Slashdot Mirror
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. "
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.