[NEWS] Is Microsoft Still a Monopoly?

[MRD]

First off, server grade and business grade are two completely different measurements.

Please define exactly what you mean by "business grade" so that we can discuss it further. Apparently I do not understand what you're getting at.

To further explain my issues with window managers, yes you are right that the window manager performs very trivial tasks and should not be an issue. However, there are many problems that occur due to improper window manager handling that do not happen on Windows or OS-X in similar situations.
Examples are:
Root window conflicts
Banner/decorations showing up or not showing up
hotkey conflicts
resizing/minimizing issues
alphablending issues
Not to mention numerous problems with icons
While many of these errors are relatively easily fixed, they are not the sort of thing that most computer users are going to be able to fix. And that is precisely who needs to be targeted if Linux is ever going to be successful on the desktop.

First of all, I use linux 24/7 on 10 different computers. I have used it in the workplace as well. I have never seen ANY of these issues you talk about from window managers. The existence of different window managers in linux is a great strength of the OS. In Windows, it's one size fits all. If you have a system that can't handle all the eye candy without losing speed, too bad. If you prefer a different look, too bad. With linux, you get a lot more freedom, choice, and power, without any real drawbacks. You are attempting to turn what is a huge advantage into a disadvantage with unsubstantiated scare tactics.

You should look into the cost of producing hardware in the mid 80s, and and the cost of producing it now. Therein lie most of the story of why PCs are vastly less expensive. Secondly, saying that consumers won is an irrelevent point. It was IBM's choice to allow their PCs to be cloned, and for that choice they paid the price of ultimately getting pushed out of the market. Similarly, it is Microsoft's choice to produce a closed source OS and not allow it to be cloned and thereby ensure their sole ownership of the product they produce.

Well, certainly there are innate changes in the price of hardware, and hardware has gotten cheaper partly because of the cost of production. However, the reason computers are as cheap as they are is competition. Without it, they would be far more expensive, as a company with a monoplistic hold on computer hardware would have little reason to lower prices. Intel's profit margins dropped substantially when AMD started making a truly competitive chip. The same happened with computers.

As for cloning M$ windows, it's already been done. There is an open source clone of Windows called ReactOS. It's still VERY beta atm and not that stable. It's really not a viable alternative to windows yet, but it shows a great deal of promise. It is binary and driver compatible with windows, meaning it will run any windows software (in theory, not in practice... yet) and drivers written for windows will work with it. Personally, I'm very hopeful.

No. That is not the ultimate point of capitalism. Capitalism is a system where capital is built through private production and traded on a free market economy for profit. Competition is a side effect of the free market economy.

Why capitalism? Why not communism? I'm a capitalist, and the arguments I use to support capitalism boil down to one thing. It is what is best for the people as a whole. Why is capitalism best for the people? Because competition encourages innovation and controls prices. Competition is not just a side effect of a free market economy, it is an integral part of it. Competition is WHY capitalism is good.

Furthermore, copyrights and patents exist to regulate fair production and encourage innovation.

Did you know that the US is among a very small minority of countriesin the world to support software patents? The EU recently voted 648 to 14 against software patents, stating that they stifled competition and innovation and were not in the best interests of the computing industry or the citizens of the EU. Only the US is so completely sold out to megacorporations like M$ to support software patents on ridiculous and trivial things.

You really, really need to read up on the definition of what a copyright and what a patent is. As for the patenting of scroll bars and recycle bins, this is more an issue of overwhelmed patent bureaus and the fact that software is still a relatively new variable thrown into the equation.

Actually, I know quite a bit about it, having been very active in the recent fight against software patents. I'm involved with several organizations dedicated to fighting software patents. They are utterly ridiculous.

Here is just a sampling of how ridiculous software patents are.
http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/samples/index.en.html
This is not the exception but the rule. Copyright already provides more than sufficient protection for intellectual property. Patents are ridiculous in software. How ironic it is that M$ would now support software patents, the company that stole every idea that anyone ever came up with and made it their own, forcing the original innovators out of business.

Before Microsoft there was Unix and its variants, and there was Apple.

Not for desktop pc's there wasn't. It only ran on mainframes and other very expensive architectures (like Sun). No regular person could afford a *nix based computer for his home, and there was no software targeted to that market at all. All of the software was proprietary stuff that ran in large corporations for dedicated purposes, like the systems that do billing for the phone company, etc.

Yes, the government does have to make money.

I never said the govt. doesn't have to make money. Of course it needs income. That's not the point. The point is that while companies exist with the primary purpose of making money, the govt. does not. The govt. exists to serve the people, and money is just a means to an end.

Monopolies are not inherently bad, they only become a problem when they abuse their power. In fact, some monopolies are in the best interest of the people, gas and electric companies are government regulated monopolies that generally operate in the best interest of the people.

Monopolies are inherently bad. Any unregulated monopoly will abuse its position. As you've said before, the point of a company is to make money. I agree. Thus, it is consistent with the company's mission to rip off customers if it can get away with it. That's exactly what they do. In some cases, regulated monopolies do a good job, but that's due to external legal constraints imposed by the govt, not because monopolies are good. If they were so good, or even neutral, they wouldn't need special regulation to prevent abuses.

