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MS VP Speech Online
mpawlo writes: "The widely debated Craig Mundie speech is now online." We tried not to run this, but there are too many submissions to ignore. Yes, much of what the guy says is nonsensical. Why not translate it into terms your boss can understand? For example, Mundie says forking code is bad. Here's the same thought translated into manager-speak: "Having multiple vendors competing to offer us the best product at the lowest price is worse than having one vendor who can sell the product to us at monopoly prices." Update: 05/03 8:19 PM by michael : Alan Cox has a response.
If you can prove these things about bill gates, then go ahead, otherwise you take them back and apologize for slanderousness. Bill gates has always imbraced the internet and for you to say that he has not it just down right hateful, the reason why it took a while to get into windows was because it took a while for isp (internet service providers) to pop up! you couldn't get on the internet in podunk, wisconsin in 1995, sure, but that wasn't bill gate's fault.
ed edwards
MS gained desktop marketshare last year.
MS gained server marketshare last year.
MS gained portable OS marketshare last year.
Linux is mainly taking marketshare from the BSDs, Solaris, HP-UX.
Company A sells a product, gruefulbits, and they use Gruefulbits-Magic-2001 software to help them make their product. There are at least a dozen other competing companies that use Gruefulbits-Magic-2001. Company B sells Gruefulbits-Magic-2001. They employ about 10 developers to work on Gruefulbits-Magic-2001. Company A hires a developer to work on a OSS clone of gruefulbits. Assuming it all works, it's more cost effective to hire a single developer for this project than it is to pay licensing fees and constant upgrade charges to Company B. At first the project stagnates, but then the rest of company A's competitors each hire a developer to work on the OSS clone. The project flourishes, company A, and the rest of their competitors, sell more gruefulbits at lower cost because of the superior tool (gnu-fulbits), and nobody is left high and dry except for company b, whom can't compete with the free software clone. No developers lose jobs. They simply move from working for Company B to working for company A and it's competitors on the OSS version. Every arguement I've seen against OSS is always taken from the software company's point of view. For the rest of the world, a world where profits are derived from tangeble goods, the software is just a tool, a part of the overhead expense. To that end, OSS makes the world a better place. It eliminates the middle man (the software company), lowering the total beaurocracy level of society as a whole.
While reading "The Leviathan" (Thomas Hobbes) I came to realize this rare word called "pusillanimity". See how the word contrasts "magnanimity".
.dll : linux is good because of .SO
.tgz or rpm messed up an installation
.net to stop us from occasionally using windows to play games! the bastards!
-------------
Desire of things that conduce but a little to our ends, and fear
of things that are but of little hindrance, pusillanimity.
Contempt of little helps, and hindrances, magnanimity.
Magnanimity in danger of death, or wounds, valour, fortitude.
Magnanimity in the use of riches, liberality.
Pusillanimity in the same, wretchedness, miserableness, or
parsimony, as it is liked, or disliked.
-----
Try also dictionary.com
all reasons : are rational
Microsoft is bad because they sell proprietary software : linux is good because it is open
open software is good because the code can be reviewed : microsoft is bad because no one may review the code
microsoft is bad because they offer only one major OS product : linux is good because there are dozens of variations that work differently than others (though they aim to do the same things)
microsoft is bad because because we linux users feel that microsoft feels that users are stupid and we hate being called stupid.
office is bad because every year or two they charge $200for an upgrade, sometimes it seems like its manditory (being that once in a while MS screws up and makes their formats incompatible) : metaphoricaly speaking, linux (in leu of linux actually having a considerable office product to speak of in this rationalization), is better because "upgrades" are constant and don't cost anything to aquire legally.
microsoft is bad because they charge money for the aquisition of their products : linux is good because it is free
microsoft limits choice and provides "one size fits all" solutions : linux is good because anyone has the opportunity to make his or her or it's own taylored fit software with no special arrangement with satan.
Microsoft thinks users are stupid and makes stupid software : linux users are smart and makes smart software
Microsoft calls linux as not an OS but a general phenomina surrounding a pengwin : Linux calls microsoft by derogatory names like Micro$oft, M$,
Microsoft is bad because they observe the behavors of people and economic conditions : Linux is JUST OBVIOUSLY better than capitolism
Microsoft is bad because they sell software : linux is better because we sell t-shirts
Microsoft is bad because they want to make windows : linux is better because gnus not unix
Windows is bad because its not unix : linux is good because gnus not unix
Windows is bad because of
Windows is bad because install shield messes up itself : never in the history of linux has a
Windows is bad because it has lots of bugs : linux is good because at least someone somewhere in his good natured freetime will bother to fix them
Windows is bad because you pay : Linux is good because you don't
Windows supports good games : Linux can play quake3, the most awesome game in the world, hey if you don't like quake3 reboot into windows... for a little while.. then when your evil commerical.. I mean.. when your evil FREE.. shit.. I mean.. your EVIL non-free gameing experiance is fufiled reboot back to linux where you umm never have to reboot.. at least linux is stable
Windows NT is a crashy peice of shit : Linux never crashes.. well never say never right? it never crashes if you have the latest kernal patched and the latest drivers that are all FREE!
Linux isn't all about stablity : despite some things it may do wrong (that is theoreticaly speaking), overall it doesn't crash much.
Linux is a superior server operation system : everything else is dead wood unix or that NT thing
Windoze is slow : Linux is fast
Winblows takes forever to boot : ?
Linux is more secure : windows is 0nz0r3d
Unix administration is a non-trivial task : Not so with Linux!
M$ is bad because they are all about the interests of BIG business : Linux supports the little guy (for only $25 using simple to use email support in case you cannot connect to the ____ )
M$ is bad because they require you to pay for their labor : Linux doesn't require anyone to pay developers
M$ is bad because they copy everyone elses ideas : KDE looks nothing like explorer
M$ is bad because they intergrated IE with the operating system : hey have you heard that gnome is working on a new browser? Its like KDE's
No wait.. thats not right.. M$ squashed netscape, the cool company it is. Wanna smell my fart? HOT GRITS!! [editor's note, I actually like this reply a lot]
M$ is bad because they'll start using
We shouldn't have to pay anything : information WANTS to be free
++++++++
If the reader still thinks that microsoft is evil, you should think again. Look assholes, people take up the art, science, and engineering programing for whatever humanity requires
NOT TO SATISFY YOUR PATHETIC WANT OF BEATING YOUR BANKRUPT HEART UPON THE GOODS OF CIVIL SOCIETY. YOU MAY HAVE FREEDOM TO SPEAK ANYTHING YOUR HEART DESIRES BUT YOU WILL NEVER HAVE THE LIBERTY TO THE GOOD OF HUMANITY THIS WAY.
If I am mod'ed down to -1 troll I swear I will never read slashdot again. YOU WILL REAP THE REWARDS OF IDIOCY AWAY FROM THE COMMONWEALTH. WHICH IS A CREWL, SHORT, ANTISOCIAL LIFE.
be glad I bothered with you for the last 1.5 years.
-a geek saying meaningfull words. Not arbitrary "stuff" that arbitrarily "matters" to a bunch of loosers.
-and yes I've used linux, nice try.
-and yes I am using productive systems
-and yes I'm not going to say what those systems are.
Well interesting example, because that's exactly how BSD TCP/IP came about (previous stacks were all user space).
However, no sane company would use the government as a code development shop. One, it would take much longer than it would to write yourself, and you probably wouldn't get what you wanted. And two, all of your competitors would have the exact same access to the exact same code, thus negating any competitive reason to have it.
If anything, BSD licenced code (no matter who funds it) could be used lessen the advantage that a competitor has with a proprietary product. We've heard what happend to Sun NeWS when DEC-friendly (:})MIT shipped X Windows.
Yes this is *exactly* the point. How do you think they can attack OSS without this ploy? Check "The Register" about the RAMBUS v. Inineon trial. The only point the judge really agrreed on infavor of RAMBUS was that Infineon had a "look" at it's technology 10 years prior. So here is how M$ spreads fud...ship the 'review code' to some university...that done, call everyone who worked for/wet to school at said University and writes open source a "software pirate" (worse than Napsterites) because the 'may have had some contact with that glase pane. This is the real "virus" that M$ is pushing... I think the word should be sent to all CS departments and Government Labs *not* to accept the offers of these 'Greeks bearing gifts'.
