[Sussex] From last nights conversation

Steve Dobson SDobson at manh.com
Fri Mar 28 13:57:00 UTC 2003


Geoff

On 28 March 2003 at 12:24 Geoff Teale wrote: 
> 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. 

A similar view point to my own - but then I already knew that.

> 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.

But that is the nature of big (monopoly) companies.  Small
companies want a equal playing field to chip away at the
monopoly's markets.  Monopolies want to be able to absorb
the smaller ones into themselves.

> 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.  
<snip>
> 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.

Don't you me "without DE-centralisation"?  I believe that a 
market with lots of different provides of a product type or
servers provides choice.  The competition between them helps
reduce the point of sale price.  With monopolies and cartels
you get price fixing.  This is not good for the consumer.

The other problem with monopolies is that they can make mistakes.
Look at GEC as an example.  20 years ago a big employer in the UK.
Then they decided to re-brand themselves as Marconi and put all
their eggs in the mobile phone basket.  Not the best move they
ever did.

> 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.
<snip>
> 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.  

Agreed.  But specialised applications are such a small area
of the Windows market that I wouldn't expect Microsoft (or Sun
on Solaris, IBM on AIX AS400,..., HP on HP-UX, ...) to bias
their actions to help specialised apps above its other customers.
This is one area where OSS is a real benefit to the app 
vender.
  
> 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.

I don't get your point here.  How would an individual company
having to port (without adding functionally) it's customer apps 
every few years just because it's OS vendor released a new version
benefit?  I would have though that a stable OS with support, or
one that could get the source here and maintain themselves would
be better.

Steve




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