Do a bit of digging on virtually any major company and you will be shocked. They didn't get where they are today by always staying on the right side of legality. Apple is a good place to start, they have done things that would make Thomas Penfield Jackson scream. Microsoft is not out of the norm for any other company its size. The really sad thing is that some of the most dastardly things businesses do are just slightly within the bounds of legality.

I agree on the last point, about how much of what they do is legal, despite it being evil. However, M$ has taken predatory business practices to a new level. They are not just like their peers, they are far beyond any other company out there. They have enormous power and they use it. In doing so, they stifle innovation and prevent new and beneficial ideas and technologies from reaching the consumer. That is why we must stop them by invoking the Sherman anti-trust act.

Your first two examples are not illegal. You need to read up on takeovers; there is nothing illegal about completely purchasing or purchasing a share of a competitor. If a company so desires, they could offer to buy the publicly traded stock of a company for a greater value than it is worth for the sole purpose of amassing a controlling share to take over the board of directors, and thus control the management. This is not illegal.

I agree completely, you missed my point. What I was showing is that M$ uses predatory business practices to destroy the competition rather than producing a superior product. They win through business and legal means, not by producing the best product.

Furthermore, saying that Dell can't release linux PCs because Microsoft will raise prices on Windows is a false point because Dell does provide linux systems.

I should have been more specific. Dell does produce enterprise linux systems, but not consumer linux pc's. Call them up and ask them to sell you a linux pc. They can't do it, because it violates the terms of the contract with M$. Even further, they can't sell you a PC without an OS. They have a deal with M$ that every PC they sell must include an OS. This is another attempt by M$ to prevent people from running a PC without giving M$ a piece of the pie. This is wrong though. Consumers deserve a choice. They should be able to buy a PC with linux, windows, nothing, dos, cp/m, or whatever. We deserve freedom to choose our OS.

Don't get me wrong, I do not hate linux. But in terms of where Microsoft is making their money, why they are making their money, and why they will continue to make their money, Microsoft has a superior operating system.

I disagree completely. M$'s OS is not superior. They win by buying out the competition or forcing it out of business, by stealing ideas and giving them away as part of an OS, just to drive other companies out of business, and to scare potential competitors from entering the field. They're a coercive monopoly that prevents anyone else from entering the playing field with an enormous amount of money, a huge team of lawyers, and a complete lack of scruples.

As for the superior OS, don't try to tell me about superior OS... I have had to reformat and reinstall my entire windows partition twice this week due to spyware/viruses that I couldn't get rid of. I do run antivirus software, including the M$ windows defender, and anti spyware software (adaware and spybot). All of this combined can't keep my system safe. Yet in 8 years of linux use, I have not once had a single case of malware on my linux install.

Superior OS my ass.

 

[Goateh]

Dear god... thats one hell of a reply O-o

 

[hafa]

Dear god... thats one hell of a reply O-o

I agree, kudos to MRD for his thoroughly civilized and well-thought out responses throughout this thread.

That said, I just wanted to mention one word:

Adobe

As soon as Adobe creates Linux versions of their products, I'll be on board. Folks in the graphics/print industry depend on Illustrator, Photoshop and In Design to get the work done. While Gimp is available, it is a pale shadow of Photoshop and there is nothing to compare to Illustrator or In Design. Likewise, no Linux products are available which offer the depth and power of Dreamweaver or Flash for the web developer community.

 

[Goateh]

I may not be a fan of the web/graphics design part of Adboe, but I whole heartedly agree... I am a rather large fan of the premiere/video packages.
I have yet to see anything linux based to match Premiere/After Effects (Cinerella doesn't seem that great )

 

[MRD]

I just got a big survey from Adobe in my email asking me about Adobe and linux. I think they're considering it. I agree that it would really help linux out a lot to have Adobe products on the platform. Pagemaker more than anything I think, as Scribus is really not even close to it in power and ease of use. I still can't figure out how to use Scribus, although I've been told it's fairly powerful now.

Personally, I disagree with your assessment of gimp vs photoshop, I think they're pretty comparable, although quite different in how they work. I suppose it's a matter of personal preference though.

 

[hafa]

...Personally, I disagree with your assessment of gimp vs photoshop, I think they're pretty comparable, although quite different in how they work. I suppose it's a matter of personal preference though.

I tried the gimp a couple of years back, so my experience may be horribly dated, but at that time, gimp lacked:

Sophisticated layer masking
Support of LAB channels
Channel masking
Layer-based text editing and effects
Adjustable cloning tools
Unsharp layer masking
Navigation/thumbnail support
Vector Path support
Gradient and pattern layer overlay

There were several other abilities which made it unusable at the professional level; perhaps these issues have been subsequently addressed.

 

[MRD]

It may be that they have been, and it may be that my own needs are too simplistic to notice the difference. I would say that certainly for the vast majority of people, gimp is more than sufficient. However, maybe there are some features that professionals would really miss.

