[Sussex] From last nights conversation

[Steve Dobson]

Morning all

On 28 March 2003 at 08:24 Geoff Teale wrote:
> Interesting meet last night, Mark and Nik should have their 
> own show ;)  It is very interesting that in a group that all
> share a common interest in Linux there can be such a range of
> views, especially from two people who are essentially in the
> same business, but in different business sectors.  I wonder
> if all our visions of how the world really is are all skewed
> massivley by what we do for a living?  I know that an awful 
> lot of people I've met doing VB development seriously believe
> that everybody in the world runs NT/2000 servers as well as
> windows desktops, I even had an argument in a management
> meeting at Thomson with a guy who honestly believed that SQL
> Server 7 was the world most popular database sever.  Equally 
> I tend to look at the world as a place of idiotic, corrupt
> and naive management because of my experiences.

But isn't this just human nature?  Everyone believes that their
world view is the only sensible one.  This is amazing to me
because it is so obvious that I'm right and you all are wrong :-)

> One point I'd like to illustrate this morning.  Mark asked 
> for an example of how Microsoft customers would be better
> off if Microsoft software was open-sourced - here's a perfect
> example:
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/29985.html
>
> ..Whilst Microsoft claim they won't fix NT 4.0 because the 
> structure of the OS makes it too hard some former employees
> have claimed this moring that this is not true and that this
> attitude is simply a result of Microsoft winding down the last
> stages of NT 4 support.  

Is this a good example or is this just another case of Microsoft
bashing (this time by former employees)?  There have been a number
of time I've found bugs in my companies (and mine) code that has
required a major re-structuring to fix.  There may be some spin here
my Microsoft in that the resources needed to fix it is not economic.

I can remember, back in my student days, of finding a bug in VMS
(DEC were very good with support).  On reporting the bug we were
told that it was a known issue (DEC were just keeping mum) and that
it was fix in the next major release (six months away) and to just
live with it.  As it wasn't a security hole in itself this was
accepted, but later on finding a fault in the systems configuration
it was used to create a security hold.
 
> I have no problem with a business that makes its money by box-shifting
> wanting to limit the lifespan of it's older products, this is 
> a fact of life that we accept and will have to accept from Linux
> vendors as well as proprietary vendors.  However the one real benefit
> of open source is that the group of people who want (or indeed _need_)
> to continure working with NT 4 are going to see more and more of these
> problems and they would be better servered by an Open Source product
> because it simply allows them to at least have the choice - redevelop
> systems that rely on NT4 to work with newer platforms or maintain NT4's
> source.  Now in most cases an individual company would opt for re-
> development of their own systems (this makes sense), but I am sure
> there are enough companies running NT4 out there that any community
> project to continue to support the code would recieve a _lot_ 
> of commercial backing.

I'm not surprised that you have no problem with end-of-lifing a 
produce or release:  you run Gentoo - which tracks cutting edge.
You're bug fix approach is to rollout the latest version.  This is
not acceptable to many companies that want time to plan upgrades
and then test new versions.

> Does this make sense for Microsoft?  Absolutely not, they 
> need you to buy their new product, not keep on using their
> old one.  Does it make sense for Microsoft customers - yes.

I partly agree here that Microsoft do want to generate revenue
from constant upgrading.  I think this is one area where they
do let down their customers.  I would have much more respect 
for Microsoft if they announced a support roadmap for a product
and stuck to it.  Too often (to me) they appear to announce 
end-of-life when the replacement looks stable enough.  This
doesn't help companies to slowly phase in new products.

> When we talk about the world in a Windows versus Linux way 
> (not the way businesses see it, as Mark will attest, but
> certainly the way most Linux zealots and Microsoft themselves
> see it) it is often telling that one of the biggest reasons
> people are interested in Linux is not for any technical
> apsect of it but simply because they don't (to the same 
> extent, at least) have to get locked into an upgrade cycle,
> and where there is an upgrade to be made, it is a matter of
> a free download rather than a whole bunch of new licensing
> (and, often, new hardware).   A point that both Mark and
> Dominix have made about Microsoft bashing is very relevant
> here - these valid concerns often get lost in the flood of
> "Microsoft sucks because..." comments.

This is one area when I think OSS and Microsoft are very, very
similar.  Both are really only interested in supporting the latest 
version.

Supporting old versions of products is boring in the most part.
I doubt that good support for OSS will ever come from the OS
community itself.  This is were RedHat, HP, IBM & Sun come in. 
They will pay developers to keep supporting it.

Steve