
Microsoft Died with the DoJ Ruling in 1998, and Why That Means OSS Is Winning - alive2007
https://medium.com/@omarh/microsoft-died-with-the-doj-ruling-why-oss-is-winning-b172b58289c3
======
mohamedattahri
So basically, OSS wins because that's what developers want? I don't think so.

Developers want to make a living, and for that, they need a user base.
Developers were more than happy to build for MS when it had _all_ the users.

Bill Gates missed the Internet. Steve Ballmer missed Mobile. They both let
others build massive user bases on those two platforms. Developers followed
the users.

It just happens than Microsoft, the best developer tool maker at the time, did
not have anything to offer them. They found support in the OSS community.

Today, Microsoft is back in a position where it needs to court developers with
familiar tools (OSS). But make no mistake, their real selling point is the
unified and combined one billion users of Windows PCs (desktop, mobile, xbox,
etc.).

Also - there are tons of completely false statements about MSFT's position in
some key markets, profitability, and successes with consumers.

Finally, stop hating Bill Gates. Every entrepreneur's dream is to create a
monopoly.

~~~
alive2007
Good points.

Developers need to make a living. In Microsoft's heyday, Microsoft could abuse
their monopoly to coerce developers to care more about making a living than
they cared about what they liked (OSS).

Now, this simply isn't true anymore.

My insults lobbed at Bill Gates were merely jokes. I obviously have a ton of
respect for the man. Monopolies aside, he was the leading entrepreneur of his
day alongside Jobs.

What were my false statements?

------
dragontamer
Comparisons to the 90s version of Microsoft to Apple make this article sound
utterly insane.

>For the first six or seven versions of IE, Microsoft’s IE-only JScript
engines purposefully broke functionality with the open ECMAScript standards.

Thank god for that. XMLHTTPRequest truly is better than ECMAScript standards.
No matter how you look at it, the web today would not exist as we know it if
it weren't for Microsoft's proprietary JScript-only original implementation of
what we have come to know as "Ajax".

And the worship of Apple here is rather... insane as well. The "closed"
platform of Win98 looks open-as-all-hell compared to the walled-garden of iOS
and iTunes.

Mac OSX may superficially be built on top of open technologies, but its
reliance on iTunes for application distributions is harsher than even Win10's
UWP platform (somewhat closed: but sideloading is allowed).

 __OSS is losing __. iOS Apps make more money and have a stronger community
than Android. Even within Android, Google has begun to lock down APIs (Google
Play API is NOT part of the Android Open Source project for example).

Case in Point: the Amazon Fire Phone is Android. Does it "feel" like Android
to its users? No? Because Google has successfully "embraced, extended,
extinguished" the open-source Android.

Unless you really think that your fully-free Android app without any google-
integration is going to be downloaded from Amazon Marketplace... my bet is
that your competitor with Google Now / Google Play integration will get more
purchases from Google's store.

But that's just my perspective.

~~~
alive2007
I guess in a superficial sense, OSS is still losing. But it's losing less than
it was losing 10 years ago. Its been steadily growing in popularity.

F(x) is still negative, but f'(x) is positive.

~~~
dragontamer
In the 90s, if I wanted to release a game through the mail or whatever means,
I was on equal grounds as everyone else. Remember that Doom was just a
shareware game passed around through the mail primarily.

Today, if you want to write a game for a major platform (ie: iOS), you
basically have to get the permission from Apple. Put a confederate flag in a
civil war game?

Grounds for termination.

[http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/25/technology/apple-pulls-
civil...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/25/technology/apple-pulls-civil-war-
games/index.html)

Feel like writing a Bitcoin wallet for iOS?

Grounds for termination. [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2095060/apple-
removes-blockch...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2095060/apple-removes-
blockchain-last-bitcoin-wallet-app-from-mobile-store.html)

You can only write applications today if the platform holder agrees with your
purpose. How the heck is this better than the 90s, when you were allowed to
write whatever you wanted and anyone was allowed to install?

You may think things are improving, but if things keep going in this direction
of the "walled garden", I really don't think they're better.

At least the Windows Win32 platform is still relatively open for games /
applications. But everything else is basically run by an integrated store now:
iOS, Android (Google Play).

~~~
alive2007
Yeah, I definitely agree that iOS is a walled garden. It sucks and I hope
Android continues growing in the high-end smartphone field so it can demolish
the restrictive ecosystem that is iOS.

The Play Store is relatively free. If anything, at least you can access the
Android filesystem so if you so wished, you could install an .apk outside of
Google's ecosystem. Jesus.

And that's just mobile. In the desktop and web environment, platforms are
super-open. You can pretty much distribute any .exe or .app you'd like on your
website and it's the user's fault if he ends up downloading a virus.
Furthermore, you can write your webserver code in literally anything you want.
There are CGI scripts for C if you were really that insane. I'm pretty sure
someone out there has figured out how to turn a physical Turing tape machine
into something that generates HTML and CSS templates.

Your templates end up having to have some JavaScript in them, I guess, but
even then. JS is still open-source, and it's ended up being more of a target
language than it is a programming language these days.