I know it has come a long way in the last couple years. I know a number of photo professionals use this software instead of photoshop (and vice versa). I'm not sure what the breakdown is, although I imagine Photoshop has the greater share of the market. You should give it a try... I'd be interested to hear how it now compares to Photoshop from the point of view of someone more sophisticated in image manipulation software than myself. I don't even understand what most of the things you listed mean. =p

 

[futura2001]

Please define exactly what you mean by "business grade" so that we can discuss it further. Apparently I do not understand what you're getting at.

By business grade, I mean an operating system that is both functional, stable, intuitive, and compatible enough for every day business use. Supported, and tested so that updates do not regularly increase instability and intercompatibility issues. Compatible with hardware to a degree that hardware installation does not leave one wondering if new hardware will work. Supported, so that if one attaches a 3D scanner or high end midi keyboard to their computer, it will work out of the box because it has already been configured to run on that OS. Linux is starting to get support, nVidia, 3d Labs, and ATi offer linux drivers now, but linux is still a far cry from where Windows is at, which does have a lot to do with the popularity of the operating system and Microsoft having worked with developers to optimize software for their operating system.

First of all, I use linux 24/7 on 10 different computers. I have used it in the workplace as well. I have never seen ANY of these issues you talk about from window managers. The existence of different window managers in linux is a great strength of the OS. In Windows, it's one size fits all. If you have a system that can't handle all the eye candy without losing speed, too bad. If you prefer a different look, too bad. With linux, you get a lot more freedom, choice, and power, without any real drawbacks. You are attempting to turn what is a huge advantage into a disadvantage with unsubstantiated scare tactics.

First off, there are versions of Windows for virtually all the systems that linux scales to, from embedded platforms all the way up to supercomputer clusters. Second, perhaps my experiences with linux are out of the norm and due to user error, but then again I consider having to reinstall windows twice a week due to malware to fall in the same category. If you say that these are issues rarely encountered, I am inclined to believe you because you appear to know more about linux than I do. However, your issues with Windows appear to stem from a lack of knowledge thereof, and by stepping back and looking at this debate from a different perspective, a rational explanation may be that both our issues stem from personal bias from our own experiences and do not apply to this debate.

Well, certainly there are innate changes in the price of hardware, and hardware has gotten cheaper partly because of the cost of production. However, the reason computers are as cheap as they are is competition. Without it, they would be far more expensive, as a company with a monoplistic hold on computer hardware would have little reason to lower prices. Intel's profit margins dropped substantially when AMD started making a truly competitive chip. The same happened with computers.

And you know what? AMD did not need any help to get there, they made it there on their own despite the arguably predatory practices of Intel. AMD started the "race" at around the same time as Intel, and thus was able to keep some pace with Intel. In the desktop operating systems "race", Apple and ultimately Unix to a lesser degree started before Microsoft, Microsoft pulled ahead, and linux didn't even start competing for several more years. Mind you, this is a very simplified explanation because I don't see a need to get enamored in the legal quagmires pertinent to both examples; this is just an explanation of what happened.

Why capitalism? Why not communism? I'm a capitalist, and the arguments I use to support capitalism boil down to one thing. It is what is best for the people as a whole. Why is capitalism best for the people? Because competition encourages innovation and controls prices. Competition is not just a side effect of a free market economy, it is an integral part of it. Competition is WHY capitalism is good.

No, competition stems from profit (and an abundance thereof) which is inherent to capitalism. There are many cases in a capitalist economic system where one can have profit without competition because the profit margin is low enough that there is no gain in competing for the crumbs. Such can be defined as a niche market, and it may be controlled by a monopoly or an oligopoly.

As for the issue with software patents, I agree that the system is flawed. There is a direct correlation between the rampant rise in software patents to the fall in research and development in the software industry. This most likely stems from the fact that even today we do not have a legal definition of what exactly a software patent entails. However, I believe the system needs reform before it needs to be eliminated.

Monopolies are inherently bad. Any unregulated monopoly will abuse its position. As you've said before, the point of a company is to make money. I agree. Thus, it is consistent with the company's mission to rip off customers if it can get away with it. That's exactly what they do. In some cases, regulated monopolies do a good job, but that's due to external legal constraints imposed by the govt, not because monopolies are good. If they were so good, or even neutral, they wouldn't need special regulation to prevent abuses.

If monopolies and oligopolies are by nature bad, then the capitalist system is inherently flawed. Monopolies and oligopolies will arise in a capitalist system by nature. Too much governmental regulation, and the whole "free market economy" becomes a joke. Should we punish businesses for being successful?

I agree on the last point, about how much of what they do is legal, despite it being evil. However, M$ has taken predatory business practices to a new level. They are not just like their peers, they are far beyond any other company out there. They have enormous power and they use it. In doing so, they stifle innovation and prevent new and beneficial ideas and technologies from reaching the consumer. That is why we must stop them by invoking the Sherman anti-trust act.

Yes, but you see, if what Microsoft does is legal and they are not found to be using their monopolistic power in ways that demand legal action, the government cannot legally do anything.

