Jeremy Allison Calls Microsoft Dangerous Elephant 306
oranghutan writes "At the annual Linux.conf.au event being held in Wellington, NZ, one of the lead developers for the Samba Team (and Google employee) Jeremy Allison described Microsoft as 'an elephant that needs to be turned to stop it trampling the open source community.' Allison has been an outspoken critic of the vendor since he quit Novell over a deal it did with Microsoft that he saw as dangerous to open source intentions. And now he has evolved his argument to incorporate new case studies to explain why Microsoft's use of patents and its general tactics on free software are harmful.
Map Reduce? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Flamebait of a story (Score:3, Interesting)
FLOSS Community Is Their Own Worst Enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no love for Microsoft.
But in the last decade I've seen Linux on the Desktop split between two different competing environments and API's, usability experts not being able to get any meaningful traction early on in FLOSS projects, newbies being flamed on IRC for asking questions, legitimate criticism of user experience issues being written of as FUD, billions of FLOSS company dollars going to enterprise systems buyouts and kernel hacker salaries instead of high quality user testing labs (and then saying FLOSS has no money for such things like evil proprietary companies do), etc.
When I look at Microsoft, I don't see FLOSS's greatest enemy; I see a boogeyman and a scapegoat used to explain FLOSS' lack of success at getting outside of a server room.
Re:FLOSS Community Is Their Own Worst Enemy (Score:2, Interesting)
newbies being flamed on IRC for asking questions, ...
that is the truth .... not to mention being mocked when they do not know "the unix way" of doing things ....
like the other day when a colleague os mine asked how he could access the D: drive on a linux server,
that question , got us on a talk that lasted 2 hours just to explain him "the unix way" :P
Re:Microsoft is a zombie (Score:1, Interesting)
Company gets built around an innovative idea by a bunch of enthusiastic experts
BASIC for the MITS?
Then it all goes awry, clueless MBA types (hi Ballmer) take over pushed forward by vulture capitalists
Balmer is one of the original employees, hired in 1980 to run the business side. Microsoft was never founded with venture capital money. Go back to flipping burgers, you stink in the knowledge department.
Re:Random anecdote (Score:3, Interesting)
For you to call the basic .doc file format obscure is asinine.
Microsoft's 'newest obscure format' would presumably be .docx, which I've seen about twice in my life... compared to thousands of PDFs and hundreds of .odts and .docs in the last year. So obscure sounds like the correct word.
And I would imagine that submitting as PDF would be the best solution for student assignments, since they are a standard and presumably not intended to be edited after submissin.
Why we can't compete with crappy MS products (Score:3, Interesting)
I was in Dennys at the weekend and couldn't help listening to a conversation that was taking place on the table behind me. Some woman was proud of her new netbook that she had to buy because her old laptop had too many windows virusses to run (fast) any more. Clearly she was one of those people that surf everywhere and click yes to everything.
I had the revelation that she actually represents nearly all 'normal' people (us techies definately aren't normal). Most 'normal' people have already been conditioned by companies like Microsoft, Dell and Apple to view laptops as appliances, not something user-maintainable. Many people can't even differentiate between hardware and OS.
Also, most people are already familiar the windows environment, and also don't like change. Even a slightly different desktop menu layout or whatever is enough to make them feel uncomfortable enough to not want to go further. Just a new version of Windows represents a significant learning curve to these people. I mean most people still use IE for christ sake even after all the warnings and free alternatives one mouse-click away. They just want their PC to plug and play. When it runs slow, in their ignorance they prefer to throw it away and blow $1500 on another laptop rather than change their behavior or just learn about their PC.
These are most consumers, and if we want them to adopt Linux we have to take their natural behavior and all their preconceptions into account.
