According to Richard Stallman, because I write "closed-source propietary" software, I am immoral and should find another line of work.
Morals are personal beliefs. He's free to express his, but why would you care?
How does that tie in to the usual "oh, but we're all nice" party line? I will not generalize to the point of claiming every single person associated with open source has the same views, just that there are enough of them to be a problem.
I've spent my entire life working at companies that create open source software. I've contributed to numerous projects. Almost all those companies also produced closed source software. There are probably close to a hundred Linux and OSS contributors in my office. All of them are paid and some work on other OSS projects as hobbies. I've not heard any of them objecting to keeping some of our software closed source when it benefits the company more.
Richard Stallman is to FLOSS as Billy Graham is to christianity. He is an extremist who advocates a hard-line approach and adherence to doctrine in the hopes of motivating change. You should not judge the FLOSS community by Mr Stallman and more than you should judge the christian community by Mr. Graham.
"Criminals" is another one of those weasel words, eh? Please show me where Microsoft was convicted in a criminal court of a crime. I'd love to see that.
Umm, the US DoJ v. Microsoft. Antitrust abuse is a criminal code of law in the US, although prosecution of it is often precipitated by civil suits. I believe that applies as well to the EU antitrust suit MS lost, although I'm much less versed in EU law.
That aside, I think the industry is doing just fine...
Are you joking? Web standards are frozen using subsets of 7-8 year old versions of the standards because while every browser development group on the planet has managed to implement almost all of much more recent versions, MS has intentionally declined to do so to prevent the Web from becoming a viable platform for rich applications that might threaten their lock-in and desktop monopoly. Most people who have ripped music CDs over the last 10 years ripped their music to a format that added DRM and is incompatible with the most popular portable player forcing them to do the whole thing over again. Most users still don't have a spellchecker that works in all their applications. Holy crap its only been decades since users started asking for that one. By default most users cannot just run random binaries from the internet without substantial risk that it will completely take over their machine and start sending spam, despite the fact that most users want to perform that exact task. Where's my ubiquitous real time translation between languages, written and spoken? Why is it that I still can't send an IM message to anyone I want on any network, but only within proprietary networks? Why is it that binaries are still not all cross-platform? Voice recognition is still at the same state it was 8 years ago.
From my perspective the industry has been dragging along and when I look at most of the reasons I keep coming back to MS. They buy up innovative companies and mothball the technology. They slow things down so they can charge feature by feature and they halt anything that looks like it has the potential to revolutionize things because revolutions are dangerous to an incumbent.
More often than not the FLOSS claim that Microsoft "hinders" them is centered around disappointment over unrealistic expectations of fame and fortune, not to mention conveniently forgetting that Microsoft is hardly the only commercial software in the world.
What do you know about the economics of monopolies? Traditionally a monopoly is considered dangerous because they can remove the incentive for innovation in markets by introducing artificial problems and barriers that mean the best product will not necessarily make money and win
Windows suffers from being the target that is singled out the most. Could Linux withstand an onslaught of equal proportions and have its reputation survive?
If by some miracle Linux was given 50% or 80% of the desktop market tomorrow due to a massive switch campaign, within a few months we'd be seeing a serious malware problem. The security of the average Linux distro today is not up to the challenge of dealing with that much malware. It might not be quite as bad as Windows, but it would not be all that much better.
On the flip side, the security process on Linux is quite different. Linux cannot ever wield monopoly influence on the market, because of the open source licensing that shapes the development process. As a result if the above scenario were to take place, 6 months later Linux would have adapted and implemented new security technologies that gutted most of the malware problem and Linux would fair quite well in the ensuing arms race, probably moving to ubiquitous SELinux like security combined with multiple security services for the determination of trust levels and default restrictions. The real problem with Windows security is that MS does not lose enough money when its users are compromised so it has motivation. With Linux, the developers are the users and if they don't fix the problem, someone else will and nothing is stopping people from migrating to that new distro.
Windows, when you're not running as Admnistrator, is easily just a 'secure' as Linux not running as root, for definitions of 'secure' that mean one user can't kill the whole system, and the Admin account is not compromised.
When on fire you're just as secure as when you're not, for definitions of "secure" that mean you are unlikely to be hit by a russian nuclear device. Seriously, that's not a very reasonable definition of "secure" and even looking at that premise there is at least one outstanding, public privilege escalation in Vista right now and there almost always is in the current version of windows, while the same is not true on Linux. MS has never taken local escalations seriously.
Windows has a big red 'X' painted on it as far as scumware authors are concerned.
Windows is the low hanging fruit both because of default security and because of the monoculture install base size. Because of the increased risk on Windows and the education level of the users, its security needs to be technically superior to Linux to achieve the same risk and that is just not likely to happen anytime soon.
Actually, I am and I've advocated that MS step up to the plate and implement them properly in some version of Windows ever since NT 4.0 was released. While the NT kernel supports ACLs, they are pretty much unusable in real software on Windows unless you have the source code to Windows, which was one of my previous points. For ubiquitous application to all processes they are unusable and for individual processes a VM is actually more practical at this point. I stand by my assertion.
But I think that Microsoft recognize the problem they have with FLOSS and are trying (or pretending at least) to co-exist. The FLOSS party line seems to be the eventual "destruction" of Microsoft.
This is 100% not true. The party line of FLOSS fans is the promotion of free and open source software and advancement of the computer industry in general. If MS actually started developing and contributing open source software without any hidden lock in technologies, FLOSS advocates would embrace them. Personally, I don't dislike MS because they develop closed software. Lots of companies do that, like Apple and Sun and Adobe and I don't have any problem with them and I don't think most FLOSS fans do either. The problem I have with MS is they abuse their market position to hinder the adoption of FLOSS and in the process stifle innovation and slow down progress in the software industry in general. All the commercial companies out there are trying to make money, but MS is the one huge influential company that is lying and breaking the law and refusing to play by the rules everyone else does. They are criminals profiting by hurting the computer industry. That is why they are not trusted or liked by computer people in general.
People (you know, out there, not "here") by and large don't have a negative view of Microsoft, and ultimately that's what matters.
A lot of people do have a negative view of MS, not because they understand anything about their business practices, but because their computer does not work and is a stupid piece of crap that keeps slowing down and messing up. I don't think there is anything wrong with trying to inform people that it doesn't need to be that way and there are better options and if the laws were just upheld the whole industry would get better. Ranting incoherently about MS obviously will not give you any credibility, but your strawman argument about what FLOSS people are saying is just that. You're the only one that wrote leetspeak crap about sucking, so stop trying to pass it off as "the community."
You should become a bureaucrat in a socialist country....
How do you know I'm not already one?
you have the perfect mindset..
Oh, I see... you're a psychic. Since you obviously can read my mind to know my mindset, I won't bother replying to the rest of your comment. You already know what I thought anyway. And yeah, I am picturing you with one of those on your head.
If you run Windows under Parallels, your main OS is an Un*x OS.
Well, technically, Parallels could be running under Windows with another version of Windows in it, but yeah I'm running it on top of OS X.
Linux has never been big on the desktop. When the sales of OS X are rising so much, the big looser[sic] isn't Linux but MS.
I don't know. OS X sales are certainly hurting MS somewhat, but I know a lot of Linux on the desktop people who have moved to OS X on the desktop and that has to affect the number of developers available to work on it. What small home/desktop market share Linux had may be hurt pretty badly.
And when he asks you if you have specific examples of this, what are you going to point him to?
That shouldn't be too hard. MS has introduced many incompatible versions of their software over the years. In fact, I inherited an entire file server full of.doc files when I moved to one job and when I tried to archive them I discovered no currently available version of word could open a significant number of them. OpenOffice, ironically, could open some of the files, for the rest we had to ebay an old copy of Word and then save them in newer formats. That incident by itself was enough for our company to standardize on non-proprietary formats and put a partial moratorium on Word as an internal tool.
