Religious Wars

Posted on by

Was just watching CNN, and there is more unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere that, to a large degree, comes down to religious wars of sorts.

In the GeekSphere, we have our own religious wars, with its own casualties.

Let’s take a look at how those wars are going:

  • Windows vs. Apple: Surprisingly muted, but I think that’s due to the whole Windows vs. Linux war that is also ongoing. And Apple users (especially since [BSD-based] OS X surfaced) are firmly the anti-MS camp, if not in the Linux camp.

  • Windows vs. Linux: A little less rhetoric than usual, probably for the following reasons:

    • With MS on the prowl with new OS news, the rhetoric is split between the old and new OSes (split in three if you count the Win9x line and Win NT as another, with the upcoming – 2006 – Longhorn the third).

    • No current security issues – OK, while there are patches galore, there is not the LUV virus or SoBig and so on currently (*crosses fingers*). And that’s a big issue with MS users/haters

    • The ongoing SCO vs. Linux war (below) is stealing the interest of MS bashers. They’d rather hate SCO for the moment

  • SCO vs. Linux: Or should we say SCO vs. …crap…everyone that hasn’t ever paid them for anything *nix. SCO is currently involved in lawsuits with IBM and RedHat; it’s hinting/saying explicitly that it will go after Linux users, possibly Novell, maybe the GPL… They are obviously hoping to hit pay dirt with at least one of these lawsuits (the RedHad one was filed against SCO, however), because it’s sure not gaining them any customers. Hell, IBM or MS can support multiple lawsuits, but SCO? What do they have, three employees and a gardener? Obviously, they are not focusing on their products, but on their (alleged) property (IP): So why buy from them?

  • Browser wars (IE vs. Netscape, primarily): For those who have been in an HTML-induced coma the last few years, MS won. Netscape basically doesn’t exist. The whole push towards standards – and MS’s reluctance to update IE before (an embedded version of IE in) Longhorn – is making things, uh, interesting (translation: still sucks to be a Web developer). Standard is actually the new battleground, but it’s sorta hard to see…because it’s not A vs. B: It’s A is better at standards than B! Which isn’t as compelling from a rhetoric standpoint.

  • .Net vs. LibertyAlliance: This is the Web services battle, which has never really been that much of a fight: MS came out strong with an “all your bases are us” type campaign to win the world over to .Net but managed to completely screw things up by labeling everything down to their executives .Net (“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome CEO Steve Ballmer.Net!”). And the LibertyAlliance – Sun’s J2EE “answer” to .Net has been, at best, a bust. Frankly, there has not been much to talk/code/fight about. This will change, especially as Longhorn gets closer.

  • vi vs. emacs: Grow up; only battles on /.

  • mySQL vs. Postgres: Still a little bitter (see my last entry), especially since Postgres has come out with a new version (7.4) and mySQL continues to add features, and has teamed with SAP. As far as I’m concerned, this is a good battle: Helps both advance.

Notice one interesting item re: the preceding list: With the exception of the pure OSS battles (mySQL vs Postgres, vi vs. emacs), Microsoft is one of the combatants. (MS has funnelled $ to SCO, so they are in the SCO vs. *nix battle)

As the largest software firm in the world, MS probably might be expected to be in the forefront of many battles in the software industry.

But this many?