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A Bold Essay From Tim O'Reilly
skydryedblue writes "On XML.Com, there is an interview in which Tim says, that The Linux community is far too focused on the battle with Microsoft's current operating system. Some see that the big goal is to develop a competing desktop and compatible desktop applications. And while I think that's a worthy goal and Linux is doing pretty well at it, I see Microsoft much more clearly and strategically focused on what kind of software will be needed to support that next generation of computer applications, and that worries me. "
I believe with atleast Netscape Mozilla 5.0, the open source is showing an adoption of standards, which is a good thing for any market.
But linux, seems to be in a "wholy ware" That is dediced based on how you conform. Whats so different from being a Microsoft Biggot to a Linux Biggot? Bot OS's have there advantages and disadvantages, but someone has a direction.. and i agree, microsoft holds it.
While Redhat, and other distributions have a release map that seems to be 6 months (from previous discussions, i still find that too short of a release cycle) there is *no* roadmap other then directly related to the kernel. There is no beta system to show a developer road map, no enduser solution map, and no training map.. training seems to be specific to distro, which doesn't mean doodoo to an admin (since all distros are familiar) but to a corporation/business specifics do matter.. so with all these certificaitons going, there is no specific cover all certification roadmap.
Like i've express my OPINION before, i believe for linux to be stable, for personall and business use, it needs a long term plan, and short term updates. It doesn't need short term plans and long term updates :) By what i mean, slow down the release schedules, Business like 3 year product life cycles.. that means from 6-7 there should be a good few years to get your monies worth (yeah, yeah, its free. but installation/support in a business environment isn far from free). .1 releases should be minor upgrades or patch releases.. kernel upgrades should have some form of controlled distribution. and distributors should have long term plans in beta. Like redhat 7.0 for example should be in a long term beta.. throw in Xfree86 4.0, kernel 2.4 beta's, the newest kde, the newest gnome, the newest office apps, debug the system as a whole, give endusers/developers something to work with and work from, but most of all, it shows a roadmap of whats to come, and provides ample time for business to ramp up to that product
I love linux, i'm not dissing it, i love open source, its agreat concept. but for business, it needs something i can gurantee my job and and the company can gurantee its data on. not just something i get for free or something i can look at the source at..
I think a lack of focus is inherent in the Linux movement. There are no managers running around telling people what to do. I think this is, competitively, a much better strategy for large base software design because so many people want so many different things....
M$ is very focused, they are a company. I might argue that the individual companies within the linux movement (RH, etc) each have goals and management strategies of the same feel as M$'s. I think that all of the companies together make up this so-called lack of focus. I strongly feel this is a good thing and the reason that other OS's have failed in light of M$ (such as OS/2) is because they were very similar to M$. M$ has a hold on the market, the only thing that will change that (IMO) is a radically new philosophy on software development.
-- Moondog
But, and it's a big but, ignoring Microsoft can't work until they no longer unfairly control the hardware and software markets. If merely being better than Microsoft was sufficient, BeOS would far more successful than it is today. We can and should ignore Microsoft on the day the following can be asserted with truth:
1) Hardware vendors are just as likely to create drivers for Linux as Microsoft.
2) System vendors can't be pressured successfully by Microsoft to avoid using competing products like Linux or Netscape.
3) Microsoft no longer dominates standards thru controlling the OS platform used by nearly everyone.
It would be nice if Microsoft just started playing fair. But I don't expect it. Rather I expect them to lie, cheat, and steal as necessary in an attempt to ensure dominance. Desperation is rarely pretty.
His point about web applications being the future is worth consideration. The advantages in making large databases like Amazon and Yahoo available that way are quite clear. I don't quite see the clarity of that view when it comes to editors, compilers, or games however -- though I could be wrong, I much prefer local programs on my own computer for those.
The other point he makes that is well worth considering is about the open nature of web development. Clay Shirkey did an excellent paper on this subject a while back. You may find many of the other papers on his page of interest as well.
I take issue with the following quote regarding XML and XML-RPC:
It's a bad sign that Microsoft knows more about this than the leaders of the Linux community. They've already incorporated it into a new protocol that they are calling SOAP.
Ok, I'm far from being a "leader" in the Linux community (or any other), but I've been monitoring the XML-RPC and SOAP discussions for a while now. Many of the underlying grammars were clearly written by people who like COM. The data types conveniently mirror COM VT_xxx types. They CAN, however, be implemented in other languages and platforms. (IIRC, Zope implements XML-RPC.)
Personally, I have misgivings about SOAP being used for real cross-platform distributed computing in the future. It just seems to make too many assumptions about data types. XML-RPC seems geared towards replacing CGI -- it specifies port 80 for all communication (which seems a little narrow-minded to me). These may still become de facto standards because they are "good enough" for most cases.
I predict that for the next few years we will see several new XML grammars introduced. In time, we will eventually settle on a few that work best for most people. Maybe SOAP will be one of these, maybe not. Maybe it will be a derivative of SOAP. Maybe it will be something completely different.