The business case for open source and open standards, however, is a lot more compelling than just files becoming inaccessible. There are real costs involved with keeping an entire company standardized on some version of software and if the availability of that is determined by one company only and they routinely stop selling old versions you have to choose between committing to the unknown but substantial cost of maintaining that upgrade cycle, or moving to a format/software where you can take bids from multiple vendors and/or the upgrade path is guaranteed and free.
I actually wrote "TextEdit" which is another one bundled with OS X (I use it to edit.doc files quickly with a small footprint).
Sure, if you can spend $1000+ on software then there's no problem finding replacements, much better ones too.
I'm a professional. My company buys my hardware and software, unless it is something I buy for one of my contract jobs. When I'm doing contract work I bill about $100/hour. The cost/benefit of software that lets me do half my tasks faster pays for this software really, really quickly. One of the things I'd like to stress, however, is that it is not always an either/or situation. GIMP is better for some tasks and I use it for them. GIMP can be installed under OS X too, it just isn't quite as nice. Because Linux does not offer me as much that is non-portable or that is not offered elsewhere, it end up being used less on the desktop. If Windows software was more portable or had more replacements, Linux would start to win that battle. Or, if Linux was more capable on the desktop compared to OS X, or OS X was more portable and ran well in a VM, Linux might win more. As it is, its strengths aren't as important as other platform's limitations.
...you must also consider that anyone can download OO. I'm not going to switch from HP (my personal favorite) to Dell for OO. Granted, I'm certainly more in the know about OO than Joe Sixpack but if the market really does change based on the OO offering it won't be long until people who desire OO will realize that there is no need to go to Dell for OO.
I don't think that is a significant market influence. Most users don't know they can download OpenOffice. Many fear to install any software at all without help. I know people who will buy a CD-ROM at Walmart, stick it in and click and hope it works, and that is about the extend of their knowledge. If it is not for sale at Walmart, it might as well not exist, even if it is a free download for anyone who knows about it.
Even if they decide to offer support for OO through their own customer service they're going to need to jack the prices a bit for the new overhead costs.
Actually the cost spread out across all the machines they sell amounts to basically nothing. A few engineers and a process guy each at 100K a year, doubled for overhead and you're talking a million bucks, divided by the 2 million machines they ship and you're looking at $.50 a box. That's what.001% of their advertising budget to be able to tell everyone their computers come with a free office suite? It's hard to find so much potential bang for so little.
Offering OO at a small fee may help offset this but they're going to lose their marketing edge at the same time by charging for the tech support. Offering OO is a tough situation and one that I don't think is going to help Dell in the long run.
I don't think adding a few bucks for support just for that machine, or rolling it into the overall cost would hurt them. As for the long term, open source development is certainly a more efficient (cost) model of development and unless governments interfere to stop free trade, in the long run it will win and Dell will have to offer it, or something like it. Also, Dell has their neck in a noose with MS and they know it. They certainly do not want a single OS to dominate as then they can't get competing bids and are beholden to a single supplier. Anything that loosens MS's grip, is a long term win for Dell.
While they may be able to break even you're talking about putting a proven model against a risky new model. Even if you could break even on paper you'd still be making a hard sell of this to the financial portion of the company. Not saying that it can't be done but I'd place my money on the existing model winning. "Better the devil you know" kind of thing.
The risk is pretty minimal because they don't have to stop selling MSOffice, so the change is gradual and reversible. Reward is a function of risk. If they do it first, they get first mover advantage and might get 6 months of stealing customers form others before they are copied effectively. If they wait and someone else does it, they might lose those customers. The question is, what does Dell need right now? Do they need more market share or do they need to keep their revenue stream as predictable as possible? My view says the former. They've just been booted out of first place for market share and lost a lot of face and bargaining power they need to get the best prices from component suppliers. They're no longer the top dog. Even if they lose some money going this way, they gain more market share which trickles down to the pricing they can get on all their components and translates to how big of margin they get on each machine.
What support margins are you refering to and how is that going to offset lost profits from MSO? I'm sorry but this is a pretty flimsy statement and it's hard to tell exactly where you are going with it.
I was speaking in the hypothetical if they charged for OpenOffice, that they could charge more than it takes to cover suppor
My story is sort of the opposite of yours. I'm a long time user of many OS's, but lately I find myself using Linux less and Windows more. The reasons for this are a bit complicated. The recent trend towards hardware assisted virtualization has finally allowed me to consolidate all my workstations into a single laptop. That is very cool and it means I can directly run Linux at the coffee shop, whereas it used to be available only at my desk at work (not counting server use). You'd think that would make me use it more, but in reality it means I use it less. You see, I basically run Linux on the desktop for a handful of applications that operate best there (GIMP, InkScape, OO, XPDF, etc.) The drawback to this system is I can only run 2 OS's at a time. The VMs are running on top of OS X, which is my workstation OS of choice and runs 90% of my apps. I find myself more and more running Windows in the VM for an irreplaceable application, which means I have to shut it down to run Linux. That's not a big deal, but for most of what I do, there are acceptable replacements for the Linux software (Photoshop, Illustrator, TextEdit, Preview, etc.) More and more often I find myself just editing that vector graphic element in Illustrator so I don't have to shut down Windows. Linux may be winning corporate desktops from Windows, but I fear they are also losing a lot of home and power user desktops to OS X. I'll be curious to see if corporate Linux adoption really does take off and if that has the expected impact on home use. If wider adoption means those irreplaceable Windows applications become replaceable, the story will change in a hurry.
Not by default, and not as easily, but just as secure.
I disagree. For a normal person/environment, this is not the case. Out of the box, the average Linux distro is more secure than Windows Vista. If you put work into Vista you can make it about as secure from a technology perspective as the average Linux install, but you can't change the malware ecosystem which targets Windows more and presents it with more threats, making the overall risk on Windows greater. Also, for more secure, managed environments you can utilize SELinux or something that provides more fine grained control than Vista can offer in a usable environment unless you have access to the Windows source code, which normal people don't.
So if you're aiming for a level of security that is sort of middle of the road, then you can (with extra work) get Windows to the same state as the average Linux install, but you'll still have a higher risk. Further, if you're aiming for something above and beyond that, Windows just can't achieve some of the security layers that Linux can, so it will always be a bit behind.
The concern I have with IDNs is that they will make it too easy to produce "lookalike" domains, like "mcrosoft.com".
This really seems like a pretty minor issue to me. Browsers would just need to adopt a policy of flagging URIs with mixed language character sets, highlighting that character in red or something. More dangerous is the new domain land grab as companies grab legitimate domains in other languages that natives feel the real company simply must own, but which the parent company probably does not. This can be addresses by a certificate scheme that ties identity verification to the site, however, and such a scheme really needs to be implemented on a wide scale to deal with current security problems anyway.
What's obvious is that Dell can make a profit from MS Office. Frankly, if I were a business I would look to the profit aspect first.
You make the profit angle seem one sided. It is not. Dell makes money by selling computers and by selling copies of MSOffice. If they include OpenOffice for free or for a small support fee that just covers those support costs they might sell fewer copies of MSOffice, but they also might sell more computers because their computers are now better than the competition who does not include a free Office suite. It is called a "value added" gambit. Now it may be that Dell has looked hard at the numbers and feels that right now they can make more money not offering OpenOffice, but then Dell is also slipping in market share and no longer holds the top spot. If a competitor decides to undercut them by installing OpenOffice, it makes them vulnerable.
Also consider tech support. I would think that Dell is going to get more support from MS than the OO people when it comes down to wide spread issues involving their product.
Funny. Actually, Dell could easily make OpenOffice their own and do support in house. They have a few coders and the source is right there for them to submit changes to. OpenOffice gives them more options for getting support, not fewer. They can go with in house, OpenOffice.org, a third party, or Sun and take bids from all concerned. With MS they can go with MS and hope for the best.
Tech support is doubtlessly a large chunk of Dell's overhead. The better support from their software vendors the less that overhead will be.
I'm unconvinced that a significant portion of their support cost are escalations to software vendors. I suspect almost all of it is faulty hardware, or user failure to understand what is going on at a basic level. Why would you assume otherwise?
