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Just the other day, I was reading the infamous Halloween Memorandum that MSFT released. (In case you don't know, it's a briefing for MSFT execs. on the OSS movement, with a particular focus on Linux). While, frightening in many ways, it brings up some interesting points about OSS, one of which in particular is that most successful OSS projects start out trying to recreate existing software.

While this replication may be viewed by some as a lack of creativity, those with an engineering backround will see the strength and resourcefulness of it.

As any introductory engineering text will tell you, the key to a succesfull, manageable project is having a well defined product specification. Replicating an existing product allows the OSS developer to focus on the early organization of the project, as opposed to fiddling over details such as the provided feature set (not to mention the lack of deadlines imposed by the financial side of things).


If Apple can make a marketable, user friendly Unix-based operating system, what's to stop us from doing the same? If nothing else, it will be an excuse to get rid of X Windows for good.

Apple's hit some major points with MacOS X, primarily of which is the inherrent strength of Unix, this is something the OSS community already knows about. The big thing here is that where Linux has been fighting to stay truthfull to the existing codebase, and continuing to use Xwin, OS X threw it away.

What's to stop somebody from developing a Linux Distro that mirrors OS X? We've been strugling for years to find the "Linux your mother could use", and Cupertino has shown it to us. All it takes is getting rid of the kludge that is Xwin, and comming up with a decent GUI (Speaking of, what ever happened to the Berlin project? I can't find any real info on it...) and some user friendly config tools.

As a bonus, we could engineer the new GUI to compatable with the Cocoa/Aqua APIs, allowing for source level compatability between the two systems, finally making Linux development justifiable to a large number of commercial software companies. Wham, two birds dead, and we've still got more stone to go.

Where right now, Linux is still the domain of 'geeks' (as most of the world considers those who can use a CLI), we wouldn't just be making the system 'user friendly enough' for mother, this might finally make Linux the user-friendly choice.
If linux drops the ball on this, there's always the Hurd, which, might arguably be a better choice for this than Linux, as both the Hurd and OS X are based upon the same micro-kernel...

Of course, with big names like IBM and SGI pushing Linux, I'm suprised this hasn't happened yet. Perhaps this is what Sun had in mind when they started their 'Gnome Foundation'...

"Why do so many people have trouble accepting the fact that life is not fair? Even if you really, really, really want something, you still have no right to property belonging to someone else."

My initial premise is that you don't have right to own knowledge in the first place - an idea that you're not addressing, just hurdling. But you bring up some interesting points.

"This sort of "logic" comes up so often in public health debates and all it really reflects is that the person voicing it lacks critical thinking skills. Taking the creation of someone else is a good way to ensure that they either prevent you from doing that ever again or stop making things."

By this logic nothing was ever created before intellectual property laws.

"Consider - it would be infinitely more productive if everyone who complains about those evil pharmaceutical companies would instead conduct or fund research into public-domain equivalents. Why don't they do that instead? Well, it's expensive and hard to do; the people who can do the hard work and their backers might decide that after all that effort they'd like to have something show for it."

Agree, and I did mention that certain endeavors need to be given a profit motive.

"The only way communism (which this is a form of) works is if everyone involved is willing to put the welfare of the group ahead of their own and has a sufficiently broad definition of "group"."

Here is where you leap the track a bit. Communism is for the distribution of all material. I believe I have the right to my bicycle exclusively, communism does not. My rant against intellectual property is that it corrals knowledge which - IMHO - is evil. Again, you can have a copy of my poem without depriving me of my copy. This is a Good Thing.

"Linus didn't waste time whining that (Microsoft|Sun|IBM|DEC|etc) didn't give away their source code"

No, but Stallman did. And it's worth noting that Stallman and GNU is something that quite literally made Linux possible. This is obviously not a new or uncontrovertial subject and not something that is said with an eye toward a flamewar (others; read that twice if you need to).

"Does anyone think things would have been the same if someone had stolen the source?"

Probably worse, or at least that's what the folks at Microsoft think based upon their leaked Halloween docs.