I agree completely, you missed my point. What I was showing is that M$ uses predatory business practices to destroy the competition rather than producing a superior product. They win through business and legal means, not by producing the best product.

What, like buying out smaller companies that develop superior products so that they can market them as their own, poaching talent from other companies, using a veritable army of top notch lawyers to get their way and the like? Tell me, what large corporation doesn't partake in such practices? Even Google, currently called the "good guy" and "do-gooder" does this. And to expect a business to do otherwise is ludicrous; you might as well expect a hawk to not eat mice.

I should have been more specific. Dell does produce enterprise linux systems, but not consumer linux pc's. Call them up and ask them to sell you a linux pc. They can't do it, because it violates the terms of the contract with M$. Even further, they can't sell you a PC without an OS. They have a deal with M$ that every PC they sell must include an OS. This is another attempt by M$ to prevent people from running a PC without giving M$ a piece of the pie. This is wrong though. Consumers deserve a choice. They should be able to buy a PC with linux, windows, nothing, dos, cp/m, or whatever. We deserve freedom to choose our OS.

Yes, they do sell computers without an OS installed. They come with a FreeDOS disk, but there is nothing on the hard drive. Furthermore, if Dell is under so much pressure from Microsoft pushing its weight around and telling Dell that linux is a no go, why did Dell invest $100 million in Red Hat? This doesn't seem like something that a business being coerced by Microsoft would be doing. Unless of course it was a takeover ploy to perfectly legally gain control of the Red Hat board and force them to stop making their OS, but since Dell ships servers running Red Hat, I seriously doubt that.

...by stealing ideas and giving them away as part of an OS...

Ideas are generally not copyrightable, as copyrights protect mostly finished works. Most of the issues with software patents stem from the fact that ideas can be patented. So are you saying that software patents need to be changed so that businesses and individuals cannot patent ideas, and thus similar products can show up on the market if the implementation is sufficiently different, but when Microsoft does this it is suddenly bad? Microsoft is not primarily an innovator, they take something that is already on the market and make their own version that is good enough to make money. It may not be a superior product, it may not be particularly good, but the masses don't care and would rather stick with a recognizable name. Take tabbed browsing in IE7 for example, tabbed browsing already existed long before Microsoft got around to it, but it offers easier web browsing and so Microsoft decided to implement it as well.

As for the superior OS, don't try to tell me about superior OS... I have had to reformat and reinstall my entire windows partition twice this week due to spyware/viruses that I couldn't get rid of. I do run antivirus software, including the M$ windows defender, and anti spyware software (adaware and spybot). All of this combined can't keep my system safe. Yet in 8 years of linux use, I have not once had a single case of malware on my linux install.

Without even asking what can of worms you got into that required you to reinstall twice in one week, it is ultimately the user that keeps a system safe, not the software. You want to know why you have never had a single case of malware on linux? Because the miscreants spending their days dreaming up new and more infective malware couldn't care less about linux. Why bother kicking the little penguin around who doesn't even have 10% of the market, letalone 5%. Besides, those people running linux actually know what they're doing, unlike majority of people that run Windows who can't even be bothered to run anything but an admin account and are too lazy to even password it!
Security by obscurity is not security at all.
Now imagine a bizzaro universe where Linux held 92% of the desktop OS marketshare and Windows was the underdog coming in at a lean 3.2% market share: who would those same malware writers be targeting? Oh, I think they would be targeting Linux. I bet we would see more process hiding on linux, alterations the sys_call table, heap and stack overflows, process forking, and so on. Furthermore, I must stress that one of things I really do admire about linux and the community that maintains it is the speed at which things are fixed. However, in the event that linux was under the magnifying glass to the degree that Windows is, I am not sure that the community would be able to keep up. While I do not mean to say that Microsoft has done a particularly good job maintaining its OS in the face of multiple new and unique exploits being found every week (heh, there are still security risks from two years ago that haven't been fixed, which also helps to explain why malware has gotten so prevalent) that result in varying levels of security compromise, I do not think that linux community would do much better under similar circumstances.

 

[MRD]

By business grade, I mean an operating system that is both functional, stable, intuitive, and compatible enough for every day business use. Supported, and tested so that updates do not regularly increase instability and intercompatibility issues. Compatible with hardware to a degree that hardware installation does not leave one wondering if new hardware will work. Supported, so that if one attaches a 3D scanner or high end midi keyboard to their computer, it will work out of the box because it has already been configured to run on that OS. Linux is starting to get support, nVidia, 3d Labs, and ATi offer linux drivers now, but linux is still a far cry from where Windows is at, which does have a lot to do with the popularity of the operating system and Microsoft having worked with developers to optimize software for their operating system.

Linux has all of your prerequisites except 1. It does not have the same level of hardware compatibility as windows, but that's not an OS defect, that's a function of what 3rd party hardware developers produce. There is plenty of compatible software for linux, it's just different than what you are used to for windows. It's very high quality. Just because, say, excel doesn't run on it doesn't matter any more than the fact that gnumeric doesn't run in windows. Also, by your definition, Mac doesn't fit the bill as a business class OS either, as most software is not available for Macs and most hardware won't work with them.

