Windows 7 for free?

Microsoft is planning to offer a Windows 7 upgrade to Vista owners, for free. The Malaysian web site TechArp just reported that Microsoft has a draft of their Windows 7 Technical Guarantee Program, which includes details on what they're calling the "Windows 7 Upgrade Program."

Details are sketchy as of this point, but strategically, it is designed to mitigate the number of users who are putting off buying a new computer, because they would rather go directly to Windows 7 from XP, rather than deal with Vista.

According to the site, the program is targeted at consumers and small business users that bought new PCs that were pre-installed with Vista during a predetermined period of eligibility. Vista Home Basic isn't included in the program however; only Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, and Vista Ultimate. larger enterprises with multiple upgrade requirements aren't eligible.

The upgrade plan is nothing more than a rumor at this point, although TechArp does claim to have seen a copy of a letter Microsoft sent out to its OEM partners. TechArp does have a good reputation on getting the scoop on Microsoft strategies.

Open source in 2008: Everything but interest up

While 2008 has been a bleak year for the financial markets and the global economy, it has been very kind to open source, at least based on market share. A review of Net Applications data suggests that there has never been a better time for open source; however, as Google Trends data suggests, it's no longer enough to rest on one's open-source laurels.

• Number of projects. In terms of sheer numbers of open-source projects, as well as traffic to those projects, open source was on a tear in 2008, with SourceForge alone increasing its hosted projects by 10 percent.
• Browsers. Firefox has cracked 20 percent of the market, while Google Chrome has topped 1 percent. Internet Explorer has dropped month over month for nearly 12 straight months in 2008. As IE falls toward 50 percent market share we will, as Glyn Moody suggests, get a taste of real browser competition again.
• Operating systems. Windows, too, has been on a slide, though at 89 percent of the market, it's hardly in a weak position right now. Linux and Mac have both gained at its expense, with the latter taking a real bite (over 1 percent) out of the Redmond giant. But for Mac and Linux, the real market to watch isn't the desktop, but rather the mobile (or nearly mobile) market, where Mac and Linux have real consumer advantages.
• Commercialization. 2008 saw Red Hat and Novell Linux (and JBoss, in the case of Red Hat) revenue jump dramatically, as Sun also saw Open Storage and MySQL revenue climb significantly. But the real story may be in private data. My own company doubled its sales (again), while I know from conversations with executives at SugarCRM, MindTouch, JasperSoft, and other open-source vendors that their sales were on a tear, too. Separately, we're still talking about relatively small amounts of money (under $50 million), but collectively...? Commercial open source is coming into its own.
• General interest. Intriguingly, "open source" as a search term has been on the decline for years, as shown below, but I think this is a positive development. In light of the above, I read this decline to suggest that people are less interested in generic open source and more demanding of specific open-source projects. Does Hadoop meet my needs, in other words, not is it open source? This is a sign of maturity, not weakness. It's a sign of open source going mainstream, as Sun's Zack Urlocker suggests.

"Open Source" search on the decline

(Credit: Google Trends)

It has been a banner year for open source, just as it has been since at least 2000. I suspect that 2009 will be much the same...only better.

Microsoft's struggle to compete with 'free'

Back in 2002, as Roy Schestowitz calls out, Microsoft was desperately trying to figure out a response to Linux. The problem wasn't Linux as a product-level competitor. The problem, as its Windows chief, Jim Allchin, told a small gathering of Microsoft partners (PDF), is that Linux changes the nature of software competition with odd things like "community" and "GPL licensing," the latter of which Microsoft didn't like one bit :

We feel a huge threat from Linux. Maybe we shouldn't, which is a question you could answer from your perspective...There's Linux the community. We're going to learn from Linux the community. Incredible what they did...We're going to practice and practice and practice (to learn how to respond to Linux)...

GPL is the licensing model. We thlnk it's very bad...We don't think it's the same as public domain. Somebody wants to put in a free DSB(?), we don't have a problem with that, at least on licensing. But GPL, we think it's very bad basically for the world, but especially for the United States.

