[AccessD] OT: open source

Bob Hall rjhjr at cox.net
Tue Apr 6 18:31:00 CDT 2004


On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 10:58:25AM -0400, Susan Harkins wrote:
> Someone has asked me "What's in the future for Microsoft and the Open Source
> movement? "


Susan,

It's not a question of whether MS offers open source code. It's a question of how they offer it.

Microsoft's Knowledge Base contains gobs and gobs of free, open source code. Lots of independent developers offer free, open source code. Microsoft wouldn't be able to sell as many copies of Access if there weren't so much free, open source VBA code available. Free open source code is part of Microsoft's business model. 

Open source and proprietary code have always existed side by side, usually without conflict. PHP is an open source scripting language; if you use it on Windows, it was probably compiled on a Microsoft compiler. Unix was originally both proprietary and open source; you couldn't legally posses a copy of the source code without buying a license, but the system was distributed as source code. Sun OS was originally based on BSD. When the name changed to Soleris, it became more System V-like. Either way, it was based on open source code. The TCP/IP stack in every Windows system since Win2K contains mostly FreeBSD code. The TCP/IP stack in NT 4 and earlier was notoriously unreliable. MS ended up replacing it with code that was known to work reliably and was available free.

MS won't change its current business model because it makes too much money from the current model. As long as it is primarily a seller of proprietary systems to people who aren't programmers, it has no incentive to offer open source applications. Even if it starts losing market share, it still won't switch unless it goes through an IBM-like transformation and becomes primarily a provider of services. 

I know of only two cases where completely closed code became open code. Netscape didn't have the resources to do the development of a new version of Netscape Navigator, so it created the Mozilla project and based the new Navigator on Mozilla. Borland split off Interbase, which became Firebird. I'm not really sure why they did it, except that perhaps they thought it would be more valuable as a separate company than it had ever been to Borland. 

I wouldn't trust any TCO study distributed by MS. They hire "independent" analysts to do the studies, but the studies are so blatently biased that they are worthless. Basically, the issue is long-term savings versus the short term costs of switching. Since long-term savings have to be discounted over time, and the short-term costs are unpredictable, most businesses aren't going to see an advantage to switching any time soon. 

Adding to Bryan Carbonnell's comments:

You can get Linux distros that will run off a CD. That means that you insert the CD, reboot the computer, and you're running Linux. If you like it, it will install on your computer configured exactly as it is on the CD. It's even easier than a Windows install. All the decisions: desktop, window manager, etc., are made for you. Drivers are installed automatically. If you're a Linux geek, you can still make any changes you want, but the non-geeks don't need to know anything to do the installation. I tried it; it worked.

Linux will never have a standard GUI, because Linux is really only the kernal. Linus Torvalds doesn't do shell or GUI development. All Linux distros that I know of are Linux kernals with the Gnu shell. Everything else is whatever the distro teams want to include. They're never going to agree on a default window manager. On the other hand, a corporate buyer can specify that all installations use a given window manager and desktop.

The immediate threat to MS has been security problems, due to massive numbers of bugs. MS seems to have improved a lot since Gates sent out his famous security e-mail. The three OSs gaining market share right now are Win, Linux, and FreeBSD. These are systems designed to run on cheap Intel chips. The losers are systems designed to run on proprietary chips. Linux and Win are stealing market share from Soleris, not from each other. This may be changing in Europe, where governments are starting to switch to Linux for workstations. The sole reason for switchng seems to be the cost of licenses for thousands of seats. So I would say that Linux is a threat to Windows in the workstation market, not the server market.

Bob Hall



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