RAMMS+EIN, I just wanted to mention I like the way you think. I might not agree with your conclusions, but I like your approach anyhow.
P.S. The difference between the *nix "coalition" and the old Unix fragmentation is that the coalition is driven by agreed-on standards. Business is like people -- it has to learn and grow. The vendors I mentioned see the potential of a services-based business model and realize it's a better fit for the industry. Like the buggy and whip makers, those companies who resist the model too long are doomed to virtual extinction.
While we techies may be rabid supporters of particular approaches, business cares about generating revenue from it's customers, and the consumer wants to be able to access those business services and entertainments.
It's that simple. Beyond that, it's all a bitter bickering between techies, and no one outside our community really gives a damn unless it affects their life or wallet.
So far, the bulk of people and businesses seem to be quite happy with Microsoft's solutions. As long as features equal quality, fewer crashes than the previous version equal reliability, service packs and managed code equal security, and "it works without hours of prodding with configuration files" equals performance, I don't see that changing. Sure, there have been more and stronger voices against Microsoft, but most people have either the "works for me" or the "everyone else uses it" attitude. The people who really care have already switched.
Take a step back and remember socio-economic theory.
Until now, Apple was really the only alternative on the desktop, despite the efforts of OpenView or OpenLook to provide a Unix-based desktop. People needed something relatively easy to use, and so did business.
Now you have OS/X (still Apple), Gnome/Gtk (virtually any vendor's hardware that run's a *nix stack with X11R5 or newer), KDE3/Qt (as per Gnome, plus handheld/embedded support), and an ever-developing web UI infrastructure of defacto Apache standards and official HTML/CSS/ECMAScript facilities (XUL, XForms, Struts,...)
All of those products and tools support a full POSIX/ANSI API stack, plus defacto standards like X11, OpenGL, Postscript, etc. All the functionality required to develop and deploy solutions to the desktop are available via Windows or cross-vendor solutions.
So you can lock in product development to a platform with a lousy security reputation that has no significant enterprise data center share, or you can shift development to cross-platform tools that still provide what business and end-users need.
Sure it needs to evolve, but Windows 3.11 was pretty shitty, too. Right now Gnome/Mozilla/SuSE have provided my full-functionality desktop for about a year. I've been living on Linux longer, but the release of SuSE 9.0 really made it a desktop experience I could sit down a normal user or relative in front of, and expect them to be able to work with it.
That's the key point: you now have much more choice about whose tools or products you use to deploy a solution.
That leaves the question of what other reasons you might opt to go Windows. Lots of developers? Sure, but they hardly outnumber the OSS community, much less the even larger army of *nix developers that service North American industry.
Colors, bells, bings, and eye candy? You can turn all that on in Gnome or KDE3. OS/X Aqua actually outdoes Microsoft eye candy for those who want beads and trinkets instead of a solid platform.
Videogame performance? OS/X and Linux are perfectly capable of providing a secure and stable gaming experience. Right now it's a bear to set up sometimes, but Id Software and others have proven there is no particular need for Windows to build a game. It's just a market share decision.
So the only lock in Microsoft has is insecure APIs that haven't been updated as the POSIX and other standards have. Other than companies 100% in bed with Microsoft who can't even conceive of alternatives, I really don't see the majority of IT providers and vendors sticking with Microsoft in the long run.
As I've said before, once upon a whence Microsoft had a chance to win the war when it was them vs. Apple and a small Unix-based business server market. That has changed -- AS400, Mainframe, hundreds of specialized variants like QNX -- everyone supports the standards.
Everyone, that is, but Microsoft. With a security hole nightmare. With stability problems. With high entry and support license costs.
The security holes are the real issue. Even if you spend millions building a hierarchy of firewalled departmental LANs to minimize the depth of a virus, worm, or cracker penetration, you still can't eliminate the risk.
When any kid with Google and a knack for technology can crack the admin password on the parent's laptop, install an infected piece
They only win if the rest of the IT industry and society accept that it's reasonable to allow one company to "patent" such obvious ideas as timed clicks, TODO lists in code, etc. -- especially concepts that have been in use for years or decades.
So Microsoft bought their way out of penalties, can force the USPTO to approve bullshit patents, and has a few billion in cash.
Just how much do you think that matters when the other side of the court has IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, Cisco, Oracle, Sybase,... and they all see more benefit in OSS and a shared technology stack than a lock-in for one vendor.
In this corner, we have Microsoft with a platform-specific lockin solution designed to drain business revenue without actually committing to fix reported problems.
In the other corner, we have IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, RedHat, Mandrake, Oracle, Sybase, and a few thousand other vendors supporting full POSIX stacks, international and national standards, and essentially working on the philosophy of building from a shared technology foundation.
While Microsoft may have bought their way out of court-imposed penalties by delaying the case until a change of government occured, they can't buy their way out of the opinions and mistrust they've built for the past 2-3 decades.
As they've refused to compete on quality, reliability, security, and performance of business solutions, what choice does Microsoft have except to try to use the courts and barratry to survive?
After all, they can't accept (or perhaps can't grasp) a service/quality based market. Their whole mindset is package and sell, not long-term services and support that generate stable revenue instead of bursts during purchase/upgrade cycles.
Business hates upgrades. A minor patch for an existing release means much lower retraining and deployment costs.
Consumers love upgrades, they get a whole bunch of new gadgets, features, toys, and shiny icons.
It's simple: Microsoft can service one market or the other, but not both. Any attempts to use their IP portfolio for barratry are likely to get them pimp-slapped by the vendors I mentioned above: they don't like Microsoft's intrusions on their turf any more than Microsoft want's Linux on the desktop.
