[Sussex] From last nights conversation

[Geoff Teale]

Steve wrote:
------------
> But it could be.  It just appears to me, as an outside observer, that
> Microsoft care little about supporting customers happy with older
> version of their products.  What interests me in this is can we use
> this to move sites over to systems where long term support is 
> available.

Yes.  TO be fair to Microsoft why should they - there's little in it for
them apart from improving peoples opinion of them - for the moment the have
enough momentum to sell new things no matter how badly they treat people
down the line.  The existance of Linux may well change that (see below).

> I don't want Linux to win, and I don't want Microsoft to disappear.  I
> just want choice in the market place.

A reasonable and fair view.

One important aspect of Linux's success is that it may force Microsoft to
play a fairer game.  Ultimately my problems with microsoft are mainly based
in the social, political and economic damage they are doing to the world,
not their technology.  Microsoft claim that restricting them would cost
jobs, and economic prospetity, this is of course utter rubbish - the need
for computing in the world would not diminish and twenty competing vendors
would between them employ more people between them then a monopoly ever
will.  I will argue the GPL's corner (and all who sail under that license)
vehemently purely because it is a decentralising force, a collection of
elements that stands more chance of redistributing wealth and power in a
manner that allows free-market economies to function properly again than
anything else currently in existance.  It took several hundred years to
break the vice like grip Christian faiths (principly Catholism) held over
Europe and the colonies and we're still desperatley trying to achieve the
same level of sanity in Muslim states, I have no desire to see that void
filled by Microsoft, Time-Warner AOL and the Sony Corporation.  The  GPL
inherently means that no company can hold a true monopoly whilst using it,
this is the only reason I would ever feel comfortable with it attaining a
Microsoft style dominance.  Standardisation has benefits, but
standardisation without centralisation is closer to an ideal.


<snip>
> > I know of two Psycho-acoustics specialists who are funding
> > development of Open Source BeOS clones because it is more effective
> > for them to look for a future for BeOS than it is for them 
> to redevelop
> > their software on a different platform.  For Windows NT there are
> > probably a few thousand companies in similar situations
> 
> But are these really comparable?  One is a highly specialised 
> application
> with (I suspect) only a few clients so the cost of supporting 
> the OS BeOS
> is less than porting their product.
> 
> Windows based apps have a much large market sector, and the 
> port costs 
> are therefore less of a burden per unit sale.

Agreed, but there are just as many highly specialised applications running
on NT4, and they are likely to be the only people who can't easily make a
jump to Win2k or XP (because they use one of the few parts of the API that
has changed drastically).  This is why I talked about thousands of companies
rather than millions - in the world there are probably only a few thousand
companies in this situation.

> I don't think it is just open source here.  Any platform 
> which offered a
> stable API would also do.  Look at the upgrade problems Sun 
> when through
> with it's clients when the switched from BSD to SVR4.

Only where that API covers that area of functionality required.  You can
program in POSIX on Windows NT (assuming you buy the right bits and bobs)
that is a very fixed standard, it also works on Linux (mostly), *BSD,
Solaris, HP-UX, OS2, QNX, etc etc.. but it can't do everything.  If you are
a specialised minority user the mainstream OS will move forward and the
API's will change, I cannot name a single OS that hasn't worked this way -
open source (or right to purchase source) is the only way in which these
things can be maintained.  
 
As I said before, the majority of people who are effected would still find
it better (on an individual basis) to rewrite their own software - but a
community effort between such firms can (and does) make some sense.

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?

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