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If you want to use software, you must have software to use. If you want to have software to use, there must be a way to develop it. The GPL has been the "Constitution" enabling the development of a vast amount of really useful software; indeed, the majority of Free-libre / open source software (FLOSS) uses the GPL. And people are finally realizing that most FLOSS is commercial software; it's no longer exclusively "just a hobby". Before the GPL, the only ways of creating software were complete proprietary control (often by a company intent on preventing you from switching) or public domain/BSDish licenses (which sometimes works very well, but sometimes get sucked into proprietary projects often enough to die or live only on life support). So yes, if you wish to be able to use software in the future, the GPL is important; it establishes a viable method of making the software that people would like to use. In fact, it's been extraordinarily effective at doing so.

Even you don't write code yourself, you can still hire someone to write or change code. So the GPL provides additional capabilities to users, even if the user can't write code him/herself. And even if you use proprietary software, GPL'ed software has had a profound impact on limiting the costs of much of that software, which is also great for end-users (and again matters to them).

Here's an analogy - that statement is like saying that agriculture doesn't matter because many people aren't farmers. But non-farmers must eat too! Having viable methods to grow food - and a competitive system to lower costs and raise quality - are still of vital interest to the users of products from farmers. Unless you want to stop eating.

This really doesn't have much to do with anything, because both groups wouldn't use any revision of the GPL. Their "survey" seems to be simply discussions with other people just like themselves; they simply found that people who wouldn't use GPLv2 wouldn't use GPLv3 either. Big deal. The question is, will many developers who currently use or strongly consider the GPLv2 be willing to use GPLv3? If so, it's a success. If no one uses it, it isn't. Not everyone has to like it.

Since the FSF is the copyright holder of a lot of important projects, they can switch to GPLv3. All by itself that will mean that the GPLv3 will be used in many projects, and so the GPLv3 will be lots more successful than the vast majority of licenses. So this "death" is silly; it's a foregone conclusion that GPLv3 will be more successful than most licenses. In practice, I expect most GPLv2 projects to move to GPLv3; the internationalization and Apache 2.0 license compatibility are great, and the threats from patent deals and Tivoization mean that many who liked GPLv2 will like GPLv3 even more.

The GPL is the world's most popular OSS/FS license, by far, and it's critically important to use a GPL-compatible license (even if you don't use the GPL yourself). The GPL is popular for a reason. Note, for example, that when the Wine project switched from a BSD-style license to the LGPL, development began to pick up at a greater pace (more patches began to appear, the leader Alexandre made more CVS commits, and more applications were reported to work). A lot of code producers prefer copylefting licenses like the GPL (not all, but many do).

The GPL is not a license for all possible circumstances. Sure. But no license is.

This is interesting. We are looking at upgrading Office, and both Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org 2.2 are being considered. I had thought that Office 2007 would be able to use existing macros, but if this is not the case it could help tip the scales in favor of OO.o. After some study, it turns out that OO.o has templates that are more capable that Word (See thesis instructions from MIT or David Wheeler's blog. (Even if you don't want to write a thesis, they do represent a highly structured documents with stringent standards. This is something of an acid test for document formating.) The OO.o master documents are also a selling point, since dividing large written works into chapters is a time-honored approach to collaboration. If MSO 2007 doesn't import existing macros better than OO.o, its going to be harder for management to justify the considerable upgrade costs.

But FindBugs does not cover the C/C++ codebase...

C/C++ checkers:
  http://www.coverity.com/ (commercial)
  http://www.dwheeler.com/flawfinder/ (OSS)

http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2007/01/07/#drm-nonse nse-hddvd

Nuff Said.

David Wheeler has got it all in a screenful. Why it doesn't do the content-providers any good, why it doesn't do the "consumer" any good, and why it's all a waste of time anyway.

All written in clear English.

One quote from the article: "I do not approve of piracy. I don't approve of murder, either, yet I approve of the sale of steak knives and cleaning supplies... and would oppose trying to halt their sales."

