As has been pointed out, this could be a really bad idea. Completely apart from the risk of annoying Microsoft, looking petty, etc., scheduling against Microsoft's release will fail because it doesn't underline Linux's real advantages. This should be about why people should want to use Linux instead of why they should hate Microsoft.
To do that, we should take advantage of a positive, Linux centered event, and the release of kernel 2.4 seems like a perfect opportunity. It's an event of roughly comprable significance (within the community) to the Win2K rollout, and it provides an opportunity to show Linux's strengths. You could point out that when you want to start running the latest version of Linux, you only need to download the latest source, make it, install it, and reboot. No upgrading your hardware because of system bloat, no hideously expensive upgrade cost, and no waiting until Service Pack 1 comes out until it actually works as promised.
I doubt that it's just a conincidence that the more general questions raised about Corel's plans in the article seem to be pretty much the same as those raised in the current thread about interview topics for Corel CEO Michael Cowpland. The questions about Corel's long term Linux strategy are apparently quite obvious to anyone who thinks about it. Of course the same thing could be said about a lot of companies that are jumping on the Linux bandwagon.
I hear this "bloat" nonsense a lot. Would you care to actually name some of these useless features that "no one" ever uses?
It may well be true that every function that's included in MS Office products has at least a small community of users, but that's hardly enough to deny the existence of bloat. Most of the people I know who use it, for instance, agree that Word has gotten worse and worse since version 5.1. Why? Because 5.1 had all of the things that an ordinary user used the most and not much else. Subsequent additions have tended to cause more problems than they solve because they clutter up menus and toolbars far more than they help solve daily problems.
That's not to say that those features shouldn't have been included, just that it was done horribly. If they want to add a feature that only 5% of users will ever use, it should be handled as an add-in, rather than hard wired into the main program. That way you could unload unneeded features to slim down the program. MS software may not actually be bloated with completely useless features, but it tends to feel that way because the less often used features are competing for space with the more commonly used ones.
No one has really explained why a company such as dell, gateway, or ibm would not want to just roll their own distro? After finally getting an opportunity to get out from under microsofts thumb, why would they rush to get under Redhats? They have developers on staff. They have huge amounts of tech support on staff who would need little retraining ("from now on, use this database if it's a Linux question")
You may be underestimating the importance of the support angle. Re-training a whole segment of your staff from being Windows support people to being Linux support people is not going to be as trivial as you suggest. It's probably going to be more cost effective for a big firm like IBM to outsource the development and support for Linux to Red Hat, SuSe, et. al. than to build their own custom distribution and support staff.
There's also a public perception angle. On the one hand, a big company like IBM still isn't as well recognized in the Linux field as any of the existing distributions, so they can get some extra customer confidence by going with a well known and respected distribution. On the other hand, IBM at the very least doesn't have a completely spotless reputation in the computer community. If they create their own distribution, there are a lot of people who are going to get very suspicious of their motives, particularly whether they want to fork the code and tie people in to their slightly incompatible version. They can avoid that suspicion by using an existing commercial distribution.
The trial wasn't about MS being having a monopoly because they are the market leader. It was about MS using their market dominance to lock out competitors. It was about making people who offer Windows offer Office to. This is what the trial was about, and this is what the ruling is meant to fix.
A good example of this is the lack of standard applications software for Linux. Microsoft's applications business doesn't want to build apps for competing operating systems, so Linux doesn't get any. That's not to say that most Linux users would want to run MS Office even if it were available, but at least the choice would be there.
>Hmmn. I'm not that familiar with SuSE's OS, but isn't it a violation of the various Free/Open Source licenses for them to grant exclusivity in distribution? I understand wanting control of the channel and all that, but don't they have to allow for redistribution of all of the free parts of their OS? And therefore they cannot say 'you have exclusive rights,' since that... well, EXCLUDES redistribution?
SuSe may not be able to prevent others from distributing Linux, but that doesn't necessarily prevent them from giving exclusive distribution rights to their distro. If there's any proprietary software in their distribution they can probably prevent its redistribution, and under any circumstances they can probably prevent redistribution of their packaged product.
The comment about Lawyers and Judges being quite capable of understanding the issues once they've been laid out is quite correct. If you read the opinions of Judges in cases like this (like the finding of fact in the Microsoft case) it's clear that they really do understand. Similarly, I think that most techies who make a real effort to understand the laws can and do get a pretty good understanding of them.
The problem is with the laws and (ultimately) the process that produces them. Understanding the issues takes a lot of effort, and quite frankly most lawmakers just don't have the time it takes to find out about the issues. Instead, they rely on other people, mostly lobbyists of one stripe or another, to tell them how to decide. The result is that the laws are effectively created by those lobbyists.
That's where the problems creep in. Most of those lobbyists represent entrenched interests, such as existing big companies and industries, that are built around old assumptions about the way that the economy works. They try to create laws that keep things the same because that benefits them. The result is that the laws try to legislate the permanence of the old business model, whether that's realistically possible or not.
It's like Canute and the waves. The law winds up trying to do something that just isn't possible, or at least not practical, and the Judges, Lawyers, and Techies are left to try to sort out the mess.
>But, you are right. To most of us, there is nothing new in these releases. The next big thing for the real hardcore types is X4 or KDE2.
Don't forget about kernel 2.4, which should be coming out fairly soon, too. Some of the new features should be fairly significant, particularly for "real hardcore" types.
