After dunking himself in the Open Source community on multiple occasions, chatting to this and that self-acclaimed code-hacker and generally getting with the crowd, Bill hasn't yet found the Achilles Heel... so he has gone back to the very old-style FUD that we thought was gone and burried.
How sad.
The Free Software movement is dead. Linux doesn't exist in 2007. Even Linus has got a job today.
Uhhhhh, free speech, not free beer, does it need to be said one more time? This is pre-2000 stuff. Everyone gets it now, even Bill Hilf (when he can bring himself to admit it).
He said that most customers run a distribution - RedHat, Novell, Suse or Mandriva. Most of the work on maintaining the Linux kernel is done by developers working for these distributions, he noted"They are full-time employees, with 401K stock options. Some work for IBM or Oracle. What does that mean? It means that Linux doesn't exist any more in 2007. There is no free software movement. If someone says Linux is about Love, Peace and Harmony, I would tell them to do their research. There is no free software movement any more. There is big commercial [firms] like IBM and there is small commercial [firms] like Ubuntu," he said.
There he goes again, conflating libre-free with gratis-free and pretending he has reached a gigantic revelation. The GPL was never designed to be non-commercial. Other licenses were (and still are) explicitly non-commercial and GPL was a deliberate reaction against these licenses.
That's the dirty little secret. When I talk to open source developers, at least half are talking about Windows, from SugarCRM, MySQL, PHP. Every single one.
There's no secret that Open Source projects have released MS-Windows versions, and there's nothing "dirty" about it. Cygwin was one of the earliest projects, possibly with djgpp before that (although djgpp was targetted mostly at MSDOS). The primary objective of Open Source on the MS-Windows platform is to wean people away from proprietary systems and proprietary standards and make it easier for them to attain a state of "OS neutrality". The obvious examples being Open Office and Firefox. Is somehow a "dirty secret" that there is an MS-Windows version of Firefox? How absurd!
By the way, SugarCRM is not really Open Source, it's a horrible bastard-child where the authors took the Mozilla Public License, hacked it around with restrictions that made it incompatible with every other Open Source codebase (and possibly also violated the Copyright terms on the MPL itself). Then they go around selling themselves as Open Source hoping that gullible customers won't notice the difference. Now that's a dirty little secret.
The [EU's] request was, 'you have to be as interoperable with non-windows systems as you are with your own. That way we can guarantee you're not going to leverage your market leading position to disadvantage others.' We've participated actively to explain why it's not a simple problem; there's this complex balance between innovation and standardisation. I think the EU has been learning.
They have been learning how to deal with snakes who don't give a straight answer. Microsoft was asked to do just one specific thing which was give documentation of their existing SMB network protocols so that third party products could share files with the MS-Windows desktops. They failed to do that, not because of any inherent difficulty in writing documentation but because they never had any documentation in the first place. The only known documentation of these protocols was written by Andrew Tridgel and the Samba team, and the EU prosecutors knew that (which was why they asked).
Hilf accused his former employers, IBM, of starting a standards war simply because they wanted a part of the Office market. People do not want ODF (Open Document Format), but they want a way to control the information they create, he claimed."Standards is the first thing you go to in the competitive strategy playbook. Of course, IBM and Sun won't say that on the record. You create a problem that didn't exist and use standards to force a problem," he said.
More bellicose guff...
The problem people had, was dealing with no-brainer agencies who would ONLY accept documents in Microsoft Word format which was (and remains) a completely secret format properly satisfied only by one particular software package. Even MS-Word comes in many versions, each slightly incompatible with every other version and completely incompatible with earlier versions. Then the Mac versions are just fractionally different to the PC versions and so it goes.
It used to happen all the time that I was told, "We only deal with DOC files", and I have said, "I don't use Microsoft" and we have just reached a standoff right there. Open Office has improved the situation enormously, and the PDF standard is pretty good too (but Adobe wants to go mess it up again, bless their stupid little socks).
A year ago, someone developing a web service had to know all sorts of technologies such as UDDI, SOAP, WSDL and other "plumbing." Recently, Microsoft simplified all that with the Windows Communication Foundation (formerly known as Indigo). This means that a web service developer can simply say, "turn knob", rather than go through a whole library of low-level commands. This led to a multitude of new web applications being written, thus advancing the Microsoft platform plan.
