Tag Archives: microsoft

Opinion

Accidental Empires: How the boys in Silicon Valley…

Introduction

This is neither a new book nor a new purchase for me, so why am I reviewing it? Bottom line: it’s a book that I’ve enjoyed a lot over the years and one that I feel the need to recommend to as many people as possible.

What’s in it?

The obvious format for a book on the personal computer industry would be chronological, but as he points out early on in the book, things just aren’t that simple. Instead he uses what, on paper, might look to be a random arrangment of anecdotes, jumping from Apple to Xerox Parc to Microsoft and IBM in the matter of a few pages. But that’s just the nature of the beast.

What’s good

Cringelys writing is easy and engaging to read. It would be very tempting to just sit down and read the entire book from beginning to end. It’s friendly, chatty and full of interesting little anecdotes about all the main characters, from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs.

He freely admits that he’s not been a true historian. He’s missed out some arguably important stuff, but it would take a long, dull book to get all that information in. The charm of Accidental Empires is the fact that it’s easy to read.

Conclusion

When I do reviews, I normally have a section on the bad stuff. I don’t have one here. That’s not because the book is flawless, but because it achieves perfectly what it set out to do.

If you’re at all interested in how the PC industry came to be, this is the book for you.

The facts

Author: Robert X. Cringely

Cost: ?6.99

ISBN: 0887308554

The Penguin Says

Corel WordPerfect 8

Introduction

Linux is capable of many things. It is an incredibly fast and stable platform, able to sustain months, if not years, of uptime and has many world-class applications such as Oracle8 and Apache. What it doesn’t have much of are decent word processors. I find that, these days, the one of the few reasons that I boot up Windows is for Microsoft Word (the other reason is Worms 2).

So the day when WordPerfect, one of the few word-processors that can compete with Word feature for feature, arrives on Linux is a momentous one. However, just being there isn’t enough. Is it really on par with Word? And does it do justice to Linux?

First things first

Corel WordPerfect comes in three versions: Personal Edition, Standard Edition and Server Edition. I’m reviewing the Personal Edition, the one you can download from the Internet for free. The Standard Edition adds more fonts and clip-art and the Server Edition adds a character mode version and more administration tools.

Installation barely warrants a mention. It’s not a ‘standard’ Linux package such as RPM or DEB, but is very straight-forward nevertheless. It’s very Windows-like: click here, enter this information there. Easy. It’s not as confusing as StarOffice either – you install it as ‘root’!

Running it for the first time

X doesn’t make it easy to make a decent application. It imposes no standards on an applications look and feel, but does impose a relatively high memory overhead. I guess this makes it difficult for a company used to writing Windows applications.

Corel, like StarDivision, have chosen to make WordPerfect look and feel like their Windows version. This is going to annoy some Linux users, claiming that it’s not ‘UNIX’ enough, but I think it’s a good thing. It makes anyone used to a Windows word processor (i.e., almost everyone) instantly at home. No one is going to have a problem with the Office 97-like tool bar, nor the simple and logical menu structure.

Perhaps more of an issue for people coming from Windows or a Macintosh is what the application is capable of. Word processors on those machines can, just about, do everything from letters to fairly advanced desktop publishing. Most free Linux equivalents just can’t compete with that. LyX is great for long, structured documents (with certain caveats that I noted when I reviewed it last year), and many of the others look good, allowing import of multimedia clips, but are disappointing when you want to do any real work.

WordPerfect is more like a Windows word-processor in this respect.

Doing some real work

I thought a good test would be to write this review with WordPerfect. I suspect that documents of around a thousand words are not atypical and it would allow me to test out some of the nice new features, such as its Internet interoperability.

Unfortunately, half way though the review I found that there was very little to write about. This is not a criticism, in fact it should probably be taken as a compliment. In writing simple text, WordPerfect has all the tools you need exactly where you would expect them, doing exactly what you want. It has the basics, such as font and style selections, plus more recent innovations such as on-the-fly spelling- and grammar-checking. The latter is annoying and I usually switch it off, which is a useful feature that Microsoft Word doesn’t have!

So far, there is nothing that WordPerfect has that the Windows competition doesn’t already have. I guess it has two things. Firstly it has the ‘shadow cursor,’ something so obvious that I’m surprised that it’s not been done before. (People said that about the drag-and-drop cut-and-paste in Word for Windows 2.) If you switch it on, you can click anywhere on the screen and start typing. WP adds the necessary returns, tabs and spaces for you.

