We have known for a long time that the price hidden in consumer PCs was silly. Now we know it is silly for servers, too, even though the price may not be hidden…

“They were driving prices down and it eventually broke the pricing model,” Hilf said. “We sell the software for $1,000 and these guys were selling the hardware for $300. It was silly.”

Right from the horse’s mouth. A licence for 2003 etc is around $1000 and they have the nerve to charge per-seat on top of that. Silly. Hilf was talking about cripple-ware, too. Really silly.

For anyone who does not know, you can install Debian GNU/Linux on your server for just the cost of downloading/labour. No licence fee. Not silly. Smart. That includes all the bells and whistles:

• GNU/Linux, the OS
• OpenSSH, a great tool for managing systems and clusters remotely
• Apache web server, a standard on the web
• MySQL database or PostgreSQL databases
• PHP server scripting for rapid development or tweaking of existing scripts
• SWISH-e, a good search engine
• see more at Debian

It just takes a few minutes to install all this goodness. You can obtain the software and install it in much less time than you can purchase a copy of that other OS.  Then you can make it your own by customizing your site/services.

There is news that Office 2007 has been updated with new

• support for PDF
• support for ODF

OOPS! We had PDF about 2003 in OpenOffice.org version 1.1. We had ODF in 2005. That seems like lack of innovation for that other OS. You would think that one of the richest corprations in the software business could keep up but they only have about 10000 coders. The rest are salespeople. Salespeople don’t innovate. FLOSS has 300000 coders and counting. They innovate.

Go with the innovators. Go with FLOSS.

All over the web the trolls have regrouped and are attacking any who criticize M$ or praise FLOSS. Over at ComputerWorld, SJVN is heavily under attack for stating his opinions which are well-founded. At DesktopLinux.com, the trolls are becoming mellow in their old age finding ad hominem attacks are counter-productive. Here is an example:

“Linux can only succeed on the desktop if it can be offered by one of the major suppliers. So far, none of them want to take the time and expense needed to even try on any massive scale. The lesson of the netbook has been learned by all, too. Linux was an early offering, but XP now totally dominates sales. People did not flock to Linux at the price differential supported by the manufacturers.

There is no reason for the OEMs to try to offer a cheaper unit unless they can profit from the effort. If all they manage to do is sell the same number of computers to the same people but at a lower price, they have failed badly and will never recoup their costs of adding Linux.”

This sounds so sweet and reasonable, doesn’t it? This is just begging the question, politely. Suppose none of the major suppliers puts GNU/Linux on the desktop but all of the smaller players do. That’s about 42%, according to IDC. OEMs of all sizes will have to push GNU/Linux on netbooks if the small guys do. Small operations all over China are cranking out netbooks based on ATOM, VIA and ARM. It is all good.

Only a few weeks ago, the trolls were overrun by positive comments about GNU/Linux on the web. They have regrouped and are trying different tactics but they are still trolls. The willingness of manufacturers to push GNU/Linux puts the lie to the comment quoted above. The cost of not adding GNU/Linux to the mix is loss of business as the unit price/ASP drops. They have to increase volume to compensate. The OEMs who add needless features to keep their prices up will be in the same leaky boat as M$ by next year.

On Amazon.com, I found about 200 “netbooks” and 33 “netbooks linux”. Amazon even suggested I search for “netbooks linux” as a related search. They must be getting a few hits. Prices ranged from $200 to $735 for Linux and $285-$1300 for that other OS. No room to hide at the low end and the low end is creeping up. By next year, GNU/Linux will be competing with that other OS on every type of PC in every price range. The trolls will not accept that GNU/Linux sells until the roller passes over. They are either well paid or in denial.

ECIS, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, has gained intervenor status in the EU v M$, a case about tying the IE browser to that other OS. ECIS published a report that documents well the long history of anti-competitive acts and harm to consumers done by M$. You must read it.

