DecemberThe joke is old enough to be stale for industry insiders: just about every time Microsoft does something aggressive, the headline in at least one I.T. trade paper is sure to be "The Empire Strikes Back".
But until recently, this wasn't the image with the general public. Microsoft was the darling of the stock market, the great American success story, the proof that Japan couldn't do everything. Everybody loves a winner.
That's all been changing in recent months. When New York vs. Microsoft started, public opinion was divided 50/50 as to whether it was a good thing or suppression of innovation. But pundits are now remarking that even if the anti-trust action fails utterly, it has succeeded in changing Microsoft's image. The general public is now aware of Microsoft activities that used to not make it into the mainstream press.
The CNN website recently published an opinion by Ralph Nader encouraging the feds to smite Microsoft: cripple its power to use the OS as a competitive neutron bomb by walling off those developers, divest the OS division, anything. Nader arm-waved about Microsoft soon "owning the Internet" and other hyperboles that even most Microsoft-bashers don't credit. Astonishingly, SEVENTY-NINE percent of respondents to the attached poll agreed with him. Sure, it was "unscientific", but the plurality is just overwhelming.
Another sign of the shift is the new boldness of trade industry correspondents in criticizing the company and trumpeting the virtues of what would appear to be the best challenger to Windows NT as a corporate server: Linux. Unix weenies have thought this for years, but the idea was never seriously entertained by the trade press. Now I.T. and even mainstream news sources like Infoworld, CNET , and Time Digital are matter-of-factly discussing Linux as a contender against Windows just as if a whole platoon of multi-billion-dollar companies, including IBM(!) had not failed at the role.
Of particular note is the "Down to the Wire" column by Nicholas Petreley in the premiere I.T. industry weekly, Inforworld. Nick has simply not stopped pounding on Microsoft with every column for the last few months, and rarely skips a chance to extol the virtues of Linux. Infoworld's response? His column has been moved to the most prominent spot in both the magazine and the web site.
We not only have the Evil Empire; we literally have the Rebel Alliance; the Open Source community.
In real life, the opposition to evil dictators usually turns out to be more evil dictators. When the rebels in the foothills finally storm the junta in the palace, they traditionally become the next junta - as Castro's cuba so painfully demonstrated. A good part of the reason why IBM itself couldn't defeat Windows with its technically-superior OS/2 is that customers were deeply suspicious of another IBM hegemony: after 30 years of mainframe dictatorship, and an attempt to do the same to the PC world with the PS/2, their credit as Good Guys was nil. Similarly, Sun has never embraced open standards except when forced to do so, and Java still suffers credibility problems because of the control they still have over it. Even Apple, arch-foe of IBM in the 80's when that was the Evil Empire, has always tried to have its own closed standards for networking, software development, and hardware itself until backed into a corner.
The Open Source community, on the other hand, is a voluntary alliance. Nobody can lead it in a direction it doesn't want to go. The most that even Linus Torvalds can do is nudge it's direction a bit by dint of a lot of sweet persuasion. The parallels to the Star Wars namesake are remarkable.
Even Open Source evangelists are somewhat dumbfounded by the big companies joining the Rebel Alliance of late, however. In recent months, the Big Three database companies: Oracle, Sybase, and Informix, have all announced support for Linux. As I write, Infoworld has just posted the announcement that Sybase Server is now available for Linux - and it is FREE. Not Open Source, maybe, but the price is certainly right.
The other big announcement today is that the release of the first Open Source Netscape code from mozilla.org is imminent. It's beginning to seem like a week can't go by anymore without an advance on the part of the Rebel Alliance; far more often than even Microsoft can release products.
The new Star Wars movie may be coming out soon. But I'm not sure if I can pull myself away from the real thing in the news headlines to go watch it.
It made sense to assume that the U.S. would eventually give up its insane control of strong encryption, didn't it? It hadn't a prayer of working, it was hurting exports because non-controlled companies were outcompeting American software vendors, and Evil Countries could always invent their own software from first math principles anyway.
Guess again. The U.S. has persuaded all 33 countries in the "Wassenar Arrangement" (a voluntarly alliance of the Western World, basically, for the purposes of not exporting death machines to foul dictators unless they really felt like it) to add encryption over 64 bits to the "munitions" list. This includes Canada.
Just the other day, I bought a copy of the latest OpenBSD CD (2.4). This remarkable product has been produced entirely without American labour so that it can contain strong cryptography. The home of the project is right here in Calgary, and the core group includes people from all over Canada, Europe, and even South America. I think that every country involved is about to become no different than the United States in terms of encryption policy.
To call this madness seems almost weak. The American policy has come under heavy fire from members of its own Congress, almost every CEO in the I.T. industry, civil rights groups, and constitutional scholars. To read a news announcement that 32 other countries had simply agreed to follow the U.S. in this regard and promise to pass laws without consulting their own citizens (or their own common sense) strains all belief.
It can only be hoped that businesses, professional organizations, and citizens groups in Canada consider this a political insult and an organizational challenge.