It seems they may be entertaining the idea of keeping the code under the CDDL and dual-license it under the GPL, v3. I think it would be much more productive to skip the CDDL and switch entirely to GPLv3, as there are three big problems with keeping the CDDL:

• No GPL-only code import. More than 70% of all software available under an OSI-approved license is under the GPL (see Wheeler's essay, link below). Since Sun would require all GPL:d code they want to use to be dual-licensed as well, they can in fact only use GPL code that they can also get a CDDL-license for. This will be a tiny fraction, if any, of the vast amount of GPL:d quality code and libraries out there.

  For example, OpenSolaris on the SPARC can't be built from source today (nearly two years after it became available under the CDDL), because they lack an open source disassembler (yes, they need a disassembler, it's due to how the kernel debugger works). A well known and proven disassembler exists in the GNU binutils, ported to just about every useful processor type there is. OpenSolaris, I am told, wouldn't be able to use that, because it isn't dual-licensed under the CDDL and is unlikely to ever be.

• Fewer developers. If developers are forced to sign CA:s (contributor agreements) that make their contributions available under the CDDL, there is a risk that a section of the possible contributors from the GPL-only part of the world will not want to contribute.
• Smaller rate of adoption. This is a consequence of the previous two points. In turn, this leads to less demand for OpenSolaris skills, so there is money on the line here for people who know OpenSolaris or are thinking about learning it in order to make a living.

  For the obvious example of how GPL:d code is much more attractive and increases the rate of adoption even in cases when technically more advanced alternatives exist, consider that the BSD UNIX kernel never really took off in the way Linux has, even though in the early 90's the BSD kernel had an absolutely overwhelming technical lead at the time.

Much of the confused discussion on the opensolaris-discuss mailing list (warning: it takes days to read this and you don't particularly want to) could have been avoided, had the participants read David A. Wheeler's recently updated essay Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else. and been at least vaguely familiar with the Free Software philosophy.

So what is it about the GPL that makes developers want to use it? I can't speak for others, but in my own case it boils down to this: in 1985, when I first came across the GPL, I thought about the matter and decided that the inheritance of my life-time software development work to future generations should not be that of a jail built out of proprietary source code. This excludes the BSD-type licenses, as they allow someone else to take away one or more of the four freedoms I've worked hard for to establish at every opportunity. (Even then, it was not always possible, unfortunately.)

On the other hand, the only reason I can see why developers may want to use BSD-type licenses are that they want to deny others one or more of the four freedoms, or need to be able to. If you are one of these developers, maybe you will reconsider your position on this some day when it is financially possible for you. It is now easier than ever.

Umm, just found this: http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/

This might be interesting to check out. (except for using indentation as scope indicator. should be replaced with { } IMHO)

Cheers
Ben

I've created a variant of Lisp's native s-expression format called "sweet-expressions". A sweet-expression reader can read typical s-expressions as-is, but it also lets you use indentation, infix, and more traditional function notation. Yet you can still use all of Lisp's macro power, including quasiquotes and so on. Programs are still lists, it's just that the lists are now readable.

See http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/ for more info.

Well, if MySQL should be usable with GPL2, the "or later clause" may cause problems. For example a GPLv3-only-licensed patch would force MySQL to the new license.

1. they have the right to REJECT the patch
2. they require copyright assignment so they could change the license anyway

50+ millions lines of code bloat

I've wondered about this myself.

Keep in mind, Windows is a *lot* more than the Linux kernel, so it's not easy to do a direct comparison. Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations for the size of the equivalent components of a Linux distro based upon the (admittedly very strong) assumpition that the ratio of bzip2'd tarball size is proportional to the SLOC count with the same coefficient across kernel versions and across projects.

This site gives the SLOC count of an unspecified version of kernel 2.6 as of oct 2004 at 4.3 million.
The 2.6.8 (released Oct 04) bzip2'd tarball is 35M, so that's about 125,000 SLOC per meg of tarballs.