Here are some excerpts:

“This anti-trust thing will blow over. We haven’t changed our business practices at all.”
— Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and then-CEO (1995)3
“

“If we own the key “franchises” built on top of the operating system, we dramatically widen the “moat” that protects the operating system business…. We hope to make a lot of money off these franchises, but even more important is that they should protect our Windows royalty per PC…. And success in those businesses will help increase the opportunity for future pricing discretion.8
“
” Most operating systems are purchased by original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”), such as Dell and HP. OEMs preinstall operating systems on the computers they manufacture before selling the computers to consumers. In the late 1980s, Microsoft began requiring OEMs to pay Microsoft a “per processor license fee” for each computer they shipped, regardless of whether they installed Windows on the computer.28 This arrangement gave OEMs a powerful incentive not to pay for and install competing operating systems. In 1994, the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft challenging this conduct, resulting in a consent decree under which Microsoft agreed to stop using per processor license fees.29 But the anticompetitive practice had already been quite effective in reducing competitors’ share, particularly when combined with Microsoft’s other actions directed against DR-DOS.30 The DOJ consent decree also sought to impose some forward-looking relief by prohibiting Microsoft from bundling other products into its now-dominant Windows operating system. The decree included a proviso that permitted Microsoft to build “integrated” products, however, and Microsoft later took the position that, under the
decree, it could bundle “‘a ham sandwich’ in the box with a PC preinstalled with Windows 95”and “require OEMs to take the whole package.”31

“

” Also in the mid-1990s, Microsoft took a series of steps to punish IBM for promoting a competing operating system and personal productivity application suite. At the time, in addition to developing software in competition with Microsoft, IBM was also a major OEM, selling personal computers. As such, IBM was a major customer of Microsoft’s. Microsoft retaliated against IBM for developing competing software products by charging IBM discriminatorily high license prices for Windows, delaying licensing negotiations with IBM for Windows 95, and withholding technical support.33 Microsoft informed IBM executives that it would only stop treating IBM less favorably than other OEMs when IBM ceased competing with Microsoft’s software offerings.34 This resulted in $180 million in lost revenue for IBM,35 and other damages IBM eventually brought suit against Microsoft and Microsoft settled the claim for $775 million.36
“

This goes on for 33 pages and leaves no doubt that M$ is not a reliable provider of IT in an open market. There are details of which I was not aware but this document puts everything in one place. I was not involved with servers in the 1990s so I was interested to read how M$ obtained dominance in servers on the LAN. Embrace, extend, extinguish all the way. They kept changing things so that no one could interoperate with them. I saw that in my recent struggle to get a terminal server running GNU/Linux to authenticate with 2003. What a waste of time and barrier to migration. How much easier it would have been to start up LDAP and use only GNU/Linux but how many organizations of any size want to expose their accumulated data to a risky/uncertain changeover?

M$ is a monster. It is horribly real. We must avoid dealing with it as customers. Let is starve. How sad that justice is so delayed in these matters.

Business Week has published what seems to be a reasonable analysis of M$’s business plan.

• sell XP to OEMs for $15 to hold back GNU/Linux – this didn’t work
• advertise to steer people from Macs – nope, people want quality
• push multi-grade 7′s onto everything – no chance, there are not enough suckers to pay for a crippled version and upgrade for a fee. That reveals the price they have been hiding all these years.

The preceding annotations are mine, not Business Week’s.

This looks like M$ is playing defense. They are really going to have to pump up the budget for advertising to pull this off. It will not work, though, because everyone has seen Macs and GNU/Linux and they know M$’s stuff is not worth a premium in price.

$15 is no bargain for XP if you have to shell out bucks for anti-virus, periodically re-install due to corruption and fragmentation, and the thing gets slower with use. Compare it with a cell phone. As long as you do not bend, fold, staple or mutilate it, about all you have to do to maintain it is change the battery every few years. Compared to that XP is very high maintenance. Selling the new licences is going to be tough. People hate to spend money for nothing which is what M$ demands.

The market is bigger and wiser than M$ wishes it to be. The recession is provoking thought in IT. Some may get fired for buying M$. Some may choose to spend money wisely. It’s all good.

We should know in a couple of years whether the plan succeeds. I expect it will succeed in some measure but the high profit margin is over and shareholders will probably seek some revenge as will customers who wake up and realize how much time and money they have wasted on that other OS.

I had to laugh at this one. Over at ComputerWorld, Preston Gralla reports that an employee of M$ said the following:

“Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today.”

Can anyone say “Conficker”? Isn’t that exploiting multiple holes in that other OS on millions of machines? Is that patched by SP2? Probably, but an OS doesn’t suddenly go from swiss cheese for malware to porcelain just because M$ releases something. The OS has to be designed for security from the beginning which that other OS was not. Gralla is right. The huge industry that delouses M$ would not be there if the OS were the least bit secure.

I spent last evening checking out a neighbour’s PC. It was not Vista, but XP and it was slow. I found the packets uploaded=packets downloaded and no file sharing was running so it likely is infested with something. AVG detected nothing. The installation CD was 2500 miles away so we tried a GNU/Linux live CD. That was faster than XP from the hard drive but we found the inkjet printer had no driver for CUPS… We will try again to find what malware is running and to remove it but I hold up little hope. Perhaps we will have to do without printing for a while. It could be cheaper to replace the printer rather than delousing this machine. Time is money.