That's a big plus and anyone who's taken business-101 type classes can tell you this.
Hopefully the guys running Dell have a bit better education than that. There is a real business case for OpenOffice and money that can be made from support margins and that business case is more and more reasonable the tighter margins on PCs become in comparison to MS Office.
Not to mention that free software still has a stigma about it. This isn't likely to go away anytime soon.
You mean like the stigma attached to the iTunes jukebox software? Or maybe you were thinking of the stigma attached to the Adobe PDF reader or the Flash player? Or maybe you were referring to he stigma surrounding Sun's Java Runtime? All of that is free software that is well branded and most people don't even think about it. OpenOffice has reasonable branding now and if Dell included it as an option either for free of for a small fee, I doubt anyone would attach any stigma to it. Or, Dell is free to make a fork and rebrand with either the Dell brand or some other brand if they're concerned about dilution.
The truth of the matter is that the hardware market is commoditized and Dell is slipping from their place as the biggest player who can get the best bulk pricing. Software is an easy differentiator in the market and is relatively cheap for the potential benefit. Dell may need to get a bit leaner in the add-on sales to regain market share. Of course there is one complication that no one has addressed and that is doing so hurts MS's biggest cash cow. MS is an abusive monopoly and has the power to destroy any Windows reseller, via their differential pricing. If I was running Dell, that is what might stop me from looking hard at OpenOffice. Now I don't know what is going on at Dell. Maybe they looked at the business case and decided MS Office reseller business was too good and they have a better strategy for winning the commodity market share back. Or, maybe internal politics make the software add-on segment of the company too powerful to buck, even when the company overall would do better otherwise. Or, maybe they just assume MS would punish them, or MS has hinted or outright told them not to do it "or else." We're all just guessing as to which of the above is true.
Hotmail has been around a lot longer than most other web-based, free email solutions and is perfectly adequate for day-to-day use, especially when you don't want to give out your private email address to all and sundry....if you've been using one for years and it's served you well, why change? Is this just slashdot-snobbery because Hotmail is now owned by Microsoft?
There is a difference between taking into account that a person is using some brand of product and taking into account when someone who is supposedly a professional in a field is using a very poor quality product in a way that is visible to others. It does speak to their probable level of competence. When I see a resume come across my desk and the engineer in question has an AOL e-mail address, that raises a concern. Hotmail may not be quite the same, but it is still a concern. As for public versus private e-mail addresses, most good e-mail services offer throw away e-mail aliases that are a lot nicer for such a purpose as you can use different ones for different interactions, giving you more insight into the sources of spam and causing less upset to legitimate if unimportant messages when you kill one.
Though what people need to realize is that these days it is not about building a software business model, but about building an information business model. The Google's, Amazon's, EBay's, Flicker's, etc use open source, but their business is data, not software. People need to get that through their noggen...
A agree with you as far as you take it, but I don't think you're taking your argument far enough. The open source business model is one in which you use open source and contribute to open source in order to facilitate your main value proposition, but where it is not your main value proposition. Google sells organization and a service that allows people to find what they want and businesses to deliver ads to who they want. They utilize a lot of open source software to do that, but not for their core value proposition. Other companies are not information purveyors at all, but use open source in the same way. Some hardware manufacturer that makes routers probably builds on NetBSD for the base and uses a pile of free software tools to make their hardware more useful. Their business is selling hardware, which is of course not "open source" if such a term applies. Whether you sell an information service, hardware, travel arrangements, or pencils you can use open source to facilitate your business at a lower cost and with more flexibility than closed source software.
This is great for everyone who does something other than create commercial, closed software for sale as their primary business. Open source development is a more efficient way to do that and one that brings added value to end users. You can survive in that market for a limited time only until big business fully understands what is happening and then you'd better be looking for a new business model.
There is room in this equation for users who pay for the development, for developers who do the work that is needed and may also be users, and for facilitators who are go-betweens, but those facilitators are used to taking a huge piece of the pie which will be a lot smaller in the future.
Apps available in Linux are capable of all the work that needs to be done.
Sorry, this is a poor argument. First, it doesn't matter if there is an application that can do every task, that still is not good enough. More applications means more functions and more workflows for doing those functions. That means I have a better chance of finding an application that does just what I want just how I want to do it. In any case, there certainly are not good replacements on Linux for many proprietary software packages written for Windows. I run Linux side by side with Windows and OS X every day, but a lot of the applications I use because they are best of breed for some task do not run, or only run in a semi-stable re-implementation of the Windows API on Linux. This is a real issue for a lot of us who actually have to work in the real world and exchange data with others.
Linux supports more devices than any other operating system ever. Multiple vendors offer and support laptops at reasonable prices.
Basically every manufacturer of laptops in the world supports Windows on their hardware including drivers. I can pick any one. Maybe half of them have proper Linux drivers. That means I have half as many choices and thus the perfect laptop from a cost/feature/hardware perspective may not work if I'm running Linux, and so I have to buy a more expensive one with features I don't need in order to run Linux. This is a real disadvantage.
Linux wins on hardware support for old systems and systems with lesser resources, but not in the above.
Permissions for the Windows package manager allow any installer to install absolutely anything, including a root kit. This is not desirable behavior in a package manager.
Actually this is true for some Linux distros as well, but that is not the main issue. Package management on Linux, in general, is much better than Windows or OS X, but Linux package management is behind in providing commercial developers with the functions and incentive needed to get them to use the Linux package managers instead of bypassing them to the detriment of users. This is a small win for Windows in a category where they are mostly behind, but it is a win.
Having an ecosystem that supports competing malware/antimalware solutions is not an advantage, not on my planet.
No, having an ecosystem that lends itself to malware is a big loss I have chalked up to Windows, but having the ability to easily find and remove malware (which is admittedly rare on Linux) is a small win for Windows, again in a category where they are mostly losing.
Better in some ways, worse in others, advantage Windows? Huh? Did I read that right?
This is a list of where each OS is ahead of others. The fact that they are ahead in some remote desktop type functions is a win for Windows. This same item is also listed for Linux to account for the items where it does better. By keeping the list positive and giving each OS credit for each way they are ahead we avoid pointless comparisons of which feature set is "better overall" which is of course pointless since it all depends on a given user's use case. Yes, this is a win for Windows and Linux.
Second time for this old troll.
Anyone who denies that third party devices and peripherals are more likely to be supported on Windows, is living in a fantasy world. Why is it that zealots feel so emotionally entangled with their OS that they can't admit to areas where it is deficient. In this case it has little or nothing to do with the OS itself, simply with the current market and how that influences the behavior of hardware manufacturers. That makes it no less true and someone looking for the best OS for some purpose should be accurately informed about these things. Does it somehow make you less of a man if a random Web-cam from Walmart is less likely to work on Linux than Windows?
...it effectively exists on the whim of one rich guy who could lose interest and kill it whenever he wanted.
Remember we're comparing to Windows. So long as the French parliament is willing to pay for support, I doubt they'll have trouble finding a company to provide it (they have 2 now unrelated to Canonical). Also, since Ubuntu is Linux, migrating to another Linux distro can be invisible to users and result in very little change other than the build process. This is less of a risk than Windows moving in a direction incompatible with the needs of the parliament.
apparently the creaks are already showing in dapper (one person above mentioned downloading an update and his gui suddenly breaking with no availible soloution) and its less than a third of the way through its supposed support cycle.
Umm, Dapper isn't even the stable version, is it? In any case, we're looking at this for a centrally managed solution, not a home user. No one rolls out random updates with no testing when they are supporting hundreds of machines. This simply is not a real issue for such a deployment.
Support for the less major software in universe is even worse (much of the stuff in there has simply been imported straight from debian with no testing if it actually works in the ubuntu environment).