* The latest kernel version, 2.6.19.1, is 41MB, so estimate 5.1M SLOC.
* X.org 6.9 is 45MB, so estimate 5.4M SLOC. Note that the latest version is 7.1, and I think it's likely that it's noticably larger, so this is probably an underestimate. (Modular x.org is harder to get a total size of because 6.9's src is one file.)
* I had a hard time getting a good estimate of KDE, because it has a lot of stuff that isn't part of Windows (e.g. kdevelop, koffice) and because I'm not sure what each package does. I estimate 90MB of bzip2'd stuff that corresponds to Windows code. I counted from the development snapshot: kdeaccessibility (8.4MB), kdeadmin (2), kdebase (23), kdebindings (5.4), kdegames (10.3), kdegraphics (7.1), kdelibs (15.1), kdemultimedia (6), kdenetwork (7.2), kdeutils (2.8). In particular, I omitted kdeartwork and kdeedu, as well as all the kdeextragear packages. That's 11M SLOC.

Between those numbers, we're still at under 25M SLOC, even if you add a couple million for inaccuracies. This leaves a huge gap to the 50 mil. in Windows.

Anyone have any explanation of why it's so high? I don't know how those were counted (I've just heard the 50 mil tossed around), so is it possible they difference is just how you count? Are they including things like MSIE and the .Net framework? Is MS's style just more verbose?

How many times have you heard the word "innovation" from a microsoftie?
(uncountable)

How much money does it spend on research?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/06/204 2218
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/120606-micro soft-research.html

How many times has it innovated?

http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/opinions/msinnova te.html
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.sh tml
http://www.mcmillan.cx/innovation.html

This last dude gave up, Last updated 27 June 1999. Basically, it came down to a list of all accepted innovation nominations compared to two accepted: Microsoft Bob (doubtful but accepted) and the fucking talking paper clip. Which is basically Bob redone as a more annoying Help file.

all I did was a google search for "microsoft innovate" without quotes, and I came up with ZERO microsoft sites, and a whole bunch which put "innovate" into the quotes it deserves.

Worthless software company. The only things they did right are SQL server (derived from Sybase, and even though it was apparently recoded it shares similar syntax), which actually has a decent track record on security issues, and of course Visual Studio (IMO until the .NET crapfest, but even that is well done, just a personal preference, except that they are trying to win against Java using an interpreted framework, but Visual Basic was completely reengineered and basically thrown away?) (but it uses a third party C/C++ library from Dinkumware, don't think they came up with any of that themselves) (oh and they didn't make the compiler either, they made it worse). But without microsoft we wouldn't need either of these. I believe they don't suck because they were made by developers, for developers.

Dinkumware info, apparently there is a license dispute so that MS can't package the updates in a visual studio service pack, so Dinkumware tells which lines to edit and how:
http://www.dinkumware.com/vc_fixes.html

std::string causes corruption. Sorry we can't fix it, upgrade to .NET or buy a C++ library:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813810
"When you build applications in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 that use the supplied Standard Template Library (STL), memory corruption may occur, or your computer may stop responding. "

Origins of MSC compiler
http://www.nimh.org/microsoft/
"`This is just a historical note about the C compiler microsoft sells. In the late 80's I was developing C programs under DOS using the Lattice C compiler. One day I got a letter from Lattice saying they were out of the C compiler business, I should contact microsoft for support. I found out that microsoft bought the compiler and exclusive rights to sell it from Lattice. "

O man I just pissed myself off again rehashing all that ineptitude.

Uh-oh...time to change my machine to run VMS, then. Linux is catching up to Windows, according to http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/ which says of RedHat 7.1: "It includes over 30 million physical source lines of code (SLOC)."

It also says: "They found that Debian 2.2 includes more than 55 million physical SLOC", and "Debian 3.1 ("Sarge") had grown to about 230 million source lines of code".

And for other Windows versions: "Windows NT 5.0 (in 2000) was 20M SLOC, Windows 2000 (in 2001) was 35M SLOC, and Windows XP (in 2002) was 40M SLOC".

Finally, it links to a Dilbert strip that describes other types of security vulnerabilities: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/

I was wondering when the shills would come back to fight against the free market.

No one is faulting M$ for "making money". The fault the public finds is the same thing the courts on both sides of the Altantic have found fault with: predatory marketing and abusing its monopoly positions in some markets to establish new monopolies in new markets. In short, M$ apparently cannot compete in a free market and appears to do everything within it's influence, legal or otherwise, to stifle or eradicate a free market economy (or any competition at all) in the markets it sells in.