Update: This morning, I found a driver that should run the printer.

Intel is pushing the Atom processor in China, sweetened for the netbooks produced by smaller manufacturers, with GNU/Linux.

see

Intel to help Chinese netbookers

at The Register.

Where is that Yonah guy? I am sure he could clarify this for us. It looks to me that Intel sees things my way, China is booming for cheap things running GNU/Linux because of the many first-time buyers emerging/merging with the netbook. However things were is not the same as the current reality. China’s internal market is huge and there are many opportunities for small players to innovate. There is more room to innovate without that other OS.

There is news today that 2009 is a great year for GNU/Linux. Another survey by KACE finds that 50% of more than 1000 IT professionals have considered switching to a non-M$ OS. Of those 14% are in the process of switching. That is a 7% shift in one year. Expect more to follow. Not all are going to GNU/Linux but about 27% are going to MacOS and 65% are going to GNU/Linux so it is 4 to 5% of IT professionals going to GNU/Linux this year. That is huge.

Reasons given for this include saving money, avoiding that other OS, etc. It is all good. The market is returning to normal from the madness of monopoly. Most of this will be about business. The consumer is still behind the curve except on netbooks but 2009 should shake everyone out of their slumber. Everyone should be able to change in 2009 and know it.

What will the world look like moving away from that other OS? I think it will be a happier place with more IT dollars spread around and more people being able to afford more IT. Good.

Ian Lamont and Paul Graham are kicking around the idea that M$ is dead.

While they do focus on several fronts where M$ is becoming irrelevant, they totally neglect GNU/Linux on the desktop. They can be forgiven if they base that neglect on NetApplications numbers which are quite USA-centric. One would think literate folk would be more aware of what is going on in other places. The BRIC countries, where all the growth is in 2009, are on fire with GNU/Linux. Netbooks for sure but also desktops and notebooks are overflowing with GNU/Linux in the BRIC because GNU/Linux does cost less. Thin clients are most popular in this region as well and GNU/Linux is twice as good as that other OS if only because of shared memory.

Certainly, M$ is the elephant in the living room and it is too big to ignore, but it does not belong in the living room and we will “shoo” it out eventually. I was just looking at some numbers from IDC about money being spent on GNU/Linux and FLOSS. While it is easy to write:

However, it is important to remember that the relative size of the markets must be considered as well. The Linux software market in 2008 generated $12.3 billion in spending, and that total is projected to nearly triple to $35.5 billion in in 2013. By comparison, the Microsoft software ecosystem was $149 billion in 2008 – so even with a sub-10% growth rate through 2013, it will add $56 billion in spending.

the truth is evident that M$ is in decline and, if these rates continue, the amount of money spent on GNU/Linux will eventually equal and surpass that spent on M$ by 2025 (23.6% growth rate for GNU/Linux and 6.6% growth rate for M$). So, it is not M$ that is dead, but its monopoly. In years past, competitors could not grow. GNU/Linux allows competition to thrive because M$ cannot buy out the world and GNU/Linux is a cooperative project of the world.

Further, the idea that the power of a corporation is measured in dollars is false. We know that there are many free installations of GNU/Linux for every one that is paid and that the cost of copying GNU/Linux is very small, so that GNU/Linux will be a power on the desktop very soon, not 15 years from now. If we accept a 10:1 ratio for the influence of a dollar spent on GNU/Linux compared to that other OS, this is they year of GNU/Linux already. By 2013, I will not be the only one writing that. The elephant will be driven or coaxed out of the living room.

Where I work, we have spent exactly $0 on GNU/Linux this year because my salary is paid no matter what OS we run but GNU/Linux is on 26 machines this year and none last year, infinite growth and far more than 10:1 leverage. I did donate a little time and equipment but the organization is changing for the better and M$ gets no profit from it. How are they going to get this place to ever throw money at them again? No way.

A lot of people are ignorant of the four freedoms of Free Software. I hope this article enlightens someone.

From 1987 until 2000, I used that other OS, like millions of others. It came with the PCs. It worked, sometimes, but it had a lot of problems. At first, I thought the hardware on those silly little PCs was to blame, after all it was new technology. I had been used to mainframes and minicomputers and stuff with wires and ICs you could see. PCs, on the other hand, kept freezing/crashing/not working. Finally, I was using Lose ’95 in the Arctic and had crashes every hour, totally unacceptable performance. What to do? I had seen GNU/Linux once, but had no clue. People said it did not crash. I needed that. Since 2000, I haven’t had a single crash of any PC running GNU/Linux not related to verifiable hardware problems. In 2003, I was in another similar situation and GNU/Linux came through. I used LTSP in my first lab and gave new life to 30 PCs.

