ZDNet UK

CNET NETWORKS UK BUSINESS SITES:
atlarge.com
BNET UK
silicon.com
SmartPlanet.com
ZDNet.co.uk

ZDNet.co.uk - Winner of Best Business Website 2007

You are here: ZDNet.co.uk > News > Software

Desktop platforms Toolkit

Microsoft stands firm in the 'great Linux debate'

Tags:
Linux Desktop

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 23 Apr 2004 10:10 BST

Samba/HP: Just as you wouldn't trust a bridge built by a company that wouldn't show you the blueprints, you shouldn't trust software from a company that won't show you the source. I worked in proprietary software for a long time before I worked in open source and most proprietary software is crap. It's crap because you can get away with it. You can get away with it because no-one looks inside and sees the buffer overruns. You can't do that with open-source code. My name is on Samba. When we ship a new version of Samba, we don't care about the release train for SuSE or Red Hat --- we ship it when it is right. In the future, it is going to seem incredible that software was done any other way.

Microsoft: I think you have to look at the commercial aspects. If companies operating a pure open-source route can be commercially viable and make money then it becomes a commercial business model. It does have an impact on programmers and developers who chose to make their living writing code.

Also I want to respond to the inference that proprietary software is crap. When you show your software to the number of people that we show our software to, then you don't get to behave like that. There is a misconception that because your code is open and readable that A, people will read it and B, people will recognise good quality and will have good practise in writing code. Actually one of the big challenges for the Linux community and as their product becomes more complex, then how do you put the systems in place to ensure quality? If you look at some of the things that have gone on in terms of the community doing code-review, then the community is not interested -- the community is interested in building stuff for itself. So, I would take issue with that, they have just as many bugs as we have. I would even argue in other circumstances that we have less. We all have bugs in software, so to argue that closed or open is crap is a gratuitously silly thing to say.

Question: There a lot of people on the panel today from different organisations, with different viewpoints. How are you going to work together to make Linux a unified platform?
Samba/HP: The GPL is what keeps everything on a level playing field, it is the ultimate Darwinian system. The GPL is what ties and binds everything together.

Red Hat: We make sure our engineers are deeply involved in the community. They are maintainers, they are contributors -- 100 percent of what they write gets contributed back -- they are involved with the process and create elements of software that will go in the right direction and are in line with where maintainers are taking code.