Three Wise Men

I feel that it is time for another article about zealotry and pouring some more oil onto an ongoing holy flame war. Wouldn’t you agree?

In my heart I don’t see Microsoft as an arch nemesis, I don’t feel that Linux is Spiderman and Windows Dr. Octopus or King Pin, but I do like occasional holy wars, bashing and fighting against who is what to who. It is fun and entertaining. That is why I will boldly make a claim:

Linux and Open Source communities have done much more than Microsoft or any other giant dinosaur from the computer industry ever did.

Of course I will back my claim with facts and other information.

Microsoft was founded back in 1975, when I wasn’t even born yet,  by William Henry Gates the third and Paul Allen (the first?). This was a time when computers barely had a screens and floppy discs were eight inches in size. Yes, eight floppy inches, how embarrassing. Back then computer software was scarce and so were computer programmers. Microsoft was soon the only company that provided an operating system for IBM computers (and other compatibles). This happened quite fast and it is the crucial point in a history of Microsoft and their dominance. They were smart and lucky. PC-DOS and MS-DOS appeared in 1981 and 1982, they were in fact the same platform 100% compatible and branded under different names. It stayed that way until 1993. There was also a compatible DR-DOS which lasted few years but it wasn’t such a success.

On the other hand, we have Linux and Open Source. We won’t be taking taking any credit for what Linux is not. First there was GNU. GNU was announced by Richard Matthew Stallman somewhere in 1983 and the work on the software started in 1984. What is GNU? GNU’s Not Unix. It is something that looks like unix, smells like unix and feels like unix. Still, it is not unix. What does it have to do with Linux? Linux appeared in 1991 as a pet-project of Linus Torvalds, student from Finland, 10 years after release of MS-DOS. Linux was just a kernel, the core of operating system that couldn’t do anything by itself, it needed support software.

Nowadays when we talk about Linux we are mostly talking about a bunch of other programs that are gathered around the kernel. There is GNU, there is Gnome, there is KDE and there is Xorg.

From 1981 forward all the hardware industry was making hardware that was used on IBM PC and compatibles. For hardware to work you will need drivers for your operating system, so that operating system, the kernel, knows how to talk to hardware. Those drivers were mostly written by their manufactures. Just like now, Nvidia and ATI write drivers for their own graphic cards. Makes sense, they know best how their hardware works.

In the left corner, we have Linux, a new operating system that had absolutely no drivers and poor student Linus had to write his own drivers. A driver for keyboard, driver for IDE disk controller, driver for floppy disk controller and so on and so on. Then in the right corner, we have mighty Microsoft who has the whole computer, hardware and software industry behind it.

It was reported, that Linux recently reached 1% on the desktop market share and most of the people are just smirking. Why is such a good, excellent operating system lagging so far behind. Everyone should be using because its superiority. Right? Well, not really.

Microsoft has a lot of advantage with Windows. As we established it had 10 years of development advantage which is a lot, but not that much. The most important part is Microsoft’s monopoly on the desktop market and very well established vendor lock-in. Lock-in happens when you become so dependent on one vendor that you simply cannot afford to switch to the others because it would cost you too much and the big majority of the market is controlled by that vendor.

“If you don’t like Windows, then switch to Linux!” and “If linux was so good everyone would be using it!” are two very common sentences that could be true in some other scenario. Operating Systems War that is fought now is much, much different from a Cola Wars that were fought some time ago. We had Pepsi and Coca Cola it was simple. If you didn’t like Pepsi you simply purchased Coke. You were able to purchase Coke and Pepsi almost anywhere and exclusives were rare compared to exclusives in Computer business.

Imagine you just bought new set of drinking glasses. Twelve of them, brand new and polished, but they came together with Coca Cola. You go shopping, buy a set of drinking glasses and you get three bottles of Coca Cola with them. In fact, you can’t even buy them without the Coca Cola! Nowadays this has changed, luckily. After some time you drink that Coca Cola that came packaged with glasses and you desire something else to drink. Pepsi! You get a bottle, you open it and pour it in and the glass doesn’t hold it! Pepsi leaks out so fast that you don’t even get a chance to taste it. You try again in another glass and it doesn’t leak out, however Pepsi turns into a brownish green goo. Your glasses are simply not good enough for Pepsi. Pepsi will have to do something on its own to fix that problem!

Now Pepsi goes to all the glass suppliers around the world asking them how their glass is made what is the exact chemical compound so that they can improve their drink which you’d be able to pour into any available glass. So Pepsi is able to get specifications from some suppliers, but not all. Pepsi is now good in some glasses and some not. Your Mileage May Vary.

Who is responsible for all this mess now? Coca Cola that was making all sorts of deals with glass suppliers since it was the only beverage company on the market or is it glass suppliers’ fault since they refused to acknowledge another company on the market?

The guilt is divided. A little bit here and a little bit there. Those companies were basically living one of the another in a symbiotic soft of a relationship. Every now and then a third player surfaced, wiggled here and there a little and then sunk back under water.

In 1984 GNU started to surface and in its niche it was quite successful. A lot of hobbyists took it for theirs, commercially wasn’t even interesting that much, a part because of the licensing policy. Then in 1991 Linux started to surface. And now only recently Linux community managed to ripple the water so much that hardware manufacturers noticed those ripples and started to pay some attention to Linux as an operating system.

During this time the whole community went behind the industry’s back and created their own drivers for almost every piece of hardware one can imagine and almost every possible platform, from x86 to super computers and mobile phones, they made Linux possible to work on the oldest pieces of hardware and in a way forced hardware manufacturers to at least start showing some improvement on their own parts. ATI and Nvidia have their own labs were they write drivers for their graphics cards, altho still not as good as Windows drivers, but they’ll learn in time. There is also commercial software being ported to Linux, some computer games too.

That one lousy percent of the desktop market may seem like nothing at all, but it is a damn huge accomplishment when you have nobody to support you, when you have to do everything from scratch on your own.

Am I being too dramatic here? A little bit yes, but nevertheless Linux being noticed by all the big players must mean something. Did anyone hear Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates bashing on BeOS? No, it was too insignificant.

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