Most NT SA's don't code and don't care about source access. Therefore, to them, "freeware" and "Free Software" are the same damn thing. Solving a problem like using Samba to connect Unix and NT machines doesn't require that you drink the kool-aid, or that it's an appropriate type to stand up and sing the RMS Free Software Hymn.
Furthermore, it's only inside of the incestous little open sores community that "freeware" is considered an insult. "How could that mean person call Free softWare 'FreeWare'?", they run around in complete bewilderment. Sorta reminds me of the Politically Correct folks at university who decided that "People Of Color" was the preferred term, but "Colored People" was a racist term.
...
Apart from the obvious fact that forking code is bad, this was a lame attack on what was actually quite an interesting Microsoft speech [well, a dull speech, but it made some interesting announcements].
It seems Microsoft are embracing Open Source in their own way - the important way, which is to give people access to their source code. No, they're not giving it away, but they are granting access [to some].
For any of Microsoft's ISVs this is a HUGE step for the behemoth to take, and we applaud it.
No, it's not the GPL, and it's hardly interesting to the people reading this site, who want Microsoft's technology for free despite the fact they all hate it [no, I can't work out the logic of that either]. But for large business users who see the benefits of accessible source code, it's a concession, and for ISVs who have spent years banging their heads against MS's bugs, it's a huge boon.
Programmers or development houses are contracted to develop a specific solution for a specific customer. This customer then pays for the delivery of the software. Open source software (and indeed, GPL'ed software) does not affect this proven business model at all. The only problem would be that the customer could then freely redistribute the software or modify it without paying the developer. This essentially prevents the developer from selling the exact same software to another customer.
But it also allows the developer to put the code out into the wild for the customer's competition to see, poke, prod and attempt to break. If I was contracting a programmer to write specialized code for my company I would want the ability to control exactly where that code could be published, especially if it was code I considered core to my business.
Excuse me, the Ministry of Truth has just informed me that East Asia is and has always been Oceania's virtuous ally. Let's give them a big hand! ;)
The simplist way is .NET.
Running like an ASP, the code can run on M$ servers...never leaving M$, therefore, never needing to be released.
Over time, the code gets re-written, and therefore expunged of the GPL.
Completely right about GPL. From my reading of GPL, there is no way in hell to charge more for a program than the cost to distribute--otherwise someone will simply take it and undercut your price. That means that a program that costs $10 to develop has the same market value under GPL as one that takes $1,000,000. And once you stick your code in GPL, there is no way to get it back, ever. You cannot even reuse what you have already developed for new proprietary projects. That code can represent a great deal of capital investment. Is there ever an economic rational for a large company to use GPL?
The NSA's Linux version is from SAIC, I believe. And I'm not sure where a separate agency like NASA falls in the law.
Oddly, the two contentions blatantly contradict each other, when they are juxtaposed explicitly.
Good job pointing out the two main contentions, but I don't think they contradict each other. Stated another way, contentions 1 and 2 are:
(1) OSS is not a viable software model, and any software companies that use OSS are trying to make money off a flawed business model and are destined to fail like a lot of other flawed business models. (Crappy dot coms)
and
(2) These OSS companies (before they run out of cash) can take a lot of profit away from existing software companies.
An analogy: Kozmo.com puts a lot of local mom and pop video stores out of business before finally going out of business itself.
I'm not saying I agree with their speech, but I don't think the two contentions are mutually exclusive.
Obvious counterpoint: Uh, why should OSS software be illegal or even regulated at all? I thought Microsoft was all about free trade?
Microsoft's answer (in the speech) is that the GPL prevents companies that use the GPL from using their work in proprietary software once the flawed OSS company goes belly up. Those OSS projects are locked into the GPL. Except you don't have to pay quarterly fees to a giant software company.
I find it amusing that Microsoft is now complaining about restrive licenses and wants the government to help out. Uh huh.
-Steve
Ok, I know that business and money aren't the be all and end all of life, but that is what the article is focusing on. So my question is: are there any profitable open source companies? Red Hat is the most visible, and they sure as hell aren't posting any profits.
*) Comparing the ludacris failed .com business models with the GPL is just plain ridculous. - Am I the only one who picked up on this?
*) Code forking is bad !! - Can someone tell me why I need vi and vim? It's frustrating to get used to all the comfy cozy features of vim and then sit down at a system that only has vi. I have to unlearn all the features of vim quickly. I guess I sum up my fork feelings with this, "the freedom to fork is good, but actually forking usually sucks".
*) Since when is profitability the only motivator behind producing quality software - It's true that not having a solid business plan is bad for business, but it's not only businesses who use and produce software.
I guess my real point to Craig is, I personally do not care what license my software is available under. To some people it does matter a great deal. I am not one of them. I also do not mind paying for software. I am not a free software nut by any standard.
I currently, and for the last 10 years, make my living using and implementing technology. I need technology that does not suck. This makes my life easier and makes me more money. For the most part Microsoft software does suck in one way or another and this is why I got out as soon as I could. Back in 1996 after playing with Linux on and off for a few years I decided it was usable enough to replace the OS on all the computers I owned. I've been pretty much a Linux only user since then.
After 5 years of using Linux, I have learned that it sucks in a lot too in different ways. Mostly the lack of certain applications for it. Windows accels in this regard. But Linux continues to kick ass in many other ways, and that's why I'm sticking with it till something better comes along.
So Craig realize that most computer users don't care about licenses. As long as the software doesnt suck, it's likely to be a success at least in my eyes.
A company is perfectly allowed to do that under the GPL. They just have to share their modification. Money isn't the problem, it's the freedom.
Also, if you GPL a word processor you will almost definitely be able to sell thousands of copies, as Emacs has currently sold probably millions of copies despite the fact that many people can (and do) distribute it for free.
Your last paragraph supports these facts, but your preceding ones ignore it.
Anonymous Cowards: Proving daily that human beings are innately jerks.
Did you see with whom they're sharing their source? Not to us end-users. Oh, no. That would be too much like *really* sharing. No, it's with ISVs, major companies, and universities. For WinCE, they are sharing with select developers.
No, they are not even talking about sharing their code, but they still talk as if they are sharing their code. Doublespeak, to further cloud the issue.
And, though I am a strong supporter of the GPL and of RMS' ideology, they confused the GPL with Open Source. We've seen this argument from Microsoft before. It was just as fallacious now as it was then.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I'd tack "lobby" onto that list as well.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The freedom to choose has been taken from the public.
However, it is not merely the availability of Free Software as corporate welfare that does this. Also, the market's inherent herd mentality and the effect of "compatibility" also play a large part in the situation.
Suddenly, the ability of a random WinDOS user to suddenly buy and gain full utility from an iMac or a copy of BeOS is lessened or nullified.
End users are infact walled off, and corporate welfare in the form of free code just makes it a whole lot easier for the random Robber Baron to build his end user ghetto.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So?
All that means is that those that who have goals that are specifically against public policy can't indirectly use federal funds to do so.
There is no good reason that you cannot use a Free Software component in an otherwise proprietary system. Merely avoid making derivative works of other people's property.
Software developers in general must avoid this as a matter of common and traditional practice. Infact, the methods by which you would avoid creating a derivative work of Winsock or SDL are the same techniques considered to be best engineering practices in computer science.
Unless you are a spagetti code hack, there's no good reason that you can't happily exploit L/GPL code without the need to give the crown jewels away.
The only real motives for avoiding the GPL are BSDer sour grapes and the fact that GPL tries to prevent EMBRACE & EXTEND.
If you aren't some Robber Baron wannabe, there is no real reason for you to fear or loath the GPL.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sure. That guy ACTUALLY paid for a significant amount of the production cost of WinDOS.
You as a taxpayer have not paid a significant amoutn of any particular federal project. Your argument is as senseless as demanding that the Air Force allow you to take a B-2 out for a spin.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For quite some time there has been this statistic floating around that 90% of all new businesses fail. If this is actually true, then the failure rate of dot.com's is really not that far out of line. It's just that these failures have been a bit more spectacular and public.
However, they are nothing that unusual.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sure it does.
It makes the difference between running "everwhere" and being limited to one particular platform, perhaps even one single MS platform.
Examples? Apache, Sendmail, Oracle 8i, Terminus.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
One need not push Free Software in avoidance of Microsoft crapware. Infact, there is plenty of money to be spent on Microsoft alternatives when it comes to SERIOUS business computing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We also have 50 versions of Doom and Dune 2. Your comment really isn't very meaningful.
OTOH, what data dependencies are caused by a Rogue clone/fork?
IOW, in this instance: WHO CARES!
