What?!?! This model may work in the happy land of loonix where everyone shares all source code and they all frolick in pastoral fields and bla bla bla, but in the real world where corporations that have a vested interest in actually, um... making money are developing the software, it all falls to hell. You can't release product specifications and allow the competition to clone your product and still expect to make money.
Sure you can. Just because other people understand how stuff interfaces with your product doesn't make it easy to actually make the product itself. M$ has gotten in trouble on more than one occasion for not releasing info necessary for competitors to make good software.
IBM tried this with their personal computers, and guess what? I don't see too many IBM PCs anymore.
And the world is better off for it. Why do you think IBM's beat apples? Apple clearly had a better product in the Mac. PC's won because they were cloned and more affordable. There was competition in this marketplace, so consumers were drawn to it. Prices were far better. In the end, neither Apple nor IBM won the PC wars, but the consumers did. We can order PC's from any number of vendors, and they are all essentially intercompatible, and that's why PC's start at $300 from Dell nowadays instead of the $3000 they started at in the mid 80's.
Fact of the matter is that if someone releases their product specs, someone else is going to come along, produce it for less money, and steal the initial company's profits. This is why we have patents: so somebody else doesn't come along and start making money form my product.
That's the point. We need other vendors in the marketplace for the good of consumers. As it is now, M$ can treat its customers horribly, yet many have no choice but to continue to support them. If there were more competitors that were binary compatible, M$ would be forced to do what was best for consumers. That's the ultimate point of capitalism. Competition means consumers win.
We must not allow patents that help enforce monopolies? Patents by nature enforce monopolies. You can't just say that because something is the most widely successful product on the market, the patent has to be revoked because it enforces a monopoly. Or that because something is the only product of its kind on the market, the patent is null and void because there is no competition.
They already have copyright. That's enough protection. What that means is that you can't copy someone's code/program and distribute it, as they hold the rights to it. This is a good thing to protect intellectual property. What you should not be able to do, and which patents would allow, is patenting of silly concepts like "scroll bars" or "recycle bin". Patents are not needed. Fortunately, the EU agreed, and voted overwhelmingly to ban software patents in Europe.
Quite frankly, Microsoft has been a monopoly since it first routed *nix back to the server market where change is bad and left Apple to the snobs of the computing world
M$ never routed *nix back to the server market. That would imply *nix was on the desktop in any meaningful way, ever. There wasn't even a *nix kernel capable of running PC's when M$ was gaining dominance in the PC market. It was a server/mainframe only OS that ran on proprietary chipsets and cost a fortune. The first reasonably full featured *nix kernel for x86 was BSD, which I believe was released in the mid 90's, long after M$ was dominant on the PC desktop.
And now, ten years after the 1995 of Windows, the world is even more under Microsoft control. Kudos Microsoft. With a shrewd purchase of Seattle Computer Products' Quick and Dirty Operating System in 1980, Microsoft set the stage to dominate the world of operating systems. Can we blame Microsoft for their shrewd, and often predatory business practices?
It's not about blame. It's about acting to preserve competition under the Sherman Antitrust Act. It's about doing what is best for consumers. As Teddy Roosevelt believed, no corporation should ever feel it has more power than the government, over anything, because it doesn't, and the government is essentially the power of the people.
Take a look at the much publicized Internet Explorer fiasco for instance. When IE was released, Netscape was the titan. In fact, Netscape had been a titan since its beta release, a fact attributed to the fact that it was a far superior product to anything else available at the time. Then came Internet Explorer, a product from Microsoft that came bundled with their operating system, and promised greater integration into the operating system itself than any third party product could offer. In this respect, Microsoft was justified to release it with their OS. They developed IE to work seamlessly with Windows and to ultimately help run Windows itself. This is something that Netscape could never do without Windows source code, and that isn't likely to occur.
Exactly the point. M$ used its knowledge of the OS to prevent netscape from competing. This was found to be illegal, and M$ was ordered by the courts to release full info on its API's so that competitors could produce competing software. M$ also won by bundling IE. Many people just used IE cause it was there, and netscape required a download. The same thing is happening now with WMP versus RP and some others. Fortunately, the EU, South Korea, and some other govts. are requiring that M$ unbundle WMP from windows.
Furthermore, Microsoft has often left innovation for someone else to do, and instead has focused on developing products similar to current hot products, and bundling them with their own software suites. Why should I pay for a web browser when I can just get one for free with Windows? Is this any different from other operating systems? No, Apple has Safari, and *nix has... Lynx and about a thousand other browsers that offer varying levels of functionality.
Other than Opera, pretty much all browsers are, and have always been, free. I was browsing the web in college when NCSA mosaic was big, then came netscape, then IE, then mozilla, then firefox, etc. All were 100% free. It's not a matter of consumers having to pay for other browsers.
Microsoft exists to make money.
Yes, but the government does not. The govt. exists to do what is in the best interest of the people. Monopolies are not in the best interest of the people, and hence should be broken up.
By making money, they are inevitably going to cause a loss of profits for somebody else. By making lots of money, they are inevitably going to push smaller competitors out of business. This is how the world of business works, and to deny it is to deny reality itself. But to punish them for being successful is akin to handicapping an opposing football team for being a superior competitor.
