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Newsflash: Microsoft Does Not Play Nice
Posted by isecore on December 14th, 2007
Through the course of my life I’ve been a pretty firm supporter of FOSS (Free/Open Source Software). This basically started back in 1994, and since then my passion for this particular form of software has grown along with the strides made by the same. FOSS is in my opinion the most important type of software, and I’m certain that it will at some point overtake proprietary software as the dominant form of software on this planet. The matter of “when” is however up for debate.
One of the things that I constantly get reminded about from other users is one of the most fundamental differences between proprietary software and free software. I already know this difference, but other users seem to have a difficult time understanding these differences - differences which, when you think about it, quite obvious.
Proprietary software is closed software. It’s not debatable, it’s nod modifiable, it’s not verifiable and it most assuredly is not designed to be any of those things. FOSS on the other hand is open, available and verifiable in every way that proprietary software isn’t. If you have to draw a line, proprietary software cannot be trusted since you can’t verify it’s functionality or source-code. The most obvious example of this is Windows, controlled by one company who aggressively guard the source of their prize jewel. Despite the fact that Windows clearly is the dominant operating system on this planet, there is no way for anyone except Microsoft to know exactly what goes on behind the desktop. FOSS is completely the opposite, if you’re wondering then the source is easily available for scrutiny by anone who chooses to do just that.
An extension to proprietary software being closed is that the company has a tendency to play dirty in order to maintain that proprietary. Again, Microsoft and Windows are the prime examples of this. The whole Windows-ecosystem is designed to work best with itself. It does not extend a warm welcome to anything else except others just like it. Microsoft has designed it to do just that, using dirty tricks and undocumented tweaks to protocols. Even Apple has to reverse-engineer their stuff to understand it, since Microsoft only shares a small portion of the documentation with others. Everything else they keep close to their chest.
Linux and FOSS is steadily gaining exposure on the desktop. FOSS has virtually won the war as far as servers go, a vast majority of servers around the world run on some variation of Linux or BSD - the exceptions being those corporations with a PHB who has been swayed by the sales-talk of proprietary vendors such as Microsoft. This in turn leads to those companies making further modifications to entrench themselves into the customers datacenters.
Here the excellent example from Microsoft is Office. Do you ever notice how each new version of Word breaks the DOC-format for older versions? Newer versions can read files created by older versions, but not the other way around. Have you noticed that? Do you really think it’s a coincidence? If you do, then I’m afraid you’re very naive about the world of proprietary software. Of course no one can prove that Microsoft do this, but it’s just to convenient for them to essentially force users to upgrade to not be just a coincidence.
This strategy of making closed ecosystems is very typical of Windows. Everything from Microsoft plays fairly nice together, despite the large amounts of unreliability - yet integrating none-Microsoft/Windows systems into the ecosphere is very difficult.
And this is where I go back to what I wrote in the beginning. This is something that regularly baffles users who are new to the world of FOSS. They convert to something open, and then they get confused as to why it doesn’t play nice with the things from the closed ecosystem.
Now, I might be paranoid, but wouldn’t it be in the proprietary vendors own interest to make as sure as possible that their delicate little ecosystem stays that way, and thus implement as many tricks as possible to mess up things for users of alternate systems? To make things as difficult as possible and not play nice, in an effort to make the user say “oh screw this, it’s too much work, I’ll just go back to using the old stuff again”?
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.
December 15th, 2007 at 05:12
I don’t think you are paranoid, It has happened time and again so it is no secret. I mean, Microsoft even go out and buy themselves the victory in elections so… well, I think that speaks for itself conserning their moral values.
December 15th, 2007 at 16:14
What both people and goverment alike do not seem to want to understand, is that private companie
are not allways a thing of good. Not that they are allways evil or that goverments are good either.
But basiclly the principle of profit makes need for profit at basiclly any cost. The only interest most
companies have is them selves. Screw all other in other words.
Sure one needs to do this in a smart way. You do not go around telling those who are going to pay
that they are mindless fuckers that only need to do one thing: part with their money. No you must
do it in a more subtle way. But how you do it does not change the fact!
Then again, there do NOT exist anything that does not have atleast two sides to it. So FOSS is by all
means no perfect solution either. I agree, as long the competition is there at least I fell a bit better.
And should it ever go away there is a real risk of danger. But not all things are solved that way.
And like it or not the human race is primitive. It understands greed and fear. And sometime you can
use this to get good results. And often faster and more focused. Look at religion. No matter what you
feelings are about that, they have done wonders in those two areas
The question is rather: To where do we go in the future? Is it possible to adapt capitalism to something
better? Or do we need something new? Can the human race really exist with a diffrent motivator than
money and power? Or is this something to change much further along in the future?
December 16th, 2007 at 04:22
The larger the company the more the principles of a free market break down. The point of free market was to promote competition, which in turn would evolve better services, goods, etc. But when companies get large enough the underlying principles break down, there is no evolution to something better. They are so large that they can smother smaller companies at a whim, companies that may have better ideás and better way of doing things. What our society have forgotten is that the oh so holy profit, is not always a good thing. Profit for profits sake can be bad for everyone except the boss at a large company. When we say that a company is more EFFICIENT it is measured in how much money they can generate, one way or the other. This means, a company providing healthcare can be profitable by being really good at science and healthcare, or they can do it an easier way by fooling people with insurances and what not. Both examples can be as “efficient” but obviously only one of them is actually good for people in general and our society.
My view is that a free market works really well for small up to large companies but start to break down when it comes to extremely large companies, such as Microsoft. Just as Newtons laws break down when you look at really small things in physics a free market does not apply to very large companies. We need to find something else entirely, or make som special exception for these situations.
December 16th, 2007 at 17:42
The thing is that we (e.g the humans) somehow do not understand that there is no such thing as profit. And to make things worse: it can never ever go on forever. In order to get profit in one place there must be a loss at some other place. And this “other” place is not so clearly visable at all time.
A cool comparison is that companies when they grow upwards on the scale, amass what acts like gravity. The bigger the company the greater their gravity. And when it gets big enough all hell breaks loose and nothing can escape total entropy. Basicly that means that companies above a certain size are actually a bad thing. They are totally lethal and should NOT be allowed to roam free, if exist at all. The same goes for single individuals with HUGE fortunes. In order for them to exist an enormous amount of people need to be very poor. There is a finite amount of money and if some has a lot, many other has to have very little. But still we let this happen and even try hard to make it possible. Why? Well two reasons really: 1) We do not know any better, 2) We do not have any other solution (in other words: we humans are quite primitive when push comes to shove). And the sad thing is when we try to rationalize all this crazyness we use things like religion and such. It is a sad, sad state of affairs…