Would You Date Microsoft? 247
teslatug writes "Channel9 has an interview with Bill Hilf of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft. Hilf argues that the majority of companies advocate open source solely so that they can drive customers to their core business, which is not open source. He calls this his 'donut theory.' Hilf also sees RedHat in this model, with support being their core. He compares this to dating, where you have to offer your date value in order to entice them. In his view, Microsoft offers developers a platform where they can make money selling their software. The virtues of 'free as in freedom' and the value of open source to the desktop users are skirted, but he makes an interesting point about big businesses like IBM and Oracle."
My Linux Annoyances as a Hardended Windows user (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, I am a 100% Win fan. I love it; things just work. But, I have made the switch to Linux (Fedora Core 5) at home, seeing as it does 99% of what I want. After a couple of months of constant, un-interupted use, my biggest issues with Linux are broadly thus:
1. No fecking media support! I get XMMS inform me on first attempt at playing an MP3 that it won't because of licensing conflict. Wtf? Codecs for avi's and DVDs w
Re:My Linux Annoyances as a Hardended Windows user (Score:4, Funny)
How was this not moderated "Score 5, Funny"?
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Another +5 funny moderation.
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This is sort of obvious, but I'm not sure if you realize it so I'm goint to point it out anyway:
The vast majority of users aren't interested in spending 3+ months evaluating an operating system. This isn't a momentus decision like choosing a mate, buying a house, or even buying a car to them. It probably doesn't even rate the amount of time they spend picking out a new TV or a prom da
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How was this not moderated "Score 5, Funny"?
Windows as a client OS is designed for the non-technical end user. The user who is not a Geek, who will never be a Geek, and shares none of the Geek's interests and values.
I am not a Geek, I only play one on Slashdot. In ten years of running Windows at home, five years with XP and broadband, I have made one call to Dell for technical support. I have never paid a dime for support, repairs, or services of
Re:My Linux Annoyances as a Hardended Windows user (Score:4, Informative)
End User Kernel Builds Not Often Necessary (Score:3, Interesting)
You have to install new kernels for the same reasons that you have to buy new versions of windows. (You're not still running Windows 3.1, are you?) You get new drivers, methods, and all those fun things you expect from your operating system. I can write you scripts to mostly automate the process of building new kernels, which should take 94% of the pain out of the process, but it will involve answering stupid questions about new drivers. It doesn't know. Hotplugging is our weakness right now.
I haven't b
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What are your credentials that you can make this claim? X-Windows is a huge software project and it works reasonably well. There are certain people [x.org] out there who are making the source code more modularized.
GUIs weren't an afterthought. It's called modularization, meaning that if one piece breaks, the whole system won't come down.
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It's not "inexplicable," the 2.6 kernel was the first to support a preemptible kernel right out of the box (instead of as a patch for the 2.4 series).
Kernel Drivers (Score:2, Informative)
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How surprising, a ridiculously extreme and out of context example to try and disprove a valid and important point.
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What we're talking about here is minor revisions, akin to the auto-updates that Miscrosoft provides. Every time they send one of those I don't have to reinstall any drivers at all.
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The downside is that if you have a driver, wit
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These questions would perhaps be better answered on linuxquestions.org or similar, but a few points...
Re:My Linux Annoyances as a Hardended Windows user (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you know you've never installed a new kernel in Windows? Do you think it has been static, and hasn't been updated numerous times through both Windows Update and new versions of Windows? Do you not think that Microsoft has hundreds of internal kernel revisions that never get out to the public? This is simply the way that software development is done -- the fact that it's noticeable in the Linux world is a testament to its open development model.
That having been said, I don't know why you "had" to install a new kernel. Did you require a module which hasn't been back-ported? Did some other piece of software have the new kernel as a pre-req? Or did you just notice one come down the pipe when you did a yum update?
