Slashdot Mirror
The Code War-- Software By Other Means
ParticleGirl writes "Suck has a great commentary today about the back-handed, back-stabbing nature of the software industry. The for-profit software industry, that is, of course... What kind of light does this sort of business ethic (or lack thereof) shine on the open-source community, and Free vs. free software?"
> Back then, the coal mining companies wouldn't stoop to such dangerous acts as dumpster diving.
Isn't coal mining a form of dumpster diving from the get-go?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Personally, I prefered the original that was mentioned around here some place over a year ago. But this one also lets you rate your friend or sibling and the say time you do your own.
funky
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This commentary (commentary not investigative article) makes it obvious how absurd 1. how low people/corporations/cmdrtaco will sink when money and power are at stake and 2. how seriously we seem to take this issue when it's been around for years. It's making fun of the problem, yes, but it's not denying that there's a problem. Just because people have been doing this for years doesn't make it any less of an issue. It may be making fun of the "political ramifications that will doom us all" attitude, but it's certainly not hiding the fact that the corrupted system exists.
On a tangent, or parallel, really: just because it's political satire doesn't mean it's not political.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
That's what I thought - but apparantly, that's not true.
Although both projects are GPL'ed, Gnome can use KDE code (their html widget came from KDE 1.1), but KDE can't use Gnome code (the classic example is the threatened lawsuits over kgimp).
For more (admittedly one-sided and rather frustrated in tone) information, read this thread off of the KDE general mailing list.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The commercial software industry may seem cutthroat compared to the open source industry but notice the average age of commercial computer scientists compared to the age of open source CS people. Let's simplify it even more. Know any succesful politicians under 30?
pt
Will the real Richard Stallman please stand up?
By MS's own words and deeds then, Solitaire is a critical part of the operating system {grin}.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Back then, the coal mining companies wouldn't stoop to such dangerous acts as dumpster diving.
No, you'd never hear of a coal mining company hiring private detectives to bust unions, and heads.
You'd never hear of Rockefeller's Standard Oil doing anything illegal or unsavory to reduce the competition.
The software companies are still babes in the woods compared to older industries.
What're you, stupid? Who would you rather have calling the shots, a corporation or a government? Bear in mind that if you don't like a corporation, you are free to exercise the ultimate sanction: buy from their rivals. If you don't like a government (particularly one "strong" enough to control corporation), do you really imagine they give a flying fsck if you vote for another party? In fact, they'd simply outlaw other parties, shoot their leaders and lock you in a concentration camp.
This is one thing the bleeding hearts never understand: it's the free market. Free as in speech, not as in beer. It's free individuals organising themselves as they see fit, and pursuing their goals, and taking their own risks, and earning their own rewards. How can you encourage competition in a world where the prize for success is punishment?
The only real supporters of strong government are the wannabe slave drivers.
The software industry is showing its newness whenever an article like this appears. In the big world competition happens. Anytime I write code thinking to sell it, I'm aware that somebody else is probably capable of writing the same code (and probably better.) A limited number of dollars are being chased so I try to help get my code sold as much as possible. I don't resort to hiring PIs but if the battle got way more intense, I could see it happening. Do I want to know what the competition is up to? You'd better believe I do. Full Stop.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
This kind of crap doesn't have anything to do with software. It has to do with good old fashioned corporate greed.
:)
Spying on each other? Screwing each other over? Unethical contracts? Back stabbing? Welcome to corporate america, not just the software industry.
Software companies may engage in this more than other companies, but if so, it's only because the stakes are higher and larger amounts of money are changing hands. If you made the toilet plunger industry into a multibillion dollar industry that was moving as quickly and savagely as the software industry was, they'd act the same way.
So it probably makes free software look pretty good. Or maybe it just makes us look more and more like extremist dope smoking hippies because everybody knows that tech companies are our economic saviors.
They are, aren't they? Aren't they?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
When companies write code they want to make a profit from it and that is there main concern. Don't be fooled by ANY company that sells software. They are doing it for the money. Yes some may be a little more moral than others but thay ALL are just out to make money! Many people who work at these companies do so cause they like what they do. Now there is nothing wrong with makeing money from software, but when a company screws its users just to make a buck it is immoral.
What really bothers me is that there has been no real inovation in the software industry in 10 years. Neither proprietary nor open source. We still use the same tech we did 10 years ago it is just with more features and faster hardware. I want speach input that works! I want a system that does not crash (winblows and mac) or 'panic' *nix!! ;-)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't want a lot, I just want it all
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
We, the open-sourcers, may be a ragtag bunch, but we can each make our own strategy, forming temporary alliances, and even sometimes gaining support from another "businessman's army". We have at our disposal an array of powerful armaments, but usually settle on a few favorites. Our "commanders" have their position only because of the respect and experience they have earned in prior battles, and must be among the best fighters we have. We don't ask for the army to feed or house us, and may even leave the battles with some regularity; the ranks are usually swelling, though, and make up for their lack of central organization with cunning and dedication.
(Okay, okay, so it's beyond cheesy. But hey, everybody like a little cheese now and then, right? Plus, I haven't had my coffee yet...)
There are several 1 & 2-player versions of Java Nibbles out there, as well.
Nibbles is great.
The Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems
The Software Conspiracy
While there will always be quality problems in software, current practice in many companies is to not even try to do the basic things that tend towards improving software quality. Until the public wakes up and realizes they're being ripped off, and their safety and corporate information being put at risk, we will always have this problem.
One solution is to get every programmer in a company a copy of some good quality tools, static analysis tools like PC-Lint and dynamic (runtime) analysis tools like Spotlight (for the MacOS) or BoundsChecker (for Windows) or Purify for Unix (but apparently not Linux) and NT.
As a Spotlight user and a long-time reader of the Risks forum, I wouldn't dream of shipping a Mac product unless it tested absolutely cleanly under Spotlight and had zero memory leaks.
But it is amazing to try Spotlight on a mature commercial product for the first time. Think you're program's free of bugs? Guess again. I proposed using Spotlight to my manager, on our program which had been shipping for several years and cost $600 retail. It was a serious product for high-end users. My manager said it would be a waste of time because "Our program has so many bugs, Spotlight would keep finding them and progress would be very slow." And you know, he was right. I persisted anyway, and spent three months ferreting bugs out of that program with Spotlight.
There's a lot of tools out there (and there's tools like these for Java too, like OptimizeIt - do you know many Java programs have memory leaks?). You don't have to pick the tools I recommend, but look out for what's available there and make sure you have something for every developer seat in the house.
It will be the best investment you make. The $199 for Spotlight will be paid for in the day it's first used.
And free software writers, I suggest writing free software versions of these. It would be possible in principle to write a special version of gcc, or an command-like option to it, that when your program is linked to a special library all your memory accesses are boundschecked. Note that Spotlight can validate memory reads as well as memory writes.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Thats an easy question - fdisk. Its fairly well written, fast, and I have never had it fail on me so far. Of course, once you run it, the other MS products don't seem to be available, but then Linux & the BSDs offer a friendly and much more functional alternative. Still, I think we should be magnanimous enough to offer Microsoft a compliment on the effectiveness and general quality of fdisk - I recommend it to all of my friends.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
fdisk, followed closely by format. The rest of them suffer feature creep, to the point of being unusable for their primary purpose. Before you all flame on, yes, I know fdisk got a new, unneeded switch in 1997. It suffers too, but one switch in six years isn't bad!!
.sig: Now legally binding!
Backstabbing tactics are not unique to the computer industry and have, in fact been going on for as long as there has been money. They are usually more rampant when the companies involved are not equals, such as in the movie "Tucker". However, even though the small guy usually does lose, that does not mean his ideas die with him. Tucker's cars were the safest being made, and many of his innovations were fairly quickly included in the later models from the big 3 automakers. This is how M$ treats Linux -- only time will tell the rest of this story, of course.
Within open source software groups of equals, I do think there will be the same sort of attacks, but for different reasons. Instead of just being about money, it may be more about ego, pride, (spite? :) -- for example, who can claim the most improvement to KDE in the next release? In fact, I remember a recent article here about a split in this code because of differences in opinion about the direction in which the code was headed (I may be mistaken about these details, but in either case, this is what I forsee happening). I include money because even though there may be no pay now, one could easily parlay their developments into a nice job.
Some sort of centralized planning will no doubt be needed to keep code branches from divergeing too much. Maybe the developers who worked on a current version would accept submissions of proposals of what should be in the next version. They would vote and determine what will be done, and then anyone would be able to code, and become part of the voting group for the next release. This would at least ensure the integrity of a project in a version-to-version evolution, however, I think it would be difficult to keep any original grand vision intact. Do any of the more advanced open-source projects work in such a way? How successful have they been?
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
To be fair to Suck, their piece was humor. Its a shame to see Slashdot report this like everything they said was well-grounded factual reporting. Even Suck didn't pretend that.
Yes, I suppose thats why the humor icon was used to denote the article. Those sneaky slashdot bastards!
-- iCEBaLM
You forgot VIM/Emacs!! And what let's not forget the true/false controversy...
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Solitaire is probably the most useful. Keeps users from poking around in places they shouldn't ;)
It's about time somebody said it.
/.! Money bought a law.
Yes, money buys ethics, and it's even more true than you say. Money doesn't just buy the perception of ethics through marketting and advertisement, as you say. Money makes things right.
Witness the RIAA sponsored 'work for hire' copyright rider on the Satelite communications Law that was recently mentioned here on
Now Law is the definition of Ethics for our culture. Individuals define ethics and morality for themselves, but that's just an opinion. When you are in violation of The Law, you are in violation of what society thinks is right.
If money can buy a law, then money can define what society thinks is right, and furthermore, what wrong actions are penalized. "Oooh! He copied a song on Napster! He broke The Law!"
But then again, we've always know this to be true. We all know The Golden Rule - He (and it is invariably a He) who has the Gold, makes The Rules.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Backstabing goes on all the time in the Opensource world. It happens when you download a set of Debian floppy disk and install it without making a donation to Debian. It happens when you buy magazines like Maximum Linux install those distro's that ship with the magazines, without buying the boxed set. It happens when you turn your nose up at the thought of even buying a boxed distro because it's too much when you can download what you want for free.Thats ok though, because people fuck with people all the time,but correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the Opensource movement was supposed to be based on the idea of a "gift" culture. You know, I give you something and then you give something back? All i see are a bunch of kids complaining about the high cost of software and turning to Linux as a solution. I wonder if the Opensource Movement would be as strong as it is today if Microsoft desided to drasticly lower thier prices,I'd say $25 bucks for windows 2000 would be a real deal,M$ wouldn't lose anything by it, maybe they could have a special promotion, give us your Linux floppies and burned in cd's and we'll give you a free copy of any particular windows distro you want. Sure the commercial software world is dog eat dog tough, but it works. If the Opensource method of development ever fails it will be because it's users don't contribute enough or support the coders of it's projects and ultimatly developers give up on Opensource because they have to eat!
I keep waiting for the day Bill Gates gets kidnapped and replaced by an open-source advocating look-alike so we can make M$ Flight Sim opensource and multi-platform. That's the only M$ program I can remember ever being impressed with. When they bought that one they made a good choice. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.
It's a rule that has been around for OVER 2,000 years, and it holds even more true today.
[much pointless ramble on how much I agree deleted]
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Suck. I love the name. It's interesting (and unoriginal?) that Business Week did a story about this topic on July 17, 2000.
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
ask slashdot? Nah. How about a poll? Then we could b*tch to our hearts' content about our favorite product not being an option. Plus, no mailbombs; no one takes polls seriously.
That link to the front page of Suck will point at a new article tomorrow. If you want to see the article Hemos is talking about later, check out the Suck for 11 August 2000.
Yes, the Suck piece was a parody, but every parody - by being a parody - brings attention to some aspect of reality. In every myth there is a kernel of truth.
:)
/.'ers a little credit, would'ya? We're not all idiots.
Portraying Bill Clinton as a chubby, child-molesting hill-billy red-neck is a parody; but it focuses and exaggerates some aspect of the subject.
A truly successful parody is one which does not require excessive suspension of disbelief. Like a good Troll, it starts out totally plausible, and gets deeper and deeper - and you fall for it, hook, line and sinker. Only later, do you realize that it is in fact making drastic fun of something more subtle. That realization then makes you consider the subject being parodied - it forces you to think about an issue that you would normally overlook, or dismiss.
This is why a good parodical troll gets marked as informative, insightful, eventually funny and ultimately overrated and flamebait, without once earning the deserved Troll.
Everyone (almost) realized that the Suck piece was a parody - after all, it's on Suck! Duh! (Doing otherwise is like taking The Onion seriously. If they put big "blink" tag disclaimers on the article, saying "THIS IS A JOKE!", it would have ruined the joke, right?) The subsequent discussions and outbursts are centered on the issue the piece presented; the theme and not the plot, if you will; while continuing the plot. Give
Maybe you're the one who "didn't get it"?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
So THAT's what you have to do to be successful in the software business! Geeze... I've spent the last 20 years writing software. *sigh* Well, at least that explains why you guys have all the cool geek chics while all I've got is a clapped out Ford Escort - and that's borrowed! :)
The free software community has a lot of competition, holy wars, and other such nonsense. The best example, I think, to apply to this would be KDE and Gnome. Both are quality projects (no, I won't start a flame war here :), and both have similar goals.
:)
There are a lot of community holy wars between the two, but I think what makes the free software community different from most commercial software interests, is that there is acctually intelligence here, because the projects are being managed by the people that understand them, not by the guy the company hired in marketing that just happens to have taken one class in high school in pascal which makes him smarter than you.
Of course, its possible I'm totally off base considering the caffiene content of my blood right now
The software *Industry* is just that, an industry. What makes us think they'd be anymore fair and just than any other industry out there? Hell, almost every software company I can think of should have union the working conditions are so wretched. Check out the good dossier on Old Tricks in The New Economy for what really happens. Maybe this will knock some sense into all the teens out there reading /., thinking that a life of luxury and leisure awaits them as office drones...
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
Everyone has their own agenda. Some people cheer for Windows, others rally for Linux. Some people take their causes further than others, and people with vested interests tend to take their causes the furthest.
Business in general tends to take the view of "do whatever you can get away with". Industrial espionage is not new. It may be to the computer industry, but that's only because the computer industry itself is fairly new, and with relatively few big players.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
A determined corporation with a little ingenuity can do anything it wants. It spends a little money on its Human Relations and the employees think it's the greatest place in the world to work. You spend a little money on Public Relations, and the general public forgives your sins. You spend a little money on lobbying and the government plays into your hands. If some young hotshot from the government ever decides to oppose you, you spend a little money on lawyers to keep him occupied while you continue on with what you do.
corporations can buy ethics with money - that is to say, with enough money, distributed in the right places, only the thinking minority will ever think a company unethical.
wish
---
Now, whether you can _make_ them understand this is another matter. Perhaps it is simply impossible to teach corporations morals and ethics. In that case, I'd consider it evidence that perhaps they should _not_ be treated as people under the law...
On another note, it was mentioned previously that the cyberpunk culture has been anticipating in dread a world controlled by ultramegacorporations. A world in which individuals supposedly feel powerless against these behemoths. A world in which governments (and hence military, police and intelligence forces) apparently are merely pawns to be pushed around by these corporate beasts. A world in which the all-important Market, a million-headed Hydra consuming everything in its path, cannot be killed unless every head is squashed simultaneously. A world of exploitation of millions of people for no other reason than they don't have as much of this imaginary money as their exploiters. A world of behaviour modification, excessive social repression, isolation, and bizzarre psychological disorders. A world that does not value the unique characteristics of individual people.
Since the end of World War I we have been treading the path toward this world, sometimes with joy, sometimes with the horrible knowledge that we are going to fsck everything up (depending on what mood is more "newsworthy"). When the US president after World War II declared that "the purpose of the American economy is to produce more consumer goods", this set the precedent for the rest of the century.
The twentieth century was strange, as centuries go. Consider the impact of technology here: the automobile, the television, the myriad of household labor saving devices and subsequent proliferation of divertainment devices. All this time freed up so that Consumer Dogma may be absorbed from the various media.
Of course, the dogma doesn't have to be direct. Most of the time, watching the vast majority of TV shows, it is an assumed fundamental axoim on which TV-Reality is based. Thou shalt consume and shut the fsck up.
You might beleive that something is fundamentally wrong with the way all this is set up, but you don't know who to complain to, and you doubt anyone would listen, because you're possibly young, and what would you know?
Here's what I think:
Governments should exert much tighter controls on corporations. 1. Their size should be limited to a market cap of (say) ten billion dollars, for starters. This will not only encourage competition and help prevent monopolies, but create jobs. Adam Smith would be happier with that. 2. Corporations should not be allowed to hold stock in other corporations. A corporation is not a human being and should have not nearly as many right as a human being. 3. Directors and executives should be made personally responsible for the actions of the corporation, including bankruptcy. 4. Corporations should not be allowed to do in foreign countries what is illegal in their home country, to prevent sweatshop slavery and raping of natural resources.
Corporations will always evolve to survive in changing market conditions (of course, those that don't survive are replaced by a better-adapted competitor). This is why governments should have no fear in tightening the leash on corporations, instead of pandering to them (which sickens me to watch).
Therefore, everyone who is pissed off about this kind of stuff should be making lots of noise about it. If everyone told the governments of their respective countries, either at the ballot box or in writing or in protest, what's pissing them off, then that would be something acheived becuase whether the action is successful or not, more people will be made aware of the source of the problem.
--
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
That is the first site I've visited in weeks where I didn't mind waiting for the graphics to download.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
All we need now are flying cars. Where are my flying cars?
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Isn't this exactly what the cyberpunk genre has been predicting for decades? A world run by gigantic corporations, who wield power as ruthlessly and viciously as any faschist government.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
No, that's akin to walking up to a commericial provider, slapping them in the face and challenging them to a dual. No backstabbing involved.
does no one on this fscking web board understand humor? suck.com's article is parody (and mockery), not insightful reporting on some important-undercurrent-in-software-with-political- ramifications-that-will-doom-us-all.
> Well, don't we backstab commericial providers from their lawful income when making free software of same kind?
I hope you're not saying that Linux is cutting in on someone's entitlement.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Suck has a great commentary today about the back-handed, back-stabbing nature of the software industry. The for-profit software industry, that is, of course... What kind of light does this sort of business ethic (or lack thereof) shine on the open-source community, and Free vs. free software?
Suck has a bunch of allegations so weak even it doesn't try to justify them. Come on, Suck's article said exactly nothing. It claims some industry executives do bad things. It doesn't cite a single example, beyond Ellison's famed dumpster-diving. And interestingly, that was nothing to do with software development, it was related to the Microsoft anti-trust matter. Its not like Ellison was actually stealing source code...
To be fair to Suck, their piece was humor. Its a shame to see Slashdot report this like everything they said was well-grounded factual reporting. Even Suck didn't pretend that.
Of course, I've worked in the industry long enough to know that unsavory things happen. Good and noble things also happen. Most of the time what goes on is just plain hard work, neither particularly good nor particularly bad. Welcome to the world of human beings, where people sometimes do good things and sometimes do bad things.
Sailing over the event horizon
What exactly is the point of this story? That software companies should hug each other and sing teletubby songs while playing happy games?
/., which succeeded.
Of course companies are going to stab each other and fight it out. It's called capitalism.
In any case, I don't see any relevance to free software or open source, which basically seems the obligatory tag-on to get the story published on
As for back handed back stabbing, here's a newsflash - so long as it's legal, anything goes. That's how it's always been. Welcome to the real world.
And the cartoons weren't funny either.
w/m
I think they bought that technology from Norton utilities. At least at one point the two looked almost identical. With the latest NT-based windows they just rely on DiskKeeper (they bought the it to put in the Windows 2000 defrag).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Why anyone is mentioning my favorites?
Gorilla.bas and nibbles.bas!
They were a fun and great experience.
And they definetely were Open Source.
Fh
Isn't every debate w/Linux a mini holy war of it's own? I can't count how many snide remarks I have heard about BSD/Linux camp
I would venture to say that because people put their hearts into the projects
For example, what would you say if there was a 'Ask Slashdot' about which is your favorite Microsoft Product?.. Rob would get a mail-bomb if that went through..
anyways.... I have never seen a more emotional holy-war driven passionate band of cowboys in my life. I hope it doesn't ever change!
--------------------