Why had I wasted years of my life using that other OS? At first, it was not an option, GNU/Linux did not exist yet. GNU existed mostly but Linux was still a gleam in a young man’s eyes on the other side of the world. Later, when the Internet arrived, I was into e-mail mostly but just never connected with the GNU/Linux community. It was not until GNU/Linux was forced upon me by circumstances and introduced by strangers that I moved on.

Years of my life were wasted using poor software because I did not know about the four freedoms:

Think about it. My main problem was the quality of the software. How hard is it to produce poor software that is distributed with the four freedoms? Just about impossible, as long as enough people get to look at it. It only takes one person impressed with the utility of some software to take the time to fix a bug. That does not happen with that other OS. They make it. They push it out the door and the only ones who can fix it are the authours because M$ does not give us freedom to examine or to modify the code. Therefor there are fewer people fixing the code (M$ is tiny. The world is large) and the quality of the code is less. The quality of that other OS is even worse because M$ has all kinds of schemes to thwart competition and lock-in users so they use the absence of software freedom to enslave users. M$ likes lock-in so much that they preserve their bugs in new releases of the software. They also build in unnecessary complexity like DRM that hides more bugs and causes unwanted consequences.

On the other hand, free software causes nothing but blessings to those who use it. A case in point is the keynote on the Blog of Helios where Ken Starks recounts bringing in another user from the cold and that new user promptly introduces others to GNU/Linux. Freedom is like a fire. It grows from the heat and light it produces. Users of free software get better software and can share it with friends.

While I began using GNU/Linux because of the quality of the software, I continue to use it because of the four freedoms. Rarely do I need to examine the source code because I do not code in C but I can read it well enough to solve problems caused by small things. The freedom to distribute the code is big for me. I am a teacher and exercising the
freedom to distribute is wonderful. I can install on any number of PCs. I can have students practise installing on PCs and take a copy home. I can have a huge local repository to install any number of new machines any way I want. With that other OS, I am always worried about violating the cursed EULA which takes away so many rights and even puts restrictions on how I may run the software. Free Software empowers me and my students to make the best use of our hardware. We get much better performance using it and we have the freedom to do anything we need to do.

Because GNU/Linux has no motivation to lock you in with feature-bloat, GNU/Linux will run faster on most hardware than that other OS. This means you can give new life to older equipment and reduce waste and increase efficiency. When the newer hardware is used the performance is spectacular. That other OS needs new hardware just to keep performance anywhere near a reasonable level.

Please use GNU/Linux. It may not be immediately obvious that you need more than the freedom to run it but the other freedoms make the software better and permit you to share with ordinary folks who will thank you for saving them from monopoly.

What is the fourth dimension? The freedom of the four that you need now. Pick one and go for it. You have many more than four reasons to drop that other OS and its hassles.

“

”

see InternetNews.com

Amen! The same reasoning that can be applied to Vista can be applied to 7 and XP and all the other stuff from M$. It is good to see the world beginning to think instead of blindly accepting what comes down the Wintel treadmill. Too bad Texas is not looking more closely at FLOSS but it is a start.

Many report that 7 is light and fast but that only makes me think, “What was in Vista that made it slow?”. Was it some “MIPS-eating” loops put in to please Intel? We may never know. I do not have to worry about that because I don’t do that other OS but the world largely does. When will the world’s patience end? I think it is this year. People who bought Vista 0 will not want to repeat the mistake of dealing with M$. There go another 100 million customers. FLOSS will provide.

“

”

see the whole article on NYTimes here.

Millions of PC converted to do some small organization’s bidding. This is worse than the commercial monopoly of M$. It is a ciminal monopoly that M$ has fostered by killing competition. The illegal copies around the world are not being patched against this malware.

Let us hope that the high cost of monopoly will convert more to FLOSS. It is the only upside I can see to this wave of malware. Early waves kept adoption of GNU/Linux on the uptick and it has grown a lot since, so this time there could be a rather large movement resulting.

What do you think it costs to patch and reboot a billion PCs? It must be a bilion dollars or more. If the malware wreaks havoc, the cost will be much more. Both cost scenarios can be avoided by using FLOSS which is designed for security, not feature-bloat.