Isolationism

I confess I was surprised when I read that Microsoft had a change of heart on the subject of allowing Windows Vista to be reinstalled. Apparently someone at Microsoft got the message from the online community that their previous position—which was to allow the software to be reinstalled once only, ever—was pretty stupid, and that its discovery and wide publication was doing them more harm than good for a product that is already receiving a hefty share of criticism from the community on other issues.

My position on Vista hasn’t changed, though, despite Microsoft’s attempts at smoothing ruffled feathers over by referring to so-called “PC and hardware enthusiasts” as “an important group of customers.” Frankly, I think the only difference we nerds might make to their bottom line is refusing to upgrade to Vista ourselves on our personal hardware, and trying to influence friends and family to do the same; I’m certain such a boycott would equate to (a lot) less than a percentage point on a ledger somewhere.

I find myself wishing more people would come to the realisation that they don’t own any of the software they use; it’s easy to forget this is the case when everything’s installed and running well that you, the user, have effectively no rights to what software you use beyond what the company that sold you the software explicitly allows—like how Windows XP can only be authorised 5 times then you have to buy a new copy, according to the licence agreement. It’s for reasons like this that I endorse open source: The licences are a hell of a lot shorter (you might actually be able to read through one, for a start, instead of skipping over it completely like most of us do), and most open source software is governed by one of only a small handful of licences like the GPL, LGPL, BSD, and the incredibly simple and to-the-point “As-is”, so that once you know you agree with them, you don’t have to read them over again hundreds of times for each package governed by that licence.

Any discussion of the evils of Microsoft isn’t complete without a mention of their primary competitor, Apple. I know Macs are a popular alternative to Microsoft, and not a bad choice if you don’t mind paying extra for Apple’s proprietary hardware; after all, OSX has almost all the same commercial software available for it as is available for Windows (except games, if you care about those), or good alternatives exist; OSX finally delivers on all the promises Apple has been making to fix its shortcomings since the early 90s, and Macs are without question easy to use (although a lot of Windows users go through a potentially frustrating period of adjustment).

However, my feeling is that Apple’s position on DRM makes them scarier (if anything) than MS; their stranglehold on the digital music market with iTunes is enough to make me steer completely clear of both product and service (although the design of the iTunes client thankfully secured that decision long before Apple’s DRM became a concern).

I personally can’t wait for the wake-up call when Joe six-pack realizes he’s married not only to iTunes but also to Apple hardware for life unless he wants to burn all his music to CD then rip it back to disk and recompress it with a lossy algorithm—probably a wmv or mp3 for lack of knowledge (or device support) of anything better—after all, what’s the point in ripping music to a lossless format when it’s already been lossy-compressed once, assuming Joe even knows that such a thing exists? (Yes, I know that DVD Jon cracked FairPlay, but the average iPod consumer has no idea what this means and probably has little-to-no chance of finding or using such a thing anyway, even if they were willing to live with the fact that what they’re doing is highly illegal now in the States because of the DMCA). It may not have nearly as much music to choose from (and certainly no Britney Spears), but my digital music store is MagnaTune, who sells the music in the format of your choice, including even Ogg Vorbis, Flac and uncompressed WAV if you’re so-inclined.

Anyway, back to Vista: For all the grousing on the Internet I’ve seen, I still don’t think it’s going to mean a change of status quo for Microsoft unless they really blow it in corporate America, because face it: every IT manager is going to buy his or her next hundred desktop PCs from Dell, and they’re going to be pre-installed with whatever is selling at the time without bothering to ask each employee if they have any philosophical or political issues with running Vista over XP or Windows 2000 or Linux … or anything else. Even if they did, the conversation would probably go something like this:

“You want to run Gentoo? Well, that’s a lot of downloading to be doing, with a new 30mb kernel being released every few weeks… And leaving your machine on to compile all night long will raise our electricity costs, to say nothing of supporting desktop Linux when our straight-out-of-technical-school Windows sysadmins can barely point-and-click their way out of a wet paper bag to install IIS. But I respect your concerns regarding Microsoft, so sure: you can go ahead and install Gentoo on your PC. Just format the drive once it shows up, because there’s no option on the Dell site to buy the hardware without Vista pre-installed…”

Those who think they’re beating the system by not upgrading should examine the history books; Microsoft can—and will—drop support for the OS sooner or later, and the rate at which critical vulnerabilities for the operating system itself are discovered (and exploited), you really don’t want to be running one without the benefit of frequent updates; software can (and will) also be designed to run on only newer operating systems, too; How many recent software packages have you seen on the market that still state support for Windows 98 (or even ME)? You will eventually be strong-armed into upgrading, meaning you keep wearing Microsoft’s collar around your neck, and they add your money to their war chest and do it all over again in another few years with their next product, only worse.

When I saw an article earlier this week about how a quarter of surveyed “technically savvy” users (read: nerds) were planning on switching to Linux instead of upgrading to Vista, I couldn’t help but think “Yay, that’ll be me!” (followed by, “I hope they aren’t fans of Suse,”). I am compelled to wonder if Microsoft’s latest marketing ploy will be enough to woo some of those numbers back, or if some of Linux’s shortcomings might be enough to convince some of those determined to switch to run back to Microsoft in tears of frustration. Here’s hoping that some day it really will be the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, and that we’ll start to see a trend of adoption similar to that which Firefox has enjoyed since its introduction a few years ago. I’ll be happy to be taking that big first step myself in a matter of weeks.