Again, this is still better than Windows where installing random software in Vista may or may not work and may or may not hose your system or infect it with something. In a centrally managed situation, supported by both internal IT and a third party support company, if software is needed for these machines, it probably needs to be approved, then a test box is setup to see if it works, then it either goes back to the support company who fixes it or gets rolled out to some or all users. This is almost the same with Windows in a centrally managed environment, except if there is a broken interaction between the OS and the application, the support team has the ability to fix it in the OS, which is not the case with Windows.
...until then ubuntu must be regarded as a young and vulnerable distro.
All distros are young at some point, but it is not the age that is important but the level of commitment and adoption. There are plenty of old Linux distros that used to be popular but no longer are and which now suck to support because no one tests against them when developing software. Sometimes it pays to be part of the main mass, and Ubuntu is that right now. You speak as though all the support options rested on the shoulders of Canonical, but that is simply not true. For any distro, most of the work comes from outside companies. The two hired by the French parliament will likely be contributing a significant amount on their behalf and making support better for everyone. The more companies do this, the fewer problems everyone has. Such a mass is important to how well supported a Linux distro is and is a lot more important, IMHO, than how old it is.
but what does Vista (not MSO, or SQL Server or Exchange) do better than Linux?
Well, I never actually claimed that Windows was better at anything than Linux, only that the Versions of Windows available today are better than the version available two years ago. Vista adds indexed searching, more granular control of sound, the UI utilizes the GPU to offload some work, etc. As for areas where Windows is ahead of Linux and OS X, I maintain a running list of the advantages of each platform over the others, which I've posted on Slashdot several times and added to and modified as a result. Right now the Windows platform wins are:
Application availability - more developers target Windows and eventually a lot of people want to run some niche software that does not work without Windows
hardware vendors - If you run Windows you have more hardware choices and likely get a machine that meets your needs more cheaply than a Mac or Linux, as a result. (How many choices for Linux laptops do you have where everything works?)
Package manager - Windows has a pretty lame software install/uninstall manager, but it is still better than nothing and is the king for supporting commercial, closed source developers.
Antivirus/phishing features - OS X and Linux don't have a lot of need, but this is still not a bad precaution
Remote desktop features - have clients for more platforms than OS X's comparable feature, and is better than Linux for a few tasks, but worse for others.
Wider support for third party devices, everyone makes a Windows driver, not everyone makes an OS X or Linux driver
Easier to find unofficial support from random people you know
Indexed searching is useable by default
Default color support has poorer management and accuracy, but wider range
Note, I don't go into the reasons for said advantages, which is another discussion. Please feel free to comment and mention any other areas where Windows wins or loses, but only if you actually use both platforms enough to have an educated viewpoint. I'm dog tired of people bringing up some "advantage" of their favorite OS when they don't even know the state of that same technology on other platforms. Also note "Linux" is not a single platform, so different distros have different features and it is impossible to evaluate them all. I look at a few common distributions and the default setting enabled as they affect home users (I know this article was about centrally managed use which is somewhat different).
Once you've had a chance to actually deal with real-world users in the government enterprise environment, you know exactly what I mean. Linux is a great solution if every user has a basic grip on how to use a computer and are willing to explore and figure out how to do things. But in the real world, most aren't.
Actually, I think Linux is a lot better for this than Windows is. I've seen incompetent management types who can only access files from the "most recent" list in Word and have no idea where their files are stored or even what the whole file/folder metaphor is about. The difference is, with Linux it is fairly easy to customize the interface such that the tasks a user needs to accomplish are mapped directly to big buttons that are omnipresent and it is possible to make the one hundred random controls that those user don't ever want to touch, invisible by default. Remember we're talking about deploying in a centrally managed environment. Rolling out software and patches and even doing remote support tasks is a lot easier using Linux than Windows.
I guarantee that the oldest/most senior users in the french government are going to call IT every time they want to do something they weren't shown how to do, or simply forgot or became too tech-timid, when they were set up with Ubuntu.
Sure they will, and they'd do the same thing if they were upgraded to a newer version of Windows. The difference is the ease of accommodating them.
Despite the fact that "OMG Windoze wantz to rulez world so it suckz" seems to be the normal opinion here...
This is a strawman argument. No one but you said Windows sucks.
Windows XP is a solid OS with a familiar feel...
A "familiar feel" is an argument against all change. Change can be difficult and has real costs, but sometimes those costs are outweighed by other factors.
...most importantly, real support from a massive dev team.
Umm, Ubuntu probably has more professional, paid developers working on it than Windows does. Trying to get a flaw in Windows fixed is an exercise in frustration. Unless you are huge, good luck. You can wait till service pack 3 or the next release of Windows in another 5 years. Trying to get the same flaw fixed in Ubuntu is a matter of calling one of the two support companies that are part of this contract, or Canonical, or another Linux distro, or getting an internal employee to fix it, or hiring an independent contractor because all of those are options and have access to the source. Better yet, you can take competitive bids from all of them to see who will work most cheaply, and the same applies for new features of customizations.
Getting real support for Windows is a matter of hiring a company who will solve what they can without the source and pester MS on your behalf and hope for the best. That is the inferior support option.
As oppossed to a group of nerds who just don't want to pay for software so they build a modified version of Unix for themselves.
Are you smoking crack? Do you even know any Linux developers? Most of them work for IBM or Redhat or Motorola or Home Depot, or one of thousands of other companies that use Linux as a component of their business model. Heck we submit fixes and improvements to Linux all the time and not because Linux is license free, but because it was the best fit for our project and because customers demanded it. In fact some of our projects ran on BSD variants until customers demanded Linux for greater customizability with tools they were familiar with. Since the cheapest box we sell is about $40K, adding another couple hundred for an OS license is not really a significant expense if it had any benefits. It doesn't and has significant negatives.
The French parliament has two professional services companies for support and they are professional coders. They can buy support from Cano
But this is why Microsoft is actually a good thing on the desktop market.
Operating system advancement has been slow as molasses and almost always driven by someone other than MS. To argue that MS is a good thing for the desktop market is so wrongheaded it makes me want to send Gary Coleman to your home or business with orders to bitchslap.
'm all for using different OSes, but the sheer number of applications available for a single OS (And in this case it happens to be Windows) is staggering compared to how bad it COULD have been had we had multiple OSes that were popular.
I think your cause and effect are completely backwards. Because there is one dominant OS, most software is not designed to be cross platform and MS has the power to encourage that trend. Because there is one dominant platform, there is less value in cross platform toolsets so they are not developed as much. If there were four major desktop OS's each with 25% of the market, do you truly think cross platform development would not have advanced to fill the demand? As it is, some cross platform tools like Java VM based software is very popular among developers, and that is despite the fact that MS has repeatedly broken the law in an attempt to stop it.
It's expensive to develop cross platform support, which is why most companies will aim for the market that makes them the most money.
It is moderately expensive to develop cross platform because we have a single dominant OS and the vendor that produces that OS has gone out of their way to try and make sure cross platform development that works with their OS is hard. Even with that being the case, developers target all the markets that are profitable, not just the most profitable one. How many of the successful PC games never get ported to the Mac? Maybe 10%.
I'm still looking forward to Linux and Click and Run technology -- that is the first step of many needed to start surpassing Windows on the desktop.
Linux already surpasses Windows on the desktop in many ways. The main thing holding it back is MS's monopoly, not the fact that it is not as good. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of ways Linux could improve, but the data to date does not indicate that Linux becoming a much better OS would significantly increase its market share compared to Windows. The whole reason monopolies are so dangerous to capitalism is because they allow a monopolist to gain or maintain market share, even when their offering is inferior to the competition.
Since there haven't been any real advancements in Microsoft software in several years, this is no change at all.
I'm not sure you could say that MS has been advancing faster than Linux, but there are real advancements in Vista, whether you care about them or not.
Unless you consider the savings. Why would a government consider that?
I'm sure the french have considered a great many aspects of Linux vs. Windows for their needs. Basically, it comes down to the needs they have, the cost of meeting those needs, the risk of changing or not changing, and the long term flexibility and probable costs/risks associated with it. For large companies and organizations, Linux is looking pretty good in some of those comparisons (especially the last item). You never want a single supplier for something critical to your infrastructure and the more people that move to anything not Windows, the more benefit there is to doing the same.
