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ru.linux
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From : Sergey Lentsov 2:4615/71.10 01 Nov 2001 17:11:05
To : All
Subject : URL: http://www.lwn.net/2001/1101/
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Here is the [35]permanent site for this page.
See also: [36]last week's LWN.
Leading items and editorials
LWN Lite this week: Executive Editor Jonathan Corbet is taking a much
needed break somewhere in the Utah desert. Jon wrote the front page
editorial before leaving, the rest of this week's LWN has been put
together by the skeleton crew consisting of Rebecca Sobol and Forrest
Cook. Please excuse our smaller than usual content, it's been a
ghoulishly tiring week and we're both feeling like zombies.
Remember the Halloween memo? The [37]Halloween memo, remember, was an
internal Microsoft document that was leaked to Eric Raymond right
about on Halloween, 1998. It was a look at open source software as a
competitive threat to Microsoft, and it was, in a way, the first
externally-visible sign that Microsoft was getting worried. It was a
big deal at the time; there was much curiosity about how Microsoft
would react to Linux and free software. The Halloween memo seemed to
give some answers to that question; as [38]was stated in Salon:
Still, the approach [author Vinod] Valloppillil outlines is
consonant with Microsoft's previous behavior. Don't be surprised if
the strategies he outlines play out in the headlines over the next
two or three years.
Well, it is three years later, and, thus, a good time to look back and
see how things have really gone. Here is a retrospective on some of
the Halloween highlights.
One of the first conclusions made in the document was:
Commercial software development processes are hallmarked by
organization around economic goals. However, since money is often
not the (primary) motivation behind Open Source Software,
understanding the nature of the threat posed requires a deep
understanding of the process and motivation of Open Source
development teams. In other words, to understand how to compete
against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company.
That observation certainly remains true. Much more open source work is
done with a commercial motivation these days, but the process, at its
best, remains. Open source software can not be killed off by
destroying companies.
Here's an interesting claim that nobody really challened back in 1998:
Like commercial software, the most viable single OSS project in
many categories will, in the long run, kill competitive OSS
projects and `acquire' their IQ assets. For example, Linux is
killing BSD Unix and has absorbed most of its core ideas (as well
as ideas in the commercial UNIXes). This feature confers huge first
mover advantages to a particular project
Offhand, we would guess that users and developers of the BSD variants
would take exception to the claim that Linux is "killing" them. KDE's
"first mover" advantage has not kept GNOME from picking up large-scale
developer and company support. It is, in fact, quite rare than one
open source project "kills" another. There is indeed competition
between projects, but it takes a different form.
Here's a fundamental conclusion of the document:
Loosely applied to the vernacular of the software industry, a
product/process is long-term credible if FUD tactics can not be
used to combat it. OSS is Long-Term Credible. OSS systems are
considered credible because the source code is available from
potentially millions of places and individuals.
In other words, free software, unlike the proprietary variety, does
not simply disappear if things go wrong. There is no better example
than the recent Nautilus release; the company that created Nautilus is
gone, but the software remains and continues to improve. HP's OpenMail
vanished when the company ceased to support it; sendmail is
(unfortunately, some might say) here forever.
Microsoft has indeed found that FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt)
attacks against Linux tend to be ineffective. At their best, they are
laughable; at their worst, they make up a task list of things for
Linux developers to quickly address - the Mindcraft report, for
example, worked in this way. The company seemed to hold out a bit more
hope for FUD attacks against free software licenses, but those, too,
have subsided recently.
On project management:
The biggest roadblock for OSS projects is dealing with exponential
growth of management costs as a project is scaled up in terms of
rate of innovation and size. This implies a limit to the rate at
which an OSS project can innovate.
Some free software projects are huge - think KDE, GNOME, Mozilla,
OpenOffice, or the kernel. Certainly some of those projects have shown
management problems at times - for example, the "Linus burnout"
episodes in 2.1 kernel development. There are two things to keep in
mind, though:
* Proprietary software projects are not exactly famous for their
lack of management problems, and
* The problems encountered by free software projects tend to get
worked out over time.
Project management is hard, and free software projects are not immune
from problems. But they are not especially prone to them either.
Is free software future credible?
A very sublime problem which will affect full scale consumer
adoption of OSS projects is the lack of strategic direction in the
OSS development cycle. While incremental improvement of the current
bag of features in an OSS product is very credible, future features
have no organizational commitment to guarantee their development.