First off, there are versions of Windows for virtually all the systems that linux scales to, from embedded platforms all the way up to supercomputer clusters. Second, perhaps my experiences with linux are out of the norm and due to user error, but then again I consider having to reinstall windows twice a week due to malware to fall in the same category. If you say that these are issues rarely encountered, I am inclined to believe you because you appear to know more about linux than I do. However, your issues with Windows appear to stem from a lack of knowledge thereof, and by stepping back and looking at this debate from a different perspective, a rational explanation may be that both our issues stem from personal bias from our own experiences and do not apply to this debate.

Well, I don't install windows 2x every week, this was an unusually bad one. =p I download all my installers to a file server so that I don't have to redownload every time I install stuff. After I reformatted windows due to a trojan downloader virus I could not get rid of (I tried norton av, macafee, spybot, hijackthis, clamav, pandascan, and some other random ****, nothing worked), I reinstalled, and it somehow got back. So I blew out my download directory on the fileserver, re-downloaded everything, and so far so good. The thing though is that malware is just a complete non issue in linux. I mean, it just doesn't happen. Ever. Never once have I had anything more malicious in linux than a tracking cookie.

Also, M$ JUST released the cluster version of windows a couple months ago, til then there was nothing. Also, I don't think there are versions of windows available for sun sparc, alphas, ibm as400 mainframes, etc. I am not 100% sure, so if I'm wrong, give me a link.

And you know what? AMD did not need any help to get there, they made it there on their own despite the arguably predatory practices of Intel. AMD started the "race" at around the same time as Intel, and thus was able to keep some pace with Intel. In the desktop operating systems "race", Apple and ultimately Unix to a lesser degree started before Microsoft, Microsoft pulled ahead, and linux didn't even start competing for several more years. Mind you, this is a very simplified explanation because I don't see a need to get enamored in the legal quagmires pertinent to both examples; this is just an explanation of what happened.

You keep saying that, but it's not true. There simply was no form of unix for any desktop architecture until long after M$ was completely dominant on the desktop. There was Mac OS, but that didn't run on x86, and was not unix based back then. Unix simply didn't enter the desktop realm until much later.

No, competition stems from profit (and an abundance thereof) which is inherent to capitalism. There are many cases in a capitalist economic system where one can have profit without competition because the profit margin is low enough that there is no gain in competing for the crumbs. Such can be defined as a niche market, and it may be controlled by a monopoly or an oligopoly.

Not the point. Competition is WHY capitalism is good. It's why people generally benefit from capitalism as a society. Also, competition is still an inherent part of capitalism, even if you can find a few places where it does not exist.

As for the issue with software patents, I agree that the system is flawed. There is a direct correlation between the rampant rise in software patents to the fall in research and development in the software industry. This most likely stems from the fact that even today we do not have a legal definition of what exactly a software patent entails. However, I believe the system needs reform before it needs to be eliminated.

We never had software patents for the first 25+ yrs of computing, and it didn't cause any problems. Copyright was more than enough protection for ideas. Most countries still don't have software patents. They're a very new entity, having come about in the last couple years in the US. It's not like it's some long standing part of our system.

If monopolies and oligopolies are by nature bad, then the capitalist system is inherently flawed. Monopolies and oligopolies will arise in a capitalist system by nature. Too much governmental regulation, and the whole "free market economy" becomes a joke. Should we punish businesses for being successful?

Actually, the possibility of creating coercive monopolies is considered by many (including me) to be the main flaw of capitalism. We don't punish them for being successful per se, but we do take action when their market dominance threatens the consumer. That is what anti-trust is all about. That is what broke up the phone company, standard oil, and a number of other megacorps.

Yes, but you see, if what Microsoft does is legal and they are not found to be using their monopolistic power in ways that demand legal action, the government cannot legally do anything.

Sure it can. We can pass new laws preventing certain types of predatory business practices that create monopolies and remove competition from the marketplace. All companies should be aware that the good of the people is more important than their profits, and that if necessary, the government will act to reintroduce competition into a monopolized market sector.

What, like buying out smaller companies that develop superior products so that they can market them as their own, poaching talent from other companies, using a veritable army of top notch lawyers to get their way and the like? Tell me, what large corporation doesn't partake in such practices? Even Google, currently called the "good guy" and "do-gooder" does this. And to expect a business to do otherwise is ludicrous; you might as well expect a hawk to not eat mice.

No other company has ever engaged in predatory business practices on the scale of M$. No other company is responsible for putting so many competitors out of business and preventing so many good ideas from taking hold.

Yes, they do sell computers without an OS installed. They come with a FreeDOS disk, but there is nothing on the hard drive. Furthermore, if Dell is under so much pressure from Microsoft pushing its weight around and telling Dell that linux is a no go, why did Dell invest $100 million in Red Hat? This doesn't seem like something that a business being coerced by Microsoft would be doing. Unless of course it was a takeover ploy to perfectly legally gain control of the Red Hat board and force them to stop making their OS, but since Dell ships servers running Red Hat, I seriously doubt that.