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What is wrong with putting computer games under the GPL? You GPL the code, not the content. There is no reason to give away your graphics and story line along with the code...that's what makes the game unique.
An open sourced gaming engine would get all of the benefits that open source gives, and you could still pay your developers because people would still buy your game for the content.
1: Free software solutions are frequently a better alternative to the proprietary alternatives. I don't think you'll find anyone on Slashdot that will disagree openly with this statement. 2: Both users and devlopers benefit from access to source. See above. 3: Community development is a superior method of development. This has been proven. Several times over. Projects can move extremely rapidly and pick up quite a few features and squash quite a few bugs very quickly by having extra hands, eyes, and brains working on them. 4: "Open Source" development is a superior way to run a profitable software business. I don't recall anyone saying that. I do recall people saying that "Open Source" sounds more business friendly than "Free Software". Please, if you have proof, send it to me. I'd be interested to see it. 5: Copyrights, trademarks and patents are all evil. I should be able to do anything I want. I honestly don't think people really believe that copyrights and to a limited extent trademarks are evil. If I pour my life's experiences into a book, or I write a work of fiction that sparks the interest of many people, I should be allowed to decide what happens to it for a LIMITED time; that doesn't give my children/grandchildren/great-grandchildren the right to avoid working because I happen to have a creative gift. Likewise, we don't want people slapping the name "Red Hat" on anything and selling Linux-ONE CDs labeled as Red Hat Linux, do we? Patents are debatable, because they give someone a 17-year lock on an idea, and lately they have been given to ideas that are so simple as to be stupid (File-manager dialog boxes, color management, 1-click shopping, associations, etc). People rant and rave on Slashdot about how bad they are when they are abused, and I'm sure some people would rather have them abolished than have them continue in their present situation. However if they were shortened, tightened up, and returned to their original intended-purposes, I don't think anyone (Except the people who are making phat stacks of cash on other people's ideas) will bitch nearly as much.
Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Yes I have. Acording to Microsofts published financial statements of the last few quarters.
revenue from Server OS sales are down. Desktop OS revenue is stedy. Office Suite Revenue is diving.
More than 100% of Microsofts profits comes from the sale of outside investments. In other words they are lusing money elsware. And no, don't blame Internet venuters like hotmail and MSN. Those have NEVER been profitable.
In other words Microsoft is a very profitable bank and investment fund manager
Windows **, Office, Visual **. Those were the only profitable areas for the company and the profits there are down.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
If by "OS" you mean "Open Source", I likely won't be caling you. I don't see Free Software as a very good way to make lots of money.
However, that dosn't stop it from limiting the ability of some other companies to make lots of money.
This is actualy a good thing. It means that even when the money stops flowing the software will keap going.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Which is funny, since the GPL, which is used to enforce software freedom in that sense, is in fact a form of copyright, legally speaking.
--j
I'm a nature photographer.
Points 1-4 are the arguments of the Open Source movement. Points 2 and (to some extent) 5 are the arguments of the Free Software movement.
Yesterday, I saw over LWN.net a little email from ESR predicting this.
It was pretty accurate, although naturally I dont think that the comments were quite as bad as he made them out to be. But hey, what do you expect?
On to the actual content of the speech, one thing I noticed was that this guy kept inextricably tying open-source to open source businesses. This kind of annoys me because one of the key aspects of the open-source community is that anyone with computer knowledge can help out, they dont have to be part a company or anything like that. Not that corporations dont do a lot for the open-source community, they just dont do everything. Another thing I noticed was that he seemed to think that open-source implied GLP. Certainly it does not. There are many, many other open-source licences out there, too many to name. Although I do personally prefer the GPL.
Also, Shared Source sucks for both individuals and for business. Like ERS said, its just a one way relationship. The companies that see the code cant use it, all they can do is modify it for the benefit of Microsoft. This basically funnels IP from everywhere else right into microsoft. Apparently its OK for them to steal IP, but once someone else does, oh man...
Im sure theres a million things that are wrong with this guys logic that I'm missing, but I cant get everything and I'm sure they'll be fully elaborated on in further comments.
God I hate Adelphia Powerlink. If it werent for their shitty servers I might have posted this comment like 20 minutes ago and it might have been near the top and so on...thats it, i'm suing them for irreprible damage to karma.
-- Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people. Guns just make bullets go really, really fast.
As a matter of fact, they really are concerned about security! :)
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It does not matter much, though, Microsoft might be attacking the GPL specifically, but is hoping people will stay away from open source software alltogether.
For sure.
Objective C.
Never in a million years. <grin> Now, Apple is using Objective C, of course, since they bought NeXT. But considering that Bill Gates has a terminal case of not-invented-here syndrome (for under-the-hood stuff, of course,) I wouldn't expect Microsoft to touch Objective C with a 40 foot pole.
Huh? No, I just meant that Objective C, OpenStep, UNIX, weren't technologies that he put his blessing on. He's quite egotistical that way. Remember what he said to Steve Jobs when asked to port some apps to NeXTSTEP? He said, "Develop for it? I'll piss on it!"
As evidence for this, I should mention that even much older and less popular alternatives continue to be supported. I'm now using fvwm, like I have been for the past 6 years, and it has continued to meet my needs and be supported despite the fact that it's mostly ignored by the rest of the world.
Right. An even more interesting example for me is GNUstep. Relatively speaking, almost no one has even heard of Objective C or OpenStep (despite the fact that OpenStep is, of course, the best API ever ;-). However, there is a small number of dedicated and interested people using and supporting it. Even with the growth of KDE and GNOME over the last 5 years, we're still plugging away and making painfully slow but steady progress! I'd like to see any company toil like this for that long with viable alternatives cropping up and still not run out of venture capital! Staying power...
It is no more viral than the commercial license which seeks to 'infect' your pocketbook. Over, and over, and over again.
That's a knee-jerk response, the two aren't really related. Also, you are justifying the kettle by criticizing the pot. Lastly, it's more strong-arming than viral.
Noone holds a gun to your head and tells you to use GPL code. If you don't like the terms of the license, don't take the code. Just as some say about commercial licenses. If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it.
People usually make this point when they have a license that does not play nicely with others. Most people resent that. That said, I completely agree with you. I would still discourage its use in core, intended to be reusable, code. The GPL really promotes the GPL as much as it promotes freedom; as it is practically incompatible with many other (orig. BSD, orig. mozilla, QPL) free software licenses. If, for example, glibc went GPL (note the c++ headers are GPL + exception for 'GNU compilers') I couldn't distribute bsd-licensed binaries for linux. That would suck. When RMS encourages you to release libraries (readline) under the GPL, he's not shutting out proprietary apps. He's just shutting out everybody else. That sucks.
MS is bashing a license that is * totally in keeping* with its own from a legal standpoint
True enough. It is ironic that they don't enjoy their own medicine.
All this aside, I have my own free projects I'm working on (gotta give back and all that), and I hope I'll have the chance to share them with you someday.
oh. hmm. sorry for twisting it like that.
If this is true, then how can the government legally contribute to GPL'd software? It seems to me that the GPL's restrictions are sufficient to prevent legal government involvement in development since it would require the government to break the law by producing code that is GPL'd.
The GPL does not provide a contributor with the option of releasing their modifications or additions under a less restrictive license or into the public domain. It requires all changes and derivative works to be also GPL'd, which the government cannot legally do if they are compelled to release to the public domain.
If my conclusion is wrong, what aspect of the GPL or the restrictions on government IP production am I missing?
Yes, but not if my taxes have paid for the government to develop GPL'd code. In that case, I as a taxpaying business would be prevented from using that code which my taxes paid for, unless I was willing to GPL any product which incorporated that code.
That's unacceptable to me. If my taxes are going to pay for the government to participate in the software industry, then I damn well better be able to use the product of what I've paid to develop. This is why government developed work should be public domain, and not under a restrictive license like the GPL.
Imagine if TCP/IP were GPL'd. We'd all still be using IPX or NetBEUI, since no commercial products would be able to support TCP/IP without GPLizing themselves.
A microsoft employee saying somthing stupid in public. I never thought I'd see the day....
------- Assumption is the mother of all f$#@ ups.
So I guess what you are really trying to say is that you, Microsoft, need to have your markets protected from Open Source, and you want others to agree to help you in that defence because your successful and market competitive Intellectual Property preserving products are not able to retain market share and profitability in the face of their Open Source competitors, and that therefore, because Microsoft is a profitable company that employs large numbers of people, we should all agree to defend it and subsidise it with our hard earned money despite the fact that its products don't actually do what we want at the price we want? Or am I missing something in this new socialist for-the-good-of-the-people please-help-us-do-the-right-thing vision of Microsoft?
