Foreword

Hi all,

It's mid-year, the XPT for 1 July has been released, and it's time to get out and enjoy the sun. Yet there are still things to do, and opening these Linux Resource Centre pages is one.

And it's about time too. Visitors to radsoft.net might have got the impression we're pro-Microsoft, which we are not. Our raison d'etre has always been 'survival in the world of the PC', which we feel is best accomplished by the use of a strictly limited collection of tools and the application of germane knowledge about the workings of the PC, the Windows operating systems, and generic ISV programs. It's always been our belief that one could indeed survive even in a potentially hostile environment such as this. Now we are not so sure anymore.

This is no time to rant against Bill Gates - one need only rant when one is boxed in, and no one is boxed in here. The world of Linux has taken the theory that .NET is pushing people to UNIX very seriously. It's more than a theory.

This site will always keep the XPT online and accessible, but odds are development will slow down and perhaps end entirely. There is, as of the day of writing, less reason than ever to stay around the Redmond camp and wait for a miracle. It's not going to happen. Microsoft has never been good at miracles, and never been good at inspirational software engineering either, while in the world of UNIX anything is possible and so much has already been achieved.

Anyone following the development of Linux and the fight between UNIX people and Microsoft has seen a number of things coming. Let's recap the last twenty years in rough brush strokes.

Early 1980s

IBM introduces the PC. IBM approaches Bill Gates for an operating system, but Bill sends the young lions to Gary Kildall. Kildall makes an ass of himself and IBM comes back to Bill. Bill finds an OS by Tim Paterson and buys it for $50K. Bill is later sued by Tim's company and has to fork up a bit more dough. Bill establishes himself already as a conscientious honest corporate leader.

MS-DOS (or the IBM equivalent PC-DOS) is a direct CP/M spin-off, and with a reason: IBM wants the ISV products from the CP/M market to work on their machine and be available when the PC is. IBM understands the market well: no secrets, and lots of add-on software, and the 'standard' of the PC might prevail. And IBM, what is IBM doing this for? Evidently to get back at Digital Equipment, which they'd once written off completely.

MS-DOS 2.11 comes out and wins wide approval in Europe and is thus adopted as a bit of a standard for a time. But before this hits the shelves Bill Gates has bought a source code license to UNIX and also bought up the Lattice C compiler from Lattice of Elgin Illinois. He's poised to introduce UNIX to the PC and he's going to use the Lattice compiler to make it possible. The UNIX project and the Lattice project are separate: Lattice is not a UNIX-compatible compiler at this time and Bill's minions have this task assigned to them. The UNIX source on the other hand is sent to Santa Cruz Operations. The working title of this UNIX flavour is 'Xenix'.

Despite all this great source code lying around, MS-DOS does not improve. Vis the command 'MORE' which still uses lame temporary files instead of dynamic RAM buffers as on UNIX. And Bill had the source to UNIX and to their pipelining if his programmers needed it. Yet MS-DOS does not improve. It stagnates, and 'stagnates', the industry would insist, is a kind word.

Various OEMs and ISVs finally get irked with Bill and contract an Englishman to re-write MS-DOS more the way it should be, with multi-tasking and all that wonderful stuff. The result is great, but Gates, rather than try to compete with it, starts a FUD campaign instead and irrevocably ties the impending Win95 to MS-DOS so that you cannot run one without the other, cannot even buy the one without the other.

Through all this we see what kind of innovator Gates is. He invents nothing. He hardly even improves anything. He just wants to strangle markets and make more money, and progress and the consumer be damned. And this is not a slanted opinion; this is fact. Just re-read the above if you are still in doubt. I don't like these conclusions any more than the next person, but they're unavoidable.

Late 1980s

IBM introduces the AT, and things are looking good, but then they introduce PS/2 as well, and although this is looking good, they start messing up.

For one, they insist on pushing OS/2 when no one really understands why they need it. For another, no one wants to develop applications for OS/2. For a third, Microsoft is 'helping' IBM with OS/2, and so the product is typical of Redmond: 'bugged beyond belief' - so bad in fact that IBM itself refuses to run it internally within their own organisation. Not exactly the way to get a product up and running.