I'm curious whether they plan to contribute - bug reports, patches, new features/apps maybe
It is hard not to contribute while using Linux in a large organization. They've got several companies doing support and services for them and that is going to include solving bugs. If nothing else, I imagine they'll be contributing bug fixes to the french language support, which is good it being such a common language in many third world countries where Linux can be a boon.
More likely city folk who think of guns as fun instead of being a tool.
How many "city folk" do you suppose are armed on mountains so remote you need a helicopter to bring in construction materials?
Real hicks can find plenty of target practice shooting varmints and such.
I've lived in a number of places that could easily be considered hicksville. I used to carry a pistol on my belt to get from the place I was staying to the nearest road because of all the bears. There are plenty of "hicks" who just like shooting things. I knew some guys when I was a kid who used to go shoot out the tires of logging trucks, not because they disliked logging, but just because they thought shooting the tires out of trucks and other equipment was fun. They sure weren't "city folk."
Nope. The problem is the virtualization itself. Other than KVM and Xen, you can't dedicate the hardware, which means that the virtualization is unable give direct access to the video hardware
Actually VMWare supposedly has direct video card access working on one of their workstation betas and Parallels has announced that they will be including that feature in their next public beta as well. I don't expect video card acceleration to be a major stumbling block at the end of 2007.
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According to Richard Stallman, because I write "closed-source propietary" software, I am immoral and should find another line of work.
Morals are personal beliefs. He's free to express his, but why would you care?
How does that tie in to the usual "oh, but we're all nice" party line? I will not generalize to the point of claiming every single person associated with open source has the same views, just that there are enough of them to be a problem.
I've spent my entire life working at companies that create open source software. I've contributed to numerous projects. Almost all those companies also produced closed source software. There are probably close to a hundred Linux and OSS contributors in my office. All of them are paid and some work on other OSS projects as hobbies. I've not heard any of them objecting to keeping some of our software closed source when it benefits the company more.
Richard Stallman is to FLOSS as Billy Graham is to christianity. He is an extremist who advocates a hard-line approach and adherence to doctrine in the hopes of motivating change. You should not judge the FLOSS community by Mr Stallman and more than you should judge the christian community by Mr. Graham.
"Criminals" is another one of those weasel words, eh? Please show me where Microsoft was convicted in a criminal court of a crime. I'd love to see that.
Umm, the US DoJ v. Microsoft. Antitrust abuse is a criminal code of law in the US, although prosecution of it is often precipitated by civil suits. I believe that applies as well to the EU antitrust suit MS lost, although I'm much less versed in EU law.
That aside, I think the industry is doing just fine...
Are you joking? Web standards are frozen using subsets of 7-8 year old versions of the standards because while every browser development group on the planet has managed to implement almost all of much more recent versions, MS has intentionally declined to do so to prevent the Web from becoming a viable platform for rich applications that might threaten their lock-in and desktop monopoly. Most people who have ripped music CDs over the last 10 years ripped their music to a format that added DRM and is incompatible with the most popular portable player forcing them to do the whole thing over again. Most users still don't have a spellchecker that works in all their applications. Holy crap its only been decades since users started asking for that one. By default most users cannot just run random binaries from the internet without substantial risk that it will completely take over their machine and start sending spam, despite the fact that most users want to perform that exact task. Where's my ubiquitous real time translation between languages, written and spoken? Why is it that I still can't send an IM message to anyone I want on any network, but only within proprietary networks? Why is it that binaries are still not all cross-platform? Voice recognition is still at the same state it was 8 years ago.
From my perspective the industry has been dragging along and when I look at most of the reasons I keep coming back to MS. They buy up innovative companies and mothball the technology. They slow things down so they can charge feature by feature and they halt anything that looks like it has the potential to revolutionize things because revolutions are dangerous to an incumbent.
More often than not the FLOSS claim that Microsoft "hinders" them is centered around disappointment over unrealistic expectations of fame and fortune, not to mention conveniently forgetting that Microsoft is hardly the only commercial software in the world.
What do you know about the economics of monopolies? Traditionally a monopoly is considered dangerous because they can remove the incentive for innovation in markets by introducing artificial problems and barriers that mean the best product will not necessarily make money and win
If by some miracle Linux was given 50% or 80% of the desktop market tomorrow due to a massive switch campaign, within a few months we'd be seeing a serious malware problem. The security of the average Linux distro today is not up to the challenge of dealing with that much malware. It might not be quite as bad as Windows, but it would not be all that much better.
On the flip side, the security process on Linux is quite different. Linux cannot ever wield monopoly influence on the market, because of the open source licensing that shapes the development process. As a result if the above scenario were to take place, 6 months later Linux would have adapted and implemented new security technologies that gutted most of the malware problem and Linux would fair quite well in the ensuing arms race, probably moving to ubiquitous SELinux like security combined with multiple security services for the determination of trust levels and default restrictions. The real problem with Windows security is that MS does not lose enough money when its users are compromised so it has motivation. With Linux, the developers are the users and if they don't fix the problem, someone else will and nothing is stopping people from migrating to that new distro.
When on fire you're just as secure as when you're not, for definitions of "secure" that mean you are unlikely to be hit by a russian nuclear device. Seriously, that's not a very reasonable definition of "secure" and even looking at that premise there is at least one outstanding, public privilege escalation in Vista right now and there almost always is in the current version of windows, while the same is not true on Linux. MS has never taken local escalations seriously.
Windows has a big red 'X' painted on it as far as scumware authors are concerned.Windows is the low hanging fruit both because of default security and because of the monoculture install base size. Because of the increased risk on Windows and the education level of the users, its security needs to be technically superior to Linux to achieve the same risk and that is just not likely to happen anytime soon.
Actually, I am and I've advocated that MS step up to the plate and implement them properly in some version of Windows ever since NT 4.0 was released. While the NT kernel supports ACLs, they are pretty much unusable in real software on Windows unless you have the source code to Windows, which was one of my previous points. For ubiquitous application to all processes they are unusable and for individual processes a VM is actually more practical at this point. I stand by my assertion.
This is 100% not true. The party line of FLOSS fans is the promotion of free and open source software and advancement of the computer industry in general. If MS actually started developing and contributing open source software without any hidden lock in technologies, FLOSS advocates would embrace them. Personally, I don't dislike MS because they develop closed software. Lots of companies do that, like Apple and Sun and Adobe and I don't have any problem with them and I don't think most FLOSS fans do either. The problem I have with MS is they abuse their market position to hinder the adoption of FLOSS and in the process stifle innovation and slow down progress in the software industry in general. All the commercial companies out there are trying to make money, but MS is the one huge influential company that is lying and breaking the law and refusing to play by the rules everyone else does. They are criminals profiting by hurting the computer industry. That is why they are not trusted or liked by computer people in general.
People (you know, out there, not "here") by and large don't have a negative view of Microsoft, and ultimately that's what matters.A lot of people do have a negative view of MS, not because they understand anything about their business practices, but because their computer does not work and is a stupid piece of crap that keeps slowing down and messing up. I don't think there is anything wrong with trying to inform people that it doesn't need to be that way and there are better options and if the laws were just upheld the whole industry would get better. Ranting incoherently about MS obviously will not give you any credibility, but your strawman argument about what FLOSS people are saying is just that. You're the only one that wrote leetspeak crap about sucking, so stop trying to pass it off as "the community."
How do you know I'm not already one?
you have the perfect mindset..Oh, I see... you're a psychic. Since you obviously can read my mind to know my mindset, I won't bother replying to the rest of your comment. You already know what I thought anyway. And yeah, I am picturing you with one of those on your head.
Well, technically, Parallels could be running under Windows with another version of Windows in it, but yeah I'm running it on top of OS X.
