| Late Vista, timely Linux |
Mar. 22, 2006
Why does Microsoft constantly fall on its face when it comes to operating system deadlines, while Linux continues to cruise along popping out one release after another?
While Microsoft fans prefer to ignore that question, Microsoft's recent admission that it won't be able to make its latest Vista deadline of the 2006 holiday season makes this question unavoidable.
Indeed, I find it hard to see how anyone can believe in Microsoft's latest Vista deadlines. How can Microsoft get usable volume-licensed versions of Vista out by November 2006, while the consumer retail versions won't be ready until January 2007?
Yes, there are no fewer than six major Vista releases, but it's all the same core code-base, isn't it? Well, isn't it?
Could it be that the consumer releases are just being held up because of such home-centric functionality as media playback? It would be nice to think that, but the real problems cover the entire Vista line. Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division and head Vista honcho, said that Vista's quality problems are in performance, drivers, testing, and security.
That's damning. These are the fundamentals for any operating system, used at home or at work.
No one in their right mind should buy a Vista-equipped PC this November or December for production office use.
And, what do we see over in Linux? Yes, we sometimes see delays. For example, the next release of the popular Ubuntu is going to be six-weeks later then expected. The reasons? "Additional validation, certification, localization, and polish," according to Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's father.
Hmmm... Microsoft is still having trouble with "performance, drivers, testing, and security," so Vista's now going to be more than two years late.
And this, I might add, is despite the fact that Microsoft began gutting Vista's feature set back in 2004 in order to make the 2006 deadline.
How does Linux do it? How did Torvalds & Company manage to release the latest release of Linux, version 2.6.16, after not quite three months of development?
Easy. The open-source market development model works better than the traditional cathedral model that Microsoft adheres to. Eric Raymond spelled it all out almost ten years ago in his seminal open-source essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
I won't bother rehashing his arguments. If you're in the development business and you don't know them by now, you've got no business being in development.
If you still don't buy into open-source being the best way to develop software. I've got a few words for you: Apache, Firefox, and MySQL.
If that doesn't convince, consider that Borland, a company that was built on proprietary software development tools, has recently abandoned that business for open-source tools. Think, for a moment, about how Oracle recently bought Sleepycat, an open-source DBMS company. I could go on and on, but the point is that the software revolution has already happened, and open-source has won.
Another factor is that open-source, by its nature, is constantly evolving its software. By making small improvements all the time, Linux and the other open-source projects can take huge programs and make them better.
Linux 2.6.16 isn't a giant improvement over 2.6.14, but it does include a new clustering file-system, improved power management, and a host of other small improvements. Version 2.6.16 is, however, much better than version 2.6.0, which came out in December 2003.
In other words, Linux has evolved as much in just two years as Microsoft has tried, and failed, to evolve Windows from XP to Vista over what looks to be more than four years, now, of active development.
Microsoft is still fumbling about with its old, bad model, long after its software grew far too fat and complex for proprietary software development methods to work.
"If there's a lesson to be learned here, and I believe there is, it's that the development of monolithic operating systems is over... its development time and complexity is just too much to ask of customers. In the future, Microsoft will need to work off of a stable base, adding features on a yearly basis." That's not a Linux person talking, by the way -- that's Paul Thurrott, noted Windows advocate and writer, writing back on December 15, 1999.
He was right. Unfortunately for Windows supporters, while the Linux developers already knew that lesson, Microsoft has never learned it -- and I doubt that they ever will.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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