Are you claiming that IBM never saw the source code for OS/2?
Steve Mills would certainly disagree.
Posted on 09/13/2003 7:32:43 PM PDT by chilepepper
Governments like open-source software, but Microsoft does not
IN MAY, the city of Munich decided to oust Microsoft Windows from the 14,000 computers used by local-government employees in favour of Linux, an open-source operating system. Although the contract was worth a modest $35m, Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, interrupted his holiday in Switzerland to visit Munich and lobby the mayor. Microsoft even dropped its prices to match Linux—a remarkable feat since Linux is essentially free and users merely purchase support services alongside it. But the software giant still lost. City officials said the decision was a matter of principle: the municipality wanted to control its technological destiny. It did not wish to place the functioning of government in the hands of a commercial vendor with proprietary standards which is accountable to shareholders rather than to citizens.
Worryingly for Microsoft, Munich is not alone in holding that view. Across the globe, governments are turning to open-source software which, unlike proprietary software, allows users to inspect, modify and freely redistribute its underlying programming instructions. Scores of national and state governments have drafted legislation calling for open-source software to be given preferential treatment in procurement. Brazil, for instance, is preparing to recommend that all its government agencies and state enterprises buy open source.
Other countries are funding open-source software initiatives outright. China has been working on a local version of Linux for years, on the grounds of national self-sufficiency, security and to avoid being too dependent on a single foreign supplier. Politicians in India have called on its vast army of programmers to develop open-source products for the same reasons. This month, Japan said it would collaborate with China and South Korea to develop open-source alternatives to Microsoft's software. Japan has already allocated ¥1 billion ($9m) to the project.
Why all the fuss? Modern governments generate a vast number of digital files. From birth certificates and tax returns to criminal DNA records, the documents must be retrievable in perpetuity. So governments are reluctant to store official records in the proprietary formats of commercial-software vendors. This concern will only increase as e-government services, such as filing a tax return or applying for a driving licence online, gain momentum. In Microsoft's case, security flaws in its software, such as those exploited by the recent Blaster and SoBig viruses, are also a cause of increasing concern.
Government purchases of software totalled almost $17 billion globally in 2002, and the figure is expected to grow by about 9% a year for the next five years, according to IDC, a market-research firm (see chart). Microsoft controls a relatively small part of this market, with sales to governments estimated at around $2.8 billion. But it is a crucial market, because when a government opts for a particular technology, the citizens and businesses that deal with it often have to fall into line. (In one notable example, America's defence department adopted the internet protocol as its networking standard, forcing contractors to use it, which in turn created a large market for internet-compliant products.) No wonder Microsoft feels threatened—the marriage of open-source software and government could be its Achilles heel.
Policymakers like open source for many reasons. In theory, the software's transparency increases security because “backdoors” used by hackers can be exposed and programmers can root out bugs from the code. The software can also be tailored to the user's specific needs, and upgrades happen at a pace chosen by the user, not the vendor. The open-source model of openness and collaboration has produced some excellent software that is every bit the equal of commercial, closed-source products. And, of course, there is no risk of being locked in to a single vendor.
That said, open-source is no panacea, and there are many areas where proprietary products are still far superior. Oracle, the world's second-largest software company, need not worry (yet) about governments switching to open-source alternatives to its database software. But Microsoft is vulnerable, because an open-source rival to its Windows operating system exists already, in the form of Linux.
If Microsoft is indeed squeezed out of the government sector by open-source software, three groups stand to benefit: large consultancy firms and systems integrators, such as IBM, which will be called in to devise and install alternative products; firms such as Red Hat or SuSE, which sell Linux-based products and services; and numerous small, local technology firms that can tailor open-source products for governmental users.
As a result, the company has been fighting back. Microsoft and its allies have sought to discredit open-source software, likening its challenge of proprietary ownership to communism and suggesting that its openness makes it insecure and therefore vulnerable to terrorism. The firm also created a controversial slush fund to allow it to offer deep discounts to ensure that it did not lose government sales to Linux on the basis of price. And Microsoft has paid for a series of studies, the latest of which appeared this week, which invariably find that, in specific applications, Windows costs less than Linux.
More strikingly, Microsoft has been imitating the ways of the open-source “community”. Last year, the firm launched a “shared source” initiative that allows certain approved governments and large corporate clients to gain access to most of the Windows software code, though not to modify it. This is intended, in part, to assuage the fears of foreign governments that Windows might contain secret security backdoors. Microsoft has also made available some portions of the source code of Windows CE, which runs on handheld PCs and mobile phones, to enable programmers to tinker with the code. Tellingly, this is a market where the company is a straggler rather than a leader.
Jason Matusow, Microsoft's shared-source manager, says that developing software requires leadership and an understanding of customer needs—both areas where proprietary-software companies excel. As for proposed legislation that would stipulate one type of software over another, it is anti-competitive and could leave users hamstrung with products that are not the best for their specific needs, says Robert Kramer, executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice, a Microsoft-supported lobby group. Microsoft will advance these views next week in Rome, where it is hosting the latest in a series of conferences for government leaders. But the signs are that many of them have already made up their minds.
