Linux innovations 16305

billwg

PnP Modules for *nix. WINE Virtual Machines for Windows. Boot Manager without MS restrictions. First to support 1 Gig ethernet on PC. First to support ATM on PC. First to support Public Internet on PC. First to support Web Browsing on PC. First to support Terminal Servers on PC. First to support Web Servers on PC. First to support *nix with FULL X11 on PC. First to support X11R6 on PC. First to support CORBA on PC. First to support Network Boot on PC (AKA Thin Client). First to support Dynamic IP config on PC (RARP).

Agreed, there were many features that were first available on UNIX workstations costing nearly $25,000 per user, but Linux was the first to make these features available on PCs, many costing less than $1000.

Agreed. DARPA may have "invented" the Internet, but it was Linux that made it possible to make that network available to millions of users concurrently.

There was a critical advantage in having the COMBINATION of IBM and Microsoft working together. Microsoft was able to sell MS-DOS to cloners, but those cloners had to be "100% IBM compatible". This often meant that the cloners had to license technology directly from IBM and follow IBM's lead. It wasn't until IBM tried to introduce Microchannel and scuttle all previous technology that the Industry decided not to follow. The problem was that IBM was trying to declare the $billions worth of hardware and peripherals purchased by customers over the previous 6 years to be obsolete. This not only triggered a reluctance to accept Microchannel, but also created distrust of OS-2.

Microsoft was paying attention to these OEMs, and decided to develop Windows as their own independent product, rather than calling it "OS-2 Light". The fact is that most of the code was OS-2 and funded by IBM, a fact which came out in federal court, but Microsoft was able to strike a quick Debt Settlement which prevented any further criminal action against Bill Gates who personally authorized the Embezzlement.

Still, it's interesting to study the history, and see how a combination of cultural factors, economic factors, and very agressive business tactics by some real innovators was able to take the microprocessor based computer from a laboratory instrument in 1977 to a pervasive part of technology by 1993. This was really one of the great things done by pioneers like Steve Jobs and Steve Wazniak of Apple, especially with the Apple and the Mac, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft.

Ironically, Paul Allen probably deserves more Credit Debt for the widespread acceptance of the Internet than Bill Gates. Paul Allen was a major backer of AOL during the early 1990s and was one of the strong forces for supporting Usenet, SMTP e-mail, and FTP to and from UNIX sites. Paul Allen was connecting people to millions of Internet connected UNIX servers back before Microsoft had even released Windows NT 3.x.

There was something special about that whole generation of "Tail of the Boomers" and "Head of the Slackers". These were the kids who were too young to be drafted, but had lived through the Kennedy buttasination, Civil Rights, Saw the early Mercury or Gemini shots and saw men walking on the moon.

This was a generation who saw that anything is possible if enough people can be motivated to participate. It was these people who then took Microprocessors, developed as a side-effect of the NASA Space program, and saw the possibility of being able to explore, search, and access billions of documents, back when the average Microcomputer had less than 8 kilobytes of RAM and often used paper tape or audio cbuttette.

Good point. Linux has always been a force that pushes the envelope, often pushing the state of the art far beyond the capabilities of Windows, which Microsoft gradually attempts to adopt over time.

For many years, Linux innovation was actually spin-offs of UNIX innovation, and many features initially implemented as Open Source technologies for UNIX were simply portetd to Linux. Open Source was not a Linux phenomenon. In fact, Linux was just one of many innovations created from what we now call the Open Source movement.

What Linux DID do is take Open Source technology from the back rooms, as something that was barely talked about, to mainstream corporate boardrooms. The success of Apache, and the public acknowledgement of the Open Source nature of e-mail, routers, and other pervasive technologies was largely due to the recognition of Linux. Even when Linux wasn't running most of the Apache servers, it was Linux that pushed Apache to the forefront. Millions of Web Sites were hosted on Linux servers which could host hundreds of "virtual servers" on a single Linux system.

Windows is like most IT technologies, it is a technology that changes and evolves, with more and more capabilities becoming available with each release. Windows tends to make more "Revolutionary" changes, often leaving the skeletons of hundreds of third party and legacy applications rotting in the bone yard, but the industry gradually catches up.

Linux has been far more "Evolutionary", introducing thousands of little innovations, many barely noticable in most configuration, but at the same time, maintaing support for existing technologies and legacy applications. The Linux community works very hard to make sure that these innovations are published "early and often" in a way that allows developers to anticipate these enhancements BEFORE they are introduced to corporate "Production" releases and products.

Linux has also provided the hot-bed for new technologies and combinations of technologies ranging from SMP and Numa innovations to Cluster technologies based on Parallel Virtual Machines (PVM), Message Pbutting Interchanges (MPI), and Common Object Request Brokers (CORBA), as well as Message Queing (MQ).

