The road to World Domination [LWN.net]

Linux, it seems, is on a roll. In the past week we've had news of the LLNL cluster sale (see below), of Norway's decision to drop its exclusive contract with Microsoft (despite losing the substantial discounts that contract provided), of Steve Ballmer's admission that Linux is giving Microsoft some trouble, of MandrakeSoft's improving bottom line, and more. The world increasingly understands that free software is better, cheaper, and, of course, free.

Those of us who wish to promote the free software cause can't rest yet, however. Free software still has a great many hurdles to overcome, including:

Security. The free software community likes to claim greater security, and this claim may even be true. The security of free software is not yet good enough, however. Recent bugs in packages like Apache, Squid, and OpenSSH have put large numbers of systems at risk; they are the stuff that large-scale destructive worms are made of. There are still too many silly mistakes turning up in free software; we need to do better.
Interoperability. The free office suites currently available are more than good enough for most users at this point. At least, until those users need to exchange documents with people using proprietary packages. Until this problem is solved, people will stay with proprietary systems. Linux systems also need to do better at running software written for other operating systems. Progress is being made, but we are not yet there.
Proprietary software support. It will be a long time before free packages rival the variety of proprietary software out there. Where are the free business plan writers, training systems, contact managers, math tutors, foreign language instructors, genealogy assistants, home designers, tax preparers, high-end games, etc.? Until we have filled in those gaps, we should be friendlier to software vendors who make Linux systems more attractive to more people. That means standards compliance, stable interfaces, and an end to outright hostility toward software vendors. As long as those vendors comply with the licenses of the free software they are using, they are only helping the Linux cause by porting their products.
Business models. Some companies seem to be doing OK, if not great, as free software businesses. Consider Red Hat, Zope Corp., Sleepycat, Collabnet, IBM, etc. Many others are hurting, or have gone out of business. Free software needs successful businesses to keep up its current rate of growth, and it would be better if we didn't end up with just a small number of huge companies employing most free software hackers. There is still work to be done on the business side of free software.
Legal issues. Intellectual property law, including repressive copyright terms, "anti-circumvention" provisions, software patents, and more, threatens to hamper (or ban outright) Linux in many parts of the world. Somehow we have got to get a handle on our legislative systems and not allow free software to be pushed aside by laws favoring a small number of large corporations. This battle will not be easy; the opposing interests are powerful and this is not an issue that is interesting or understandable to most people. We must fight it anyway, though, or much of the rest of our work may turn out to be in vain.

There is, in other words, a lot of work to do still. Free software has always been surprising in what it has been able to accomplish, though. The free software community has a great chance of being able to handle these challenges as well.

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Progress on the Road to World Domination

Posted Jul 19, 2002 12:50 UTC (Fri) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

[Part 1 of three, the comment window hates me]

Security

While crackers may now be targeting Apache as well as IIS, we're still developing better protections against them, here in the Unix world.

Most commercial unix vendors already have military-grade versions of their operating systems, and both BSD and Linux have experimental variants with MAC (mandatory access control).

With MAC, breaking into Apache or even root won't give access to users in other "compartments" or "security levels".

I've lived under MAC on Multics, and didn't even know it was turned on, On Unix it's a bit more visible, expecially to the sysadmin, who now has a set of security admin functions to carry out, but it's not onerous. The added value is proportional to the added work. To the user, it only means an occasional message window warning that thay can't copy from a directory labelled <dad's work stuff, pretty darned secret> to <the web server, not secret at all>.

The result is like a BSD jail on steroids, or firewalls between users or groups. While someone may break into the compartment for public information, they don't get to the one where I keep my baby pictures, so they can't mortify me by publishing what my mother considered "cute little David".

This, therefor, is a trusted system for the safety of the system's owner, not the strange modern usage of a trusted system which prevents the owner access to his own property! [Interoperability and Proprietary software support in a sec]

Progress on the Road to World Domination

Posted Jul 19, 2002 12:59 UTC (Fri) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

Interoperability

While the newest free office suites may not deal well with Microsoft's file formats, Star Office reads and writes them happily.

I've used Star Office 6 since it's beta [Disclaimer: I work for Sun] and worked predominantly with folks who use Word and Excel without difficulty.

Even when MS changes file formats, they still have to keep supporting the previous version for a while, to allow everyone who is still using Office 2000 to continue working with folks using the new Office XP. If they didn't, they would be unable to convince anyone to upgrade to XP!

As we found in the IBM plug-compatable days, if there is backwards compatibility, even for limited periods, compeditors won't be excluded from the market, and they will have the time to write filters or converters from the new format to the old.

So I expect to keep using Star Office to cooperate with my office-XP friends, with only occasional inconveniences.

Progress on the Road to World Domination

Posted Jul 19, 2002 13:12 UTC (Fri) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

Proprietary software support

While there are always programs "you just gotta have", we're not locked to Windows just because the program's authors see it as the platform of choice.

I use Microsoft Project a lot, since it's a de-facto standard in my part of the industry. I don't have a free equivalent. But I do run it on Linux, just under Win4Lin.

Surprisingly, it runs faster on Linux on an ancient Pentium I that it does on one of our late-model departmental laptops. W4l, you see, uses the Linux filesystem and MMU, which give Project a lovely speed boost over the Win 9X system. As long as I only run one or two programs under linux -> Win4Lin -> Windows, then Windows doesn't have the chance to thrash and slow me down.

This is a lot like the early days of DOS: I ran most of my programs there, and a few under CP/M emulation. As more and more companies started shifting to DOS, I ran fewer and fewer programs on CP/M, until they were finally all gone.

Go ahead, ban Linux.

Posted Jul 22, 2002 22:04 UTC (Mon) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026) [Link]

Intellectual property law, including repressive copyright terms, "anti-circumvention" provisions, software patents, and more, threatens to hamper (or ban outright) Linux in many parts of the world.

I think you mean, "hamper (or ban outright) free software" here. Banning Linux isn't especially scary. If that happened, I would switch to Hurd or a BSD kernel and keep using all the tools I've come to know and love. No problem.

Or did you mean to use "Linux" as a synonym for "free software" in this case? That's confusing, non-sensical and just plain wrong. Please don't do it.