I was reading some Free Software-related interviews tonight, and I came across this article about how Novell hired Jeremy Allison, the lead developer of Samba.
Samba, for those who don’t know is a piece of software that lets non-Windows computers share files with Windows computers. That might sound boring, but what actually makes it kind of neat is that Samba on Linux is a stabler, faster, more secure platform for serving files to a buch of Windows machines than Windows itself. This got me thinking.
When we think about Microsoft, The Monopoly, we think about how they swoop into markets (like the web browser market) and decimate the competition. We think about the tens of billions of dollars of cash they are sitting on.
But what if we think about it a different way… maybe–as is the casewith file sharing–Microsoft is actually getting spread too thin. They don’t have enough focus devoted on these issues to compete effectively. Maybe they have their hands in too many cookie jars, and they are going to get picked apart by vultures.
Free software vultures.
With talons.
People talk about Free Software and how much duplication of effort there is–Gnome and KDE, for example–but perhaps this is actually one of Free Software’s greatest strengths. Because GNU/Linux is made up of so many pieces, each of which is maintained by an independent group of developers, people are forced to really compartmentalize things well. That means you can have several web browsers that all compete for users, and they are all interchangeable. Doing things this way means that market forces drive innovation within the Free Software world.
Microsoft only has one web browser, and within the company it has no competition, nor could it. It’s tied deeply to the operating system. That’s how Microsoft ensures lock-in, but it also might be what prevents Microsoft from competing at full force with Firefox.
Food for thought.
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