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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!
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."
Isn't it a bit early to feature this on Slashdot?
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
Is this supposed to be news? Funny? Interesting? Engaging? If I create one and put a picture of Stallman in saint drag humping a penguin will Slashdot publish it for me?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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.
What happened to the in-fighting between KDE and GNOME? It was included in the old version.
Completely surrounded will Microsoft discover another _dark_ way of winning everything or is the giant starting to feel the weight of time as some current moves in its staff shown ....
It's not your fault that you're always wrong The weak ones are there to justify the strong
...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$.
I love how the /. crowd needs a Wikipedia link to remind us what Free and Open Source Software is. We'd all be in the dark without that!
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
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
since when are companies like apple and google considered FOSS?
Just read that over at Groklaw yesterday in Pamela's lesson on statutory defenses.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
So why are they on that map?
...with pitting Windows XP against all of the UNIces and other Network Operating Systems. I mean, HPUX really isn't tailored to end users, and Windows XP isn't a server-grade OS. Windows Server 2003 is at least marketted to servers...
I was expecting something more like the Eric Levenez's UNIX Timeline.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Looking at the older maps, it is curious how much space that was occupied by proprietary software got replaced with GNU based offerings.
... smells like victory."
(apologies to Robert Duvall & Francis Ford Coppela)
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).
I love that this is presented as a serious piece of news!
No... actually it was posted on Slashdot
Linux seems neat. Conventions like Penguincon support it. Those in the "Know" know it's better. Still, other OS's dominate. Until someone finally argues their point with the undeniable logic of guns and explosives (because guns and explosives trum everything. Duh). Now it's an OS battle in the street and Linux has a penguin's chance in Hell of surviving.
Until YOU arrive on the scene. Sure, you'd rather have the OS wars conducted peacefully via Blogs, one user at a time. But someone just took a shot at you from the iPod-controlled building across the street. And that nice bald guy in suspenders just handed you a loaded missile launcher. Screw logic. This thang is ON!
Taken from the Sluggy Freelance Grand Auto Theft Shirt
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
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.
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$oft w00t we so rock" and then get all angsty and whiny when it doesn't.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Any gains by the lunatic fringe are negated by the loss of net neutrality and also by the gains in the prevelance of DRM, "trusted computing" and Patent legislation.
FACT: OSS is doomed. For all practical intents and purposes, OSS is Dead.
Pardon my ignorance, but isn't Mono on the wrong side of the fence? ... I mean, isn't Mono just an implementation of a MS technology that's already encumbered by many patents?
It's more of a damaged weapon than anything else. Use it if you can and fight to keep it. It might be loose, but you can't just surrender everything that's challenged. The whole point of free software is to be able to use your computer as you see fit. That includes running whatever code you want for whatever purpose you have. I don't have any use for Mono, but others might and I'm glad someone is working on interoperability.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
Is it bad that that map reminds me of the last mission of Starcraft: Brood War? I mean, you play as the Zerg and start in the middle completely surrounded, and have to wipe out all of your opponents. Does that make Microsoft the Zerg? Bill Gates would be Kerrigan?!!?!
Well....the Zerg infest, assimilate, overpower, and outnumber their opponents, and are led by a single all-powerful Overmind bent on galactic domination. That sounds like Microsoft to me.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
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.
I agree with you, this is stupid. But it was Microsoft who declared this a war. So if you're going to blame someone for being stupid, at least blame the right party.
I would love to continue to use the "tools best suited for the task at hand". Unfortunately, in many cases, Microsoft has, or is trying to, drive the "tools best suited" out of the market. No FLOSS developer has ever tried to prevent me from using MS tools (in fact, many bend over backwards to provide compatibility with MS), but MS is trying to deny me the option of using any other tools, FLOSS or not.
The real war is between Microsoft and the free market, and in that war, I am solidly on the side of the free market.
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
Maybe it's just my imagination or psyche doing this:
All the OS software has those friendly icons. Tux smiles, the GNU gnu smiles, the mozilla dragon smiles, heck even the SuSE animal smiles.
The Closed source software, doesn't want to have anything to do with animals. The Windows "flag" looks kinda like a torn battleflag, the SCO tree looks like you have been drinking for a while and then looked at the tree, passport looks like it wants to invade your wallet. That's just what I noticed...
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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
[The General stands before a large electronic wall display talking to the rebel fighers]
General: "The battle station is heavily shielded and carries a firepower greater than half the fleet. It's defenses are designed around a direct large-scale assault. A small one-man coder should be able to penetrate the outer defense."
Code Leader: [stands up to ask question] "Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are programmers going to be against that?"
General: "Well, the Empire doesn't consider small one-man coders to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense. An analysis of the plans provided by Steven Hilton has demonstrated a weakness in the station."
General: [Tux makes penguin sounds. The computer display starts as the General keeps talking] "The approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver your packets straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two kilobytes wide. It's a UDP port, right below the TCP port. The shaft leads directly to the RPC. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station."
General: [a murmer of disbelief runs through the room] "Only a precise hit will set up a chain reaction. The shaft is Firewalled, so you'll have to be l33t."
shouldn't iTunes be a fortress by now?
I believe those are called Emperor Gnus.
your kid's school (BSA) Please provide proof of this. Thanks.
That's funny because I love to point out how the non free software way is anti-social by pointing to just that. Yes, the BSA has sued public schools for copying text editors. The dumb ass administration handed worker bees M$ Word Docs without purchasing Word for them. The BSA set up exam time ambushes, which cost everyone tons of money and heartache. The same threat is still held over every public school, just like any other place people use non free software. The suits are public record and articles like this one are easy to find.
Your Welcome
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
- 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."
--
Am I too old for
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