That's been the business model since the 1980's: M$ has leveraged the desktop monopoly Bill's mom got him from IBM into one for web browsers, productivity software / formats, and online audiovideo software / formats. It's that middle one, productivity software/formats, that's relevant here. If M$ had even documented it's office formats, there would be no need for the establishing a universal office format like OpenDocument. Without documentation, competitors are easily marginalized or even run out of that market, and of course without documentation it is darn near impossible for new entrants.

It's not about open source. Closed source and open source can both be used in conjunction with open standards to make loads of money. Yes, the Internet and the web were invented using open source and run mostly on open source, but this is all about open standards, which is a different thing.

Without open standards you would not have e-mail (SMTP/ASCII), the WWW (HTTP/HTML) or the Internet (TCP/IP). Nor would you have single sign-on authentication (Kerberos/LDAP), nor even long distance telephone service - not even land line, let alone mobile service. Not even would you have iPods or other "mp3 players", all of which are dependent on different components of MPEG. The list goes one. And, without open standards for productivity software, you end up in a situation with no free market there.

If you've ever been awake in the last several years, you'll notice that one of the primary ways that people get exploited is through Internet Explorer (IE, aka Internet Exploiter). Scanit's Browser Security Test group found that in 2004, 98% of time Internet Explorer was vulnerable to dangerous known remote attacks, with no patch available to prevent it, compared to 17% for Opera and 15% for Mozilla/Firefox. There were only 7 days in 2004 where Internet Explorer could be safely used (where patches were available for all publicly-known worst-case vulnerabilities). That's just one study; study after study shows that Internet Explorer should not be used for normal browsing.

Papers like my Securing Microsoft Windows (for Home and Small Business Users) note that one of the most important ways to improve the security of Windows (while still using it) is to replace IE and Outlook (the most insecure programs around) with something else (such as Firefox and Thunderbird). Nothing's perfect, but when you junk the programs with the worst security, your security gets better - isn't that obvious?

Many banks are starting to wake up to the fact that people are using other browsers. But while most other sites now work fine, banks are some of the last people to support Internet standards, and instead some still insist on vendor-specific codes... using the browser most dangerous to use.

So, let's hit 'em in the pocketbook. If banks won't let you take reasonable care by allowing you to select a secure browser, then they should be held responsible for forbidding customers from taking reasonable care.

It's not quite so simple. Suppose a manufacturer were to build a computer that would only run an OS signed with Linus's key. That turns his "signing key" into an "embedded key". The problem here is that there is no fundamental distinction between the two kinds of keys; it's just a question of how they are used.

It is fair to say that down the line even when they do opensource it, Sun's version will be the defacto standard.

You're somewhat misinformed. Sun's implementation has never been a basis for determining what's "standard". That's because Sun's implementation, like every other Java implementation (and there are quite a few) is required to adhere to a written specification.

People (including everybody at Sun) often say "Java" when they mean "Sun's Java implementation". That can be misleading. When you talk about "open sourcing Java" you're really talking about open sourcing a particular implementation of Java.

There are plenty of source-lines-of-code value estimators out there. One which I have used out of curiosity was sloccount (http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/), which took various models of code-lines per man-day and extrapolated from there.

There's a technique for completely countering the "Trusting Trust" attack, called "Diverse double-compiling". See my web page on countering trusting trust through diverse double-compiling, which includes a link to a paper describing how to do it, and an example where it's been done.

You don't need to learn Linux to use ReactOS. End users wouldn't need to be retrained. More importantly for businesses, Systems Administrators and Network Administrators that were used to Windows wouldn't need to be retrained. Installing Windows software would work, ideally, the exact same it would on an actual Microsoft operating system.

You would get the ability to use all of your Windows-compatible software PLUS no cost for the operating system PLUS the ability to view the source code of the operating system PLUS the added security and stability because anyone could look at the source code and add their own patches and fixes.

I think it's a spectacular idea. That said, Windows is huge. According to this http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/ Windows XP has 40 million lines of source code. We're talking tens of thousands of volunteer man hours of work.

1. You can look up the "bracketing convention" for RedHat yourself...
2. By default, with David Wheeler's sloccount, { does count as a SLOC, but all whitespace and comment-only lines do not count

We shouldn't forget despite all this that Windows Vista remains the largest concerted software project in human history.

