I was reading an article on “Why Vista will mean the end of the Microsoft monolith” in The Observer yesterday (actually, it popped up in my RSS aggregator, but you get the idea). It was actually reasonably interesting, until I stumbled upon this bit:
“And yet while Microsoft engineers were trudging through their death march, the open source community shipped a series of major upgrades to the Linux operating system. How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?”
I’m surprised that in 2006 we’re still seeing articles repeating this same old refrain, containing misconceptions and factual inaccuracies.
Problem one: Linux is not written by “hackers” but by professional software developers, just like Windows. Just because they organise through “the net and shared values” does not make them any less experienced or qualified.
Problem two: Free software does not mean developers do not get paid. It may be given away, but people still pay for software to be created in the first place, and for support of those products from any of the many companies out there that provide it (for example Red Hat, IBM, Sourcesense).
It would be wonderful to see articles that represent both sides of the story fairly and accurately, but I guess that just doesn’t sell newspapers.
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Problem three : Please show me the QI tests demostrating that Microsoft is the “smartest software company on the planet”, and I’ll go back to Windows, and eventually even pay for it!