[Dclug] Where is the free software dividend?

[Larry Howe]

On Saturday 02 December 2006 12:32, Adam Morey wrote:
> Ubuntu gets better and better with every release?  It will take years at
> its current snails pace to reach the capabilities of Vista.

Hello Adam,

There is a problem with trying to compare software based on features. Say you 
try to do the same thing with animals, say, a grizzly bear, and a human. 
Let's compare:

Height: 10 ft.  6ft
Weight: 900 lb  200 lb
Claws: 4"  0.2"
Teeth: 3"  0.3"

So the analysis says, if you put these up against each other, the bear will 
win, and that is true in the 1-on-1 case. But as we know, that is not true 
for the species-on-species case. You could say that the human wins because he 
can control the environment.

Likewise with software, the environment is a huge factor. Here is where linux 
has the advantage. As far as I can tell, every MS product has a dependency on 
at least one other MS product. For many companies, who have already drunk the 
kool-aid, taking one more drink of it doesn't hurt. But I think a lot of 
companies are starting to ask the question, why should my choice of web 
server impact my choice of database or web browser?

The other thing that I think people are slowly catching up on, is most of the 
"new features" are primarily hype. Good example would be the "ribbon" in a 
recent release of Office. This was hyped as some huge leap in GUI design. 
Well, MS took some metrics, through some kind of built-in spyware feature, on 
who was actually using the ribbon, and it turns out the number of people who 
actually used it in the way it was intended (i.e. customized it) was: 0.3%. 
So much for a major leap!

Other features that are hyped have existed in Linux for years. Example, when 
XP came out, the MS website listed the Top Ten Reasons to Switch to XP, and 
one of them was Remote Desktop. This is hilarious to a Linux user since not 
only has X Windows been giving us remote desktop since the 1980s, but it was 
originally conceived as a remote system, and was only later adopted to run 
locally.

In other areas, MS is definitely playing catch-up to Linux. Two that come to 
mind are tabbed browsing, and the use of peer-to-peer correspondence as the 
primary support mechanism.

After you've been around the block a few times, you start to see that most of 
the stuff that's hyped as "new", really isn't new, or might just be 
unnecessary. And eventually (I hope), people and companies will start to ask 
themselves why they should be paying for that.

Linux isn't perfect. MS isn't perfect. They have a healthy competition going, 
although not perhaps on a perfectly level playing field. It will be 
interesting to see what the outcome is.

Larry