Slashdot Mirror
2006 Software War Map between FOSS and Microsoft
Ant writes "Neatorama mentions Steven Hilton's Software War Map that depicts "the epic struggle of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) against the Empire of Microsoft. It was updated in 2006."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I love that this is presented as a serious piece of news!
This belongs on webcomic or something.
"I'm not religious, but at the same time I don't get why science always has to have something to prove."
It seems to be missing some things. Surely some of the Companies shown fighting MS are also fighting each other? And who says it's a war anyway? Some things are just good ideas, and lots of folks are going to come up with variations. Does that always mean a battle? It seems silly to me, rather than informative.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
...from the lower left corner what with filing Chapter 11 and all. Such a pity...
The Army reading list
What happened to the in-fighting between KDE and GNOME? It was included in the old version.
...against Microsoft. Look at the names: Apple, Novell, HP, Sun, SGI, IBM -- various combinations of these guys have bumped heads a few times also. And, not all of those names are exaclty pro-FOSS either, maybe they are just anti-M$.
since when are companies like apple and google considered FOSS?
So why are they on that map?
One thing that this map conveys, is that Microsoft, as a company, has its products and markets all over the place, it is just not focused on doing one thing well. It is competing against dozens of other companies that are working on only the piece of the business that they want and are ultimately making their products better than Microsoft.
If you throw in some other stuff, like the entertainment division with the XBOX-360, you can add another 2 big competitors in Nintendo and Sony.
Also notice that some of Microsoft's competitors may compete against each other, but their focus is entirely on Microsoft, they cannot get a break anywhere. Though this really their own fault for not focusing only a few markets.
Java is encumbered by patents. The Linux kernel is violating patents. Openoffice and Mozilla is violating patents. Microsoft Windows XP is violating patents. OpenBSD is violating patents.
WTF do you think free software people are freaked out about it? BECAUSE YOU CAN NOT NOT AVOID PATENTS.
Mono is actually using patents legally, at least as far as known patent issues are involved.
Mono is definately on the side of Free software. It's Free software through and through.
It's a hell of a lot better then Java, which is patent encumbered AND is propriatory (well of course Sun has it's shitastic see-but-don't-use licensing BS).
Does that help?
So much for brevity. Mono allows a lot of things to run on Free software platforms. You chose to ignore this in favour of a vague appeal to untested patent problems. Many people would see this as bias masquerading as insightfulness.
Also, you're kinda defensive.
Be true and faithful like your dog; but don't eat vomit like your dog
It seems to be missing some things.
Yes, the war includes all kinds of media and it's creators. Programmers have been joined by all kinds of artists and creators. There's a free media revolution going on. The incumbents have shown their hand and it stinks.
And who says it's a war anyway?
Microsoft and big publishers say it's a war. The goal is TV and Radio broadcast style control of all media. They will sue you in your home (RIAA), at your business (SCO), and at your kid's school (BSA). They don't really care what you do, but they will try their best to have you do as they say.
The goal is to take your money without your consent for any information exchange. You will pay for a M$ license each time you buy a computer. You will pay per minute or byte of conversation on any electronic device, per play of your music, movies novels and textbooks. Your taxes will pay to encoded your information into secret formats and pay again to retrieve it. The new media, paradoxally, will be more expensive and restricted than it's analog and physical predecessors. All of these intentions have been openly declared and loudly demanded by all of the bad actors.
If that's not a declaration of war, I'm not sure what is. The less you know and care, the easier it will be for them to make the world as they wish.
The world does not have to be that way. People do not mind sharing if it cost them nothing and brings greater returns. Excellence thrives in competition and everyone prospers. Success stories are the whole free software movement, which has obliterated the need for non free, and free media: archive.org and creative commons instead of the big three music publishers; YouTube instead of TV; VOIP instead of Telco; Wikipedia instead of expensive paper publications. The economics of electronic data exchange doom the monopoly publishers unless they pass truly unAmerican laws. Fight the bastards by not giving your money to those who would enslave you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Mono on the wrong side of the fence? ... I mean, isn't Mono just an implementation of a MS technology that's already encumbered by many patents?
It's more of a damaged weapon than anything else. Use it if you can and fight to keep it. It might be loose, but you can't just surrender everything that's challenged. The whole point of free software is to be able to use your computer as you see fit. That includes running whatever code you want for whatever purpose you have. I don't have any use for Mono, but others might and I'm glad someone is working on interoperability.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Mono allows very few things to run on free software platforms that were not expressly written for Mono, brings nothing not already available with Java or Python and hands direction of technical policy to Microsoft.
Nevertheless, Mono is as lazy and blatant a rip-off of chunks of Dotnet as it is possible to contrive, so if Microsoft choose to make use of the large number of patent lawyers they have hired recently I think it's possible to guess what might be an open goal for them.
You can choose to ignore this etc. etc.
The good pragmatic folk of the real world will continue to use the tools best suited for the task at hand.
It would be nice if that could be the case. Unfortunately it is not possible as long as a company wields as much monopoly and market leveraging power as Microsoft does in the software space. At the moment, otherwise pragmatic people find themselves in situations where due to the various systems of lock-ins and anticompetitive actions Microsoft has assembled, they absolutely must use Microsoft products whether they are the tool best suited for the task at hand or not.
The rest find themselves at the end of the unemployment line.
Another good way to find yourself in such a position is to work for a company which competes against Microsoft.