Linux has never been big on the desktop. When the sales of OS X are rising so much, the big looser[sic] isn't Linux but MS.I don't know. OS X sales are certainly hurting MS somewhat, but I know a lot of Linux on the desktop people who have moved to OS X on the desktop and that has to affect the number of developers available to work on it. What small home/desktop market share Linux had may be hurt pretty badly.
That shouldn't be too hard. MS has introduced many incompatible versions of their software over the years. In fact, I inherited an entire file server full of .doc files when I moved to one job and when I tried to archive them I discovered no currently available version of word could open a significant number of them. OpenOffice, ironically, could open some of the files, for the rest we had to ebay an old copy of Word and then save them in newer formats. That incident by itself was enough for our company to standardize on non-proprietary formats and put a partial moratorium on Word as an internal tool.
The business case for open source and open standards, however, is a lot more compelling than just files becoming inaccessible. There are real costs involved with keeping an entire company standardized on some version of software and if the availability of that is determined by one company only and they routinely stop selling old versions you have to choose between committing to the unknown but substantial cost of maintaining that upgrade cycle, or moving to a format/software where you can take bids from multiple vendors and/or the upgrade path is guaranteed and free.
I actually wrote "TextEdit" which is another one bundled with OS X (I use it to edit .doc files quickly with a small footprint).
Sure, if you can spend $1000+ on software then there's no problem finding replacements, much better ones too.I'm a professional. My company buys my hardware and software, unless it is something I buy for one of my contract jobs. When I'm doing contract work I bill about $100/hour. The cost/benefit of software that lets me do half my tasks faster pays for this software really, really quickly. One of the things I'd like to stress, however, is that it is not always an either/or situation. GIMP is better for some tasks and I use it for them. GIMP can be installed under OS X too, it just isn't quite as nice. Because Linux does not offer me as much that is non-portable or that is not offered elsewhere, it end up being used less on the desktop. If Windows software was more portable or had more replacements, Linux would start to win that battle. Or, if Linux was more capable on the desktop compared to OS X, or OS X was more portable and ran well in a VM, Linux might win more. As it is, its strengths aren't as important as other platform's limitations.
...you must also consider that anyone can download OO. I'm not going to switch from HP (my personal favorite) to Dell for OO. Granted, I'm certainly more in the know about OO than Joe Sixpack but if the market really does change based on the OO offering it won't be long until people who desire OO will realize that there is no need to go to Dell for OO.
I don't think that is a significant market influence. Most users don't know they can download OpenOffice. Many fear to install any software at all without help. I know people who will buy a CD-ROM at Walmart, stick it in and click and hope it works, and that is about the extend of their knowledge. If it is not for sale at Walmart, it might as well not exist, even if it is a free download for anyone who knows about it.
Even if they decide to offer support for OO through their own customer service they're going to need to jack the prices a bit for the new overhead costs.
Actually the cost spread out across all the machines they sell amounts to basically nothing. A few engineers and a process guy each at 100K a year, doubled for overhead and you're talking a million bucks, divided by the 2 million machines they ship and you're looking at $.50 a box. That's what .001% of their advertising budget to be able to tell everyone their computers come with a free office suite? It's hard to find so much potential bang for so little.
Offering OO at a small fee may help offset this but they're going to lose their marketing edge at the same time by charging for the tech support. Offering OO is a tough situation and one that I don't think is going to help Dell in the long run.
I don't think adding a few bucks for support just for that machine, or rolling it into the overall cost would hurt them. As for the long term, open source development is certainly a more efficient (cost) model of development and unless governments interfere to stop free trade, in the long run it will win and Dell will have to offer it, or something like it. Also, Dell has their neck in a noose with MS and they know it. They certainly do not want a single OS to dominate as then they can't get competing bids and are beholden to a single supplier. Anything that loosens MS's grip, is a long term win for Dell.
While they may be able to break even you're talking about putting a proven model against a risky new model. Even if you could break even on paper you'd still be making a hard sell of this to the financial portion of the company. Not saying that it can't be done but I'd place my money on the existing model winning. "Better the devil you know" kind of thing.
The risk is pretty minimal because they don't have to stop selling MSOffice, so the change is gradual and reversible. Reward is a function of risk. If they do it first, they get first mover advantage and might get 6 months of stealing customers form others before they are copied effectively. If they wait and someone else does it, they might lose those customers. The question is, what does Dell need right now? Do they need more market share or do they need to keep their revenue stream as predictable as possible? My view says the former. They've just been booted out of first place for market share and lost a lot of face and bargaining power they need to get the best prices from component suppliers. They're no longer the top dog. Even if they lose some money going this way, they gain more market share which trickles down to the pricing they can get on all their components and translates to how big of margin they get on each machine.
What support margins are you refering to and how is that going to offset lost profits from MSO? I'm sorry but this is a pretty flimsy statement and it's hard to tell exactly where you are going with it.
I was speaking in the hypothetical if they charged for OpenOffice, that they could charge more than it takes to cover suppor
My story is sort of the opposite of yours. I'm a long time user of many OS's, but lately I find myself using Linux less and Windows more. The reasons for this are a bit complicated. The recent trend towards hardware assisted virtualization has finally allowed me to consolidate all my workstations into a single laptop. That is very cool and it means I can directly run Linux at the coffee shop, whereas it used to be available only at my desk at work (not counting server use). You'd think that would make me use it more, but in reality it means I use it less. You see, I basically run Linux on the desktop for a handful of applications that operate best there (GIMP, InkScape, OO, XPDF, etc.) The drawback to this system is I can only run 2 OS's at a time. The VMs are running on top of OS X, which is my workstation OS of choice and runs 90% of my apps. I find myself more and more running Windows in the VM for an irreplaceable application, which means I have to shut it down to run Linux. That's not a big deal, but for most of what I do, there are acceptable replacements for the Linux software (Photoshop, Illustrator, TextEdit, Preview, etc.) More and more often I find myself just editing that vector graphic element in Illustrator so I don't have to shut down Windows. Linux may be winning corporate desktops from Windows, but I fear they are also losing a lot of home and power user desktops to OS X. I'll be curious to see if corporate Linux adoption really does take off and if that has the expected impact on home use. If wider adoption means those irreplaceable Windows applications become replaceable, the story will change in a hurry.
I disagree. For a normal person/environment, this is not the case. Out of the box, the average Linux distro is more secure than Windows Vista. If you put work into Vista you can make it about as secure from a technology perspective as the average Linux install, but you can't change the malware ecosystem which targets Windows more and presents it with more threats, making the overall risk on Windows greater. Also, for more secure, managed environments you can utilize SELinux or something that provides more fine grained control than Vista can offer in a usable environment unless you have access to the Windows source code, which normal people don't.
So if you're aiming for a level of security that is sort of middle of the road, then you can (with extra work) get Windows to the same state as the average Linux install, but you'll still have a higher risk. Further, if you're aiming for something above and beyond that, Windows just can't achieve some of the security layers that Linux can, so it will always be a bit behind.
This really seems like a pretty minor issue to me. Browsers would just need to adopt a policy of flagging URIs with mixed language character sets, highlighting that character in red or something. More dangerous is the new domain land grab as companies grab legitimate domains in other languages that natives feel the real company simply must own, but which the parent company probably does not. This can be addresses by a certificate scheme that ties identity verification to the site, however, and such a scheme really needs to be implemented on a wide scale to deal with current security problems anyway.
You make the profit angle seem one sided. It is not. Dell makes money by selling computers and by selling copies of MSOffice. If they include OpenOffice for free or for a small support fee that just covers those support costs they might sell fewer copies of MSOffice, but they also might sell more computers because their computers are now better than the competition who does not include a free Office suite. It is called a "value added" gambit. Now it may be that Dell has looked hard at the numbers and feels that right now they can make more money not offering OpenOffice, but then Dell is also slipping in market share and no longer holds the top spot. If a competitor decides to undercut them by installing OpenOffice, it makes them vulnerable.
