News and Views from Microsoft's Open Source Lab

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 15:28:00 GMT

Have you ever wondered what Microsoft is doing in the open source world? Microsoft has opened Port 25 which is a site dedicated to news and views from Microsoft's Open Source Lab.

So what goes on there? Well, basically insights into the Open Source world from Microsoft. Almost every day there is talk about Interop between the *nix and Windows worlds. It's all very exciting stuff, so check it out!

Will Linux Ever Be a True Desktop OS?

Matthew Podwysocki — Thu, 04 May 2006 20:58:00 GMT

In Rob Enderle's latest latest column, he discusses why he believes that Linux will not overtake Windows as a true desktop operating system. There are a few paragraphs worth glossing over in here that I find particularly interesting.

"Windows is free to the OEMs. In fact, not only is it free, but Microsoft, in effect, pays them to take it. Regardless of the cost, Windows is a logical choice, and a straight pass. Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) Latest News about Dell pays about $80 for it and typically charges about $80 for it."

He continues:

With Linux, the customer often expects to get the product for free and wants the retail price of Windows deducted from his/her purchase price. There are no funds passed back to the vendor and, because Linux is different, customers tend to place more service calls -- at $85 a call. As a result, the vendor generally ends up losing money on average with Linux.

This is the primary reason vendors don't want to do desktop Linux, unless there is an extremely lucrative services contract tied to it.

He also goes onto note that there are too many versions to support and there needs to be a clear leader in the Linux world. Also, zealotry can turn off a lot of new users to the product.

Me:

I've encountered a bit of the zealotry over the ages on both sides of the isle and you must take the good with the bad. I've tried out a few distros but have yet to feel really comfortable with any one just yet. Configuring multimedia and other pieces have been more difficult than I imagined.

I have a couple of VMWare images of Fedora Core, SUSE and the latest being Ubuntu. Primarily my interest has been pretty much limited to Mono and Apache at this juncture which comes standard with some distros including SUSE for some proof of concept work.

Which distro is best? Any thoughts?