--
Shouldn't government created code be under a "free-er" liscense such as the BSD? I'm not trying to troll or flame or whatever. but isn't a part of free speech the right NOT to say anything? I'm just wondering if the value added by the NSA (or any other government org) is properly released under the GPL. I guess i should go skim through old posts as this ground is probly well trod.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
As long our economy depends on having a sole rights to something it will always do the same thing. People will have to pay for material things and then depend on them to deliver.
Many of my clients are not interested in paying for my services to fix or help them with some software the have just shelled out money for. Huh. Common quote. "I just paid $... for this software and it says that it works. Why do I have to pay you to get it to work properly?". It's getting harder everyday to explain this one.
I can't see any good in taking software/ideas or whatever, bottling it up and storing it in the cellar. Drink it. Share it. Lets others appreciate it. Damn it.
There's a lot more money available in the IT industry, in fact probably in every industry, in supplying services and not materials.
You go into MacDonalds and order a Cheese Burger. You pay 95c for the smiling face, the curtious nature and leave with your free hamburger
I know I'd be a lot more forgiving later if I found that the pickle had been left out and had to go and ask why this had happened.
Anyway, that's my rant for the day, so far
Time to help a client. Does this error seem familiar to anyone.
"This application uses CTL3D32.DLL, which is not the correct version. This version of CTL3D32.DLL is designed only for Windows NT systems."
A wealthy man is heard uttering... "My Kingdom for a Knife!"
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
In the past 20 years the velocity of that change has accelerated at a seemingly exponential rate,
Xlation: You need to upgrade more often!
Yes, that explains why this leading tech company rolls out stuff that others created 10-12 years ago (LDAP, Kerberos)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
If anyone is still ignorant about the OSS movement, they will now feel the urge to find out what it's all about.
Precisely. that's why you win after step 3.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
in the KDE vs. GNOME debate, the two streams are incompatible (to a large extent). Either one could be eliminated in favour of the other
Incompatible? What are you talking about? I don't run either desktop, just a vanilla Window Maker, and I have no problems using either KDE or GNOME apps. Unless the projects are deliberately sabotaging each other, I could be running either environment and use the other's apps just as successfully as I do now. (If they were sabotaging each other, OSS means that I could defuse the spurious incompatibilities. Try doing that the next time that MS makes a change and "accidentally" breaks a competing application!)
And, secondly, someone has paraphrased the GPL as, "The Source will be with you. Always." If that big ol' GNOME foot stomps all over KDE, the KDE source will still be there and if I prefer KDE, I can keep using it. And even developing it! Neither one can be eliminated unless everyone comes to a unanimous decision that it's so awful they don't even want it blighting their backups.
With the centralized, shared source approach, upper management can make a decision and force the issue - something that's good for the company, the product, and the customers.
Uh-huh. After all, upper management knows far more about what's good for the users than the users ever could.
I agree with your statement that proprietary code is better for the company. But I'm more concerned with what's good for the users, and on that criterion, OSS wins, hands down.
The GPL only protects intellectual property belonging to the public domain
Nope. GPL code is not public domain, despite the many people who use the terms equivalently. GPL code is still under copyright, which is what allows the viral restrictions on its use to be imposed.
the concept of creating something and making money from it is core to success in today's economy. The GPL removes that right from the creators of the product.
Absolutely not. The GPL makes it difficult to make money by distributing work which has already been done, but does nothing to inhibit payment for doing the work. Even if you can't sell software as a product, you can still sell software development as a service.
And, of course, there's always the option to write your code from scratch without using any GPL code in the process. You are unconditionally barred from using Microsoft's source in your programs; why is it worse to allow you to use my code under the conditions of the GPL?
If you remove thier ability to leverage the creation of their software, and force each customer to pay the entire costs of the software
This one is just laughable... Because of traditionally restrictive proprietary licensing, "Microsoft, Oracle, and other large software development houses" already have to write all their components from scratch. If everything were GPL, Oracle would never have to reinvent another of Microsoft's wheels - each vendor would be able to leverage the others' work as well as their own. This leads to something similar to *nix shell commands: Lots of pieces that interoperate well with each other, allowing a large amount of custom software development to be done simply by wiring a number of existing components together. This is one of the major factors behind the success of Visual Basic, so why not encourage it to spread to all levels and types of software?
Shared source is an excellent way for customers to have an influence in the development process
No it's not. Unless the customers can make and redistribute their own changes to the software (or hire a consultant to do it for them), all new code still has to go through the vendor. Any code which conflicts with the company's plans (or some manager takes a personal dislike to it or a marketer thinks it's the wrong color or...) will be dropped by the wayside and never make it into a released product, regardless of how much benefit it might provide to the users. That's no different from today.
Adapt to *what*?
To the new market reality, of course.
RH (and other linux companies that release GPL programs) doesn't makes money, MS makes billions a year.
They're rich, so they must be right. What about the closed-source-proprietary software companies that went up against MS and went out of business. I'd say it's proof of the viability of Free software that it can actually go head to head against a convicted anti-competitive monopolist and survive, where so many "traditional" software companies could not.
*Why* should I pay for something I get for free?
That's a good question. You should ask Bill Gates why you should pony up $100 for his crappy, second-rate OS and another $250 for his office suite, when you can get Linux and Star Office for free. Several years ago, you couldn't ask that question. Today, you can.
So RH has to work much harder for their money, and they *still* don't make a profit.
MS makes a lot of dimes.
They're rich, so they must be right. Nobody's going to disagree with you that it's pretty sweet to own the monopoly franchise. Most companies have to work a lot harder than MS for less reward.
Explain to me the bussiness model of selling GPL software, please. And how you can profit from it. Support doesn't count, BTW, commercial software makes money from support as well.
I really didn't want to, but okay, here goes.
A significant amount of software is developed for custom ("vertial market") applications. If I can re-use components, I can write your application faster and cheaper than if I have to write it from scratch. Sure, I can license third-party VBXes or OCXes or ActiveX components and leverage somebody else's work, but I'm going pass that cost on to you. If I used free (beer) parts, you'd save a few $thousand. Not that big a deal when you're paying a half $million for an application, but it doesn't hurt.
Of course, Free (speech) software is not necessarily free (beer). Don't forget that. So you might not save any money there, after all. Incidentally, returning for a moment to your previous argument, Free software need not be free. Sometimes the Eskimos don't have a supply of free ice.
The problem with using non-Free components is that they often don't work exactly as you need them to. Sometimes their vendor will work with you to extend or fix their functionality, and sometimes they won't. From personal experience, I can tell you that it can be exceedingly costly to hack a given tool to meet an inflexible customer's requirement when you have to use it in its shrinkwrapped form. With Free software, you get the source. If you need the tool to work a little differently, you hack it yourself. You still pay the provider, if they require it.
What about support? In a vertical market, your customer is going to direct all their support questions to you. If you trace the problem to a part you bought, you can try to pass the request down the line. Every step further from your client diminishes the urgency of the issue. Sometimes your supplier may go out of business or cease to support an old product. You're SOL. If you had the source, you could fix it yourself. Free software comes with source, and the right to use it. With the source, if you go out of business, your client can support the product themselves. You'd never have to worry about "source code escrow" or other silly mechanisms that were invented to CYA in case the owner of "secret stuff" disappears.
If you use Free software, then you can give your client a rebate on the cost of code you write to support their app, because you can reuse it in other projects. And, although they could hire someone else to provide ongoing support, unless you really messed up they probably won't, because you as the author of their application can support it more effectively and less expensively than somebody new.
What about non-vertical market ("shrink-wrap") software?
Because of the terrific economies of scale, the marginal cost of producing shrinkwrapped software is exceedingly low. I've heard that the gross profit margin (sales price less cost to fabricate) on a copy of MS Office is about 85%. MS has some pretty high SG&A and engineering expenses, but they still make a ton of cash, even if not 85%.
There's nothing magical about Office. It's just some basic productivity apps. Basic economics should tell you that, for a high-volume, commodity item, the sales price shouldn't be all that much higher than the marignal cost of production. Why isn't it? Because MS has everyone locked into their proprietary file formats. No, wait, my friend Bill is telling me it's because MS software really is better than the other stuff. Please, don't make me laugh. I might spurt milk out my nose, and then I'd have to sue you. Okay, fine, we'll compromise. Most people don't even know they have a choice.
