Slashdot Mirror
How Microsoft Beat Linux In China
kripkenstein notes an analysis up on TechRepublic detailing how Microsoft beat Linux in China, and the consequences of that victory: "With the soon-to-be largest economy standardized on Windows desktops, desktop Linux does seem to have an uphill battle ahead of it." "Linux has turned out to be little more than a key bargaining chip in a high stakes game of commerce between the Chinese government and the world's largest software maker... The fact that... Linux failed to gain a major foothold in China is yet another blow to desktop Linux. After nearly eight years of being on the verge of a breakthrough, Linux seems more destined than ever to be a force in the server room but little more than a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop."
But Linux has always had an uphill battle, the hill just got a little higher.
If Linux wins out in the end it will be in part for this reason. You can examine it for backdoors, concealed reporting etc, which you cannot do with a proprietary closed source OS. I have no doubt that if it was asked by the NSA to include that sort of thing in its product offerings to China, MS would be willing to comply. What company would be willing to rely on the goodwill of a foreign, potentially hostile or at least rival government's goodwill, when it can develop its own operating system and include these features itself and under its own control?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
The Chinese government wishes to control the use of the Internet and of computers. The Linux community is hardly likely to help China take control of computers away from the users. But with Trusted Computing, Microsoft may be able to offer exactly that capability.
For a government concerned about control, Microsoft's obvious motivations (control and profit) may be both more familiar, more predictable - and because Microsoft is centralized, mor tractable. This in comparison to the diverse coalition of interests making up the free and open source community.
Read the article again more carefully. The maximum price outside multinationals will be $3; nothing near $100. Most people will be permitted to "pirate". The lesson from this is that the only way to negotiate with MS is to have a serious and already deployed Linux strategy. RedFlag remains crucial to China's bargaining. If you country doesn't have it's own RHEL based Linux distribution, it's time to start asking for explanations.
Huh? As a graybeard I remember those horrible days where we got our OS from our hardware vendor, along with the "opportunity" to buy their crappy, proprietary, $10,000/seat applications. Further, as an application developer, I remember those dark, pre-Windows days when I had to test my software on reams of different hardware; it was not a good use of my time, but without a ubiquitous layer between my application and the hardware (any vendor's hardware), I had no choice. Counter to your assertion, I think Microsoft has played a major role in improving the life of people like me. Admittedly, they have gotten rich in the process; they weren't doing it out of altruism. But I do not begrudge them their profits. I gladly pay the "Microsoft tax", which is a pittance in the grand scheme of things, in return for the many benefits their efforts have afforded me.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
``The fact that... Linux failed to gain a major foothold in China is yet another blow to desktop Linux. After nearly eight years of being on the verge of a breakthrough, Linux seems more destined than ever to be a force in the server room but little more than a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop.''
Oh, come on. Just as those who have been proclaiming, the past few years, that whatever year it happened to be would be the year of Linux on the desktop were to early to proclaim victory, this is a bit too early to proclaim defeat.
I seem to recall something about one of the world's largest PC vendors starting to ship systems with Linux pre-installed. Does that sound like "a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop"? To me, it sounds more like one step on the road to being a recognized and respected operating system.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So, in a country governed by a surpressive regime which wishes to controll and monitor it citizen's as much as possible, a proprieatry closed system controlled by a centralised body is standard software rather than a free open system with an ideological emphasis on the freedoms of the users. Doesn't sound to surprising does it ? Now the real WTF is that the democratic world is using it as well...
Microsoft didn't kill that hateful environment. Unix (and I suppose some others) did. Remember the term "Open systems" from the early 1980s? It was the reaction to the situation you describe.
That too, wasn't Microsoft, but Unix and others. Heck, even the microcomputers of the mid-1980s had serious operating systems like AmigaDOS, RiscOS, Unix dialects ...
Is your beard really gray?
I do the same as you, but I would never give up my crappy old laptop running Windows XP, because OpenOffice isn't absolutely bug-for-bug compatible with MS Office. I still have to go to the Windows machine occasionally to open a file.
The rest of the "not ready for the desktop" stuff people talk about is a bunch of red herrings. What's missing is not technical capabilities in the kernel, UI slickness in the applications, or games but the massive entrenchment that Microsoft relies on to make Windows look magical: OEM installs, reliable drivers provided by hardware vendors, and a decade of user familiarity. No amount of work on applications or task schedulers will ever begin to address those issues. Linux-on-the-desktop fans should look for ways around those problems instead of obsessing over programming.
To put it more concisely: Slashdotters are programmers; programming is the hammer; widespread desktop adoption of Linux is the problem; and no, it is not a nail.
You're missing two important things:
1) The China regime gets a monopoly, not Microsoft.
2) Payment to Microsoft doesn't go the USA. It goes to Microsoft's investments and business in China. China (or any other country) isn't going to to pay another country for bits that can be copied for free, unless they get something back.
