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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JRH who wrote (1398)	3/30/1999 7:40:00 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2615

WHY BILL GATES STILL DOESN'T GET THE NET WHILE HIS NEW BOOK PEDDLES PCS AS THE ULTIMATE CORPORATE INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM, THE INDUSTRY IS MUTATING RIGHT UNDER HIS NOSE. salonmagazine.com That the free Linux operating system and its open-source methodology represent a genuine threat to Microsoft is now widely acknowledged in the technology industry, even by some of Microsoft's own front-line engineers, who touted Linux's strengths in the widely leaked "Halloween memo." Many users are frustrated by the inefficiencies, rigidities and flaws Microsoft products are increasingly riddled with; many are attracted to Linux and other open-source products that provide ready access for software developers to fix and enhance them without waiting for Microsoft to call back with a patch or deliver a long-delayed upgrade. Tested in real-world conditions by guerrilla groups of coders working collaboratively across the Net, open-source software, proponents argue, offers faster and smarter development than Microsoft. It is, you might say, software "@ the speed of thought." The one person at Microsoft who doesn't seem to have received the bad news is Gates himself. Last week, he dismissed Linux with these words: "There has certainly been a lot of free software out there for the last 20 years. The main thing that has held that back is that because it's free software there's no central point of control. So what you see with Linux, and other things, is you get proliferations of different versions and everybody can go into the source code, and everybody does." To Gates, openness and lack of control is a bug; to free-software programmers, it's a feature. Only time will tell whether Gates' prediction of a confusing, splintered Babel in Linux's future proves accurate -- it's certainly a possibility. But that Linux's loose-reined approach can offer a valuable alternative to businesses today is beyond dispute. Microsoft's public responses to Linux have been all over the map. Sometimes it plays up Linux to bolster its position in its antitrust trial ("Competitors? Sure we've got competitors!"), and sometimes it plays down Linux to reassure Wall Street that Microsoft will continue to be a profit machine. There's just one thing Microsoft's top brass can't seem to do: carefully and openly evaluate the appeal of Linux's fundamentally different approach to developing and distributing software. The company's digital nervous system is failing to properly identify the threat -- perhaps because it comes in the unrecognizable guise of an idea rather than a corporation. To anyone with a reasonably long memory, Gates' pooh-poohing of Linux offers an overpowering whiff of déjà vu: The last time Microsoft dismissed a popular new technology as being good only for "the student and hobbyist market," as Gates is now describing Linux, it was the early '90s, and the technology in question was the Internet itself -- which, like Linux today, was "too hard to use," "didn't have a good graphic interface" and just didn't fit into Microsoft's vision. " ... proliferations of different versions ... ? How many versions of Windows will there be when and if Windows 1900 comes out?