Right now, XML-RPC/SODL/XMOP/SOAP have momentum and the backing of Microsoft and a few authors who want to be first on the shelf with "Designing Distributed Applications with SOAP for Dummies" I'm not aware of any alternatives to SOAP right now. Maybe there is no need for one.
If you've gotten this far in my long-winded post, you may want take a look at a few sites relating to XML and distributed computing:
http://discuss.develop.com -- SOAP discussion board.
http://www.xml-rpc.com -- XML-RPC specs and discussion.
My own shameless plugs:
http://www.maiermedia.com/lab/xml/opml.t xt -- My OPML proposal for object persistence in XML. It's crude, but I think it has less platform affinity than SODL.
http://www.maiermedia.com/lab/xml/ opmlsample.txt -- A sample of objects serialized in OPML.
At this point, I've shelved OPML because I don't see any point in competing with the SOAP crowd. If you do take the time to look at it and would like to send suggestions or feedback, my email address is donkpunch@maiermedia.com. I would love to get some input from people who aren't already convinced that SOAP is the best solution. Maybe I gave up on the idea too soon.
Thanks.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I run FreeBSD because I simply want the power and stability of a great OS. I don't run Windows because it's slow, unstable, a huge mess of incoherency and scattered inconsistencies. What I want in an OS is to actually have control over it. Open Source is about control and software superiority. With many people working on a project, it quickly can become best of breed. I have control over the entire OS when I use an Open Source system. If I find a bug, I can fix it.
With Windows I have a bloated monstrosity which, while trying to be everything to everyone, is purely unuseable to me. Things are far too simplistically designed and making things "click-simple" isn't worth any of that. You're trapped in something you can't truly control, can't fix, and can't expand upon. You lose every bit of flexibility that should be possible on a computer when you run Windows.
But, of course, you do have applications which you need on an OS, since after all, what good is an OS unless you have something to run on it? Many apps in Unix are simply much more well-done than those in Windows.
You say you want a lightweight Programmer's OS. Unix is not that. Unix is a system that can be almost everything to everyone witout sacrificing anything. Yes, the "base distribution" over the years has grown, but so has hard drive space and memory availability, not to mention pure speed of the computers. Don't forget that in Linux a distribution is not the OS. The kernel is the OS and the distribution just happens to run on top of it. There are many distributions to choose from , and they're not all going to be bloated past belief or inflexible to configure. You make that choice when choosing between Open Source OSes and distributions.
Also, the bloat is not the same as Windows's bloat. I can speak for FreeBSD, since that's what I run, here. There is a relatively small base system which includes the kernel, utilities, base applications, base data, base libraries and includes. This is the core of the OS. In the base you also have things for developing. development, such as the compiler, assembler, linker, debugger, and various binutils. This gives you flexibility: you have what you need, and nothing too esoteric. I have what I need to rebuild and modify the system to my liking except the source install itself.
After installation, you can install any non-OS components you like from ports or packages. There is just about every type of program an end-user would need, and you install what you want. Sure, because of this systems become different as different configurations are made and programs installed. But the OS is still the same underneath it.
In a closed operating system, you're stuck with what they give you without being able to uninstall much of it. The result is that you have no control over hundreds of megabytes of cruft you'll never use. Windows is appropriate for the desktop because of applications you say? Well, there are good applications for any platform. You're not going to find server applications, for instance, that are better on a closed system than for an open one. Why? When you're serious about your application, you care about the OS and what you can make it do, not the cruft surrounding it. Serious development is better done on an open platform.
Besides, who said Windows is a better desktop in the first place, EVEN just for applications? I am writing this using Mozilla, which still has a bit of a way to go before being truly finished, but is very useable and much faster than Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer. I run LyX and get professional typesetting, not just dinky "word processing," when I use it and LaTeX. I run OLVWM and have a much nicer GUI than possible on Windows, coupled with the much more flexible XFree86 3.9.16 than Windows's GUI could be. Of course, I'm not tied down, and can change my system's GUI components at will. I have my GNOME Panel and apps, giving me the familiar toolbar (much more flexible though), a CPU meter, a mixer, themeable clock, command-line tool, application menus, and any of various small applications and dockable applets. I have my TiK for my instant messaging needs, exim and pine for mail needs, the GIMP and KIllustrator for graphics, mp3/mod/avi/mov/mpg players, audio applications including the ver-present sox, and my full development system with DDD for graphical debugging.
In other words, I have a full desktop system, and my choice from many other apps should I ever want those. How can you say that Windows or BeOS are the only systems which should be on desktops when it's obvious a better OS than Windows can have everything else you'd ever need, too?
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Yes, thank you. Exactly.
Let me see if I can concretize this a little, at least from my point of view.
