Apparently Linux has Ceased to Exist and I didn’t Notice
May 14, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Director and head of Microsoft’s Linux Labs, Bill Hilf, made some rather interesting comments recently about Linux. He’s proclaiming that Linux has ceased to exist in 2007 and that the open source movement is dead because many of the developers actually have paying jobs to work on Linux programs. He went on to mention that the rise of Linux had nothing to do with Linux itself, but with the rise of Apache, MySQL, and PHP and the usage of them on the Linux platform. He described those three stalwart components of many web servers as the “Visual Basic of open source”. Oh yeah… IBM, his former employer, also decided to start a standards war by promoting the Open Document Format because they wanted a part of the Office market and people just don’t want the ODF.
Wow! I don’t even know where to begin on this. I don’t know if this is just the standard FUD that comes out of the Microsoft camp, or if Mr. Hilf really believes what he’s saying, but it’s certainly absurd on many levels.
I can start by saying that I’m pretty sure that Linux still exists right now. Gentoo just released the 2007 version of their base installation. My laptop is running Linux just fine. It hasn’t fallen apart. I’m writing this inside version 2.2 of OpenOffice, which still works and supports ODF as its default document format. Things are good as far as I can tell.
Even though Linux isn’t quite ready for the desktop for the average Windows or MacOS user, it has made great strides. The real power is in using Linux as a server platform. It’s certainly not going anywhere anytime soon. On the server the LAMP stack has worked quite well. It’s possible that the AMP combination had the side effect of raising the awareness of Linux, but my guess is that’s more due to performance on Linux vs Windows than anything else. Also, I’m surprised that Mr. Hilf would compare anything to Visual Basic since that’s less of a “real” programming language than PHP (obligatory VB dig).
I’m not sure why people wouldn’t want the Open Document Format. What it does is create an open standard for storing various document data that has no vendor lock-in associated with it. It will force office software vendors to really compete with their products rather than relying on their locked-in format to keep a person from switching to a different office product.
I don’t see it as a bad thing that programmers are getting paid to write Linux and open source software. They need to make a living, too. If a company wants to sponsor the creation of an open source product, that’s great. It makes it even more likely that the product will continue to be improved upon than if the product was created by a programmer who was in between jobs or creating the product in his or her spare time.
So, in deference to Microsoft and Mr. Hilf: I’m sorry, but I don’t think that Linux is going to go away anytime soon.
Here’s a link to an article (PHP, no less) about this, and another link to the Slashdot story.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/090507_Database/09May2007_data05.php
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/14/2038250
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