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COLTRANE
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Posted: Monday May 9th, 2005 15:04 |
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Open Digital Opportunity
Recently, Forbes published their annual list of the wealthiest
individuals on the planet. More than half of those who made the top
ten are in the ICT sector, particularly in the software industry.
Bill Gates, the passionate and visionary founder of the Microsoft
Corporation comfortably leads the pack as he has done over the last
ten years. His net worth is estimated at $46.5 billion. If Gates
were an African State, his would be the seventh largest economy in
the continent.
How did he get to be this stinking rich? Writing software. Software
is a set of instructions (source-code) written for computers. The
machines use it to execute and complete everyday tasks such as word
processing, adding figures, storing records and sending emails.
Gates and Co. have over the years written and aggressively marketed
their software, eventually dominating the industry. Basically, nine
out of every ten personal computers used in the world today use
application software from Microsoft.
Gates, incidentally, makes more money while asleep than when he is
awake. This is because his products have a global market. Indeed, 70
per cent of his customers live outside the US. So when the US
finally goes to sleep, 70 per cent of his revenue base wakes up and
profits continue streaming in.
His business model is based on developing software whose source-code
(programme) is hidden from the public. Customers simply buy the
right to use the programme under some licensing agreement. Since the
same programme is sold to millions of users, Gates probably covers
his overhead costs after selling off the first 1,000 licences. Any
subsequent sales are what accountants call net profit or disposable
income.
In the late 1980s, some computer enthusiasts in the US were toying
with another totally different and radical business model for the
software industry. They felt that the source-code in computer
programmes was more like a recipe, which is basically a series of
instructions on how to prepare a good meal.
In normal life, recipes are shared, modified and changed with a view
to improving the meal. They therefore felt that the source-code
should not be hidden from the public but should instead be open and
freely distributed, modified or changed with a view to improving on
the original design. This marked the beginning of a movement that
later became known as the Open Source Community.
This community believes that software should never be sold as a
product. It should instead be rendered as a service. In other words,
it should be given or distributed openly and freely. What may be
sold, however, are the professional services revolving around the
free software; that is the skills to instal, configure and fine-tune
the software to suit a client's needs. This model encourages
innovation, creativity and skill transfer, things that Africa and
the rest of the developing world are in dire need of.
But this profound message flies against the conventional and
traditional thinking regarding software, especially when
intellectual property rights have been designed to support and
entrench the status quo. So, as Bill Gates & Co. passionately
believed in and promoted proprietary (closed) software, the Open
Source Community pushed for freedom to look at and modify the source-
code. They encouraged users to modify and adopt software to suit
their needs.
It was not until 1992, when a young Finnish university student by
the name Linus Torvalds published a free piece of software called
Linux that the Open Source Community began to flourish. Linux was to
become a platform around which numerous Open Source Applications
coalesced.
Linux became for the Open Source Applications what Windows has been
for Microsoft - the operating system. The two have today become the
most contradictory business models for the software industry. The
question is whether to Copyright or to "Copyleft" as the Open Source
Community sometimes refers to their licences.
At first, the corporate world was simply amused. It remained aloof
and preferred not to bother with the Open Source products. They
argued that if 'cheap' often gets to be 'expensive', do not
try 'free' because it is likely to get worse than expensive. They
felt more 'secure' buying proprietary (closed) software licenses
because with these, they could at least sue someone in case
something went wrong. Basically, they were paying for insurance
rather than the value of their software.
But the Open Source Community and its radical business model refused
to fade away. And by the late 1990s, it become apparent that it was
instead growing and becoming more relevant. By then, 60 per cent of
Internet services (Web, Mail, Firewalls, etc) were using Open Source
Software. Even big companies such as Yahoo! Amazon and eBay amongst
others joined the bandwagon.
It looked like Open Source did not necessarily imply lesser
security. In fact, some argued that it implied better security
because in the event of a software hole (error), it would be easier
to find a solution. This is because Open Source Software would have
a global team of programmers working to fix a hole compared to a
single corporate team for proprietary software.
Today, NetCraft Services, an International Internet Monitoring
Research Agency reports that over 70 per cent of Web Servers across
the globe run on Open Source Software. Governments in South Africa,
China, Germany and others use it as their first choice solution
where applicable.
This is the biggest compliment the Open Source Community has ever
received; a resounding confirmation that their business model does
indeed work. Give the software for free, avail the source code to
whoever needs it and let that person charge a fee for the technical
skill required to implement tailored solutions. Could this be
Africa's greatest digital opportunity?
jwalu@yahoo.com
http://allafrica.com/stories/200503280424.html
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umbrarchist
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Posted: Saturday May 21st, 2005 01:09 |
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It's quite a bit more complicated than that.
If I shook hands with Bill Gates I would be sure to count my fingers afterwards.
http://www.aaxnet.com/topics/msinc.html
Last edited on Saturday May 21st, 2005 22:05 by umbrarchist
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dexxtreme
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Posted: Saturday May 21st, 2005 05:42 |
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How did he get to be this stinking rich? Writing software.