Linear extrapolation would take us to about eighty-two-million today, comfortably over Vista's projected fifty-million; but who's counting?

Let's see... 91,000,000 hours / 8 hours in a day / 5 days in a week / 50 weeks in a year = 45,500 person years.

That's utterly... amazing.

In comparison, David A. Wheeler's paper Estimating Linux's Size approximates the work on Linux so far to be about 4,500 man years. (He uses the COCOMO model.)

That reference was off the top of my head - I think it was mentioned on /. before. Didn't have much luck finding other interesting estimates...

Alloy is a cool tool, if it does something you want done. But nobody should be fooled into thinking that you can just run Alloy and suddenly your code is perfect. Alloy just helps you check out a model based on set theory, etc... it's a long distance from models like that to the actual code.

Alloy is a cool tool, if it does something you want done. But nobody should be fooled into thinking that you can just run Alloy and suddenly your code is perfect. Alloy just helps you check out a model based on set theory, etc... it's a long distance from models like that to the actual code.

Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS or FLOSS):
* Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers! (Paper)
* Why FLOSS? Look at the Numbers! (Presentation)
* OSS/FS References
* How to Evaluate OSS/FS Programs
* Generally Recognized as Mature (GRAM) OSS/FS Programs
* Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else
* High Assurance (for Security or Safety) and Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS)... with Lots on Formal Methods (aka high confidence or high integrity)
. . .
* What Should Governments Examine in Acquiring COTS Open Source Software (OSS)?

Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS or FLOSS):
* Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers! (Paper)
* Why FLOSS? Look at the Numbers! (Presentation)
* OSS/FS References
* How to Evaluate OSS/FS Programs
* Generally Recognized as Mature (GRAM) OSS/FS Programs
* Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else
* High Assurance (for Security or Safety) and Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS)... with Lots on Formal Methods (aka high confidence or high integrity)
. . .
* What Should Governments Examine in Acquiring COTS Open Source Software (OSS)?

Straight from the innovations in software page, we have: "As patentability has increased, there's good evidence that the number of software innovations has decreased. Bessen and Maskin also demonstrated a statistical correlation between the spread of patentability in the United States and a decline in innovation in software. In particular, between 1987 and 1994 , software patents issuance rose 195%, yet real company funded R&D fell by 21% in these (software) industries while rising by 25% in industries in general. This paper gives additional evidence that software patents are inversely related to innovation; it's hard to not notice that as patenting become more common (e.g., 1987 and later) that the number of major innovations slowed down and are almost always not patented anyway."

The link supplied is to this PDF about patents. It's worth your time to read about this research.

OpenBSD is actively replacing GPL code with BSD to excise the last parts (although I seriously doubt we'll see another BSD-licensed C compiler).

Perhaps if they weren't so intent on wasting time, they could be exciting enough to get funding!

Seriously, I think the BSD community's devotion to its license is notable, but they're never going to make any progress at all if they're so fanatically opposed to the GPL. Since the GPL doesn't affect normal users at all (rather, just the people that want to take and not give back), it seems like a dramatic waste of time. They're not about to win anyone over that is going to do anything for their cause -- unless their cause is to be a free programmer for the proprietary software industry.

Sorry BSD guys -- the GPL is huge! You'll never escape it! David Wheeler surveyed license penetration in 2003 by looking at Freshmeat and SourceForge. GPL-licensed code came in around 70%, BSD licensed code around 4-7%. LGPL - the FSF's answer to BSD - came in at 5-10%!

Everyone likes to think they are experts on technical design by relating to physical manifestations. Saying that a piece of software is big and bulky with lots of patches and duct-tape is really convincing when you are trying to tell someone that it is slow and onerous. (Just the other day, I heard someone commenting on the radio that “They” are building a “New Internet” because the one we have is so patched and jury-rigged that it cannot be fixed. See all the confusion you people with your “Web 2.0” terminology are creating?) Fortunately, that is just not the case. Software is not a bridge or a house or a car or a toolshed.

