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Microsoft Proclaims Death of Free Software Model
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Nov 12, 2003 03:28 PM
from the faint-praise-and-damnation dept.
from the faint-praise-and-damnation dept.
geoff313 writes "
As previously mentioned here,
Microsoft's new wave of FUD has begun to arrive. This time it is
courtesy of Bradley Tipp, Microsoft's UK national systems engineer, who
spoke at the Microsoft IT Forum in Copenhagen. In this article
from ZDNet UK, he is quoted as saying that 'Linux is great' and 'there
are a lot of things we should learn from open source' but then is quick
to point out that 'We haven't talked to a single user who has said
they're using [open source] because it's better.' Another Microsoft employee was quoted as
saying 'At least if Linux takes off, their viruses will propagate and
we won't be seen as the bad guys any more.' I for one am happy to see that they are taking their new interest in security seriously, and I'm
sure you all are too. Most interesting is the assertion that the decision by Red
Hat to end support for its free distribution and Novell's
aquisition of SUSE marks not only the death of free software,
but actually is a validation of Microsoft's business model. Does anyone
besides Microsoft see these events as the end of Free software?" I use Free software because it's better; they just didn't ask.
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in other news.. (Score:5, Funny)
Huh??? (Score:5, Funny)
I use it because M$ software is worster
Re:Huh??? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
I use it because it is the only sane alternative (Score:4, Informative)
Linux, Apache and Postgres is stable and secure thank you very much.
Parent
Re:Better at what? (Score:5, Insightful)
If that's correct then the basic premise of Microsoft is wrong... The point being that open source projects can - and often do - outperform their closed competitors in most every way. You're right that out-of-the-box, they are not as user friendly - yet. But you can have Apple or Suse package them nicely.
Mind you, the same goes for furniture: you can buy the wood yourself, put it together and make furniture. But it won't be as user friendly as a furniture building packet that you can buy at Ikea's. People who don't want to bother with all this can just buy the same Ikea furniture already put together. And you'll have people who just want nice furniture, no matter what the cost or the supplier and they'll go to the nearest retail shop. That's what happens to commodities: easy to get, lots of choice.
Here you can see a job for open source: people want choice. But of course Microsoft doesn't want software to become a commodity, it'll destroy their market monopoly.
Parent
Areopagetica (Score:5, Insightful)
John Milton [rowan.edu] wrote an essay [bartleby.com] about this freedom (in a broader sense) called Areopagetica. It's one of those things journalism majors usually have to wade through their senior year in mass communication history.
In his time, one in Britain could not print without prior authorization from the crown. The King's official reason for this prohibition was to "protect libel from being spread." Milton argued that it took the public grappling of truth against falsehood to determine what really was true. Without this public airing, you simply could not know whether the facts you had were true or not.
The closed source vs. open source issue, especially from the perspective of code security and reliability, is inherently linked to this issue argued nearly 400 years ago by Milton. There simply is no way Microsoft can expose its proprietary code to the inspections open source benefits from. The result is horribly broken, insecure and crash-prone Microsoft code vs. a base of increasingly stable open source.
And the future gets worse for Microsoft. Complexity is the instigator of this dynamic; as software complexity grows, the ability of closed source to hang on evaporates.
*scoove*
Parent
Re:Huh??? Huh??? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. it's safer.
2. it's faster.
3. it's more customizable.
4. it's so customizable that, if looks are the only thing that matters and if you really love the way Luna looks, you can make your desktop the same as Luna (not that I would want to)
5. I have the choice. this means that, if NetBSD continues improving its scalability, as they did last two weeks, maybe it will be a better KDE desktop than Linux, and I will migrate with much less pain, and generally using the same applications that I used under Linux. Means that, if I want to run a web server or a router in the old 386 I have under my bed, I can do so, because I can customize it easily.
I don't even know why I am feeding an obvious troll, but... so be it.
Parent
Isn't Rock-n-Roll dead as well? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about DOS? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah...right...
Parent
Elvis, Jim, Jimi and Janice would like to ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Isn't Rock-n-Roll dead as well? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe that's why they call it the Free software movement.
The corporate versions of Linux are far from free.
Really? Then why can I download Red Hat AS, ES, or WS and install them on any of the computers I own for free. The support you have to pay for if you want it, the software however remains free, and freely distributable.