I know you told me not to count support, but I have to. Because when the marginal cost of production of a commodity item approaches zero, you'll see that it really doesn't make sense to try to make too much money on the original sale. The genie is bound to get out of the bottle sooner or later, as indeed it has. People have figured out that they can give away the software and still make some money selling support. If you knew that you could choose between paying $250 for the inital purchase plus $2/minute or $50/incident for support, or $0 initial purchase plus, say, $25 per incident for support, for otherwise similar products, which would you choose? It sure sounds like a reasonable value proposition to me.
So, bottom line, why should anyone try to make money on Free software? Because they think they can offer a better value proposition to the customer. Whether or not you think GPL software is a good idea, you and Microsoft and everyone else have to accept that GPL software does exist , and react accordingly. You can wish for it to go away (futile), or you can run with it. MS can safely ignore some GPL products (e.g., Star Office) for many years to come, because (a) it's not quite as good, (b) most people don't know it exists, (c) FUD, and (d) proprietary file format lock-in. With others (e.g., operating systems), they can't be so complacent.
So how do you deal with the reality of Free (and/or free) software, since it quite clearly does exist? It's a little late to base your argument on the premise that the world not have free software at all, so any arguments in that direction are only wishful thinking or straw man arguments.
One way is, differentiate yourself. Take a good thing and make it better, and see if people will give you money for doing a good thing. Another way is, sell services. Assemble bundles; perform QA validation; integrate systems and support them. A third way is, do something special that nobody else is doing. Sell a proprietary app that runs on a Free foundation, or take contracts from people with special needs who are willing to pay for something that everyone can have, just so that they can have it too. The $100 million that Red Hat made last year had to come from somebody.
If you're feeling defeatist, you can also just recognize that the rules have changed; stuff that used to be exclusive is now common; you can't think of a way to profit under the new rules; so you quit while you're ahead, give all your employees and stockholders a big bonus; liquidate your business; and retire rich and happy. Once upon a time, you could make a pretty good living just selling DRAM memory, when it took $2000 to max out a personal computer. Today, I can max out my machine for $200. That SIMM merchant can find something new to sell, or retire knowing (s)he did a good business while it lasted.
Then, of course, there's all the dirty, underhanded tricks we all know about, manipulating society, laws, and the marketplace to try to snuff out this quaint little movement that has the audacity to try to give the little guy a fair shake. Why anyone would want to take this low road through the slime and mud, I can't imagine. I suppose a select few could benefit from this, even if it harms society as a whole.
You know, people are pretty smart. Give them a sandbox, and they'll figure out a way to build a sand castle. Give them some free tools, and they'll still find a way to make a buck; they'll be happy because the cost of their tools won't break their wallet, and their customers will be happy that their product will cost less and carry less risk, and everybody will be better off.
I can't for the life of me imagine how it can be bad to start everybody off with a better sandbox. And that's what Free software is all about.
Michael on code forking: Here's the same thought translated into manager-speak: "Having multiple vendors competing to offer us the best product at the lowest price is worse than having one vendor who can sell the product to us at monopoly prices."
Look at that, then think about it. Code forking hardly gives you the same product from both parties...In fact, that's why forks happen. It is usually over drastic differences of opinion about which way a project should go. These often lead to incompatibilities. This is what MS is finally trying to correct - especially with WinXP merging the NT and 9x product lines.
Your portrayal of code forking as a good thing with no potential downside is just as irresponsib;e as MS execs saying code forking is a bad thing to be avoided. Sometimes therre are valid reasons, others there are not.
What the corporate environment wants is standardization. This isn't true of all corporations, but in general they want to pick something and use it exclusively. Note the large contracts companies have, usually with one or two OEMs. In most companies, MS is the software of choice. They want to have Windows and Office on every machine, and they want everything to work the same. MS is trying to do that.
± 29 dB
What you're missing is the case where you simply want to link against a GPL'ed library, or embed a GPL'ed component, without making any changes. Under the GPL, that doesn't matter -- you still have to adopt the GPL for your own code, and distribute the source for it.
Let's look at a hypothetical situation for a moment to see what the problem is. First off, let's assume that there's a widely-used widget library that's unfortunately licensed under the GPL, let's call it HTK (Hypothetical Tool Kit) (aside: I know the LGPL exists for just this reason, and I also realize that few useful libraries are GPLed anymore, in favor of the LGPL, but this is a hypothetical situation, so we're ignoring that for now since the article was really only talking about the GPL). Now, let's also assume that public demand has caused Microsoft to realize that they need to port their software to linux, starting with Office. Since the HTK is so popular in our imaginary world, and thus is guaranteed to be on roughly 90%+ of all linux installations, Microsoft decides to use the HTK for their port. But wait! To do so means that all of Office's source code must be opened up, which is unaccetable. Thus, Microsoft is given a poor set of choices:
- Continue on using our hypothetical widget set, and living with the consequences (forced open-sourcing of one of their major cash cow products)
- Use a different, less ubiquitous widget set with a more forgiving license
- Develop their own widget set
- Give up on linux development
Which do you think they'd choose?Taking a narrow view of the two licenses, you're correct -- both "protect" IP rights, though in vastly different ways. However, ignoring all the supposed benefits of an open source license and the fact that you have to pay for most Microsoft products, Microsoft's typical license is much more forgiving than the GPL. You're allowed to use any of Microsoft's published objects in any manner you wish, with the exception that some objects may require you to purchase a different licensing agreement if you plan to sell your product for lots of money. You can embed internet explorer's html rendering engine, the msxml XML parser, or even Word's document rendering engine, and you're not forced to change the license of your application. You can very well give away your source code, or not, but it's your choice whether or not to do so, not Microsoft's choice or RMS's choice.. Doing the same with the GPL requires that you license your code under the GPL as well.
So which is it, BSD or GNU?
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
"I see. Let us celebrate our arrangement with the adding of chocolate to milk."
:)
--
Legally it probably classes as truely public domain - it just goes further in assuring the CONTINUAL availablility of it in the public domain via some copyright license agreements.
I don't think you'll have much luck arguing that it isn't Public Domain to a court of law, especially given the nature of PD software being called "FreeWare"
I read it, and I do not see anything wrong with it. They seem to understand the GPL and OSS. GPL is a virus. Thats the way it was made. Programmers give away their work to better their fellow man. This does not mean that programmers are required to write GPL work. They never even said that. They were just making aware that GPL is for non-profit / freeware. I dont see anything wrong with selling software, or closed source. (I wont use it, but nothing wrong with it.) If I want to sell some code, then I'll write it and sell it. If I want to give it away, then I will GPL it. I believe that they were not wrong about anything they said. I did not see any lie's or FUD. I only seen GPL is not for profit, MS is not GPL.
--
_|_
The above is not worth reading.
So one thing which MS is giving away is question marks.
Probably makes the moderators feel like they are smart or something when they moderate supposedly against the grain.
So... *ahem* I guess I'll get modded to hell now for calling the moderators stupid.
I read that part in the article and thought "Wow, I wasn't giving gates enough credit, what with him completely ignoring the internet in 1995" but if that statement in the speech is a blatant lie, that makes this some pretty dirty FUD. I mean, that's the first thing you read, to draw in the crowd - "Behold our mighty prophet who told you not to buy 5,000 shares of amazon back in '95" - That's just straight out of 1984 - "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
Quote from the interview:
A common trait of many of the companies that
failed is that they gave away for free or at
a loss the very thing they produced that was
of greatest value - in the hope that somehow
they'd make money selling something else.
Gee, that sounds a lot like this story about a big company spending half a billion dollars creating a web browser and then paying people for using it.
Hey, I payed for windows 3.11, I want to use that with out constraint too (no, not really, just trying to make a point). Well, I'm not a u.s. citizen anyway so that leaves me out of this discussion I guess.
There's a big difference.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Actually, you have to willfully infringe for _profit_ to get into really really bad trouble.
That, I think, is the main reason the we dont see more GPL infringements from large corporations. They know that most GPL authors lack the resources to bring a civil suit, but in the case of a willful infringement for profit you up the stakes so you get to go up against a federal prosecutor and face possible prison time instead.
I would like to take to task the "middle road" which the speech proposes. Microsoft wishes corporations and the open-source community could "just get along." The fact is, the open-source community, with its tradition of giving away intellectual property, must fight very hard whenever there is "interaction" to protect the freedom to share. New laws continue to strengthen the "intellectual property" of corporations that choose to close their source and disallow copying of their software; their business models play well into the traditional business models lawmakers are used to. However, legislation which supports the rights of the open-source software creators is slow in coming. The fact is that when a company allies itself with a group of open-source developers, the open-source developers must fight to protect the openness of the software they created; if it weren't for the protections of the GPL which Microsoft condemns, the company could walk away with thousands of programmer-hours worth of code free. It is Microsoft's (and others') fault that the GPL must be so restrictive; the business model of traditional IP-based companies encourages the practice of acquisition of IP, whatever it takes.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
Let's Share our software! I'm going to Share my source code with
you=). You can't use it or change it. You can only look at it. Look,
but don't touch. That's _Sharing_. Everybody Share now. Share and
Share alike.
proclus
--
Visit GNU-Darwin! http://www.gnu-darwin.org/
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http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/
Go port Open Office to Darwin and Mac OSX.
proclus
Yamla's information is a little incorrect, for the following reasons:
t ml) does not provide any kind of protection against plagiarism or Protection of Intellectual Property.
1. Windows CE, Windows 9x (including ME), and Windows 2000 are *DIFFERENT* Operating Systems for *DIFFERENT* uses and, in the case of Windows CE, a totally different architecture and processor-family. As pointed-out throughout the last 7 years by a variety of people who like to call themselves "Systems Engineers", Windows 9x really is just MS-DOS with a new suit.
2. Windows NT & Windows 2000 have as much in-common with MS-DOS as RSTS/E or RSX-11M+ does to VaxVMS; interestingly, NT actually has more in common with VaxVMS than it does MS-DOS (David Cutler, one of the creators of Windows NT, was one of the architects of VaxVMS - hence the internal similarities)
3. The only thing that someone could even elude to for "common lineage" is that they all came from Microsoft.
4. Regarding "Code Forking": Can I expect to run the exact same binary on the multitude of Linux variants in the current market? Can I go to my local store and buy Win32 software and run it on *any* version of Windows NT or 2000? You answer the question; My experience shows "No" and "Yes", respectively. "Code Forks" are defined as: a change or divergence in source code that a) deviates from the original source code and b) such changes in the source code that can cause subtle changes (or drastic ones) in the use or intended functions of the executable software.
Here's the rub: The concept for "Open Source" software works wonderfully - in Academia or as a hobby. GNU GPL *does* have it's place, to be sure. But the Open Source advocates tend to forget some very salient points:
1) Applying the GNU GPL License to to other things in life: If I go to a museum and find a wonderful painting that took the artist many years to create, and take a felt-tip marker to that piece of art, what happens to that piece of art? It no longer has the intrinsic value it once had, and I can now claim that it is *everyone's* piece of art - true or false? I changed it, so now under the GNU GPL rules it's now everyone's!!
2) Let's say, for example, that Yamla wrote some wonderful code, and released it under the GNU GPL. I like it so much that I take what I want from it...ok, I took ALL of it...and make a very nice program that I compile and release commercially and *don't* release it under the GNU GPL. People like my new program so much that they wish to throw money at me so they can have my program, too. Since I compiled my software and did not release the source code under the GNU GPL, Yalma would be very hard-pressed to prove that I used his code in my product, since "reverse engineering" is prohibited under the DMCA. So, I benefited from someone else's hard work, Yalma is screwed out of some money for his hard work, and I laugh all the way to the bank. "Open Source" is totally dependant on the honesty of the people involved. (Yamla, I would never do such a thing - the inference was needed for the illustration)
There is no real protection for the authors / code writers who choose to go the "Open Software" avenue. Even the GNU GPL License itself (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.h
Other people like to blur the connection between "Open Source" and "Freeware". Open Source is, by it's own definition "Freeware", because anyone can get the source code, get one of the many free compilers available, compile the source code and get an executable for absolutely NOTHING!
The harsh realities of life are:
1) Apply "Occam's Razor" to the question of honesty, and you find that everyone is a liar.
2) Money is MUCH thicker than Blood.
3) Given half a chance, someone you know (and quite possibly respect) will screw you out of your chance to obtain riches and fame if it comes down to "you or them" as the recipient.
Open Source Software or "Freeware" is not the problem - it's the greed of Commerce that makes people want to sell the software they make. "Open Source" software will always be hard-pressed to make any kind of *real* (read "economic") difference in the Software Industry because it lacks one, vitally important component: someone paying for it to generate revenue so the development process can continue.
Don't get me wrong, here - "Open Source" products are excellent in many ways, but it's no way to build a business.
'nuff said
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
Of course, you don't want people around here to know how you REALLY feel, right? It's pretty easy to flame without actually responding to anyone's comments if no one knows it was you, i guess. Then you probably posted something glaringly obvious above somewhere and got 5 karma points and a big erection, right?
When you post to a community message board, you have an identity as a member of a community. This is the entire point of creating an alias to use in an internet discussion board. What you do is you attempt to create a persona, which has nothing to do with your actual identity, as a person who only says really intelligent, useful things. This is what is false and cowardly about an AC. You want to flame someone because it is in your nature, but you don't want your fake online personality to suffer. It is none of your business who I am, but at least you might know what my opinions really are like.
MS is afraid that you can take ideas from the public domain or from gov. research and make something out of it (which you can) and then take your invention/innovation/etc. and GPL the code. This makes public domain knowledge a resource (knowledge is a resource) that they can't exploit for commercial gain, and in _this_ they have a point.
Cell phone companies took NASA research to make a commercial product that is spreading like wildfire. If someone had taken NASA's public research and GPL'd the idea for a portable telephone (aka, made their own cell phone using exsisting broadcast technologies and communications research by nasa - not like shortwave radio) this could have prevented or at least detered large companies from launching communications satalite. Why? Because they couldn't 'innovate' without releasing all their technology under the GPL and therefor under review by their competitors.
From here it becomes a philisophical debate: Is that a good thing or a bad thing? (It's better business to blindside your competitor with a new whizbang whistle-bobbit, but it's better for the consumer to have this level of competition). From MS's perspective, this isn't dirty pool, they're not lying or trying to decieve anyone, they just think that what they're doing is right and what we're doing doesn't make good business sense. The reason we differ is because they're businessmen and we're consumers.
Sgt_Jake
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Hmm... what was MS saying about the folly of giving away IP freely? ;)
I.P. Freely? I.P. Freely? Paging Mr. I.P. Freely.
Yes, that's something that Microsoft doesn't do, pay dividends on it's stock. The only way you can get money from shares of Microsoft is to sell them...And then to make money, you have to sell them at a higher price that when you purchaced them.
Oh, and by the way, Microsoft has never paid a dividend on their stock at all.
Just my $0.02
--Ben
"Today, any government putting work under GPL is walling it (the work) off from commercial business,"
The USGS makes all of their very expensively collected data available for free at their website, http://www.usgs.gov. It is made freely available on the premise that the US tax payer has already paid for it once and shouldn't have to pay for it again. This is a policy decision that was reached very deliberately. Now the questions are:
My point is that this is as much a challenge to the function of government, and it seems MS would prefer to see a marginalised government as seen in "Snowcrash". The assumption that this country exists for the benefit of private companies and not its citizens is only that and must be challenged.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Yeah, they have. In exchange for signing a 3 year contract with MSN at $20/month, which comes out to $720 to MSN. Consumer loses $320. And with it being a contract, it means that you will pay unless you go bankrupt. They're making their money.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
That's an interesting point. One man, even one as, ahem, talented as BillG himself, couldn't possibly shape the personalities of thousands of employees... could he??
Female Prison Rape in NY
Female Prison Rape in NY
Alan Cox wrote:
Apparently Craig also has problems reading licenses. The GPL requires you provide the source to the customers not to everyone.
It also requires you to grant those customers the right to redistribute the source to anyone they want, so the effect is very similar, particularly in the context of trade secrets or copyright, which Craig Mundie was discussing at that point. Mundie was strategically ambiguous as to which of the two he meant.
Hang, draw and quarter him by all means, but only after due process.
Actually, only the original author of the code can make that code GPL. If someone else used non GPL "free" code, and put as part of a GPL project, derivations of which would be under the GPL, but anyone could also go back to the original source and use it in a non-GPL (even comercial) project.
I'm not inclined to agree with much of the speach, but Microsoft is right about one thing. GPL is probably too restrictive of a license to put public domain code into. Truly free code would allow people to put it into closed source projects. The original code is still free, and the company keeps its own source. Nobody gets hurt.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Regardless of how Microsoft spins it I find this article silly. They first talk about the would-be Yahoo's of recent months who have gone down the toilet. Then they start comparing that kind of foolishness with Open Source, as if it mattered. Yeah, a lot of fools rush into ventures and screw themselves. That's got nothing to do with providing Source Code as a part of the product. Source Code is simply a value-added item that you can use to both entice and educate your users. Go ahead and release it under a license that forbids them from mentally processing the code, but Jesus, you ought to get a floor-plan when you buy your freakin' house, man!
What makes a company's products valuable is the artistry and wizardry behind them. I'm sorry to hear that Microsoft doesn't want to share. No surprises. Fine with me. But I still want to contribute to worthwhile projects that are GPL'ed, BSD'ed, and APSL'ed. Their licenses allow me to take part and contribute, for god's sake . That's all any good developer needs or cares about. I can still get paid for my gringe work in the intelligent and rock-stable part of the net economy: among the builders for hire.
Don't be fooled. Microsoft would like to "fork" the world of licensing models with its crimson tide and are, it seems, trying to entice users with the promise of greater wealth. The only licensing restriction: Thou shalt hold out for more money!
--------
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
-- thinkyhead software and media
As long as there's someone out there who thinks your prized (and expen$ive) software product wouldn't be that hard to implement, who has the talent, and who believes in Open/Free Software enough to give away their valuable IP for free, you will lose.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
This is bogus. The LGPL exists precisely to allow linking with non-GPL code. All device drivers and other code that needs to be linked should be LGPL. GCC has been this way since forever.
There is no conflict. The government no more has the right to break GPL than it has the right to break any other license. The government is not in the business of making free software or any other kind that it did not create public domain.
The public domain software means anyone can pick it up, modify it somewhat to be incompatible, make it proprietary, close the source and do other things that directly infringe on the freedom of its users.
GPL does not prevent use of public information. It only prevents making free sofware un-free.
I've worked 50-65 hrs a week for the last 20 years so I could stack up a pile of patents on every new idea and many of the picked up own ideas (those not already patented) that I ever invented or used. I did it so I could lock everyone else out of using every technique I invented or learned that wasn't nailed down unless they paid through the nose to me or my corporate gang of the moment.
Every single scrap of knowledge that led to my programming career was paid for in blood and money, every bit of science, all the math, all the computer time, everything. Yeah, right.
I was never into computers because I loved them and saw them as a way to change the world for the better. Neither was anyone else. It was always just for the money and the power.
And software is only a vehicle, only some static property to be sub-divided and parceled out and rented. It is not a dynamic body of knowledge ripe for cross-fertilization. Any cross-fertilization is an example of software rustling and should be a hanging offense. Pay the man to determine what you need and to negotiate with others in terms of money and power to form new blends that you will accept because you have no choice. Make the software mogul the richest man in the world regardless of whether the software does what you need or not. You are not free to change it, to look under its hood, to swap parts, to write about it without permission. All this and more is declared to be your good and your prosperity and the prosperity of the world.
The real world isn't better off for the freer flow of information and the self-expanding and growing knowledge base. It should be tightly metered and every cent squeezed out of it and if that stops the future geniuses that could have saved us from the current or next mess and enabled the next huge jump in our way of life, then so be it. At least they didn't rise up to threaten our pile of chips.
What two decades of economic success? What about the really deep inflation of the early 80s? What about the downturn of 87?
For a company that believes in IP rights Microsoft is sure into telling people what they can do with their IP. I choose to share my software wherever possible with others on my terms in exchange for them sharing theirs. It is my experience and considered opinion that this works better in the realm of software than models such as that proposed by MS. That is my right to do. By so doing I have become intellectually richer and professionally many times more productive than I could be otherwise and have seen more of the world touched and changed by software and computer technology than I believe would otherwise have been the case. And this is only the beginning.
Microsoft knows this. These are not misguided people. These are people fighting with all they have to stop a change in the way the world treats information and computing that undermines the source of their (not your or our) financial wealth.
If MS was right and you really couldn't create good software that people are very happy to have using Open Source models, then MS would not need to speak against it. It would be obvious to all concerned that no matter how idealistic OS is, it just doesn't work to produce better software that people want and use. Clearly this is not the case. Clearly there is a strong need for the many benefits of Open Source.
The internet grew out of largely volunteer and academic hacking efforts. The internet was around long before the early nineties and highly used by academics, software people, librarians and others in the know at the time. Much of the infrastructure the explosion of the mid=90s rights on was developed a decade or two earlier by people who largely did not put up fences or when they did, noticed it didn't work so well.
The 90's explosion was not about b2c or b2b. It was about people to people. The business users came later. This is a very crucial hole in the speech. The importance of software is empowering people and increasing the flow and value of informaiton. Information increases in value by being accessed, winnowed and combined. The more sources of such functions are active the more valuable the information becomes.
Complex hubs of information are very old school. ONly a few types of applications benefit a lot by dense hubs and even they [can] gain by the network of peers offloading processing and local storage. Less and less is a middle man or a toll road needed on the internet highway.
MS talking about privacy and security? Hahaha.
.NET is not user centric. It is MS server centric.
Software communities are not just about developers. They are about users/developers. They are about dynamic growth from the components of software. Grwoth that cannot happen if the source is closed and or tightly controlled.
Does anyone believe that current EULAs are about protecting your rights or give you or acknowledge you have any "property rights" to the software you purchase under them?
There are 5 million MSDN developers because MS has pushed its technology really hard and you have to sign up to MSDN and have more money extorted from you in order to successfully keep up with their hodge-podge of closed and unresponsive krap.
There is no clear division between developers in a company and developers outside it and customers. Not in a knowledge economy. MS is doomed as long as it believes such a distinction is real.
Ah, the old forking myth. In practice forking is rare in OS and forking leading to bad consequences such as stranded users and community groups is nearly unknown. This is not at all the case with closed proprietary source. Let a company close its doors, be taken over by the wrong party or simply change its mind about priorities and software YOU depend on could dissappear or become an orphan overnight. You don't have the source or any rights to it even if you could read it. So you get no recourse. Remember the forks of commercial Unix back in the 80s?
GPL is not the only license. It does what it does well and with the LGPL is a quite legitimate and important instrument. There are others. GPL says that changes to a GPL'd program must be GPL'd. This includes linking if the code to be linked is GPL'd. That is why the LGPL was invented, so non-GPL code can be linked without becoming GPL. Other licensense were invented that give more leeway while protecting user and developer rights without lessening the power of software. But MS will not mentione these. Instead it concentrates on only the licence it feels can cause the most FUD as if it was the only point to consider.
It is my development talent that I sell for my daily bread. It is not the software itself. Some businesses I have worked for do try to sell the software itself as their main cash sources. Others find they make more money in Application add-ins, consulting, customization and so on than in direct per-seat costs.
I am a systems (infrastructure) developer. What I build cross-cuts any particular business except a speciality house in systems software. So what sense does it make for any one company that needs such software to own all rights to what I produce? That is not their business nor in my or thw general software world's interest.
No one asked any developers to go hungry.
*Quote is Property of MS*
People will have control over how, when and what information is delivered to them.
Sorta like we have control over what Windows does.....oh wait we don't....
Why does about.mozilla crash my computer (because I told it what information to display?)
Why did Windows crash right before i saved three hours of typed papers due in 5 minutes (becuase I have control over when the computer crashes!)
Why does Windows not support legacy software like the package promissed? ( because I have control over how Windows operates!)
Yet another M$ lie used to draw the lemmings to the water
But Open Source is not necessarily free. If it were, then a good chunk of Mundie's argument that's not true now, would be. Open Source software could hardly be a major part of any successful business model if it were inherently free of charge.
Yes! That guy!
Nope. IE isn't their cash cow; IIS is.
What Mundie was referring to is companies like that provide the distribution for free (if you've got the bandwidth)... but try to make money off support, manuals and so forth.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
GPL
2.b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
and back up to 1.:
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
So, you could charge $250 for support (warranty), but that wouldn't be an infringement on the original author's IP.
restrictive licenses indeed. excellent points raised here by a lot of people, but i haven't seen anyone mention the following quote: "This is a shift in focus from individual Web sites or devices to new constellations of computers, devices, and services that work together to deliver broader, richer solutions"
does anyone else see this as part of a MS larger strategy of world domination? edge out the little guys, marginalize the individual?
i could do a thesis on the philosphies espoused in this propaganda.
