As far as enterprise-ready OSs go, the licensing fee differential (Linux's "free beer" advantage) is negligible. If you have an enterprise-ready budget, NT licenses are almost candy; the internal and external support are the expensive bits.
But if you mean free speech rather than free beer, you're right. Smart IS directors are realizing a huge advantage with Linux: even if there is a horrible bug in the OS, they can hire one of several companies to fix it! If(?) there is a horrible bug in NT, you have to either pray for Microsoft to fix it (risky and time-consuming) or change OSs altogether (mucho expensive). If your Linux support team fails you, you can get a brand-new Linux support team without switching platforms.
That's what makes Linux less expensive in the enterprise. The support is non-monopolistic, thus cheaper. And the support is the expensive part.
This is where people with open source money (the biggest gun being Red Hat) can getter their own marketing at the expense of some major hurt on MS.
In most cases, lying is a Bad Thing, but certainly not illegal. Two cases where lying is illegal, however, are under oath (that's perjury) and making claims about a competitor's product (that's slander). A good law firm should catch them talking out of both sides of their mouth in these arenas, and thus show them guilty of one or the other offense.
Microsoft could either say that they overstated the competition's quality in the DOJ trial, or understated the competition's quality in the realm of the marketroids. If they do the former, they dig themselves deeper into the antitrust hole. If they do the latter, they have to retract the statements, you get legal press releases, and the competitor can use the DOJ statements (wow, this is really good software, it competes with ours) as advertising copy. AFAIK, court transcripts are not subject to copyright law.
Does MS include Crypto in Win9x? No, partly because they couldn't export it if they did.
Yes, indeed, they do. Win 98 includes Internet Explorer (remember, it's a part of the OS...repeat that enough times and you might believe it). Internet Explorer is an HTTPS client, and thus has SSL encryption. Now, are there two strengths of Win98/IE, one for domestic and one for foreign?
And so what if they did ship Win98 with the full 128-bit crypto? The government seems to have little control over Microsoft anyhow. Would the DOJ come by and issue a cease-and-desist?
Win98 ships with IE. IE ships with cryptography. The state department defines cryptography as a munition. Win98 comes with munitions.
What the US restrictions are effective in doing, however, is to cripple the development of cheap, commercial, embedded crypto. No US company want to develop a domestic-only product, that will qualify as munitions per export regulations. So they don't bother.
In short, they make it illegal for US companies to create top-notch secure software. I guess that if the job really requires the security, our only legal option would be to import software from Europe.
This isn't crippling the world's ability to do crypto. It's just insuring that the US won't be able to cash in on it.
Methinks that the NSA came up to Washington one day and strongly encrypted some legislators' minds. In some cases, the point is that it inhibits rights. That aside, my problem is that it won't work to do the job it is supposed to do. It will just move the suppliers overseas, and let them legally export the tech to us.
We have already altered this planet plenty by being "GOD". And we say it with distain, because we have up until this point been a childish selfish god. An infant god. Now as we are just begining to realize the complicated nature of our responsibility there is a very strong tendancy for people to want to walk away from it all, and not be "god" any more.
It is not a choice we can make. We are now the parents of the planet which reared us. To look at in any other way is wishful thinking, and nostalgia.
We should be careful. We should think more often than we act, but we should not hope that "God" knows what to do, and its not out place to mess-a-bout.
With regards to playing God, merely changing the face of the earth is not playing God. It is terraforming, and I admit that we humans have a lot to learn about it. We're decent terraformers, but not very good ones yet. But that isn't playing God.
In fact, per the Judeo-Christian mythos, this is exactly what we are supposed to be doing. The first commandment God ever gave a person in the book of Genesis is (paraphrasing here) to go forth and multiply, to fill the earth and to subdue it.
I don't expect everyone to agree with this perspective; there are a number of religions among the Slashdotters. However, not all of them think that we are playing God with the earth. IMHO, we are not "raping the planet". We are doing our job, but stumbling a lot when we are doing it.
3) What harvard did was right. It was OK for them to spew FUD (untruths) because they needed "time." Welcome to the real world. It isn't a pretty place and it hasn't been for as long as I've been alive. Harvard did what needed to be done at the time, yes.
