Microsoft Continues Anti-OSS Strategy

MacDaffy writes "Microsoft's General Manager of Platform Strategy, Michael Taylor, continues Microsoft's press blitz against Open Source in general and Linux in particular in a CNET Interview. He says of Linux: 'You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it...(due to) the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break.'"

To recap for those in the back

[OctoberSky]

Its simple really. Microsoft hired a team of scientists to figure out how to implement the third step in the UnderPants Gnome theory of economics. They succeded and thus... profit.
They fear going Open Source would divulge this information and that would put a damper on thier profit margin.

Its rumored that MS is in talks with the Sock Monster as well.

Oh yeah, people didn't understand buffer overflows

[WolfWithoutAClause]

The original internet worm exploited a buffer overflow in the finger daemon. So for a Microsoft spokesman to stand up and say that this wasn't understood 10 years ago.

I mean c'mon. That was in 1988; by computing standards that was prehistoric. Everything Microsoft wrote should have been looked at for that bug ever since. They didn't. Microsoft didn't even bother to look at security issues much at all until a few years ago. Unix was ahead of that curve by 5-10 years.

Re:And Windows never breaks, right?

[LurkerXXX]

Mod parent up. If you do this with OSS or any OS in a corporate production environment, you shouldn't be in the job you have. Every good amin I know has test machines of whatever flavor OS they run, for just that purpose.

Re:In other news

[nra1871]

I switched to a Mac a couple years ago, and its handling of applications astounded me. Why can I just drag and drop an application onto my hard drive and have it work? Even better is uninstalling it, which involves just trashing the app. Why hasn't Linux or Windows implemented something like this (maybe Linux can, I don't use it enough to know)? I'm not trying to fan some flamewar, I just don't understand why it works so well, but noone else seems to have implemented it.

INDEMNIFICATION???

[Laura_DilDio]

First, companies need to have some level of indemnification and protection from the technology deployed.

This guy is spreading SCO-FUD. If you use FOSS technologies, you might open yourself up to being sued by some IP holder.

However, it turns out that Microsoft doesn't offer much more than FOSS when it comes to backing their product. The following is from the WinXP EULA:

16. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES. The Limited Warranty that appears above is the only express warranty made to you and is provided in lieu of any other express warranties or similar obligations (if any) created by any advertising, documentation, packaging, or other communications. Except for the Limited Warranty and to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Microsoft and its suppliers provide the Software and support services (if any) AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS, and hereby disclaim all other warranties and conditions, whether express, implied or statutory, including, but not limited to, any (if any) implied warranties, duties or conditions of merchantability, of fitness for a particular purpose, of reliability or availability, of accuracy or completeness of responses, of results, of workmanlike effort, of lack of viruses, and of lack of negligence, all with regard to the Software, and the provision of or failure to provide support or other services, information, software, and related content through the Software or otherwise arising out of the use of the Software. ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE SOFTWARE.

WTF does the NON-INFRINGEMENT statement refer to?

Re:Linux vs Windows

[should_be_linear]

There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do.
One word: fork()

To quote Tonto...

[schon]

"What you mean 'WE', Kemosabe?"

There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do.

If by "we" he means Microsoft, then the response is "well duh" (after all, they *do* have the source code.)

But the obvious response is "then why don't you?"

I use Linux machines as routers for a local school district. A couple of weeks ago, the HD in one of them died - and nobody noticed (well, I noticed when the nightly backup didn't happen.) This machine was doing packet filtering, traffic shaping, and policy routing (iproute2 rocks! :o) And when the HD died, the machine kept on ticking. This isn't the first time I'd experienced it, so I recommended to them that they not panic and deal with it during the regular maintenance period (on the weekend.) It kept happily running until I powered it off to replace the drive. I've no doubt that it would have continued to run until the power ran out (which would have been a long time, as it was on a big honking UPS.)

Let's see Windows do traffic shaping.
Let's see Windows do policy routing.
Then let's see it keep running when you rip out the hard drive.

Re:In other news

[matth]

Hrmm Microsoft Flight Simulator has done it to me... additionally some programs have done it because "Windows has a lock on the directory" and you have to reboot and manually delete.. definately a Microsoft/OS issue (albiet some of them may be bad uninstallers)

Re:So....

[Quux]

/jumps straight to google groups

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/news.software. b/browse_frm/thread/d2f6b1b351300c8/0b932aae5d1d45 44?q=%22buffer+overrun%22+1989&rnum=4&hl=en#0b932a ae5d1d4544 [google.com]

a patch announcement from september '89, referring to a buffer overrun as "this nasty problem"

Re:Hmmm

[dmaxwell]

MS' own recommended strategy for servers is one box for each function. AD tree that's a box. An IIS server? That's a box. A SQL server? Yet another box.

I can and have run DNS, Samba, Apache, Netatalk, MySQL and others on the same machine and it just sits in the corner and does it's job. I think MS doesn't want to start throwing stones in this particular glass house.