Secondly, it has what I can only describe as an on-the-fly thesaurus. It’s a drop-down list on the tool bar that gives a continuous list of alternatives to the word that you just typed. I’m not sure that it’s a great improvement over pressing Shift-F7 in Microsoft Word, but it’s there anyway.

Advanced stuff

Once I found that I could test more than a small amount of functionality while writing the review, I started playing round in other documents.

The first I opened was my CV, a Word 95 document complete with some of the dodgy advanced formatting that you can do there. The import was less than perfect, but was still quite impressive. It brought across all the text and most of the formatting, including most of the style information. Unsurprisingly it failed on the floating frames, but it did place the text at a suitable place in the document. Full marks for falling over gracefully. I was surprised that it didn’t manage to import the header and footer information, though.

I then tried to reapply the formatting that the import had managed to remove. Again, it gets boring to write about as it was so easy.

The second document I tried was rather longer, nearly seven thousand words. Again, conversion was impressive although imperfect. This time the main problem was the heading numbering, a fault that Word 97’s converter also has.

Having lost the table of contents, I tried to recreate it. I didn’t find this entirely straight-forward and never did get exactly what I was looking for. It looks like you have to define each paragraph that you need entering into the table of contents, rather like the way LyX insists. I much prefer the Word approach where it uses the list of styles to work out the document structure.

Not all good

It has to be said, there isn’t a lot wrong with WordPerfect 8.

The font handling – unique to WordPerfect – isn’t quite as good as that in Windows, but is probably better than that in most X applications, StarOffice included. Also, the version that’s free to download doesn’t have the on-line help. I can’t help but think that this is a very important thing to miss out.

The two worst things that I can think of are that the Microsoft Word filter doesn’t work with fast-saved documents (I’m not sure what MS has done with fast-saved documents, but no software other than Word itself seems to be able to deal with it!) – annoying as most of my Word documents are fast-saved!

And the finally, a question mark hangs over its stability. I had a couple of (unreproducable) crashes while wring this. However, it should be noted that WordPerfect managed to reinstate a recent backup each time meaning that I only lost a sentence or two.

Conclusion

This is exactly what we need. WordPerfect is a superb application, just as good as its Windows counterpart, but running under Linux. Due to its less-than-one-hundred-percent compatibility with Microsoft Word, I can’t guarantee to use it always (my work uses Word) but it is going to stay on my hard-disk.

The Penguin Says

WINE 980614

Introduction

This is the second time in as many reviews that I’ve started like this: I don’t want this to be the start of a trend. I did say in my ‘policy’ document that I didn’t want to look at very early releases of software and I stand by that.

However, sometimes you see something and, even though it doesn’t work fully, it show such great promise that you need to shout about it. WINE is such a piece of software.

What is it?

Wine allows you to run Windows applications on x86 Unix machines, Linux in this case. It should work on almost any PC based UNIX like NetBSD, UnixWare, etc. and it’s supposed to run 16- and 32-bit Windows applications, although the former are much better represented at the moment. There are some that will never work properly (the FAQ says something about VxD’s which I don’t understand).

At least, that’s what it will do. At the moment it is a developers release, not even stable enough to be called beta software. However, I’m not here to bash Wine because it’s in its early stages of development. I’m here to express how shocked I am that it’s so good!

Installation

I’ve tried a number of times in the past to make Wine, and they’ve all ended in tears. I rake around my hard disk trying to find enough space — around 50 Mb — spend ages while it compiles and then when I run it I find that there’s been a segmentation fault in 32-bit code. I don’t know what that means, only that it’s not mentioned in the FAQ and that I can’t run anything, not even Notepad.

Then the other day I decided to make one last attempt and, rather than get the source code, I got a precompiled RPM. It didn’t work at first. I had to customize it, changing the configuration file to match where my Windows 95 partition is, but nothing too arduous (or unexpected).

So, I fired it up trying to run calc.exe. I wasn’t hopeful, and the fact that it was taking 100% of CPU and seeming to get nowhere fast didn’t help. I left it chugging away and made some coffee and toast.

Success!