Actually, you just proved my point. Why not just ship a PC without an OS? Why include FreeDOS? Because M$ makes them do it. They found a loophole. I expect M$ will take action to plug it up soonish. Also, the consumer can't get the freedos thing, that's enterprise only also. Dell even made it clear that this was not intended for linux servers, but for companies that already have valid M$ licenses.

Ideas are generally not copyrightable, as copyrights protect mostly finished works. Most of the issues with software patents stem from the fact that ideas can be patented. So are you saying that software patents need to be changed so that businesses and individuals cannot patent ideas, and thus similar products can show up on the market if the implementation is sufficiently different, but when Microsoft does this it is suddenly bad? Microsoft is not primarily an innovator, they take something that is already on the market and make their own version that is good enough to make money. It may not be a superior product, it may not be particularly good, but the masses don't care and would rather stick with a recognizable name. Take tabbed browsing in IE7 for example, tabbed browsing already existed long before Microsoft got around to it, but it offers easier web browsing and so Microsoft decided to implement it as well.

When other companies do it, it introduces a competitive product into the market and improves the life of consumers. When M$ does it, it's to push a company out of the market and create a monopoly, so it's bad. The whole idea is that the laws need to foster the creation of a truly competitive marketplace. All forms of coercion should be removed. Deals that prevent a company from selling a competitor's products should be illegal (actually, I think they are, as AMD is now suing Intel for having done just that with Dell and other companies).

Without even asking what can of worms you got into that required you to reinstall twice in one week, it is ultimately the user that keeps a system safe, not the software. You want to know why you have never had a single case of malware on linux? Because the miscreants spending their days dreaming up new and more infective malware couldn't care less about linux. Why bother kicking the little penguin around who doesn't even have 10% of the market, letalone 5%. Besides, those people running linux actually know what they're doing, unlike majority of people that run Windows who can't even be bothered to run anything but an admin account and are too lazy to even password it!
Security by obscurity is not security at all.

But the point is that it simply doesn't happen in linux. Ever. It doesn't require any effort to prevent malware.

Now imagine a bizzaro universe where Linux held 92% of the desktop OS marketshare and Windows was the underdog coming in at a lean 3.2% market share: who would those same malware writers be targeting? Oh, I think they would be targeting Linux. I bet we would see more process hiding on linux, alterations the sys_call table, heap and stack overflows, process forking, and so on. Furthermore, I must stress that one of things I really do admire about linux and the community that maintains it is the speed at which things are fixed. However, in the event that linux was under the magnifying glass to the degree that Windows is, I am not sure that the community would be able to keep up. While I do not mean to say that Microsoft has done a particularly good job maintaining its OS in the face of multiple new and unique exploits being found every week (heh, there are still security risks from two years ago that haven't been fixed, which also helps to explain why malware has gotten so prevalent) that result in varying levels of security compromise, I do not think that linux community would do much better under similar circumstances.

People always say that windows has more malware because it's more targeted. While I do not doubt that windows is more targeted, I don't think that's the only reason, or even the more important reason, that it has so much spyware. Windows is just an insecure and buggy OS. Linux is just designed to be more secure. Yes, there are systems designed to be even more secure than linux, but linux just blows windows away in terms of security. There just aren't nearly as many holes.

It's too convenient to just blame it on which OS is more targeted. Windows needs to take some of the blame itself.

 

[rseven]

Well put MRD! You have summed up Microsoft to a T. Just one added note. Corporations are much stronger than they use to be. The days of trust busting are a dim memory. The new age of the Robber Barons is in full swing. I fear it will get worse before it gets any better. People really have to open their eyes and see what scandalous things are going on and then scream like hell!

 

[MRD]

In many ways, it's our own damn fault. All of the apathetic people that just keep throwing money at corporations like M$ or Sony no matter what they do are very much responsible for the problem.

Incidentally, I heard a funny joke. The corporate slogan for Gap Kids: "Clothing made for children by children"

 

[futura2001]

Linux has all of your prerequisites except 1. It does not have the same level of hardware compatibility as windows, but that's not an OS defect, that's a function of what 3rd party hardware developers produce. There is plenty of compatible software for linux, it's just different than what you are used to for windows. It's very high quality. Just because, say, excel doesn't run on it doesn't matter any more than the fact that gnumeric doesn't run in windows. Also, by your definition, Mac doesn't fit the bill as a business class OS either, as most software is not available for Macs and most hardware won't work with them.