To me it's quite obvious that the Chinese regime clearly has seen the problem with free software that would make public control much harder. Now they just have to call MS and say "Hey, people are using bittorrent to download porn!" and it will be fixed in the next update.
In many countries it is a common business practice of giving "gifts" to the "right" people if you want to get something done. If you need a license in four months and not four years you bribe officials. Of course you don't do so in an obvious way but they reap your generosity anyway.
It's usually done through third parties that are hired and given a large operational budget.
Linux may be better for China but Microsoft money is better for some key officials.
And that folks is the way it works.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Whoa, Nelly! This article - and the discussion here - is rife with untested assumptions. Let's establish a bit of context here before going too far.
Microsoft beat Linux? That most certainly is how Microsoft sees the situation. But their entire ethos is of conquest, control and coercion. None of these apply to Linux. While it's true that some have used Linux as a tool to gain leverage with Microsoft, Linux as an operating system has no goal, except to be good at what it does. Unlike Microsoft, Linux is not controlled by any single actor, or even by a like-minded group of actors.
Linux doesn't fight Microsoft (though MS does fight Linux and FOSS in general). It just keeps improving for its own sake and for the sake of its users. If that has detrimental effects on Microsoft's control of the operating systems market - and it does - well, that is nothing more than a collateral benefit.
So, from Microsoft's perspective, maybe they did 'beat' Linux, but even that defeat isn't complete or permanent. When China donates PCs to its development partners, what OS does it ship? Linux. Is Red Flag dead and buried? No. Is China dependant on Microsoft for its IT infrastructure? Hardly.
What price victory? A more honest evaluation of the circumstances of China's decision to accept Microsoft at all shows that Microsoft's 'victory' may be more pyrrhic than anything. With trademark deftness, China has largely de-fanged one of the most effective and brutal corporate negotiating teams in the world. This is the corporation that managed to buy off the US government and avoid any real punishment following its conviction for abuse of monopoly powers. It's the company that has consistently and rather successfully thumbed its nose at the European Union, the largest economic entity in the world today. It has controlled standards processes, locked in countless corporations and ruthlessly dominated the supply chain world-wide.
Yet Chinese negotiators got everything they asked for. Price reductions? They pay about 10% of what other governments do per seat. Control? They not only have access to the source code, they have to right to alter it to suit their purposes.
Think about what that means to the Chinese. In economic, political and strategic terms, they've negotiated unprecedented access to an invaluable resource, and they've done it in a way that costs them next to nothing. Truth be told, Microsoft got almost nothing out of this deal. China still uses Linux whenever and wherever it wants.
A deal that would make Stallman laugh. If we think about the Four Freedoms that underlie the GPL, the same four freedoms for which Richard Stallman and the FSF have fought so desperately to support and preserve, the same freedoms that are so perfectly antithetical to everything that Microsoft stands for... these are exactly the freedoms that China has preserved in its deal with Microsoft.
Let's be honest here: Microsoft may have won the battle, but only by utterly compromising itself and its future in China. They have placed themselves in a virtually abject position vis à vis China. Happily, the Chinese know enough about loss of face to ensure that they never rub this in Gates' face.
Bottom line: This is not a Linux/Microsoft story. Linux is a bit player in this story, a Rosencrantz to Microsoft's Hamlet. The real story is how China managed to pull a classic con on one of the toughest negotiating teams in the corporate world, and how they did it so well that Microsoft keeps coming back for more.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Yours is a good post, but one that I disagree with.
Well, I actually would agree with you that there is less money in open source software. However, I think this indicates not a failing of open source, but of commercial development. I agree with you that the commercial software ecosystem is very vibrant, with great profit potential. But I view this as a drain on the rest of the economy. Just think about how many web startups are using a LAMP stack... would their businesses be possible in a purely commercial software world?
I'm not looking to see the software industry destroyed, or even crippled, since I hope to soon get a job developing software. I think there is money in development on demand, where developers make money for their labor in custom-tailoring software to a customer's demand. The software would be free, but of course the labor wouldn't.
Now, this kind of business won't thrive in current climates, because there is more money and easier money in commercial software. But eventually free software will dominate, because in the long term how can something be more attractive than free? Of course there is support to think of, but I don't see any inherent reason that free software should be more expensive to support.
So I think that whether we like it or not, free software is the future. And I choose to see that as a positive future, where software becomes more pervasive in our environment, more adapted to our specific needs.
There'll always be money in software development until we create machines that are smarter than us in every way.
-------
Incite and flee.
it's interesting to see their old policies coming back to bite them on this one.
microsoft leveraged their monopoly to make it impossible for customers for 6 years to get anything other than windows xp on a new computer. the result? customers think that a new computer means windows xp, and are deeply suspicious of change. now there's suddenly a new operating system none of their friends have. windows xp's main advantage was always its ubiquity. vista, due to being new, does not have this.
microsoft has told the customer for years that different=difficult. now they are reaping what they have sowed.