When I returned from the kitchen, the Windows Calculator was sat proud in the middle of my Trinitron. My jaw dropped, and the dog nearly got my toast.

Okay, the display wasn’t completely right. The text in the title bar is far too small, the buttons are in the extreme top left and right rather than in the middle of the bar, and the font on the menu bar is proportionally spaced meaning that it looks rather odd, but I suspect that this is all configurable — you can certainly tell Wine to use your window manager rather than X directly.

But it worked. I could do sums; I could change between normal and scientific mode; I could get the About box. I was stunned.

Moving onto Notepad, I found that the same was true: it worked. I trundled though a few other applets that Windows 95 comes with, many of which, at least partially, worked.

Getting arrogant

Having got the tiny programs working, I started hunting around my hard disk for new challenges. Why start small and build up, I though. ‘wine "`pwd`/winword.exe"‘ I typed. That’ll show it.

I started on my toast, figuring that it’d take a while before it gave up.

But it didn’t give up. After a worrying amount of disk activity, the Word 95 splash screen appeared. As did screens and screens full of errors in the console window. Despite the errors, Wine and Word battled on, eventually displaying the normal Word screen, tool bars, menus and all. Again, the fonts weren’t quite right and the toolbar was far too dark, but there it was. Linux running Microsoft Word 95.

Tentatively I entered some text. This worked fine — even the font rendering was spot on — until I mistyped something. Word underlined the suspect characters with a wavy red line and then crashed.

Next time I managed to get the About box (fairly simple, but with a big bitmap and a sound clip) to display, followed by the Options dialog (big with lots of tabs). A few others also worked without problem. The open dialog, however, causes Wine to exit. I guess this is because Microsoft didn’t use their own standard libraries for the task! (Let’s blame Microsoft.)

Excel works roughly as well as Word. It starts without any problems, you can enter data in the cells and auto-sum works. Many of the dialogs appear, full and correct, but save crashes the system. PowerPoint vanished shortly after completing loading and Access didn’t even get as far as the splash screen.

I was very surprised at the success that I’d had up to this point. Okay, nothing useful actually worked, but I was looking from more of a technical point of view. I did, however, find a program that worked incredibly well, something much larger than clac.exe or Notepad. The program? Maxis SimCity for Windows 1.1. (Saying that it’s useful is stretching the point, but I digress.) I play tested SimCity quite thoroughly and found that, although small parts of the screen occasionally became corrupted, everything worked. Since games are usually associated with some of the worst coding and low-level hacking around this was good. (I’m not sure whether the credit should go to the Wine team or Maxis!)

Overall

I’ll not mess around: Wine is not ready for the prime time yet and is still some way off. This is not news, the developers say this too.

What is news is that it is an incredible piece of software. A non technical user might not see this (unless they want to play SimCity), but anyone who has written a non-trivial program can see what an incredible achievement Wine is.

Opinion

Dreadful Thoughts

Introduction

I have a terrible confession to make. I am not a spiritual man so, rather than seek penance through the church, I shall document my reasoning here on the web and you can make your own conclusions.

Please go easy on me.

My confession: I can see myself buying a Macintosh later this year.

To some, that may not sound like something to be ashamed of but it’s all a matter of perspective. By trade and education I’m an engineer or scientist; I have short hair, no piercings and virtually no artistic ability (I present the evidence of that here on this web site!). My computer of choice tends to have a barren, baroque user interface. Let’s be honest here, it’s Unix.

The Macintosh and Unix sit virtually on opposite ends of a spectrum. It’s usually called usability, but I think it’s even more precise than that. The Mac makes it easy for people to learn how to use it. Apple make things easy to use and they sacrifice power and flexibility in order to do that.

One of the best examples if this extreme position is the mouse. In Unix you tend to have three buttons. Windows originally had two but now seems to have spawned wheels and more buttons than a Space Shuttle. In each case although it only takes a short time to realise that the left button does most of the useful stuff, Apple decided that one button was less confusing. They’re right, of course. But it does limit your options as far as, say, short-cut menus are concerned.

Unix is the opposite. It has a huge learning curve, but an expert can quickly do just about anything. After spending a lot of time on that curve, I’d actually say that Unix was more usable than a Mac. I’m under no illusions, though, that it’s more difficult to learn.