I didn't say that apple produces a business class OS, and outside of a few niche markets, it is not widely used as such. The software issue is a completely different matter, and while there are open source alternatives to most office productivity suites, they are not yet developed enough to be competitive. Take openoffice for example; it still is not as fast or as productive as any of the other office suites, which Microsoft does dominate. The web based version of openoffice is very forward thinking and ultimately a step in the right direction, but it just cannot compete. Linux does not have the out of the box usability that Windows does. While it is virtually infinitely customizable, this helps cripple efforts to migrate it over to the desktop. Most people and businesses look at that customizability as a timesink, they don't want to bother with that, they just want something that runs. Windows has kept the same general look and feel since 95, and this is because the majority of people don't want to have to relearn how to use the OS every two years. Linux is getting there, but it is still too fragmented in its current state. Sure, a business could just set a mandate as to which of the available choices to use for each and every part of the OS, but what happens when those projects stop new development. There isn't much if any guarantee that anything currently developed for linux will continue to be refined two, five, or ten years from now.

Well, I don't install windows 2x every week, this was an unusually bad one. =p I download all my installers to a file server so that I don't have to redownload every time I install stuff. After I reformatted windows due to a trojan downloader virus I could not get rid of (I tried norton av, macafee, spybot, hijackthis, clamav, pandascan, and some other random ****, nothing worked), I reinstalled, and it somehow got back. So I blew out my download directory on the fileserver, re-downloaded everything, and so far so good. The thing though is that malware is just a complete non issue in linux. I mean, it just doesn't happen. Ever. Never once have I had anything more malicious in linux than a tracking cookie.

Sounds more like a rootkit virus capsule than an ordinary trojan. There are some really scary projects over on rootkit.com that are enough to put fear in most admins...
As for malware, in my own anecdotal experiences I rarely ever have problems with malware, and I use IE. The only times I do have any problems stem from unpatched vulnerabilities, and these are few and far between. This is mainly because I keep tight control over what I let into my machine in the first place, and buffer what actually is let through. However, I am a bit extreme in that sense and by no means represent the majority of Windows users. On the Linux side, there are virtually no instances of linux exploits actually being put to use outside of the occasional hacker vs. hacker wargames.

Also, M$ JUST released the cluster version of windows a couple months ago, til then there was nothing. Also, I don't think there are versions of windows available for sun sparc, alphas, ibm as400 mainframes, etc. I am not 100% sure, so if I'm wrong, give me a link.

You are partially right there, however these are very insulated instances that do not have much impact. The Alpha AXP was supported by NT until Win2k RC2. The AS/400 (and iSeries/i5) can run Server 2003, Windows 2000, and *nix distros all at the same time. SPARCs are not currently able to run Windows, although now that Microsoft is starting to transistion to 64bit, that may change in the future depending on how the new sparc generation fares.

You keep saying that, but it's not true. There simply was no form of unix for any desktop architecture until long after M$ was completely dominant on the desktop. There was Mac OS, but that didn't run on x86, and was not unix based back then. Unix simply didn't enter the desktop realm until much later.

As I said, certain Apples such as members of the Apple II family could and did run Unix if the user was willing to go through the trouble, but this has about as much relevance as running linux on an ancient system that isn't windows compatible.

Not the point. Competition is WHY capitalism is good. It's why people generally benefit from capitalism as a society. Also, competition is still an inherent part of capitalism, even if you can find a few places where it does not exist.

While I partially agree with you on this point, this is probably something that is best left to the best economic minds to ruminate over. I hold that capitalism is good because of profit, economic growth and stability, private production, and employment for citizens in addition to the free market economy that breeds competition, but that is another discussion for another time as it does not exactly pertain to our general debate here. However, if you do want to continue this discussion, feel free to send me a PM.

We never had software patents for the first 25+ yrs of computing, and it didn't cause any problems. Copyright was more than enough protection for ideas. Most countries still don't have software patents. They're a very new entity, having come about in the last couple years in the US. It's not like it's some long standing part of our system.

No, arguably the first software patent was granted to BP in the sixties. If I understand correctly, what really opened the floodgates, however, was the supreme court case Diamond vs. Diehr in 1981, which revoked the 1972 ruling of Gottschalk vs. Benson. It is relatively modern, and while problems in the system didn't not overtly show themselves until the dotcom boom, they had been around twenty years prior.

Actually, the possibility of creating coercive monopolies is considered by many (including me) to be the main flaw of capitalism. We don't punish them for being successful per se, but we do take action when their market dominance threatens the consumer. That is what anti-trust is all about. That is what broke up the phone company, standard oil, and a number of other megacorps.

I agree, this is one of the flaws of capitalism. Inversely however, market competition can also be thought of as a flaw of capitalism as it ultimately forces the losers out of the system. Large corporations ultimately are able to have a certain degree of control over the flow of the system by being able to put new competitors out of business before they become a threat. While this is the corporate version of babykilling, there are legal ways to go about it that are in no way illegal. Marketing is a perfect example of this.

Sure it can. We can pass new laws preventing certain types of predatory business practices that create monopolies and remove competition from the marketplace. All companies should be aware that the good of the people is more important than their profits, and that if necessary, the government will act to reintroduce competition into a monopolized market sector.

Careful there, too much governmental control will destroy the free market economy, and this in of itself will remove competition from the system. And then you have to get into whether forcing businesses to act in the "good of the people" will actually result in such. Such enforcements could ultimately lead to economic instability, market decline, loss of jobs and income... and while companies would be forced to act in the good of the people, the people wouldn't have the income to purchase the fruits of such a system.

