Linux is an OS. People are not going to reinstall/delete their harddrive over this. What about their games? What about compatiblility with what they use at work?
The same could easily be said for Windows XP. Believe it or not Microsoft has got to sell Windows XP. If Windows XP is chuck full of stupid "features" that are actually disincentives to the upgrade then people will stick with what they have. This is nearly as dangerous for Microsoft as if the user had switched to Linux. Remember, Microsoft's biggest competitor isn't Corel, or Oracle, or IBM, or even the amorphous "Linux," Micrsoft's biggest competitor is previous versions of their own software.
Even worse issues like games and compatibility with work also make it more likely that people will stick with what they have. I don't know of any businesses that have rolled out Windows XP (nor do I know of any that have done a serious desktop rollout of Windows 2000, for that matter). They should be making their operating system as attractive to buyers as they possibly can. Instead they are lining up an initiative to treat their customers as copyright breaking thieves. Things like WMA and the new copy protection scheme aren't likely to entire current Windows users to this new OS.
Meanwhile Linux will continue to grow. naysayers have been predicting its imminent demise since it's first arrival on the scene, and they have always been spectacularly wrong. The reason for this is simple, Linux is too darned useful. It's price tag is a siren song for hackers and entrepreneurs everywhere, and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure that keeps Linux alive is negligible. Microsoft can't bankrupt Linux, it can't buy Linux, and it can't intimidate enough Linuxers to make a difference.
This doesn't make Linux better than Windows. I personally don't think that Linux is ready for the desktop, for example. But it does guarantee that Linux will keep growing, and that it will continue to become a more viable alternative every day. If Microsoft continues to misuse their customers they will someday find that most of them are jumping ship.
Well said. And this will be Microsoft's undoing. If the protocols are truly open then what is the ASPs incentive to use Microsoft software? ISPs haven't been tempted by Microsoft's extensions to open protocols, and my guess is that ASPs aren't going to be too interested in paying the Microsoft tax either.
They will, of course, build.Net compatible services (in order to tap into the large Microsoft using customer base), but my guess is that they will generally shun the Microsoft specific extensions.
What most Slashdot readers are afraid of is a future in which Microsoft can say "All your Data belong to Us" (in much more polished English, of course), but this is essentially becoming less and less the case every day as Microsoft is being forced by their customers towards open standards.
It's already happening. Sun's ultimate goal for Star Office is for it to be deployed by ASPs. The beautty of this is that StarOffice will not require that the ASP give a cut of the profits to someone else. This is good for the ASP because it lowers their costs, and it is good for Sun because it A) cuts of Microsoft's Office cash flow, and B) sells more beefy Sun hardware.
The funny thing is that Microsoft is going to go through a ton of work forcing their customers into the ASP model, only to find increased competition for their software (and from software that will almost certainly be less expensive to own).
Yes, but nobody said that you had to spend your money on word processors. Myself personally, I have lots of stuff that I would rather spend my cash on.
People spent money before Microsoft existed, and they will continue to spend money even if Microsoft disappears. They just won't spend as much of it on software.
We have all seen what has happened to the VC driven Dot Com's and their startup kin. They thought (mistakenly for the most part) that the only database that was likely to be "good enough" was Oracle, and so they paid through the nose for it.
This made Oracle happy (in the short run) because they made a great deal of profits, but it made these profits by and large from a group of customers that are now unlikely to be repeat customers. Meanwhile the wiser startups (the ones you haven't heard of because they didn't buy Super Bowl commercials and haven't been listed on fuckedcompany.com) decided that some other database was "good enough" and they might actually be around again to buy upgrades in the future. If their needs grow from their success they might even actually need Oracle the second time around (but they will be able to afford it now). The fact of the matter is that for some workloads there simply is no choice but Oracle. They sell the only tool that is "good enough."
