Windows XP versus Linux

by Bill Turner, 20 November, 2001

In my last column I talked about companies in the past that have learned too late, that extreme copy protection schemes are simply not something the consumer wants. And things haven't changed since then.

The trouble with XP

Windows XP has excessive copy protection as part and parcel. Whether you call it product activation or copy protection makes no difference. To make things worse you do not get a CD if you buy your system with Windows XP preinstalled. What you get instead is a copy of the operating system, on a separate disk partition of your hard drive. This is how you are supposed to re-install, if something goes wrong.

I have one question. What happens if you decide to replace your hard drive? You can't. If your hard drive goes belly up - and hardware does that from time to time - you're plain out of luck.

Laurence: Something I found to my horror when I tried to buy a computer for my mother. I was told by Tiny that Windows XP would come pre-installed with no CD. Dell did a little better by telling me I would get Windows XP preinstalled with a backup CD that wasn't Windows XP but an image of what had been preinstalled. And on an aside, both companies refused to let me pay more to upgrade to an external modem. Ok from Tiny, but terrible from Dell who advertise the fact you can tailor-make the computer you purchase. Whether or not these facts are true from the ever-present idiot-sales teams is altogether another story. But one thing is sure, both companies lost themselves a sale.

This is unforgiveable in a company the size of Microsoft. Surely they can afford the price of a CD? If they can not, or will not, then I would suggest you run, very far and very fast before deciding to rely on Windows XP for your next system. You buy an operating system, you get a CD. This is not rocket science by any means.

To cry about piracy is just an example of Microsoft trying, once again, to pull the wool over the eyes of the computing public. Even columnists that make their bread and butter writing about Microsoft are upset by this.

The Halloween Documents

Eric Raymond, one of the leading advocates for Linux and an Open Source author in his own right with fetchmail, announced what he dubbed the Halloween Documents, a few years back. Internal memos from Microsoft, about the threat of Linux, leaked to Eric by someone inside Microsoft.

You would think after a couple of years, not to mention having corporate email and memos made public at the anti-trust trial by the U.S. Department of Justice, that they would have learned. They have not.

In the latest 'Halloween document' it seems that Linux has been promoted, from a threat to The Threat. This is good. It shows that Microsoft, no matter how many truly inane things they do, recognize Linux as a legitmate operating system of choice for the corporate environment. Maybe not for the desktop as yet, but definitely something worthy of their concern.

I find it more than a little amusing in the new leaked memo that they go on and on about the victory against Linux for a single company. That is certainly an important victory, if we were in a war. But we are not at war. The only people looking at it with that sort of intensity are the people at Microsoft.

The pursuit of excellence

Microsoft obviously still doesn't get it, and likely never will. Linux is not one man (Linus Torvalds), nor is it one company (Red Hat), it is rather a movement if you will. Dedicated to one thing. Making Linux absolutely the best it can be.

Since the day that Linus posted his first mention of an operating system he was working on to a newsgroup, asking if anyone would care to take a look at it and make contributions, Linux has made massive progress ever since. Coded by people from all walks of life, with no ax to grind, except one:

The pursuit of technical excellence and the maintenance of standards in that operating system.

Laurence: Most notably, but by no means exclusively, POSIX, allowing software to be ported to other Unixes with relative ease.

Please note that in Linux, standards are not something Linux coders came up with on their own and decided that these be the standards today. No. In Linux, standards are standards because a group of people from the computing industry got together and decided on these standards. And for the most part these standards have been in existence for a very long time.

Linux is heavily-based on UNIX, which means you not only have the history of Linux to draw on, about ten years now, but also the history of UNIX. UNIX just turned thirty.

Linux, like UNIX, was designed from the beginning to be multi-tasking and multi-user and since Linux was coded from scratch, Linux was able to take the best things about UNIX and use them, while leaving behind some of the baggage that didn't work so well but nobody could quite figure out how to get rid of.

Why Linux?

The GPL though is what makes Linux so special. This is the brainchild of Richard Stallman and the FSF (Free Software Foundation). Because of work done before Linux was even a gleam in the eye of Linus Torvalds, Linus was able to take the utilities and compilers from the FSF to make the task of creating Linux far easier than it would have otherwise been.

Every Linux distribution comes with a ton of utilities and development tools as standard. The GNU C/C++ compiler (GCC). Perl. Python. Java. PHP. All kinds of text editors, including the powerful (LH: and delighfully cryptic) Emacs and Vi. Linux is coder heaven if you want serious development tools.

On the desktop, things are getting better all the time. As it stands now things are pretty good. There really is nothing that can be done under Windows that you cannot do equally as well under Linux. And for a lot less money. On older hardware that you'd be hard pressed to even install Windows 2000 or Windows XP on, Linux is perfectly content to do the job without complaint.

Laurence: Although to run the latest KDE or GNOME desktop environments you do need a reasonably high-spec computer to run it comfortably. Also playing DVDs and other video formats still needs a good bit of work. And Linux still has light years to go to match the quantity and quality of sumptuous games on Windows. But for those that want to watch DVDs and play games Linux will happily coexist with Windows on the same hard drive. Even allowing you from within Linux, to browse and modify your Windows files, run Windows applications with Wine (with varying success), and run Windows in a window with VMWare (although at considerable cost).

This is why the Mexican school system uses Linux. And why Linux is spreading like wildfire in so many places throughout the world. It is much cheaper than Windows, and has the GPL so you can install Linux on multiple machines and still be in compliance with the licensing agreement. It also has useful desktop applications, like StarOffice, that are compatible with the Microsoft Office suite, but without the heavy licensing fees.

About us
Latest stable kernel: 2.4.19 | Latest development kernel: 2.5.31 Copyright © 1998-2002 Linuxdot.org. Linux ® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.