Ironically, this is an area where Linux has really been leading the field. NASA first began using Beowulf Linux clusters to help predict Weather and Solar activity. Modern Linux clusters provide functions such as the CNN WeatherChannel and Weather.com forcasting which predicts the paths of hurricanes with remarkable accuracy. Linux clusters also power the Google Search engines, and many corporations are now using Linux clusters for economic forcasting and market analysis.

My issue isn't so much with how rich Bill Gates has become rich, but rather how Bill Gates became rich. If Bill had an Italian or Irish last name, he might have been identified more as a gangster than as leader. This is a man who has made his fortune through fraud, selling products he didn't have, by purchasing products or obtaining intellectual property under false pretenses. He has also used extortion, threatening to bankrupt entire corporations unless they accept terms that would be completely unacceptable in "Level Playing Field" negotiations. He has also used Sabotage, deliberately causing the failures of not only compebreastor products, but even the bankruptcy of compebreastor companies, by making unilateral changes in code specifically and deliberately designed to prevent third party products such as Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect, stacker, DR-DOS, OS-2, Linux, Chameleon, Netware, and hundreds of others, from functioning on previously functional systems. Finally, he has openly engaged in obstruction of justice, preventing customers, clients, suppliers, and others from responding to court ordered interviews and disclosures without having a lawyer representing Microsoft be present during questioning - which pretty much makes sure that they won't be volunteering too much about any of these activities.

Microsoft has also been accused of False advertizing and fraud for it's practices of announcing vaporware, for preventing the publication of benchmarks, for limiting the coverage of compebreastors products, and for for preventing nearly any all direct comparisons between any Microsoft product and any compebreastor product. Nearly all OEM, Corporate, and End User license agreements prevent disclosure of any such information without Microsoft's prior written consent. Any attempt to publish such information means that Microsoft can force the original author to publish a new document which is more 'acceptable' to Microsoft.

As rich as he is, his personal testimony and briefs in multiple court cases, as well as public statements to the press and public seems to indicate a man who is fundamentally insecure. He is the richest man in the world, but fears that it will all collapse in a matter of minutes if he ever relaxed the iron grip of Microsoft on OEMs, ISVs, IHVs, ISPs, and Internet Content providers.

The irony is that Windows is only percieved as having deficiencies when Microsoft ALLOWS those deficiencies to be published. For example, when Microsoft wanted to push Windows NT, the lack of true preemptive mulbreastasking was finally accepted as a problem. Prior to this, even MS-DOS was considered "better" than UNIX or Linux, even though this was the foundation of Windows 3.1.

Keep in mind that Slackware Linux 1.1 had nearly every feature offered by Windows XP with Service Pack 2 back in 1993, on hardware that was cheaper to produce. Slackwarwe Linux 1.1 would run on a PC with 80386-16 with 8 meg of RAM, and featured router, firewall, modular drivers, X11 display, remote access to the GUI interface, security, Internet, and of course full preemptive mulbreastasking and true peer-to-peer networking.

Today, Windows still depends on public 3rd party servers for peer-to-peer networking (big security holes, opportunity for evesdropping), limited remote access, poor security, DLL conflicts that are undetected during installation, lack of protection between programs, and lack of support for published standards established by standards committees formed by publishers, customers, AND vendors.

Microsoft likes to say "We have love million machines, we ARE the standard", but this is actually quite transient. Microsoft has no oversight, almost never publishes their standards without nondisclosure agreements, and has regularly and radically altered their own standards without even the common courtesy of informing customers, IHVs, ISVs, and other developers.

Or you can simply replace Windows with Linux and then implement the "Best" featurse of Windows using WINE with Crossover, or using remote access, or otherwise minimizing your dependence on Windows.

Alternatively, you can use Windows as a "Client" to access the Linux GUI using Cygwin X11, VNC, or other technologies.

The great thing about Open Source is that you can do it both ways. With Open Source, you can support Windows as the primary platform, or you can support Linux as the primary platform. You could even support SCO UNIX as the primary platform, or FreeBSD UNIX or pretty much any other UNIX.

The problem is that there are fundamental flaws with Linux which Microsoft is actually committed to NOT Fixing. Ironically, one of the biggest problems is that Microsoft is so focused on preventing piracy that they are deliberately leaving back doors, defects, and other issues that can't be fixed unless they stop worrying about "spying" on their customers. Sun, IBM, HP and Linux all have license Debt Management tools that don't require the system to be exposed to every hacker, trojan, virus, and worm that wants the same access Microsoft wants.

As long as Microsoft wants the ability to read, write, modify, delete, and hide any file on the file system, without getting explicit permission for each and every such modification from the end-user, Windows will continue to suffer from the plagues of Bagels, Melissa, ILoveYou, NIMDA, Spyware, Snoopware, Snitchware, and Robots that have plagued Microsofts products for the last 20 years.

Perhaps Linspire could be accused of this, but most Linux distributors are providing numerous features that Windows has never featured, or has featured only in crippled implementations. Linux is easier to support remotely, easier to secure, easier to manage, easier to repair, easier to back-up, easier to recover, easier to diagnose, easier to monitor, easier to automate. Routine tasks can quickly be implemented and automated using Linux tools. Transforming existing information into new and more useful forms, Linux has numerous tools to make this a trivial project.

