…on dalegroup.net regard­ing the state of oper­at­ing sys­tem devel­op­ment (no perma­link avail­able due to the nature of the soft­ware that is being used for news over there).

I’ve been play­ing around with domains and forests (mmm trees) today. Con­nect­ing domain servers to dif­fer­ent com­put­ers all talk­ing to one cen­tral DNS box. Oh my how I love win­dows. Every­thing just works. Really I love win­dows. I don’t care what any­one else says. I find it sta­ble, fast and easy to use. Isn’t that what com­put­ers are meant to be like? I also spent a far bit of time on a 12″ iBook with OSX 10.3.x very nice too. I like these oper­at­ing sys­tems because they have one com­pany behind them push­ing them in one direc­tion, not some linux dis­tro which has been split so many times it isn’t funny, or a tech­nol­ogy release gone wrong (fedora any­one?). You need direc­tion when build­ing an oper­at­ing sys­tem and that is what Microsoft and Apple both do. Great job guys.

Linux, whilst not guided in the same uni­lat­eral man­ner as both OS X and Win­dows, is still capa­ble of con­sis­tent devel­op­ment val­ues and poli­cies allow­ing for a highly effi­cient, scal­able and usable plat­form.  Linux on the desk­top has not yet reached the matu­rity of even Win­dows (let alone the sophis­ti­ca­tion of OS X), a claim which I am yet to see con­tested.  Devel­op­ment poli­cies result­ing from Open Source are, by their very nature, open.  This does not REQUIRE frag­men­ta­tion such as that which was described, although this is often a result.

The lack of con­trol by a mono­lithic entity over a prod­uct per­mits inno­va­tion in the mar­ket­place, result­ing in tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment for the greater ben­e­fit of the entire com­mu­nity, not the bottom-line of a TNC soft­ware monop­oly.  Not that TNC monop­o­lies are bad — well, they are, but that isn’t the issue being dis­cussed here.  TNC monop­o­lies sti­fle inno­va­tion, and sub­ject users to the deci­sions made by afore­men­tioned monop­oly — users have no choice, at this point, but to wait for the sit­u­a­tion to change, or to switch platforms.

I can’t help but notice a strik­ing par­al­lel between Roman Catholi­cism and closed-source monopolist-software ven­dors.  My rea­son­ing is a lit­tle abstract, so bare with me, here.  Both enjoy mono­lithic, absolute con­trol over those within their respec­tive struc­tures — this, arguably, is a good thing — peo­ple with the knowl­edge are mak­ing deci­sions for the greater good of the organ­i­sa­tion as a whole.

But what if those with knowl­edge aren’t mak­ing the cor­rect deci­sions?  Or are pur­su­ing a path which allows users no input or con­trol over that which they are sub­ject to (i.e. their belief sys­tem, being dic­tated by the Pope, or their soft­ware envi­ron­ment, being dic­tated by Microsoft)… are users sup­posed accept this path as being right, going with what those with knowl­edge tell them, or is there room for indi­vid­ual choice, even if this means ques­tion­ing the entity, as Mar­tin Luther did?

Open-Source, like the Protes­tant move­ment, does not require users fol­low an estab­lished struc­ture.  To an extent, it allows users to choose for them­selves — any appar­ent church struc­ture within what­ever denom­i­na­tion shouldn’t have the power to dic­tate the beliefs of indi­vid­u­als who pro­fess that faith (as con­ser­v­a­tive Roman Catholics would believe); mat­ters of faith are indi­vid­ual, as are all beliefs (n.b. this does not make indi­vid­ual beliefs CORRECT).

Because of this inher­ent propen­sity for devi­a­tion and frag­men­ta­tion to occur, it has — not all peo­ple will see eye-to-eye on all things, and a frame­work in which peo­ple are free to make up their own mind does result in frag­men­ta­tion.  Not always for the better.

Like­wise, the Open-Source com­mu­nity allows for frag­men­ta­tion to occur.  This is ideal for indi­vid­u­als, although not always for the com­mu­nity as a whole — this is where prod­uct ven­dors come in.

A key exam­ple, most rel­e­vant given com­ments made regard­ing Fedora Core 2, is that of Red­Hat.  They are an OS appli­ca­tion ven­dor, with strong Open-Source ties, specif­i­cally in their finan­cial and devel­op­men­tal sup­port of the Fedora project.  Fedora exists both to serve the Open-Source com­mu­nity as a whole, as well as pro­vide an envi­ron­ment in which devel­op­ment and test­ing may occur for the refine­ment of Red­Hats’ commercial-grade/Enterprise offerings.

In this, Red­Hat oper­ates as an inte­gra­tor.  Whilst the qual­ity of freely (as in beer/speech/whatever else) avail­able soft­ware released by the Fedora project may be of dubi­ous qual­ity at var­i­ous stages of devel­op­ment, Red­Hat, oper­at­ing as a com­mer­cial soft­ware solu­tions devel­op­ment organ­i­sa­tion, ensures that the qual­ity of their enterprise-grade offer­ings do not suffer.

Win­dows just works?  Often… although I would ven­ture that in terms of ALL server related tasks, a solu­tion from one proven OSS ven­dor would prove just as ade­quate.  Wor­ried about inter­op­er­abil­ity?  That is a sep­a­rate con­cern — remem­ber, Win­dows doesn’t have a monop­oly on the server mar­ket, and it is far from inter­op­er­a­ble with *nix platforms.

Win­dows just works on the desk­top?  Sure, in between the spy­ware and mal­ware and virus out­breaks and other var­i­ous sys­tem com­pro­mises.  I spent an hour today try­ing to get crap off a com­puter used by my broth­ers.  Spy­bot, AdAware — lat­est def­i­n­i­tions, mul­ti­ple scans, noth­ing resolved.  I spent the remain­ing 20 min­utes man­u­ally hack­ing things down, think­ing “this wouldn’t hap­pen if this com­puter were run­ning Linux”.

And it wouldn’t have.  I was (and am) sorely tempted to install a locked-down heav­ily cus­tomised ver­sion of Fedora (heh, Core 1, because 2 sucks, appar­ently ;)) on there, with Mozilla, aMSN and OpenOf­fice, and leave home indef­i­nitely.  They would be per­fectly fine until it ran out of disc space.

If they wish to play games?  Then why are they still using a Pen­tium 166 (OC’d to 200) with 48MB of RAM?  That doesn’t appear to be a con­sid­er­a­tion from where I am sitting.

What a shame, they won’t be able to install any soft­ware they want.  No dialers for you, I’m sorry.