Hmmm, "turn knob", that would be a verb followed by a noun or a command followed by parameters. By Jove! Bill Hilf has reinvented the command line interface. Such ingenious creativity... such strategy... such innovation. Next week he will rediscover Boolean algebra.
All going well, we will get an answer on 17 September 2007...
go vote it up or something :-)
It makes perfect sense if the Vole's real agenda is to continue to deny interoperability of its server software with and crush open source software. If that's the case, making the guy in charge of Microsoft's vision of open source "interoperability" also responsible for increasing its Windows server market share does fit.
From the Information Week article:
Hilf: When people buy commercial software, really what they're buying is a guarantee. You're buying a guarantee that what you have will perform, and has been tested and there's someone you can call up, and if things go really bad someone's liable if something doesn't work. You're buying this ecosystem of accountability. One of the challenges of open source and really the challenge with the open source business model is: it's hard to replicate that ecosystem of accountability and that guarantee.
They might think they are buying a guarantee but look closely. No Microsoft product provides a warranty that it will work as expected. Never have, probably never will. IBM are one of the very few companies who are willing to give a written commitment to fix bugs in their software, and IBM are one of the biggest embracers of Open Source. That should say it all really. Go back and read those EULAs and try to find the terms and conditions that provide for "this ecosystem of accountability".
How about one single court-case where Microsoft were held accountable for their security vulnerabilities? Just once. On the other hand, if you are a Red Hat Enterprise customer then you get a support phone number and a bug tracker and you can submit your bug reports and Red Hat do take you seriously (I've seen this from personal experience). They fix the problem and roll out the fix as part of their Red Hat network. Note that RedHat's written guarantee is quite limited:
10.1 General Representations and Warranties. Red Hat represents and warrants that: (a) the Services will be performed in a professional and workmanlike manner by qualified personnel; (b) it has the authority to enter into this Agreement with Client; and (c) to Red Hat's knowledge, the Software does not intentionally include malicious or hidden mechanisms or code for the purpose of damaging or corrupting the Software.10.2 Disclaimer of Warranty. EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY PROVIDED IN THIS SECTION 10, THE SERVICES AND THE SOFTWARE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE WARRANTIES IN THIS SECTION 10 ARE THE SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE WARRANTIES (EXPRESS OR IMPLIED) WITH RESPECT TO THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THIS AGREEMENT. NO ORAL OR WRITTEN INFORMATION OR ADVICE GIVEN BY RED HAT, ITS AFFILIATES, DEALERS, DISTRIBUTORS, AGENTS OR EMPLOYEES WILL CREATE A WARRANTY OR IN ANY WAY INCREASE THE SCOPE OF ANY WARRANTY PROVIDED HEREIN. RED HAT DOES NOT GUARANTEE OR WARRANT THAT THE USE OF THE SERVICES OR SOFTWARE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR FREE.
On the other hand, compare RedHat's support services to Microsoft's responsiveness and I think everyone will agree that RedHat provides better support. Follow the link above and check the appendices for a list of contractual response times for various severity of problem -- at least they can provide a guarantee of a response time, even if they don't guarantee to produce a working product.
Red Hat's been really the only proof that somebody can provide an overlay support service, and even then, I don't know that it's even that significant of a proof.
Hmmm, Oracle seem happy enough to provide support services, Novell also provide support. There's upcoming structure for the Ubuntu/Canonical support network and indeed many small businesses are providing support for Ubuntu. It remains to be seen how the whole Canonical organisation fits together but it seems to be growing in a semi-organic way at the moment which is OK. Then there's good old IBM who work with RedHat and also work on their own Linux strategy -- a combination of services and IBM software running on the Linux platform.
There's lots of participation of IBM in open source, but there's very little shared source code between IBM's shipping products and open source software.
A minute ago, the question was whether support services and accountability were offered, now suddenly it's about shared source code between products? Well, make up your mind, already!
For us, it's not a religion, there's literally feature requests from customers showing up in some of our competitive products, we said great, people want this stuff.
Freedom is not a religion, freedom is a philosophy. There's a difference. You don't need to believe in anything supernatural in order to support software freedom. You can be a complete empirical athiest or a loony God Botherer and both types of people can still agree on a basic philosophy that freedom provides the best results for the software industry. Best in terms of interpoerability, best for innovation and best for educating each new generation of coders by letting them study what has been done before.
Here's the latest FUD rundown:
Nothing new in that list then...
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