Not necessarily. While IBM supplied the OS/2 specs and change requests as MS was doing the coding, MS reportedly had a "secret" project going on, which was Win95. I think it came as a total surprise to IBM ESD, which was wondering about MS' performance just before they took OS/2 development back in-house.
Different development teams. Different platform. Different code.
Are you claiming that IBM never saw the source code for OS/2?
Steve Mills would certainly disagree.
Of course not. IBM hired Microsoft to do the work. IBM owns OS/2, including the source code.
"Not necessarily. While IBM supplied the OS/2 specs and change requests as MS was doing the coding, MS reportedly had a "secret" project going on, which was Win95. I think it came as a total surprise to IBM ESD, which was wondering about MS' performance just before they took OS/2 development back in-house." - Techjunkyard
Here's where the conspiracy theories again break down: software ran at the same speed under Os/2 as it did under Windows 95.
If there were "secret hooks" and other such shenanigans written secretly into Windows 95, then the competitors affected by such tricks would have gone to court and shown the judge and the jury their software (e.g. WordPerfect) running dog-slow under Windows 95 versus rabbit-fast under OS/2 in a side-by comparison that would have been difficult to defend against at trial.
So it's pretty tough to get me to accept the whole secret conspiracy by MicroSoft argument.
Broadly speaking, IBM was privvy to the Windows 95 code base, the performance for Windows 95 and OS/2 is generally equal, and U.S. copyright law would lend weight to all of the above source code being stored in the Library of Congress. Those are all hurdles that the secret conspiracy crowd would have to overcome to be believed.
That of course rests on the ability of Microsoft's competitors to be able to legally make software that can seamlessly transition their data from MS's products to theirs. Microsoft owns patents on most of its technologies, therefore it would be easy for them to make it cost prohibitive to make a product that can make switching easy or even possible.
Interesting theory. But the fact is that W95 apps wouldn't run on OS/2; it was fundamentally not the same system. If they had, there would have been scads of apps for OS/2, and Billy would not have been happy.
Win95 was still essentially a shell on top of DOS while OS/2 was totally different from the guts up. OS/2 would not format bootable diskettes; '95 did. Perhaps there were some similarities between '95 and OS/2 1.x or 2.1, particularly the networking layer, but that's about it. Remember, the Win-OS/2 compatibility stuff was for Win 3.1 apps!
I'll admit that my memory from 8 long years ago may be fuzzy. Could you please help remind me which major commercial application wouldn't run on both systems, as I don't seem to remember any such apps offhand.
Um, you yourself mentioned DR-Dos (interestingly enough, it was the SCO group who won that lawsuit against MS).
MS has a long baggage train of lawsuits behind them.
The only thing I have against MS is their repeated use of illegal behaviors such as fraud, coercion, purposeful breach-of-contract, exclusionary tactics, "embrace, extend, extinquish", FUD storms, and on and on.
MS has been convicted of the economic equivilant of assault and murder in numerous cases on a mountain of evidence.
I do not believe it is in their interests to release the Win95 source specifically because of their plans -- they clearly plan to continue to use every tool available to them to lock out the competitors as long as humanly possible.
They'll happily give away a *lot* of software forever if it allows them to keep a 90%+ marketshare of something they make a what, one thousand percent markup on?
And if OS/2 runs on top of DR-DOS then I'll concede to your point.
Does it?
Well, since code written to the Win32 APIs wouldn't run natively, the short answer is "all of them". The apps had to be ported and re-released. Since developers were writing to at least two Win32 APIs (one for NT, one for '95) some felt an OS/2 port wasn't worth the effort.
That's why IBMers in the early to mid 90's got used to using WP and SmartSuite for OS/2 while the rest of the world was on Microsoft Office. (This was before IBM bought Lotus, decreed Notes as the official groupware/mail suite, and dragged everyone kicking and screaming away from PROFS on VM/CMS (don't even get me started... ;-))
By the late 90s most of IBM's internal desktops were running NT anyway... because that's where the apps were.
They 'broke' Windows on purpose in regards to DR-DOS, to leverage their Windows marketshare into a MS-DOS marketsahare.
Embrace, extend, extinquish.
MS's only successes have come from using leverage to control a market, just like that. Every time they have to actually compete head-to-head, they lose.
In all those cases they did indeed leverage their Windows marketshare to win -- well, except in the case of SQLServer, which hasn't won yet and for *exactly* that reason. MS does not have a dominant share in the server market to leverage!!! Same same with IIS.
Also add, "Internet Explorer", "Windows Media Player", "MSN".
Just ask yourself, if MS didn't have 90% marketshare for Windows, would any of the products hold the marketshare they do today?
Clearly not.
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