OS/2 eZine

16 April 2001
 
Robert Basler is the president of Aurora Systems, Inc. and a dedicated OS/2 user since he tired of rebooting Windows 3.1 twenty times a day.

Any opinions expressed here are his own, and are not endorsed by, or necessarily representative of the opinions of, his employer or the OS/2 eZine.


If you have a comment about the content of this article, please feel free to vent in the OS/2 eZine discussion forums.


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Visit CooLFM homepage now! http://os2.ru/projects/coolfm

Opportunities

Has anyone else noticed that the computer industry doesn't seem to learn from its mistakes? I've been using computers for nearly twenty years now. At 32, I'm not exactly old by industry standards, but I'm starting to feel that way.

The Register reported that the terms of service for Hotmail specifically allow Microsoft to read your email and commercially exploit anything contained in it without having to pay you. I bet the fellow who came up with that little gem got a lot of addaboys at the old water cooler! This just goes to show, reading the fine print is worth your time. Of course, Microsoft responded quickly to this PR nightmare, changing the terms of service for Hotmail, at least in the U.S., but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth when you consider that with Hailstorm and other .NET initiatives, they want to become the central repository of all your personal information.

Microsoft, never to be outdone, is also taking reporting to the mothership as pioneered by Real, Doubleclick and others one step further: the new version of Microsoft Office and Windows XP both require that you register with Microsoft before they will run. Of course that leads naturally to the question "What happens three years down the road when these products reach their end of service date and you accidentally toast your hard drive with the latest e-mail macro virus?" I've tried to get service on Microsoft's older products in the past, let's just say it was "pricey" and didn't inspire a lot of confidence in any product that needs to get the A-OK from Redmond before it is going to work.

I can imagine how this is going to play out. "Well sir, you need to reinstall Office 2000? That's pretty ancient (chuckle.) Let's see. Ok, you can open a support incident for $$$ to get a new activation code and of course we'll need a proof of license plus a notarized affidavit that you have uninstalled or destroyed your previous installation, or we can upgrade you to the latest release with all these cool extra features for just $$$. Will that be VISA or Mastercard?" I'd like to say that these guys should talk to the folks at DeScribe about product activation, but frankly I think they're going to get away with it.

Further on the profit motive (I don't have anything against profits, really, but...) now Microsoft is reportedly going after its customers, both big and small, for license compliance. Here's a free tip for everyone down in Redmond: Don't tick off your clients for a quick buck, especially the big ones with deep pockets. The Linux people are ecstatic about this.

Oh yeah, Windows 98, Windows 98 2nd Edition, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP. Doesn't that seem like a lot of non-free operating system updates in just 3 short years? This isn't just a pain for users - how are developers supposed to test against all these versions?

And what about Steve Ballmer calling for belt-tightening at Microsoft as a result of lower than expected revenues? Hello? Steve? You're a billionaire. That's with a B. BILLIONAIRE. Don't talk to people about belt-tightening. They're all going to laugh at you.

Then there's Java. Cool technology. Amazing potential to make my life as a software developer easier and more profitable. Not exactly being managed as well as it could be. Sun withdrew it from the ISO standardization process, a bad move in my opinion. Then Microsoft tries to muck with it and gets in a legal battle with Sun resulting in the wonderful new product C# (kinda like Java) and its "intermediary language" (kinda like a JVM.) Is there anyone who needs C#? Have they no sympathy for the poor people who bought Visual J++? These guys need to kiss and make up.

Linux is also getting a lot of nice press. Good buzz, some amazing software, you certainly can't beat the price. I guess the people reporting on all this don't know that Linux is UNIX. That means it's hard to use. Does anyone really want to have to learn how to reconfigure the kernel, compile and install it into LILO, and then have to download a half-dozen developer source packages using CVS or FTP, making sure to get the correct versions, then install and compile them before having to untar, .configure and compile the application they actually want to run? That's too hard. I know; that's how my last attempt at Linux went. Actually it was a lot worse, but I have a word count to keep to.

Distributions like Red Hat and Debian and Caldera and Corel and Mandrake and Slackware and SuSE and Platinum and and and (I'll spare you the other 70 in the list I have) make Linux easier of course, since much of the software you're likely to want is preinstalled, but which of the dozens of distributions do you get? You'll probably end up with more than one since many software developers support one distribution and not another. In any case, no matter which distribution(s) you choose, pretty soon you're going to find yourself working with the source code to a bunch of frequently updated software packages, puzzling over makefiles and reading man pages, as well as HAT's, FAQ's and HOWTO's from a command line with VI. These people need to get together. And the people at KDE and Gnome - they need to kiss and make up too. Really.

Not only do we have our own industry's companies to cause us grief, but other industries feel a need to cause trouble too. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) went after some people who helped disseminate the information on how to break the CSS copy protection on DVD's. The reason for breaking the copy protection of course, was so that people could use their Linux systems to play the DVD's they had legally purchased. Has the MPAA forgotten about "fair use?" Interestingly enough, so far the MPAA hasn't gone after the people who actually broke the copy protection system. How much sense does that make? Hey, the cat's out of the bag; the movie companies should try to make the best of it and enjoy the profits from the DVD's those people are going to buy. (Did you know there's a working DVD player for OS/2? There is, but thanks to the MPAA I still can't play my DVD's without booting to Windows.)

So what does all this have to do with the OS/2 community? These are opportunities where IBM could use OS/2 to capitalize on the mistakes of others. OS/2 is reliable, has a good pedigree, has one user interface, it supports cross-platform industry standards, it does Java, it doesn't need to be updated every week, its internal API's are stable and well designed, it is fast, it doesn't need 2G of disk space to install or suffer from DLL rot, it has solid networking, and it isn't encumbered with a bunch of chrome and annoying advertising. If we could get some decent multimedia applications, better OEM hardware support, all those nice developer products like VisualAge C++ and Java from IBM back on life support, and a few bucks to help out the Odin folks, this thing would really kick some ass. If IBM still sold it of course.

After all this ranting I should probably end off with something snappy like "of course that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."


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