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ZDNet UK - News - Microsoft: 'We should learn from open source'
by k at 3:44 pm EST, Nov 12, 2003 |
] Despite the rivalry, Microsoft is keen to talk up its
] love for the competition, One Microsoft employee even
] went so far as to say Linux having a 50 percent market
] share would be good for Microsoft. "At least if Linux
] takes off, their viruses will propagate and we won't
] be seen as the bad guys any more," he said. Tipp
] equally sees advantages to Linux taking off. "We think
] Linux is great," he said, adding that competition from
] the penguin and associates keeps the Microsoft on its
] toes.
]
]
] Open-source users, however, aren't quite so overflowing
] with praise, he said. "We haven't talked to a single user
] who has said they're using [open source] because it's
] better." hm, thoughts on this? what products are actually better in OSS than their proprietary counterparts? does it all come down to price/performance? i certainly believe that OSS is better insofar as it provides variety and choice, among other reasons, but is an OSS database system ever gonna truly compete with Oracle, DB2, or Sybase, for example? (I'm not indicating that they don't -- i know nothing about dbase performance rankings -- it's a real question). Presumably it all comes down to your definition of better. Price/performance is one factor. as i've aged and spent days and years of my life with computers of all kinds, i've reached a point where ease and reliability are more critical than cost, motivating me away from linux for day-to-day activity. but i won't be buying an XServe for my mp3 collection anytime soon, which i guess puts me into the class of user where linux is a development and lightweight server platform. anyone else have thoughts on this? or on what microsoft can learn from OSS? |
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RE: ZDNet UK - News - Microsoft: 'We should learn from open source'
by Decius at 4:13 pm EST, Nov 12, 2003 |
inignoct wrote:
] ] Open-source users, however, aren't quite so overflowing
] ] with praise, he said. "We haven't talked to a single user
] ] who has said they're using [open source] because it's
] ] better."
]
] hm, thoughts on this?
]
] what products are actually better in OSS than their
] proprietary counterparts? does it all come down to
] price/performance? Something that gets beaten into you in engineering is that there is no such thing as a situation that doesn't come down to price/performance. If you eliminate price from the picture, the conversation is silly. In the real world everything costs money. No square cows. Linux is certainly better then Windows for running just about any network service other then printing and file sharing. The only reason the later two don't measure up is because the printing and filesharing protocols you are using (NBT) are controlled by Microsoft. Use NFS, webdav, LPR, or cups for any of these things and Linux wins again. This is because UNIX is better in general for servers then Windows. Windows is designed with personal computers in mind. UNIX is designed with network services in mind. This is not a matter of features or performance. Often NT has better performance on the same hardware. This is a matter of adminiability. The GUI/VBScript "paradigm" just isn't very good for running critical systems on the other side of the planet. What Microsoft has to learn from the open source community is that they need to build unix machines. If they build unix machines everyone would stop complaining. They need to have a very powerful command line interface. I hear its coming in longhorn. If they do it right, they may win some converts. Now, is Linux the best UNIX platform for network sevices? It depends. Solaris is for some things (like high end webservers). For some things linux (via IBM or HP) is the answer (databases seem to be moving to it). But the thing is that you can't always afford Solaris (or IBM) and all the trappings. Things actually do cost money. Apache is the most popular web server platform in the world, because it doesn't suck as much as IIS and it doesn't cost as much as iPlanet. Thats all there is to it. There is only one place where price is not a factor. (In the sense that with these applications being slow always costs more then whatever commerical price tag exists on the product.) That is scientific computing and huge cluster applications like Google. Guess what. Those guys use linux. Not because its cheap, or good, but because they can tweak it to do what they need. You can't mold windows to do your application. |
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RE: ZDNet UK - News - Microsoft: 'We should learn from open source'
by k at 4:23 pm EST, Nov 12, 2003 |
Decius wrote:
] Something that gets beaten into you in engineering is that
] there is no such thing as a situation that doesn't come down
] to price/performance. If you eliminate price from the picture,
] the conversation is silly. In the real world everything costs
] money. No square cows. i had a feeling you'd be the first with that reply. i agree, of course. it's doubly hard in the world of engineering for normal people b/c there are so many hard to define parameters. so many preferences and habits and idiosyncracies, all of which make definition of the optimal specs even more impossible than on, say, a mechanical system that only 5 highly trained technicians will ever use. and the points about linux as optimal for tasks with uncommon custom requirements is certainly true. maybe too many software developers took their physics classes to heart instead of their engineering... "imagine a perfecly flat, frictionless surface, in a vaccuum, in a fixed reference frame..." |
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