I guess these extremes, to some extent, explain the success of Windows. Ignoring Apples mistakes and the fragmentation of the Unix market in the early nineties, we can see that Windows is easier to use than Unix but much less so than a Mac. It has the Start menu, Wizards, pop-up help and often hides information rather than bombard the user with difficult, unnecessary detail. On the other hand, it does have rough and ready multi-user facilities, solid TCP/IP networking and a command-line interface (for the brave). It fits the middle ground doing neither task especially well.

The battle ground

That’s how they stand right now, but six months from now things may be very different.

The Unix side probably isn’t going to change much. Linux, especially, will continue with its vast range of incremental upgrades. distributions will eventually come on-line with the new 2.4 kernel, and improvements will continue in both the KDE and GNOME environments.

In the same time-frame, the next desktop version of Windows, XP, will be unleashed on the world. The beta’s are currently doing the rounds and people seem generally impressed. The interface is easier, more consistent and more aesthetically pleasing, and its built on the Windowds 2000 core which has generally been well recieved.

Normally it might have been enough for me to upgrade from my old copy of Windows 95. But for two things: you can’t, you can only upgrade from Windows 98 or above; and MacOS X.

It would be an obvious choice to buy a new PC preloaded with Windows XP since I’ve had a small succession of similar machines over the last ten years, but I find the improvements in MacOS X to be so compelling than I’m considering moving to a completely new architecture. In a sound-bite those reasons are power and user-friendly in one.

MacOS X is based on a BSD Unix kernel (called Darwin and available under an Open Source licence) and has an enhanced Macintosh user interface grafted on top. This is truly the key. You have the complex internals available from a command-line when you need it and a state of the art GUI when you just need a word processor.

In conclusion

There is only one other operating system that supports such a neat combination of Unix and User Friendliness (the BeOS) and that has many problems: I have tried it on three machines and all have had some device that is unsupported, so this can hardly be a unique scenario; and the software support is worse. I may prefer not to use Microsoft Office, but I need to be able to exchange files with people that do.

No other operating system will have quite that level of flexibility. Microsoft won’t be adding more Unix like functionality to Windows and the open source community just can’t compete with the many years of experience that Apple have designing computers for people who don’t write code.

Free Software Howto

Free Software HOWTO

v1.2, 17 January 2001

With the current Linux trend towards multi-million dollar IPO’s and “Open Source” software, much of the emphasis of “free” software has been lost leaving people new to the fold confused and not completely understanding all the implications. This HOWTO will, hopefully, reduce some of that confusion.

Introduction

What’s in here?

This document talks in non-technical terms about free software, what it means and why you should care about more than just the cost of your software.

Who is this HOWTO for?

People that have been hacking for years will already be fully au fait with the content of this document. Or at least you should be!

The Free Software HOWTO is aimed at people new to Linux, Open Source or free software.

New versions of this document

The official home of this HOWTO is here. You will always find the most up to date version here.

Disclaimer

You get what you pay for. I offer no warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise. I’ll help you where I can but legally you’re on your own.

Credits and Thanks

I welcome any constructive feedback on this HOWTO and any general software licencing issues, although my opinions are just that: a subjective view. You should understand what each licence means before committing to one for your own software or documentation..

Licence

This document is copyright 2000, 2001 Stephen Darlington. You may use, disseminate and reproduce it freely, provided you:

  • Do not omit or alter this copyright notice.
  • Do not omit or alter the version number and date.
  • Do not omit or alter the document’s pointer to the current WWW version.
  • Clearly mark any condensed, altered or versions as such.

These restrictions are intended to protect potential readers from stale or mangled versions. If you think you have a good case for an exception, ask me.

(This copyright notice has been lifted from Eric Raymond’s Distribution HOWTO.)

Overview

Introduction

Until now, you’ve probably never given much thought to software licences. No-one can blame you. They’re usually pages and pages of legalese telling you what you can and can’t do with the CD you just bought. If you actually sat down and read it all, you would probably never agree to it!

Licences, however, are at the heart of what free or open-source software is all about. Let’s take a look at a number of very broad categories of licence.