I can guarantee you that in the long run Oracle will either earn the premium that their customers pay, or they will have to lower their price (or go out of business). Oracle has plenty of competition, and most workloads do not come anywhere close to requiring their database.
The minimum payment for commercial Curl usage is $1000 per month and the maximum is $50000 per month based on the characters of Curl content sent. I don't know what kind of magic Curl claims to be doing. But the bits from your images and text have to get to the client somehow. My guess is that they aren't doing a better job than PNG, JPEG, and Apache with mod_gzip.
The difference, of course, is that I can use Java and JavaScript for the low price of FREE, and support is included in most browsers without the hassle of a plug-in.
Curl, on the other hand, wants to charge by the character for commercial content, and your customers will be forced to install their goofy plug-in to boot. Oh, and they want to force you to learn another language as well, that makes sense.
Face it, the folks behind Curl are clearly insane. Their mousetrap might be better at killing mice, unfortunately it irradiates the entire neighborhood and makes your house unsuitable for human habiation for the next 1e237 years.
Well said. There is no way that Curl has any chance of being succesful given that it is competing with several well tested (and well-known) systems that do essentially the same thing for free.
Exactly. This is nothing more than a Flash or Java Applet substitute. Unfortunately for the folks working on Curl they seem to have forgotten the most basic premise of computer economics.
The "winner" in any technological niche will go to the software that is "good enough" at the lowest price.
Curl is competing with several entrenched technologies, and both Flash and Java Applets have progressed a great deal over the last couple of years. More importantly, both of these solutions are easier and less expensive to deploy than Curl. So even if Curl has serious cool points it doesn't stand a chance.
What's most amazing to me is that apparently these folks just don't see that. That absolutely boggles my mind. Surely they must realize that the last thing that the web needs is yet another plug-in. Especially a plug-in that requires you to pay by the character for commercial content. The folks at Curl must be targetting the demographic of billionaires who recently had a botched frontal lobotomy.
Actually, this is one case where Microsoft will quite likely have the inferior lawyers. Microsoft is the biggest fattest prize on the face of the earth, and class actions suits are literal gold mines. Especially class actions suits in which there are 40 million plaintiffs.
The big money lawyers are going to want to be on the plaintiff's side on this case. After all, 33% of umpteen billion dollars is one heck of an incentive. This ruling is like giving Microsoft a big cut and throwing them into piranha infested waters. They are fair game now, and the lawyers will clean their bones.
The worst part is that this signifies all that is wrong with the American legal system. This has about as much to do with justice as a lynching. It's not often that I wish Microsoft the best of luck, but they deserve a break (good luck).
Is it just me, or is it actually funny that your reply to my post (which genericly commented that "If pressed hard enough these businesses will undoubtedly find out that for very little expense they can quickly and easily migrate their Microsoft Office data to Star Office" got modded higher than my original post, which described a real life example and some of the real life problems in doing so. : ) Ah, slashdot..
Actually, I have enough Karma so that my posts always start at a score of 2. It's part of the fun.
Yes, I realize that this is a troll, but it serves to illustrate a point.
Star Office is licensed under a "free beer" style license. You don't get access to the source code, but you can install it on as many computers as you like. Check it out. OpenOffice, Star Office's next generation, is available under the GPL.
And don't think that Microsoft isn't worried about this. They know very well that once the customer's only reason to stick with a piece of software is "it will cost too much to migrate" that the software is essentially doomed. The short history of computing is littered with products that had tremendous market share and were eclipsed by less expensive (and often less able) competitors. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Novell Netware are probably the best known examples. Migrating away from these programs cost businesses a mint, but they still did it.
Linux has a lot of advantages. Chief among them are that it allows developers and solutions providers to cheaply an inexpensively create turnkey solutions that are then deployable without license fees. So while it may not make financial sense for a company to chuck out existing systems in favor of Linux, it does make sense for new systems to be written using Linux and other freely available tools. By and large this is what is happening with Linux today. No one is replacing Windows with Linux across the board, but lots of shops are finding ways to implement Linux based solutions instead of Windows based ones.