I am no Windows apologist (hate it), but just because it has nine hundred million gazillion lines of code (oh noes) does not mean it is slow for the user (and in fact, Windows is not slow). Consider the 90/10 Law which states that a program spends 90% of its time in 10% of the code, and you realize that all that so-called bloat does not matter that much. Two decades of legacy libraries which remain unlinked and unloaded are not going to cause the system any headache. (There are caveats here, but for all intents and purposes, the win16 libraries in WindowsXP are not causing slower frame rates, or making Office users less productive, or taking floating point operations away from mathematicians. What does, if anything, slow down Windows is the presence of many services which the user simply does not use (or want). When you install Office, for example, its libraries are preloaded at start up to help make the program load more responsively when requested (this is also the case with Internet Explorer). This takes up memory, which in many cases will cause swapping. Furthermore, a principle cause of sluggishness in Windows is all the garbage users add to the system after it is installed. This is hardly to blame on Microsoft.

These arguments that software performance is inversely proportional to the amount of code in it are nonsense, and is demonstrated in many areas. A practical example would be found in how much code is in your average Linux distribution. An academic example might compare the tiny implementation of a Bubble Sort to the much longer implementation of a Radix Sort. I suppose the experts at the New York Times would have us believe Bubble is faster because it can be as small as four lines of code (or less).

Now, do not get this confused with the maintanence of software. Yes, indeed, as software grows in complexity, it becomes much more difficult to change it and fix it without causing additional problems. But this is not necessarily a factor on runtime performance.

• DOS. Helloooo Q-DOS.
• Windows. Continually evolving ripoff of MacOS and, formerly, OS/2.
• Office. WordStar did Word first, Lotus did Outlook and Excel first, all the rest is fluff and was mostly acquired anyways.
• XBox. Duh.

This makes sense, since David A. Wheeler has had a lot of good things to say about Linux servers. Plus, I've kept a Linux server/router working for a while elsewhere.

And I just saved a bunch of money by switching to Geico... uh I mean using
Flawfinder.

"Which is why HURD will never see the light of day in any substantial fashion. Philosophy doesn't yield code."

If you simply want to argue over the semantics of whether or not philosophy yields code or people yield code, read no further; I have nothing to say to you. The point of this post realtes to substance, not semantics. (And before you stop reading, ask yourself this: what is philosophy without people?) Your second statement is clearly a generalization you're drawing from your first, and in incorrect one, at that. As GP alluded to, the GNU in GNU/Linux is all the utilities you use on the command line, up to and including the command line itself, and is under the copyright of the FSF. I haven't done recent SLOC counts on GNU vs. Linux, but I would be surprised if they weren't at least comparable - I'd expect that GNU actually has produced substantially more source code (that is used all the time by all manner of users and developers) than the Linux kernel itself these days. Back in 2002, RedHat 7.1 was studied and though the kernel was the largest single body of source (~2.5 million lines), there are GNU programs all over that quickly outstrip the kernel in sheer volume of source: gcc alone is huge (~900k lines), but emacs (~600k lines) and glibc (~600k lines) are both quite large as well. Those are only three GNU programs, the directory of FSF software contains (as an estimate) hundreds, including the Hurd itself.

Indeed, philosophy is a manner of viewing of the world and is expressed not by some abstract theoretical paper you write, but in how you choose to live and contribute your work to others. In this sense, philosophy is very much responsible for yielding code - do you honestly think that without the philosophical buy-in of its contributors, free software would be anything today?

from: http://www.freeswitch.org/docs/

"Licensing
Freeswitch is licensed under the terms of the MPL 1.1"

this license is *not* compatible with the gpl. even mozilla.org has stopped using this license:

Mozilla Relicensing FAQ
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html

mozilla is relicensing all of their code under a triple mpl/lgpl/gpl license in order to make their products compatible with the gpl. please consider doing the same with freeswitch.

read this if you need some more convincing as to why to relicense:

Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html

bottom line, if freeswitch isn't gpl-compatible it's much less likely to be successful.

If you like this, you might also like my definitive four fours answer key. The goal of the four fours problem is to find a mathematical expression for every integer from 0 to some maximum positive integer, using only common mathematical symbols and exactly four fours (no other digits are allowed). For example, zero is 44-44, one is 44/44, 2 is 4/4+4/4, 3 is (4+4+4)/4, and so on.