Commercial software

The first type is the commercial licence, like the one that Microsoft or Lotus might insist you agree with before using their software. The basic premise is that you don’t own the software, you have an agreement with the author that allows you to use it within certain guidelines. As the copyright owner, they can impose whatever restrictions they want. Common conditions include limits on the number of concurrent users, number of copies, and what you can use it for (for example, “non-commercial use” or a ban on reverse engineering).

The emphasis is what you can’t do, and all the power is in their court!

One thing to note, and this will become more relevant later on, is that none of this relates to the cost of the software (or, more properly, the licence). You can get commercial software, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, for no cost and still be forced to abide by the publishers conditions.

Shareware

The next kind of software, shareware, is sometimes called free, although as we shall see, that’s not correct.

Shareware was started in the early eighties by Jim Button when a few of his friends started passing round some software he’d written and he started getting phone calls asking for support. Eventually he added a request for $10 to the startup screen and shareware was born.

In short, shareware authors allow you to try out their software for free but request payment for continued use. Many of the same restrictions as for commercial software remain, including the limitations on reverse engineering, concurrent use of the full version, etc, stand. Additionally, the “free” downloads are often broken in some way, perhaps limited functionality or splash screens.

Interestingly, Linus Torvalds describes shareware as combining “the worst of commercial software (no source) with the worst of free software (no finishing touches).”

Public Domain software

All the licences we’ve seen until now have been designed to reduce people’s ability to do what they want with the software.

At the opposite extreme is public domain software. This is software that has no copyright and, therefore, no restrictions on its use. You can copy it onto as many machines as you like, reverse engineer it, make modifications and distribute it as you feel fit.

This is the first kind of software that we’re come across that can rightly be called “free.”

Normally, whenever you write something you automatically own the copyright, even if you don’t add an explicit copyright message. For public domain software, the author throws away these rights allowing everybody to do what they like with the software.

Unfortunately, “anything” also includes selling it. Imagine spending a huge amount of time producing your masterpiece, giving it away and then finding that someone else was able to sell it and make their fortune with all your hard work! Worse, people don’t even have to give you credit for your work; they can legally take it, replace their name with yours and distribute it.

This might be why there isn’t a huge amount on public domain software.

At this point it might be worth looking back at free commercial software. Both public domain software and a free piece of commercial software cost the same, but the freedom you’re given to use it varies. A common phrase you hear with free software is “think free speech not free beer.” The difference between public domain and commercial software show the opposite extremes.

Free software

By now it should be clear that there are many different kinds of free software and not all are equal. The version of free that this section relates to is the one promoted by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation.

But first, a little history.

The Free Software Foundation was formed in 1984 when a printer manufacturer refused to give Richard Stallman the source code (the computer instructions required to make a program). It had been leading up to this for some time — the increasing number of non-disclosure agreements, new software that banned sharing of information, etc. — and the printer manufacturer was just the straw that broke the camels back.

Stallman decided that he could not, in clear conscience, sign a non-disclosure agreement or work with a company that restricted his ability to share information. While most people would have given up at this point and gone to work, for obscene amounts of money, for a big company writing proprietary software, Stallman stuck by his principles and decided to make his own operating system, free of the constraints of commercial systems.

The process leading up to this is documented in more detail in Steven Levy’s excellent ‘Hackers.’ You’ll note that Levy calls Stallman ‘the last real hacker.’ Happily he was wrong, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this!

As we can tell from the background, “free,” in this context, relates not to the initial cost but to freedom. Stallman was unwilling to surrender the right to make modifications or improvements to any software he used — and to do this you need the source code.

This may sound just like public domain software up to this point. The difference is that there are clauses in the licence that attempt to keep the software free no matter what changes are made. The most famous free software, Linux, uses the most famous free software licence, the GNU General Public Licence. It is sometimes also called Copyleft, as it very cleverly uses the current copyright laws to do the exact opposite of its original mandate.

The way it does this is by insisting that the code and anything derived from it is also released with the GPL licence. In some senses it is ‘viral’ in nature and it is this that is central to many people’s objections.

Also, it’s worth noting that the word ‘derived’ is a little too vague. Does a library linked to a GPL’d program need to be GPL’d also? Does a program running on a free operating system need to be GPL’d?

There’s no clear, obvious answer for either of these with the current version of the GPL. The new version (3) is intended to fix some of these shortcomings, but it’s viral nature will remain.

Open Source software

Open Source software is, in many ways, exactly the same as free software, despite what Richard Stallman says!