Right now, if I want to buy books over the Net, I go to Amazon. Now, I dislike Amazon's web site. It's carefully designed to feed me all sorts of data that I don't want. Amazon doesn't want me to buy the single book I decided to buy; if I do that, they've lost. They want me to buy dozens of books, *and* sign up for Amazon mailing lists, *and* move my book conversations from Usenet over to Amazon-managed chat boards, *and* put buy-from-Amazon links on my web pages.
I despise that. (Other people don't, but I'm talking about me right now.) I dislike that for many of the same reasons I dislike using Microsoft software. They're ignoring my goal, and in some cases deliberately making it harder, because their goals are totally different.
So. What if Amazon (or whoever) builds their entire web presence on Linux and Perl, and I use Lynx to shop there? Is that a victory for open-source software?
Yes and no. Yes, because they're using OSS, and that has benefits (stability, low costs, interoperability, choice of browser.) But no, because no matter what software is involved, I'm still having this crappy time buying a book.
This is O'Reilly's point: that the "no" part of that is going to get very important compared to the "yes" part. I agree; that crystallizes a whole bunch of my misgivings about the way the Net is evolving. If the OSS movement is about choice, I want choice about what I do. Five years ago, that was to run applications on a desktop machine. I still do that, but now I also buy books on the Web. Times a-change.
Here's the question, I guess: how can the principles of open software development be applied to, well, whatever the buzzword is for the Next Thing?
Obvious answer: Have Amazon offer shopping data, in a standard interchange format, so people can use it without going through Amazon's idea of a book portal. (That's what O'Reilly had in mind, and why he was talking about it on XML.com, hint hint.)
Obvious followup: Why should Amazon bother? They've got a proprietary lock on what they do, and they're making money on it. (Sound familiar?)
We need to think about what advantages an open approach offers to that -- analogous to the advantages that open-source development offers to software. Then, of course, we have to convince the web sites.
-- Andrew Plotkin (erkyrath@netcom.com)
Tim O'Reilly said:
Almost everyone who talks about Open Source software wants to know whether or not Linux stands a chance of dethroning Windows.
He's really talking to the wrong people then. As far as I can tell, most people who are talking about Free software are talking about how they can increase the features available with the Free software codebase, and how to handle the software patent issues. Even with the Open Source folks that O'Reilly, the issues seem more geared towards how they can encourage more companies to open their licenses. Most of the Linux people are worried about better supporting an increasingly dynamic hardware environment, and improving scalability and performance.
None of these people are talking about Windows. The media is talking about Linux vs. Windows, some of the users are talking about Linux vs. Windows, but the people who count don't really give a damn about Windows. It's just irrelevant.
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Open mind, insert foot.
What a very thought provoking and timely speech. I only wish I could have been present to hear it from the man himself. In either case, he brings up many interesting points. The crux of the whole speech revolves around this statement from him, "We need new business models. And those models are not always what you might expect."
In general, we Linuxites have to remember some important things if we are to ever prevail:
1) Money/compensation is a driving force. We can't ignore it.
2) The OSS *can* make money, just not how we expect it to make money
3) We have to support vendors who are more than "hip" to the OSS system. We don't need lip service. We need to seek out vendors that truly incorporate OSS as part of their entire business model. What will this model look like? I can only begin to guess.
4) Keep your eyes on the prize. If, as a community, we succumb to the tunnel vision concept of, "Kill Microsoft!", all hope is certainly lost. As an anecdotal example, look at Apple and their Macintosh fiasco in '84. In many respects, I see similarities in the Big Brother image in their infamous 1984-esque commercial and much of the Linux rhetoric I read here day in and day out. Look what it did to Apple. I imagine if they would have focused on reality a bit and what really mattered, things may have turned out differently.
All I'm asking is a little reality from the community. Read the article, please. Follow your mother's advice about the big bad bully. Ignore him and he'll eventually go away. I suspect this will be the same with Microsoft. The more focus *we* put on them the more press they receive. Let's focus on our own merits and achievements and strive to make not just a better product, but the best product we can.
It *has* been done before... that was the whole point behind Linux in the first place, no?
Summarizing Tim in a single sentence: Chase the dream, not the competition..
Wow, am I glad that Tim took the opportunity of a keynote address to express this pov, and with such conviction.
To focus on Linux vs. Windows is like driving with both eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror. Or like my old track coach said "You'll always run slower if you look behind you to see where the competition is."
The concept and reality of "Internet Speed" will eventually determine the success or failure of products, companies, and their respective paradigms.
While Microsoft is very powerful and very rich, they're also very big. And their culture of software intellectual property and a tremendous dependence on the desktop computing metaphor could very well be their downfall.
For Linux-mavens (or, more specifically, anti-Microsoft-mavens) who only think victory is measured by how many choose Linux over Windows, remember that the computer world is bigger than your desktop.
But anything I write here is soooo much better said by Tim!
Re-read the article. Print it. Post it.
Our revolution isn't about taking power away from the establishment and giving it to us, it's about not having a center of power at all.