. . . well program, sloccount. Of course, do some research and tweak the paramaters to get a reasonably accurate result though.

... I have never worked for a company that willingly said, ok lets open source the drivers we spend thousands of dollars writing and optimizing.

So what? You expect to be able to get the benefits of Linux for free and not contribute something in return?

Oh, and for people who don't [actually] work for hardware companies that ship drivers, driver development is often times an expensive process, not because the software engineers are expensive, but because the hardware and software needs to be tested and certified in particular enviroments. There are orders of magnitude more linux distributions this makes it cost orders of magnitude more to test and support than a half dozen windows enviroments

And what makes you think MS won't follow suit

Because they said so? While that may mean nothing, at this point it is MS' position that they will not support OpenDocument formats, regardless of requirements by governments. MS Not supporting OpenDocument

Now MS is claiming the open document standard is inferior, yet they sit on the standards committee. Instead they support the MS XML standard which is a standard for MS documents. Which means it owns (under copyright and soon patent), the format and standard.

Office 12 XML documents will not have an easy introduction into many non-Microsoft products. To do so, you will need to license the format from MS, who has said it sees no reason to support OSS in this regard and the use of MS XML in a GPL'd product would invalidate the GPL, and the MS license. (Microsoft does have some very smart lawyers writing their EULAs and contracts). All the others would need to pay a fee and it is doubtful MS would provide a discount to the disadvantage of their own products.

A better read on OpenDocument vs. MS XML is found on Wheeler's page

The format matters because a company, in part due to its responsibility to stockholders, must have planned obsolescence. MS documents from the 80s are difficult to open and read, even in MS products. An open standard ensures that my documents are available to me, through many companies, for a very long time. Governments need this and are now getting smart enough about technology to understand and demand it. And while no one can imagine MS being gone, the same was said of dozens of top 20 companies over the past 20 years.

As for the comment about the learning curve between open office and MS Office, we can now thank MS. With office 12, they cannot claim an easy transition, the product takes a new direction and whether it is better or not, is irrelevant. The learning curve of going to 12 will be greater than moving to Open Office which retains the current MS office look and feel for the vast majority of users.

It appears as though the author of the article feels that microsoft has invested much in creating a very wide, broad reaching network of products, file formats, and hardware that makes an overall seamless work environment for MSCE IT departments to play in.

The only problem is, Microsoft products Only work with Microsoft products. Whereas the Open Source community chooses to use more global standards. What should I bring up? OpenDocument beating out Microsoft XML format, the fact that Microsoft still doesn't adhere to W3C standards? Or maybe the fact that the goal of the Open Source community is for everything to talk with everything, whereas Microsoft's goal is for Microsoft Products to talk with Microsoft Products.

That's not innovation, that's pigeon-holing your customers into using your product, and your product alone.

Funny enough, my Mozilla Browser has yet to have a problem displaying a web page just because it is on a Linux or Windows server. Brand consistency is only important when you are being narrow minded and working without standards. Maybe if Microsoft adopted more of an open source mentality about things, they could be even more far reaching, but I think that will be something Microsoft will never be able to do to catch up with the Open Source Community.

The parent links to an article describing the problem. If you read it, it links to http://www.dwheeler.com/openformula/ which describes a potential solution.

XML != open.

Wikipedia defines XML: "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages. It is a simplified subset of SGML, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. Languages based on XML (for example, RDF, RSS, MathML, XHTML, SVG, and cXML) are defined in a formal way, allowing programs to modify and validate documents in these languages without prior knowledge of their form.

One uses XML to 'define' a document format. The problem is that one could easily define a format (schema), permit royalty free-licensing, but 'patent' the schema/format.

Remember GIF?

MS XML formats have this problem. One, there are a couple licensing requirements. Two, the royalty-free license does *not* grant the licensee rights to use any MS patents that the document format may utilize. Even if one interprets some as the text as granting a right to the patents for certain implementations of MS XML, there's no reason to believe you have a perpetual right to those patents.

MS has some control over who can implement these formats, and for instruments of public policy, that is simply not acceptable.