It was started in 1997 by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens as a response to the increasing confusion over the use of the word “free” in relation to software. (Confusion that has continued, or I wouldn’t be writing this document!)

In essence, Open Source is a marketing or PR exercise to make free software more acceptable, more understood by the general public and the big corporates that, until that point, were comforted by the money they had to pay to get commercial software.

Like “free” software, the “Open Source” trade-mark does not mandate a single licence. (Freedom of choice is important, even when it comes to giving away software!) Technically any licence that meets all the requirements in the Open Source Definition can be termed Open Source. These, in summary, are no restrictions on the use of the software, access to the source code and the freedom to make modifications and distribute them.

The two most famous are the Berkeley System Distribution (BSD) Licence, which allows distribution without the source code, and the GNU General Public Licence, although there are many more.

The Sun Community Source Licence, for example, is not compliant because Sun Microsystems demand a fee for any commercial distribution and insists that derivations are still compatible in some arbitrary ways. (This is not intended to single out the SCSL as being particularly bad. However, the fact that it purports to be “open” when it isn’t is a disturbing trend.)

The implications

Overview

Free software has already had a significant effect on the computer industry. Free software is behind most of the critical parts of the Internet, it was used (unsuccessfully) as part of the defense in the Microsoft anti-trust trial and the spate of recent IPO’s has shown that there’s money too.

Unless you bought some shares, this all appears to be affecting other people. There is an impact, however.

I just use software, how does this all affect me?

It’s tempting to think that, if you’re not a ‘techie’ or a hacker, the difference between free commercial, public domain and Open Source software is minimal. But that’s not true, even as a user the difference affects you because the development of the software is affected.

I’ll outline a plausible scenario as an example.

Company X designs and releases a fantastic piece of software. It’s commercial software, but the publisher seems receptive to new ideas, indeed versions 1.1 and 2.0 are exactly what you were looking for and the upgrade costs were reasonable.

At this point any number of things can happen. Perhaps you find a bug in it, one critical to your business. But the publisher offers no warranty for the software and say they are not sure whether they will fix it. (Note that just because you paid for the software, you do not necessarily get better service or a guarantee of any kind. According to the licence, you can’t sue Company X if the software is not fit for the purpose it was sold for.)

Or maybe they go out of business. Or perhaps they start competing with your company and won’t sell you the next version. Or perhaps the features you want are not in the new version. There are a huge number of ‘if’s and ‘maybe’s, all outside your control.

Basically, if you use commercial, close-source software you are at the whim of the publisher. If they do something you don’t like, tough.

However, if you’d used Open Source software you’d have access to the source code and could fix or upgrade the program as you saw fit. And if you couldn’t do it, there are many programmers willing to support the new versions or you could hire someone to do it for you. In summary, you have much more control over future development of the product.

You’ll note that none of the advantages here are strictly related to cost. I think that’s something that people tend to focus on too much, possible due to the “free software” title. However, there are still advantages.

But first we need to get away from the initial cost of the software as that’s normally a small percentage of the total cost. Instead, let’s think in terms of support costs. Once you’ve installed the software, what costs are there? An obvious cost is that of upgrades. Less obvious is lost productivity due to software failure and support charges from the manufacturer.

In the case of free software, there are no upgrade costs (other than the time and inconvenience of doing it, which also applies to commercial software). Free software is usually regarded as more reliable then commercial software — see Fuzz Revisited for more information. And the support charges are optional: you can either deal with it in-house or hire any one of a number of support organisations.

I’m a developer. How does this affect me?

As a developer, you’ll already know the benefits of being able to access the source code for a program. You can fix it, see how it works and integrate bits of it into your new program. (Using parts of another program, however, isn’t quite that simple and is dependent on the licence of the original software.)

A common problem developers see is the loss of their livelihood. If everyone gives away their software, how can anyone make money? It’s a fair question and there’s no single, correct answer.

Perhaps the most common answer is that most software is developed in-house and is not distributed. None of this development will be affected, so if you have that kind of job you can rely on your salary for a while yet!

If you work for a consultancy, almost all the revenue comes not from selling software but from “professional services,” i.e., they charge for developing the software rather than the licence to use it. Again your job is safe.

