This is more of an essay than a post... It wasn't originally intended to be anything more than another quick post against Microsoft, but I kept thinking of other stuff. Still, I couldn't imagine anywhere other than here as the ideal place to post it.
So, feel free to ignore it or read it, as you see fit. I would be extremely interested to hear what everyone, BSD/Linux/Mac/Microsoft/Sun/other/undecided/uninterested advocates have to say about it... naturally _constructive_ criticism only.
Today I have seen the future.
It is bright, it is exciting. It is full of people getting their work done without constant crashing and worrying about compatibility between systems. It is all that we have dreamed it should be, and more.
Over the past few weeks (well, years actually, but have never really seriously looked into it before) I have been wondering just why it is that one product (and its derivatives) in the i386 operating system marketplace should be so totally dominant, and more importantly, why it should remain so.
The reasons, until this time at least, for this phenomenon can be fairly well understood. The current dominant player in the marketplace has gained their position by way of a few mainly fortuitous circumstances.
They were the first to provide an operating system for the architecture which was amongst the first to provide serious computing power to the smaller business (ie not vastly expensive mainframes etc).
Initially, file formats, protocol standards and pretty much all communication methods for this architecture were either extremely immature or non-existent. This gave the first player in the game the obvious advantage. By the time other players entered, defacto standards had already been established. Worse still of course, these are closed-source 'standards' which a competitor must take great pains to experiment with in order to create a system which, at best, seems to comply with them. Without access to the original source code, full compliance for anyone other than the original creator is exceptionally difficult.
These arbitrarily declared 'standards' serve to further the dominance of their owners in the marketplace. If a competitor cannot adhere to these standards -- to which they are not permitted the luxury of knowing the full specifications -- they cannot compete in the marketplace since they will produce a product which is not completely compatible to most users of the architecture.
The natural progression from this is that the owner of these defacto standards will use them to promote their new standards in other areas, often by ensuring that they are _not_ compatible with competitors' products - this is business after all, and the aim of business is to generate profit.
This is one of the defining characteristics of our currently immature technological age - defacto standards. The current predisposition of the US Patent Office to grant patents for such absurd things as
sideways swinging epitomizes the world's willingness to uphold the rights to ownership of anything that despite being common-sense to most people they were the first to attempt to obtain a patent for.
This age will not last long. There are many things that should genuinely be protected under patent law - the purpose of which is supposed to be to encourage investment in the development of new ideas.
I digress. The issue at hand is not really about patents as such, but is about the freedom of transferrence of information between everyone on our planet.
Yes, I admit that was quite a leap there. From running a few programs on your computer to being able to communicate unimpeded to others in one single step. Allow me to explain.
Language... It is a fascinating topic. There are many hundreds of thousands of written or spoken languages and dialects in use across the world today. There are some languages that are more widely used than others - I'm no expert in this area, but would hazard a guess at Mandarin, English, French, Cantonese, Spanish and Japanese as the major players. Languages have evolved over many hundreds - if not thousands or hundreds of thousands - of years to provide a common medium over which people in the same locality can communicate their ideas, emotions, opinions, to one another.
Imagine this - one company, one commercial entity, one profit-making organisation owns the rights to (for example) the English language. And they are entitled to charge a licence fee for its use. English is a pretty decent language. I understand it, I enjoy using it and I am completely comfortable using it. However, if I were not free to use it without editorial or financial bias from some orginisation, I would have no hesitation in learning another language that was not subject to these limitations. Not necessarily because I cannot afford to pay for using it, but because I believe no-one should have to pay to express their ideas, their innovations, their dreams, their hopes or their desires.
So - why has this commercialisation never happened to spoken language? Does anyone know of a spoken language that imposes these commercial limitations? Language has evolved within our civilisation as we know it over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, and it will continue to evolve for many hundreds of thousands of years with the sole purpose of further precipitating greater understanding between those who dwell on this earth. Who can really claim to have invented, for example, the English language? Clearly their was some person or group of people in our collective distant past that first devised a crude, but consistent, set of vocal sounds that once known by others could communicate a particular set of emotions, desires, concerns, etc.
Has anyone ever suggested that these vocal protocols be subject to license fees? Our ancestors (without exception) have developed our spoken and written language - whatever language that may be - purely because everyone needs tools with which to communicate with each other, not because there's money to be made from it.
This is an important point now. Communication for all people is an inexorable right. Access to those methods of communication for everyone are absolutely essential to maintain our society. When a person wishes to make themselves understood in another language they at least have the option to learn the other language from freely available texts. The only circumstances where they would have to expend financial resources would be if they do not wish to expend the effort learning the language for themselves and hired an interpreter.
My point here is that spoken and written language in general is in effect open source. It has taken hundreds of thousands of years to develop to the point at which we find ourselves today through nothing other than the instinctive desire of mankind to progress methods of communication to the point where we can effectively communicate with each other. Millions - even billions - of people have collaborated to make our world languages what they are today. Few have asked for any recompense other than the satisfaction of knowning that they have assisted in providing a platform upon which others might better understand each other.
What, and you may have guessed by now, I'm trying to put across here is that communication is one of the fundamental necessities of the human race. In the recent past it's been relatively easy - you write down your sentiments on paper in a particular language and if the recipent does not understand that language they can either learn that language (through freely available specifications, like a dictionary) or hire an interpreter.
Sadly, we find ourselves in the position now that electronic communications even between people who are familiar with the same actual language (ie English, Mandarin etc) are unable to understand each other because of artificial barriers erected by companies who arbitrarily maintain control of a communication system that has only survived because of a concerted effort by that company to ensure that everyone misfortunate enough to use them is able to communicate only with others who are locked into the same protocol.
The new electronic medium of which I speak is of course the Internet. It is an unprecedented medium which puts so many more people on this planet in touch with each other with -- theoretically -- no barriers other than those actual lingustic barriers. However, the defacto, as-yet-unregulated, powers mean to maintain many more barriers than mere language, to ensure that the world must use *their* software in order to communicate.
[Finally] I return to my earlier points...
Our current information age is in an exceptionally immature state. It has only been thirty years since your average man-on-the-street heard of a 'computer'.
When I was at school (no more than 15 years ago -- honest!) we didn't even have computers other than a few VIC20's and some BBC micros. A lot of my current knowledge of computers is derived from experiences with those computers and my own ZX Spectrum at about that time. However I learned a hell of a lot more from them than I suspect a lot of High School users do today since we were forced to know all the resources of the machine otherwise it may not do what we wanted it to do...
...and now most schools have fairly well equiped computer labs. Labs with computers equiped with Win[9x|NT|2K|XP]. What does this teach them? You can only develop apps for other Windows PC's?
Why will Microsoft fail?
For many hundreds of years physicists, chemists, liguistics, psycologists, etc, have been publishing the results of their research to others for no reason other than peer recogniton and the knowledge that they are helping the human race in its quest for further knowledge. The same is already happening with open sorce software, and it will not be long before this is the accepted norm.
It's only a matter of time. Free exposure of information is the norm for the scientific community, and it will continue to be, since all that matters is the progression of the sum of human knowledge.
I've said it before and I'll say it again ... none of us are really tied to a particular OS, and we can chage. For the sake of our continued right to free speech, free expression, free computing, for God's sakes please think about it!
I've seen the future and Microsoft are a bit-player. Who wants to work with a conpany that does everthing to ensure their products are only used by some particular set of user?
