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Monoculture or Mass Hysteria?
Oct. 15, 2003
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Source: The Register
Story Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33396.html
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Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk writes in The Register, "From the attention the subject is attracting at the moment, one might assume that our so-called software “monoculture” is about to spawn a plague of biblical proportions." He states that he thinks the software monoculture hysteria is "under-baked" explaining, "As seductive as it is to root for David against Goliath, the fact is: Microsoft is not the only 'monoculture' in the digital world. Protocols and open APIs are an example of a necessary monoculture; it would be difficult to describe the web, for example, without HTTP as a common interface. Or DNS. And so on. Linux is increasingly a monoculture. Linux is seen as 'the Microsoft alternative', and as such, is almost by definition a monoculture. Apache, like Linux, is one of the core applications constituting the web’s backbone. Should we kick Linux and Apache out or reduce their exposure in favor of IBM AIX, say, and Lotus Domino, just because these are not Microsoft and not Linux? We don’t think so."

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