Letters to the editor

Common sense takes a holiday: buying the Enderle FUD

Dear Mr McKenzie,
 
I obtained your email address from http://www.linuxpipeline.com/contact.jhtml
 
I write with reference to an article by Rob Enderle, at
http://www.linuxpipeline.com/60401613 , titled "Reality Takes A
Holiday: Buying The Firefox Hype".
 
In the interests of brevity I will not go into Mr Enderle's past
record at objective analysis of open source issues, (who can forget
his role in getting SCO and BayStar together and his speech at SCO
Forum, among many other highlights). I will, therefore, restrict
myself to commenting on the points he had made in this article.
 
Yes, Firefox is at version 1.0. However, what Mr Enderle will not
acknowledge, even though I'm sure he knows, is that 1.0 in the open
source world means it has already been through a huge amount of
testing already. Open source does not have the commercial pressures
of getting something out the door by a certain date, so when an open
source project says "1.0", it means "quite ready for public
consumption, thank you very much".
 
Automatic patch delivery is certainly important, and in theory
Microsoft has it. However, does Mr Enderle know of any large
organisation that allows auto-updates for all their machines, without
some internal testing to make sure the patch does not mess up critical
applications? So why is this an issue?
 
Ben Goodger moving to Google is no more significant that Linus
Torvalds working for Transmeta for many years. Linux did not stop
dead while he was working for Transmeta, and neither will Firefox just
because Ben Goodger is at Google. Even if that were to happen, the
beauty of the open source world is that there are others who can step
in if needed.
 
I have no idea how he can say Firefox breaks on banking and e-commerce
sites. The only app for which I still need to borrow someone's
Windows machine to use IE is, sadly, an inhouse application.
[Naturally, I cannot tell you who I work for :-)] It is well known
that corporate applications are able to get away with more stringent
demands on users ("you must have IE to use our intranet portal") while
banks and other sites meant to be accessed by the general public need
to be more careful.
 
Anyway you get the drift. I'll stop here. I'm sure you'll hear from
others about this.
 
With best wishes,
 
Sitaram Chamarty
 
--
sitaramc@gmail.com

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