And then there is the licensing stuff associated with PS/2. For while IBM let anyone who wanted to (well...) clone the PC, save for the token task of creating a BIOS (vis the Compaq 'virgins'), this time around IBM wants MONEY. And OEMs are not about to shell out anything when they can already clone ATs for free.

And then to make matters worse for IBM, Compaq comes along and really pushes the AT and the industry backs up behind Compaq instead of IBM, and IBM is suddenly out of the picture. Foolish IBM.

Xenix is there for the taking, and AT&T tries again and again to push a 'UNIX PC', but nobody's buying. And things still go in 'character mode' and people are reasonably happy, or at least they're not aware of how happy they used to be.

But Ridley Scott comes to America to promote Steve Jobs' new 'thing' and suddenly, after a brief foray with the Lisa (very cool machine) we had the Mac and the critics were lyric. Apple made a good move in promoting graphics as much as it did, and in a short while all cutting-edge newspapers and magazines were using Macs for layout etc. Yet Apple continued to deliberately play odd man out, sporting standards no one else used and remaining UNIX-incompatible.

And Gates got 'upped' at Comdex and of course had to bluff his way out, and the result was Windows - a stillborn project if there ever was one. Work on Windows stagnated as IBM pushed OS/2, but the project was never closed. As Gates became more and more convinced IBM was 'losing it' he decided to jump ship.

And then we had the 'LIM' memory standards: products of a joint venture between Lotus, Intel and Microsoft, they attempted to address the inferior capabilities of PCs as compared to Macs. Their first offering was lame, but the second really opened the PC up and made Windows 3.0 possible. And following in the wake of Windows 3.0 was Windows 3.1, and the rest - for the past nine years - has been history.

And it would seem this 'history' has now come full circle. It's hard to remember that Gates' finest years are so few, that his dominance in the software industry is so ephemeral, but it is. And while his Windows and MS-DOS would hardly win any technology awards and be praised by the minds of our day, UNIX has won these awards and has been around a relatively long time, and when first introduced to the mainframe gurus of the day, blew their minds away. The likes of no less than Edsgar Dykstra and Tony Hoare were taken with their pants down. Messrs Thompson and Ritchie caused a cataclysm.

Yet we were still to not reap the rewards on our PCs. Our PCs were too feeble, and when they finally started to get better, Windows got in the way.

Early 2000s

Today of course the situation has changed dramatically. Not only are GUIs standard even on UNIX platforms, but Intel PCs are fully capable of running this stuff and even more. 32-bit computing was a reality back in the early 90's, even if Microsoft hasn't yet made the full transition (Windows ME is still a 16-bit platform), and 64-bit computing on the PC is right around the corner. And while UNIX suffered greatly from all the spurious flavours out there which flourished because of the inexpensive source code licensing agreements (which among others Scott McNealy and Bill Gates took advantage of), along comes Linus to put an end to it.

Linus tried to go back to the elegant simplicity of UNIX when UNIX was still UNIX (see 'The UNIX Programming Environment' by Kernighan/Pike for an eloquent rant on this subject). He seems to have succeeded brilliantly. The one big complaint David Cutler always had about UNIX was that it read like a committee of PhDs rather than the brainchild of a single mind, yet that very characteristic is perhaps what makes UNIX and Linux so great: there are so many people involved, from the bottom itself, and from the word 'go'. It's a monumental effort by hundreds of thousands of contributors; it's built in the true spirit of academia; and nothing but nothing Microsoft can beg buy borrow or steal can ever compete with the model and Microsoft and Bill Gates know this to be painfully true. The very underpinnings of the Microsoft market strategy are undermined by UNIX and Linux.

The Halloween Documents

Back when NT was still NT Microsoft was already panicking. They assigned the research project to a middle echelon executive who came up with what are today known as the Halloween Documents, so named because they were sent to Eric Raymond around that time of year. The New York Times was let in on the scoop and immediately contacted Microsoft for verification, and wonder of wonders, Microsoft admitted the documents were genuine.

