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
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
pt
Will the real Richard Stallman please stand up?
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.
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
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...)
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 $199 for Spotlight will be paid for in the day it's first used.
And free software writers, I suggest writing free software versions of these. It would be possible in principle to write a special version of gcc, or an command-like option to it, that when your program is linked to a special library all your memory accesses are boundschecked. Note that Spotlight can validate memory reads as well as memory writes.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Thats an easy question - fdisk. Its fairly well written, fast, and I have never had it fail on me so far. Of course, once you run it, the other MS products don't seem to be available, but then Linux & the BSDs offer a friendly and much more functional alternative. Still, I think we should be magnanimous enough to offer Microsoft a compliment on the effectiveness and general quality of fdisk - I recommend it to all of my friends.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Backstabbing tactics are not unique to the computer industry and have, in fact been going on for as long as there has been money. They are usually more rampant when the companies involved are not equals, such as in the movie "Tucker". However, even though the small guy usually does lose, that does not mean his ideas die with him. Tucker's cars were the safest being made, and many of his innovations were fairly quickly included in the later models from the big 3 automakers. This is how M$ 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
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! :)
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
---
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!
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.
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.
This of course is troubling, since it is the blatant suppression of risk information to the public, but the article and related articles also touched on how, in the new corporately-directed academia, subjects like English, Classics, and yes... Ethics are completely falling by the wayside. Nowhere is this easier to see than in the words of some Slashdot geek posters- technically brilliant, yet ethically illiterate.
In some cases, it's sarcasm- it's hard to tell whether jabber is being intentionally outrageous as a joke, or to provoke a response. In other cases, it's no joke, and the people honestly know no better.
It's very much like the moral/ethical equivalent of a VB programmer (better yet, an HTML 'programmer' doing entirely MSHTML) insisting that there is nothing beyond that level- that what programming _IS_, is clicking buttons and operating 'wizards', and anyone claiming differently are full of themselves.
When viewed in this context, it's easy to see the error- to Slashdot readers like kernel hackers and security gurus and John Carmack, it's obvious that programming does not stop with the operating of Code Wizards, does not stop with Frontpage and HTML. It's glaringly self-evident that there's more to it than that.
To someone who's read a lot of classics, who's _studied_ ethics and morality with a certain amount of academic rigor (such as you don't get from school these days), the claims of slashdottenlibertarians are equally astonishing, and it's just as self-evident that such claims are not simply wrong, but even Considered Harmful (tm). Morals, ethics are _arranged_, they do not simply arise from the interactions of utterly self-interested individuals. They have a societal value that is more powerful than their individual value. Read some real philosophy- Confucius' "The Analects" on ethics, Plato's works involving Socrates for a taste of just how easily your beliefs can be tied in knots when you haven't thought them through, Thoreau for a taste of what it is like to not worship self-interest as a god, for what it's like to seek more than that out of life.
The bottom line is that the ruthless pragmatist approach, personified by the corporate 'persons' that surround us, is only one approach, and it is a destructive approach, with no future in it. Survival dictates that those of us who can, _must_ attempt to fall back on ways of thinking which have better societal survival value. This is very well demonstrated by the free software movement- which very directly places societal wellbeing ahead of the rights of individuals to profit from and withhold their works- and in so doing, tangibly gives all those 'oppressed' individuals access to far more than they could ever generate on their own.
That's the way society has always worked, folks. The future didn't belong to the first guy who made an axe, killed everyone else in his village who made axes, and became the lead hunter. The future went to the villages where everybody was cooperating in making axes, where the social expectations were that people would till the fields, would take care of things that needed doing even if it didn't benefit the individual all that much. Cooperation is a survival trait- a SOCIAL survival trait.
The people who are espousing the 'morality' of the gunpoint, of the 'I win, that is what morality is', are doomed- because yes Virginia, there is a reality, and your decision to place your own profit ahead of any other consideration does not affect this reality one iota, nor protect you from the consequences that you wish to simply ignore. And when the bill comes due, you can rant all you want about how _immoral_ it is for anyone to limit you or restrain you the slightest bit- you can rave about how unfair it is, don't people understand that you WON?
But society must survive- and if you place your interests ahead of society's, you'd just better hope that you don't end up getting in the way, or your protests will be ignored as you get steamrollered- because morality and ethics do NOT boil down to 'he who wins, wins'. Nobody is so completely immune from the requirements of interacting with society as that...
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!
--------------------