• "Decent food and sanitation would help at least one order of magnitude more people than an AIDS treatment."

  Agreed.

• "Widespread use of condoms would not only take care of AIDS but also reduce the birth rate enough that children aren't doomed to poverty and disease because there's too little money providing for too many people."

  I agree with the former, everything after "because" is debatable.

• "There's a perfect cure for AIDS which is completely free: don't have sex with anyone you don't trust with your life. Oops, that would be the smart thing to do and requires personal responsibility, too. Never mind."

  Flamebait.

• "The most important change, however, would be political. There have been countless stories about grain shipments rotting on the docks while the political leaders decide whose tribe gets the most. Money which could have been spent improving an entire country is instead lining the coffers of the resident dictator and his friends. Supplies are often sold on the black market, again to benefit a well-connected few."

  I see a conflict here between #2 and #4. You say there isn't enough to go around but then admit there is a political and/or greed factor that prevents existing resources from being distributed equitably. I agree with this and would suggest that it precedes #2.

Again, unless you believe that IP is morally reprehensible. If you want to debate the ethics and merits of IP, that's great. What I object to is Nicholas taking Napster, interpreting the users actions in a narrow way then foisting his notions on the entire "Free Speech" crowd. Your reply to my post is far more well thought out than his essay.

My .02
Quux26

"...KDE made the mistake... of basing their software on QT, which at the time was not free software."

Interesting that the QPL is listed in the open-source website as being "free software."

(IIRC, they didn't modify the QPL; they just adopted the GPL the other day.)

This is an excellent idea. We haven't had sufficient resources to create a matrix of license compatibility. Would you volunteer to do such a thing? If you don't have that much time, then at least you can support us by linking to us, and show companies that you think OSI certification is important. Now that we have 501(c)3 approval, we're going the rounds, looking for donations. We'll only get them if we're appreciated (and that is how it should be). So when you see an open source product, ask if it's OSI Certified Open Source.
-russ

I'm a programmer, now a lawyer... TO hell with your 'license' crap.

That's exactly WHY I bother to be on the OSI board: so that programmers can look for the OSI Certified Open Source certification mark, and be comfortable developing and redistributing their improvements.
-russ

Heck, if it's only a few thousand, finding an individual sponsor shouldn't be hard. Linus lashed out and bought a BMW roadster, perhaps he'll lash out and buy a book? I know I would, if I were swimming in money, but I'm not Linus (or Eric etc).

You left them alone in the room with a penguin!? Mr Gates, your men are already dead.

Well, it happened to Vinod Valloppillil... (-: Remember Nat Brown's "No 2-day NT drivers" statement? :-)

The point: They All Suck. But Linux sucks less, at least based on my experiences. =)

It's not a secret that both have security holes; however, with open source systems, the security-related bugs tend to get fixed in finite time.

What is "dogma", then?

Dogma \Dog"ma\, n.; pl. E. Dogmas, L. Dogmata. [L. dogma, Gr. ?, pl. ?, fr. ? to think, seem, appear; akin to L. decet it is becoming. Cf. Decent. ]

1. That which is held as an opinion; a tenet; a doctrine.

2. A formally stated and authoritatively settled doctrine; a definite, established, and authoritative tenet.

3. A doctrinal notion asserted without regard to evidence or truth; an arbitrary dictum.

Syn: tenet; opinion; proposition; doctrine.

(Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913)

So: Dogma is an opinion handed down from above. Call me paranoid, but using "dogma" in this case smells of FUD-spreading - "The Linux Folks are Believers, and Taco is their Pope". Believe me, I have seen a lot of ugly MS trolls telling us what they think of "Linux Believers"... and I'm bored.

The fact, with or without opinions, is that Windows has showed itself to be less secure, or that security bugs have been fixed later than in case of open source projects (need I remind of OOB?).

Bah, get the hence, AC... =)

Is it just me, or is assuring the quality of open source projects (both in terms of openness and functionality) more or less impossible? I mean, by its nature, open source holds no associations to any governing bodies that carry sway. There's the argument that accepted standards organizations for open source just don't exist, but that's not even true...it's more a case of public trust being a fickle thing.