Every OS has kernel updates. Linux is admittedly more susceptible to updates due to the way that device drivers (modules) are tied to it, and the lack of a stable binary interface for drivers (which requires them to be compiled against the kernel you're running). In the end, however, it generally works the same for the end user: updates give you new features, functionality, and drivers. Package management tools like yum make this sort of update process easy.
I have a lot of problems with Linux on the desktop as well (on the client side, I'm a Mac OS X person), but this seems to be such a silly one to complain about. The Windows kernel is updated all the time via Windows Update -- you just don't see the word "kernel" on the display, and thus don't realize it. Linux is just more open about this sort of thing.
Yaz.
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1. No fecking media support! I get XMMS inform me on first attempt at playing an MP3 that it won't because of licensing conflict. Wtf? Codecs for avi's and DVDs were a simular story; all had to be downloaded via yum (bloody excellent tool!). Seriously; not good, but fixed in the end.
Blame the patent holders for making veiled threats to sue infringing parties, and to a lesser extent, the Fedora Project for not wanting to get sued for something they don't make
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I've noticed no speed differences in terms of responsiveness between X and Windows. In fact, fr
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MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:2)
Feel free to formulate your own thoughts and opinions - you are allowed, assuming you are capable.
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2: Oh, but ever heard of a "service pack?" You're replacing damn near half the operating system when upgrading XP SP1 to XP SP2. Of course, Windows doesn't have the same sort of kernel that linux does. Linux's kernel is "separate" from all the other pieces parts... Windows is this mish-mash of "things."
3: Call nVidia and bitch. or rebuild the
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Re:My Linux Annoyances as a Hardended Windows user (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO, KDE's Konquorer is superior to Windows' Explorer. Both provide standard context and drag-n-drop file management. Konq also provides some nice split windows options. But the real advantage comes from the KIO slaves. Its nice to grab an archive from a SMB fileshare, open it up, drop a few of the internal files over to a SSH server (via SFTP or SCP). Being able to use the KIO slaves within most KDE file dialogs is a nice added bonus.
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probably wasn't that far from the truth then.
reality today is that linux supports most hardware and media formats, The easy first step is to boot a live Cd and check what hardware works or not. Easyubuntu or automatix will take care of the media issues in ubuntu for example.
if hardware isn't working you have a number of choices.
replace the hardware for something that does work.
investigate the problems in getting a particular piece of ha
Maybe he is right (Score:2)
Surprised? (Score:5, Funny)
The doughnut's core? (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition to trying to make open-source business models seem just like commercial ones, as in "they just change the core of their doughnut" (from intellectual property to support services), this Hilf fellow isn't very accurate (honest?) about the actual core of Microsoft's doughnut. Microsoft's core a
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It's because he's a competent propagandist. Notice the lack of transcript? Tone, pacing, body language, carefully sloppily-put questions, ooooh, that Mac running Red Hat so casually, so constantly on screen ... beautifully prepared.
But right up front he says what he's all about:
What's different about the Microsoft way of building software
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Yes, I agree. My issue was not tha
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Yes, I bow to you for being the genius you are.
Thing is some people don't realize what they are getting on when they are lured to open source software, so it's worth it that they hear it from time to time.
Open source is of course great, but like anything, too much of a good thing isn't that good. I use Lin
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Next thing you know, only communists will use closed source software.
I'd never date MS.... (Score:5, Funny)
... and what's even worse is ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:... and what's even worse is ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yea, but her ports are all open to everybody on the world... Not someone I'd gladly marry.
marry then divorce (Score:5, Funny)
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Is all of that money worth all of the pain and abuse from all of those chairs flung at you whenever Microsoft gets mad?
Hilf (Score:2, Insightful)
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Would You Date Microsoft? (Score:2)
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You'd date an it?
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Be warned some of those 'Swedish webcam chicks' are "its".
http://85.235.16.145/view/index.shtml [85.235.16.145]
Would you "date" a hooker? (Score:5, Insightful)
Date - to mark or supply with a timestamp (Score:3, Funny)
My two cents... (Score:3, Informative)
Regardless of whatever the company does, it is very important they have a competent support staff.
