Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 23:33:10 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "David Johnson" <djohnson@acuson.com> Cc: <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Microsoft and FreeBSD, as reported in the Wall Street Journal Message-ID: <000c01c0f952$dfa76d20$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <3B2F94A9.A539BB45@acuson.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of David Johnson >Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2001 11:07 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: Microsoft and FreeBSD, as reported in the Wall Street >Journal > > >Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > >> But, many in the GPL community have already tried taking GPL and >labelling >> it as the Whole Open Source so Microsoft isn't doing anything that hasn't >> already been attempted by some people in GPL. > >There's malcontents and rabble-rousers in every faction. We've got >enough of our own people saying that the GPL isn't truly free (and I >tend to sympathize). Numerically they've got more people bashing us then >we do bashing them, but percentage-wise it may be equal. > >> I know it's humbling but we just don't represnt that big a chunk of the >> market compared to Linux. Expending effort splitting us off >won't gain them >> the same advantage that >> spending that effort directly fighting the GPL would. > >We don't represent much in the way of market share. But we represent a >hell of a lot in terms of philosophy, ideas and ethics. Open Source You are arguing that _Microsoft_ cares about anyone's _ethics_? :-) Seriously, lots of people have philosophies, ideas and ethics. The world is filled with them. But Microsoft only cares about the _actions_ of people that are threatening their software sales. >licensing has two basic licenses: copyleft and unencumbered. The GPL is >the standard bearer for copyleft, and BSD is the standard bearer for >unencumbered. > >Creating a split between these two poles would be devastating. Right now That would frankly be impossible as long as BSD uses gcc. Hell, Wall Street makes a big fragging deal over Microsoft using BSD for a few minor things here and there. Can you imagine the story if BSD started actively bashing the GPL on philosophical grounds of license differentiation? I could see them now: "FreeBSD's criticism of GPL Doesen't Stop Them From Building The Entire BSD Software System Using It" > >Think about this: the Open Source software that poses the biggest threat >to Microsoft isn't Linux. It's Apache. > It's the only software that >they've lost market share to. I disagree with this. You can't lose market share you never had. Microsoft's IIS has not had a history of 60%, then 50%, then 40%, then 30% and so forth falling market share compared to Apache. It started out at 1/2 of one percent. Arguments that "Well if Apache didn't exist then IIS would rule the webserver market" are stretches of imagination. IIS didn't even have memory separation of virtual webservers until Windows 2K and the IIS for that. I don't know if you've ever worked at a ISP that fields virtual hosts on NT, but I do and I can assure you that NT/IIS is far, far less profitable than even the worse UNIX webserver ever was. (and we started out with NetScrape's commercial server, not Apache) This is why there's so much work getting ASP and Front Page Extensions to run under Apache. I don't see anyone working to get mod_cgi to run under IIS, there's little interest in using IIS for anything serious. If you want to look at lost sales there's 3 major areas that I can point to where it's _clear_ that Microsoft has lost sales, they are: 1) mailservers. There are lots of people that switched away from proprietary Exchange servers and went to POP3/SMTP using Microsoft's mail clients, rather than pay for yet another Exchange upgrade. Consider that Exchange 5.0 and prior gave spammers wet dreams because there was no way to stop blind relaying through it. 2) Samba. It's clear that basic File & Print services are under a fundamental attack from Samba, because you do not have to purchase large numbers of expensive CAL's to run Samba. This is one reason why Microsoft is pushing Active Directory so much because AD is an unnecessairly complicated, proprietary, additional layer that is not needed on 99% of all installations. A Samba server is equivalent to an NT server without AD in File & Print, and I think that this is one reason that so many IT shops are going very slow in deploying Win2K, particularly overseas. 3) Internet Access. For years, in fact until Win2K, Microsoft's answer to an Internet Gateway device was to use Microsoft Proxy Server on NT 4 They had no address translation of any kind. Proxy servers are annoying and require a lot of expensive (in admin time, not direct cost) work loading Proxy Client on the clients, plus Proxy Client interferes with some network apps and greatly complicates troubleshooting network problems on a network. Plus that, it takes at least 256MB of ram on a Microsoft Proxy server for it to run at any halfway decent speed and most shops are cheap, particularly 3 years ago when Proxy first came out and were trying to run it on 64MB of ram wherupon it ran slow as molassas. There have been many, many shops that 3 years ago started out running Proxy then ditched it, and replaced it with LinkSys routers, or Win2K+NAT, or Linux+NAT. All 3 of those areas are ones that Microsoft _had_ market share that they see slipping to Linux. They've taken some defensive measures, like putting the kitchen sink into Exchange, creating Active Directory, and putting NAT into Win2K, but these don't stop the slipping. Even worse than that is that it's forcing them to replace profitable software lines with non-revenue generating ones - when they put NAT into Win2K they didn't charge anything more for it - but Win2K NAT basically killed the Microsoft Proxy Server which they were selling for $2K a pop. >Copyleft threatens Microsoft on >ideological grounds. Unencumbered threatens Microsoft on pragmatic >grounds. Both are real threats to them. > Microsoft has never cared one whit for any of those threats. What they are trying to do is build a profit model based on continual upgrades of software. For this to work means they need lots, and lots of _different_ software products, all going down that same 2-year upgrade cycle, and ALL generating revenue. Microsoft does not generate revenue for product lines like Internet Explorer because there is no profit there, thanks to Netscape. Netscape forced Microsoft to release a software product line that they were unable to sell, thus Microsoft put them out of business with illegal monopolistic practices. To do this meant forgoing all revenue from the IE product line. With Linux, Microsoft sees more and more add-on products going the same way the web browser went. Sure they are worried about Linux servers replacing Win2K servers, but this pales in comparison to their real fear. What fundamentally threatens them is Linux ruining their ability to come out with new "accessory" software products that they are able to charge money for, because free versions are already available under Linux. It's like service on a car. When a car dealership sells you a new car, they make most of their money from you continuing to bring it back to them for service. (which you do to mantain the warranty) When Microsoft sells you Win2K, they make most of their money from you buying the accessories like Proxy, Exchange, SQL Server, CAL's, etc. etc. If Linux already has not only the base OS but all the other crap, all for free, it's the "other stuff" is what is killing Microsoft's business model, not Linux itself. What they care about is the practical aspect of when they see the needle on the money graph starting to drop down because of all of this real software out there doing this, not ideological reasons why it's happening. They care about the results of the ideology, not the ideology itself. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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