Your post summed up the precise reason why it is that Microsoft should play nice. Currently they are able to trick nearly every business in the United States into mass deploying their OS and their expensive office suite.
If pressed hard enough these businesses will undoubtedly find out that for very little expense they can quickly and easily migrate their Microsoft Office data to Star Office (which is free).
Sure, Star Office isn't quite MS Office, but it is much closer than most people think, and it is a heck of a lot cheaper.
I agree that Windows has every right to uphold their licensing agreements. They wrote the software, they get to create the license, pure and simple.
However, there aren't many vendors that can treat their paying customers as poorly as Microsoft does and still get away with it. Microsoft is going after customers that it has successfully extracted hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars from. Take the example of Bank of Tokyo/Mitsubishi that was cited in the article. After Microsoft forced the company into an expensive audit of it's systems it then charged it $10,000 for missing licenses. That's insane. The Bank of Tokyo/Mitsubishi almost certainly spends a lot of money on Microsoft software. Forcing them through an expensive audit just so that you can charge them an extra $10,000 is the type of move that is guaranteed to send your customers packing.
And according to this article buying an enterprise license is no solution either. The CIO of Snapper is quoted as saying that it is difficult to get Microsoft to acknowledge new systems as part of the original agreement (which in my mind is the whole point of an enterprise license).
In other words, this article isn't a cut-and-dried licensing issue, but rather Microsoft throwing around their weight to improve revenues, at the expense of their best customers. The customers cited in the article are all big Microsoft clients, and they are all being treated like shoplifters. Quite frankly that is no way to run a business.
Microsoft has been able to keep it's stock price stratospheric for years by posting record earnings. However, with slumping hardware sales, a slowing economy, lethargic adoption of Windows 2000 and Office 2000 and a emergence of a real threat on the low end server from Linux and BSD Microsoft can no longer afford to look the other way when it comes to licensing issues. Microsoft needs the revenues, and it needs them now. After all, employee options are a huge part of the average Microsoftie's employment package. If their stock doesn't go up (or worse, if it goes down), then working at Microsoft is not really that nifty a job.
In the past Microsoft realized that casual sharing of their software actually served as a very effective free advertising campaign. It helped maintain their position by making sure that their software was ubiquitous. Now that they have the market tied up, they are looking to reel in all the freeloaders.
Microsoft's plan will backfire, especially if they continue pestering companies that are honestly trying to comply.
This particular CD won't work in your computer, it won't work in your car stereo if it has anti-skip technology. It's not the older CD players that are going to have problems with this beast, it's the newer and nicer ones.
In other words, there is no way in heck that this thing is going to fly. Consumers aren't going to put up with it. The RIAA members are simply crucifying themselves for the pure spectacle value.
If you read the article you will notice that this type of stunt has already been tried. The technology was subtly different, but if these unburnable CDs have even a similar rate of return then the company will be forced into an expensive recall. That's why the industry is testing the waters with a country music "star" that none of us have heard of. This is just a test. They know that if they did something like this with a well known artist they would generate enough bad publicity to guarantee that they would never be able to experiment like this in the future.
Not to mention the fact that many will probably buy this CD, find it doesn't work in their kit, and will want to take it back. Returns are expensive. With a little bit of luck it could make this particular album a very expensive mistake for the record companies.
The Falcon and the Amiga were doomed by simple economics. The PC (with its open architecture) was significantly less expensive than the Amiga, and for most folks it was "good enough."
In other words the same market forces that doomed the Amiga are going to make sure that Linux continues to do well in the marketplace (notice I didn't say "Linux companies"). Linux is very inexpensive, it is flexible, robust, and mature, it runs on commodity hardware, and for many uses it is "good enough." That's a winning combination, my friend, and that's why Linux is being used in all sorts of projects.
