Who's Sowing FUD now?
Ever since the anti-trust issues of the '90s surfaced, Microsoft has been roundly (and justifiably) accused by the digerati of sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) around issues of Linux, Open Source, and what Lawrence Lessig terms Free Culture. Hence, the agreement to collaborate between Novelll and Microsoft several month ago was greeted by Open Source supporters with suspicion and with much reading of the tea leaves.
Yet, to my mind, the whole discussion has taken on the appearence of a witch hunt. (M$ is evil, dude. Linux is l33t. 3rgo this suks.) This, despite the fact that there is an underlying sound business model here for both Novell and Microsoft. Linux isn't going anywhere (indeed SUSE Linux--a Novell distro--is the platform that yours truly uses whenever he's not gaming, like right now...). And like it or not, neither is Windows going anywhere, at least for the foreseeable future. So why wouldn't two leaders and erstwhile enemies decide that it made good sense to colllaborate and provide their customers with better products and, thereby, give themselves a competitive advantage?
Why not deploy Occam's razor to explain the partnership instead of trying to ferret out the evil conspiracy? The simplest explanation is that the agreement is exactly what it appears to be: a business partnership.
Now don't get me wrong, my mission in life is to get all my games running in Wine so that I never, ever have to install Vista on any computer in my household. I loathe the Microsoft business model. I despise the fact that when I terminated my licensing agreement with them a few months ago that they sent me a nastygram threatening to require me to provide a "certificate of destruction" (whatever that might be?!) if they suspected that I was still running their precious--and for this Linux user, utterly superfluous--software.
Yet, for me, that only means that I won't be buying Vista, SQL Server 2005, Exchange, et cetera, because there are viable and more cost-effective alternatives. It does not mean that I'm going to turn into a conspiracy theorist.
All of which is preface to my including a link to this article, which I believe gets it right.
Members of the open source “community” will probably throw virtual bricks through my Windows (pun intended) because I support this agreement so enthusiastically – just as members of the Microsoft “community” did when my research proved the cost benefits of Linux in January this year. However, I believe it delivers what businesses need – document interoperability, management capabilities for heterogeneous environments, cross-platform support for virtualization, and the freedom to choose the right mix of operating systems for each requirement.This in turn will improve enterprise adoption of Linux and open source.
And it is enterprise adoption – much more so than ill-informed bloggers sitting in their basements tweaking their kernels – that will drive success for Linux and open source.
Well put. It's a good read for my fellow techies out there.