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Gates: "Linux Can't Compete"
An anonymous reader writes "Theres a curious little article at
WUGNet, talking about a Bill Gates' speech on his new book, where he cites that Linux isnt viable because its openness. According to him, theres "no central point of control", and "Windows offers far more functionality and features than Linux ever will". So much for their Anti-Trust case. "
Let me also say that, out of the box, Windows NT Workstation is useless. There's nothing you can do with it. You could run IE, that's about it. There is absolutely no functionality.
Constrast that with, say, Red Hat Linux which out of the box can run as a web server, POP3 server, has numerous email clients, has a full featured, high-quality C/C++ compiler, programmable text editors, a full range of text processing tools (sed, awk, perl, grep), can provide nice typeset output (TeX, LaTeX), can make beautiful graphics (Gimp), etc.
For crying out loud, you can't even setup tasks to execute periodically under NT without buying additional products. Linux at least has cron! For example, I wanted to record one hour of audio from the sound card input each day, compress it to MP3 and copy it to a Jaz disk so I can take it and listen to it at work. I have to do this at home on a Linux box because there's no way to script that up under NT easily.
Gates has got a flashy interface, but it's on top of a mess of nothingness underneath.
You can quote me on this: "Windows tells me how I have to work. I tell Linux how it's going to work for me."
Gates says that you get proliferations of different versions and everybody can go into the source code, and everybody does. I see Gates' point---he thinks that, for example, Red Hat and Debian are really different, and if I know Red Hat, that I'll be clueless at a Debian machine. We all know this is far from the truth. As a matter of fact, I think this "fractioning" of the market is a good thing. Different companies can market their distributions at different customers. Slackware is marketed towards the Linux experts who want complete control, Red Hat is marketed a newbies and people who want an easy to use system. Debian is geared towards those who want a truly free system. There are distributions of Linux for those who want to run it on tiny machines as routers. On the other hand, Gates only gives you one version of Windows NT. It's a one-size fits all scheme. He'll tell you it's better for you since it's all the same, but I'd rather see many different solutions geared towards different people so each person can pick what fits them best.
Gates says that Linux has no central point of control. How does that make a system bad? Contrast a company like Microsoft with the Linux movement. Having a central point of control for Microsoft certainly hasn't made Microsoft products more reliable in my opinion, or the opinions of many others.
Gates says that Linux's biggest feature is its price. No, it has to do with price (again, real freedom versus free beer). I'd like to say that I'd be willing to pay $200 for Linux, but I can't really say that since its freedom precludes that. But, let's put it this way: if Windows NT were free, I'd still pick Linux over Windows NT in a heart beat.
Gates says "We put things into our system like systems management that's not much fun for university developers". I work at a large company with hundreds of Sparc boxes and Dell machines running NT. The sysadmins will always tell you that the NT machines are a bitch to administer, and the Sparc and Linux boxes just run without any maintanence. At the last company I worked for, I setup an HTTP/FTP/POP3 Linux server. I left over a year ago and it's still running without any maintenance. Try that with Windows NT.
Gates says "It doesn't have a rich set of device drivers". Well, USB support isn't in there, but other than that, it supports my scanner, ethernet, SCSI, video, and multi-port serial card. NT, on my namebrand Dell machine here at work often can't recognize even the simplest namebrand hardware we try to add (between blue screens). And we're not idiots, either. As long as you don't buy brain dead Winmodems and pick decent hardware, there's nothing out there (again, with the exception of USB) that Linux doesn't work with.
Gates says "I really don't think in the commercial market, we'll see it [compete with Windows] in any significant way". I guess he's ignoring all of those Apache equipped Linux boxes out there.
Pretty much the standard FUD we've come to expect from Microsoft. After all, this article was posted on WUGNET, Windows Users Group Network. Ha.
I'm glad to say I've never paid for a Microsoft product, never recommended the purchase of one, and probably never will.
Systems management features refers to the ability to remotely manage other machines - he's probably referring to their SMS (Systems management Server) software. The idea is that an IT guy can sit at a server and completely manage all client systems - take inventory of their hardware and software, install new software, see if someone has opened the case, reboot the machine, that sort of thing. You can also do mass software upgrades over the network - upgrade everyone to Windows 98 or Office 97 or whatever.
If you've got Linux for a server and Windows 95 for clients, gates is basically correct. But if you've got Linux for clients, then what he says is total FUD. i'm no linux expert, but (correct me if I'm wrong) all configuration is based on text files, which are easy to manipulate across the network. You can telnet into a Linux box and make all the changes you need without leaving your chair. You can write scripts to make mass changes on all clients across the network. In fact, anything you can do while sitting at a Linux system, you can do remotely.
The only thing that may be lacking in Linux(again, correct me if I'm wrong) is the ability to do a network broadcast to update the software on multiple machines simultaneously. I don't know if SMS can do this, but there are packages for Windows NT that can do this.
The very fact that Gates mentions the fact that "Linux is not a threat" means that he already considers Linux a threat. The momentum has been building for the past few years.
I must admit that until very recently, I was running NT4/NT5/98. Not that I have anything against Linux, I just wanted to play games and game support for Linux, sadly, sucks. That should change soon when Q3A and a few other games are released commercially for Linux (maybe that will kick NVidia into realeasing drivers for their card and I won't have to reboot to play games at all). The reason I switched is that games became unimportant to me (relative to grades at least) and Linux has more functionality outside of games that Windows ever has (you wouldn't believe the amount of software available to me on MIT's distributed system, Athena).
Even though I only installed Linux a few months ago, I have been using UNIX since 1990 or so, and I toyed with Linux on my family's 486/33...I know countless Linux users that will never experience the joy of downloading the ~ 20 slackware disks on a 14.4 modem from sunsite, creating the dreaded root and boot disks (make sure they don't have a single bad sector before you RAWRITE them, or you'll ruin the disk!), etc. Linux is where it is today because there has been a push to make it more user-friendly...even in my day you had a color boot disk and the ability of UMSDOS, both of which made the transition from a DOS environment to Linux a bit easier)
So Linux has made definite progress in the five or so years that I've been using it. There is no reason to think that it will stop or even slow down. I doubt Gates loses sleep over Linux right now, but the fact that Linux is free and there are free alternatives to all of M$'s applications has got to at least make him sweat when these same applications get media coverage (for free, no less).