All companies compete. However, M$ has used far more predatory and illegal business practices than any other company. Also, to some degree, we do handicap the best sports teams. Do you know what a draft is? It exists to keep major league baseball competitive. Each year, the team that sucked the most gets first pick of the best players. They then must play for that team for a period of 7? years until they become a free agent (unless the team trades them earlier). This ensures that baseball teams remain competitive, as that is what is in the best interest of the sport and the people. In this case, we must maintain competition in the computer industry, as that leads to greater innovation and is in the best interests of the industry and the people of the world.
Oh! The Kernel went from 2.6.12 in June, to 2.6.13 in August, to 2.6.14 in October! 3 updates to the kernel itself in a matter of 5 months.
It doesn't matter though. For example, let's take Mathematica. It's a commercially developed linux application (and one of the few commercially developed linux apps I have at my fingertips atm). The only requirement is that the kernel be >= to a certain version. Beyond that, it doesn't matter. Any distro, any window manager, any kernel version after 2.2 will all work. The comparisons you are making are absurd. It's not far off me complaining that windows differs too much to develop for, as people use different desktop wallpapers, and it would have to be tested with all the possible wallpapers! Some things simply do not matter. Window managers are not OS's. They just control the pretty graphics in the background, the virtual desktops, the borders around windows, etc. They don't run gui software. X11 does that.
Yes there are more versions of linux kernels than windows, but there are different versions of the windows kernel in each OS. There are different builds of Windows 2000 for example. It doesn't really matter which you are using though, as they maintain backwards compatibility.
To think that in its current state Linux is ready to be a business and consumer grade OS is optimistic at best and stupid at worst.
Linux and BSD are already commercial grade OS's. They're present on an enormous number of servers, and those servers are consistently demonstrated to be more stable and secure than their windows counterparts.
Most of the linux developers really don't "program for a WINDOW MANAGER". Which really is a shame, because for linux to ever get accepted as a mainstream alternative OS, there is going to have to be a lot of work.
This just shows a complete lack of understanding of the division of labor between the OS, X11, the desktop manager, and the window manager. Go do some reading before you even try to discuss this stuff.
Why would anyone want to program something for a window manager when most Linux junkies are too busy running everything straight off the console?
Honestly, linux and windows are pretty much the same here. You can run an app by clicking on an icon or you can run it by typing it into a cmd window/xterm. Both OS's offer both options. So I don't see your point at all.
So what does a window manager have to do with all this? Well, these people certainly can't be expected to bother with a command line, so they are going to want to point and click their way around an OS. And if they want to point and click their way around, they need a window manager that works all the time, every time. They need every program to interact with the window manager perfectly.
Linux already has this, and has had it for many years. If an app wants to add a menu entry or a desktop icon, it can do so trivially.
This is something that is a long, long, way off for Linux, and will probably not happen until a project like GNOME that focuses on simplicity and usability gets universally adopted.
Umm no, Linux had this in like 1995.
Linux is not a business class OS, and the people that try and espouse the benefits of linux over anything are only kidding themselves. Sure, your OS is built like a tank, but it is a tank that you have to drive not by a steering wheel, but by typing in geographic coordinates. Do you think the other 99% of the population will stand for that? No, they'd rather have a cheap sedan that, while it has trouble climbing hills and has a leaky fuel line, is easy to use and even comes with a GPS navigation system to make it even easier to get from place to place.
Then why is linux still chipping away at M$'s market share in the server market? *nux already runs most of the web. IIS has a tiny market share, about 1/5 that of Apache. The server world is owned by *nix. Computing clusters are completely dominated by $nix. The only thing linux has made lousy headway in is the desktop, and even that is growing steadily.
You seem to think you "know so much" about Linux and operating systems in general, but if you really did you would have a lot more respect for Apple and Microsoft for the products they have put together. Linux isn't even in the same ballpark; it isn't anywhere close...
You're completely wrong. Pick up a Xandros OCE CD and put it into the drive. The installer is easier than windows. My grandmother can do this without an issue. You get a pretty gui interface, all set up automatically. Installation of programs is EASIER than with windows. You don't even have to go on the web to download stuff. You just open up a gui menu app and choose the app you want, it goes and downloads, installs, and configures it.
Windows really has two advantages. Familiarity and 3rd party support. The first is simply that people are used to it, because its dominant, so they are comfortable with it. The second is that more software and hardware are made for windows than for linux. The reason this happens is two fold. First of all, it's market share. If you want to make a program, would you target the OS on 95% of the computers in the world or the one on 5%? Pretty obvious there. The other is that M$ prevents, illegally btw, companies from producing linux software. There was a company that made a linux antivirus suite (I can't remember the name now). M$ bought the company, and discontinued the linux version. Corel made a linux office suite. M$ bought a share in Corel contingent on them dropping the linux office suite. Dell can't produce a linux desktop, or M$ will increase their pricing on windows. That's illegal btw, but we all know they do it. Same reason Dell can't release AMD pc's, Intel will jack up their chip pricing. This is the kind of thing that must be stopped. Let M$ try to compete by just making a better product, but they must be stopped from destroying the competition through buyouts, threats, and price punishment.
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