No other company has ever engaged in predatory business practices on the scale of M$. No other company is responsible for putting so many competitors out of business and preventing so many good ideas from taking hold.

What corporations are you using to weigh Microsoft against? Furthermore, have you looked into the largest corporations around the world and how they got to be where they are today?

Actually, you just proved my point. Why not just ship a PC without an OS? Why include FreeDOS? Because M$ makes them do it. They found a loophole. I expect M$ will take action to plug it up soonish. Also, the consumer can't get the freedos thing, that's enterprise only also. Dell even made it clear that this was not intended for linux servers, but for companies that already have valid M$ licenses.

Maybe, but this does not address the issue of why Dell doesn't ship consumer boxes running Linux. The investment in Red Hat indicates to me that while Dell may or may not ultimately choose to ship desktop Linux systems, they do not see a large enough market right now or they do not think Linux is ready. Furthermore, in the assumption that Dell and Microsoft have some unholy, illegal contract signed in blood of the firstborn, what would happen if Dell did start shipping Linux desktops? You might say that Microsoft would then try to enact on the terms of said illegal contract, but if Dell were to bring the issue to court, Microsoft would lose and be found violating the antitrust ruling of 2001, which would probably open a whole new antitrust case. You seem to think that Microsoft is somehow abusing their monopoly here, but the legal ramifications for doing so at this time are enormous. It is mostly for this reason that I believe Microsoft probably is not abusing its power as a monopoly.

But the point is that it simply doesn't happen in linux. Ever. It doesn't require any effort to prevent malware.

And my point is that while one in theory could program a completely new OS that would not be susceptable to the malware floating around now, it would not be secure, just obscure. Such is the case with Linux, it is too obscure right now.

People always say that windows has more malware because it's more targeted. While I do not doubt that windows is more targeted, I don't think that's the only reason, or even the more important reason, that it has so much spyware. Windows is just an insecure and buggy OS. Linux is just designed to be more secure. Yes, there are systems designed to be even more secure than linux, but linux just blows windows away in terms of security. There just aren't nearly as many holes.

It's too convenient to just blame it on which OS is more targeted. Windows needs to take some of the blame itself.

I don't disagree that Linux was made with security in mind to a further degree than Windows has been, saying that there aren't nearly as many holes is most likely untrue. Saying that there haven't been nearly as many holes found would be a more accurate statement.

 

[futura2001]

In many ways, it's our own damn fault. All of the apathetic people that just keep throwing money at corporations like M$ or Sony no matter what they do are very much responsible for the problem.

Incidentally, I heard a funny joke. The corporate slogan for Gap Kids: "Clothing made for children by children"

FUBU for kids, eh?
Speaking of monopolies, Gap not only makes the clean-cut Gap and related lines of clothing, they also own hot topic and make money of all the people who are trying to "be different" from the norm...

 

[JenBell]

Its like this, people in the majority are never happy being the majority!

 

[futura2001]

Its like this, people in the majority are never happy being the majority!

Yep. And conversely, people in the minority are never happy society's lack of acceptance of their minority, so they promote the agenda of whatever minority they are a part of and don't realize that by doing so they destroy the "underground subculture" of the minority and become just another part of the masses.
Kind of sad, isn't it?

 

[Commander_Kang]

Futura2001 and MRD while I dont have much if anything at all to add to this since I think you both covered it I have to commend the two of you on making a very interesting and fairly civil discusion

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

Yep. And conversely, people in the minority are never happy society's lack of acceptance of their minority, so they promote the agenda of whatever minority they are a part of and don't realize that by doing so they destroy the "underground subculture" of the minority and become just another part of the masses.
Kind of sad, isn't it?

so true! and then they complain when they dont get their special minority treatment anymore

i have been part of both worlds living abroad.

 

[twoeyes]

Fact of the matter is that if someone releases their product specs, someone else is going to come along, produce it for less money,

Yes, and let me tell you that it wont be an american company

 

[futura2001]

Futura2001 and MRD while I dont have much if anything at all to add to this since I think you both covered it I have to commend the two of you on making a very interesting and fairly civil discusion

I and I am sure MRD as well are well aware of how easy this sort of discussion could turn into a flame war. It is much more difficult to make sure that it doesn't degenerate into a flame war, even while it is much more beneficial and educational to ensure that it doesn't.
While I am not so brash to think that either one of us changed the others opinions, I do think that (hopedully) we both learned from it, and that is worth the effort of keeping the thread from bursting into flames.

so true! and then they complain when they dont get their special minority treatment anymore

Indeed, and while we aren't blind to what is better, we only see the positives and not the negatives that inherently come with the positives. What good is it if you can see greener grass on the other side of the fence, but are unable to see the nettles and thorns that grow amongst the grasses?

 

[-maddog-]

Indeed, and while we aren't blind to what is better, we only see the positives and not the negatives that inherently come with the positives. What good is it if you can see greener grass on the other side of the fence, but are unable to see the nettles and thorns that grow amongst the grasses?

Agree.