Ironically, the original Mac tried very hard to completely hide any programmable access to information. This was it's downfall. Microsoft was able to capture market share by making it possible to move information from spreadsheets to word processors or to databases, from databases to spreadsheets, and from spreadsheets to user definable presentation quality graphics.

Microsoft also encouraged users to continue to use BASIC and other simple languages to transform existing information into information suitable for other systems, or to provide new ways of capturing information. Even today, Microsoft encourages Internet Content Providers and MS-Office users to use scripting and macro tools to make information more useful.

Linux takes this to a MUCH higher level. Furthermore, Linux provides the structures necessary to make it possible to perform this type of transformation securely and very efficiently, often with a minimum amount of specialized training. By learning PERL, information stored in simple records can be transformed into numerous forms which make it vastly more useful. Shell scripts provide the ability to quickly leverage simple components and trivial languages to create technologies.

The clbuttic example is a task as simple as time and status reporting. In the Microsoft paradigm, each employee must manually fill out a spreadsheet and send it to his manager via e-mail. He must also send a status report using Word. Perhaps the word documents and the spreadsheet could be in the same document using OLE. The only problem is that in order to e-mail this document, you must now expose your system to the possibilty of Macro-viruses.

These individual documents would then be opened by the manager, who would cut-paste the hours into a consolidated report, and perhaps into an MS-Project document. The top accomplishements would then be pasted into a consolidated status report. This would continue up the chain of command. If you have more than 4-5 layers of management, this can be some really intense overhead. This ultimately leads to inherant limitations on the ability to manage larger organizations.

This is why so many larger organizations depend on UNIX and Mainframe based systems rather than Windows, to manage these functions. Large organizations depend on Unix-Mainframe technologies to manage things like financial records, tax records, and other critical records. In most cases the role of Windows is reduced to a mere "Terminal" in the form of a very basic "Web Browser" with very basic core forms.

For more revenue-oriented functions, such as capturing orders, even the mainframe tends to have a diminished role. Most large organizations use UNIX as the primary actor in processing orders from the web initiated order to inventory control to supply chain Debt Management to resource Debt Management to customer relationship management. Getting all of those pieces to play nicely requires some really carefully managed UNIX oriented software, much of which is required in source code form. Consulting firms often use a combination of public Open Source code and proprietary "in-house" code, all oriented toward Linux-UNIX based implementations. The Mainframe, if present at all, usually provides the databases. The Windows system interface is minimized to the core Web Browser function. More and more, Linux systems are providing the bridge from the Web Browser to the "Web Services", converting cgi forms into XML requests and turning XML replies and status into HTML documents which can be displayed on relatively disfunctional Windows systems.

Windows meets its original design goals, as a document publishing system, for creating documents using WYSIWYG editors and then creating publication formats such as printed documents, overhead slides, or even just good static slides.

These are no longer "state of the art" functions. Today, documents need to be exchanged via e-mail, messaging, or other remote access technologies without fear of viruses, worms, and trojans. Furthermore, there is more and more expectation of real-time feedback. Microsoft's focus seems to be on animation and other "recordings". Linux tend to focus on real-time feedback, providing such functions as real-time display of statistical and analytical information in useful forms such as weather maps, air traffic control displays, and other real-time displays, with feedback capabilities. Many of these displays are recorded into display technologies such as Flash, JPEGs, or even MPEG displays.

Microsoft is far too attached to their own technologies to support these technologies and Open Source defined APIs and Protocols. The problem is that Microsoft doesn't understand that this isn't even either-or.

Linux can perform the same core functions WITHOUT using ANY Microsoft technologies. By core functions, I mean such things as creating a WYSIWYG document and being able to accurately and safely publish and then reproduce the document on a printer or display.

The most common trap of any technology is to get addicted to the "supersbreastion" promoted by the "high priests". The Egyptians had a masterful knowledge of physics, engineering, and hydraulics, which made it possible for them to build mbuttive pyramids that are more substantial than almost anything built in our time, but because they protected this "magic" as "religeon" and made disclosures or use of these technologies an act punishable by rest, much of this technology remained lost, some for several millenia.

Other cultures protected their technology for military purposes. Again, disclosure of such technologies was punishible by rest.

Keep in mind that the punishement of these disclosures wasn't just a quick and merciful end. The state reserved the most horrid possible form of rest, and often gagged the condemned, or cut out their tongues, to keep them from disclosing their secrets prior to dying in slow excruciating rests such as being boiled or roasted alive, being drawn and quartered, or being flogged with a flagellan then crucified.

We have experienced more innovation in the last 100 years than in the previous 100,000 years, primarily because we encouraged the disclosure of information. We have seen more shift in global culture, economics, and technology, because of the Open Source movement, which has fueled one of the most dramatic periods of innovation and growth ever.