Gates: "There is nothing monolithic about chaos."

jamie

from: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=67186#67186

To all the mathmatical linear geniuses on C9 ( especially charles.. Wink

)

Would you agree with Bill - or is chaos by definition monolithic (chaos theory etc)

Im sure bill meant: "sure theres lots of linux players but the markets fragmented. Id disagree with that. This isnt a paid UNIX - its a free system gathering momentum

momentum x speed to market x first to innovate x more probabilities = monolithic = (huge / unstoppable)?

* that was my best attempt at trying to sound like golblum's charater in jurrasic park Wink

So is OSS monolithic - or not
Id say it is

***Monolithic ** dictionary.com

Massive, solid, and uniform: the monolithic proportions of Stalinist architecture.
Constituting or acting as a single, often rigid, uniform whole: a monolithic worldwide movement.

jamie

Gates: I don't think you can say anything about the open-source community as a whole because there are so many different players in there with so many different products. There is nothing monolithic about chaos. There is more variety of everything

I take it to mean hes saying its fragmented and that = not huge/monolithic

could you not say the OSS movement dwarfs MS corp?
I think he meant "unlike MS - OSS isnt monolithic

back to the dictionary defining monolithic as:
***Monolithic ** dictionary.com

Massive, solid, and uniform: the monolithic proportions of Stalinist architecture.

*that sounds like oss to me lol

Constituting or acting as a single, often rigid, uniform whole: a monolithic worldwide movement.

* this too

So i dont understand what he's saying. OSS may be chaotic - but not like the unix chaotic - its all basically different implimentations of one thing - or will be soon enough = monolithic

jamie

Gates: end comment: "There are some of those players that are looking at commercial type revenues. We'll certainly spend time with those people"

yes i agree thats what hes saying at the end - but i dont see how that has anything to do with the larger statement above

To me he is refering to a point in history where the unix's fought it out but couldnt get a common act together. So he'd be right in that scenario

jamie

innovators dilema = disruptive technologies = chaos
linux OSS = worldwide co-ordinated movement = monolithic

"There is nothing monolithic about chaos"

sorry - perhaps i did read too much into that satement - which I interpereted to be very very out of touch - refering to another era and just over all disappointing

he should have compared windows developers/devices and applications as being more monolithic than their oss counterparts - as there would be more of them - all combined

at least thats how i read it

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

Monolith literally means "one rock" - a solid structure with no points of weakness. This is a decent metaphor for Microsoft.

I see the open source movement is like a game of pick-up-sticks. There's a lot of structure but it's not at all well organized.

If it becomes organized - someone picks up all the sticks, and bundles them together - then you get a fasces and the Mussolini analogies start coming up.

jamie

Beer28 wrote:

As a linux user, I'd say he's right on target. When you use linux there's a little of everything, it really is chaotic, with lots and lots of disparate sources for what you use.

i agree - lots of it = monolithic

edit (to be clear) when the worlds richest man says something like above - i seriously doubt it was flippant/off the cuff. so - yes - i was reading into it - admitted

also - even discounting what he may have meant - the statement alone - sans MS -

"There is nothing monolithic about chaos"

chaos - the origin of all - is the opitome of monolithic = huge / unstoppable/ movement

funny choice of words

jamie

Charles
Welcome Change

This is interesting. It's really a perfect example of the chaos of semantics. Good stuff.

Re: The mathematical significance of such a statement; it's relative. That is, theoretically, the possibility of an unchanging, static, predictable entity, an encapsulation of chaos, is entirely reasonable depending upon how and from where you are observing it.

C

jsrfc58

Whenever I hear the word "monolith" I keep thinking back to the movie 2001.

It could be argued that each Linux distribution is sort of a "mini-monolith" (if you really want to go metaphorically overboard, tie this into the 2010 movie's mini-monoliths that take over the surface of Jupiter). However, as a whole, even though the open source movement is quite large (larger than Microsoft), as a collective whole it is somewhat chaotic, even if they are relatively united in purpose. I think he would worry more if the collective chaos actually organized itself a little better. Sure you could argue about Redhat, IBM, Sun, everybody jumping onto the open source bandwagon, etc. as being "organized", and they are to some extent, but when the average end user (note I did not say developer) sees the multiple distributions of Linux, the chaos is uninteresting and downright annoying.

AndyC

I think the point he's getting at is that it is difficult to negotiate a "standard" with a disparate bunch of people rather than an organization.

So, MSFT could go speak to the Samba people tommorrow and agree on a set way of doing things, only for someone to fork the codebase the next day because they think there is a better way. This makes it hard, if not impossible, to get actual agreements on how things happen - ultimately there isn't anyone with the authority to say "okay, let's do it that way"

Sure there are things like LSB that want to fix these issues but they're by no means compulsorary, nor can they ever be. The Linux world can't even agree on a standard GUI so why people expect them to agree on anything else is beyond me.

Gates: &quot;There is nothing monolithic about chaos.&quot;