LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 16:03:28 +0930

Re: linux is not GNU/linux [was RedHat 7.1 reliability?]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 02:20:39PM +0930, Daryl Tester wrote:
> Phil Hutton wrote:
> 
> > Sorry, I think that's a lot of crap.  ;-)  It is never appropriate to
> > consider Netscape to be the operating system.
> 
> This soooo reminds me of a UF cartoon.
> 
>     http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19971221
> 



I think it's interesting to recall that the first Halloween
document (in October 1998, see
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/index.html) showed
a strong focus by MS on linux and netscape as providing a
competing API - not so much the OS itself.
And in the MS anti-trust trial, the MS people said that
they saw Netscape as a threat to MS-windows in that it
provided a competing API.

It seems that the MS people see the OS in terms of its
ability to control applications through the API, which is
all the applications developer really gets to see of the
MS operating system.

The interesting thing to me is that MS people really are
on a different planet.

When the open source people talk about protocols, they mean
interface definitions. The MS (marketing) people understand
protocols to mean protocol _implementations_.
When open source people talk about an OS, they mean that
big chunk of source code they see. The MS people see
the OS as a "user experience" plus a set of APIs, because
everything else is private.

In a sense, during the last 10 years, the linux adherents
have stuck with an open model of thinking about software
which was current decades earlier, whereas the MS people
have moved off to their own planet - which is consumer
and business oriented rather than software-development-oriented.

I see a close analogy here with the advent of Italian-style
music in Europe in the mid 17th century. The music of Bach and
others was oriented towards the performer of the music and
a small circle of connoisseurs who could appreciate fugues
and dense counterpoint. But the popular music (harmonic,
vertical, monophonic) coming in from Italy just completely
took over all of the music scene, because that kind of
music was more oriented towards the "end-user experience"
and a profitable business model.

In this sense, linux is the JS Bach of the software world,
and MS is the WA Mozart. In the long run, populist music
won the day, and that's we still listen to today.
This does not augur well for linux.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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