Technology has little or nothing to do with the success of a product. We've all seen countless hardware and software gizmos that were gunned down by inferior competitors. The trick is to make a product that is "good enough" for most people, and do it for less than your competitors. Of course, knowing what constitutes "good enough" is quite tricky.
It's all about corruption. If there is one thing that I have noticed in my travels around the globe it is that the prosperity of a country is inversely related to the amount of corruption in it's systems. In those countries where the postman steals your mail, or the policeman hits you up for protection money it is simply impossible to effectively run a business of any kind. This is especially true because these countries generally also have politicians that buy and sell elections.
Democracy helps, but not as much as the rule of law. It is much better economically to have a dictator if he/she comes down hard on corruption (Chile under Pinochet is a good example of this).
It's impressive that they've gotten a tiny piece of a modern operating system up and running. But commercial OSes have LOTS more functionality. And they have a little something called support. By and large, you are paying for support with most software (news flash: shrink-wrap software for consumers is a tiny bit of the entire software market. The real software industry is business software).
When they add the OpenBSD userland to this kernel they will have a pretty impressive amount of useability. In fact, I would be interested in a list of the LOTS of extra features that commercial OSes have.
As for your insinuation that only commercial OSes can survive in the business market, well the numbers would seem to disagree. Linux seems to be doing fairly well, and it was written by a Finnish college undergraduate. In fact I still have the text of the flamewar between Linus and Prof. Andrew Tannenbaum in which Prof. Tannebaum told Linus that he would flunk him if he turned in Linux as a project. Now unless you happen to think that commercial OS == Windows, then I think that you would have to admit that somehow, despite its humble beginnings, Linux has managed to be pretty darn useful. There are plenty of commercial OSes that would love to have Linux's growth rate and market penetration.
I don't think the dropout and his buds are going to be an impressive support organization for companies in the Fortune 1000. Or, heck, the Fortune 10,000.
I would actually agree with you there. It will certainly be a harder sell. But if the software is good, it will find users. Heck, there are all kinds of uses for such a beast.
Clearly you are educated. After all, how many CS students can say they have written their own Mach based BSD kernel (at 16). But the corporate world puts a pretty strong emphasis on formal education. And it isn't just the suits either. Heck, you no doubt have seen the education bigots on Slashdot talk about how someone who is self taught could "never really grasp CS."
Apparently they don't realize that CS textbooks are available to everyone.
You know that commercial software vendors have got to be feeling like they are in a precarious position when 16 year-old highschool dropouts can successfully write their own Unix microkernel based operating system.
Seriously, the programming team for this xMach thing consists of some punk kid and 5 or 6 other people (none of which stuck the project out to the end). That is insane (in a good way). Honestly, if uneducated volunteers can accomplish a feat like that and give the results away then you almost have to feel sorry for those people in the business of creating proprietary operating systems. Basically they are screwed.
The user is king. And with Linux (and most other operating systems) the user is occasionally going to want to build a one off application. I have seen a lot of these applications (often built with tools like Access) and they are hardly ever built in the proud tradition of Model View Controller, and yet they are still useful. What's more, these applications are oftentimes much easier to write (at the expense of being difficult to extend and maintain).
The fact of the matter is that Berlin has got to be more flexible if it plans on ever taking X's place. After all, Gnome already has all of the nifty features of Berlin (Corba, OpenGL, anti-aliased fonts, etc.) and you can certainly use MVC to design your Gnome applications. The difference is that Gnome works today (mostly), and unsophisticated users can easily build simple applications without having to worry about using an MVC model. If Berlin doesn't do everything that X + Gnome does, plus some extra nifty features, then hackers and users will simply use Gnome (and the same argument applies to KDE).
This is why it makes sense for the Berlin folks to be targetting non-PC devices. After all, there isn't a pile of legacy X software for these things. There is a chance that they could get a jump on the competition. However, with new shrinky-dink versions of X and GTK and QT both being able to work with framebuffer devices I don't see that happening either.
