Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 02:08:02 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>, "Technical Information" <tech_info@threespace.com> Cc: "FreeBSD Advocacy" <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: FreeBSD and Microsoft Message-ID: <001a01c0ffb1$d5a18300$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010628102030.B9802@lpt.ens.fr>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Rahul >Siddharthan >Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 1:21 AM >To: Technical Information >Cc: FreeBSD Advocacy >Subject: Re: FreeBSD and Microsoft > > >Technical Information said on Jun 27, 2001 at 22:08:31: >> Are you kidding? Microsoft has one of the best PR machines on the >> planet. If they wanna do some stuff to promote FreeBSD as a viable >> alternative to Linux and port some of their software, I hardly >see that as >> A Bad Thing (TM). > >I have to wonder, why the heck are Microsoft doing this? If more and >more people start to learn that Linux isn't the only MS-alternative >out there, there's another OS with friendlier licensing which does >everything linux can (including running linux binaries like >StarOffice) and is used by Microsoft itself (and on doing some >research, they'll also learn that the same OS is used by Apple), >exactly how does that help Microsoft? > Because to put it simply, Microsoft knows that Open Source will not go away. Even Linux, while they are probably operating under the delusion that they can completely wipe Linux off the face of the earth, will not go away. So they have 2 choices - fight against Open Source or work with it. Certainly, they can gain some things if they fight against Open Source, and in the beginning they tried this and undoubtedly they were successful in slowing the introduction of Open Source in some entities, thus slightly prolonging sales of Windows in those entities. But, Open Source did eventually get introduced, despite Microsoft. Now that the camel's nose is under the tent, so to speak, it's only a matter of time and perserverence before the rest of the camel is inside. And, the Open Source community was here a long time before Microsoft was, and will be around long after the current principals of Microsoft have gone to their graves. Microsoft, as big and as rich as it is, is nowhere near as large as Open Source is and simply does not have the collective perserverence that Open Source has. Nothing they can do will stop the inevitable increase in it's use. So, it's now time for Microsoft to decide how their own future as a company is going to play out in this environment. Naturally, they want to make sure that however they are going to fit in, it's going to be in an area that makes money. And, what they are seeing is examples of companies like IBM and Apple who are in effect taking a base of Open Source and creating a superset of functionality that is layered on top of it, then charging for that functionality. And, people are paying them for it. Now, in most cases, that layering is not really critical to the functionality of the base package. For example, a FreeBSD-based router is a FreeBSD-based router, whether or not it has a fancy web-based GUI on it that the administrator can use to manage it, or whether the administrator has to make the changes by editing /etc/rc.conf. But, the software market has shown repeatedly in the past that there's a lot more people willing to pay for the fancy web-based GUI than are interested in saving a few bucks by learning how to edit /etc/rc.conf. It also so happens that for various physological reasons having to do with how people interact with technology, that a good fancy web-based GUI is a lot more complicated and harder to write than the routing functionality is, because while the routing functionality only has to deal with clearly-defined inputs, the fancy GUI has to work for everyone from the most technologically knowledgeable network administrator to the moron off the street that has never seen a fileserver before and who bought your router because he saw a commercial about it with a cute girl in it. This is why so many really good Open Source software projects DON'T have a fancy GUI that takes a gagabit of processing speed to run - the designer writes the core of the code first then once it gets working, there's little incentive to spend a lot of effort writing GUI code that they personally would never use anyway. If you look closely at Microsoft products, you will see that in general they are mostly about style, not substance. For any given package, 90% of it is user-interface code, and about 10% of it actually does useful work. Since the majority of software purchasers pay for style before substance, it's no surprise why Microsoft has been so successful. Microsoft, contrary to what you might think, knows all about this. And, when they contemplated that their strategy of fighting against Open Source wasn't ultimately going to succeed, they obviously asked the question "why can't we apply our very successful 90/10 rule of GUI/substance code to Open Source UNIX as well?" 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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