Gates Upstaged By Open Source, again!?!
My friend Andrew, a pioneer in podcasting and now a news anchor for MN1.COM just finished up a tour of China. The tour encompasses his reporting on everything from China's Financial World to a good Peking Duck!
If you know Andrew you know he makes things happen! He attracts what he thinks and he thinks big and well!
So, he is in China, thinking about how to provide our viewers and visitors with great experiences, information, what to promote next for the good of all! Guess, what, he's stuck on Open Source... He is in love with the idea of Open Source and how it is virally fueled. We have long conversations about this very topic and his passion competes with no one on this subject. Who better else from our team should have noticed the young man with the SOS mantra "Free Software Open Source".
As you can see, Andrew's trip to China led him to one of his passions, Open Source. This young man whom has no fear but spawns his belief, expressing to Mr Gates, who lives in a free country the value of "Free Software"; least he not forgot Open Source's purpose!
There is a deeper thing going on here, but for now, Andrew received validation.
Why is Bill in China? Well, the story is simple, he's pushing Vista, The upgrade path is no Windows '95 (80 Million copies sold in a day) for Microsoft. In the past 2 months Vista barely topped the 2 million copy mark and that is with a forced supply attempting to stimulate a demand. The result is M$ is now peddling their wares in China. Makes perfect sense, no!?!
If you have not heard, M$ claims that the Vista's sales numbers are up to 2 Million. They would like the World to believe these numbers are up because it appears we are rushing to the store to purchase their shiney new OS. The volumes of sales are escalated by the fact that Dell, Compaq, Frye's, Best Buy and any other retailers on the prowl can only ship Vista, hence the numbers jump not because of a demand but because of forced supply.
Now ask M$ how many users rip Vista off the drive and reversion back to XP? Well, a lot more than you would think. Vista's reliability and alterations to the user mechanics is so overwhelming to usability productivity is simply lost. M$ has managed to go backwards and loose users familiarity with the user interface. Vista's value add towards work optimization lacks due to these cumbersome navigation enhancements in the user interface. To far, to quick and the features are about as worthless a start A, stop B on your vintage 80's high-end CD player for the typical user.
So, here is what the world thinks, above, as you can see the young man expressing his love for Open Source. Its very interesting, if you look at the World's coders, its absolutely trending towards less M$ coders in Europe inclusive of Hungary, Romania and Russia. Yes, of course, you could find .NET professionals but its less and less. It was a difficult job to find a .NET shop which I never imagined to be a problem until we researched the issue. This is not to say .NET is not a great environment however, its more of a demonstration that the barrier entry of an OS is money to the developer community. Community is what its all about, right!?! Hence, LINUX is stable enough and has no barrier of entry, just the cost of a computer and the price of bandwidth. Choose your LINUX flavor Redhat, Fedora, Ubuntu, GenTOand the list grows.
In China, I am sure Vista is being sold and bought with great fever, according to Coffey, its plastered all over the place from airport to Tiananmen Square. Though, if only 5% of the coding population latches onto an OS, LINUX/Windwos, that community can be a sustainable market. The sign and the gusto this young lad has to stand up in front of Bill is something a little more important than if some coder was to do it in the USA.
Whats' this tell us? How important is Open Source, Free Software? The free part is slightly ridiculous as its not about free! Its about open, its about the user community and change, its about the World's team of minds iterating over an application and getting effective feedback. It's about the team of software engineers jumping on the user communities requests, exposure to bugs and final requirements.
Most of all, its about the World working together. Open Source is open, Open Source is for you and most of all it is for us. Open Source allows us to win, together, for everyone. There is a deeper meaning here, don't ya think!?! 