Let us say you have a problem. You contact support. They answer but fail to resolve the issue. You Google the error, take a few minutes going to sites, and find the answer to your problem so easily. What does that say about the company?
(The above paragraph is more or less my experience with Microsoft's help staff after not being able to do Windows Update. A Google search found out that slow processors might not work with their latest Windows Update on the web.)
Not sure what it says about the company... (Score:2)
So much for the "give the software away, charge for support" meme
( yes, yes.. I know 'support' is a broad term and could include making special extensions to the code for just that company blabla. )
I'd date Microsoft (Score:4, Funny)
Cue jokes... (Score:2)
protection? (Score:2)
A question for slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
what virtues? He expects the article to touch upon these points, but to many people they have not been sufficiently justified.
I've been using open source software for years, and have heard many people talk as if there was some moral imperative to release software under the GPL, or other oss license. Catch phrases like "free as in freedom," and "information wants to be free" are bandied about, and it is generally implied that commercial software developers are evil in some unspecified manner. However, these attitudes have never been justified to me with anything more than rhetoric and metaphor.
Slashdotters, maybe I am a fool. It might be that the moral imperative behind open source is only so obvious that no one can be bothered to write it down. However, I beg your patience and ask that someone take the time to explain it to me.
Now, to be clear I am not asking how open source helps to develop high quality software. I am already convinced on this point. I am asking for a justification of the commonly observed attitude on slashdot that open source developers are "good" and closed source developers are "bad" in the moral sense. I am asking for a justification of Richard Stallman's position that, as I understand it, there is a moral imperative to develop software under the GPL (or similar license).
Furthermore, as some suspect that I am already clearly quite daft, let's avoid using metaphorical terms or similes in the argument, as they might confuse me. Instead let us use only actual terms. By this I mean that I ask that responders do not derive some moral truth about computer software design by comparing it to plumbing, or cars, or politics (all of which are popular patterns of argument on slashdot). In these forms of arguments we are expected to accept some truth about an unrelated subject as a premise (i.e. you shouldn't send someone to jail for speeding) and from this premise come to accept some truth about computer software that holds a somewhat similar form (i.e. you shouldn't send someone to jail for hacking into their computer). In my ignorance, I often fail to see how the one proposition follows from the other. Often I even imagine that I see semantic distinctions that render the similitude meaningless with respect to the subject at hand. To avoid wandering into these failings in my comprehension, I ask that responders simply tell me why something is directly, without comparison to other truths.
Have at it.
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a) you're beholden to the original developers to make changes
b) if the original developer goes belly up you're screwed in terms up updates/changes
c) you can only run the software where they say you can run it ("We can't be bothered to do a Windows/Linux/BSD/SkyOS/64bit etc. etc. port")
d) the software won't necessary survive its useful life, it will
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b) if the original developer goes belly up you're screwed in terms up updates/changes
c) you can only run the software where they say you can run it ("We can't be bothered to do a Windows/Linux/BSD/SkyOS/64bit etc. etc. port")
d) the software won't necessary survive its useful life, it will only be maintained as long as it is commerically viable for the closed source developer to maintain it.
Unless you have the big bucks to maintain your softwa
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I will start with two presumptions I make.
1 - Regarding wealth, abundance is good, lack is bad. Note I am not saying that people who lack are bad, but that lack itself is bad. This is the reason that it is generally considered good to help the poor (out of lack bad into abundance good).
2 - The rule of law is good and necessary. Note I am not saying that all la
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1. First, most of the coding you know and learn you do from code someone else wrote already. You won't be able to get to speed that fast if you had to pay for every single line of code you will ever encounter.
2. There is no point in inventing the wheel again and again, so why not post the description how to build a wheel somewhere, and everyone can go and do more sensible stuff than to design a wheel again? (But if they are actually good in designing wheels, who should
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The problem is, the distinction isn't entirely artificial. Most end users for most projects won't be developers, and most of those who are developers don't want to spend their time working on that project.