Also consider tech support. I would think that Dell is going to get more support from MS than the OO people when it comes down to wide spread issues involving their product.Funny. Actually, Dell could easily make OpenOffice their own and do support in house. They have a few coders and the source is right there for them to submit changes to. OpenOffice gives them more options for getting support, not fewer. They can go with in house, OpenOffice.org, a third party, or Sun and take bids from all concerned. With MS they can go with MS and hope for the best.
Tech support is doubtlessly a large chunk of Dell's overhead. The better support from their software vendors the less that overhead will be.I'm unconvinced that a significant portion of their support cost are escalations to software vendors. I suspect almost all of it is faulty hardware, or user failure to understand what is going on at a basic level. Why would you assume otherwise?
That's a big plus and anyone who's taken business-101 type classes can tell you this.Hopefully the guys running Dell have a bit better education than that. There is a real business case for OpenOffice and money that can be made from support margins and that business case is more and more reasonable the tighter margins on PCs become in comparison to MS Office.
Not to mention that free software still has a stigma about it. This isn't likely to go away anytime soon.You mean like the stigma attached to the iTunes jukebox software? Or maybe you were thinking of the stigma attached to the Adobe PDF reader or the Flash player? Or maybe you were referring to he stigma surrounding Sun's Java Runtime? All of that is free software that is well branded and most people don't even think about it. OpenOffice has reasonable branding now and if Dell included it as an option either for free of for a small fee, I doubt anyone would attach any stigma to it. Or, Dell is free to make a fork and rebrand with either the Dell brand or some other brand if they're concerned about dilution.
The truth of the matter is that the hardware market is commoditized and Dell is slipping from their place as the biggest player who can get the best bulk pricing. Software is an easy differentiator in the market and is relatively cheap for the potential benefit. Dell may need to get a bit leaner in the add-on sales to regain market share. Of course there is one complication that no one has addressed and that is doing so hurts MS's biggest cash cow. MS is an abusive monopoly and has the power to destroy any Windows reseller, via their differential pricing. If I was running Dell, that is what might stop me from looking hard at OpenOffice. Now I don't know what is going on at Dell. Maybe they looked at the business case and decided MS Office reseller business was too good and they have a better strategy for winning the commodity market share back. Or, maybe internal politics make the software add-on segment of the company too powerful to buck, even when the company overall would do better otherwise. Or, maybe they just assume MS would punish them, or MS has hinted or outright told them not to do it "or else." We're all just guessing as to which of the above is true.
There is a difference between taking into account that a person is using some brand of product and taking into account when someone who is supposedly a professional in a field is using a very poor quality product in a way that is visible to others. It does speak to their probable level of competence. When I see a resume come across my desk and the engineer in question has an AOL e-mail address, that raises a concern. Hotmail may not be quite the same, but it is still a concern. As for public versus private e-mail addresses, most good e-mail services offer throw away e-mail aliases that are a lot nicer for such a purpose as you can use different ones for different interactions, giving you more insight into the sources of spam and causing less upset to legitimate if unimportant messages when you kill one.
A agree with you as far as you take it, but I don't think you're taking your argument far enough. The open source business model is one in which you use open source and contribute to open source in order to facilitate your main value proposition, but where it is not your main value proposition. Google sells organization and a service that allows people to find what they want and businesses to deliver ads to who they want. They utilize a lot of open source software to do that, but not for their core value proposition. Other companies are not information purveyors at all, but use open source in the same way. Some hardware manufacturer that makes routers probably builds on NetBSD for the base and uses a pile of free software tools to make their hardware more useful. Their business is selling hardware, which is of course not "open source" if such a term applies. Whether you sell an information service, hardware, travel arrangements, or pencils you can use open source to facilitate your business at a lower cost and with more flexibility than closed source software.
This is great for everyone who does something other than create commercial, closed software for sale as their primary business. Open source development is a more efficient way to do that and one that brings added value to end users. You can survive in that market for a limited time only until big business fully understands what is happening and then you'd better be looking for a new business model.
There is room in this equation for users who pay for the development, for developers who do the work that is needed and may also be users, and for facilitators who are go-betweens, but those facilitators are used to taking a huge piece of the pie which will be a lot smaller in the future.
Apps available in Linux are capable of all the work that needs to be done.
Sorry, this is a poor argument. First, it doesn't matter if there is an application that can do every task, that still is not good enough. More applications means more functions and more workflows for doing those functions. That means I have a better chance of finding an application that does just what I want just how I want to do it. In any case, there certainly are not good replacements on Linux for many proprietary software packages written for Windows. I run Linux side by side with Windows and OS X every day, but a lot of the applications I use because they are best of breed for some task do not run, or only run in a semi-stable re-implementation of the Windows API on Linux. This is a real issue for a lot of us who actually have to work in the real world and exchange data with others.
Linux supports more devices than any other operating system ever. Multiple vendors offer and support laptops at reasonable prices.
Basically every manufacturer of laptops in the world supports Windows on their hardware including drivers. I can pick any one. Maybe half of them have proper Linux drivers. That means I have half as many choices and thus the perfect laptop from a cost/feature/hardware perspective may not work if I'm running Linux, and so I have to buy a more expensive one with features I don't need in order to run Linux. This is a real disadvantage.
Linux wins on hardware support for old systems and systems with lesser resources, but not in the above.
Permissions for the Windows package manager allow any installer to install absolutely anything, including a root kit. This is not desirable behavior in a package manager.
Actually this is true for some Linux distros as well, but that is not the main issue. Package management on Linux, in general, is much better than Windows or OS X, but Linux package management is behind in providing commercial developers with the functions and incentive needed to get them to use the Linux package managers instead of bypassing them to the detriment of users. This is a small win for Windows in a category where they are mostly behind, but it is a win.
Having an ecosystem that supports competing malware/antimalware solutions is not an advantage, not on my planet.
No, having an ecosystem that lends itself to malware is a big loss I have chalked up to Windows, but having the ability to easily find and remove malware (which is admittedly rare on Linux) is a small win for Windows, again in a category where they are mostly losing.
Better in some ways, worse in others, advantage Windows? Huh? Did I read that right?
This is a list of where each OS is ahead of others. The fact that they are ahead in some remote desktop type functions is a win for Windows. This same item is also listed for Linux to account for the items where it does better. By keeping the list positive and giving each OS credit for each way they are ahead we avoid pointless comparisons of which feature set is "better overall" which is of course pointless since it all depends on a given user's use case. Yes, this is a win for Windows and Linux.
Second time for this old troll.
Anyone who denies that third party devices and peripherals are more likely to be supported on Windows, is living in a fantasy world. Why is it that zealots feel so emotionally entangled with their OS that they can't admit to areas where it is deficient. In this case it has little or nothing to do with the OS itself, simply with the current market and how that influences the behavior of hardware manufacturers. That makes it no less true and someone looking for the best OS for some purpose should be accurately informed about these things. Does it somehow make you less of a man if a random Web-cam from Walmart is less likely to work on Linux than Windows?
Y
...it effectively exists on the whim of one rich guy who could lose interest and kill it whenever he wanted.Remember we're comparing to Windows. So long as the French parliament is willing to pay for support, I doubt they'll have trouble finding a company to provide it (they have 2 now unrelated to Canonical). Also, since Ubuntu is Linux, migrating to another Linux distro can be invisible to users and result in very little change other than the build process. This is less of a risk than Windows moving in a direction incompatible with the needs of the parliament.
apparently the creaks are already showing in dapper (one person above mentioned downloading an update and his gui suddenly breaking with no availible soloution) and its less than a third of the way through its supposed support cycle.Umm, Dapper isn't even the stable version, is it? In any case, we're looking at this for a centrally managed solution, not a home user. No one rolls out random updates with no testing when they are supporting hundreds of machines. This simply is not a real issue for such a deployment.
Support for the less major software in universe is even worse (much of the stuff in there has simply been imported straight from debian with no testing if it actually works in the ubuntu environment).Again, this is still better than Windows where installing random software in Vista may or may not work and may or may not hose your system or infect it with something. In a centrally managed situation, supported by both internal IT and a third party support company, if software is needed for these machines, it probably needs to be approved, then a test box is setup to see if it works, then it either goes back to the support company who fixes it or gets rolled out to some or all users. This is almost the same with Windows in a centrally managed environment, except if there is a broken interaction between the OS and the application, the support team has the ability to fix it in the OS, which is not the case with Windows.
