Cybersurf 9 February – Open Source vs. Proprietary

Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, a weekly update on what's new on the Internet. I am your cyberhost Steven Lang.

Some time last week I was listening to AM Live, of course, and I heard my colleague John Perlman interviewing Alistair Otter of the tectonic.co.za site and it made me realise that it is time once again for Cybersurf to look at the running conflict between open source and proprietary software.

The need for this discussion became more urgent because this conflict was, to a degree, responsible for the recent tsunami of MyDoom viruses that flooded mail boxes the world over.

A slight digression – a colleague of my has pointed out that MyDoom is in fact a worm and not a virus – but I think that we'll leave technicalities aside and go with the generic virus.

It is believed that the author of MyDoom was specifically targetting a company called SCO – that is S.C.O because that company claims ownership of eight hundred thousand lines of coding that is currently used by the Linux system. SCO is also threatening to sue anyone who uses the Linux operating system – including computer giant IBM.

Many people in the open source fraternity believe that SCO's claim runs counter to the spirit and aims of the opne source movement – so certain open militants wrote the MyDoom virus to swamp the SCO web site. They were succesful in that I have not been able to access the SCO web site found at www.sco.com for more than a week. Just for good measure – a variant of the virus has also targetted Microsoft – the old enemy of Open Source. I don't know for sure how badly afected the Microsoft sites were – but I have had no trouble accessing them.

The open source versus proprietary software war has become ugly – and it is almost impossible to find an expert who is completely objective about the dispute. Microsoft commissioned a series of “independent” reports to compare its products with welll known open source software. The comparison criteria was the overall cost of operating the respective systems over the long term.

Guess what – surprise, surprise – the independent reports – commissioned by Microsoft – showed that it is cheaper to run Microsoft applications than open source software. Truly amazing!

If you would like to look at a site advocating open source software – then you will do well to look at the site I mentioned at the beinning of this program. Alistair Otter runs the tectonic.co.za site and it is very good if you want to keep up with th latest open source news in South Africa.
The CSIR open source centre at meraka.org.za that is m.e.r.a.k.a dot org dot za has loads of information about open source conferences and gives you a fair idea of government thinking on the issue.

Obsidian systems, which can be found at obsidian.co.za, has a very interesting site in that it is clearly aimed at turning a profit out of its distribution and implementation of Linux, but it also has a section advising you when it is not a good idea to use Linux.

If you are really interested in getting an excellent overview of the dispute, I advise you to go to the bridges.org site – that's it – bridges.org – there is no za in it even though it is being run from Cape Town. - Why I strongly recommend bridges dot org is because it has a complete section dedicated to the dispute. This section which contains mainly links to other sites, is divided into three groups – firstly The Background – then the arguments for open source software and the third group has a collection of links arguing in favour of propriatary software.

And before we wrap up today's edition of Cybersurf – let me state for the record that the script for this program was written in an openOffice document running off a Windows 95 platform – and since I have been told that anyone can now run a Linux operating system on their PC – let me tell you that my next project is to install Linuxon my home computer just to find out how easy, or how difficult it is.

Thanks for listening and remember to keep on surfing.