How Microsoft Could Embrace Linux 424
"He goes on to cite the governments of Paris, Munich, Brazil, Peru, China, Korea, and Japan which are all embracing open source software to varying degrees. Meanwhile, when they choose Microsoft software, fast-growing emerging markets like China and India opt for pirated copies. Salkever explains that the concerns for customers like these are the 'relatively high price of Microsoft software' and the 'concerns about buying proprietary software to run critical government operations.' Finally he points to recent moves by Sun and IBM to leave the commoditized software and hardware business behind, writing 'When the world's largest and most respected IT consultancy draws a clear bead on your crown jewels, it's time to mount a bold counterattack.'"
Re:Office for Linux? who'd use it? (Score:3, Informative)
Why? (Score:5, Informative)
With no MS Office for Linux, migrating is a lot harder. OOo works fine for most people (better in my experience, but my experience probably differs), but in some cases you just simply need the original, which means you also need Windows (or Crossover Office).
It really is as simple as that. Office isn't just MS's biggest cash cow, it's also their most important selection of proprietary file formats.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'd love to see X11 support (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If MS were not so proud... (Score:4, Informative)
Thank you for displaying your profound lack of knowledge of MS operating systems.
The kernel behind Windows 2000/2003 is as solid as Linux. Crashes are almost without exception the result of third party device drivers. The perceived frailty of MS is (a) a hangover from the Win95/98/Me crap and (b) because of the UI and application communication layers, not the kernel.
As a developer I get to see the side of Windows and Linux that many don't -- low level interfaces to system functionality. And many aspects of Windows, from a developer perspective, are ahread of *nix.
The Win32 threading and synchronisation models are ridiculously powerful compared to *nix, which is precisely what makes it so hard to port a lot of Win32-based software to other platforms. The fact that you can't do a simple operation like "wait for a mutex to be released or a socket to become readable" deserves to be a joke about legacy operating systems, not a persistent reality. At least BSD's kqueue comes close.
There are many other places in which the *nix kernels show their age compared to the design of Win32 (not to mention MS's ability to maintain a consistent API over 10 years of product developments). 30 year old technology may be "mature", but its not always The Right Thing To Do for the future.
So try to get the facts before you succumb to FUD about the state of computing -- from MS or FLOSS.
Re:That would be a wise move (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If MS were not so proud... (Score:3, Informative)
Ummmm.......what about select?
$ man 2 select
explains it, or am I missing something here?
They can't do it in India (Score:3, Informative)
India has such a HUGE variety of languages that almost 100% of computer users know English and are often unwilling to use PC's in their native language. (I belong to this category). A Hindi version of WinXP would suck totally ... in the market and everywhere.
I was involved with a bit of work on Pango rendere r for my mother tongue ... the unicode renderer was fairly easy to handle - but the translation was a horror . Imagine translating Abort :)
Look at all the scripts [geocities.com] available in Indic languages , and that's just the first grid. You might realize why India reads , writes and speaks english.
It ain't easy, it ain't viable ... but a blind eye towards home-piracy and a watchful eye on corporate licensing has been MS's ploy in India.
Re:If MS were not so proud... (Score:5, Informative)
The kernel that you talk about, was mostly stolen from DEC..
The UI and application layers were microsoft's own code bolted on top...
The original kernel was a microkernel architecture where device drivers shouldn't have been able to drop the whole system, microsoft screwed that up by allowing drivers to be loaded into kernel space.
The stable parts of windows were stolen, the unstable parts were their own code.. Tells you something about the quality of their development process. The same thing applies to a lot of their other products, the more stable ones were bought/stolen from elsewhere.
Re:Office for Linux? who'd use it? (Score:2, Informative)
Not quite. I'm a translator, and I'm stuck using Win2K under VMWare in part because Crossover cannot offer me the Japanese functionality needed. That and the obscure hoops to jump through to get Shift-JIS filename compatibility under Linux. But even given legible filenames, Crossover chokes when it comes to setting Office up with international UI options.
Just my ¥2...
Re:If MS were not so proud... (Score:1, Informative)
BTW, it's that same async I/O technology from VMS that made its way into Windows NT, when David Cutler left Digital Equipment Corp for Microsoft in 1988.
I would also take another exception to what you've said about Windows 2000/2003 being as solid as Linux: I use both on a daily basis. Windows 2000/XP/2003 sit on a stock Dell platforms, running industry standard comercial apps. RedHat/Fedora/Mandrake Linux platforms are a mishmash of parts and bits. MTBF is about 90 days for Windows and 180+ days for Linux.
Re:Office for Linux? who'd use it? (Score:3, Informative)
I use Appleworks for word processing, but Escel is the king.
Re:Office for Linux? who'd use it? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If MS were not so proud... (Score:2, Informative)
The kernel that you talk about, was mostly stolen from DEC
Stolen from DEC? A quick search on the net (or even here on
The UI and application layers were microsoft's own code bolted on top
It was rewritten for NT from the ground up.
The original kernel was a microkernel architecture where device drivers shouldn't have been able to drop the whole system, microsoft screwed that up by allowing drivers to be loaded into kernel space
You do have a fair point here. Under NT 3.1 - 3.51, drivers operated in user space. They took a performance hit for that, but until (say) Win2k SP2, NT 3.51 was the most stable Windows out there. Moving the drivers into kernel space caused quite a bit of angst in the trade press, but for the most part it seems to have survived.
There's a comment elsewhere that the greatest flaw in Windows today is not being able to abort a kernel call, and it's a fair comment.
So your final summary sentence come across as nothing more that a nasty slur, hardly worthy of +4, Informative.