The co
Why does Slashdot even have a Linux section? (Score:3, Insightful)
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The same can be said of Windows, or any other operating system mentioned on here, I'd imagine.
Welcome to Slashdot, where your operating system is your religion with all the holy wars that it implies.
Bill Hilf (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope, never. (Score:2)
That's if I had to date any of them. The only OS I can think of as female is OS X, and she's an ice queen...
Wow. I need a life, don't I?
Would I date Microsoft? (Score:2)
I'd hit it!
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With what, a sledgehammer?
RegardselFarto
Hilf (Score:3, Interesting)
Today more open source runs on windows than on Linux machines. Content Management means open source. Cluster computing means Linux. Webserver means Apache.
In some areas Open Source provides real advantage. Unlike its competitors Microsoft cannot run a real open source strategy. They cannot use open source for their own advantage.
And what is worse: Microsoft's policy making, its advocacy against open source, against interoperability, money for politicians, money for software patent lobbying and other dirty business provides them with nasty press coverage and they lost the support of the software elites.
What professional developer likes a company which fights for DMCA style laws and software patenting? Microsoft lost the support of developers. Its technology and progress does not excite us anymore. (Oh, I like MDX but that's very old.)
Open source values developers. Developers run open source. No marketing braggarts blur the field. That is why we love it.
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Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers! [google.com]
Would *I* date Microsoft? (Score:2)
No way... (Score:2)
Remember where you are! (Score:2)
If Redhat is like dating ... (Score:2)
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The Issue of Quid Pro Quo (Score:2)
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I think it's there in your disclaimer. Think about the command line. Deprecated publicly and buried three clicks and a typing of "cmd" because Microsoft figured no one would ever want to use it any more. OS X comes out, Linux continues to grow and someone in Redmond realizes that a useful command line and a good shell would be a sales feature. Do they do the sensible thing (like Apple) and put in bash and tcsh? Nope. They go and write a new shell, albeit with potentially more power, and expect, when it's of
Once again, a doomsayer who just doesn't "get" it (Score:3, Insightful)
Which I will point out as the single most revealing point, by virtue of its absence, of the entire link.
Virtually every criticism I've seen about open source, "free" software, and Linux in general, centers around a single (irrelevant) point: Not business-friendly.
You also hear "not ready for the desktop" or "too focused on developers", but those only matter in relation to the POV of trying to sell a product, in that they reduce the potential customer base. Thus even those classics reduce to "not business-friendly".
Well, I have news for Hilf, and Roland, and IDC, and all the rest who go on about why Linux and open source will fail - open source doesn't exist in a form that can fail. Yes, you have assorted groups with the goal of advancing open source (RMS, Debian), and various companies who have pretended to embrace the idea (IBM), but as much as they may contribute to the underlying idea of free software, they don't embody it in some mortality-inducing way. They can vanish tomorrow, and I can still build my own Linux distro from sources.
So, when any criticism of open source "skirts" the issue of free-as-in-freedom, you can ignore that criticism without a second thought. Because "open source" MEANS free-as-in-freedom. It doesn't depend on any company or person or government. Laws and patents and liabilities can make it harder to obtain and contribute to, but NOTHING can ever eliminate it completely. As long as a single fourth-world geek with a bicycle-powered laptop can compile a "hello world" program, open source will remain.
I thank IBM for its massive contributions of code and ideas. I thank RedHat for its PR work. I thank Linus for the kernel itself. But the abstraction doesn't need any of them to survive. Making a profit counts as a nice side effect, not the goal, of open source.
speaking from experience (Score:4, Interesting)
I also did some VB stuff. They went through three different, slightly incompatible database access classes during my use of it. All were written by committee.
Note that these were the cheap tools, too, I wasn't using sql server or such.