The only way to get desktop Linux to the majority is to beat Microsoft at being able to plug in any hardware or application and have it just work, which means getting hardware manufacturers and app developers to stop blindly developing stuff for Microsoft-based OS only. As long as hardware suppliers don't provide Linux drivers and, for example, games developers still use DirectX and not OpenGL, Linux will never be in a position to reach the public consciousness, even though its technically and intrinsically better. Linux has clearly already won that war but obviously thats not enough as still no mass migration from Windows to Linux desktop that we'd all like to see.
The thing is, most people still have never heard of Linux. We need to stop hoping people will join our community just because its technically better, and start spending money on advertising.
Linux needs to be shoved into the public perception through the TV and media at least as hard and frequently as Microsoft do with their products. Advertising is the only way that desktop Linux will ever get to critical mass, which it needs to do so that its obvious to all HW and SW manufacturers that they will quickly loose out if they continue to only target Windows. Furthermore 'Normal' consumers need to at least know that Linux exists before they can try it.
Re:Flamebait of a story (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It wouldn't be a problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah my company won't use open source for things beyond a certain "importance." Our intranet and VoIP systems are both running 100% FOSS (or FLOSS? Everyone's suddenly saying FLOSS these days), but we can't switch our firewall to pfSense, which everyone in IT can agree is technically superior, because we want to have a large well-known corporation to blame when things go bad - and they do go bad much more often with proprietary products - our Watchguard box often gives all kinds of trouble that can only be solved by power cycling, Windows Update servers (can't remember exactly what they call them) can't download updates through them for reasons known only to the computer gods, and all Watchguard can do is say they know about the problem and shrug their shoulders. But this is considered preferable to a more reliable, convenient (this box can only be configured via a connection from a Windows client app), affordable solution for purely political reasons. We spend more money and suffer more downtime to work around the (at least perceived threat of) irrational thinking of upper management.
tl;dr version: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" lives on.
I even suggested two pfSense firewalls in a failover configuration - this way the chance of a failure is far smaller than it could be with any one appliance...but no, any potential for failure without a big name to blame is unacceptable.
Absolutely. (Score:3, Interesting)
My first Linux install was RH 5.1; it was a bit of a bumpy ride getting X to work, and there were some other issues, so I didn't do much with it- just stuck to Windows. I tried again a year later, and RH 6.x was much better- the 2.2 kernel series made a big difference, GNOME was new and exciting, most things just worked, etc. I did more dual-booting and thought that surely the pace of improvement would make it so after the next release or two I'd always be booting into Linux. But from my point of view the past decade brought very little improvement in making Linux more palatable to use- in some ways it's worse now than it was in 2000.
As someone else mentioned, the purism issues and the hostility towards those developing proprietary software for Linux have been a major detriment. Plenty of old programs that worked well and shipped with earlier distros but had not-quite-free licenses (many of which used Xt or Motif) have just recently started to get decent RMS-approved replacements. In 1999-2000, with Corel making a serious WordPerfect for Linux push, Loki doing ports of most of the biggest games, etc. it looked like a market for consumer Linux software was developing, and I thought that it wouldn't be long before one could find Linux versions of most software on the shelves of box stores. Piracy, hostility towards those developing proprietary software for Linux, ABI churn, Loki going nova, the end of RH's commercial desktop distro (after a couple of less-than-stellar releases), and other factors scared developers away.
Usability is little better than it was then. Having a cadre of self-proclaimed UI experts arguing about button order doesn't help anything, and many of the actions that have been taken in the name of usability have been major steps backward (GNOME 2.0, anybody?). While there are things to be learned from real, long term usability studies, it's counterproductive to make changes based on an assumption that all users are stupid and thus can't be trusted to do anything outside of the most common tasks or on the basis of what someone unacquainted with the software said in their first 5 minutes of trying to familiarize themselves with it.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with Chrome OS. It's possible that a company the size of Google will be able to overcome the worst offenses of the modern Linux desktop scene and create a viable ecosystem for the development of 3rd-party consumer software, taking the good points of how Apple made a similar move in the OS X transition while keeping things more open than Apple has. I don't know that any other company or group is really in a position to bring Linux to desktop relevance.