OSS vs Proprietary

[Lincoln Peters]

The information that I give here is believed to be accurate, but if you find 
anything that you know to be incorrect, please speak up.

>My opinion is that open-source software will continue to evolve,
>but will have a hard time replacing some proprietary software.  For
>example, Linux on the desktop will never be as ubiquitous as MS
>Windows
>on the desktop for a variety of reasons. The first and foremost one
>right now being that Linux desktops (KDE/GNOME) do not compare well to
>Microsoft Windows on a usage basis, and that their application suits
>do
>not compare favorably either. This seems to be the biggest thing
>stopping Linux on the desktop, but it also seems to be one of the
>areas
>that OS will always have a very hard time conquering for a few
>reasons.

Open source office suites may be lacking some of the functionality of 
Microsoft Office, but there are a lot of people working to bring open source 
suites to the level of Microsoft Office.  This is especially noticeable in 
the OpenOffice project, which runs on Linux as well as Windows, and is 
already used by quite a few groups (especially schools and universities).

MS Office may be packed with features that no other office suites have, but 
few people actually use all of them.  Additionally, many people are 
unwilling or unable to pay $500 per MS Office license, and they are quite 
interested in free alternatives that meet all of their needs without 
providing features that they don't need.

It is difficult to predict the future of anything, not to mention computer 
trends, but I suspect that as OpenOffice matures and Microsoft's licensing 
becomes more predatory, more and more people will hear about open-source 
suites such as OpenOffice, try one or more of them (probably on their 
Windows boxes), and proceed to use one of them regularly.  Once they're 
comfortable with the open-source office suite(s), making the transition to a 
Linux desktop should be easy.

>First, ubiquitous standards are very important from many people's
>viewpoints, this is something that Linux Desktops do not have, and
>probably will not have. The second is development of complex projects
>like operating systems, or Desktops will probably never get the
>resources devoted to them from the open source world that a company
>like
>Microsoft could devote to them. The result would be that OS would
>continually be playing catch up to proprietary solutions, while never
>adding innovative or new features.

Most open-source application use XML, and it is far easier to convert files 
between different XML-based formats than between binary formats such as 
those used by everything Microsoft.

You are correct that there are few if any standards for desktop 
environments, but not even Microsoft has adopted a standard and stuck with 
it.  You may recall that when Windows 95 came out, most people who were 
experienced with Windows 3.11 and earlier had a terrible time learning the 
new system.  More recently, Microsoft re-designed their interface for 
Windows XP, and few if any people experienced with the older systems took 
the changes very well (not to mention the new color scheme).

Another consideration is that historically, Microsoft has put much more 
attention towards packing features into their products than towards fixing 
bugs.  The end result of such pracitces is sure to be a rediculously 
overbuilt product that can't do anything right.  Some might argue that 
Microsoft's product have already reached this end, most if not all would 
agree that if they have not yet reached this end, they are closing on it 
fast.  By contrast, most open source projects put most of their attention 
towards fixing bugs, and they don't concern themselves with bells and 
whistles until the product works correctly.

Whether innovation or catch-up predominates the Linux desktop depends also 
on how much momentum the desktop development has.  It is clear that for 
server applications such as Apache, there are enough people working on it 
(enough momentum) that Microsoft IIS will never be able to compete with it, 
and considering the sheer bloat and insecurity of IIS compared to Apache, I 
can't understand why anyone uses IIS at all.

At Rancho Cotate High School, I found that anyone who was willing to try to 
use a Linux-based workstation (usually with the KDE desktop) was very happy 
with it.  It could do everything they need without random crashes, and at 
about 1/20th the price, it performs just as well as a Windows NT 
workstation.

(By the way, how could Microsoft have possibly thought that it was a good 
idea to allow an e-mail to contain executable code that runs it as soon as 
the message is opened?)

>
>But for other things, systems that are designed around one open
>source platform things are different. Anywhere where what the software
>needs to provide is a simple tool set for application vendors. In
>other
>words where developers need a platform to build off of, instead of
>having to reinvent the wheel. Look at where Linux is used a lot today,
>anywhere where someone needs a simple operating system to provide a
>simple service for some other application.

Actually, there are now lots of large mainframes running Linux and running 
incredibly large, complicated, mission-critical tasks such as database 
servers.  At LinuxWorld in August, both IBM and HP were showing off these 
kinds of servers.  Go to http://www.ibm.com and take a look at their 
offerings for small and medium-sized businesses, and you'll see what I mean. 
  All of their eServers are available with Linux, WinNT/2000, Novell, et 
al., depending on what you prefer (and most customers prefer Linux).

>
>Anyway, to summarize things, I do not think that open
>source/free software will ever be able to continually commit enough
>resources to a complex software product that a proprietary company
>would
>be able to. However, for simple applications that do not change often
>(i.e. something like Apache), OS looks to be a great alternative.

Think again.

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