The world of Free software is completely different. I have control. I cannot stress this enough: I HAVE CONTROL. It's considered a myth that anyone can fix bugs, but I have more than once. I remember well fixing a bug in the pop server that I'm using. It would have taken Microsoft or a company such as that a month or more to fix a bug like that. It took me 30 minutes from never having looked at the code to having the bug fixed, patch sent to maintainer.
Now, for the stuff that I do nowadays, not only is the control factor large, so is the cost factor. They are correct that Microsoft provides a platform where you can make money. But that means you have to give Microsoft some of your money. If free Free software didn't exist, that would make sense. However, in the presence of an equal or better alternative that costs no money, it makes absolutely no sense to give Microsoft money for their often inferior offerings.
I have a particular client that I took from another company. It was an ecommerce site, nothing special, frankly. The other company had already billed the client $40,000 and the product wasn't yet working. The client brought me in to help the other bozos with some html. Yes, you read that correctly. So I asked the client for their data set, and three days later showed them a prototype that was more functional than what the other guys had spent three months and $40,000 to accomplish.
I then made them an offer. They hadn't paid for the Microsoft licenses yet, which were going to run about $15K. I told them that I could deliver the entire thing for less than the up-front cost of the Microsoft licenses. In other words, they could abandon everything that the other guys had charged them so much for and still save money. They decided to play both sides, and a month later I delivered the completed site, under budget. The other guys charged them another $40,000 for time they had spent since the last bill, but still no completed site. I don't know if they paid it.
I have found that most companies like those do not inform their clients ahead of time that there are going to be Microsoft license fees to pay. They rather find out afterward. In this case, when the guys found out what I was doing, they went to the client and told them falsely that they didn't have to pay for those licenses, that they could just use a free test license.
There's a lesson there, though. For most larger projects, those license fees are laid out up front (although they are usually dishonest about the ongoing costs, I've found). But think about it. If a client is going to spend $50K on a project, my choice as the vendor is either $50K in my pocket or $40K in my pocket and $10K in Microsoft's pocket. Again, for what? Better yet, I can "undercut" at $45K, still make more money than the other guy and save my client money.
Note to other vendors: keep pushing Microsoft crap at people. I love it when you do. Seriously.
This is Slashdot.... (Score:2, Funny)
Hilf fuds Open Source, again (Score:2)
This doesn't make sense. Most companies are not in the software business. Companies advocate Open Source to get customers - yes. Very presient of you to have spotted that. Business are in the business of making money. Is such revenue somehow different that that made by selling solutions to other developers. It's interesting that you are able to divine
"Date" Microsoft? (Score:2)
Free as in peanuts (Score:2)
Sorry Microsoft... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'm not sure (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft fucks you on the first date, marries you and forces you to an EULA - sorry, pre-nup - and turns into a wife who gets everything if you decide to leave her.
It's a date I'd avoid, thank you so very much.
Since we're talking about fucking... (Score:2)
You have - inadvertently, I'm certain - pointed out the most important bit:
With Microsoft, I'm getting fucked on the first date.
Not getting laid, but getting fucked.
Sounds like I'm the passive party there.
And not just on the first date, but for ever and ever.
Like a newbie in prison. Ass-raped.
Thanks, but no, thanks.
As for your vision of OSS... ever heard of Stephen Lynch?
"She's part girl
She's part boy
She has parts everyone can enjoy"
Your vision lacks... scope.
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A typical date with MS (Score:2)
You tell of the bugs. Not to worry... out comes the bug spray which is sprayed into your face, leaving the bugs intact.
Get into car. It's hot. Window doesn't open.....etc etc for a couple of hours.... Get back to His Place. He pulls out a condom with a bunch of holes in it (Expires in 1998, but patched to 2000...). Before you get any action he has a buffer overflow.....
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In Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
...you fuck Microsoft!
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I wouldn't. I'd always limit myself to the 10% of the available dates... 90% of them really aren't worth the trouble.
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