I wouldn't mind having one for cross-platform builds, but I really have no particular use for one myself. I just find most users are more comfortable with the idea of a Mac on their desk than a Linux box.
Plus they can go bug the forums and vendor for support instead of the staff.
You're being a bit harsh on OS/X, don't you think?
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Apple has had the foresight to switch over to a POSIX stack, bringing along their GUI and multimedia expertise to *nix platforms.
They need to clean up their security approach before they look like another "gaming over reliability" vendor, but Apple has a very realistic chance to make significant inroads on the corporate desktop.
You can buy MS Office for it, clean, native support from the vendor. No workarounds, no bullshit, and business needs that support if it comes with a believable promise to maintain the security and reliability of the software product. That matters more to business than anyone likes to admit: You must have Excel-compatible macros to deal with other businesses, right from the initial projections used to gain investors.
You can cross compile a bazillion POSIX/ANSI C/C++ applications on OS/X, AIX, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and literally hundreds of other systems. Apple happens to be the only one that has a GUI as nice (if not nicer) than Microsoft's efforts.
If Apple makes sure they take care of security, I see no reason why a business manager wouldn't prefer an Apple solution to generic Linux. It gets most of the benefits plus full vendor support and a moderate/growing product support catalog.
I used to think Apple was dead myself, but I think they're making the right moves for the future. The same goes for Novell (again, security: eDirectory) and their purchase of SuSE (again, standards: POSIX/ANSI/...)
Linux has potential for a lot of desktop markets, but as long as Apple doesn't get greedy on their pricing I think they have a very viable shot at stepping in to the desktop as a balance between OSS and commercial products.
Personally if I had to choose a desktop solution for the enterprise, I'm pretty sure it would be a coin toss between Apple OS/X and either SuSE or Mandrake with Gnome. (More standards -- Gnome is effectively the new CDE.) Qt/KDE have advantages, too, but my focus is server side with the desktop as a client side requirement. I'm not so much concerned with porting desktop applications as I am with making sure I have access to desktop tools for the users.
Because you can bet that Microsoft will be putting in a few hooks to do an online check to verify your OS and system license. They already hate Crossover, and would likely do just about anything to have them shut down.
They did the same thing to other products and companies, tweaking code so it wouldn't run on OS/2, or on other versions of DOS, or link with other compilers, or...
Their whole model is based on lock-in, not competition over quality, service, reliability, or price. Online services give them an excuse to check for DRM-enabled Windows clients, and refuse to allow anything else under the excuse that it's "not secure" or "unreliable". Heck, they'll probably even trot out some speech about the Patriot Act or DMCA as their "sound business reasoning".
They don't miss the point of the GPL, they're just irked that they can't steal the code without risking the same pimp-slapping over the GPL that IBM is giving SCO. Odds are some "mysterious" backer is really the one perturbed that IBM is willing to test the GPL in court to settle the issue.
There is also the fact that MBA's aren't typically trained on service model businesses, and are brainwashed from day one to believe that product based models such as the shiny disks from the MPAA and RIAA have meaning or value. They just can't seem to grasp that it's the data that matters, not the media.
If they can't grasp something as obvious as that, how can one expect them to grasp that many people and organizations use dual licensing: GPL and a specially negotiated commercial license.
Oh, that's right. Paying the copyright/license holder goes against their policy of keeping it all for themselves and the shareholders.
Human society and nature are tribal or pack based, not competitive/capitalist. The individual dies quickly and alone at the gnashing teeth of hungry predators, the cooperating pack turns the predator into lunch.
Whichever model fits better, I don't think Infineon has any chance of success. Near as I can see, they've re-created the XBox but bundled an ethernet port. Big whoop.
Had they come out on schedule, maybe it would have been different. Microsoft took their market before they ever showed a functioning prototype.
Microsoft has nasty habit they have of creating so-called "websites" that don't follow standards and won't run on anything but Windows, where they use the same entry points and callbacks that cause security problems for the native code. If I still have to use a Microsoft "browser", it does nothing for collaboration. In fact it makes the situations worse as you won't be able to use anything like Crossover anymore.
If I want a collaborative online environment, I use a webserver and CSS. Why would I want to go anywhere near a proprietary lock-in format just to share content? Why not WebDAV? ssh-ftp with a file manager hook ala Gnome? CVS?
My third concern is standalone operation. Just how in the world am I to do editing at a cabin, while travelling, or otherwise unable to connect at any kind of useful speed?
Not that it really matters, I guess, as I use Open Office for pretty much everything except Excel. They did do a nice job on the spreadsheet, and too many sheets have to use non-portable macros.
Eventually maybe Microsoft will clue in that "service model" does not mean the same thing as the old mainframe style "software rental." It's not a cash cow to keep sucking people's wallets, it's a way of providing flexible updates and maintenance as ongoing services instead of oft-delayed "service packs" or patches.
Besides, what makes Microsoft think I'd even think about letting their servers manage my document data? That stays right here in my managed environment where I know it's backed up and safe, thank-you-very-much!
Equally important, the companies advertising in the newspaper at least put in enough effort to write copy, do the graphics art, the layouts, and get the ad into the media.
Spammers can't spell, have no business history, have no reputation, and just keep intruding on my life, my business, and my bills (increased costs to my ISPs.)
Sorry, but "If I nag 5,000,000 people, someone will buy" is not a marketing plan or strategy, it's begging. It's disingenuous fraud, hoping that someone will be stupid enough to waste their money on a con. It's hoping users don't notice that "cheap software" is pirated, or that the "herbal viagra" is available for $10.95 at their local health food store instead of $49.95 through some spammer.
Spammers are not legitimite businesses, no matter how they bleat and plead about their "rights". You have no right to harass people on the street pushing your wares -- you'd be arrested for being a public nuisance at best. You have no right to barge into my home to tell me about your products without invitation -- that will have you arrested on trespassing or B&E.
Spam is not about "business", it is not about "rights", it is about a bunch of scum sucking vermin who twist the courts and ISP contracts to swindle and scam the public, hoping to make their cash and escape quickly.
In the past 7-10 years, I have not seen one legitimite or viable product advertised by spam. Not one.
Shut them down and arrest them as the frauds they are, and to hell with yet another US government sellout to "corporate" interests via CAN-SPAM. I don't know anyone who calls the info broadcasts from respected corps "spam" because they ask if you want it, not shove it down the throats of strangers.
Microsoft knows these patents are bullshit -- they're not stupid. They're counting on the patent office being stupid enough to approve them so they can hold them over someone's head in court.
If Microsoft can force enough delays to buy a government and a reprieve from their due penalties, what in the world makes you think anyone other than IBM can afford to defend against this crap?
The process of resolving patent disputes is only a problem because the reviews are performed by untrained monkeys with no experience in the field they're reviewing. Even the Canadian government has the sense to assign the reviews for R&D claims to workers with industry experience, but not the USPTO.
Hell no, that'd interfere with the smooth flow of money back through the lobbyists and "donations".
Stop making excuses for the incompetent. We all have to pay for their screwups, and it's about freakin' time they were held accountable.
Sue them. Sue them for your legal fees, your lost revenue, your lost potential revenue, damage to your corporate image, and anything else you can think of if you get caught in a bogus IP "lawsuit" by some vulture corp because of USPTO incompetence.
If they can't do the job, don't do it. Let the backlog build up until industry screams and starts pushing for Congress to increase the budget. As long as you push incompetent crap through instead, the funding will never be increased because corporate America does not see just how much damage you're doing with your negligence at the USPTO.
Excellent idea! Maybe those who've had to defend against invalid patents should be entitled to sue the USPTO not just for the expenses, but for the loss of reputation, loss of potential revenue, etc.
Everyone else in industry is responsible for their actions and subject to lawsuits. Why should a government agency be any different if they are going to perpetuate such blatant and expensive incompetance?
Finally, it would seem rationality is coming to the forefront. Now lets see if the legal system has any sanity and quashes this SCO garbage already. We've all wasted far too much time and resources on the IP leeches already.
At least maybe the mess will help force some changes on the USPTO. (No, I don't care how overworked you are. If you can't do the job right, then let the backlog build up until someone ponies up the resources to deal with the backlog.)
Unfortunately that shows you don't see what the difference is at a market level vs. an individual service or product level.
The product model that doesn't fit is the "box of software" pitched at the consumer. Patches, updates, and any enhancements are considered a legitimate part of the original purchase price by the consumer, much as dealing with recalls for a car.
That may work for the consumer who can identify a need, buy a "product" that fills the need, and be content. Business software isn't like that -- it has to constantly adapt to changing regulatory and business requirements, not to mention a constant stream of security patches and performance updates from all the vendors and tools involved.
The old software leasing models of the 1970's and 80's is not the service based model. It's close, but the leasing model still was based on the idea that a single, unmodified package was suited to the needs of business.
SAP, Oracle, IBM, and a handful of other companies have shown business frameworks with the services to customize them can be very lucrative. The current framework services companies are probably the closest you'll see in current industry to a true service-oriented model.
IBM and others are getting closer. The essential goal of the service-oriented models are to allow business to treat their IT solutions as a service, the same as their accounting firm or their photocopier leases. Expenses are tax writeoffs, capital investments in equipment and products have to be depreciated. That difference alone is a key point of why service-oriented models are needed in the IT industry.
Unfortunately the media companies haven't grasped that any form of electronic data delivery is implicitly an IT business. They keep looking at their pressed plastic as being the product, forgetting people are paying for the delivery and license to listen to the music they like, not the plastic.
Product-focused consumer companies like Microsoft struggle to find a way to keep a stream of upgrade revenue going when they are no longer providing new features people want, and finally getting around to fixing the problems with the products would essentially kill the update revenue their business model is currently based on.
Consumers don't want leased products, they want to buy it and "own" it, the direct opposite of what business wants. Product companies like Microsoft are simply going to have to decide which market maintains a revenue stream in the long run: consumers who will tire of being ripped off by updates that don't fix problems, or the business IT services market they've neglected in favour of quick cash from under-educated consumers.
Everyone already understands what's going on. SCO, the RIAA, the MPAA, and a number of other old businesses are led by executive management who just don't get the new service-based models, can't adapt, and just can't accept that if they don't adapt, their business is dead.
So instead they try to plead, whine, and use barratry to protect their pathetic, outdated business models.
What they forget is the problem is the socio-economic market shifts are to blame, not their competitors. If it weren't their "enemies" such as Linux, it would be BSD or some other "product."
Ah well, at this point maybe Darl could at least interest some execs in the media industry. After all, Darl's and SCO's viewpoints on "reality" are about as honest and truthful as "Survivor" or "Big Brother".
Personally I believe that everything coming out of the SCO "press releases" has degraded to demonstrating a completely delusional lack of contact with reality. Rather than just shooting them, maybe we should lock them up and pump them full of thorazine for their own safety.
Just how many order forms, bank payment systems, and other such online services make use of QuickTime, RealPlayer, Flash, or any of the traffic and media-heavy crap that you're talking about?
Forms are about business, not eye candy. Customers need it easy, business needs it portable and reliable. XForms is both.
There will never be a silver bullet that appeases the so-called "web artist" who likes to play with pixel alignments and color transformation maps. Most of the world really doesn't care, as long as it works.
For that matter, a lot of the key business targets -- the 40-60 market that runs must industries don't even like the fancy animated interfaces. They literally want something as boring and simple as the computer equivalent to the paper forms they've filled out for 20 years.
You say it only takes 5 seconds to load the graphic-heavy display. They say you wasted 5 seconds for one page out of the dozens I need to do my job. Even with a high-speed internal backbone, media is just a bad idea for anything but targetting markets that would rather watch animations than get the job done.
I think you'll find that IBM has priced the PowerPC hardware running AIX or ready for Linux (SuSE or RedHat enterprise licensing) such that you pay roughly the same price either way. Certainly no business is going to quibble over the nickel and dime OS pricing difference when they're facing far greater costs on licensing all the products they still need (e.g. RDBMS.)
The hardware sale, the maintenance, the support -- those are still all IBM's. All they lose in the deal is the OS licensing fees, which hasn't been the major revenue generator for a while. Don't forget how cut-throat the competition between Sun, IBM, and HP has been for so many years -- they learned not to lean on an operating system as a revenue generator a long, long time ago.
Think of the vendor OS not as a particular package, but as your assurance that the vendor has taken responsibility for testing and maintaining the OS. Not a purchased product, but an on-going service to keep your systems protected from the various bugs and oversights that always hide in the code. It's that "chain of responsiblity" that OSS zealots forget about when they bleat that their favourite tool is just as good as the commercial product.
Business doesn't pay just for the functionality -- they pay for the assurance and to identify a responsible party if there are any legal/insurance issues to be dealt with. Without that big backing vendor, big business will not deploy OSS. It's too risky from a business perspective, regardless of the technology.
You need to read the GPL again. As far as I'm aware, SCO lost their rights to ship GPL software when they started suing over other people using the same GPL software.
Is there some reason the EFF isn't suing SCO for breach of license? Not theft of IP, not alleged copyright violations, but blatant sale of products they've lost license rights to.
Buy out the SCO nightmare, spend some of that cash reserve, and have the existing Windows kernel engineers turn the SVR code into something that scales and performs.
Don't try and cobble the Windows APIs on the kernel -- stick with Windows.net and other "clean" APIs. Let the crud die -- no more untyped pointers, multifunction entry points, etc. Those are the crux of the Windows security problem, and the only way to clean it up is get rid of those APIs.
Port DX if you insist, but leave it a Ring 1 or outer service.
Microsoft has a lot of good UI work in Windows that can easily be carried over via the Windows.net or whatever proper class-based APIs they've been working on for Longhorn.
But it's time to stop pretending Windows is "secure". It's not. Hundreds of thousands of regular infections costing literal millions of dollars in lost staff time, tech time, restore time, and overtime to catch up from the latest Windows security breach for hundreds of corporations is too much to expect society to tolerate.
99% of the data center servers in North America run a full or close to full POSIX stack that handles real-time pthreads, system resources, etc. Coupled with ANSI C/C++ it's the standard for data center systems. Even AS400, OpenVMS, and mainframes can deal with POSIX.
It's time for Microsoft to face up to the fact that they lost the war. Windows will not be running corporate infrastructures, and until Microsoft accepts that they will be forever relegated to the "security jail" of firewalled desktops and departmental servers.
Microsoft could just as easily do it with OSS, such as a Linux kernel.
Microsoft's biggest enemy is Microsoft and their asinine refusal to support industry programming standards beyond the minimal level required to slap a sticker on their box and claim compliance for government project bids. It's Microsoft that refuses to abandon a security nightmare of spaghetti code, even though they can't maintain it properly any more and have to keep pushing back service packs farther and farther while they try to get it re-stabilized for shipment.
Bad for industry, bad for Microsoft, bad for everyone. Let the Windows kernel die already.
Barratry, fraud, libel -- there are a few terms for what new-SCO likes to pull.
What Darl and his crack pipe forget, as per usual, is that AIX5L is AIX + Linux compatability. Monterey was specifically related to an x86 port of AIX, which as far as I know was never done.
I seriously, seriously doubt that IBM's lawyers allowed AIX5L to be released without addressing the engineer's notes about any IP issues. It's perfectly normal to flag potential issues to management, and hardly a "smoking gun."
Anyone who has ever dealt with IBM's legal team knows damn well they cover all their bases. If someone mentioned the possibility of a problem, I am quite comfortable assuming IBM's lawyers followed up on it before proceeding.
Will somebody please just shoot SCO's "lawyers" already? There has been more than enough damage to the industry over their bullshit, and it's far past time for them to prove something, shut the hell up, or be arrested on barratry and worse.
To be a "lie" it would have to be false. Every piece of information I've ever had access to says Microsoft used the BSD stack, modifying it as permitted by the BSD license. There even used to be credits for BSD code in some of the Microsoft products at one point.
Don't forget Microsoft's lovely habit of trying to rewrite history. They may have rewritten their stack later so they could claim it has no OSS, but it started out BSD.
Like SCO, Microsoft thinks that if they repeat their "version" of history enough everyone will forget what really happened. Techies have much better memory than the general public. Maybe because it's pain that makes us remember bugs and problematic software.
I know the grandparent's post isn't really a viable option, but among the OSS components that would be shut off is the BSD TCP stack, which happens to be not just in Linux, but Windows, and most likely 99% of all computer systems on the continent.
If you think a business with dozen Apache servers would not balk at paying for IIS, WinXX Server, etc a dozen times over, you really haven't had much dealings with real management.
The flip side of the business profit coin is not spending money. Once a cheaper solution has been used that worked, any other vendor is automatically dragged down to that price.
Not to mention the side-effect costs of constantly having to restore the websites a few dozen times a day thanks to the script kiddies and high security IIS underpinnings.
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RAMMS+EIN, I just wanted to mention I like the way you think. I might not agree with your conclusions, but I like your approach anyhow.
P.S. The difference between the *nix "coalition" and the old Unix fragmentation is that the coalition is driven by agreed-on standards. Business is like people -- it has to learn and grow. The vendors I mentioned see the potential of a services-based business model and realize it's a better fit for the industry. Like the buggy and whip makers, those companies who resist the model too long are doomed to virtual extinction.
While we techies may be rabid supporters of particular approaches, business cares about generating revenue from it's customers, and the consumer wants to be able to access those business services and entertainments.
It's that simple. Beyond that, it's all a bitter bickering between techies, and no one outside our community really gives a damn unless it affects their life or wallet.
Take a step back and remember socio-economic theory.
Until now, Apple was really the only alternative on the desktop, despite the efforts of OpenView or OpenLook to provide a Unix-based desktop. People needed something relatively easy to use, and so did business.
Now you have OS/X (still Apple), Gnome/Gtk (virtually any vendor's hardware that run's a *nix stack with X11R5 or newer), KDE3/Qt (as per Gnome, plus handheld/embedded support), and an ever-developing web UI infrastructure of defacto Apache standards and official HTML/CSS/ECMAScript facilities (XUL, XForms, Struts, ...)
All of those products and tools support a full POSIX/ANSI API stack, plus defacto standards like X11, OpenGL, Postscript, etc. All the functionality required to develop and deploy solutions to the desktop are available via Windows or cross-vendor solutions.
So you can lock in product development to a platform with a lousy security reputation that has no significant enterprise data center share, or you can shift development to cross-platform tools that still provide what business and end-users need.
Sure it needs to evolve, but Windows 3.11 was pretty shitty, too. Right now Gnome/Mozilla/SuSE have provided my full-functionality desktop for about a year. I've been living on Linux longer, but the release of SuSE 9.0 really made it a desktop experience I could sit down a normal user or relative in front of, and expect them to be able to work with it.
That's the key point: you now have much more choice about whose tools or products you use to deploy a solution.
That leaves the question of what other reasons you might opt to go Windows. Lots of developers? Sure, but they hardly outnumber the OSS community, much less the even larger army of *nix developers that service North American industry.
Colors, bells, bings, and eye candy? You can turn all that on in Gnome or KDE3. OS/X Aqua actually outdoes Microsoft eye candy for those who want beads and trinkets instead of a solid platform.
Videogame performance? OS/X and Linux are perfectly capable of providing a secure and stable gaming experience. Right now it's a bear to set up sometimes, but Id Software and others have proven there is no particular need for Windows to build a game. It's just a market share decision.
So the only lock in Microsoft has is insecure APIs that haven't been updated as the POSIX and other standards have. Other than companies 100% in bed with Microsoft who can't even conceive of alternatives, I really don't see the majority of IT providers and vendors sticking with Microsoft in the long run.
As I've said before, once upon a whence Microsoft had a chance to win the war when it was them vs. Apple and a small Unix-based business server market. That has changed -- AS400, Mainframe, hundreds of specialized variants like QNX -- everyone supports the standards.
Everyone, that is, but Microsoft. With a security hole nightmare. With stability problems. With high entry and support license costs.
The security holes are the real issue. Even if you spend millions building a hierarchy of firewalled departmental LANs to minimize the depth of a virus, worm, or cracker penetration, you still can't eliminate the risk.
When any kid with Google and a knack for technology can crack the admin password on the parent's laptop, install an infected piece
They only win if the rest of the IT industry and society accept that it's reasonable to allow one company to "patent" such obvious ideas as timed clicks, TODO lists in code, etc. -- especially concepts that have been in use for years or decades.
So Microsoft bought their way out of penalties, can force the USPTO to approve bullshit patents, and has a few billion in cash.
Just how much do you think that matters when the other side of the court has IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, Cisco, Oracle, Sybase, ... and they all see more benefit in OSS and a shared technology stack than a lock-in for one vendor.
In this corner, we have Microsoft with a platform-specific lockin solution designed to drain business revenue without actually committing to fix reported problems.
In the other corner, we have IBM, Sun, HP, Novell, RedHat, Mandrake, Oracle, Sybase, and a few thousand other vendors supporting full POSIX stacks, international and national standards, and essentially working on the philosophy of building from a shared technology foundation.
While Microsoft may have bought their way out of court-imposed penalties by delaying the case until a change of government occured, they can't buy their way out of the opinions and mistrust they've built for the past 2-3 decades.
As they've refused to compete on quality, reliability, security, and performance of business solutions, what choice does Microsoft have except to try to use the courts and barratry to survive?
After all, they can't accept (or perhaps can't grasp) a service/quality based market. Their whole mindset is package and sell, not long-term services and support that generate stable revenue instead of bursts during purchase/upgrade cycles.
Business hates upgrades. A minor patch for an existing release means much lower retraining and deployment costs.
Consumers love upgrades, they get a whole bunch of new gadgets, features, toys, and shiny icons.
It's simple: Microsoft can service one market or the other, but not both. Any attempts to use their IP portfolio for barratry are likely to get them pimp-slapped by the vendors I mentioned above: they don't like Microsoft's intrusions on their turf any more than Microsoft want's Linux on the desktop.
I wouldn't mind having one for cross-platform builds, but I really have no particular use for one myself. I just find most users are more comfortable with the idea of a Mac on their desk than a Linux box.
Plus they can go bug the forums and vendor for support instead of the staff.
Apple has had the foresight to switch over to a POSIX stack, bringing along their GUI and multimedia expertise to *nix platforms.
They need to clean up their security approach before they look like another "gaming over reliability" vendor, but Apple has a very realistic chance to make significant inroads on the corporate desktop.
You can buy MS Office for it, clean, native support from the vendor. No workarounds, no bullshit, and business needs that support if it comes with a believable promise to maintain the security and reliability of the software product. That matters more to business than anyone likes to admit: You must have Excel-compatible macros to deal with other businesses, right from the initial projections used to gain investors.
You can cross compile a bazillion POSIX/ANSI C/C++ applications on OS/X, AIX, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and literally hundreds of other systems. Apple happens to be the only one that has a GUI as nice (if not nicer) than Microsoft's efforts.
If Apple makes sure they take care of security, I see no reason why a business manager wouldn't prefer an Apple solution to generic Linux. It gets most of the benefits plus full vendor support and a moderate/growing product support catalog.
I used to think Apple was dead myself, but I think they're making the right moves for the future. The same goes for Novell (again, security: eDirectory) and their purchase of SuSE (again, standards: POSIX/ANSI/...)
Linux has potential for a lot of desktop markets, but as long as Apple doesn't get greedy on their pricing I think they have a very viable shot at stepping in to the desktop as a balance between OSS and commercial products.
Personally if I had to choose a desktop solution for the enterprise, I'm pretty sure it would be a coin toss between Apple OS/X and either SuSE or Mandrake with Gnome. (More standards -- Gnome is effectively the new CDE.) Qt/KDE have advantages, too, but my focus is server side with the desktop as a client side requirement. I'm not so much concerned with porting desktop applications as I am with making sure I have access to desktop tools for the users.
Because you can bet that Microsoft will be putting in a few hooks to do an online check to verify your OS and system license. They already hate Crossover, and would likely do just about anything to have them shut down.
They did the same thing to other products and companies, tweaking code so it wouldn't run on OS/2, or on other versions of DOS, or link with other compilers, or...
Their whole model is based on lock-in, not competition over quality, service, reliability, or price. Online services give them an excuse to check for DRM-enabled Windows clients, and refuse to allow anything else under the excuse that it's "not secure" or "unreliable". Heck, they'll probably even trot out some speech about the Patriot Act or DMCA as their "sound business reasoning".
They don't miss the point of the GPL, they're just irked that they can't steal the code without risking the same pimp-slapping over the GPL that IBM is giving SCO. Odds are some "mysterious" backer is really the one perturbed that IBM is willing to test the GPL in court to settle the issue.
There is also the fact that MBA's aren't typically trained on service model businesses, and are brainwashed from day one to believe that product based models such as the shiny disks from the MPAA and RIAA have meaning or value. They just can't seem to grasp that it's the data that matters, not the media.
If they can't grasp something as obvious as that, how can one expect them to grasp that many people and organizations use dual licensing: GPL and a specially negotiated commercial license.
Oh, that's right. Paying the copyright/license holder goes against their policy of keeping it all for themselves and the shareholders.
Human society and nature are tribal or pack based, not competitive/capitalist. The individual dies quickly and alone at the gnashing teeth of hungry predators, the cooperating pack turns the predator into lunch.
Whichever model fits better, I don't think Infineon has any chance of success. Near as I can see, they've re-created the XBox but bundled an ethernet port. Big whoop.
Had they come out on schedule, maybe it would have been different. Microsoft took their market before they ever showed a functioning prototype.
Microsoft has nasty habit they have of creating so-called "websites" that don't follow standards and won't run on anything but Windows, where they use the same entry points and callbacks that cause security problems for the native code. If I still have to use a Microsoft "browser", it does nothing for collaboration. In fact it makes the situations worse as you won't be able to use anything like Crossover anymore.
If I want a collaborative online environment, I use a webserver and CSS. Why would I want to go anywhere near a proprietary lock-in format just to share content? Why not WebDAV? ssh-ftp with a file manager hook ala Gnome? CVS?
My third concern is standalone operation. Just how in the world am I to do editing at a cabin, while travelling, or otherwise unable to connect at any kind of useful speed?
Not that it really matters, I guess, as I use Open Office for pretty much everything except Excel. They did do a nice job on the spreadsheet, and too many sheets have to use non-portable macros.
Eventually maybe Microsoft will clue in that "service model" does not mean the same thing as the old mainframe style "software rental." It's not a cash cow to keep sucking people's wallets, it's a way of providing flexible updates and maintenance as ongoing services instead of oft-delayed "service packs" or patches.
Besides, what makes Microsoft think I'd even think about letting their servers manage my document data? That stays right here in my managed environment where I know it's backed up and safe, thank-you-very-much!
Equally important, the companies advertising in the newspaper at least put in enough effort to write copy, do the graphics art, the layouts, and get the ad into the media.
Spammers can't spell, have no business history, have no reputation, and just keep intruding on my life, my business, and my bills (increased costs to my ISPs.)
Sorry, but "If I nag 5,000,000 people, someone will buy" is not a marketing plan or strategy, it's begging. It's disingenuous fraud, hoping that someone will be stupid enough to waste their money on a con. It's hoping users don't notice that "cheap software" is pirated, or that the "herbal viagra" is available for $10.95 at their local health food store instead of $49.95 through some spammer.
Spammers are not legitimite businesses, no matter how they bleat and plead about their "rights". You have no right to harass people on the street pushing your wares -- you'd be arrested for being a public nuisance at best. You have no right to barge into my home to tell me about your products without invitation -- that will have you arrested on trespassing or B&E.
Spam is not about "business", it is not about "rights", it is about a bunch of scum sucking vermin who twist the courts and ISP contracts to swindle and scam the public, hoping to make their cash and escape quickly.
In the past 7-10 years, I have not seen one legitimite or viable product advertised by spam. Not one.
Shut them down and arrest them as the frauds they are, and to hell with yet another US government sellout to "corporate" interests via CAN-SPAM. I don't know anyone who calls the info broadcasts from respected corps "spam" because they ask if you want it, not shove it down the throats of strangers.
You are not getting the point.
Microsoft knows these patents are bullshit -- they're not stupid. They're counting on the patent office being stupid enough to approve them so they can hold them over someone's head in court.
If Microsoft can force enough delays to buy a government and a reprieve from their due penalties, what in the world makes you think anyone other than IBM can afford to defend against this crap?
The process of resolving patent disputes is only a problem because the reviews are performed by untrained monkeys with no experience in the field they're reviewing. Even the Canadian government has the sense to assign the reviews for R&D claims to workers with industry experience, but not the USPTO.
Hell no, that'd interfere with the smooth flow of money back through the lobbyists and "donations".
Stop making excuses for the incompetent. We all have to pay for their screwups, and it's about freakin' time they were held accountable.
Sue them. Sue them for your legal fees, your lost revenue, your lost potential revenue, damage to your corporate image, and anything else you can think of if you get caught in a bogus IP "lawsuit" by some vulture corp because of USPTO incompetence.
If they can't do the job, don't do it. Let the backlog build up until industry screams and starts pushing for Congress to increase the budget. As long as you push incompetent crap through instead, the funding will never be increased because corporate America does not see just how much damage you're doing with your negligence at the USPTO.
And believe me, it is emphatically negligance.
Excellent idea! Maybe those who've had to defend against invalid patents should be entitled to sue the USPTO not just for the expenses, but for the loss of reputation, loss of potential revenue, etc.
Everyone else in industry is responsible for their actions and subject to lawsuits. Why should a government agency be any different if they are going to perpetuate such blatant and expensive incompetance?
Finally, it would seem rationality is coming to the forefront. Now lets see if the legal system has any sanity and quashes this SCO garbage already. We've all wasted far too much time and resources on the IP leeches already.
At least maybe the mess will help force some changes on the USPTO. (No, I don't care how overworked you are. If you can't do the job right, then let the backlog build up until someone ponies up the resources to deal with the backlog.)
Unfortunately that shows you don't see what the difference is at a market level vs. an individual service or product level.
The product model that doesn't fit is the "box of software" pitched at the consumer. Patches, updates, and any enhancements are considered a legitimate part of the original purchase price by the consumer, much as dealing with recalls for a car.
That may work for the consumer who can identify a need, buy a "product" that fills the need, and be content. Business software isn't like that -- it has to constantly adapt to changing regulatory and business requirements, not to mention a constant stream of security patches and performance updates from all the vendors and tools involved.
The old software leasing models of the 1970's and 80's is not the service based model. It's close, but the leasing model still was based on the idea that a single, unmodified package was suited to the needs of business.
SAP, Oracle, IBM, and a handful of other companies have shown business frameworks with the services to customize them can be very lucrative. The current framework services companies are probably the closest you'll see in current industry to a true service-oriented model.
IBM and others are getting closer. The essential goal of the service-oriented models are to allow business to treat their IT solutions as a service, the same as their accounting firm or their photocopier leases. Expenses are tax writeoffs, capital investments in equipment and products have to be depreciated. That difference alone is a key point of why service-oriented models are needed in the IT industry.
Unfortunately the media companies haven't grasped that any form of electronic data delivery is implicitly an IT business. They keep looking at their pressed plastic as being the product, forgetting people are paying for the delivery and license to listen to the music they like, not the plastic.
Product-focused consumer companies like Microsoft struggle to find a way to keep a stream of upgrade revenue going when they are no longer providing new features people want, and finally getting around to fixing the problems with the products would essentially kill the update revenue their business model is currently based on.
Consumers don't want leased products, they want to buy it and "own" it, the direct opposite of what business wants. Product companies like Microsoft are simply going to have to decide which market maintains a revenue stream in the long run: consumers who will tire of being ripped off by updates that don't fix problems, or the business IT services market they've neglected in favour of quick cash from under-educated consumers.
Everyone already understands what's going on. SCO, the RIAA, the MPAA, and a number of other old businesses are led by executive management who just don't get the new service-based models, can't adapt, and just can't accept that if they don't adapt, their business is dead.
So instead they try to plead, whine, and use barratry to protect their pathetic, outdated business models.
What they forget is the problem is the socio-economic market shifts are to blame, not their competitors. If it weren't their "enemies" such as Linux, it would be BSD or some other "product."
Ah well, at this point maybe Darl could at least interest some execs in the media industry. After all, Darl's and SCO's viewpoints on "reality" are about as honest and truthful as "Survivor" or "Big Brother".
Personally I believe that everything coming out of the SCO "press releases" has degraded to demonstrating a completely delusional lack of contact with reality. Rather than just shooting them, maybe we should lock them up and pump them full of thorazine for their own safety.
Just how many order forms, bank payment systems, and other such online services make use of QuickTime, RealPlayer, Flash, or any of the traffic and media-heavy crap that you're talking about?
Forms are about business, not eye candy. Customers need it easy, business needs it portable and reliable. XForms is both.
There will never be a silver bullet that appeases the so-called "web artist" who likes to play with pixel alignments and color transformation maps. Most of the world really doesn't care, as long as it works.
For that matter, a lot of the key business targets -- the 40-60 market that runs must industries don't even like the fancy animated interfaces. They literally want something as boring and simple as the computer equivalent to the paper forms they've filled out for 20 years.
You say it only takes 5 seconds to load the graphic-heavy display. They say you wasted 5 seconds for one page out of the dozens I need to do my job. Even with a high-speed internal backbone, media is just a bad idea for anything but targetting markets that would rather watch animations than get the job done.
I think you'll find that IBM has priced the PowerPC hardware running AIX or ready for Linux (SuSE or RedHat enterprise licensing) such that you pay roughly the same price either way. Certainly no business is going to quibble over the nickel and dime OS pricing difference when they're facing far greater costs on licensing all the products they still need (e.g. RDBMS.)
The hardware sale, the maintenance, the support -- those are still all IBM's. All they lose in the deal is the OS licensing fees, which hasn't been the major revenue generator for a while. Don't forget how cut-throat the competition between Sun, IBM, and HP has been for so many years -- they learned not to lean on an operating system as a revenue generator a long, long time ago.
Think of the vendor OS not as a particular package, but as your assurance that the vendor has taken responsibility for testing and maintaining the OS. Not a purchased product, but an on-going service to keep your systems protected from the various bugs and oversights that always hide in the code. It's that "chain of responsiblity" that OSS zealots forget about when they bleat that their favourite tool is just as good as the commercial product.
Business doesn't pay just for the functionality -- they pay for the assurance and to identify a responsible party if there are any legal/insurance issues to be dealt with. Without that big backing vendor, big business will not deploy OSS. It's too risky from a business perspective, regardless of the technology.
You need to read the GPL again. As far as I'm aware, SCO lost their rights to ship GPL software when they started suing over other people using the same GPL software.
Is there some reason the EFF isn't suing SCO for breach of license? Not theft of IP, not alleged copyright violations, but blatant sale of products they've lost license rights to.
They don't even need to go OSS.
Buy out the SCO nightmare, spend some of that cash reserve, and have the existing Windows kernel engineers turn the SVR code into something that scales and performs.
Don't try and cobble the Windows APIs on the kernel -- stick with Windows.net and other "clean" APIs. Let the crud die -- no more untyped pointers, multifunction entry points, etc. Those are the crux of the Windows security problem, and the only way to clean it up is get rid of those APIs.
Port DX if you insist, but leave it a Ring 1 or outer service.
Microsoft has a lot of good UI work in Windows that can easily be carried over via the Windows.net or whatever proper class-based APIs they've been working on for Longhorn.
But it's time to stop pretending Windows is "secure". It's not. Hundreds of thousands of regular infections costing literal millions of dollars in lost staff time, tech time, restore time, and overtime to catch up from the latest Windows security breach for hundreds of corporations is too much to expect society to tolerate.
99% of the data center servers in North America run a full or close to full POSIX stack that handles real-time pthreads, system resources, etc. Coupled with ANSI C/C++ it's the standard for data center systems. Even AS400, OpenVMS, and mainframes can deal with POSIX.
It's time for Microsoft to face up to the fact that they lost the war. Windows will not be running corporate infrastructures, and until Microsoft accepts that they will be forever relegated to the "security jail" of firewalled desktops and departmental servers.
Microsoft could just as easily do it with OSS, such as a Linux kernel.
Microsoft's biggest enemy is Microsoft and their asinine refusal to support industry programming standards beyond the minimal level required to slap a sticker on their box and claim compliance for government project bids. It's Microsoft that refuses to abandon a security nightmare of spaghetti code, even though they can't maintain it properly any more and have to keep pushing back service packs farther and farther while they try to get it re-stabilized for shipment.
Bad for industry, bad for Microsoft, bad for everyone. Let the Windows kernel die already.
Barratry, fraud, libel -- there are a few terms for what new-SCO likes to pull.
What Darl and his crack pipe forget, as per usual, is that AIX5L is AIX + Linux compatability. Monterey was specifically related to an x86 port of AIX, which as far as I know was never done.
I seriously, seriously doubt that IBM's lawyers allowed AIX5L to be released without addressing the engineer's notes about any IP issues. It's perfectly normal to flag potential issues to management, and hardly a "smoking gun."
Anyone who has ever dealt with IBM's legal team knows damn well they cover all their bases. If someone mentioned the possibility of a problem, I am quite comfortable assuming IBM's lawyers followed up on it before proceeding.
Will somebody please just shoot SCO's "lawyers" already? There has been more than enough damage to the industry over their bullshit, and it's far past time for them to prove something, shut the hell up, or be arrested on barratry and worse.
To be a "lie" it would have to be false. Every piece of information I've ever had access to says Microsoft used the BSD stack, modifying it as permitted by the BSD license. There even used to be credits for BSD code in some of the Microsoft products at one point.
Don't forget Microsoft's lovely habit of trying to rewrite history. They may have rewritten their stack later so they could claim it has no OSS, but it started out BSD.
Like SCO, Microsoft thinks that if they repeat their "version" of history enough everyone will forget what really happened. Techies have much better memory than the general public. Maybe because it's pain that makes us remember bugs and problematic software.
I know the grandparent's post isn't really a viable option, but among the OSS components that would be shut off is the BSD TCP stack, which happens to be not just in Linux, but Windows, and most likely 99% of all computer systems on the continent.
If you think a business with dozen Apache servers would not balk at paying for IIS, WinXX Server, etc a dozen times over, you really haven't had much dealings with real management.
The flip side of the business profit coin is not spending money. Once a cheaper solution has been used that worked, any other vendor is automatically dragged down to that price.
Not to mention the side-effect costs of constantly having to restore the websites a few dozen times a day thanks to the script kiddies and high security IIS underpinnings.