Survey says...XXX!
Living in the real world is no excuse for doing the Wrong Thing. Spreading untruth is almost always the Wrong Thing, and it is more so for Harvard.
Not only is Harvard a college, it has a valid (though disputable) claim of being the best college in the world. Harvard is in the business of education. They are in the business of dissemenating knowledge. They are in the business of dissemenating truth.
Every lie, every piece of FUD that Harvard puts out attacks their own credibility, their own reputation. Where are they without that?
However, how can you guarantee that it is "made in the USA"?
If you're talking about export regs, that question is irrelevant. If you have strong crypto code within the US, it is illegal to export it even if it was imported. The place of origin is irrelevant.
BTW, NAI has a neat way of dealing with it. All these export regs do not apply to source code in the form of a printed book. Publish, scan, and compile. And, voila! Legally exported code. NAI does this to ship their code to their international site in the Netherlands.
Then on the other: Kind of scary all these businesses looking to make money off of opensource projects. It has become known that makeing consumers happy is not as important as consumer lock in and incompatability in the software industry. While opensource software relies heavily on standards, I don't see it impossible that business makes Apache propietary (with no source) at some point in the future.
Open source changes the rules of software business. Specifically, it destroys software as a business. It promotes service as a business.
When you guarantee to show your source, it is hard to make a proprietary protocol. Others can see it and reimplement it. The only lock in you will get is the lock in of having the plain old best product.
Micro$oft is now convinced that they are #1, and Linux will never be able to compete.
Don't you believe it.
If Microsoft thought that Linux would never be able to compete, they wouldn't have bothered to publish the test results. They think that Linux is so popular that bad press is better than no press; that it is no longer under the radar. Never believe that a company's marketing reflects the internal realities; that goes double for Microsoft.
As near as I can figure, Microsoft sees Linux as the new platform threat, and will deal with Linux accordingly. If they're smart, they will realize that FUD cannot destroy Linux, but can certainly slow it down. When MS markets a commercial product out of existence, the war has a limited duration and is over when the product's vendor pulls it. Since nobody can pull Linux, marketing and FUD wars could last for decades. But in the meantime, MS may find it useful to slow Linux growth until they can organize a better defense.
If we're lucky, MS will be stupid and try to FUD us to death. Linux can beat any FUD, because it has more long-term viability than any proprietary software; we have forever to make Linux kick ass. I'm not going to count on that, however; MS shipped all their stupid people to federal court.
They may be able to embrace and extend popular protocols (like TCP). They can put their proprietary ware on top of the open source Linux kernel, though they can't do much to the kernel itself. One interesting strategy might be to port Win32 to Linux as Microsoft payware. Thus, they get to collect their tax as you install MS-Office onto your corporate Linux desktop. I don't know if this approach would be beneficial or harmful to them.
Microsoft understands that Linux is a threat. They are allocating resources to deal with it. Don't turn your back on them.
Re:All Christians aspire to be like christ
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 2
If I can save all of humanity by being nailed to a tree, hammer away. I don't think that this is the case, however.
Jesus did the whole "nailed to a tree" thing because it was God's way of saving the Earth.
In the meantime, we would appreciate it if you laid off the death threats.
PR can eat itself. Linux is uniquely able to ignore the PR wars and win in spite of them.
At the end of the day, the smart companies have only two questions about IS technology:
1: Can I do more with this?
2: Can I do the same job cheaper with this?
All the other numbers are indirect data, trash talk. Management--especially smart management, doesn't directly care about MIPS, MTBF, or benchmark numbers. They care about the two questions above, and care about the other numbers indirectly because those numbers tend to be good predictors of the answers to the real questions. In this business, when almost everything is potential, these early indicators are very important, because you can't get good answers to the top two questions.
You have the same thing in sports. You can measure free-throw percentage, height, weight, slugging averate, save percentage, and a host of other details. But at the end of the day, only one question matters into it: How often do you win? All the rest are trash-talk numbers--good predictors, but not the bottom line.
In sports and business, you have to have those trash-talk numbers for people to give you a chance. If you weigh a trim 175lb, nobody in their right mind is going to make a nose tackle out of you--you won't get the chance to show the coach that you can topple the 325lb center. If a product has enough benchmarks damning it, the vendor will pull support and recoup its losses.
