[Ilugc] Check out my Facebook profile- Security issues
- From: kapil@xxxxxxxxxxx (Kapil Hari Paranjape)
- Date: Tue Jun 10 13:01:08 2008
Hello,
On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 8:17 AM, Pranesh Srinivasan <spranesh at gmail.com>
wrote:
I do not wish to flare your temper, or start a flame war,
I agree but feel that there are too many "given wisdom" statements in
what Sarad AV has said to let them pass. My apologies for fanning the
flames. ;-)
If you want to skip the rest of this mail then the pithy summary is:
Monopolies are born out of perceived _convenience_
or
_Convenience_ is the always wrong reason to accept less choice
(Or less security). I assure you that the rest of this mail is not
(only) ideology _and_ has something to do with GNU and Linux!
Do you know how the MS monopoly started? The following is how I
personally experienced it and remember it.
In the 80's and early 90's, MS was not the monopoly that it is today.
The proprietary *nix companies were "not evil". The management of
these companies decided that:
a. free software was bad for them
b. commodity hardware would never be any good
c. competition meant that they should diverge from each other
The users of these proprietary *nices found it _convenient_ to just
play along --- so you had Solaris networks, HP/UX networks, AIX
networks and so on. All based on proprietary mutually incompatible
hardware. Quite often there were software incompatibilities as
well. These users (which were well-funded government and institutional
labs) depended on the paid-for support from these companies, which was
generally quite good --- at least until the late 90's.
Those who played along with this "convenience" helped create the
MS monopoly. In the late 90's it started to became hard for these
companies to find well-trained support staff. All the small computer
labs were by then running MS; most of the job applicants had been trained
in these labs. Or if the job applicants had studied in an HP/UX
network it was not easy for them to learn to maintain Solaris or vice
versa. At that point the users who had created a Solaris network were
caught between a rock and a hard place; let the network be handled by
incompetent people or pay top-dollar for the few trained professionals
who were smart enough to work with any system.
Many of these labs then fell into MS's lap! I won't name names...
Did these labs have a choice? Of course, they did! They could have
taken the slightly less convenient path of installing GNU/Linux and
creating a network based on that and the cheap commodity hardware
that it worked on. Moreover, if enough of these labs had done this
there would not have been the shortage of trained *nix professionals
that started in the late 90's.
Remember that Linux (or GNU) was not written to dethrone MS. Linux
was written so that its users could use a smoothly working *nix on
cheap commodity hardware. GNU was written so that its users could
conveniently and legally share code across different *nix platforms.
Hereendeththelessen,
Kapil.
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