Re:Isn't Rock-n-Roll dead as well? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, no, you can't download binaries for AS, ES or WS. (Sources, yes. Binaries, no -- so the process is more like "download onto a separate computer, recompile and install" -- a rather different thing from "download and install").
Re:Isn't Rock-n-Roll dead as well? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been here for five years, though mostly lurking. I've seen the yro stories get 800 comments and the "Announcing the AMD N+1 chip!" get, deservedly, 53. Semi-political stuff is what slashdot has always been popular for, and Microsoft has always been bashed. Now people are feeling that Linux is more ready for the desktop, and that future Microsoft OSes will be so horribly DRM'd that we, if not joe six-pack, will be migrating, so it's no wonder the conflict heats up more than it did in the past.
Spare me your va-linux conspiracy theories. Slashdot runs stories that get the most comments and get the most page views. It is driven by what we want.
Parent
MS is forgetting a major *distribution* model... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:MS is forgetting a major *distribution* model.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be gratis (i.e. Free Beer), but it won't be libre (i.e. Free Speech) until they let users modify and share the source.
Parent
I've hear this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Imminent death of OSS predicted!!!!!!!11!!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Imminent death of OSS predicted!!!!!!!11!!!! (Score:3, Funny)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Pepsi commented that it hasn't spoken to a single customer who said they drank Coca Cola because it tasted better. A senator from Maine said he hadn't spoken to a single constituent who lived in Hawaii because it was warmer. A doctor said she hadn't spoken to a single patient who had never been sick.
Or...could it be that people who use free software because it is better are not Microsoft users? Nah.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
So long as a single OSS Coder lives... (Score:5, Insightful)
We need not, nor care not, about the opinions of the world regarding our existance, relevance, or lack thereof of both.
Re:So long as a single OSS Coder lives... (Score:5, Funny)
The OSS movement is harder to kill than cockroaches.
Parent
Correct, that is our strength... (Score:4, Insightful)
That will never change.
They cannot break our spirit, for we do not care if they like us. They cannot run us out of business, for it is our passion not our livelihood. They cannot deceive us, because it is in the open. They cannot lie about us, for we hide nothing. They cannot fight us, for we are legion.
Someday, the OSS movement will be looked upon as an emergent enlightenment comparable to the expression of the scientific principal and the enlightenment that occured as the result of the unencumbered distribution of scientific knowledge.
Companies like Microsoft will be remembered as malicious entities, profiteering on ignorance, with a great deal to loose from any "enlightenment".
Parent
Re:So long as a single OSS Coder lives... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Sharpening my Skates (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone wanna go ice skating? Hell just froze over.
Oh wait a minute, they didn't mean it. They were hoping I'd hop onto Haydes and be burned to death. Oooo! You are a sly one, Mr. Gates!
different goals (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:different goals (Score:3, Insightful)
The users ARE QA teams for both open source projects AND commercial products. Commercial software is released with unpreviously recognized bugs because in-house QA is a synthetic process that will never be able t
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Absolutely not.
I use free software because it is often developed and a more agressive pace, and the features I want are more likely to be implemented. Free software also cuts out the middleman a lot of the time as far as getting help with some software. Numerous times I have had a problems compiling x program and emailed the developer and gotten the help I needed to get it working, not to mention clued the developer into the fact that there is an issue getting their software to work on insert my platform here.
Compare, for example, the MSN Messenger, and Gaim. Gaim has more features, has an extensible architecture so that even non-geniuses can write plugins, and no advertisements.
Free software is better because it does what paid developers can't.
What the F@#$ are they talking about ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Pure high quality top management PR bull$hit. I don't see free software dying anytime soon, as long as debain, gentoo, slackware, LFS are around.
And if Microsoft's business model is indeed true and going by their word, that s/w amounts to only a fraction of total cost, then whether linux is free or not, really doesn't matter does it ?
So going by microsoft's argument, it really doesn't matter costwise (only software) whether you are using linux or Windows. But by using linux you get a much stable, scalable, SECURE, reliable , easily configurable, accountable s/w, instead of propritory, unsecure, un-scalable, s/w.
RedHat's business model (Score:3, Insightful)
* is dying trolls (Score:3, Funny)
Now we know who the AC posting all those "* is dying" trolls is: Bill Gates.
apache (Score:3, Insightful)
heh, no.
The birth of bartered software (Score:4, Funny)
I use ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux
cygwin
OpenOffice
I also think that Free software is better for humanity as a whole, but I'm not dogmatic about it.
I still use Windows on the desktop, because I didn't yet have time to move everything over to Linux (f*ck NTFS, otherwise I wouldn't have to), and because Soulseek works much better under Windows.
Free software? Always has been, always will (Score:3, Insightful)
Free software has been common and useful during the Microsoft era (from DOS to Windows), and freeware for Windows PC's and other platforms abounds on Sourceforge and www.download.com (once you look past the crippleware falsely labelled as "Free").
There is no reason to believe that this will change, and we have Microsoft partially to thank for this: they promote Visual Basic, which is used to write a lot of programs which are given away to run on the Windows platform.
Free software is free (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not a corporation, and I can't afford thousands of dollars in license fees to run a web server + mail server + database server for my personal use at home.
"better" isn't even the criterion (Score:3, Insightful)
It's now twenty years later... how many people do you know that use a Beta deck?
the rest of the dialog we didn't get to see... (Score:5, Funny)
millions of people: "Ah, but there are millions of us here, and we all use open source solutions because they're better, cheaper, faster, more secure, and easier to maintain."
Microsoft: "What's that? You say that open source is better?"
millions of people: "Yes"
Microsoft: "Right! Then we're not going to talk to you. Now, as we were saying, we haven't talked to a single user..."
or maybe it was the other way around, and the pro-open source people didn't want to talk to Microsoft, because you know, why bother. And then Microsoft says "we haven't talked to a single user..."
Problems at my office... (Score:3, Interesting)
In my office, for example, the slickest and most popular install was a simple Red Hat base, compiled software to fit the needs of that workstation or server, and a Ximian install on top, with Red Carpet managing packages and keeping the RH stuff up-to-date. The key to this system, all around, was simplicity. When RedHat decided to focus only Enterprise (which we did not need) and trust everything else on an unproven community, they lost me and my company as a customer. They've probably also lost a ton of support among those who've provided mirrors for their repackaging of our software, because this is nothing but a slap in their face and the disavowal of a long-term relationship with many schools and businesses.
However, it looks like RHAT's up around 4%.
Free software is not dead, but it could really use more polish and coordination among groups like Debian and less public focus on these repackaging companies...
Microsoft UK have not talked to us! (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft tried to sell us on their mail systems - cost would have been no object as far as software was concerned since they would bury us in software to do this one fairly simple (but large scale function) because they were desparate to get a big ISP on board their bandwagon.
We looked at the stuff, but walked away. Actually we ran away screaming. We just didn't have enough data centre space to handle the number of boxes it would take to run their unproven messaging system for our userbase of 3 million (and expecting growth) users.
Instead we implemented an open-source based mail system - exim as the MTA, a set of pop servers, an open source radius system for authentication - all the normal stuff. Becuase it was better. Because it worked. Because we could fix it when it broke. Because we knew how it scaled, how to make it scale better. Because it didn't have the possibility of us getting a buttload of licensing additional costs at a later date. Because it was better in every way than the MS option other than having a point-and-drool interface that a monkey could use to completely shaft a million users at a time.
Replace XP? Not... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Bull. (Score:5, Interesting)
More on Topic: What MS is most worried about is servers. They aren't gaining much ground in that area and Linux is poised to become the dominent player in that area. So MS does what they do best, the spread FUD, in hopes that some PHBs will get scared and stop considering Linux for deployment.
MS also knows that Corporate embracement of Linux is good for it (and thus bad for them). RedHat is focusing large companies who want top-level support. There isn't anything at all wrong with that as so go the bigger companies the smaller ones follow, until eventually you start seeing it on people's desktops.
FUD isn't making Linux or free software go away anytime soon.
Parent
Re:Bull. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
Folks who claim Linux isn't ready for the desktop are poorly informed. I've been using Linux as my main OS for several years now, and for my work (writing) it is much better than Windows.
Why? Well, here's a little personal history. I started writing oh so many years ago on an Atari ST. When the time finally came to admit that Atari was never going to overtake the PC clone, I bought a Pentium 60 and Wordperfect. I kept Wordperfect through a succession of clones, since it was perfectly adequate for writing professionally.
As an sf writer and general techfreak, I was almost immediately intrigued with Linux and the open source model. Also, when the web first appeared, you had to know a little Unix to put up a site (my first site was hosted by UNC, like a lot of web pioneers.) So I experimented with a Slackware installation, but at that time, Linux really wasn't ready for the desktop.
Time passed, Windows progressed, I started building my own boxes and had to actually start paying actual money to put Windows on them. I kept reusing Wordperfect in each new box, even though I worried that someday the big box of floppies might not work. Eventually I tried Redhat 6.1 and discovered that Linux was now ready for the desktop, or at least the desktop of a writer who wasn't much interested in games. I found a copy of Wordperfect for Linux and thought I was set for life. But it got even better when I started using OpenOffice, and knew that my files would be eternally transportable to new machines.
Couple that eternal transportability with the worry-free nature of Linux online (much less danger of virii, worms, etc.) and with the flexibility of Linux (I can run an Atari emulator and access files from 15 years ago written on the ST) and with the availability of all kinds of software to play with that would cost me an arm and a leg in a Windows environment. It's more fun for me to use Linux on my desktop and more practical.
Parent
Re:Microsoft are bad guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you did a search for it, you'd find that there are. However they are mostly "theoretical" and nobody has yet seriously sat down to design a fast-spreading, damaging Linux virus. (As an aside: there are experimental viruses that are able to infect cross-platform -- i.e., they run on both Windows and Linux. Pretty crazy, huh?)
Microsoft's point is fundamentally correct however: there are no serious Linux viruses not because they are impossible on Linux, but because Linux just isn't popular enough yet to make it worth the virus writer's time. It makes much more sense to exploit that vast majority of Windows machines. (If you look at Google's Zeitgeist page, you'll see that only 1% of Google queries come from Linux boxes. I consider that a fairly good indicator of the popularity of Linux.)
None of what I just said should be construed to mean that Microsoft isn't responsible for the security of their operating system. There is a major difference between Windows and Linux viruses: on Windows it is very easy to obtain administrator priviledges, which makes Windows viruses much more dangerous. However, it is dishonest for people to claim that Linux is impervious to viruses. It's not true, and to boastfully make that claim is to court disaster.
Parent
Re:Microsoft are bad guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
1% of Google queries come from Linux boxes. I consider that a fairly good indicator of the popularity of Linux.
Don't make the same kind of mistake as MS.
That is an indicator of the popularity of browsers hitting Google that provide a UserAgent string that identifies the system as Linux.
On topic, though, I think there have been (cheese, lion) worms that have exploited applications typically run on Linux.
Public marketing security comparions are always suspicious, though: Linux the OS has been much less vulnerable than applications overlying, such as PHP on top of Apache, or sendmail, etc.
Likewise, Windows security looks worse because of overlying misconfigured misdesigned applications such as IIS, Outlook. Since Win2K, the OS per se has been much less vulnerable than in the Win 9x days.
Parent
Re:Microsoft are bad guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of cours
Re:Microsoft are bad guys? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to re-phrase that a little better:
"there are no serious attempts at Linux viruses not because they are impossible on Linux, but because Linux just isn't popular enough yet to make it worth the virus writer's time."
If Linux magically took over 90% of the desktop tomorrow, sure, there would be an assload of activity going towards writing viruses for it.
The damage that would come out of this is less certain.
In order to create such wonderful things as Blaster or Slammer in this imaginary Linux world, we'd have to see every major distro start shipping with an SSH daemon or Apache running by default. And running as root, or a lot more local root exploits.
It's certainly possible, just a lot less likely.
Parent
No; this is just more FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
The only real opportunity would be through some single flawed release of one certain distribution, but even this is far-fetched and questionable. Most distributions are now using sensible alternatives to traditionally flawed services (sendmail being replaced by postfix, exim or qmail for example, even diversity there) and a few are shipping with basic firewall functionality by default. Also bear in mind that servers (where Linux really figures in terms of installation counts) don't search Google....
Parent
Re:No; this is just more FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact is, it's very possible for local exploit conditions to exist in the kernel itself. That means it doesn't matter what software you might or might not have installed -- you are always potentially vulnerable. All it takes is a single point of weakness to get local access, and then the story's over.
It is a critical misjudgment to assume that Linux itself is somehow invincible.
Parent
Re:What he meant to say (Score:3, Funny)