This is why Linux can ignore the trash-talk and go straight to increasing capabilities and lowering costs. Linux isn't a business; vendors cannot cut all support. Nobody has the power to tell Linux that it cannot enter the IS world. It can't get cut, and can only get discontinued if every Linux geek in Creation decides to spontaneously drop it. Red Hat and Caldera can go belly-up, Torvalds and Cox could be swallowed up in earthquakes, and Linux will keep on existing.
So long as Linux exists, it can win. With the development advantages it has, it can win well. It needs a foothold in some IS shops; it's getting that, or has already gotten that.
If Linux wins, it is going to start by revolutionizing an IS department. Some big gun like AOL will see the potential and let it start taking over the infrastructure. It will work. Forget the runtime, forget the performance, it will do the job for cheaper. In the business world, such success gets copied. People look at the company that pulls this off, ask how they do it, and see a room full of Linux boxen.
The IT budget will convince more smart managers than any amount of benchmarking will.
PR is still relevant, but only in the short term. Good or bad PR can accelerate or slow the rate of Linux installation. In the long term, however, the success of Linux will have nothing to do with the benchmark numbers and have everything to do with the budget numbers. If Linux can do the job cheaper, it will win. If it can't, it will remain a hobby OS.
But the good news is that, unlike a corporate product, short term effects cannot destroy the long term picture. Linux will have all the time it needs to fit into the corporate structure to its best abilities.
I can't understand why the government hates monopolies anyway. After all, the gov has a monopoly on your public school systems and I don't hear any motions to stop that.
Then we take our source, go underground, and improve illegal Linux past legal Linux to the point where you basically have to use illegal Linux to get the work done.
Linux, like the Internet is bigger than any government. Either will eventually topple any attempts to reign them in. Governments will try to put both on a leash; the world will see who is taking who for a walk.
Agreed. In most cases, the law is supposed to be the last resort, not the first. A civilized solution is likely to work and will be less expensive than a civil solution.
If the iToaster has no Linux within it, and they stated that it does, then we (and especially Linus) should write to their marketing (not legal) department, noting the problem and asking them to retract the word "Linux". A smart, professional marketing department will at least stop using the word "Linux", if not post an apology and a retraction. It saves them a lot of face to handle the situation that way, and marketing is all about face.
If this doesn't work, the next step is to send a similar message to their legal department. A smart, professional lawyer will realize that it is a lot cheaper to retract the statement then to go to court over it--corporate lawyers are hired to keep their clients out of court.
If these first two steps don't work, then you have to bring in the lawyers and sue for trademark infringement. This is the last resort, and the expensive solution. You likely won't get here, unless the company is being nonprofessional and deserves to be shown up in court anyhow.
a) they released a complete list of GPL programs they use, and b) if they allowed some independent code auditor to assure they had not modified the code in any way.
No auditor is needed. If they're using shipping GPL code in the toaster, and they're shipping the toaster, they have to ship the source (or let you know where to get it).
I once worked for a company that played with the concept of shipping diskless Linux boxen connected to a server. We figured we had to ship a Linux source CD with each box to meet GPL requirements. The fact that we expected our customer base to use them as coffee coasters was entirely beside the point...
-IMHO, ESR's talk was not extremely convincing - I think there's a lot more money to be made by keeping "private source."
A proprietary software house will usually make much more money than a similar open source software house--unless the houses are in competition. The existence of good open source software drastically reduces the money you can make with proprietary software.
If there is a good open source offering in a market, the proprietary competition can't survive like before. It can survive only if there is some vast technical or other superiority between itself and the open source product. Word survives because of MS's compatibility games; commercial Sendmail survives because it ships with features that freeware Sendmail will never have (funny that, they're both made by the same people...). Other than that, good open source will squash the competition. When was the last time you heard of someone paying for a Unix C/C++ compiler? We can thank Cygnus and GCC for that.
I don't care if Bill Gates makes one trillion dollars. Let him! I simply mind that he is doing it by polluting us with broken software.
If Windows works well, and you can fix what doesn't work, and add the stuff you need to it, I would count myself lucky and proudly run NT on my system.