MS is free to implement OASIS formats, because everyone is free to implement them. Governments are having to upgrade anyways--> DOC is being phased out. It's either switch to OASIS (ISO-approved), with multi-vendor support, and shipping software that supports it; or switch to MS Office Open XML, which hasn't been released yet, which *no* software on the market currently supports, which is not vendor neutral in implementation, and is not any kind of 'official' standard.

People use DOC over all the other formats because it has marketshare. MS Office Open XML has 0 marketshare right now. It has to compete on its merits alone, and a such, is failing.

Read here for more information:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/why-opendocument-wo n.html

Isn't this precisely what the State of Massachusetts is attempting to solve by using OpenDocument? http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/why-opendocument-wo n.html

...governments want a single format that uses XML for its many advantages (e.g., ... ease of repair/recovery, ...) ...in XML, if some data is scrambled, you can recover the rest, but a scrambled binary file is often unrecoverable.

David Wheeler on why opendoc won: link

You might want to look at this essay: Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn't)

There are already lots of studies. See Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!, which lists lots of them. While I certainly like the idea of getting even more information, the claim that "there are no independent studies" is ludicrous.

While there are some few thousand programmers who get paid to write GPL code, they are WEIRD, and their employers are WEIRD, and the reasons they are in that position are WEIRD.

No, there's nothing weird about any of this. You simply don't understand the economic forces at work. Still, I notice you have retreated from your original position, which was that the development teams of GPL projects will simply dry up and blow away from a lack of proprietary license fees. That's a good start. No matter how baffled you are by this, smart people can and do make money writing and using GPL software.

The logistics don't scale. You may as well tell your careers advisor that you plan to be a rock star, or join the NBA, or become the President of Burundi: it's simply not a viable plan for your future.

No, sorry, you're wrong. Not everyone can be Linus Torvalds, but not everyone has to be. Around 90% of people employed as programmers are working on in-house project or in other ways not producing software for proprietary sale. Most of those people could, and many demonstrably do, incorporate GPL licensed software into the systems they develop rather than writing things from scratch. They and their employers then have a natural interest in contributing to the project, because doing so is more efficient than rewriting or maintaining an internal fork. These people are not rock stars, but they are being paid to contribute to GPL licensed software. This is one of the reasons there is such a staggering quantity of software available under this license.

Again, proprietary license revenues are neither the only nor the best way to collect money for writing software. Read the Bruce Perens paper linked above if you would like to understand.

When will we have a linux version of get the facts? We should compile a list of reason why GNU/linux is better or why it's TCO is lower.

Take a look at http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html.

I suppose, if by "failed", you mean "failed to achieve complete and total domination". They certainly make a profit on their server OS, server tools, development tools, hardware, XBox, ...

I thought I was quite clear about exactly what I meant by "failed": failed to achieve #1 position in the market and profitable status, which is what all the Slashdot articles have been suggesting Xbox 360 will do in the console market. In fact, this latest one seems to think they'll get over 50% market share like they did with Windows on the desktop.

Thanks for spreading more Microsoft propaganda, anyway. As of this quarter, Xbox is still losing money. SQL Server is a distant third in market share after DB2 and Oracle. Entertainment software and mobile devices both run at a loss. Microsoft's developer tools business isn't evidence that they can achieve another big success, because it basically has no competition--if you want to develop Windows applications for current and future versions of Windows, you have no serious alternative.

When it comes to server OS market share, note that most pro-Microsoft articles (e.g. from IDC) deliberately undercount Linux and BSD by only counting sales of boxed product. Restricting ourselves to more statistically valid data, we see that Microsoft's web server market share is a fraction of OSS's. In messaging, Exchange may or may not be #1 in commercial offerings (it's highly disputed), but add in OSS and their market share is well below 50%.

So in short: you're wrong, or deliberately lying.

It's easy to get market share or profits; Microsoft could make Xbox 360 the #1 console by sales volume just by dumping (i.e. selling below cost) even more than they did with the first Xbox. That's not what I call a business success, though.

How freaking sad do you have to be to be convinced that anyone who doesn't rabidly hate the XBox as much as you do has to be a "Microsft astroturfer"?

So I guess you want us to believe you're just an ill-informed idiot, rather than a paid shill? OK by me.