[SGVLUG] Microsoft's nightmare inches closer to reality

[Dustin]

On Sun, 25 Sep 2005, John E. Kreznar wrote:

> Interesting, yes.  But it's also disappointing.  More satisfying would
> be if some FOSS killer app were to become Microsoft's nightmare.  But
> the threat described here comes not from FOSS, but from Google, whose
> formerly benign image is rapidly becoming tarnished.  Where Microsoft
> panders to people's fear of learning, Google seduces them into giving
> up their last strand of privacy.

Hmm.  I think Google is only the messenger, and the reporter is dutifully
reporting on the enemy du jour Redmond is obsessed with at the moment.  
But the underlying problem is the web becoming capable of deploying better
and better applications.  FOSS is pretty heavily involved with that.

Tim O'Reilly wrote an excellent article that should be easy to find on the
web titled something like "How the web was (almost) won."  Yep, easy, it
was a 1999 Salon article:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/11/16/microsoft_servers/

His point was that Microsoft correctly realized that the WWW could be
proprietized (is that a word?) by controlling both client and server.  
That meant they had to have a browser to compete with Netscape, and we all
know how that turned out.  They also had to make IIS become the dominant
web server. We also all know how that *didn't* work.  The Apache
foundation was the last thin line preserving the openness of the web, and
rarely gets credit for little things like us being able to use it from
Linux or any non-MS-WIndows platform:

    "It reminds me a bit of World War II. France (Netscape) has fallen, 
    and the Battle of Britain is being fought for the Web, with the
    stalwart resistance of the Apache Group holding up the juggernaut till
    the rest of the free world can get its act together. Whether Linux and
    the rest of the open source movement, or the Justice Department and
    the courts, play the role of America, I leave to history to 
    determine."

Given that it's six years later, I wonder if he has an answer yet.

Assuming you buy the general thrust of his argument, Google is simply the
currently most visible company taking advantage of an opportunity that
FOSS created and still sustains.  A non-Google example: you can use
TurboTax on Linux just great--because they have a web version.  The web is 
a good enough platform that you don't have to buy it at all, just pay to 
use it on their server.

Dustin