Thomas Boxley's Personal Site

Let’s jump right in.

Last year, Microsoft contributed nearly 20,000 lines of code for inclusion into the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds decided to implement them into the kernel. Now, before you go all “OMG MICROSOFT HALPED LINUX” on me, let’s learn about what they actually contributed first.

Hyper-V, formerly named Windows Server Virtualization,  from Microsoft is a virtualization system which runs with Windows Server 2008 or standalone. I won’t get into the full details on it, as they’re quite confusing. Just imagine a glorified VirtualBox. Hyper-V is praised as being one of the greatest virtualization systems available today.

What Microsoft contributed were just device drivers so that Linux would run better in the Hyper-V software. So yes, version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel included the Hyper-V device drivers. However, Microsoft failed to maintain the code,  and so the drivers were removed from version 2.6.35.

Even though Microsoft *did* actually contribute code to Linux, it was only for their own good, and they didn’t even follow through with it. Microsoft will never be an open source company, and will never develop anything worthwhile for the open source community.

Now let’s analyze Apple and what they have done for open source. Apple is very interesting on this front. As we all know, and even Steve Jobs admits, Apple is a very proprietary company. They have, however, contributed quite a bit to the open source movement, even though they’re somewhat obligated to, considering Mac OS is based largely off of FreeBSD.

On September 10th of 2009, Apple licensed the core library to Grand Central Dispatch, libdispatch, under the Apache License, thus making it completely open source. Grand Central Dispatch allows different tasks to be scheduled (not like cron jobs) to run on a different core.

The open source community praised Apple after libdispatch was open sourced, and libdispatch has already been ported to Free BSD where it is compatible with the Apache HTTP Server on that operating system.

Novell recently won a lawsuit between them and the SCO, the group that previously owned most of UNIX. The court ruled that Novell is the real owner of UNIX, thankfully… Actually, how good is this? As I mentioned in the last post, Novell and Microsoft are partners. Novell has the responsibility of making sure stuff made by Microsoft works on Linux, like Silverlight / Moonlight.

Silverlight is just as bad as Flash in many ways, and just as proprietary. While I have said that I will use proprietary software, I don’t think that proprietary software has a place on the internet when it comes to actual rendering of pages and stuff.

It’s a shame when you need a proprietary program like Flash to view 90% of video content on the internet. Huzzah for HTML 5 video.

Hmm, it looks like I’ve gotten a bit off topic. Well anyways, if someone was to ask me, “What are your opinions on free versus proprietary software?” I will answer with, “Proprietary software = great. Free software = even better.” But the whole point of these 2 posts wasn’t only to explain what I think about the debate,  but they were to provide you with enough information so that you could have an educated opinion on the subject matter.

As always, thank you for reading my blog. If you have anything to say, just leave a comment. I’ll be posting more in the future.

This does not only give my opinion on the free vs. proprietary software debate, it also addresses what I think about some of the rifts in the Linux community.

In order to explain my thoughts on this, we must first understand the difference between ‘free beer’ and ‘free speech.’ Richard Stallman doesn’t care whether or not the program costs money. He’s only concerned with whether the source code is available to everyone or not. The phrase “Free as in beer” means price, while “Free as in speech” means freedom to view and make changes to the source code. Open source means that the software must be free as in speech and free as in beer.

In my opinion, the constant bashing of proprietary software coming from the Linux community needs to end. There is a tonne of amazing, yet proprietary software. Photoshop is a great example. While I normally dislike Adobe because they fail to support Linux and other Unix-Like operating systems properly, I’ll make the exception when talking about Photoshop. I believe Photoshop to be miles ahead of it’s closest alternative / rival, GIMP.

There is an open source implementation of the .NET framework that you’ve probably heard of, Mono, that is constantly being bashed by free software advocates because 1.) It is based on Microsoft software; 2.) It is being developed by Novell, who are apparently “in bed with Microsoft”. Why are these things bad? Well, the average Linux user (including me) has a grudge against Microsoft and anyone supporting Microsoft.

I recently signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct on Launchpad and read an amazing post on the SABDFL’s blog which has made me rethink my stance on Microsoft. After all, they are a company. And companies need to make money in order to be successful (Don’t ask me how Red Hat became successful without making money. They’re just an amazing case). Even Canonical is making money selling enterprise Linux support.

While I praise Richard Stallman’s ideology and admire his devotion to continue advocating free software, even when the rest of the world thinks he is crazy, he fails to understand something that’s been brought up many a’ time: Developers need to eat! Developers can’t develop unless they have food. They can’t have food unless they sell their programs. If they open source their programs, they get no money. If they license them as free software, but sell them, then someone will just buy and fork the code, giving it away at no cost.

Such is the case with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS. RHEL is a commercial Linux distribution, but because it is licensed under the GNU GPL, I can email them and say “Hey, I want the source code to that!” and they have to give it to me. That’s what happened with the CentOS team. They just got the source code to RHEL, changed the name, and they’re giving it away. CentOS is just a community branded version of RHEL. That’s just how the GPL works.

And then there are times where the wisest thing to do is not release the source code at all. Ubuntu One is a service that backs up your files to the Ubuntu One cloud. It is entirely closed source, and this has all of the zealots in a frenzy. While, in the end, Canonical usually releases the source code, I don’t think they will with Ubuntu One considering it’s helping them to be more profitable.

So yes, there you are. My opinions on free vs. proprietary software. I’ll probably post a Part 2 sometime in the future detailing things like Moonlight, Apple open-sourcing Grand Central Dispatch, Microsoft contributing code for increased VM performance, and other stuff.

Thanks for reading!

Literally. Open source software is in all kinds of devices from mobile phones to iPods. In fact, when I go to the About viewer on my PSP, it says lib(something or another) Copyright Eric S. Raymond. Licensed under the GNU General Public License. When I go to the “Legal” on my 4th generation iPod Nano, about half way down it lists software that is licensed under the GPL. So yeah, that’s it. Short post, I know.