this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Nope, the correct solution would have been for MS to compete fairly with OSS, instead of, for example, buying the standardization of its Office suite formats, and then never implementing those formats to prevent OpenOffice from being 100% interoperable.
Hmmmmmm...what force might have coerced Microsoft to behave more reasonably, in that situation? PERHAPS A SOLID COMPETITOR, WHO WOULD GAIN MARKET SHARE AGAINST THEM, IF THEY PISSED OFF THE MARKET BY BREAKING COMPATIBILITY, IN THE VITAL OFFICE SUITE SPACE?
Robust competition in the actual operating system market would be the solution, exactly like I said.
The problem with Linux is that, despite being fucking free, it's not robust competition. It always hovers somewhere in the 1-4 percent range, for desktop users. It's not fair or logical for that to be the case, really...but here we are.
I honestly think there's a parallel universe, quite close to our own, where IBM made a bigger push to establish OS/2 (or something else) as a general-purpose, consumer-targeted operating system, or maybe a whole other company made a compatible competitor OS. I'm talking, like, all the way back in the early 90s, when Windows was just getting on its feet.
In that world, where Microsoft had been forced to split the market with a genuine competitor, they wouldn't have been able to do all the crazy shit that a monopoly allows. The point is, they truly would have had to be forced into that position. No business is going to compete fairly out of the goodness of its heart, because it doesn't have a heart. It only has predatory instincts.
Of course, to belabor the point, that's why nobody's high-minded philosophy about "free as in free speech, not free beer" software was ever going to be the solution. That kind of homespun cringe shit is exactly how you get 1-4 percent market share, even though your product can be obtained gratis.
It's not my fault, but it's the truth.
Strong antitrust and anti-corruption laws. Their actions were not "unreasonable", they were straight up illegal.
Edit: also you should read up on the whole thing. They didn't break compatibility with their own office suite of course. What they did is lie to (and almost definitely pay off) the standardization body: "here is the spec for OpenXML, you see we're open it's right here in the name, anyone can implement it and be interoperable with us". So OpenXML was standardized along with OpenOffice's OOXML (at the start of the process, only OOXML was considered for standardization).
Once the deed was done, they of course didn't implement OOXML in MS Office (as is their right), but they also didn't implement their own OpenXML spec properly, which means OpenOffice still had to reverse-engineer an intentionally obfuscated and broken format to try and read/write documents compatible with MSO.
So the whole thing has been absolutely useless, except for a couple of "experts" from the panel who came out of it a bit richer.
See, here's the thing, though:
Imagine what might have been accomplished if everyone who has ever oh-so-aggressively proselytized to their fellow citizens, trying to get them to adopt Linux had TALKED ABOUT THIS SHIT, INSTEAD.
Not as a reason to adopt Linux. Not as a way to try and grow Linux's 1-4 percent of the market share up to oooooh, maybe 8 percent. No. Imagine if they had set that shit aside and expended all that effort, getting the vote out for candidates who would have supported anti-trust enforcement.
And don't get pessimistic on me, now. If you're enough of a die-hard, lost-cause enthusiast to believe Linux can grow from 1-4 percent of the userbase to somehow, some way take over Microsoft's dominant position, one of these decades....well, you can't very well turn around and say "nah, all politicians are the same, there's no hope for change in that area."
Either be a pie-in-the-sky dreamer who never gives up hope OR DON'T.
In all honesty, I think most Linux street-preachers would actually rather open source never get any more traction. At least, not in the actual desktop operating system realm. Deep down, I think most of them prefer to be the poor, noble, beknighted underdog. Always preaching the truth, always being ignored by the idiot masses. It's a phenomenal way to stroke one's own ego.
Yeah that's all we talked about over at Slashdot at the time. Nobody else gave a fuck.