Linux Foundation Calls for 'Respect for Microsoft'

kripkenstein writes "Jim Zemlin (executive director for the Linux Foundation) gave a talk at LinuxWorld saying that the open source community should stop poking fun at Microsoft. From the VNU article: 'Open source vendors have to recognize that Windows is here to stay and that together with Microsoft it will form a duopoly in the market for operating systems. This also requires that the Linux community respects Microsoft rather than ridicule it. "There are some things that Windows does pretty well," Zemlin said. Microsoft for instance has excelled in marketing the operating system, and has a good track record in fending off competition.'"

I thought OS X Linux

[LokiSnake]

Duopoly? Microsoft and Linux? I thought OSX has more market share than Linux does. Well, okay, at least in the desktop market.

Respect? For M$?

[bheer]

What is this, Hug a Grizzly Bear Week? Be Nice to the Sharks Month? This man Zemlin is obviously either a shill or a sad deluded man who needs to be shipped off to the re-education camps as soon as possible!

Respect is earnt.

[miffo.swe]

And i cant think of ONE single puny nice little thing that Microsoft has done for Linux. I can oth think of pretty many things Microsoft has done to kill or stifle Linux. If Microsoft has earnt anything its respect in the sense you dont turn your back against a raving pitbull.

Re:So MS does marketting, Linux does software?

[Bombula]

Unfortunately, marketing is a necessary evil. And not just in business. You have to sell yourself, you have to sell your merits, you have to promote and promulgate your ideas and your beliefs and your values, whether your a person or a business or any other kind of organization or institution.

But if by marketing you just mean the crap that's on TV intermixed with the shows, well, fair enough.

You must not use Linux.

[khasim]

gconf is, basically, a registry. Yes, a better one, but it's still doing the same job in much the same way.

It is A registry. But I can boot a Linux box WITHOUT it. And one I can boot it, I can fix it.

This applies to Linux, as well; cruft builds up in the corners, configurations get slightly broken, and after a while it's frequently easier to reinstall than to clean it out.

BULLSHIT. I'm typing this on a machine that's been upgraded, online, to Gutsy Gibbon all the way from Hoary Hedgehog. (Hoary - Breezy - Dapper - Edgy - Feisty - Gutsy)

And I've upgraded during the ALPHA portions of those releases. And I still don't have problems.

It's called "Computer SCIENCE" for a reason. It's not magic. If something breaks, it can be backed out.

Windows Live CD.

And I would use that, how, to fix virus/rootkit on a Windows machine? Be specific.

I'll give you that one.

Strange, because that kind of contradicts your other claims. It's the packaging system that allows me to validate the operating system and apps. Which allows me to smoothly upgrade from one release to the next. Which allows me to remove old packages or upgrade them.

And I haven't even touched on Windows security.

Re:Wait, what?

[jimicus]

Have you ever used XP or 2000? It's not "shitty". It's certainly not the best thing ever, but it sure as fuck beats using Linux for a desktop machine. Please note that I ran Linux as my only OS from 1997 through 2002 and then went back and haven't returned.

Yes. In fact, I'm responsible for system management for a number of them.

I'll happily accept that XP and 2000 are miles ahead of '9x.

The main problems I have are:

1. Their lack of respect for established, published standards. Linux and Mac OS X can both be fairly easily configured to authenticate against LDAP out of the box - Windows requires that you use a Windows domain (either NT4-style or AD). (Yes, I know AD is in essence LDAP+Kerberos+proprietary addons. Please point me at a third-party functioning implementation if it's so standard. Shouldn't be that hard - it's only existed since Windows 2000).

2. Their cavalier attitude to logging issues. Practically every Unix system I've ever seen could log almost everything that happens on the system in an absurd level of detail. Windows, on the other hand, has the Event Log which isn't even very widely used by Microsoft software, let alone third-party apps. Have you any idea how much easier it is to troubleshoot a system when there are logs available?

Doubtless I could think of a few more, but those are the most obvious that spring to mind.

Re:I thought OS X Linux

[bblboy54]

And think about how it got to be that way. Remember when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997? The most memorable moment of his keynote was hime saying microsoft doesnt have to fail for Apple to win [youtube.com] and he called for huge respect for Microsoft. Today, Apple has grown into a huge company again.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Torvaun]

Being a monopoly isn't illegal. Sustaining that monopoly through anticompetitive practices is. After all, anytime someone is innovative and markets it, they have a monopoly. They are the only people who make widget x. It's not until they start trying to keep everyone else from making widget x knockoffs that they're breaking the law. Also, if widget y gains a large enough share of the market, widget x is now free to be as anticompetitive as they want.

Re:I thought OS X Linux

[shaitand]

'Mac OS-X, (like all the Unixes), is closer to being a "real" OS than Linux or Windows'

In what world? Perhaps you have some sort of strange unspoken defintion of "real" the rest of us aren't using? OSX isn't an operating system at all. The operating system is Darwin (its kernel to be technical) and the distribution that is based on that operating system is OSX. Linux is a real and complete operating system and there are many distributions based on it. Windows is both an operating system and a distribution.

'Dissing it as "not a real OS" or "not available for general use" is an exaggeration at best, or really just a troll.'

I wouldn't really go around saying it isn't a real OS (technical distinctions aside) but 'not available for general use' certainly applies. Most of us define general use for an operating system as 'general use on commodity hardware'.

'Also, your argument about licensing out the Mac OS has been shot down so many times I won't even bother to get into it.'

It's been discussed anyway. I'm pretty sure the only ones who walk away feeling it was shut down were those who felt that way from the get go.

