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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."
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Just wait till Vista enters the picture! Then there'll be total chaos!
Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Mono on the wrong side of the fence? I thought that it should be pictured alongside .Net trying to move into the Free Software camp (or circling around the back to take Free Softare from behind). I mean, isn't Mono just an implementation of a MS technology that's already encumbered by many patents?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I'm having trouble understanding what all the little explosians are... some make sense as software market clashes (IE v. Firefox) but others are scattered around for no apparent reason.
It also seems top be very LOTR where it's the alliance of MAC, JAVA, and GNU against Microsoft. I dont think thats the way its actually happening.
Shots: A Populist Parable
Looking at the older maps, it is curious how much space that was occupied by proprietary software got replaced with GNU based offerings.
"It seems to be missing some things."
Why isn't Visual Studio going toe-to-toe with Eclipse?
Where's VBScript vs JavaScript?
What's Web / AJAX services doing in the corner? MS has that capability, too.
What about DirectX vs OpenGL?
I'm sure it's missing quite a bit more, too.
Layne
SFU on one side and Cygwin, MSYS and Wine on the other...I think we are winning there.
The good pragmatic folk of the real world will continue to use the tools best suited for the task at hand.
The rest find themselves at the end of the unemployment line.
Why no highlights on the war against Apple, Sun or IBM? They weren't always OSS "good guys", and IMHO, still aren't. Just corporations with their own particular strategies.
So go fight your imaginary "war". Convince yourself that the next version of KDE will totally "kill micro$oft w00t we so rock" and then get all angsty and whiny when it doesn't.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
They should base arrow boldness on adoption... oh wait, that would show that IE 6 still has a majority market share. It looks like from the diagram that it is puny compared to the double defended bold line "POW" of Firefox. Dont get me wrong, I love firefox... but... To take the war analogy a bit further. If you don't have accurate intelligence then you cannot grasp the battle, cannot fight the battle, and cannot win the battle.
Perhaps you somehow missed this, but both IIS/ASP and the Windows Scripting Host (WSH) support both VBscript and Jscript out of the box. I am responsible for the website for a Califonia tribal casino, and I am developing it entirely in ASP+Jscript since we were already on IIS. It's not my first choice, but actually it has turned out to be a surprisingly competent environment - I'd certainly choose ASP long before, say, CFM.
He thought about putting that on there, but the arrow for OpenGL would be too small to see.
Seriously though, OpenGL is not making any serious competition with DirectX. Apple is nowhere in gaming, I don't know of any game consoles that use OpenGL as their primary 3D API, and Microsoft is all but dropping it (though they have provided Software OpenGL for years.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To continue the whole "battlefront" analogy, Microsoft has basically captured AJAX tech and is forcing it to work for them, while I would say open source (and Google and Yahoo) are far more on the cutting edge of expanding the AJAX boundaries.
In another very real way Ajax is working against Microsoft because it is enabling the creation of apps that are truly OS independant in a way that was not as true or as easy before. So even if Visual Studio ads a lot more AJAX support (which they are, I know they also support it today) the applications built from that may cause Microsoft desktop share to erode.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
See, I agree with about half of that, because pretty much the same arguments have been going on for centuries; I was going to say back to the birth of the printing press, until I remembered the Gnostic gospels, and even earlier Bible fragments. That tradition of the underground press has carried on through the centuries, but there have always been many reasons - sometimes things are uncommercial, sometimes things are actually bad but vanity rules, and sometimes they are suppressed by society.
Where I depart with you, however, is in your statement that the free software and free media have obliterated the need for the non-free. In the most basic sense this is true. There is no 'need' seeing as functionally equivalent software is available. However, many proprietary packages are still years ahead of the FOSS equivalents (compare OpenOffice presentation features with Keynote) - our society is not really built on 'need' but on desire and whim, waste and surplus. There is a lot wrong with that, and it is certainly a trap (work harder to buy things you don't need), but it is hardly news. I don't have a problem paying for Keynote or Delicious Library because I like them.
When you move onto art, you are into more dangerous territory. I buy a lot of small label music, and I've been involved with the underground music scene back to the 80s. I don't mean Underground as in 'MTV's alternative show' but as in bands distributing home-recorded cassettes and self-run record labels. A lot of these people are politically anti-major label. Most of them don't actually make any money out of what they are doing, but very few of them are into the idea of 'free culture', which is kind of odd. Even the cassette label people would charge about 4 times the value of a blank cassette for their music (quarter of the price of a CD or record). There was still an unspoken buy in to the capitalist idea that recorded music was something you traded.
(This may be because a lot of them are involved in home recording - if you are one-person and a home-studio there is no live performance to advertise. And T-Shirt sales were the sort of thing corporate bands do to get even more money out of their fans).
There is a lot of space between the major labels and free media. It's the space occupied by independent labels, download sites like emusic, small publishing houses, independent art galleries - the people who believe that the existing system of copyright that saw us through the C20th is actually OK - that MP3 is simply another way to sell music, not an opportunity to enforce anarchism on artists, or an opportunity to use that threat as a reason to introduce control.
The 'Economics of Electronic Data Exchange' only apply if you insist that because you CAN distribute something at zero cost, and share it with strangers, you must be allowed to. This has always struck me as a fallacy. There are many areas where we are fighting the exact same battle against technological abuse - where governments insist that because they CAN do something with technology, they must be allowed to (snooping, cluster bombs, chemical weapons, data mining). There is also the economics of production - even free culture has costs (the cost of your free time) - and for most artists, musicians and authors, those costs are eventually too high.
Finally - the idea that well-written books will be supplanted by Wikipedia is my idea of hell. I use Wikipedia regularly, and the web is my first port of call for searching for information on coding problems, but I have absolutely zero problem whatsoever with paying for a well written reference or teaching book. When I had no money, I used to use the library (cheaper than a PC and broadband).
Let's not even start on literature - Shakespeare and Dickens were hacks who wrote for pay, but I shudder to think about some of the voluntary contributions I read while doing DTP for a creative writing magazine.
Sometimes I think people get so caught up in the political and technological arguments they become far more important than the art. I can imagine some people reading this will be going - 'yes, exactly, the politics are more important than the art. Humanity must be truly free, even if all non-free art must be destroyed in the process'.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
shouldn't iTunes be a fortress by now?
- VGA card
- sound card
- network card (in WfW)
to work was a real pain in the ass....and software (and games) were for DOS... "pls. exit your Windows and start again."
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Am I too old for