...until then ubuntu must be regarded as a young and vulnerable distro.All distros are young at some point, but it is not the age that is important but the level of commitment and adoption. There are plenty of old Linux distros that used to be popular but no longer are and which now suck to support because no one tests against them when developing software. Sometimes it pays to be part of the main mass, and Ubuntu is that right now. You speak as though all the support options rested on the shoulders of Canonical, but that is simply not true. For any distro, most of the work comes from outside companies. The two hired by the French parliament will likely be contributing a significant amount on their behalf and making support better for everyone. The more companies do this, the fewer problems everyone has. Such a mass is important to how well supported a Linux distro is and is a lot more important, IMHO, than how old it is.
Well, I never actually claimed that Windows was better at anything than Linux, only that the Versions of Windows available today are better than the version available two years ago. Vista adds indexed searching, more granular control of sound, the UI utilizes the GPU to offload some work, etc. As for areas where Windows is ahead of Linux and OS X, I maintain a running list of the advantages of each platform over the others, which I've posted on Slashdot several times and added to and modified as a result. Right now the Windows platform wins are:
Note, I don't go into the reasons for said advantages, which is another discussion. Please feel free to comment and mention any other areas where Windows wins or loses, but only if you actually use both platforms enough to have an educated viewpoint. I'm dog tired of people bringing up some "advantage" of their favorite OS when they don't even know the state of that same technology on other platforms. Also note "Linux" is not a single platform, so different distros have different features and it is impossible to evaluate them all. I look at a few common distributions and the default setting enabled as they affect home users (I know this article was about centrally managed use which is somewhat different).
Once you've had a chance to actually deal with real-world users in the government enterprise environment, you know exactly what I mean. Linux is a great solution if every user has a basic grip on how to use a computer and are willing to explore and figure out how to do things. But in the real world, most aren't.
Actually, I think Linux is a lot better for this than Windows is. I've seen incompetent management types who can only access files from the "most recent" list in Word and have no idea where their files are stored or even what the whole file/folder metaphor is about. The difference is, with Linux it is fairly easy to customize the interface such that the tasks a user needs to accomplish are mapped directly to big buttons that are omnipresent and it is possible to make the one hundred random controls that those user don't ever want to touch, invisible by default. Remember we're talking about deploying in a centrally managed environment. Rolling out software and patches and even doing remote support tasks is a lot easier using Linux than Windows.
I guarantee that the oldest/most senior users in the french government are going to call IT every time they want to do something they weren't shown how to do, or simply forgot or became too tech-timid, when they were set up with Ubuntu.
Sure they will, and they'd do the same thing if they were upgraded to a newer version of Windows. The difference is the ease of accommodating them.
Despite the fact that "OMG Windoze wantz to rulez world so it suckz" seems to be the normal opinion here...
This is a strawman argument. No one but you said Windows sucks.
Windows XP is a solid OS with a familiar feel...
A "familiar feel" is an argument against all change. Change can be difficult and has real costs, but sometimes those costs are outweighed by other factors.
...most importantly, real support from a massive dev team.
Umm, Ubuntu probably has more professional, paid developers working on it than Windows does. Trying to get a flaw in Windows fixed is an exercise in frustration. Unless you are huge, good luck. You can wait till service pack 3 or the next release of Windows in another 5 years. Trying to get the same flaw fixed in Ubuntu is a matter of calling one of the two support companies that are part of this contract, or Canonical, or another Linux distro, or getting an internal employee to fix it, or hiring an independent contractor because all of those are options and have access to the source. Better yet, you can take competitive bids from all of them to see who will work most cheaply, and the same applies for new features of customizations.
Getting real support for Windows is a matter of hiring a company who will solve what they can without the source and pester MS on your behalf and hope for the best. That is the inferior support option.
As oppossed to a group of nerds who just don't want to pay for software so they build a modified version of Unix for themselves.
Are you smoking crack? Do you even know any Linux developers? Most of them work for IBM or Redhat or Motorola or Home Depot, or one of thousands of other companies that use Linux as a component of their business model. Heck we submit fixes and improvements to Linux all the time and not because Linux is license free, but because it was the best fit for our project and because customers demanded it. In fact some of our projects ran on BSD variants until customers demanded Linux for greater customizability with tools they were familiar with. Since the cheapest box we sell is about $40K, adding another couple hundred for an OS license is not really a significant expense if it had any benefits. It doesn't and has significant negatives.
The French parliament has two professional services companies for support and they are professional coders. They can buy support from Cano
Operating system advancement has been slow as molasses and almost always driven by someone other than MS. To argue that MS is a good thing for the desktop market is so wrongheaded it makes me want to send Gary Coleman to your home or business with orders to bitchslap.
'm all for using different OSes, but the sheer number of applications available for a single OS (And in this case it happens to be Windows) is staggering compared to how bad it COULD have been had we had multiple OSes that were popular.I think your cause and effect are completely backwards. Because there is one dominant OS, most software is not designed to be cross platform and MS has the power to encourage that trend. Because there is one dominant platform, there is less value in cross platform toolsets so they are not developed as much. If there were four major desktop OS's each with 25% of the market, do you truly think cross platform development would not have advanced to fill the demand? As it is, some cross platform tools like Java VM based software is very popular among developers, and that is despite the fact that MS has repeatedly broken the law in an attempt to stop it.
It's expensive to develop cross platform support, which is why most companies will aim for the market that makes them the most money.It is moderately expensive to develop cross platform because we have a single dominant OS and the vendor that produces that OS has gone out of their way to try and make sure cross platform development that works with their OS is hard. Even with that being the case, developers target all the markets that are profitable, not just the most profitable one. How many of the successful PC games never get ported to the Mac? Maybe 10%.
I'm still looking forward to Linux and Click and Run technology -- that is the first step of many needed to start surpassing Windows on the desktop.Linux already surpasses Windows on the desktop in many ways. The main thing holding it back is MS's monopoly, not the fact that it is not as good. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of ways Linux could improve, but the data to date does not indicate that Linux becoming a much better OS would significantly increase its market share compared to Windows. The whole reason monopolies are so dangerous to capitalism is because they allow a monopolist to gain or maintain market share, even when their offering is inferior to the competition.
I'm not sure you could say that MS has been advancing faster than Linux, but there are real advancements in Vista, whether you care about them or not.
Unless you consider the savings. Why would a government consider that?I'm sure the french have considered a great many aspects of Linux vs. Windows for their needs. Basically, it comes down to the needs they have, the cost of meeting those needs, the risk of changing or not changing, and the long term flexibility and probable costs/risks associated with it. For large companies and organizations, Linux is looking pretty good in some of those comparisons (especially the last item). You never want a single supplier for something critical to your infrastructure and the more people that move to anything not Windows, the more benefit there is to doing the same.
It is hard not to contribute while using Linux in a large organization. They've got several companies doing support and services for them and that is going to include solving bugs. If nothing else, I imagine they'll be contributing bug fixes to the french language support, which is good it being such a common language in many third world countries where Linux can be a boon.
How many "city folk" do you suppose are armed on mountains so remote you need a helicopter to bring in construction materials?
Real hicks can find plenty of target practice shooting varmints and such.I've lived in a number of places that could easily be considered hicksville. I used to carry a pistol on my belt to get from the place I was staying to the nearest road because of all the bears. There are plenty of "hicks" who just like shooting things. I knew some guys when I was a kid who used to go shoot out the tires of logging trucks, not because they disliked logging, but just because they thought shooting the tires out of trucks and other equipment was fun. They sure weren't "city folk."
Actually VMWare supposedly has direct video card access working on one of their workstation betas and Parallels has announced that they will be including that feature in their next public beta as well. I don't expect video card acceleration to be a major stumbling block at the end of 2007.