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As has been pointed out, this could be a really bad idea. Completely apart from the risk of annoying Microsoft, looking petty, etc., scheduling against Microsoft's release will fail because it doesn't underline Linux's real advantages. This should be about why people should want to use Linux instead of why they should hate Microsoft.
To do that, we should take advantage of a positive, Linux centered event, and the release of kernel 2.4 seems like a perfect opportunity. It's an event of roughly comprable significance (within the community) to the Win2K rollout, and it provides an opportunity to show Linux's strengths. You could point out that when you want to start running the latest version of Linux, you only need to download the latest source, make it, install it, and reboot. No upgrading your hardware because of system bloat, no hideously expensive upgrade cost, and no waiting until Service Pack 1 comes out until it actually works as promised.
I doubt that it's just a conincidence that the more general questions raised about Corel's plans in the article seem to be pretty much the same as those raised in the current thread about interview topics for Corel CEO Michael Cowpland. The questions about Corel's long term Linux strategy are apparently quite obvious to anyone who thinks about it. Of course the same thing could be said about a lot of companies that are jumping on the Linux bandwagon.
I hear this "bloat" nonsense a lot. Would you care to actually name some of these useless features that "no one" ever uses?
It may well be true that every function that's included in MS Office products has at least a small community of users, but that's hardly enough to deny the existence of bloat. Most of the people I know who use it, for instance, agree that Word has gotten worse and worse since version 5.1. Why? Because 5.1 had all of the things that an ordinary user used the most and not much else. Subsequent additions have tended to cause more problems than they solve because they clutter up menus and toolbars far more than they help solve daily problems.
That's not to say that those features shouldn't have been included, just that it was done horribly. If they want to add a feature that only 5% of users will ever use, it should be handled as an add-in, rather than hard wired into the main program. That way you could unload unneeded features to slim down the program. MS software may not actually be bloated with completely useless features, but it tends to feel that way because the less often used features are competing for space with the more commonly used ones.
No one has really explained why a company such as dell, gateway, or ibm would not want to just roll their own distro? After finally getting an opportunity to get out from under microsofts thumb, why would they rush to get under Redhats? They have developers on staff. They have huge amounts of tech support on staff who would need little retraining ("from now on, use this database if it's a Linux question")
You may be underestimating the importance of the support angle. Re-training a whole segment of your staff from being Windows support people to being Linux support people is not going to be as trivial as you suggest. It's probably going to be more cost effective for a big firm like IBM to outsource the development and support for Linux to Red Hat, SuSe, et. al. than to build their own custom distribution and support staff.
There's also a public perception angle. On the one hand, a big company like IBM still isn't as well recognized in the Linux field as any of the existing distributions, so they can get some extra customer confidence by going with a well known and respected distribution. On the other hand, IBM at the very least doesn't have a completely spotless reputation in the computer community. If they create their own distribution, there are a lot of people who are going to get very suspicious of their motives, particularly whether they want to fork the code and tie people in to their slightly incompatible version. They can avoid that suspicion by using an existing commercial distribution.
The trial wasn't about MS being having a monopoly because they are the market leader. It was about MS using their market dominance to lock out competitors. It was about making people who offer Windows offer Office to. This is what the trial was about, and this is what the ruling is meant to fix.
A good example of this is the lack of standard applications software for Linux. Microsoft's applications business doesn't want to build apps for competing operating systems, so Linux doesn't get any. That's not to say that most Linux users would want to run MS Office even if it were available, but at least the choice would be there.
>Hmmn. I'm not that familiar with SuSE's OS, but isn't it a violation of the various Free/Open Source licenses for them to grant exclusivity in distribution? I understand wanting control of the channel and all that, but don't they have to allow for redistribution of all of the free parts of their OS? And therefore they cannot say 'you have exclusive rights,' since that... well, EXCLUDES redistribution?
SuSe may not be able to prevent others from distributing Linux, but that doesn't necessarily prevent them from giving exclusive distribution rights to their distro. If there's any proprietary software in their distribution they can probably prevent its redistribution, and under any circumstances they can probably prevent redistribution of their packaged product.
The comment about Lawyers and Judges being quite capable of understanding the issues once they've been laid out is quite correct. If you read the opinions of Judges in cases like this (like the finding of fact in the Microsoft case) it's clear that they really do understand. Similarly, I think that most techies who make a real effort to understand the laws can and do get a pretty good understanding of them.
The problem is with the laws and (ultimately) the process that produces them. Understanding the issues takes a lot of effort, and quite frankly most lawmakers just don't have the time it takes to find out about the issues. Instead, they rely on other people, mostly lobbyists of one stripe or another, to tell them how to decide. The result is that the laws are effectively created by those lobbyists.
That's where the problems creep in. Most of those lobbyists represent entrenched interests, such as existing big companies and industries, that are built around old assumptions about the way that the economy works. They try to create laws that keep things the same because that benefits them. The result is that the laws try to legislate the permanence of the old business model, whether that's realistically possible or not.
It's like Canute and the waves. The law winds up trying to do something that just isn't possible, or at least not practical, and the Judges, Lawyers, and Techies are left to try to sort out the mess.
Don't forget about kernel 2.4, which should be coming out fairly soon, too. Some of the new features should be fairly significant, particularly for "real hardcore" types.