Microsoft has decided to strategically take on open-source software as a true competitor according to this article at News.com. Open Source software has long been taking business from such expensive competitors and in the long run that is a good thing for the consumer and businesses.

LAMP is the combination of four things used in combination from the open-source arena:
L is for Linux,
A is for Apache Web Server,
M is for MySql, and
P is for PHP, Perl or Python.

Used in combination, or as a stack in the parlance of the web engineers, they offer a formidible set of capabilities, with much lower risk of virus propogation and much less bloat generating great speed advantages.

Microsoft’s response, according to that article, is to argue that its products are cheaper when you look to the total cost of ownership: maintenance, upgrades, support, etc. In reality, however, I think just the opposite will be true for many organizations and individuals. Further, Microsoft is going to be offering some express or lite versions of software in an effort to cut the up front costs. Don’t fall for it, it is just a hook to eventually force you to buy the more expensive versions down the road. Competition is a good thing when done fairly. So go Microsoft, compete, but compete by doing a better job.

Sun Microsystems has released Open Solaris in an attempt to take some of the collaborative community that surrounds Linux and also to try to sway companies that are considering Linux to instead give Solaris a try. There are a few problems with their approach however, and they look like they will seriously dent Sun’s ability to command a following anything like the one Linux has.

For one thing, Sun is free in the money sense, not in the freedom sense. Basically if you write code that improves Solaris in some way, you must then give Sun equal copyright to the code so they can essentially do whatever they want with it. (This is unlike GPL Linux where the copyright stays totally in the hands of the developer.) You must not use that code in any GPL products also. In short, Sun’s version of what Open Source means, is very different from what the general Open Source community believes it means. Sun thinks the free in free software means “no cost”, where as the OSS community tends to view free as in “freedom to improve/use/distribute changes etc”. The CCDL license that Sun has adopted is not in any way compatible with the GPL governing the vast majority of the Open Source software available. It is that lack of “freedom” that is going to cost them the large community they obviously wish to create around OpenSolaris. The problem stems from Sun’s desire to control the development of Solaris with an iron first. It’s really just a one way exchange, Sun wants a community to contribute changes and improvements for free and to give Sun almost total control over that new code, and in exchange the developers only get to use it for free. It just won’t work like the GPL because Sun has kept total control over the project. Anyone can take the Linux kernel, modify it to their own design and release it for distribution as they see fit. The same cannot be said of OpenSolaris. Sun has apparently done this to avoid “forking” or incompatible versions of Solaris floating around, but it hasn’t been much of a problem with Linux so why are they so concerned? Why help Sun build a better Solaris when you don’t get anything back from it? That is the question many developers appear to be asking in light of all the announcements.

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Today Microsoft released updates to it’s popular windows software.

On todays list of released updates by level of importance are these:
Critical (3)
Important (4)
Moderate (3)

According to this article at Security Focus celebrity names including Britney Spears are a common way to peoples security flaws. The top ten list also includes Bill Gates, Michael Jackson, Anna Kournikova and Pamela Anderson, among others. It appears as though the common theme is beautiful women who like to show off their bodies and scary men.

LAMP, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python is starting to make an impression as a development framework for enterprise according to Cnet. Since most of the rest of the online world is already using LAMP or part’s of it, it isn’t really a surprise to discover that big companies are following suit.
Creating solid but flexible frameworks that best utilise LAMP’s strengths is what is needed most in the competition with .NET and Java. Having said that, if the Apache foundation’s Harmony project gets a finished stable product out soon, we will have to figure out how to get a J into LAMP. Harmony is to be an Open Source implementing of the Java J2SE specification and would add another compelling reason for Enterprise to consider LAMP (or LAMJ as the case may be.) As the Cnet article explains, LAMP isn’t just a bunch of unaffiliated Open Source developers, it has the backing of several large companies now. Apache already has about 70 percent of the web hosting market stitched up so they are not starting from zero to work their way up, they already have the most popular web server software in the world as part of their base.

According to InternetNews, almost half of enterprise desktops are still using Windows 2000. There is good reason for that since Windows 2000 is quite stable, user friendly and functional once all the patches are loaded, (for a Microsoft platform anyway.) Not only that but it isn’t wasting precious hardware cycles on eye candy like Windows XP has a tendency to do and it doesn’t have the same hardware requirements as XP SP2 either.
Microsoft’s recent push to provide a much needed update to Internet Explorer is going to leave these users in the lurch as IE6 is still the last browser update they will receive from Microsoft (IE 7 is a XP SP2 and above only update). This might be part of Microsoft’s plan to convince these enterprise businesses to upgrade their Operating System when Longhorn comes out or before, but since Longhorn (or even XP SP2) has such higher hardware requirements, the upgrade will essentially mean totally new computers and many large businesses are likely balk at the idea of so big a financial outlay.

As long as new applications support Windows 2000, there isn’t really any need to rush out and upgrade anyway as most of the functionality is available from third parties and much of it is free. Firefox is a better replacement for Internet Explorer and already has most or all of the features that IE7 will ship with. It’s also available for free and has a much better security record then Internet Explorer, (In part because it is allot newer, but that’s a whole other issue.) Best of all, Firefox is not only available for Windows 2000, it also runs quite happily on Windows 98 and ME as well. Desktop search is one of the other touted features of Longhorn but you can get most of those same features by installing Google desktop search which is also free and even a version of Google desktop search for enterprise.

Internet Explorer 7 when running on Windows Longhorn, will run in reduced privilege mode by default to reduce the possibility of Spyware and Virus infection. Running under a root or admin account is one thing that Linux and other Unix look-alikes have strongly frowned upon almost since their inception. It is also a practise that Microsoft has encouraged in Windows by setting new users up with administrator privileges from the get go in most versions of Windows. Apparently that will change when the next windows release finally comes out sometime next year.
Internet Explorer 7 will NOT be available for Windows 2000, and only XP SP2 and above platforms will be supported. The XP installation will also not make use of reduced privilege mode. Anybody not running one of the supported Windows versions can install and use Firefox to get a comparable browsing experience without the cost of an Operating System upgrade.

Is it just me, or is Windows becoming more like Linux/Unix at the back end with each new release? After years of seemingly ignoring the problems that running as admin causes, they have suddenly decided that Linux/Unix developers were right and reduced privilege modes are good.