Scope

[tomstdenis]

Depends on the scope of the project. Sure things like Firefox [re: not linux] are hard to add to because they are big ...

But i'd say Linux is a hell of a lot more extensible than windows.

Say I want to develop a new device [/dev/toms] for some reason. I have the Linux Kernel SOURCE CODE for free to look at. What do I get in the windows camp for free?

And they really have to learn to distinguish between the kernel [that is Linux] and distros. The kernel for the most part is very stable. Yes, the bleeding edge [e.g. 2.6.12.3 may not work well] versions are a tad buggy but the recent ones [2.6.12 for instance] works just fine on my AMD laptop, AMD64 dual core desktop and P4 Prescott desktop.

Three different architectures with different drives, graphics, etc [my 64 has SATA drives too and a PCI-X graphics card] but they all work out of the box with a trivial kernel configuration.

I can take the kernel and use it with Gentoo. In this distro I can add/remove programs with a simple emerge command. You think installshield is easy? How hard is

emerge firefox

or

emerge -C firefox

etc, etc, etc.

This is just more fud from a person who obviously doesn't use [or take the time to understand] how the technology actually works.

I guess that's his job, to spread FUD to sell Windows. Unfortunately for him people are waking up and are not FUCKING MORONS anymore.

Tom

Re:Hmmm

[SillyNickName4me]

MS' own recommended strategy for servers is one box for each function. AD tree that's a box. An IIS server? That's a box. A SQL server? Yet another box.

Hmm, they recommend that, but I'd like to mention 2 things here:

1. This has been a recommended strategy for building servers, one that MS finally adapted itself (tho possibly for the wrong reasons).

It is a very good idea because it ensures physical seperation between the different services and greatly reduces the potential of compromise of one service spreading to other services.

2. You can have IIS, AD and MSSQL on one machine. It is not recommended, but it is quite possible.

Re:So....

[Tom]

Is he seriously suggesting that 10 years ago no one had ever heard of a buffer overrun?

He's not that far away. Aleph1's famous article was from 1996 [phrack.org] and is one of the first publications that got mainstream attention.

It begins with "Over the last few months there has been a large increase of buffer
overflow vulnerabilities being both discovered and exploited." - so saying this was unknown in 1995 is not quite true, but it certainly was a fairly new and not entirely well understood problem.

Re:This is true...

[ccady]

For those of you who don't get it -- zoom in to the max.

Re:"Linux" is a Total Generality.

[ssj_195]

BUT one thing I have not figured out is how to play things like WMV files on my Linux box.

Which distro? Ubuntu has an excellent user guide (http://ubuntuguide.org/ [ubuntuguide.org]) that covers many common tasks - try the "How to install Multimedia Codecs?" section - it worked for me! As for hardware, I've always been happy to buy hardware specifically for Linux compatibility (my PCI wireless card, for example, requires NO effort to get working, at all, whatsoever - I can browse the web from the first boot after install). This course can be pretty expensive, though, and is obviously not for everyone :)

Re:Hmmm

[sconeu]

The R&D on the space pen thing is an urban legend [snopes.com].

Re:What distro is he using?

[ssj_195]

"Try installing from source" is also not an ideal solution, as it will (correct me if I'm wrong) take said application out from under the watchful eye of package management.

I think there is a solution to this in Debian called checkinstall [debian-adm...ration.org]

Re:Joel on software

[someone300]

"no one has a real true standard to enforce anywhere."

"A standard way of doing things are key to appeal to a large audience."

Freedesktop standards [freedesktop.org]
Gnome HIG [gnome.org]
KDE Guidelines [kde.org]
If I use either KDE or Gnome, I very rarely use applications that don't match the environment. My desktop of choice is Gnome, and I've found it much more consistent than the windows GUI.

Windows User Experience [microsoft.com]

Office (XP anyway) is really inconsistent. I normally use Microsoft Word, in which every new document opens in a seperate window. However in Excel, the new documents actually open in a new window inside the main excel window, but they create another application button on the taskbar, giving the illusion that it's opened in a seperate window.

Sometimes I've had 1 document open that I've not edited, and 1 that I have edited. I'm used to Office bugging me to save documents even when I've not edited them, so when I hit the big "X" button on the window, and it asks to save, I just click "no" because being a human, I don't read messages that I expect to say something, stupid I know. I lose my work.
I'm not the only person this has happened to either...

I know I'll probably get modded troll or something...

Re:And Windows never breaks, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you get an MSDN subscription, and you can set up as many machines for development as you want. Still costs some money, but not nearly as much as the actual licenses.

Re:Oh please

[farble1670]

Now microsoft providing a way to setup NTP without editing the registry

they've had that ever since XP. is that three years now? you have to click a checkbox to turn it on. it couldn't be simpler. you're talking about win 2k, which is eol'd i believe.