AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
AFTER LAST MONDAY’S PIECE about potential non-antitrust challenges to Microsoft’s thumbscrews on the computing world, a couple of kind readers sent emails proposing another possible reason MS’s day in the sun might be approaching its natural end: “Open Source”-type software, best exemplified by the Linux operating system.
MS rules the roost in shrinkwrapped, copyrighted software, created by centralized staffs and shipped as compiled, unalterable code. But, open-source advocates claim, that ain’t the only way software has to be made.
At its heart, open-source is a return to the way software used to be made before there was any real money in it. Programmers worked on one project for one user at a time; they freely exchanged tips and ideas and even whole pieces of code. When this was done for the pure thrill of discovery, as opposed to work on the clock, it was the original (non-criminal) definition of “computer hacking.”
Today, Linux and other open-source warez have a growing and fervent following among folks who earn their livings tinkering with computers and their networks. People who know how computers work and want to make them work their best.
But consumers, and businesses too small to have a staff computer expert, aren’t supposed to want something you have to heavily customize. They’re supposed to want something that starts working out of the box, that does what it’s supposed to do without bugs or complications.
The catch is that shrinkwrapped software (particularly if it’s from Microsoft) seldom lives up to these goals.
Software, by its very nature, is complex and complicated. The more its makers try to make it “user friendly,” the more elaborate its under-the-hood workings have to be.
Instead of trying to fit their business fuctions around what, say, MS Office allows them to do, it makes increasing sense for more and more small businesses to turn to consultants who can whip together a system that works right for them, built around more-or-less interchangable open-source parts.
For certain common business or institutional functions (payrolls, points-of-sale, inventories), enterprising companies could slap together applications from open-sourced parts and sell them on CD-ROMs with service contracts included.
And in the consumer arena, the first big (semi-) open-source application is on the way. The next edition of Netscape Navigator, currently in early beta versions, was developed with input from “The Mozilla Project,” a group of outside programmers and users who were given access to the program’s source code and encouraged to suggest and create new features and other improvements.
So far, early beta-users’ reports indicate a lot of work still needs to be done to turn the next Navigator from a ragtag assemblage of separately-thought-up parts into a unified, smoothly-running whole.
This shows one of the problems with open-source software, and with large-scale programming in general–it’s a vast, vast undertaking, with many people working on different pieces of the puzzle, each of which has the theoretical potential to crash any other piece.
Knowledgeable open-source hackers know this, and test any outside code they bring into their own projects to make sure everything plays well with others.
And that’s fine on customized applications for specific business environments.
But Navigator isn’t that. With its web browsing, e-mailing, and handling of upteen Web-based data formats, it’s one of the most complex consumer software packages around. (The help files for Navigator’s Mac version state that it “writes more files to more places than any other Mac application.”)
On a one-size-fits-all big applications suite like Navigator, it’s generally been considered helpful to have one (or at least a few) people in charge to hold the whole thing together.
Whether Netscape’s tech staff (or what’s left of it after AOL’s buy-and-purge) can turn a thousand open-sourced subroutines into one professional package (albeit one given away free without warranty and with little tech support) remains a challenge to be faced.
Beyond all this lies a bigger consumer-software issue: Without Microsoft imposing its will, will everything fragment into a hundred incompatible standards?
Alas, Babel-lovers, no. Thanks to the Net, there’s too much at stake in inter-platform readability for any future post-MS computer world to go back to the early days of MS-DOS and TRS-DOS and ProDOS and CP/M.
IN RELATED NEWS: A broken-up Microsoft wouldn’t be able to finish its gazillion-dollar project to turn the Net into a Windows-only space. Yay!
TOMORROW:It’s still square to be hip.
ELSEWHERE:
