eChannelLine article on Linux: Alec Taylor's comments

Please forward as appropriate.
 
From http://www.integratedmar.com/ECL.cfm?item=DLY011705-4 - Quoting Alec
Taylor, Microsoft's "Canada (MFST) [sic] platform strategy spokesperson in
Mississauga," Ontario:
> "One COO of a major financial institution commented to me recently he'd
> be hard-pressed to introduce open source into his bank's systems knowing
> there's a possibility his 13-year-old son may have contributed to the
> code."
 
That article's a sad commentary on the COO's respect for his son's abilities.
If he's more concerned about the son's age than the quality of the son's
work, what blunders of similar style must he be making with millions of
dollars of other people's money?
 
It's also typical and unfair of Microsoft to focus on a _potential_ random
13-year-old (regardless of his or her actual talents) and ignore the many
_existing_ battle-seasoned veteran programmers and engineers out there
writing Open Source applications. It's also typical of Alec, who late last
year claimed that OpenOffice didn't offer alternatives for a misspelling - a
feature which had long been in OO at the time - and regularly denies that
insecurity is independent of popularity.
 
The Open nature of Linux really bugs Alec. It seems to distrub him that code
is out there, flapping in the breeze for any random Internet user to stare
at, and he seems entirely uncomfortable with the idea that said code could be
safe because it was designed right and works, rather than because its
deficiencies are hidden and simply haven't been discovered yet. Yet two
thirds of the world's web servers and almost all of the world's exposed email
servers work like that and they are NOT the ones that give us the CodeRed
deluges of wild and alien traffic (and I note with a sigh that there's a new
MS IIS attack popping up in my logs as I type) or ship our private documents
to random net denizens mentioned in our address books.
 
The internal IT management at two Australian banks have told my book-keepers
that they'd much rather we used FireFox for their web interface than MS IE,
and one of them is already switching staff over internally. Another
Australian bank's tech support staff told me personally that they would much
rather that their banking application is used with WINE on Linux than under
WinME because it causes far less problems for them. So reports from the front
lines hint that Alec's finance COO has his head in the sand.
 
> "You can take a Microsoft solution, pop it into your environment, and
> away you go. Whereas in the open source world ... there are gaps in
> that solution stack and you have to ask yourself, 'who is going to
> fill those gaps?'" he said.
 
It's also a sad commentary on the state of Microsoft's application stack that
it only plays nicely as an invariant monocultural block, it's so lip-service
disrespectful of real standards that evidently stepping outside their own
application stack is a bit of a chore.
 
Worse, if a slice of that stack develops a problem - such as the recent
catastrophic vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer which have been known and
not fixed for months - the whole stack comes thundering down for lack of a
compatible alternative to bridge the gap.
 
Picture having all of your eggs in a tall, thin, wobbly tower of baskets and
you won't be too far from the truth. Open Source (including Linux) could be
modelled as a well-adapted and steady group of stacks, with scores of spare
baskets ready to slot in should anything begin to creak or twang.
 
Now think about the observation that the phrase "the recent catastrophic
vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer" is pretty much constantly applicable
and you can begin to understand what a terrifying house of cards a Microsoft
adoptee is really living in.
 
> right now open source is attempting to approximate what we already have
> with innovative integration
 
Inasmuch as "innovative integration" is in practice newspeak for vendor
lock-in, that's just plain not true. PHP, with its many integrated features
and flourishing community of third-party libraries, is one of the _many_
mutually interoperable technologies eating Microsoft's web application lunch
from the bottom up. It runs on many different web servers, from the
command-line or in a GUI framework.
 
We (Open Source developers) are putting considerably more effort into avoiding
Microsoft's mistakes than copying them. And since the developers are also the
users, the Open Source solutions are being built by the people who actually
use the stuff. You can't buy better customisation than that.
 
Mozilla FireFox, for example, provides many powerful security and convenience
features today that Microsoft is only just beginning to strap onto their own
browser, and because it's not hobbled with dependencies on vendor-specific
technologies you can use the same browser on Macintosh, Linux, Solaris,
anywhere. XUL and similar technologies in FireFox provide levels of seamless
integration which others can only dream about (or mimic with security
nightmares like ActiveX).
 
KDE's Konqueror browser is another example. It already encompasses a level of
smooth integration only dreamed of by proprietary competitors and is rapidly
getting even better. Files, archives, web pages, shell accounts, music CDs,
FTP servers, they're all one and the same. Dragging a selection of tracks
from my CD and dropping them onto a remote server results in the tracks being
ripped, named, converted (to Ogg, MP3, Shorten or whatever) and securely
uploaded. I don't have to start any media players, I don't have to know
anything about the remote server, not even what protocol I'm using to fetch
or send stuff, it all Just Works. If passwords are needed either I'm asked or
they're fetched from KWallet. And if there's a misspelling anywhere, yes, I
_am_ offered alternate words.
 
This level of integration extends throughout KDE, and it doesn't come with
IE's constant security burden. Anything that requires a database has a sheaf
of them to choose from, it's not hobbled to a single piece of software, never
vulnerable to an MS-Blaster worm of any sort. Microsoft is culturally unable
to offer any of this.
 
As if to rub salt into the wound, Microsoft's web site is as I type unable to
offer me any form of electronic feedback ("This Service is Currently Not
Available") or any way to contact Alec Taylor on line to include him in the
conversation. That's pretty pathetic for such a large and capable company,
especially one whose founder advised everyone (in his book "The Road Ahead")
to use more email. Such frustrating opacity is a happily very rare in Open
Source communities.
 
Cheers; Leon
 
--
http://cyberknights.com.au/ Modern tools; traditional dedication
http://plug.linux.org.au/ Vice President, Perth Linux User Group
http://osia.net.au/ Member, Open Source Industry Australia
http://slpwa.asn.au/ Member, Linux Professionals WA
http://linux.org.au/ Member, Linux Australia