Industries that market tangible products have no problems creating standardization bureaus and bodies, usually because these sorts of things can be governed in turn by governments, by qualified authorities, by laws. Could the FCC have been created without respected, universally trusted leadership? Doubtful. Who then will take on the challenge of developing an overseer for open-source?

It has been tried...there are any number of open-source websites that act as collectives for development. There have been attempts to create instituions of authority as well, notably the group led by Eric S. Raymond, the Open Source Initiative, which has had undetermined effectiveness, as far as i can tell. Still, i can't help but think that, currently, excellent open source becomes accepted by reputation, and reputation alone.

I wonder if this lab will have the power to start the responsible monitoring of open source...just an interesting idea. Really, do we even need such a system, or can the open Freshmeat bazaar and word of mouth serve as adequate testing grounds? Sometimes i think it would take an organization with direct influence over the net, like the IETF or ISOC to get the ball rolling...from innovators to watchdogs.

If anyone else knows of any other certitification programs for open source, i'd like to hear about them.

-j

It looks as if none of the approved opensource licences fit your bill. Forth is apparently a breed apart. I would recommend patching the BSD licence to include "as well as the source code of the original program" after "the above copyright," in clause 2.

Or perhaps the OSI? Don't they have it trademarked? If so, it's a pretty clear cut case of defamation, right?

PGP's source is published, but the restrictions on changes and redistribution mean it does not meet the definition of Open Source promulgated by the Open Source Initiative.

Several months ago I saw that Deja.com was not providing an open access to Usenet and programmed a solution for it. My project is hosted at sourceforge..

My girlfriend has started a company for it and we now try to keep this free service in operation. Our operational costs are $90/month and we need a few daily visitor to break even. The advertisement income would cover our hosting cost. The advertisements are not yet on-line, but will need to be soon.

In the spirit of Open Source the full Usenet archives can also be downloaded.

Check out the open source usenet archive. If you would like to contribute source code to this Open SOurce project, or want to run your own deja.com-like server, please send me and e-mail.

I don't think they were Open Source according to the Open Source definition... but in the sense that you got the source...

Or were those programs excluded from the general license terms of MS DOS?!

--

Its just human nature. Get over it & get into it.

The source for POVRay is freely available, right? Then it's open source.

I don't think you're being helpful with the terminology. The term "open source", "opensource", "Open Source" or however you spell it is universally understood by slashdotters to mean that its licence complies with the Open Source definition. POV-Ray does not comply, therefore it is not open source.

Yes, POV-Ray's source is "freely available" for some definition of "freely" (that's a can of worms in itself, so let's not go too farther down that track). So is PGP's source, but you wouldn't call PGP "open". Merely being available doesn't make it open. In particular, it's not open if it discriminates between commercial and non-commercial redistribution.

If you mean to say the source is available at no cost, say that. Please don't confuse well-understood terminology by redefining it.

This would be a copyright violation.

Looking at the first clause is all that is necessary:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

I suppose if you distribute the code via Napster the copyright doesn't matter. :-)

It's difficult to find good evidence on both sides of the argument for Open Source. For the record, I'm definitely in favor of open source (especially if your company has no competency in software). In any case, I've included some pieces of evidence, not necessarily in favor of open source per se, but perhaps a bit more generally about dealing with an open community with regards to development.

• Luc Barthlet's "The Simulation Sandbox"
  Actually an overview of "The Sims" before it came out, but the end of the lecture discusses how they used immediate Internet feedback to improve the design of the game.
• Linux GNOME FAQ
  Hidden in the depths of the FAQ in the section "What CORBA implementation is GNOME using?", is a comment about how Xerox's implementation of CORBA was not used. If this had been open sourced, Xerox's name would be associated with an important part of one of the largest software projects around.
• OpenSource.org
  I apologize if I've being repetitive, but I didn't see this URL earlier. Anyway, this site has some very good arguments in favor of open source. You may wish to take what they have and modify it slightly for your specific purpose.
• Successful OpenSource sites
  Conferences like O'Reilly's Open Source Software Convention, LinuxWorld Expo, open source projects like Apache and MySQL, and sites like SourceForge and IBM DeveloperWorks are showing that Open Source Software (in some cases) is becoming quite mainstream. If you have even one really cool project, that's advertising that no budget could pay for.

Well, I hope this helps.

In the now infamous Halloween Documents, MS made reference to the fact that their IP stack could use improvment, apparently it was suggested that they may wish to release them open-source to try and improve them. The closed anchor is here. Look for a bullet labeled "Put out parts of the source code," it details the fact that they thought the the IP stack needed improvement, and that they were thinking of trying to "tap the resouce" that OpenSource provides.

In the now infamous Halloween Documents, MS made reference to the fact that their IP stack could use improvment, apparently it was suggested that they may wish to release them open-source to try and improve them. The closed anchor is here. Look for a bullet labeled "Put out parts of the source code," it details the fact that they thought the the IP stack needed improvement, and that they were thinking of trying to "tap the resouce" that OpenSource provides.

author: Pulina Borsook
publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1891620789
pages: 256
rating: 8/10
summary: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech

I heard about Cyberselfish when driving around Vermont Memorial Day weekend from used bookstore to used bookstore. The NPR station was broadcasting an interview with Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook, a writer who worked for Wired during its glory years. I was put off by the book's wretched title, but engrossed by the subject: the powerful undercurrent of libertarianism that flows through high-tech circles. I have been astounded but not amazed at the deeply adolescent and peevish libertarian attitudes that so many techies cling to, from gun worship to fear of governmental Internet regulation. Listening to Borsook speak intelligently and cogently about technolibertarianism made me want her book very much.

This month I garnered a copy of Cyberselfish, and I'm still appalled with the title (which comes from an eponymous essay for Mother Jones she wrote in July 1996, when such cyberlanguage wasn't so cybertrite). Cyberselfish is a book-length essay, in fact a somewhat thinly edited series of linked essays. There's a rush of immediacy and wit; for a random example, "Polyamory is the preferred term of art; it's gender-neutral, where polygamy and polyandry are not, and allows for all persuasions of partner choice (gay/straight/bi/it depends)." With the freshness and informality comes flaws. There is too much repeated material in the book. It's clear that essays written at different times have been cobbled together. Reading the book straight through is like reading some multivolume series straight through, in which the characters and history are rehashed at the beginning of each book.

Cyberselfish looks at a few specific examples of technolibertarianism in depth: Bionomics, cypherpunks, Wired magazine, and Silicon Valley's impressive lack of philanthropy. Each time Borsook exposes the compassionless, fearful, posturing, politically myopic core, without dismissing the good aspects of the high-tech culture and individuals. For example, she thinks fighting for privacy rights is good, but obsessing about it and descending into rabid, paranoid ranting on alt.cypherpunks is scary. She moves smoothly from the historical to the academic to the personal, deliberately exposing her own frailities and biases while she examines those of others.

To give a deeper example of the content of Cyberselfish, Bionomics is the use of biological (and particularly Darwinian) metaphors to describe economic processes, as popularized by Michael Rothschild (Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem) and then the The Bionomics Institute (TBI). Borsook convincingly points out through both empirical observation and reasoned analysis that Bionomics boils down to economic libertarianism, where government involvement is wrong and the most cut-throat, efficient and entrepeneurial businesses are the best. Ecological metaphors are used in Bionomics only when they're useful and sexy: The ecosystem of Hawaii was used as a metaphor for the fragility of protected industries. Under Bionomics logic, Hawaii's beautiful, lush, peaceful ecosystem is to be derided. Bionomics uses metaphors to draw syllogistic conclusions. Doing that can be powerfully convincing but amounts to hand-waving and emotional appeals. Borsook cuts through the smoke and mirrors.

After a few years, the Bionomics Institute conferences were (literally) taken over by the Cato Institute, the premier libertarian think tank in the nation. The annual Bionomics conterences began in 1993. The 1997 conference was the Cato/Bionomics Conference; 1998, the "Annual Cato Institute/Forbes ASAP Conference on Technology and Society." TBI morphed into software-startup Maxager, which intends to offer Bionomical tools to companies. Borsook wonders what meaning can be ascribed to the success or the failure of the company. If Maxager fails, is it because it wasn't Bionomically good enough, or just because of the many uncontrollable factors that cause the vast majority of startups to fail? If it succeeds, does it validate Bionomics, or just the good connections the founder has with Silicon Valley venture capitalists?

The other chapters are just as interesting. Cyberselfish sharply describes all the archetypes of the technolibertarians, from the neo-hippie polyandric Burning Man attendee to the Lexus-driving, 100-hour-a-week, plugged-in entrepeneur with a sprawling bungalow in Santa Clara county.

One of the most crystalline passages in the book describes Eric Raymond's leaking of the Halloween Document, written by Microsoft program manager Vinod Valloppillil. The two clearly have vast ideological differences, the open-source cowboy and the Evil Empire functionary, but they're both hard-core libertarians, an entirely unreported fact. In Borsook's words, "It was rather like discovering that both a liberal and a conservative senator had both acquired their law degrees from Yale: no news here."

As I said before, the book is somewhat haphazardly put together, and nearly every sentence is to some degree contentious; even someone who agrees with her basic position will find reason to quibble. Cyberselfish doesn't come near to answering all the questions it raises. Borsook doesn't really tackle the paradox that "libertarians celebrate the cult of the individual" but Open Source celebrates the collective. What does it mean to be an Open Source libertarian?

I personally think it's somewhat unfair to attack those flaws, as they're inexorably part of Cyberselfish's loose, immediate, opinionated, and conversational style. It's kind of like how Slashdot's open forums allow for a review like this and the inevitable "hot grits" responses.

Why so many licenses? Now, this custom-written license for ONE specific product, Interbase. Does this imply that Borland is never going to release source under such an open license? Or will they carbon-copy-and-rename the license for every other "IPL" licensed product?

Is the IPL approved by the Open Source Initiative?

Methinks all these new licenses are bloating the license namespace ;)

--

Of course, the Open Source Initiative is at http://www.opensource.org, not .com ;)
--

Actually, Open Source (tm) is a registered trademark of the Open Source Initiative. You are not allowed to call your product Open Source unless it is licensed after one of these licenses.
--

(Although I must admit that you are correct when you are referring to the official Open Source definition and I agree that it would have been better to give a different example.)

Thinking is one of hardest types of work.

Check this out:

This is precisely why people approach VCs. If you're product's good and you believe in it, then you need capital to start the ball rolling and pay your in-house developers. This model only works if there's a market for support. Zope is a good example and is used on OpenSource.org's business person's case for open source. Paul Everitt of Digital Creations was told to go open source by their VC Verticality, and it looks like it's been a success. Everitt makes a very eloquent case for his open source business decision.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the KDE developpers don't grasp the difference between Free software and Open Source.

So what is the difference?

I've read Richard Stallman's definition of Free Software, and I've read the OSS's definition of Open Source. As near as I can tell, anything that is Open Source must also be Free Software. Which one of RMS's four points does the OSS definition not cover?

• There are already free tools like aide that do the same job tripwire does. I don't have personal experience with any of them, so I cannot vouch for their quality, but I've heard good things about aide.
• Tripwire cannot be open source for linux alone. Either it is open source, in which case it follows the rules of the open source definition, including rule 8, "License Must Not Be Specific to a Product." or, it is not open source at all. Of course, they are welcome to release a version of tripwire that only works in linux, and license it under the GPL -- but then any hacker may go make it work on another OS without violating that copyright.

So, um...it's not Open Source. You can download it from that link because the source code is available under a non-Open Source license. The GLUT license notoriously disallows distributing modified copies, as has been discussed endlessly on the various OpenGL-related mailing lists. You might want to follow the freeglut link, or take a look at the Open Source definition.

• Security
  
  • Peer review of code yields more pro-active identification of problems
  • Source availability allows users to create fixes to identified critical security bugs in a more timely manner -- hours rather than days or weeks.
  • A security paradigm which accounts for multiple users and a network connection from the ground up, rather than a kludge tacked on later as an afterthought
  • Well behaved user applications which do not open themselves up to trivial attack by default a la' MS Exchange.
  • User permissions, preventing a user from doing damange to anyone other than themselves should they launch a destructive trojan, or simply run amok deleting everything they can.
    
  • Kerberos implimentation which doesn't suffer from deliberate attempts to limit interoperability with other systems
  • etc.
    
• Robustness (uptimes measurable in years, as opposed to days)
• Memory management - when programs write to memory which doesn't belong to them they receive faults and are killed, they do not take the entire OS down. This is not true of windows 95 or 98, or NT when running in compatability mode.
• etc. etc. etc.
  

OTOH, I can see MSFT and/or AOL cheerfully supporting this patent and entering into a cross-licensing agreement with BT. Nice way to kill off that pesky free and open Internet.

Remember the Halloween Documents (oohh...hyperlink! That's gonna cost!) and the running themes of de-commodotizing protocols and using IP to squash the competition from OpenSource.

Gordon.

That pretty much sums it up, and from a Microsoft VP, no less. You can pretend that Microsoft is a benevolent company all you want, but that doesn't change the facts.

The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

I see, Microsoft == Evil, so DOC must be created to obfusticate. Very smart of you. Why would a company with the smartest people in the world make life more difficult on themselves by making their own formats hard to read?

From Halloween: "OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."

We *KNOW* that MS is specifically making protocols, not to enhance the experience of the user or add capabilities (although these may also be done sometimes), but to decrease the ability of free software to interoperate.

If someone else else wants to do that, that's fine. It doesn't change the incompatibility between the multiple licenses in KDE's code. Until they're sure they can satisfy the software's licenses, I doubt Debian will touch KDE.

This should probably be 5, Informative IMO because it's dead on. As I've said about as many times as I spent working on this (which means I no longer have any idea other than "a lot"), it's NOT a matter of KDE being non-free or Qt being non-free. KDE is GPL'd and Qt's QPL satisfies our Free Software Guidelines (which are the origin of the Open Source Definition), so Qt v2 IS free software.

The whole crux of the problem lies in KDE's use of code under the GPL which they did not write and have not right to change the license of. If you write some code and put it under a given license, I don't have the right to change your code's license to suit my needs. KDE has done precisely this in spirit. In legality, they are simply committing Copyright infringement. So is Red Hat and any other distribution distributing KDE. What's interesting is the number of messages from Red Hat employees my editorial has garnered trying to explain how market pressures forced them to include KDE even though they knew the final licenses weren't compatible. They agreed to do this back when Troll Tech was actively talking with me and it looked like the license would be GPL compatible when finished.

Market dynamics are apparently more important than legal and moral reprocussions of Copyright infringement. KDE better hope they don't touch my code.

Open Source: (Oh-pehn Sor-ss): Source code for a given application is readily available to those who use the application.

You see. Nowhere in there does it say that the people get the source for free. Nor does it state that you cannot sell the source with the application and restrict the source only to those who have purchased a license.

The license may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost -- preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

This may be a definition of Open Source but it is not the official definition of Open Source. For that you have to visit http://www.opensource.org/osd.html. The official definition of Open Source specifies free redistribution of the software and very easy access to the source code. While it is possible for you to still the source to an Open Source application at a high price your users are free to redistribute it as they wish.

While you can license your software under a license that does not permit those actions and try to call it Open Source you will not be complying with the Open Source Definition and will likely be ignored.

later,
yahzell

And you were too busy flaming to notice that they dropped it because they couldn't agree to who owned it. But, you don't have to take my word for it....

Ask Eric Raymond.

Or if you don't believe him, why don't you ask Bruce Perens?

What part of the Open Source Definition haven't you read?

Why don't you read the Open-Source definition?

This is it
-----
If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.

Sing a happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy song.
Sing a happy, happy... oh, wait. Wasn't it ESR who said he wanted to see M$ defeated by consumer choice and not by the government?
I have to say I agree. Even though M$ is split into two, they're still the same company (in two pieces) with the same ethos and the same terrible software. All that will happen now is that anyone who ate out of M$-Monolithic's hand before will now have to buy their software from two different companies - and it will be the same software!
What we really need is more public revelations of what M$ is really up to - even more so now with the possibility of inter-corporate plotting - such as the Halloween Memos.
So really, nothing's changed. Sorry to disappoint you.

OK for hardware. Microsoft was pretty good. But take a look "inside".
Mouses must be "awakened" by the OS. Why ? Did we really deserve this ?
Remember optical mouses are now 15 year old technology. Ask Sun about it.
Remember USB is a VERY old technology too.
Kerberos existed long before Microsoft used it.
So Microsoft's "innovating" is rather copying.
Also take a look on your negative electrical voltages while Windows 9x is running. Why are they unstable (and stable with Linux, so the power supply is fine) ?
BTW, this is the best method to reduce the lifespan of any electronic device.
So buy hardware more often. It's called quality !
Feel free to take a look at The Halloween Document and you'll see what Microsoft wants for its users for tomorrow: "In order for Microsoft to win, the customer must loose" (halloween document).
Even fanatics can turn to Linux when they realize they have been cheated.

----------------

What is this Linux thing anyhow.. I know I've heard of it somewhere before. Hm.. Oh yeah.. maybe It was here. It's going mainstream you say?

The restriction to Open-Source operating systems is a problem. While you can get away with quite a lot of things under the Open-Source banner, this one violates pretty much every guideline set and "example license" out there. GPL and BSD, the two most popular "example licences" out there, certainly don't allow this. It violates the discrimination clauses of the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open-Source Definition. And on top of that, it's just plain not fair to those who choose to use other operating systems.

I never much liked Motif anyway. It was a great piece of work for its time, but it had too much inertia going for it; it eventually seems to have stopped evolving. When that happened, the other toolkits grew to surpass it. It's a shame, but it happens to every piece of software in time. It's the nature of the beast; when software stops evolving, it is ruthlessly cut out of the marketplace by faster-evolving software, which in turn will eventually be cut themselves.

I think O'Reilly may be running the danger of being hypocritical. I have here a book on C algorithms ("Mastering Algorithms with C", ISBN 1-56592-453-3) put out by O'Reilly. At the opening of the book are the words: "Copyright (C) 1999 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved". If I were to take, say, the chapter on double-linked lists and use the code as a template for my own program, wouldn't I be in violation of copyright law? I mean, code is copyrightable and, infact, the GNU GPL depends on it.

So what does the license on the code say? I find the following in the example file to which you refer:

The source code on this disk can be freely used, adapted, and redistributed in source or binary form, so long as an acknowledgment appears in derived source files. The citation should list that the code comes from the book "Mastering Algorithms with C" by Kyle Loudon, published by O'Reilly & Associates. This code is under copyright and cannot be included in any other book, publication, or educational product without permission from O'Reilly & Associates. No warranty is attached; we cannot take responsibility for errors or fitness for use.

Hypocrisy? Not here.

"OSD/DFSG compliant" - uh, is that something you made up?

Can I read the source? Yes. Can I modify the source? Yes. Must be open source then.

Everything else is just grousing

Although the free in the question is really concerned with software where the binary (without source code) is distributed free of charge to the user. The definitions being confused here are :

Free Software defined by GNU
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
here

``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free speech'', not ``free beer.''

``Free software'' refers to the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

Open Source (according to the Open Source definition - http://www.opensource.org/osd.html - here)
doesn't just mean access to the source code.

there are anumber of qualifying factors which i wont repeat here
.oO0Oo.

OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

Anyone know if the Halloween Documents have been introduced into evidence? Were they allowed?

OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

Anyone know if the Halloween Documents have been introduced into evidence? Were they allowed?

Also, while the source code may be available, the licesnse that MySQL is under does not come anywhere close to meeting the open source definition - with the exception of older versions as you mention.