Proclamations from open source developers on future features may or
may not be credible - think about Linus's "[39]2.5.x looks like it
will open in a week or two" comment from last June. That may be part
of why open source developers tend to be reluctant to make promises
about what will come. They tend to let the code speak for itself in
its current state.
One could argue that future features in open source code could be more
credible, not less. Features in Microsoft code are hidden from public
view until they spring, fully developed, from the head of Bill. Until
a product is released, nobody really knows how development is
progressing. Those interested in how a free software development is
coming along can look at the code, run a development version, and see
exactly where things stand.
What does it mean for the Linux community to "sign up" to help
build the Corporate Digital Nervous System? How can Linux guarantee
backward compatibility with apps written to previous API's? Who do
you sue if the next version of Linux breaks some commitment? How
does Linux make a strategic alliance with some other entity?
Hmm...one hears a lot less about digital nervous systems these days...
And who, exactly, do you sue if Microsoft breaks a commitment?
There were few answers to the last question above at the time, but now
the answer appears obvious. "Some other entity" can make a "strategic
alliance" with a free software project by joining in the development
process. Thus, for example, a number of distributors have built
"strategic alliances" with the kernel developers - by employing them.
The memo concluded that Linux was unlikely to be a threat on the
desktop. There were a few reasons for that; first:
OSS development process are far better at solving individual
component issues than they are at solving integrative scenarios
such as end-to-end ease of use.
Three years later, there is perhaps some truth to that. The desktop
projects are getting a better handle on integration and ease of use,
however. Detailed user testing, for example, has begun to be a part of
their process, though they could do more.
Switching desktops is hard and a challenger must be able to prove a
significant marginal advantage. Linux's process is more focused on
second-mover advantages (e.g. copying what's been proven to work)
and is therefore unlikely to provide the first-mover advantage
necessary to provide switching impetus.
For the purposes of most desktop users, this claim is probably true.
Reproducing what is available on a Microsoft desktop will win some
users, but it is not enough. It may yet turn out, however, that
Microsoft's licensing will provide that impetus to switch.
Ease of use must be engineered from the ground up. Linux's hacker
orientation will never provide the ease-of-use requirements of the
average desktop user.
The desktop projects are being engineered from the ground up. It
remains true that ease of use is not always at the top of many
hackers' priorities, however.
So, how was Microsoft to beat Linux?
Fold extended functionality into commodity protocols / services and
create new protocols. Linux's homebase is currently commodity
network and server infrastructure. By folding extended
functionality (e.g. Storage+ in file systems, DAV/POD for
networking) into today's commodity services, we raise the bar &
change the rules of the game.
This was the core of the document's strategy: move toward proprietary
protocols and services. The antitrust trial may have slowed this
process down, but it's happening: .NET and HailStorm provide ample
evidence. The world, however, is increasingly suspicious of
proprietary protocols, and this will still prove to be a hard battle.
In three years, Microsoft has not gotten too far with it.
The document took a look at Mozilla, predicting that it would continue
to drop behind Internet Explorer. Much controversy came from the
document's use of declining traffic on the Mozilla lists as evidence
that development was slowing. Mozilla-general went from 1862 postings
in April, 1998 to 687 in June. Mozilla-ui went from 285 to 76. For the
curious, Mozilla-general seems to have bottomed out with 211 messages
in October, 1999; it carried 1451 postings in September, 2001.
Mozilla-ui carried 243 messages, and appears to be headed toward
double that in October.
In other words, three years later, Mozilla is alive and well, and
reaching the point where it can do numerous interesting and novel
things. While IE development has slowed, Mozilla has picked up. For
many, Mozilla or its derivatives (Galeon, Skipstone, etc.) are the
browser of choice. Mozilla and IE have not yet come to a real
"battle;" it will be interesting to see what comes out when that
happens. But it's clear that Mozilla will be there for that battle.
Heading toward a conclusion, the report asked how Microsoft could
"capture" the benefits of open source development. The recommendations
included putting more source out there, something that Microsoft is
experimenting with in its "shared source" program. Also included were
a number of internal changes - radical things like giving the Excel
team access to the Windows source. It is, of course, harder to know if
such changes have happened within the company. Then, of course, there
was the famous recommendation:
OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server
applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized,
simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new
protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
Microsoft has certainly made efforts in this area, and will continue
to do so. Most of the important protocols remain free, however, for
now. How that will play out in the future remains to be seen.