This is not surprising, given that Allchin had earlier deprecated Linux as "an intellectual-property destroyer" in 2001.

But name-calling was proving not to be enough, and for a reason that Allchin and Microsoft struggled to grasp, but one that its partners, which distribute the bulk of Microsoft's software, felt first-hand on the front lines. When Allchin later asked the participants what the biggest driver of Linux is, they didn't mention its modularity, high performance, or other characteristics. Back in 2002 (and, indeed, today, in many instances), one thing mattered:

Linux was free.

Sure, there was the cost of deployment, training, etc., and Allchin called out the work Microsoft was going to do to "educate" the market through IDC and other analysts about the "true" costs of Linux, but price was why these Microsoft partners were starting to defect, in some instances, to Linux.

Allchin's response?

We'll never meet free."

And that is why Microsoft has struggled against open source, and why it will continue to do so. Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth called it out well over a year ago, arguing that the difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is huge and game changing. Microsoft can halve its price, and Allchin talks in the transcript about doing just that. But free? That's not its business model.

Given Microsoft's difficulty in competing with open source's price, it's perhaps not surprising that Allchin hinted at another way of competing with Linux and open source: patents. Imposing a patent tax on open source is a viable way of raising its price tag beyond $0.00.

There's going to be a patent lawsuit on Linux. It's bound to happen...and the patent lawsuit won't really be about the license. It will be simply, "Hey, these guys took intellectual property." And whether the lawsuit comes from Wind River or in X, Y, Z, there's going to be one. Guaranteed. As I sit here today, I will guarantee you at some point there's going to be a challenge about the patents...

(H)ere's indemnification that is being passed on when you buy products from Microsoft. You don't get that (with Linux). And eventually, you know, in the litigious society that we live in, something is going to happen.

Was Allchin just speaking of probabilities, or was he hinting that Microsoft was going to help ensure a certainty? Well, as we later found out through Groklaw, Microsoft was hard at work all this time supporting SCO's lawsuitagainst the integrity of Linux and its patent rights, and later as it went public in Forbes with wild accusations of Linux's infringement of 235 of its patents, completely without (public) substantiation.

To its credit, Microsoft has not directly launched a lawsuit against any open-source vendors, and it has becomefar less strident lately against open source in terms of patent FUD. Indeed, Microsoft's history is not litigious and I doubt it ever will file any such lawsuit.

But until it learns how to effectively compete with "free," there's always the risk that it will feel compelled to defend its "right" to a proprietary business model by launching a lawsuit. As I noted in 2007, "Microsoft makes good software; it doesn't need to be a lumbering Lenny of a patent troll."

I still believe that. Let's hope Microsoft does, too. It can compete on product quality. It doesn't need to compete on patent quality.

Obama wants to know: Why open source?

President Barack Obama is a smart guy. Where others zig, he zags. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that he's been asking around about the benefits of open source, according to Sun Chairman Scott McNealy, who has been asked by President Obama to author a white paper on the benefits the U.S. government can derive from open source.

McNealy, cited in a BBC News story, wasn't shy in identifying them:

It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software....The government ought to mandate open-source products based on open-source reference implementations to improve security, get higher-quality software, lower costs, higher reliability--all the benefits that come with open software.

While I agree with those benefits, I'm not a supporter of mandates. I wouldn't want the government mandating Microsoft software--why would I therefore seek an open-source mandate? Open source has done remarkably well in the U.S. federal government without mandates, and will continue to do so because of the benefits identified by McNealy.

Will President Obama listen? I suspect he's more likely to do so. He'll get plenty of lobbyist cash from technology companies like Microsoft, but with few companies now solely dependent on proprietary software (indeed, I'd argue that there aren't any left), open source is going to be on everyone's agenda.

For other positions on McNealy's open-source suggestions, see The 451 Group's Matt Aslett's blog and OStatic.