My current problem is not that I run NT, but that NT is incapable of working the way I want it to, forces me to go down paths that I don't want to go, and is gratuitously incompatible with the rest of the world. An open source NT would not have these problems.
Ignorant is correct. The people he was talking about brought Oracle up as an example of a semi-open-source company, and noted that Microsoft earns more per employee than Oracle. This produced enough evidence for the employee to conclude that closed-source development is technically superior to open-source development.
The ignorance comes from the fact that, by jumping to that conclusion, the employee implied that Microsoft's income is directly related to the technical merits of their products. This is false, even by Microsoft's own lights. Microsoft keeps their income up via superior marketing. Note that by all reports, Bill Gates concentrates more on the marketing of his products than the development of them. This shows the relative importance of both efforts, more so since Gates was once a software developer.
The employee was critical, but based that criticality on false assumptions. Thus, the employee was acting out of ignorance.
"Couldn't decrypt it? Hmmm...what's your Genesis translation? I encrypted it with the King James version...your New International version would never be able to read it..."
As well, I couldn't believe how many times the word "whore" was used. Damn, just when I thought I had busted that glass ceiling.
While I wouldn't use that word per se, prostitution is a good description of Mindcraft's activities of late. As a benchmarking company, they live or die by their credibility. By their actions on this test (adequately documented on this site; one of my earlier posts has the link to ESR's stuff), they have sold out their credibility. IMHO, this is indeed worse than selling out one's body.
And to write off a respected company as in the pocket of Microsoft because your favourite operating system didnt win is immature. They held a second test at their own expense to prove they are not biased. They are a company, with responsibilty and credit being their currency.
Some wrote off Mindcraft because it showed that NT outperformed Linux. I agree; this behavior is wrong and counterproductive.
Other people smelled a rat, and found one (or several). These people didn't complain because NT won, but because the test was entirely rigged. This response is entirely appropriate to the situation.
Eric Raymond collected the evidence and presents it here.
To summarize what you will find at the link:
The test was paid for by Microsoft (a fact not originally stated by Mindcraft). Was Mindcraft paid off by Microsoft? That depends on your definition; they were indisputably paid by Microsoft. But I trust no benchmark where the ones funding it have a vested interest in the results.
The hardware was optimal for NT, and pessimal for Linux.
The test used dissimilar Web servers. Apache was used on Linux, while something else (IIS?) was used on NT.
The test problem was specifically something that the Apache Web server was bad at; other Linux Web servers are better suited to this problem. While this is somewhat underhanded for an Apache test, the fact that this was supposedly not an Apache test shows the rigging.
The NT machine was well-tuned by NT professionals. The Linux machine was poorly tuned.
Mindcraft criticised both Red Hat support and USENET support. Later reports showed that they attempted to get tuning information from Red Hat's installation support line (which doesn't answer such questions; you have to pay for that level of service). They also showed that they made exactly one USENET post, which didn't contain enough information for a proper solution. USENET requests for more information were not replied to. In short, Mindcraft made no more than token attempts to get support.
Mindcraft's "attempts" at tuning Linux actually made it slower than normal.
While there is some mindless rage concerning this issue, there is a lot of well-documented righteous indignation.
I guess we have to strike a balance between telling the truth (which, IMHO, most of those mails on Mindcraft's page *do*, albeit maybe a touch more directly than they oughta) and playing the good diplomatic game
A lot of the "rants" I read on the Mindcraft page were zero-content. Effectively, they were all variations on "Windows Sux, D00DZ!". This is zero intelligence and sheer rage. If this is a war of Windows versus Linux, our goal is to get Bill Gates running around, screaming "Linux Sux, D00DZ!". Imagine what that would do for NT market share. Doing it ourselves doesn't help a bit.
One need not strike a balance between truth and diplomacy, because you can maximize both. My favorite way of winning arguments is being calm, collected, rational, and right. If I can achieve this, I can drive my opponent stark raving mad; anyone who is keeping score can see who the winner is. We can do that here.