The user is king, and Berlin has no users. Nor does it really have any truly nifty advantages that are going to lure developers its way. Without users, and without developers building applications to lure those users to the new platform then Berlin will likely remain a nifty toy that CmdrTaco brings up every 6 months or so for old times sake.
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The same could easily be said for Windows XP. Believe it or not Microsoft has got to sell Windows XP. If Windows XP is chuck full of stupid "features" that are actually disincentives to the upgrade then people will stick with what they have. This is nearly as dangerous for Microsoft as if the user had switched to Linux. Remember, Microsoft's biggest competitor isn't Corel, or Oracle, or IBM, or even the amorphous "Linux," Micrsoft's biggest competitor is previous versions of their own software.
Even worse issues like games and compatibility with work also make it more likely that people will stick with what they have. I don't know of any businesses that have rolled out Windows XP (nor do I know of any that have done a serious desktop rollout of Windows 2000, for that matter). They should be making their operating system as attractive to buyers as they possibly can. Instead they are lining up an initiative to treat their customers as copyright breaking thieves. Things like WMA and the new copy protection scheme aren't likely to entire current Windows users to this new OS.
Meanwhile Linux will continue to grow. naysayers have been predicting its imminent demise since it's first arrival on the scene, and they have always been spectacularly wrong. The reason for this is simple, Linux is too darned useful. It's price tag is a siren song for hackers and entrepreneurs everywhere, and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure that keeps Linux alive is negligible. Microsoft can't bankrupt Linux, it can't buy Linux, and it can't intimidate enough Linuxers to make a difference.
This doesn't make Linux better than Windows. I personally don't think that Linux is ready for the desktop, for example. But it does guarantee that Linux will keep growing, and that it will continue to become a more viable alternative every day. If Microsoft continues to misuse their customers they will someday find that most of them are jumping ship.
Well said. And this will be Microsoft's undoing. If the protocols are truly open then what is the ASPs incentive to use Microsoft software? ISPs haven't been tempted by Microsoft's extensions to open protocols, and my guess is that ASPs aren't going to be too interested in paying the Microsoft tax either.
They will, of course, build .Net compatible services (in order to tap into the large Microsoft using customer base), but my guess is that they will generally shun the Microsoft specific extensions.
What most Slashdot readers are afraid of is a future in which Microsoft can say "All your Data belong to Us" (in much more polished English, of course), but this is essentially becoming less and less the case every day as Microsoft is being forced by their customers towards open standards.
It's already happening. Sun's ultimate goal for Star Office is for it to be deployed by ASPs. The beautty of this is that StarOffice will not require that the ASP give a cut of the profits to someone else. This is good for the ASP because it lowers their costs, and it is good for Sun because it A) cuts of Microsoft's Office cash flow, and B) sells more beefy Sun hardware.
The funny thing is that Microsoft is going to go through a ton of work forcing their customers into the ASP model, only to find increased competition for their software (and from software that will almost certainly be less expensive to own).
Yes, but nobody said that you had to spend your money on word processors. Myself personally, I have lots of stuff that I would rather spend my cash on.
People spent money before Microsoft existed, and they will continue to spend money even if Microsoft disappears. They just won't spend as much of it on software.
We have all seen what has happened to the VC driven Dot Com's and their startup kin. They thought (mistakenly for the most part) that the only database that was likely to be "good enough" was Oracle, and so they paid through the nose for it.
This made Oracle happy (in the short run) because they made a great deal of profits, but it made these profits by and large from a group of customers that are now unlikely to be repeat customers. Meanwhile the wiser startups (the ones you haven't heard of because they didn't buy Super Bowl commercials and haven't been listed on fuckedcompany.com) decided that some other database was "good enough" and they might actually be around again to buy upgrades in the future. If their needs grow from their success they might even actually need Oracle the second time around (but they will be able to afford it now). The fact of the matter is that for some workloads there simply is no choice but Oracle. They sell the only tool that is "good enough."