'you seem woefully... biased in general. OS-X is... arguably the best desktop operating system'

Perhaps you should consider yourself before saying others are biased. OSX being the best desktop operating system is something that MOST informed individuals would dispute (I don't give my own opinion because its beside the point).

Like it or not, not everyone who makes a negative comment about MacOS, Mac's, or Apple is a troll and this is an open forum where people are entitled to think OSX, Linux, or Windows sucks. If you are modding people down simply because they think your pet system sucks you are abusing moderation privs. In fact, if you (or anyone) are modding people down for any reason you are probably using the moderation system incorrectly. Moderation is primarily intended for modding up worthwhile comments, not censoring comments you feel unworthy.

Re:I thought OS X Linux

[Ohreally_factor]

Hey, I was looking for the proper place to make this exact comment. I also really like Linus' take [linuxworld.com]:

CW: Microsoft has recently claimed that free software and some e-mail programs violate 235 of its patents. But Microsoft also said it won't sue for now. Is this the start of a new legal nightmare?

Torvalds: I personally think it's mainly another shot in the FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] war. MS has a really hard time competing on technical merit, and they traditionally have instead tried to compete on price, but that obviously doesn't work either, not against open source. So they'll continue to bundle packages and live off the inertia of the marketplace, but they want to feed that inertia with FUD.

CW: Do you think you and the open-source software community are prepared for this battle?

Torvalds: I don't actually see it as a battle. I do my thing because I think it's interesting and worth doing, and I'm not in it because of any anti-MS issues. I've used a few MS products over the years, but I've never had a strong antipathy against them. Microsoft simply isn't interesting to me.

And the whole open source thing is not an anti-MS movement either. ... Open source is a model for how to do things, and I happen to believe that it's just a much better way to do things and that open source will take over not because of any battle, but simply because better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things.

[my emphasis]

Bottom line is that ones energies are much better focused on creating a great product, and not fighting a battle. Personally, I think the firebrands and the rabid dogs on either side of the MS/FSF debate just get off on the emotional charge of being outraged or are manipulating others with it. You see this sort of stuff a lot in politics. (Oh, and, what's the last program RMS wrote and how long ago? That should provide a nice outrage high for one of our friendly rabid freetards.)

Re:I thought OS X Linux

[dhavleak]

Actually, I was aware of Apple's Xserve/SAN offerings when I wrote my post. I didn't mean to imply that Apple is absent in the Server segment, though I guess it's easy to infer that - so my bad.

The context there started with Windows and Linux forming a duopoly and then someone pointed out that OS-X wasn't an OS with 'general availability', and got pounced on. I attempted to defend him saying that unlike Linux and Windows you can't buy a sundry 1u blade and run OS X Server on it (afaik - pls correct me if I'm wrong). i.e. Apple limit the 'general availability' of their OS in the server scenario as well, similar to the way they do in the desktop scenario. I guess AIX was a bad example...

With due respect to John Siracusa's article, I don't think it was very informative. He went on repeatedly about the iPhone in the enterprise, which is far from relevant to Apple's presence there. He also claims that Apple is being high-minded and deliberately ignoring markets where it has to sell to someone other than the end user. Well, that would be any bulk contract. I don't think Apple sells the macs in schools and colleges to the kids there directly - they sell them to the universities and boards controlling the money. I don't understand this attempt to put an altruistic/high-minded/whatever spin to Apple's intentions - they're a company like any other.

Then he repeats classic Jobs sound bytes such as:

Want more? Here's Jobs's response to a question about Apple's neglect of the low-end of the market (e.g., $500 PCs, $100 phones, etc.):

There's some stuff in our industry that we wouldn't be proud to ship. And we
just can't do it. We can't ship junk. There are thresholds we can't cross
because of who we are.

This can all sound pretty smug. For a more grounded interpretation, you can try to look at it from a business perspective--profit margins, avoiding commoditization, the potential for growth and so on--but there's no getting around the results. And no matter how you slice it, the decision to ignore markets where you must sell to someone other than the end user is pretty high-minded (for a corporation). It's also perhaps the only way to ever create great products, products that customers actually love.

Think about this the next time you're peeling stickers off your new laptop at work.

This is where Apple and Jobs let themselves down. It comes off as smug and disrespectful towards companies and individuals who buy budget PCs. At my previous company we had about 1000+ corporate employees who's PC use consisted of productivity apps, and enterprise app front-ends, so a fairly common enterprise scenario. Bbudget PCs and laptops are exactly what they need. And they need to be easy to maintain, upgrade etc. If style/brand positioning is getting in the way of these criteria, taking pot-shots isn't the solution. They need to find the right compromises -- and they will do this if and when they are able to focus on this segment. Until then, the high-minded thing to do would be to refrain from snide remarks of this nature.

I have no doubt that OS X is a credible server OS. That's not the point. There are many reasons it's not present more in the enterprise. One of them is that Apple doesn't focus on the different Enterprise verticals and sell complete solutions. It's more like, here's Xserver and OS X Server, and Web Objects, and oh btw: there's all this cool OSS stuff that you can run on it as well. Over generalization, I know, but the point remains.

They seem to know it, and they don't want to get spread too thin, so they're picking battles they can win. Right now the consumer desktop is one such battle, so I think they're doing the right thing by nibbling away at the desktop market first, while keeping the enterprise thread alive until they're ready to make moves there as well. This is a much more credible explanation than Siracusa's -- contrast Apple's manpower to MS and IBM's, and add the "we delayed Leopard because we moved a lot of devs to the iPhone" and it gets even more weight.