The report concluded with a list of "interesting links," one of which
was LWN.net. Three years later, we're still trying to be
interesting...
Penguin Gallery Update. The [40]LWN Penguin Gallery has been updated
again. Head penguin wrangler Dennis Tenney reports:
Today's update added eight penguins. Two of the penguins are from a
really nice collection of desktop backgrounds from the German
magazine C't, at [41]http://www.heise.de/ct/motive/. This site
would be worth a mention on the desktop page, if we had one.
Inside this LWN.net weekly edition:
* [42]Security: 2.2 kernel updates, the ANX secure network, openssh,
squid, and uucp updates.
* [43]Kernel: Kernel page on vacation. Expect a final 2.2.20 soon.
* [44]Distributions: Caldera Openlinux 64 Release 3.1 for Itanium;
SuSE 7.3 ships.
* [45]Development: Netscape 6.2, scary Ghostscript install, OSDN
Printing Summit, Gnumeric 0.72, TinyCOBOL 0.55, Erlang R8B,
OpenMCL 0.8.
* [46]Commerce: SuSE Linux Announces Distribution Agreement For IBM
Software on Linux; Red Hat Embedded Linux Developer Suite Now
Available.
* [47]History: Linux 2.2 - almost; Burn all GIFs day; Python
embraces Zope Corp.
* [48]Letters: ZDNet mining Gartner?; Booting emacs; DMCA and
censorship.
...plus the usual array of reports, updates, and announcements.
This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
* [49]Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor
November 1, 2001
[50]Click Here
[51]Click Here
[52]Next: Security
[53]Eklektix, Inc. Linux powered! Copyright Л 2001 [54]Eklektix, Inc.,
all rights reserved
Linux (R) is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
References
1. http://lwn.net/
2. http://ads.tucows.com/click.ng/pageid=001-012-132-000-000-001-000-000-012
3. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/security.php3
4. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/kernel.php3
5. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/dists.php3
6. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/devel.php3
7. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/commerce.php3
8. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/press.php3
9. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/announce.php3
10. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/history.php3
11. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/letters.php3
12. http://lwn.net//2001/1101/bigpage.php3
13. http://lwn.net/daily/
14. http://linuxcalendar.com/
15. http://lwn.net/stocks/
16. http://lwn.net/Reviews/
17. http://lwn.net/Gallery/
18. http://lwn.net/archives/
19. http://lwn.net/op/headlines.phtml
20. http://lwn.net/op/Contact.html
21. http://linux.tucows.com/
22. http://news.tucows.com/ext2/
23. http://unixthemes.tucows.com/
24. http://lwn.net/2001/features/oreilly2001/
25. http://lwn.net/2001/features/OLS/
26. http://lwn.net/2001/features/MandrakeSoft.php3
27. http://lwn.net/2001/features/KernelSummit/
28. http://lwn.net/2001/features/Singapore
29. http://lwn.net/2001/features/djbdns.php3
30. http://lwn.net/2001/features/linuxworldny/
31. http://lwn.net/2001/features/JHaas/
32. http://lwn.net/2001/features/LarryWall/
33. http://lwn.net/2001/features/Momjian/
34. http://lwn.net/2000/features/Timeline/
35. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/
36. http://lwn.net/2001/1025/
37. http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween1.html
38. http://www.salon.com/21st/rose/1998/11/04straight.html
39. http://lwn.net/2001/0628/a/2.5-coming.php3
40. http://lwn.net/Gallery/
41. http://www.heise.de/ct/motive/
42. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/security.php3
43. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/kernel.php3
44. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/dists.php3
45. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/devel.php3
46. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/commerce.php3
47. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/history.php3
48. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/letters.php3
49. mailto:lwn@lwn.net
50. http://ads.tucows.com/click.ng/buttonpos=lwnbutton125top
51. http://ads.tucows.com/click.ng/buttonpos=125-001-016
52. http://lwn.net/2001/1101/security.php3
53. http://www.eklektix.com/
54. http://www.eklektix.com/
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URL: http://www.lwn.net/2001/1101/ |
Sergey Lentsov |
01 Nov 2001 17:11:05 |
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