will still develop. MS will release the Linspire AD connector, and you won't see any code for that, I tell you what. Next we'll see Linspire Server. Then we'll see MS Office for Linspire (not Linux, just Linspire). And there'll be DRM and Trusted Computing added to Linspire in just the right places and just the right ways to make it illegal to reverse engineer (or even look at).
Windows is dead. Long live Windows!
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
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.
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.