Then there’s shrink-wrapped software. The Free Software Foundation would say that it should be free. So if you listen to them and you work for Microsoft your job is in danger unless they diversify into services.

The Open Source people would say that there’s nothing wrong with shrink-wrapped software, but point out that there are advantages in releasing the source.

As you can probably see, the risk to your jobs is small and there are many benefits. At least that’s the way I see it and I work writing software!

Where can I read more?

The most obvious place to read more is at the GNU website, after all they started it all.

But there are alternatives. Other important web-sites are as follows:

  • Open Source. This is the ‘official’ Open Source page. There’s lots of interesting stuff here, including a more detailed discussion on the effect of free software on different people Microsoft’s Halloween documents, their unofficial response to the Linux threat.
  • Eric Raymond’s web-site. Eric has written much about Open Source software, with much more depth and style than I can muster!
  • Slashdot. There aren’t more ‘HOWTO’s here, but Slashdot is a community of people interested in Open Source software. The discussions sometimes get childish, but you can learn a lot!

There are also a few books published (at least partially) on the subject:

  • OpenSources. Voices from the Open Source Revolution.. This book talks about all aspects of the Open Source community, including licencing. The main reference is Bruce Perens essay.
  • The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Again, this book is about general Open Source issues, but it includes a discussion on some of the non-obvious implications of the licences, particularly the reason why just because you can, you don’t frequently get many versions of a piece of software.
  • Hackers Steven Levy talks about the early days of the hacker community, including a good piece on Richard Stallman.
Opinion

Whats with Windows 2000?

It is now two days after Microsoft’s official release of ‘the next generation’ of their premier operating system, Windows 2000 (n?e, NT5). We’re now at a safe distance to be able to assess the impact it has had on people and the press.

The first interesting thing to note is that on Slashdot, the Internet’s favorite site for hacker-oriented hi-tech news, did not make any announcement. One argument is that Slashdot is Linux, or at least Unix, biased making Windows news irrelevant. I don’t buy that. What Microsoft is doing is important if Linux is to achieve world domination.

The real answer came as a comment to another thread (about a new development kernel release), not by the sites editors. 17th February is not really a very significant date even to Microsoft. The software has been available to big customers — the main target market — for months and even smaller customers should not have had too much difficulty finding a copy. The only significance is that you can buy a shrink-wrapped copy. Big deal.

But should you buy a copy?

This brings me to my second point: despite a sprinkling of pro-Linux-is-Microsoft-doomed? articles, almost all the press I’ve read pretty much follows the line of Microsoft’s PR company. Whatever happened to reasoned, critical journalism?

Since there’s so much of this, I’m loath to identify individual magazines or articles, it just wouldn’t feel representative. The kind of thing I’m talking about are blanket statements such as “Windows 2000 is faster, more scalable and more reliable than NT.”

Where do they get this from? There is certainly no ‘real world’ evidence of this. If you discount this months release, people have been trialing the OS on small, test systems for a few weeks. Without a realistic load who can say, honestly, that it’s more reliable? And does ‘more reliable’ just mean ‘better than NT4’ or does it mean ‘as good as ‘Unix’? (Personally I believe neither interpretation. I very much doubt that a first release can be as reliable as NT4 with all the service packs, and that’s before we get to the months of uptime you can expect from a well configured Unix box.)

If reliability is difficult to understand, more scalable is laughable. At work we’re using a four processor Xeon 550Mhz machine with tonnes of disk-space. Right now there are very few Intel boxes that are bigger than that. Okay Win2K may support that hardware better than NT4 but it’s still the biggest you can get. An equivalent Sun machine probably falls into the ‘midrange’ category. What happened to the Alpha support? What happened to the PowerPC port? Both these architectures are far more scalable. And Linux, popularly believed to be less scalable than NT, supports them all.

So far, this piece is definitely painted as an anti-Microsoft tirade. That’s not going to change substantially, but Microsoft does deserve some credit for getting something the size and complexity of Win2K out the door at all. Check the metrics and success rate of projects that are thirty-five millions lines long. And there are some nice features. The GUI admin tools are not matched on any Unix implementation I’ve used and some things, such as the file protection and the separation of web applications from the web server, are long overdue.

However, the late delivery, high price and Microsoft-only nature of many new features don’t help in Microsoft’s defense against the monopoly allegations.