I can guarantee you that in the long run Oracle will either earn the premium that their customers pay, or they will have to lower their price (or go out of business). Oracle has plenty of competition, and most workloads do not come anywhere close to requiring their database.
Try starting your next project like this:
#!/usr/bin/env python
And you too will know the secret.
The minimum payment for commercial Curl usage is $1000 per month and the maximum is $50000 per month based on the characters of Curl content sent. I don't know what kind of magic Curl claims to be doing. But the bits from your images and text have to get to the client somehow. My guess is that they aren't doing a better job than PNG, JPEG, and Apache with mod_gzip.
The difference, of course, is that I can use Java and JavaScript for the low price of FREE, and support is included in most browsers without the hassle of a plug-in.
Curl, on the other hand, wants to charge by the character for commercial content, and your customers will be forced to install their goofy plug-in to boot. Oh, and they want to force you to learn another language as well, that makes sense.
Face it, the folks behind Curl are clearly insane. Their mousetrap might be better at killing mice, unfortunately it irradiates the entire neighborhood and makes your house unsuitable for human habiation for the next 1e237 years.
Well said. There is no way that Curl has any chance of being succesful given that it is competing with several well tested (and well-known) systems that do essentially the same thing for free.
Exactly. This is nothing more than a Flash or Java Applet substitute. Unfortunately for the folks working on Curl they seem to have forgotten the most basic premise of computer economics.
Curl is competing with several entrenched technologies, and both Flash and Java Applets have progressed a great deal over the last couple of years. More importantly, both of these solutions are easier and less expensive to deploy than Curl. So even if Curl has serious cool points it doesn't stand a chance.
What's most amazing to me is that apparently these folks just don't see that. That absolutely boggles my mind. Surely they must realize that the last thing that the web needs is yet another plug-in. Especially a plug-in that requires you to pay by the character for commercial content. The folks at Curl must be targetting the demographic of billionaires who recently had a botched frontal lobotomy.
Maybe they will simply threaten to take over the world by exploiting a secret backdoor in the OS software.
Just imagine Bill Gates delivering this ultimatum to the US President, "Give us a 'Get out of Jail Free' card or all your base are belong to us."
Sorry, couldn't help it.
Actually, this is one case where Microsoft will quite likely have the inferior lawyers. Microsoft is the biggest fattest prize on the face of the earth, and class actions suits are literal gold mines. Especially class actions suits in which there are 40 million plaintiffs.
The big money lawyers are going to want to be on the plaintiff's side on this case. After all, 33% of umpteen billion dollars is one heck of an incentive. This ruling is like giving Microsoft a big cut and throwing them into piranha infested waters. They are fair game now, and the lawyers will clean their bones.
The worst part is that this signifies all that is wrong with the American legal system. This has about as much to do with justice as a lynching. It's not often that I wish Microsoft the best of luck, but they deserve a break (good luck).
Yes, I realize that this is a troll, but it serves to illustrate a point.
Star Office is licensed under a "free beer" style license. You don't get access to the source code, but you can install it on as many computers as you like. Check it out. OpenOffice, Star Office's next generation, is available under the GPL.
And don't think that Microsoft isn't worried about this. They know very well that once the customer's only reason to stick with a piece of software is "it will cost too much to migrate" that the software is essentially doomed. The short history of computing is littered with products that had tremendous market share and were eclipsed by less expensive (and often less able) competitors. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Novell Netware are probably the best known examples. Migrating away from these programs cost businesses a mint, but they still did it.
Linux has a lot of advantages. Chief among them are that it allows developers and solutions providers to cheaply an inexpensively create turnkey solutions that are then deployable without license fees. So while it may not make financial sense for a company to chuck out existing systems in favor of Linux, it does make sense for new systems to be written using Linux and other freely available tools. By and large this is what is happening with Linux today. No one is replacing Windows with Linux across the board, but lots of shops are finding ways to implement Linux based solutions instead of Windows based ones.
Your post summed up the precise reason why it is that Microsoft should play nice. Currently they are able to trick nearly every business in the United States into mass deploying their OS and their expensive office suite.
If pressed hard enough these businesses will undoubtedly find out that for very little expense they can quickly and easily migrate their Microsoft Office data to Star Office (which is free).
Sure, Star Office isn't quite MS Office, but it is much closer than most people think, and it is a heck of a lot cheaper.
I agree that Windows has every right to uphold their licensing agreements. They wrote the software, they get to create the license, pure and simple.
However, there aren't many vendors that can treat their paying customers as poorly as Microsoft does and still get away with it. Microsoft is going after customers that it has successfully extracted hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars from. Take the example of Bank of Tokyo/Mitsubishi that was cited in the article. After Microsoft forced the company into an expensive audit of it's systems it then charged it $10,000 for missing licenses. That's insane. The Bank of Tokyo/Mitsubishi almost certainly spends a lot of money on Microsoft software. Forcing them through an expensive audit just so that you can charge them an extra $10,000 is the type of move that is guaranteed to send your customers packing.
And according to this article buying an enterprise license is no solution either. The CIO of Snapper is quoted as saying that it is difficult to get Microsoft to acknowledge new systems as part of the original agreement (which in my mind is the whole point of an enterprise license).
In other words, this article isn't a cut-and-dried licensing issue, but rather Microsoft throwing around their weight to improve revenues, at the expense of their best customers. The customers cited in the article are all big Microsoft clients, and they are all being treated like shoplifters. Quite frankly that is no way to run a business.
Microsoft has been able to keep it's stock price stratospheric for years by posting record earnings. However, with slumping hardware sales, a slowing economy, lethargic adoption of Windows 2000 and Office 2000 and a emergence of a real threat on the low end server from Linux and BSD Microsoft can no longer afford to look the other way when it comes to licensing issues. Microsoft needs the revenues, and it needs them now. After all, employee options are a huge part of the average Microsoftie's employment package. If their stock doesn't go up (or worse, if it goes down), then working at Microsoft is not really that nifty a job.
In the past Microsoft realized that casual sharing of their software actually served as a very effective free advertising campaign. It helped maintain their position by making sure that their software was ubiquitous. Now that they have the market tied up, they are looking to reel in all the freeloaders.
Microsoft's plan will backfire, especially if they continue pestering companies that are honestly trying to comply.
This particular CD won't work in your computer, it won't work in your car stereo if it has anti-skip technology. It's not the older CD players that are going to have problems with this beast, it's the newer and nicer ones.
In other words, there is no way in heck that this thing is going to fly. Consumers aren't going to put up with it. The RIAA members are simply crucifying themselves for the pure spectacle value.
If you read the article you will notice that this type of stunt has already been tried. The technology was subtly different, but if these unburnable CDs have even a similar rate of return then the company will be forced into an expensive recall. That's why the industry is testing the waters with a country music "star" that none of us have heard of. This is just a test. They know that if they did something like this with a well known artist they would generate enough bad publicity to guarantee that they would never be able to experiment like this in the future.
Not to mention the fact that many will probably buy this CD, find it doesn't work in their kit, and will want to take it back. Returns are expensive. With a little bit of luck it could make this particular album a very expensive mistake for the record companies.
The Falcon and the Amiga were doomed by simple economics. The PC (with its open architecture) was significantly less expensive than the Amiga, and for most folks it was "good enough."
In other words the same market forces that doomed the Amiga are going to make sure that Linux continues to do well in the marketplace (notice I didn't say "Linux companies"). Linux is very inexpensive, it is flexible, robust, and mature, it runs on commodity hardware, and for many uses it is "good enough." That's a winning combination, my friend, and that's why Linux is being used in all sorts of projects.
Technology has little or nothing to do with the success of a product. We've all seen countless hardware and software gizmos that were gunned down by inferior competitors. The trick is to make a product that is "good enough" for most people, and do it for less than your competitors. Of course, knowing what constitutes "good enough" is quite tricky.
It's all about corruption. If there is one thing that I have noticed in my travels around the globe it is that the prosperity of a country is inversely related to the amount of corruption in it's systems. In those countries where the postman steals your mail, or the policeman hits you up for protection money it is simply impossible to effectively run a business of any kind. This is especially true because these countries generally also have politicians that buy and sell elections.
Democracy helps, but not as much as the rule of law. It is much better economically to have a dictator if he/she comes down hard on corruption (Chile under Pinochet is a good example of this).
When they add the OpenBSD userland to this kernel they will have a pretty impressive amount of useability. In fact, I would be interested in a list of the LOTS of extra features that commercial OSes have.
As for your insinuation that only commercial OSes can survive in the business market, well the numbers would seem to disagree. Linux seems to be doing fairly well, and it was written by a Finnish college undergraduate. In fact I still have the text of the flamewar between Linus and Prof. Andrew Tannenbaum in which Prof. Tannebaum told Linus that he would flunk him if he turned in Linux as a project. Now unless you happen to think that commercial OS == Windows, then I think that you would have to admit that somehow, despite its humble beginnings, Linux has managed to be pretty darn useful. There are plenty of commercial OSes that would love to have Linux's growth rate and market penetration.
I would actually agree with you there. It will certainly be a harder sell. But if the software is good, it will find users. Heck, there are all kinds of uses for such a beast.
Clearly you are educated. After all, how many CS students can say they have written their own Mach based BSD kernel (at 16). But the corporate world puts a pretty strong emphasis on formal education. And it isn't just the suits either. Heck, you no doubt have seen the education bigots on Slashdot talk about how someone who is self taught could "never really grasp CS."
Apparently they don't realize that CS textbooks are available to everyone.
You know that commercial software vendors have got to be feeling like they are in a precarious position when 16 year-old highschool dropouts can successfully write their own Unix microkernel based operating system.
Seriously, the programming team for this xMach thing consists of some punk kid and 5 or 6 other people (none of which stuck the project out to the end). That is insane (in a good way). Honestly, if uneducated volunteers can accomplish a feat like that and give the results away then you almost have to feel sorry for those people in the business of creating proprietary operating systems. Basically they are screwed.
Congratulations to the hackers working on xMach.
The user is king. And with Linux (and most other operating systems) the user is occasionally going to want to build a one off application. I have seen a lot of these applications (often built with tools like Access) and they are hardly ever built in the proud tradition of Model View Controller, and yet they are still useful. What's more, these applications are oftentimes much easier to write (at the expense of being difficult to extend and maintain).
The fact of the matter is that Berlin has got to be more flexible if it plans on ever taking X's place. After all, Gnome already has all of the nifty features of Berlin (Corba, OpenGL, anti-aliased fonts, etc.) and you can certainly use MVC to design your Gnome applications. The difference is that Gnome works today (mostly), and unsophisticated users can easily build simple applications without having to worry about using an MVC model. If Berlin doesn't do everything that X + Gnome does, plus some extra nifty features, then hackers and users will simply use Gnome (and the same argument applies to KDE).
This is why it makes sense for the Berlin folks to be targetting non-PC devices. After all, there isn't a pile of legacy X software for these things. There is a chance that they could get a jump on the competition. However, with new shrinky-dink versions of X and GTK and QT both being able to work with framebuffer devices I don't see that happening either.
The user is king, and Berlin has no users. Nor does it really have any truly nifty advantages that are going to lure developers its way. Without users, and without developers building applications to lure those users to the new platform then Berlin will likely remain a nifty toy that CmdrTaco brings up every 6 months or so for old times sake.