Have Microsoft, linux finally buried the hatchet?

20-year-old rivalry by sending Linux a happy 20th birthday wish. The open source community has obviously responded with scepticism about windows juggernaut’s warm pet on the back.
I received the video tweet which rolled on for some 30 seconds but the message was quite clear, at least from Microsoft perspective and it ended with a befriending message saying – ” Microsoft and Linux not Microsoft vs Linux”.
For the uninitiated populace of my beloved nation, operating system is not Windows and Windows is definitely not the operating system. My heart bleeds when someone asks me what version of Windows I am using only to tell them that I don’t use Windows, or not as much as they do. Using Windows is like using petrol for your engine. It’s not by your choice but these guys who make cars have made the choice for us. I could have opted for a diesel engine or maybe an electric car so for someone to think that we all use petrol is as naive as someone who thinks we should all use Windows.
The battle between Microsoft and Linux will not make sense without including the history of Bill Gates and Microsoft and the open source community. The open source community is what everyone was before Bill Gates came in with his capitalistic ideology of Microsoft. The open source community is built on people or computer programs who are gifted and are ready to make a serious contribution to the growth of computing world for absolutely free or affordable prices. They advocate for free computer operating systems, free access to codes that develop them and open access to enhancements and anyone has a right to ownership.
In real sense, the free open community is more of a communist based system, they advocate for absolute openness and for whatever software programme they design and sell, all contributors get a share. But they are motivated by the product more than the profits and this is where the main difference and battle line was drawn against one of the world’s richest living man, a Harvard University dropout Bill Gates and his company Microsoft.
Computer systems are built on a platform called a kernel and the oldest most popular kernel is the Unix. This kernel was built by AT&T in 1969 which has given birth to operating system like Windows, Apple’s Macintosh OSX and Linux. Even the Internet is built on the Unix platform by the Open System Foundation.
Microsoft was not the first company to discover computers, it was rather the first to commercially market a functional operating system called DOS which they had bought and modified from a Seattle-based computing company and back then it was called QDOS and they modified it and christened it Xenix. In 1973 Steve jobs, the current CEO of Apple and Bill Gates attended a seminar by Xerox which introduced them to graphical user interface operating system. Jobs was the first to implement it into his Apple computers and after it turned out to be successful. Gates followed up later.
IBM, a computer hardware manufacturing company, approached Bill Gates for a joint venture so that they supply them with the operating system to produce a market-ready product. According to the agreement, Microsoft was supposed to join with IBM to make their first operating system called 0S/2 but later close to the official release, Microsoft dumped IBM. Microsoft came up with MS-DOS to gain total sole control and other supporting companies were also left clueless on how to support the new creature. Because of compatibility issues other small players were seriously financially attacked so they bowed out. Microsoft ended up making its own major applications way before other players adapted that. Even IBM tried to compete with its OS/2 but it was too late as the market then was busy trying to adjust to Microsoft. OS/2 dismally failed to shape up and IBM had to go back to their core business of making hardware and supporting the Microsoft OS.
In April 1975, Microsoft was officially established as Microsoft before they started running a fully-fledged operating system in 1980 with IBM. They refused to share their codes with former open source associates. According to critics, Microsoft is also said to have monopolised its operating system and threatened any hardware company with higher software prices should they engage any other company. Microsoft clinched a deal with most computer hardware manufacturers that sold all their computers pre-installed with Windows operating and their web browser Internet Explorer that started decades of lawsuits against monopolisation.
Back in the days the computer market was targeting mainly government, army and university but Microsoft was smart enough to push for the personal computer. The PC dream was to move computers to people’s homes right on top of their desks thus the desktop computer concept. Since then every computer from IBM and large computer manufacturers shipped in with Windows already installed. Microsoft maintained this dominance and to date most computers are shipped in with Windows and the tertiary world subsequently adapted to this norm and taught Windows. This is the only reason why today Windows is taught and easily sold everywhere because they manipulated the tender computing baby. Microsoft did not subscribe to the open source foundation; in fact, Microsoft has completely locked its source code and has kept it exclusively a Microsoft proprietary.
This move obviously provoked the open source community and to date it’s the basis of the battle between Microsoft and the open source community. Microsoft owns all versions of Windows from the Windows 9x to the windows NT versions. Linus Torvalds in 1991 pioneered a new Unix version called Linux and this gave birth to many distributions or distros owned by different companies notably Redhat, Suse, Knoppix and Ubuntu.
Linux is the world’s best operating system. It is so stable that it can go for 10 straight years without crashing or restarting. You only need to restart the kernel instead of restarting the whole computer. It now comes in with a high quality video Graphical User Interface and device driver support and many pre-installed free programmes. The Linux graphic system is detached from the kernel that it almost cannot crash, you do not need to restart it after software installation that it can update itself and maintain maximum uptime especially for a server or a busy computer. Linux is also not prone to virus attacks, it is normal to run red hat without an antivirus package and still be safe yet you cannot survive a day online with Windows without protection.
Today 90 percent of the world top 500 super computers run on Linux. The internet is built and run by Linux-based system. Most web servers run on Apache web server, a Linux product. Linux based products have dominated the market and has given birth to niche giants like Cisco, Oracle database, VMware server, Google chrome and the Google operating system MySQL,Xbox , Open Office and many others.
Linux has over 75 percent of the web-based servers and database server market share yet Microsoft has maintained dominance in the desktop world. It is approximated that Microsoft owns more than 80 percent of the desktop market share. Apple computers even have a better 5 percent and the all-powerful unknown Linux claims an average of two percent in end user computers.
Microsoft is scared of Linux it sees the open software as a threat not an opportunity. In 2009 Microsoft told its retailers that Linux was rubbish, on its web page Mats Birgersson said if you go with Linux, you can never be sure of what kind of support you are going to get. Besides its dominance it truly knows that Linux cannot be taken for granted.
Recently Microsoft has changed its tone towards the open source community. It is now sharing some of its source codes. Whenever it released a product to share on its API (application programming interface) it would rather call it shared source initiative and avoided calling it open source. Microsoft has said it relies upon a diverse ecosystem that includes open source to satisfy customers.
Microsoft has also contributed 20 000 lines of device driver code to the Linux kernel so that Linux can run on MS hyper-Virtualisation technology.
The company even nowadays attends open source business conference OSBC and it now has a director on open source strategy. Microsoft’s collaboration with Facebook, Google and Yahoo pioneered the open network foundation to improve networking through the Internet based computing. It has extended its support to the community by giving US$100 000 to Apache software foundation and supports PHP, a freely available scripting language for web development.
Currently, Microsoft is openly recruiting Open Office designers, a cloud-based office tool owned by the open source community and this has raised sceptics’ interests and fear that Windows is suing for peace while in the background is preparing for war.
So is this war really over or not? Maybe Microsoft has changed its fighting strategy to try and beat them from the inside. If it’s really over, then Linux has won the 20-year-old battle against Windows but definitely not against Microsoft!
l The writer is a computer specialist and can be reached at [email protected]