Slashdot has been following the Mindcraft saga well. While there were some simple rants from both the Linux and Microsoft camps here, a lot of Slashdotters came up with some damning facts that made Mindcraft cringe. The best ones did so calmly and collectively, along the lines of "Hey...did anyone notice that they picked out RAID hardware with a bogus Linux driver?" or "Hmmm... Usenet only sees one post to the Linux boards as a help request," and "If they're pitting Linux versus NT, why are they only using Apache on Linux? For this sort of work, I'd choose another Linux HTTP server". Of course, we finished up with "Thanks, Mindcraft, you gave us some ideas on how to speed up Linux. See you next rev!"
That's why Mindcraft has been dragging it out, redoing the test, asking for Linus himself. They likely expected us to pointlessly rant (which some of us did). I don't think that they expected us to pick their test to pieces in an open forum. They were completely knocked off their game, and found themselves playing ours
At one point, Microsoft had a rant on their page calling the Linux community 'chicken' (not in so many words) for not taking Mindcraft on the offer of a retest. They seemed rather peeved at being denied the satisfaction of a rematch, even after they understood our reasons for avoiding it. You don't cut a deal with a dragon, and you don't trust Microsoft further than you can throw them.
The truth shall set us free. Even if the majority of people don't believe us because they listen to Microsoft, a few will become Linux shops. When they report their IT budgets, their NT-using competition will take notice. If they cannot see the truth, they can read the writing on their bank accounts. And if they can't even do that, then corporate Darwinism takes over--the company that can do the same job with fewer IT dollars is likely to take over the one spending more IT dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you mean free speech rather than free beer, you're right. Smart IS directors are realizing a huge advantage with Linux: even if there is a horrible bug in the OS, they can hire one of several companies to fix it! If(?) there is a horrible bug in NT, you have to either pray for Microsoft to fix it (risky and time-consuming) or change OSs altogether (mucho expensive). If your Linux support team fails you, you can get a brand-new Linux support team without switching platforms.
That's what makes Linux less expensive in the enterprise. The support is non-monopolistic, thus cheaper. And the support is the expensive part.
In most cases, lying is a Bad Thing, but certainly not illegal. Two cases where lying is illegal, however, are under oath (that's perjury) and making claims about a competitor's product (that's slander). A good law firm should catch them talking out of both sides of their mouth in these arenas, and thus show them guilty of one or the other offense.
Microsoft could either say that they overstated the competition's quality in the DOJ trial, or understated the competition's quality in the realm of the marketroids. If they do the former, they dig themselves deeper into the antitrust hole. If they do the latter, they have to retract the statements, you get legal press releases, and the competitor can use the DOJ statements (wow, this is really good software, it competes with ours) as advertising copy. AFAIK, court transcripts are not subject to copyright law.
Beware goddesses bearing apples.
Yes, indeed, they do. Win 98 includes Internet Explorer (remember, it's a part of the OS...repeat that enough times and you might believe it). Internet Explorer is an HTTPS client, and thus has SSL encryption. Now, are there two strengths of Win98/IE, one for domestic and one for foreign?
And so what if they did ship Win98 with the full 128-bit crypto? The government seems to have little control over Microsoft anyhow. Would the DOJ come by and issue a cease-and-desist?
Win98 ships with IE. IE ships with cryptography. The state department defines cryptography as a munition. Win98 comes with munitions.
Or, in short, Win98 bombs.
In short, they make it illegal for US companies to create top-notch secure software. I guess that if the job really requires the security, our only legal option would be to import software from Europe.
This isn't crippling the world's ability to do crypto. It's just insuring that the US won't be able to cash in on it.
Methinks that the NSA came up to Washington one day and strongly encrypted some legislators' minds. In some cases, the point is that it inhibits rights. That aside, my problem is that it won't work to do the job it is supposed to do. It will just move the suppliers overseas, and let them legally export the tech to us.
It is not a choice we can make. We are now the parents of the planet which reared us. To look at in any other way is wishful thinking, and nostalgia.
We should be careful. We should think more often than we act, but we should not hope that "God" knows what to do, and its not out place to mess-a-bout.
With regards to playing God, merely changing the face of the earth is not playing God. It is terraforming, and I admit that we humans have a lot to learn about it. We're decent terraformers, but not very good ones yet. But that isn't playing God.