Don't work for a company that competes against Microsoft?
You mean you don't yet. Microsoft enters every market eventually, so long as it has something (anything) to do with ones and zeroes. It's only a matter of time...
I'm a little disappointed. What I was hoping to see was an actual look at some of the roadmaps of various F/OSS projects, and to compare that with the timelines for various Microsoft projects. Perhaps as a point of interest it could also include the roadmaps from other companies.
I actually think it would be pretty interesting if someone did this - maybe once every 6 months or so- and kept track of it over a several year period. I think it would give a lot of insight into the complicated dynamics of the relationship between open and proprietary software, between Microsoft and some of the big Linux distributions, and between Microsoft and Everyone Else.
It would at least help to settle the question of who rips the most off of whom.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Here in America, we have been gradually increasing the slavery quotient from a few percent at the turn of the century, to about 50% today. (Estimate based on middle class wage slave paying 50% taxes. Add 'em up - 15% SS [employee+employer], 15% federal, 5% state, 5% state sales tax, 5% real estate tax, 5% utilities+gasoline+medicare+whatever else they can get away with.)
Once you are used to someone making decisions for you, it is scary to go back to making your own decisions. For example, we just switched from HMO to HSA health insurance. Before, the HMO told us when we could and couldn't go to the doctor (and have them pay for it). We could do the same thing with HSA by maxing out the deductible, but now we have the option of saving the money instead. Seems like a no brainer, but is scary nonetheless.
No, he's pretty squarely in our reality, only it's our information that's in the process of being enslaved. If you were to take a good, hard look at the caliber of the people that run the media companies and their proxy organizations, you'd realize that what he is saying is precisely what they are trying to achieve. That they've not fully succeeded yet doesn't make their intentions any less of a concern. Actually, it makes them unenlightened capitalists, in my book, because they have absolutely no concern whatsoever for anyone or anything outside of the revenue stream. And, towards the end of maintaining that flow, they will do anything to anyone, buy any Congressperson they can lay bills on, pass any law that suits them, cause any degree of economic dislocation, as long as they own the distribution channels. Like all successful coups, it will happen because the majority are simply unaware of what is happening: all they'll notice is that "gee, it sure seems like I can't do as much with my computer and entertainment equipment as I used to, even though it's shiny and looks really high-tech and all" and will long for the good old days. Then, after some period of time, even that dim memory will fade and nobody will care because, so far as they can remember, it has always been that way. That's what these people want, total control over our media and usage habits, and total acceptance of that control. It'll take some time, but today's technology permits a level of remote authority that did not exist twenty-odd years ago when Sony was fighting the MPAA to keep the VCR legal.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Almost. The correct way it was said is as the following quote:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in courts, we shall fight on the Web and Usenet, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in cyberspace, we shall defend our Imperium, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the portable, we shall fight on the games boxes, we shall fight on the desktops and on the handhelds, we shall fight in the media; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Imperium or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our bought senators, armed and guarded by the BSA would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World Order, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
of reasons why visual studios is a better IDE than eclipse.
.NET languages, embedded development for pocket pc and windows CE. You can even use it to debug the javascripts running in freaking internet explorer. There's also a ton of other development tools that can plug into it.
>That said, I find two big advantages to VS2005: its learning curve is a lot less steep
>(remember the first time you actually tried to run your program in Eclipse?), and its GUI (WinForms)
>editor is very simple+powerful (as long as you don't want to dig too much inside the
>code it generates).
but here's the main reason visual studios outclasses eclipse. Visual studios provides uniformly good support for whatever programming needs you have over an entire operating system. Visual studios supports C++, all the
Visual Studios is an IDE in the sense that it integrates *all* of your development environments. Eclipse has excelent java support, and plugins for other languages that *may* *someday* evolve to the point where people will jump ship. However, right now they just aren't in the same class as visual studios.
In short, Eclipse is a wellcrafted program for you java development needs, but VS is a titanic beast of an IDE for everything else.
iTunes, iPod and MacOSX are FOSS? Where do I download the source? I also missed HPUX being FOSS. I didn't like Opera was GLPed either...
They overlooked computer games, and games are the MAIN reason to buy Microsoft OS.
Linux / Apple / Solaris, etc don't have much vs windows in the games department, and, even if they did, there's still a 15 year legacy of windows/dos game supremacy, and alot of those games still WORK with newer MS OS.
The funny/sad thing is that microsoft operating system "game supremacy" (in terms of overall game availability) has been evident for a very long time, yet none of the other operating system developers have done anything (with their knowledge of that fact) to boost their own OS sales. (unless i'm mistaken?) They could have opened game houses of their own, for instance.
Anyhow, it's silly to look at Microsoft as the enemy even if you don't like their prices or their policies. Like em or not, microsoft made a good, reliable operating system, and they maintained it, (unlike amiga, or next or be-os or any of the dead os's), and grew it over the years. You might complain about bloat, or pricing, or historical policies / unfair competition, but they've done alot of good things, and I believe that the fact MS is still around is GOOD for us, even if we don't use their OS. (which I DO use)
At least I can play Half Life 2 and WarCraft3 on Windows. Those are nice games, and there's no linux equivalent. Kill MS? Can you linux zealots spell "Don't shoot yourself in the foot"? Kill MS and you can't play half life.
Microsoft is large, it contains multitudes. =)
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer