1) Office for Mac exists to prop up Office for Windows - period. Office for Linux wouldn't, so it doesn't exist.
2) MS apps dominate on the desktop because they tied to the OS via the APIs - previous challengers such as WordPerfect were not so tied. It should be obvious to anyone with a brain that companies would prefer to buy apps from the company that makes the OS they run on. So they WERE "challenged" - but the challengers were running with both hands tied behind them. Nowhere is that more obvious than IE.
3) My point stands - Windows USED to be cheaper than anything else, and Microsoft's monopoly behavior allowed them to tie their apps to the OS and their OS to the machines being sold.
4) Windows security problems are not about the users - they are direct flaws in the system design, and would require yanking out Active X and un-entangling IE from the OS and removing insecure "features."
5) Microsoft spends shit on R&D compared to their cash balance, and their R&D produces virtually nothing - certainly nothing that improves Bill's bank balance.
"Open source has been around as long as I can remember."
You have a very short memory - or you're about fifteen years old.
Prior to the early 1990's, there was no "open source" as a movement per se. You had "shareware" and some "freeware".
And you had some bozos trying to create a new UNIX-like system that wasn't UNIX - some geek crap called "GNU." They got nowhere, but they made a lot of tools that some people piled on top of some kernel toy some Finnish guy made.
What you had in OS terms was several expensive proprietary versions of UNIX (costing thousands of dollars for a license and most of them wouldn't run on a PC at all or were considered toys - like Xenix that Microsoft once owned), some proprietary mainframe OS costing millions - and cheap DOS - which became Windows...which stunk until it became Windows 95.
The sole reason people used DOS and then Windows was because it was "free" with their PC, and was a minimal cost to corporations because PCs went for $2K, and Windows was only five or ten percent of the price.
Today, Windows at $25-100 is the first or second most expensive thing on the $300-400 box (not counting Office). And the cost of maintaining it is orders of magnitude MUCH higher than the cost of the box. Depending on whose TCO you believe, a PC workstation and user costs $8,000 to $26,000 PER YEAR to maintain.
As Marcus Ranum points out in his rant mentioned here before, there has NEVER been a corporation that actually sues software companies to hold them "accountable" - that's a CYA point that has nothing to do with either technical or business reality. It has strictly to do with incompetent management.
Also, most IT management wouldn't know a "solution that works" if it bit them on the dick. Most IT management decisions are made from a CYA viewpoint, or a kickback viewpoint. There are absolutely no long-term consequences or basic design principles taken into consideration.
So, yes, that makes it harder for open source to beat commercial software. But as I mentioned elsewhere here, at some point not noticing reality just makes you look stupid. And that moment has come for a number of companies, and it will come for a lot more as the statistics about the growth of open source are demonstrating.
When you have the number of companies considering open source growing from single digit percentages to twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty percent in a year or so, it means a wake-up call has been sounded.
Numerous corporate managers at seminars have explicitly told the software industry that commercial software sucks, it costs too much, and it doesn't do what they want it to do.
The only thing slowing OSS growth at this moment, as I've said before, is a lack of large-scale enterprise applications, which is directly a result of the amount of manpower and effort and time needed to produce such apps. Open source is slowly producing the infrastructure for such applications, but it will take some IT industry people time to realize that they need to - and can - develop such apps in their vertical industry.
When this happens, commercial software will be under considerable pressure to at least reduce prices, if not convert to an OSS development model entirely.
And nobody in open source cares if some end user like you never looks at the code of an app. What matters is that the developers and implementors of that app can look at the code underlying that app. Chris Dibona from Google made exactly that point at LinuxWorld the other week. He said they stuck with Linux because they can tweak it to make Google work.
And THAT answers the problem with commercial code being fixed and unable to do what somebody wants it to do - especially interoperability with legacy code. And that's a huge cost factor in the corporate world right now. Or haven't YOU been reading the business trade press?
Studies about why companies have switched to open source clearly show that cost is the least of it - it's about avoiding vendor loc
First, Microsoft hasn't admitted one damn thing about Linux or open source, other than that it exists (duh!) There comes a time when ignoring your rival just makes you look stupid, which is not helpful for marketing.
Second, we have absolutely NO evidence that this "study" isn't a setup to gain publicity advantage by making it look like the OSDL agreed to an "independent" study which is then tweaked somehow to let Microsoft win or appear to win.
Third, Microsoft has the advertising budget to take advantage of any positive publicity from such a study. Linux has much less budget to do so - even assuming it got all the positive publicity, which, the issue is, unlikely since Microsoft isn't going to do this unless they win the results or can spin it as a win for them.
This is like those movies where the hero and the villain both draw guns, then the the villain says, "Let's not use guns, let's just duke it out!" You KNOW the hero is going to win, but you also KNOW the villain is going to "cheat."
I prefer the "Serenity" way: the villain says, "I'm unarmed", so the hero says, "Good!" and shoots him.
Consider yourself shot for being a Pollyanna about the whole thing.
2) Our apps dominate on the corporate desktop because they only run on Windows.
3) Our OS's dominate on the corporate desktop because they run our apps - and because we have business contracts and marketing to convince people to use our OS because it was cheaper than UNIX for years. So we got there first.
4) If it ain't broke, don't fix it - unless it makes us more money DIRECTLY to fix it.
5) Security ain't "it" - yet, anyway - when we see people ditching us in droves because of security, then maybe we'll fix it - 'cause it's gonna be a major rewrite and that costs me money, so it ain't happening until it costs me MORE money NOT to do it. And as long as we're making profit and have dominant market share, why should I?
6) I'm all about money, not technology. Business contract law and marketing is THE way to make money. Technology is just the product.
7) I don't listen to people with less money than me telling me how to run my business.
8) We make 30% of our revenue from the OS, 60-70% from our apps. The only reason we make anything else is to try to find something to boost our profit margins so the stock looks good - cause other than my $10-15 billion in cash (and the stock laundering my Dad does at the "charitable foundation"), my wealth is stock value. And our profit margins are single digit these days, which is bad for the stock. That's why I pissed away $37 over the next few years - to prop up the stock - instead of spending it on pointless - to me - technology research. I could spend $37 billion on research and get nothing. I can spend $37 billion of the company's money and keep MY personal stock value up there.
THIS is how Bill Gates thinks.
As long as he's running Microsoft, they're not going to do ANYTHING good for anybody but Bill.
Reminds me of Gary Bussey in "D.C. Cab" complaining that he didn't know what women were upset about, because "they have half the money and all of the pussy!"
Red Hat says why in the article: they believe in using customer testimonials, rather than a lab environment which may or may not - usually not - resemble the real world.
They also know how easy it is to tweak such an environment to produce the results you want.
I don't entirely disparage lab tests. When the trade journals run a test on Windows 2003 Server vrs. SUSE or whoever, and come up with the figures that a Linux distro with Samba is twice as fast at file and printer sharing as Windows, I can accept that. If they legitimately found the opposite, I could accept that - unless of course the trade journal was known to be anti-OSS.
But when someone is PAID by a company to do a study, the study is compromised, no matter what the research company says.
Many of these "research" companies let the paying company set the ground rules and configurations and targets for these tests, which compromises the study right there.
There's no advantage to an OSS company doing the same study, as the same criticism could be made against them.
There have been a number of studies which show lower TCO for Linux over Windows. Unfortunately, most of them were done by companies either actively involved in OSS, or companies using OSS and justifying their use of OSS. So Microsoft naturally ignores those studies and prefers to use "independent" studies from "research" outfits that show lower TCO for Windows.
It's a game, and not particularly useful for anything except propaganda.
Actual usage statistics of Linux vrs Windows, growth in market share stats, and testimonials from companies who HAVE measured their costs under both systems before and after a migration are the most reliable indicators.
The latter, by the way, is why Laura DiDio is now babbling about how most companies don't know what their TCO even is. That's undoubtedly true. BUT companies that spent money on Windows licenses for years and switched to Linux KNOW what they spent before and what they are spending now (there's a little thing called "budgets" in most companies) - and every company I've read about who have switched have stated they realized actual dollar savings. DiDio is trying to blunt those real world stories by claiming the companies don't know what they're spending on Linux or OSS.
But that's the kind of comparison Red Hat prefers to rely on.
Number one theory is the most likely. They want a rigged comparison to seem to be supported by OSDL.
They don't need OSDL to find out where Windows is weak against Linux - they've been told that over and over by everybody - including their own people in the famous "Unix memo" - and I'm sure a lot of their customers switching away from them have told them, too.
Show me one quote where Linus thinks Microsoft are in any way "good guys" - however you or he defines "good guys."
Yes, Linus is not a "free as in beer software" fanatic. However, he DOES believe in open source and in Linux as a process and a product, as well as a technology challenge. The latter may be what floats his boat, but he's not exactly an SCO supporter, either. And he's not stupid.
Stallman may be a socialist or semi-socialist or pseudo-socialist or whatever, but even the GPL allows people to sell open source software as long as the source is included.
Bill Gates and Microsoft have NEVER been about free as in freedom OR free as in beer, ever. Go back and read his "You Hobbyists Steal Your Software" rant and his poker days at Harvard.
Why should anybody in OSS concern themselves about "cooperation" (in other than a technical interoperability sense) with Microsoft?
As I'm sure you've concluded, the only purpose for this suggestion is to get the OSDL to look like it approved the conditions for a Microsoft "win", thereby allowing Microsoft to claim it was truly an "independent" comparison.
Right - like the 9/11 Commission was "independent" - they wanted Kissinger on it at first, but that was TOO fucking obvious.
Now we're finding out how the REAL facts about 9/11 - like over 20 intelligence agents having specific information about the attack before the attack - were "left out" of the Commission report.
No matter how the test is set up, Microsoft would arrange to somehow "win" or at least make it appear they won in their spin cycle.
They probably want Gartner and Laura DiDio to conduct the test under a "joint" financing arrangement. Yeah, right...LOL, Microsoft.
And if that's the case, there's no advantage to Linux to accommodate them.
Always make sure your opponent knows as little about you as possible.
Probably what Microsoft is aiming for is a server "face-off" where they get to tweak Windows 2003 Server against one or more of the Linux servers (Red Hat or SUSE) - and then swing the conditions so they win or can at least spin that they won.
They've steadily lost these comparisons before (by up to a factor of 2 - 2.5.) This way they could "truthfully" say that it was a non-Microsoft-sponsored comparison that was agreed to by the OSDL.
There's no incentive for Linux to contribute to Microsoft's competitive advantage against Linux by being manipulated like this.
Nothing Taylor says can be taken for anything but a lie, anyway. He's a Microsoft employee and they are paid to lie at all times. So whatever his stated motivations, they're false.
If you'd SAID that OSS software is doing well, but not "beating" commercial software, instead of mouthing off with "Huh? In what universe?", you'd have gotten a better reaction.
Particularly since I then could have explained to you that MY point was that OSS software was "beating" commercial software in the sense of being BETTER, not necessarily because of market share.
Which still includes the point that OSS is going to beat commercial software market-share wise EVENTUALLY, with Linux being taken up twice as fast as Windows for servers and the rest of OSS a no-brainer as soon as it develops enough enterprise-level apps.
In simple English, "beating" does not mean "already beaten."
Next time, try to make a point instead of being an asshole, and you might get treated better.
Look, stupid, I don't have time to respond to juvenile taunts from idiots who have no clue what OSS is about or how well it's being taken up by corporate America.
And being funded better by providing a double license is why MySQL is improving quickly. The more OSS programmers that can afford to work on a project, the better the project is, usually.
But PostgreSQL is older and had more time to develop, so it's still the more fully developed product.
If PostgreSQL had the kind of money MySQL has, let alone Oracle, it probably would be better than Oracle by now. But it's pointless to discuss it, because that doesn't happen in OSS.
It doesn't mean PostgreSQL isn't a perfectly good database for the people that can use it. There's no need to have every "feature" - including the most obscure ones - of Oracle to be a completely adequare replacement for Oracle for those users who don't need Oracle's extra features.
All the trade journal articles have pointed out that up to now, you had to pay Oracle's price for Oracle's features - including the ones you'll never need. Now you can get MySQL and PostgreSQL and Firebird and others and get all the features you WANT for no or less money.
This is one place where direct comparison between OSS and commercial software breaks down. Commercial software HAS to be all things to all people. OSS doesn't. It can fork, be customized, do anything it needs to be useful to varied groups of people without being a bloated POS like Oracle or Microsoft Office.
The net effect, however, on commercial software is bad for them - people stop paying for stuff they don't need. Which means the commercial company can't charge the same anymore. Which means their profitability goes down. Which also means their customers save money. So in that sense OSS software reduces the TCO of even closed-source software!
Look at how many times recently Microsoft had to reduce its license fees for various governments that were considering open source.
Did Microsoft take that reduction into account when comparing their TCO against open source?
I wonder if any of the TCO studies take that into account!
You can't read the percentage uptake of OSS products over commercial? The double-digit percentage growth of Linux and other OSS products year after year? The trade journal articles that cite double-digit percentages of companies implementing open source?
"Unless the manufacturers start programming a lot of code themselves and don't mind giving up their work to competitors"
Well, if you buy a closed-source product, your competitors are buying it, too. Where's your competitive advantage?
Whereas if manufacturers support open source projects run by people either directly or not directly employed by themselves, but who are familiar with MRP needs, those people will write the basics - and then the manufacturers can hire those people as consultants to customize the suites to give them competitive advantage.
As for the pain of switching, closed-source providers will never even attempt to make it easy to switch away from their own product, although they might make it easy to switch from a competitor's product. OSS providers have every incentive to make it easy to switch - provided that they've been told that's a major requirement, otherwise they're likely to ignore it in the process of making the software.
Switching is going to painful, anyway - and what do you do if your closed source vendor goes out of business? You have to switch anyway, then. OSS doesn't go "out of business" - although a given project may become moribund. As long as you've got the code, the customer is still in business.
As for your first question, ERP/MRP products are just now being worked on in OSS. It will be a while - years even - before entire suites are available to replace PeopleSoft or whoever. Doesn't mean it won't happen.
It will happen quicker if manufacturers that want MRP start expending a small fraction of their IT budgets on supporting OSS efforts. A number of European companies are doing this, and the OSS products being produced are sophisticated and powerful.
Open source doesn't mean software that springs full blown from the brow of Zeus. It still has to be developed, debugged, and tested - just like closed source software. The difference is that the quality tends to be better (if not the user interface, in some cases).
The problem with a lot of large companies is this: they want quality software NOW - but they won't pay LESS - or anything - for OSS than they do for closed source. As usual, they want SOMEONE ELSE to pay for the software, then they'll consider using it.
They handle training the same way - they only hire employees that some other company has trained.
Another good reason to use open source is that a company's infrastructure vendor can reduce its own development costs by using Linux, and pass the savings onto their customers in terms of better and lower costing products - which in turn affects their customer's TCO.
This seems to be happening in the retail POS industry.
"A product like Oracle, for instance, has had years upon years of time and millions upon millions of dollars poured into it."
While PostgreSQL hasn't had scores of millions of dollars poured into it, they also haven't had the "years upon years" - although they ARE one of the older OSS products around.
Nonetheless, their achievements are impressive.
Most of Oracle's "features" beyond PostgreSQL are stuff involving applications development, tuning, and other stuff that most smaller companies don't particularly need or which are so complicated to use that most DBA's probably don't even understand them. Oracle is one hellaciously complicated product.
Oracle has more "feature-itis" than even Microsoft.
A better comparison would be MySQL which is younger and doesn't have all the features a good database should have - but it's getting them over time.
Given that most open source is less than ten years old, and open source project methods vary across the board from one-man projects to corporate-sponsored projects with hundreds of people, I think this form of comparison to closed-source software as to end results is a bit premature.
Open source is division of labor at its best. As the open source methodology matures, I think we'll see no real limits on what it can achieve - short of putting a man on the moon in ten years.
And this is exactly why open source is beating commercial software.
Because open source is OPEN SOURCE - you can see the software and you can tweak it. Which saves money on contracting with a closed source company to do that, as you can likely find somebody to tweak it for less money.
Closed source companies won't even tweak it in many cases, for exactly the reasons you state - it then becomes a nightmare for them to support a hundred different versions of their software.
Also, a closed source company is going to charge mucho dollars per hour to do customization. They have fixed costs for such a project. An OSS guy can charge anything that gets him the contract, which is usually less, thus saving his client money.
City College of San Francisco library requested their vendor to add custom functionality to the new ILS system. The vendor agreed, then reneged later. Now an in-house person has to mess with it - probably unsuccessfully because the software is closed.
A second reason OSS beats commercial software in this respect is that it has been proven that a Linux sysadmin can maintain more servers than a Windows sysadmin. As more servers are brought on line, fewer sys admins - less employee cost to the company.
Also most of the COMPONENTS of TCO are the same for OSS and commercial software - except the licensing cost. Therefore, most of the time, TCO for OSS is less simply because the cost of consultants remains the same in many cases but the licensing and upgrade costs are less. Especially since much commercial licensing is per server, and OSS can frequently be used on ALL the servers in the corporation (unless you're buying Red Hat, of course.)
Finally, this argument has been done to death - the FACT of the matter is that TCO must be determined on an individual corporate basis, and EVERY single company that has moved to OSS that I have read about has decided that the TCO was better - frequently DRAMATICALLY better.
"The vulnerability in question is one of two noted as "critical" by Microsoft on Tuesday, when it released February's monthly fixes. Hackers could exploit flaws in Windows's usage of Abstract Syntax Notation (ASN), a language for defining the syntax of data messages shared between applications and computers. If attackers successfully created exploits, they could clandestinely destroy data, steal information, or compromise network security.
The bug has been characterized as one of the most serious ever due to its widespread use in many of the Windows operating system's security subsystems, including Kerberos and NTLM authentication, and in numerous server and desktop programs, such as Exchange and Internet Explorer.
The ANS vulnerability was first identified on July 25, 2003, by eEye Digital Security, but not fixed until more than seven months later.
And there's the rub.
'Microsoft had 200 days to fix this,' Mark Maiffret said in a teleconference. Maiffret is the chief hacking officer and a co-founder of eEye Digital Security, and the discoverer of the ANS vulnerability. "That's a ridiculous amount of time.'
To his credit, Maiffret kept quiet about the vulnerability while Microsoft worked on and tested a patch. Currently, there are no exploits circulating or pending.
In its defense, Microsoft said that the company needed the time to assemble,but more importantly, test, the fix. "This investigation required us to evaluate several aspects and instances of this pervasive functionality in order for our engineers to create a comprehensive and high quality fix," a company spokesperson said. 'This was an instance in which due diligence required us to very carefully evaluate the broadest possible implications of the anomaly.'
But that's no excuse, another analyst said Thursday.
'I recognize that Microsoft has thrown an incredible amount of money and resources at security issues,' said Laura DiDio, a senior analyst for the Yankee Group who has been tracking security for over 17 years. 'The company is under siege, no question. They're the number one target, like a policeman in Baghdad.
'Where I fault them -- even if you give them the benefit of the doubt -- is that you can't take seven months to patch a problem of this magnitude.'"
Did you catch that last? LAURA DIDIO, Microsoft shill par excellence, can't even justify that!
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Install an Alpha software on a X86 box?
This reminds me of the British EDS event where they crashed 80,000 systems trying to update a half dozen test systems.
Obviously, they tried putting on an XP patch which proceeded to destroy 80,000 Windows 2000 machines.
You'd think the patch mechanisms would be designed to see if the patch is even for the right architecture...let alone the right version of the OS.
Morons.
"Here, Bill! Write any old binary over the binary on our servers! It'll work! No need to test!"
1) Office for Mac exists to prop up Office for Windows - period. Office for Linux wouldn't, so it doesn't exist.
2) MS apps dominate on the desktop because they tied to the OS via the APIs - previous challengers such as WordPerfect were not so tied. It should be obvious to anyone with a brain that companies would prefer to buy apps from the company that makes the OS they run on. So they WERE "challenged" - but the challengers were running with both hands tied behind them. Nowhere is that more obvious than IE.
3) My point stands - Windows USED to be cheaper than anything else, and Microsoft's monopoly behavior allowed them to tie their apps to the OS and their OS to the machines being sold.
4) Windows security problems are not about the users - they are direct flaws in the system design, and would require yanking out Active X and un-entangling IE from the OS and removing insecure "features."
5) Microsoft spends shit on R&D compared to their cash balance, and their R&D produces virtually nothing - certainly nothing that improves Bill's bank balance.
"Open source has been around as long as I can remember."
You have a very short memory - or you're about fifteen years old.
Prior to the early 1990's, there was no "open source" as a movement per se. You had "shareware" and some "freeware".
And you had some bozos trying to create a new UNIX-like system that wasn't UNIX - some geek crap called "GNU." They got nowhere, but they made a lot of tools that some people piled on top of some kernel toy some Finnish guy made.
What you had in OS terms was several expensive proprietary versions of UNIX (costing thousands of dollars for a license and most of them wouldn't run on a PC at all or were considered toys - like Xenix that Microsoft once owned), some proprietary mainframe OS costing millions - and cheap DOS - which became Windows...which stunk until it became Windows 95.
The sole reason people used DOS and then Windows was because it was "free" with their PC, and was a minimal cost to corporations because PCs went for $2K, and Windows was only five or ten percent of the price.
Today, Windows at $25-100 is the first or second most expensive thing on the $300-400 box (not counting Office). And the cost of maintaining it is orders of magnitude MUCH higher than the cost of the box. Depending on whose TCO you believe, a PC workstation and user costs $8,000 to $26,000 PER YEAR to maintain.
As Marcus Ranum points out in his rant mentioned here before, there has NEVER been a corporation that actually sues software companies to hold them "accountable" - that's a CYA point that has nothing to do with either technical or business reality. It has strictly to do with incompetent management.
Also, most IT management wouldn't know a "solution that works" if it bit them on the dick. Most IT management decisions are made from a CYA viewpoint, or a kickback viewpoint. There are absolutely no long-term consequences or basic design principles taken into consideration.
So, yes, that makes it harder for open source to beat commercial software. But as I mentioned elsewhere here, at some point not noticing reality just makes you look stupid. And that moment has come for a number of companies, and it will come for a lot more as the statistics about the growth of open source are demonstrating.
When you have the number of companies considering open source growing from single digit percentages to twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty percent in a year or so, it means a wake-up call has been sounded.
Numerous corporate managers at seminars have explicitly told the software industry that commercial software sucks, it costs too much, and it doesn't do what they want it to do.
The only thing slowing OSS growth at this moment, as I've said before, is a lack of large-scale enterprise applications, which is directly a result of the amount of manpower and effort and time needed to produce such apps. Open source is slowly producing the infrastructure for such applications, but it will take some IT industry people time to realize that they need to - and can - develop such apps in their vertical industry.
When this happens, commercial software will be under considerable pressure to at least reduce prices, if not convert to an OSS development model entirely.
And nobody in open source cares if some end user like you never looks at the code of an app. What matters is that the developers and implementors of that app can look at the code underlying that app. Chris Dibona from Google made exactly that point at LinuxWorld the other week. He said they stuck with Linux because they can tweak it to make Google work.
And THAT answers the problem with commercial code being fixed and unable to do what somebody wants it to do - especially interoperability with legacy code. And that's a huge cost factor in the corporate world right now. Or haven't YOU been reading the business trade press?
Studies about why companies have switched to open source clearly show that cost is the least of it - it's about avoiding vendor loc
Or is that "misspell 'misspell'"?
Fuck it.
"Billshit" is Bill Gates bullshit uttered by Windows shills, if you didn't get it.
No problem if you assume Taylor is a paid Microsoft liar.
His stated motivations are "billshit" (no, I didn't mispell bullshit.)
First, Microsoft hasn't admitted one damn thing about Linux or open source, other than that it exists (duh!) There comes a time when ignoring your rival just makes you look stupid, which is not helpful for marketing.
Second, we have absolutely NO evidence that this
"study" isn't a setup to gain publicity advantage by making it look like the OSDL agreed to an "independent" study which is then tweaked somehow to let Microsoft win or appear to win.
Third, Microsoft has the advertising budget to take advantage of any positive publicity from such a study. Linux has much less budget to do so - even assuming it got all the positive publicity, which, the issue is, unlikely since Microsoft isn't going to do this unless they win the results or can spin it as a win for them.
This is like those movies where the hero and the villain both draw guns, then the the villain says, "Let's not use guns, let's just duke it out!" You KNOW the hero is going to win, but you also KNOW the villain is going to "cheat."
I prefer the "Serenity" way: the villain says, "I'm unarmed", so the hero says, "Good!" and shoots him.
Consider yourself shot for being a Pollyanna about the whole thing.
I don't see Gates thinking that way.
I see him thinking like this:
1) Our apps only run on Windows.
2) Our apps dominate on the corporate desktop because they only run on Windows.
3) Our OS's dominate on the corporate desktop because they run our apps - and because we have business contracts and marketing to convince people to use our OS because it was cheaper than UNIX for years. So we got there first.
4) If it ain't broke, don't fix it - unless it makes us more money DIRECTLY to fix it.
5) Security ain't "it" - yet, anyway - when we see people ditching us in droves because of security, then maybe we'll fix it - 'cause it's gonna be a major rewrite and that costs me money, so it ain't happening until it costs me MORE money NOT to do it. And as long as we're making profit and have dominant market share, why should I?
6) I'm all about money, not technology. Business contract law and marketing is THE way to make money. Technology is just the product.
7) I don't listen to people with less money than me telling me how to run my business.
8) We make 30% of our revenue from the OS, 60-70% from our apps. The only reason we make anything else is to try to find something to boost our profit margins so the stock looks good - cause other than my $10-15 billion in cash (and the stock laundering my Dad does at the "charitable foundation"), my wealth is stock value. And our profit margins are single digit these days, which is bad for the stock. That's why I pissed away $37 over the next few years - to prop up the stock - instead of spending it on pointless - to me - technology research. I could spend $37 billion on research and get nothing. I can spend $37 billion of the company's money and keep MY personal stock value up there.
THIS is how Bill Gates thinks.
As long as he's running Microsoft, they're not going to do ANYTHING good for anybody but Bill.
Reminds me of Gary Bussey in "D.C. Cab" complaining that he didn't know what women were upset about, because "they have half the money and all of the pussy!"
Red Hat says why in the article: they believe in using customer testimonials, rather than a lab environment which may or may not - usually not - resemble the real world.
They also know how easy it is to tweak such an environment to produce the results you want.
I don't entirely disparage lab tests. When the trade journals run a test on Windows 2003 Server vrs. SUSE or whoever, and come up with the figures that a Linux distro with Samba is twice as fast at file and printer sharing as Windows, I can accept that. If they legitimately found the opposite, I could accept that - unless of course the trade journal was known to be anti-OSS.
But when someone is PAID by a company to do a study, the study is compromised, no matter what the research company says.
Many of these "research" companies let the paying company set the ground rules and configurations and targets for these tests, which compromises the study right there.
There's no advantage to an OSS company doing the same study, as the same criticism could be made against them.
There have been a number of studies which show lower TCO for Linux over Windows. Unfortunately, most of them were done by companies either actively involved in OSS, or companies using OSS and justifying their use of OSS. So Microsoft naturally ignores those studies and prefers to use "independent" studies from "research" outfits that show lower TCO for Windows.
It's a game, and not particularly useful for anything except propaganda.
Actual usage statistics of Linux vrs Windows, growth in market share stats, and testimonials from companies who HAVE measured their costs under both systems before and after a migration are the most reliable indicators.
The latter, by the way, is why Laura DiDio is now babbling about how most companies don't know what their TCO even is. That's undoubtedly true. BUT companies that spent money on Windows licenses for years and switched to Linux KNOW what they spent before and what they are spending now (there's a little thing called "budgets" in most companies) - and every company I've read about who have switched have stated they realized actual dollar savings. DiDio is trying to blunt those real world stories by claiming the companies don't know what they're spending on Linux or OSS.
But that's the kind of comparison Red Hat prefers to rely on.
Number one theory is the most likely. They want a rigged comparison to seem to be supported by OSDL.
They don't need OSDL to find out where Windows is weak against Linux - they've been told that over and over by everybody - including their own people in the famous "Unix memo" - and I'm sure a lot of their customers switching away from them have told them, too.
Hey, I've copyrighted, trademarked and patented the use of the term "morons" on
You owe me money!
And you need to sublicense "oxymorons"!
Sorry, couldn't resist...
(No, this wasn't a slam at Linus, I support trademarking Linux!)
Totally agree with your point.
Show me one quote where Linus thinks Microsoft are in any way "good guys" - however you or he defines "good guys."
Yes, Linus is not a "free as in beer software" fanatic. However, he DOES believe in open source and in Linux as a process and a product, as well as a technology challenge. The latter may be what floats his boat, but he's not exactly an SCO supporter, either. And he's not stupid.
Stallman may be a socialist or semi-socialist or pseudo-socialist or whatever, but even the GPL allows people to sell open source software as long as the source is included.
Bill Gates and Microsoft have NEVER been about free as in freedom OR free as in beer, ever. Go back and read his "You Hobbyists Steal Your Software" rant and his poker days at Harvard.
Why should anybody in OSS concern themselves about "cooperation" (in other than a technical interoperability sense) with Microsoft?
As I'm sure you've concluded, the only purpose for this suggestion is to get the OSDL to look like it approved the conditions for a Microsoft "win", thereby allowing Microsoft to claim it was truly an "independent" comparison.
Right - like the 9/11 Commission was "independent" - they wanted Kissinger on it at first, but that was TOO fucking obvious.
Now we're finding out how the REAL facts about 9/11 - like over 20 intelligence agents having specific information about the attack before the attack - were "left out" of the Commission report.
No matter how the test is set up, Microsoft would arrange to somehow "win" or at least make it appear they won in their spin cycle.
They probably want Gartner and Laura DiDio to conduct the test under a "joint" financing arrangement. Yeah, right...LOL, Microsoft.
And if that's the case, there's no advantage to Linux to accommodate them.
Always make sure your opponent knows as little about you as possible.
Probably what Microsoft is aiming for is a server "face-off" where they get to tweak Windows 2003 Server against one or more of the Linux servers (Red Hat or SUSE) - and then swing the conditions so they win or can at least spin that they won.
They've steadily lost these comparisons before (by up to a factor of 2 - 2.5.) This way they could "truthfully" say that it was a non-Microsoft-sponsored comparison that was agreed to by the OSDL.
There's no incentive for Linux to contribute to Microsoft's competitive advantage against Linux by being manipulated like this.
Nothing Taylor says can be taken for anything but a lie, anyway. He's a Microsoft employee and they are paid to lie at all times. So whatever his stated motivations, they're false.
Or, a more recent example:
O: It's a trap.
Q: What now?
A: Spring the trap!
In this case, it would be fun to see Obi-Wan Torvalds slice Count Taylor's head off.
But until Darth Gates gets blown up in the Redmond Death Star, the revolution must continue.
If you'd SAID that OSS software is doing well, but not "beating" commercial software, instead of mouthing off with "Huh? In what universe?", you'd have gotten a better reaction.
Particularly since I then could have explained to you that MY point was that OSS software was "beating" commercial software in the sense of being BETTER, not necessarily because of market share.
Which still includes the point that OSS is going to beat commercial software market-share wise EVENTUALLY, with Linux being taken up twice as fast as Windows for servers and the rest of OSS a no-brainer as soon as it develops enough enterprise-level apps.
In simple English, "beating" does not mean "already beaten."
Next time, try to make a point instead of being an asshole, and you might get treated better.
Naah, never happen.
Look, stupid, I don't have time to respond to juvenile taunts from idiots who have no clue what OSS is about or how well it's being taken up by corporate America.
Do everyone a favor - walk in front of a bus.
MySQL is still younger than PostgreSQL.
And being funded better by providing a double license is why MySQL is improving quickly. The more OSS programmers that can afford to work on a project, the better the project is, usually.
But PostgreSQL is older and had more time to develop, so it's still the more fully developed product.
If PostgreSQL had the kind of money MySQL has, let alone Oracle, it probably would be better than Oracle by now. But it's pointless to discuss it, because that doesn't happen in OSS.
It doesn't mean PostgreSQL isn't a perfectly good database for the people that can use it. There's no need to have every "feature" - including the most obscure ones - of Oracle to be a completely adequare replacement for Oracle for those users who don't need Oracle's extra features.
All the trade journal articles have pointed out that up to now, you had to pay Oracle's price for Oracle's features - including the ones you'll never need. Now you can get MySQL and PostgreSQL and Firebird and others and get all the features you WANT for no or less money.
This is one place where direct comparison between OSS and commercial software breaks down. Commercial software HAS to be all things to all people. OSS doesn't. It can fork, be customized, do anything it needs to be useful to varied groups of people without being a bloated POS like Oracle or Microsoft Office.
The net effect, however, on commercial software is bad for them - people stop paying for stuff they don't need. Which means the commercial company can't charge the same anymore. Which means their profitability goes down. Which also means their customers save money. So in that sense OSS software reduces the TCO of even closed-source software!
Look at how many times recently Microsoft had to reduce its license fees for various governments that were considering open source.
Did Microsoft take that reduction into account when comparing their TCO against open source?
I wonder if any of the TCO studies take that into account!
This one, moron.
Did you expect it to happen overnight?
You can't read the percentage uptake of OSS products over commercial? The double-digit percentage growth of Linux and other OSS products year after year? The trade journal articles that cite double-digit percentages of companies implementing open source?
Can you read at all?
"Unless the manufacturers start programming a lot of code themselves and don't mind giving up their work to competitors"
Well, if you buy a closed-source product, your competitors are buying it, too. Where's your competitive advantage?
Whereas if manufacturers support open source projects run by people either directly or not directly employed by themselves, but who are familiar with MRP needs, those people will write the basics - and then the manufacturers can hire those people as consultants to customize the suites to give them competitive advantage.
As for the pain of switching, closed-source providers will never even attempt to make it easy to switch away from their own product, although they might make it easy to switch from a competitor's product. OSS providers have every incentive to make it easy to switch - provided that they've been told that's a major requirement, otherwise they're likely to ignore it in the process of making the software.
Switching is going to painful, anyway - and what do you do if your closed source vendor goes out of business? You have to switch anyway, then. OSS doesn't go "out of business" - although a given project may become moribund. As long as you've got the code, the customer is still in business.
As for your first question, ERP/MRP products are just now being worked on in OSS. It will be a while - years even - before entire suites are available to replace PeopleSoft or whoever. Doesn't mean it won't happen.
It will happen quicker if manufacturers that want MRP start expending a small fraction of their IT budgets on supporting OSS efforts. A number of European companies are doing this, and the OSS products being produced are sophisticated and powerful.
Open source doesn't mean software that springs full blown from the brow of Zeus. It still has to be developed, debugged, and tested - just like closed source software. The difference is that the quality tends to be better (if not the user interface, in some cases).
The problem with a lot of large companies is this: they want quality software NOW - but they won't pay LESS - or anything - for OSS than they do for closed source. As usual, they want SOMEONE ELSE to pay for the software, then they'll consider using it.
They handle training the same way - they only hire employees that some other company has trained.
What's wrong with this picture?
While looking for more information on this, I found this article, which is interesting, too.
0 073608244
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/2003111
Another good reason to use open source is that a company's infrastructure vendor can reduce its own development costs by using Linux, and pass the savings onto their customers in terms of better and lower costing products - which in turn affects their customer's TCO.
This seems to be happening in the retail POS industry.
"A product like Oracle, for instance, has had years upon years of time and millions upon millions of dollars poured into it."
While PostgreSQL hasn't had scores of millions of dollars poured into it, they also haven't had the "years upon years" - although they ARE one of the older OSS products around.
Nonetheless, their achievements are impressive.
Most of Oracle's "features" beyond PostgreSQL are stuff involving applications development, tuning, and other stuff that most smaller companies don't particularly need or which are so complicated to use that most DBA's probably don't even understand them. Oracle is one hellaciously complicated product.
Oracle has more "feature-itis" than even Microsoft.
A better comparison would be MySQL which is younger and doesn't have all the features a good database should have - but it's getting them over time.
Given that most open source is less than ten years old, and open source project methods vary across the board from one-man projects to corporate-sponsored projects with hundreds of people, I think this form of comparison to closed-source software as to end results is a bit premature.
Open source is division of labor at its best.
As the open source methodology matures, I think we'll see no real limits on what it can achieve - short of putting a man on the moon in ten years.
And this is exactly why open source is beating commercial software.
Because open source is OPEN SOURCE - you can see the software and you can tweak it. Which saves money on contracting with a closed source company to do that, as you can likely find somebody to tweak it for less money.
Closed source companies won't even tweak it in many cases, for exactly the reasons you state - it then becomes a nightmare for them to support a hundred different versions of their software.
Also, a closed source company is going to charge mucho dollars per hour to do customization. They have fixed costs for such a project. An OSS guy can charge anything that gets him the contract, which is usually less, thus saving his client money.
City College of San Francisco library requested their vendor to add custom functionality to the new ILS system. The vendor agreed, then reneged later. Now an in-house person has to mess with it - probably unsuccessfully because the software is closed.
A second reason OSS beats commercial software in this respect is that it has been proven that a Linux sysadmin can maintain more servers than a Windows sysadmin. As more servers are brought on line, fewer sys admins - less employee cost to the company.
Also most of the COMPONENTS of TCO are the same for OSS and commercial software - except the licensing cost. Therefore, most of the time, TCO for OSS is less simply because the cost of consultants remains the same in many cases but the licensing and upgrade costs are less. Especially since much commercial licensing is per server, and OSS can frequently be used on ALL the servers in the corporation (unless you're buying Red Hat, of course.)
Finally, this argument has been done to death - the FACT of the matter is that TCO must be determined on an individual corporate basis, and EVERY single company that has moved to OSS that I have read about has decided that the TCO was better - frequently DRAMATICALLY better.
And here's a quote from another article on the subject back in 2004:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/26803909
"The vulnerability in question is one of two noted as "critical" by Microsoft on Tuesday, when it released February's monthly fixes. Hackers could exploit flaws in Windows's usage of Abstract Syntax Notation (ASN), a language for defining the syntax of data messages shared between applications and computers. If attackers successfully created exploits, they could clandestinely destroy data, steal information, or compromise network security.
The bug has been characterized as one of the most serious ever due to its widespread use in many of the Windows operating system's security subsystems, including Kerberos and NTLM authentication, and in numerous server and desktop programs, such as Exchange and Internet Explorer.
The ANS vulnerability was first identified on July 25, 2003, by eEye Digital Security, but not fixed until more than seven months later.
And there's the rub.
'Microsoft had 200 days to fix this,' Mark Maiffret said in a teleconference. Maiffret is the chief hacking officer and a co-founder of eEye Digital Security, and the discoverer of the ANS vulnerability. "That's a ridiculous amount of time.'
To his credit, Maiffret kept quiet about the vulnerability while Microsoft worked on and tested a patch. Currently, there are no exploits circulating or pending.
In its defense, Microsoft said that the company needed the time to assemble,but more importantly, test, the fix. "This investigation required us to evaluate several aspects and instances of this pervasive functionality in order for our engineers to create a comprehensive and high quality fix," a company spokesperson said. 'This was an instance in which due diligence required us to very carefully evaluate the broadest possible implications of the anomaly.'
But that's no excuse, another analyst said Thursday.
'I recognize that Microsoft has thrown an incredible amount of money and resources at security issues,' said Laura DiDio, a senior analyst for the Yankee Group who has been tracking security for over 17 years. 'The company is under siege, no question. They're the number one target, like a policeman in Baghdad.
'Where I fault them -- even if you give them the benefit of the doubt -- is that you can't take seven months to patch a problem of this magnitude.'"
Did you catch that last? LAURA DIDIO, Microsoft shill par excellence, can't even justify that!
Check http://eeye.com/html/research/upcoming/index.html site for a short list of overdue fixes.
And that's just the vulnerabilities THEY reported.