In fact, per the Judeo-Christian mythos, this is exactly what we are supposed to be doing. The first commandment God ever gave a person in the book of Genesis is (paraphrasing here) to go forth and multiply, to fill the earth and to subdue it.
I don't expect everyone to agree with this perspective; there are a number of religions among the Slashdotters. However, not all of them think that we are playing God with the earth. IMHO, we are not "raping the planet". We are doing our job, but stumbling a lot when we are doing it.
Survey says...XXX!
Living in the real world is no excuse for doing the Wrong Thing. Spreading untruth is almost always the Wrong Thing, and it is more so for Harvard.
Not only is Harvard a college, it has a valid (though disputable) claim of being the best college in the world. Harvard is in the business of education. They are in the business of dissemenating knowledge. They are in the business of dissemenating truth.
Every lie, every piece of FUD that Harvard puts out attacks their own credibility, their own reputation. Where are they without that?
If you're talking about export regs, that question is irrelevant. If you have strong crypto code within the US, it is illegal to export it even if it was imported. The place of origin is irrelevant.
BTW, NAI has a neat way of dealing with it. All these export regs do not apply to source code in the form of a printed book. Publish, scan, and compile. And, voila! Legally exported code. NAI does this to ship their code to their international site in the Netherlands.
Too bad Kanly is illegal in this country. It would save a lot of court costs. Sigh...
(This post is smiley-captioned for the humor impaired).
Open source changes the rules of software business. Specifically, it destroys software as a business. It promotes service as a business.
When you guarantee to show your source, it is hard to make a proprietary protocol. Others can see it and reimplement it. The only lock in you will get is the lock in of having the plain old best product.
Don't you believe it.
If Microsoft thought that Linux would never be able to compete, they wouldn't have bothered to publish the test results. They think that Linux is so popular that bad press is better than no press; that it is no longer under the radar. Never believe that a company's marketing reflects the internal realities; that goes double for Microsoft.
As near as I can figure, Microsoft sees Linux as the new platform threat, and will deal with Linux accordingly. If they're smart, they will realize that FUD cannot destroy Linux, but can certainly slow it down. When MS markets a commercial product out of existence, the war has a limited duration and is over when the product's vendor pulls it. Since nobody can pull Linux, marketing and FUD wars could last for decades. But in the meantime, MS may find it useful to slow Linux growth until they can organize a better defense.
If we're lucky, MS will be stupid and try to FUD us to death. Linux can beat any FUD, because it has more long-term viability than any proprietary software; we have forever to make Linux kick ass. I'm not going to count on that, however; MS shipped all their stupid people to federal court.
They may be able to embrace and extend popular protocols (like TCP). They can put their proprietary ware on top of the open source Linux kernel, though they can't do much to the kernel itself. One interesting strategy might be to port Win32 to Linux as Microsoft payware. Thus, they get to collect their tax as you install MS-Office onto your corporate Linux desktop. I don't know if this approach would be beneficial or harmful to them.
Microsoft understands that Linux is a threat. They are allocating resources to deal with it. Don't turn your back on them.
Jesus did the whole "nailed to a tree" thing because it was God's way of saving the Earth.
In the meantime, we would appreciate it if you laid off the death threats.
Thanks in advance!
At the end of the day, the smart companies have only two questions about IS technology:
1: Can I do more with this?
2: Can I do the same job cheaper with this?
All the other numbers are indirect data, trash talk. Management--especially smart management, doesn't directly care about MIPS, MTBF, or benchmark numbers. They care about the two questions above, and care about the other numbers indirectly because those numbers tend to be good predictors of the answers to the real questions. In this business, when almost everything is potential, these early indicators are very important, because you can't get good answers to the top two questions.
You have the same thing in sports. You can measure free-throw percentage, height, weight, slugging averate, save percentage, and a host of other details. But at the end of the day, only one question matters into it: How often do you win? All the rest are trash-talk numbers--good predictors, but not the bottom line.
In sports and business, you have to have those trash-talk numbers for people to give you a chance. If you weigh a trim 175lb, nobody in their right mind is going to make a nose tackle out of you--you won't get the chance to show the coach that you can topple the 325lb center. If a product has enough benchmarks damning it, the vendor will pull support and recoup its losses.
This is why Linux can ignore the trash-talk and go straight to increasing capabilities and lowering costs. Linux isn't a business; vendors cannot cut all support. Nobody has the power to tell Linux that it cannot enter the IS world. It can't get cut, and can only get discontinued if every Linux geek in Creation decides to spontaneously drop it. Red Hat and Caldera can go belly-up, Torvalds and Cox could be swallowed up in earthquakes, and Linux will keep on existing.
So long as Linux exists, it can win. With the development advantages it has, it can win well. It needs a foothold in some IS shops; it's getting that, or has already gotten that.
If Linux wins, it is going to start by revolutionizing an IS department. Some big gun like AOL will see the potential and let it start taking over the infrastructure. It will work. Forget the runtime, forget the performance, it will do the job for cheaper. In the business world, such success gets copied. People look at the company that pulls this off, ask how they do it, and see a room full of Linux boxen.
The IT budget will convince more smart managers than any amount of benchmarking will.
PR is still relevant, but only in the short term. Good or bad PR can accelerate or slow the rate of Linux installation. In the long term, however, the success of Linux will have nothing to do with the benchmark numbers and have everything to do with the budget numbers. If Linux can do the job cheaper, it will win. If it can't, it will remain a hobby OS.
But the good news is that, unlike a corporate product, short term effects cannot destroy the long term picture. Linux will have all the time it needs to fit into the corporate structure to its best abilities.
That's what I said. The government can't stand competition. What is the government if not a monopoly?
The government can't stand competition.
Linux, like the Internet is bigger than any government. Either will eventually topple any attempts to reign them in. Governments will try to put both on a leash; the world will see who is taking who for a walk.
If the iToaster has no Linux within it, and they stated that it does, then we (and especially Linus) should write to their marketing (not legal) department, noting the problem and asking them to retract the word "Linux". A smart, professional marketing department will at least stop using the word "Linux", if not post an apology and a retraction. It saves them a lot of face to handle the situation that way, and marketing is all about face.
If this doesn't work, the next step is to send a similar message to their legal department. A smart, professional lawyer will realize that it is a lot cheaper to retract the statement then to go to court over it--corporate lawyers are hired to keep their clients out of court.
If these first two steps don't work, then you have to bring in the lawyers and sue for trademark infringement. This is the last resort, and the expensive solution. You likely won't get here, unless the company is being nonprofessional and deserves to be shown up in court anyhow.
No auditor is needed. If they're using shipping GPL code in the toaster, and they're shipping the toaster, they have to ship the source (or let you know where to get it).
I once worked for a company that played with the concept of shipping diskless Linux boxen connected to a server. We figured we had to ship a Linux source CD with each box to meet GPL requirements. The fact that we expected our customer base to use them as coffee coasters was entirely beside the point...
A proprietary software house will usually make much more money than a similar open source software house--unless the houses are in competition. The existence of good open source software drastically reduces the money you can make with proprietary software.
If there is a good open source offering in a market, the proprietary competition can't survive like before. It can survive only if there is some vast technical or other superiority between itself and the open source product. Word survives because of MS's compatibility games; commercial Sendmail survives because it ships with features that freeware Sendmail will never have (funny that, they're both made by the same people...). Other than that, good open source will squash the competition. When was the last time you heard of someone paying for a Unix C/C++ compiler? We can thank Cygnus and GCC for that.
I don't care if Bill Gates makes one trillion dollars. Let him! I simply mind that he is doing it by polluting us with broken software.
If Windows works well, and you can fix what doesn't work, and add the stuff you need to it, I would count myself lucky and proudly run NT on my system.
My current problem is not that I run NT, but that NT is incapable of working the way I want it to, forces me to go down paths that I don't want to go, and is gratuitously incompatible with the rest of the world. An open source NT would not have these problems.
The ignorance comes from the fact that, by jumping to that conclusion, the employee implied that Microsoft's income is directly related to the technical merits of their products. This is false, even by Microsoft's own lights. Microsoft keeps their income up via superior marketing. Note that by all reports, Bill Gates concentrates more on the marketing of his products than the development of them. This shows the relative importance of both efforts, more so since Gates was once a software developer.
The employee was critical, but based that criticality on false assumptions. Thus, the employee was acting out of ignorance.
"Couldn't decrypt it? Hmmm...what's your Genesis translation? I encrypted it with the King James version...your New International version would never be able to read it..."
While I wouldn't use that word per se, prostitution is a good description of Mindcraft's activities of late. As a benchmarking company, they live or die by their credibility. By their actions on this test (adequately documented on this site; one of my earlier posts has the link to ESR's stuff), they have sold out their credibility. IMHO, this is indeed worse than selling out one's body.
Some wrote off Mindcraft because it showed that NT outperformed Linux. I agree; this behavior is wrong and counterproductive.
Other people smelled a rat, and found one (or several). These people didn't complain because NT won, but because the test was entirely rigged. This response is entirely appropriate to the situation.
Eric Raymond collected the evidence and presents it here.
To summarize what you will find at the link:
The test was paid for by Microsoft (a fact not originally stated by Mindcraft). Was Mindcraft paid off by Microsoft? That depends on your definition; they were indisputably paid by Microsoft. But I trust no benchmark where the ones funding it have a vested interest in the results.
The hardware was optimal for NT, and pessimal for Linux.
The test used dissimilar Web servers. Apache was used on Linux, while something else (IIS?) was used on NT.
The test problem was specifically something that the Apache Web server was bad at; other Linux Web servers are better suited to this problem. While this is somewhat underhanded for an Apache test, the fact that this was supposedly not an Apache test shows the rigging.
The NT machine was well-tuned by NT professionals. The Linux machine was poorly tuned.
Mindcraft criticised both Red Hat support and USENET support. Later reports showed that they attempted to get tuning information from Red Hat's installation support line (which doesn't answer such questions; you have to pay for that level of service). They also showed that they made exactly one USENET post, which didn't contain enough information for a proper solution. USENET requests for more information were not replied to. In short, Mindcraft made no more than token attempts to get support.
Mindcraft's "attempts" at tuning Linux actually made it slower than normal.
While there is some mindless rage concerning this issue, there is a lot of well-documented righteous indignation.
A lot of the "rants" I read on the Mindcraft page were zero-content. Effectively, they were all variations on "Windows Sux, D00DZ!". This is zero intelligence and sheer rage. If this is a war of Windows versus Linux, our goal is to get Bill Gates running around, screaming "Linux Sux, D00DZ!". Imagine what that would do for NT market share. Doing it ourselves doesn't help a bit.
One need not strike a balance between truth and diplomacy, because you can maximize both. My favorite way of winning arguments is being calm, collected, rational, and right. If I can achieve this, I can drive my opponent stark raving mad; anyone who is keeping score can see who the winner is. We can do that here.
Slashdot has been following the Mindcraft saga well. While there were some simple rants from both the Linux and Microsoft camps here, a lot of Slashdotters came up with some damning facts that made Mindcraft cringe. The best ones did so calmly and collectively, along the lines of "Hey...did anyone notice that they picked out RAID hardware with a bogus Linux driver?" or "Hmmm... Usenet only sees one post to the Linux boards as a help request," and "If they're pitting Linux versus NT, why are they only using Apache on Linux? For this sort of work, I'd choose another Linux HTTP server". Of course, we finished up with "Thanks, Mindcraft, you gave us some ideas on how to speed up Linux. See you next rev!"
That's why Mindcraft has been dragging it out, redoing the test, asking for Linus himself. They likely expected us to pointlessly rant (which some of us did). I don't think that they expected us to pick their test to pieces in an open forum. They were completely knocked off their game, and found themselves playing ours
At one point, Microsoft had a rant on their page calling the Linux community 'chicken' (not in so many words) for not taking Mindcraft on the offer of a retest. They seemed rather peeved at being denied the satisfaction of a rematch, even after they understood our reasons for avoiding it. You don't cut a deal with a dragon, and you don't trust Microsoft further than you can throw them.
The truth shall set us free. Even if the majority of people don't believe us because they listen to Microsoft, a few will become Linux shops. When they report their IT budgets, their NT-using competition will take notice. If they cannot see the truth, they can read the writing on their bank accounts. And if they can't even do that, then corporate Darwinism takes over--the company that can do the same job with fewer IT dollars is likely to take over the one spending more IT dollars.