The Halloween Documents make great reading, not because they contain truisms you never thought of before, but because they illuminate exactly what Microsoft is scheming up, where their minds are at, and how they plan to deal with Linus and the entire Linux threat. The message of the Halloween Documents is very clear: Linux cannot be defeated, NT can never hope to be superior, and thus the only way to survive in the market is to disparage Linux - disparage the idea of Linux itself, FUD it to death, and if you have to, even disparage Linus himself and smear his person - anything to destroy him and that damned Linux once and for all.

Heaven knows why Microsoft is trying to make matters worse with .NET, but the fact of the matter remains that they seem to be playing directly into Linux' hands. Perhaps they're betting the farm again. Who knows. It hardly matters. One need only look at the one - Microsoft and Windows and all that pain - and the other - Linux and all that fascination and all those possibilities - and the choice is easy.

What's Holding Up The Show?

So why is Microsoft still alive? Why isn't Bill Gates running Caldera on a laptop sitting in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Why hasn't the Microsoft campus been donated to the government of Washington state? Why aren't most of these crooks behind bars?

My guess? In a word? 'MS Office'. These are no great programs, but 94% of the world uses them as a standard, and changing that means overcoming inertia. This is the hurdle Linux must surmount. Anyone can and should create their documents today in something more applicable than the Winword format such as - may I suggest? - HTML, and given an adequate Linux replacement for other MS Office programs there is nothing stopping the jump, but logistics still need to be dealt with.

Migrations cost a lot of money because a lot of people are not computer savvy. These people will require extremely costly courses in the MS Office equivalents for Linux, even though most of it seems painfully self-explanatory to us. A new cottage industry will most likely spring up, a new generation of suits will attempt to exploit the new market situation, new Billies of Brazil will pop up out of the ground... That's one scenario at any rate. Things might go better of course.

The real stumbling block is of course the fact that things like Linux appeal to those of us who have a penchant for 'res computer science' while those aligned behind the Pied Piper Bill Gates are what are affectionately known as 'computer dummies'. Charming these people to follow down the cobblestone road is a magic trick no one can do better than Bill Gates - and Linux will by definition never try. Linux doesn't have a marketing budget; Linus doesn't have spin doctors creating a personal cult around him; Linux has only the discretion of the intelligent computer user.

But for so-called transactional software and in the server market, Linux is already the platform of choice. It's hard to argue with its stability and its being free. And as for support - where do you want to go today to get support anyway? A call to Microsoft? Usenet has more support for Linux than any company or its sysadmins can ever need, and much more than Microsoft offers its customers for Windows.

A Spec

Microsoft is a spec in history. Anyone coming to the net knows that the net is something entirely different, something vastly superior, incredibly more huge, and that Microsoft will never count in this bigger picture.

Linux and the net on the other hand are one: they're built and they exist on the same premise.

You might miss all your k3wl games to start with, but give it time and try to remember that computers weren't made to play games. Given time the games will come anyway - it's like the early days of the PC, when Sheep Dog with its 'm's scurrying about the console mode screen was the only game available and critics everywhere wrote the machine off as doomed for game playing. Things were slow then too. And now we are in a new era, the era of the Internet, and we its netizens must protect it and make sure it evolves in the direction we want. And yes, we can do it - in fact we must do it.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that people running Linux don't have the woes all the poor Windows users have. You're not going to find 'I Hate Linux' sites sprouting up around the net. Complaints? Their resolutions are built into the model: supply feedback (or code) and they're history.

Linux users are mirthful, happy - they're not walking around grudging things like Windows users do all the time.

Even with Linux your woes aren't all over because so much of the net is held up by Microsoft users, and these users can be found everywhere. You might find it hard to connect with your ISP because the MCPs there think Bill built the net. Give it time. Keep after them until they get their act together, but have patience and give it time.

And just imagine: a day without the constant terror of Outlook junk trashing your computer, no more worms, the whole virus threat a thing of the past basically. Of course there are holes, but they're nothing like what you've become used to running the Swiss cheese of operating system and Internet software.

Things Have Changed

So we have indeed come a long way since the birth of PC. Much too far some would say. Back then it was a playtoy. Back then it didn't have the user group it has today. Back then a PC was not on every desktop - it wasn't on any desktop. But that was then and this is now.

Times have changed - and it's time we changed with them.