Bill Gates probably hasn't written a segment of code in over a decade. Microsoft didn't get this big by just writing code. They got this way by:
1. Buying the competition - Everything good that Microsoft has released started off as code created by someone else. This goes all the way back to MS-DOS, which they bought from someone *after* they sold IBM on the fact that they had a working product.
2. Crushing the competitors that they couldn't buy legally or otherwise - If they can't buy them, then they made a competing product and bundled it into Windows. (BTW: Windows and Apple have been heavy competitors for over 20 years.) They added software such as the TCP/IP stack (Trumpet Winsock), DoubleSpace drive compression (Stac), Internet Explorer (Netscape Navigator, Mosaic), Outlook/Outlook Express (Lotus Notes, Eudora), Media Player (Real Player, QuickTime), Windows Messenger (AOL IM, Yahoo IM, ICQ), Visual Studio (Borland), Word (WordPerfect), Excel (Lotus 1 2 3), firewall (ZoneAlarm), antivirus (Norton, McAfee), and countless others after there were already competitors out there.
3. Man-handling hardware manufacturers into buying their software - "If you don't agree to sell only Windows operating systems on your computers and servers we will charge you full price for our licenses, while your competitors will get deep discounts." Only over the past couple of years have mainstream manufacturers started selling their computers with anything other than Microsoft products on them. Some started earlier than others (i.e., Dell), but they push so many units that MS couldn't really say anything about it.
Gates is not a software developer, he is a powerful businessman. Microsoft is not really a software company, it is a very powerful marketing machine that just happens to sell software.
As far as open source goes, many people don't realize that it is the backbone of the Internet. (Of course, I mean the backbone of the actual content, since the actual links and networks are connected with commercial routers.) Most people don't know that there is anything other than Windows, and they think that big computers out there are just like the computer they have sitting on their desktop. In my case, however, that would be true since I am running linux on my workstation. 
In areas where financial resources are tight, open source products would fit in well because they can more easily be configured to work on donated (read: outdated) hardware. Try running Windows XP on anything slower than a P4 and you will see how bad things are. (This is the reason why so many people stil run Windows 9X / Me .) Linux has the ability to be configured to work well on older hardware while still maintaining the power and features needed to have an enjoyable computer experience. Maintenance on linux systems also require less work (and can be easily automated) because the various updates are smaller and can be customized to your particular machine. (BTW: Windows XP Service Pack 2 is 260MB.)
Unfortunately, finding experts in open source is not an easy task (most people never stray away from MS Windows), so deploying it in a meaningful and effective manner will be a fairly challenging prospect for years to come.Last edited on Sunday May 22nd, 2005 05:09 by dexxtreme
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umbrarchist
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Posted: Saturday May 21st, 2005 18:17 |
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dexxtreme wrote:
"finding experts in open source is not an easy task (most people never stray away from MS Windows), so deploying it in a meaningful and effective manner will be a fairly challenging prospect for years to come."
Yeah, most computer people are actually in it for the money and not really all that interested in technology.
Have you checked out the book HOW LINUX WORKS by Brian Ward dexxtreme?
umbrarchist
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dexxtreme
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Posted: Sunday May 22nd, 2005 05:29 |
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umbrarchist wrote:
Have you checked out the book HOW LINUX WORKS by Brian Ward dexxtreme?
No, I haven't really read any computer books in a couple of years. I used to use a mysql book and a perl book, however after new software versions were released they were both rendered out of date within a year or so. (Now it is much easier to go to google.com for answers.) I looked up info about "How Linux Works" on amazon and through the publisher's web site. From what I can tell, it looks like a good intro for people who are learning about the internals of running a linux box. I could have used something like that a few years ago. However, after working as a UNIX sysadmin for 5+ years and maintaining a personal web server (freebsd with mysql, bind, postfix, apache, ssh, etc.), a home network that runs multiple versions of linux/freebsd with a variety of hardware (SCSI, IDE, USB, DVD+-RW, etc.) and software (NFS, NTP, rsync, XWindows, miscellaneous scripts, etc.), I have long since learned most of the info listed in the two chapters available on the web site.
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umbrarchist
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Posted: Tuesday May 24th, 2005 04:50 |
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Whose Linux are you using now?
I am currently playing with Mepis. It has worked more smoothly than any other I have tried so far. Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, though I haven't gotten the latest versions of each.
Intel has this MATRIX RAID system that lets you put Raid 0 and 1 on a pair of drives, but it needs an ICH6R south bridge. I'm ordering an ASUS motherboard to play with it tho I am not aware of any Linux support for it yet. I need a more up to date machine anyway. I haven't messed with any SATA drives yet.
It gasses me how this stuff is so cheap now. My first drive was $600 for 20 megabytes. And I thought it was a bargain. ROFLMAO
umbrarchist
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dexxtreme
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Posted: Wednesday May 25th, 2005 09:19 |
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umbrarchist wrote:
Whose Linux are you using now?
I use Slackware, mainly because it is a basic distribution and is the first one that I was exposed to. (It came free with a linux book I bought.) It is also supposedly the most UNIX-like distro out there. I never liked the way RedHat does things. They try to abstract the administration part out of the OS. I like being able to customize my kernel from scratch and install things from source in the directories I want them in.
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