Definitely not meant as a dig, and, perhaps the past 6 years are starting to bear fruit. Hacking's fun, but, my primary reason for choosing Open Source is because I just wanted to write songs. So sad, that tangent has lasted this long, but, perhaps the tides are changing, and, we'll begin to see choice in applications in the near term, as well.
C'mon.... Wouldn't you love to see Cakewalk ported to *n*x? I sure, as hell would.
Excellent and timely rebuttal from Alan. You should read it. Sure, I'm biased. But, my MPU401 is NOT! a gameport joystick controller. It wasn't on Win3.1, and, it still isn't. It controls drum machines and MIDI synthesizers. If Microsoft hadn't fscked that up, I'd probably still be using their crap.
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
Microsoft can talk about technology and innovation all they want, but keep in mind that this company still can't figure out the proper character code for a frickin apostrophe.
So now please point me to wherever I made any statement that could possibly be construed as saying I had no plan to release my "updated" source code?
Also, how is arguing for its infeasability a win? Is it possible for the GPL to lose in your eyes?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
> Unlike the Msft attitude of "Windoze everywhere" and "why would anyone use anything else" - you don't have to use GPL code. Just write your own from a clean start - or just pay Msft or someone else.
Err. What exactly does that mean?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
So. What was wrong with the example I gave? English this time, please.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
> Say I write a new browser and release all the source code under the GPL. Now, my intellectual property is protected in the event that a company comes along, takes my source code and makes minor modifications and then sells it for $250 a piece.
Say you write a new browser and release everything under the GPL. I take it, make some minor updates, and sell it for $250 apiece, distributing all my code along with the binaries I'm selling. Exactly how is your IP protected?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Hey, I payed for windows 3.11, I want to use that with out constraint too (no, not really, just trying to make a point). Well, I'm not a u.s. citizen anyway so that leaves me out of this discussion I guess.
and your point is? MY point was the GPL. Yours is...?
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
Sure, anyone can "claim" that someone used GPL code (or MS code for that matter). It's still not a violation of the GPL and it has nothing todo with a "viral aspect" in any sense whatsoever.
From what I've heard, the engine upgrades from quake -> quake 2 were much more than just a minor engine upgrade. Most of the internals were completely re-written for Quake 2.
You can't find the code for any advanced commercially used engines? Try Quake and Doom(a bit old). If Quake 2 hasn't been released, knowing ID it may be soon. Also, I'd suggest looking into plib. Thats a 3D development library that I am currently using to develop games. It has been used by many commercial games already (including some for the PS2). If you want stuff to look at, it's out there.
Best Wishes
--
Twivel
Linux and the rest of those "open-source" terrorists are wrecking America. We need to stop this whole open source thing now.
...Just Kidding.
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
TRANSLATION: Runs on more platforms.
weakened interoperability,
TRANSLATION: Improves and expands upon existing API's.
product instability,
TRANSLATION: (as stated earlier in his speech) Augmented debugging.
and hindering businesses' ability to strategically plan for the future.
TRANSLATION: Does not let poor management and development practices off the hook and give them someone to file a lawsuit against.
Furthermore, it has inherent security risks
TRANSLATION: Does not run VBScript macros.
and can force intellectual property into the public domain.
TRANSLATION: Accelerate innovation by building around the structure and spirit of the Internet, i.e. share creativity and ingenuity freely.
An interesting piece of MS FUD that's a textbook illustration of psuedo-reasoning combining elements of red-herring, straw man, and false dilemma arguments. Mundie, the MS VP who gave the speech, admits that the GPL is only one of the many licensing schemes known as Open Source. Open Source is portrayed as the alternative to MS's much touted Shared Source model. Open Source is bad because:
"The OSS development model leads to a strong possibility of unhealthy "forking" of a code base, resulting in the development of multiple incompatible versions of programs, weakened interoperability, product instability, and hindering businesses' ability to strategically plan for the future. Furthermore, it has inherent security risks and can force intellectual property into the public domain."
Unfortunately, these are mere unsubstantiated claims. Then, seemingly forgetting his own observation that the GPL is only one of many Open Source licenses, Mundie shifts into an all out attack on the GPL. He argues that the GPL is incompatible with IP (which it is, I think). IP, he claims, is basis of any successful business model. This is one of my favorite parts where he likens the GPL to a virus:
"The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it." (my emphasis)
Therefore, since the GPL is BAD, the only remaining alternative is Microsoft's Shared Source model.
In this argument, the GPL becomes almost a red-herring. Although it's not entirely irrelevant to the debate about Open Source vs. Shared Source, it's only a small part of that debate. It's also a bit of a straw man, because the GPL is not equivalent to Open Source, so knocking down the GPL is not knocking down Open Source. Finally, it's a false dilemma because other Open Source licenses are ignored, such as the far more business favorable BSD license. Consequently, one cannot conclude that MS's Shared Source model is the better alternative because not all alternatives have been considered. Maybe if he'd taken a philosophy class or three he could've devised a less obviously fallacious argument.
The good thing is not to fork, it's to have the right to fork.
Forking should only happens in a extreme situation where the development of the software is not satisfactory. This is your guaratee as a user, if you depend on a software you are not a slave of its authors.
Look, this guy is defending Microsoft's strategy. So one of three things is possible:
1. Microsoft's model is bad and they will fail miserably due to the aforementioned bad model.
2. Microsoft's model is NOT bad, and their success can be attributed in part to it.
3. Mr. Mundie had a temporary (or permanent, who knows) lapse of brain power and is just WRONG.
Hm... wonder which of those it is.
Zaphod B
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
"When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it. "
The phrase "This viral aspect of the GPL..." truely brings a smile to my face.
Ahhh yes! The windows codebase has never forked. That is why I am dealing with 9 different versions of Windows at the workplace.... Stick a fork in it dude!
a bit perplexed, doesn't it seem that GPL'ed software is at a disadvantage when we are talking about microsoft. They could easily dl gpl'ed software and import it/use it for there own benefit. And how would be know? What is the procedure in finding out if closed software has been abusing open software w/o acknowledging the "giants that stood before them"? Do we have to wait till an ex-employee shares his insider secrets w/ the open source community?
what is the definition of a coward? a man who thinks twice about fighting a lion. what is the definition of a braveman?
I dlove to asnswert that but... it was long enough ago that I read it that I don't remember.
However, the information was pretty easy to find on the US Copyright office website. In fact, they have a bunch of materials on the suibject of copyright, derivitive works, etc etc.
Thats where I came to this understanding.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Actually... you apear to have a misunderstanding.
According to traditional copyright law, a derivitive work is entirely copyright by the original copyright holder.
Of course, its not that simple. Copyright of the derivitive MAY be on the hands of the derivitive producer (eithe rpartially or fully) if certain conditions are met (specifically relating to how substantial the changes are, and how creative they are)
As with most of these laws, no specifics are set. However, it is clear (from my "not a lawyer" reading of the law - which may differ from case law, if there is any) that generally speaking - the original author holds the copyright on derivitives.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
In order to mask this significant (potentially fatal?) mistake, it instead says that open source (the effective model) is fundamentally faulty, yet comes up with ways to deny that it is not using some of its practices, albeit not in even remotely the correct form.
After reading Alan Cox's response to this, it becomes even clearer how utterly stupid and just plain desparately pathetic Microsoft's internal philosophy is. As far as I'm concerned, this alone, along with fircing themselves upon end users/buisninesses, is all that is keeping this pathetic and downright incompetent company afloat at this time.
-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
Sounds like a good argument for an open, moderated submission queue.
You're going to work, so you enter your car and close the door
A familiar voice: "Good morning, Sir. Welcome to your brand new Microsoft powered car, since its 9am I suppose you are going to work, fasten your belt and please don't touch anything. And meanwhile listen to special offers of Microsoft business partners. Enjoy!"
You scream: "Stop it! My head hurts from the constant stream of bullshit!"
Microsoft diagnostic program discovered you are in unhealthy conditions. A visit at your physician has been scheduled in 15 minutes, fasten your belt and please don't touch anything. And meanwhile listen to special offers of Microsoft business partners. Enjoy!"
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
IP business did not bring the exponential growth we see, rather it was FREE software and OPEN standards. Let's see now...
TCP/IP sprouted in universities; Dido FTP; Unix was originally AT&T property but became the de facto standard for networked computing because the government forced AT&T to give it away practically free; The WWW was started by a bunch of professor types who gave it to the world for nothing.
M$ are a bit confused, I think...
We have no customers, no company central company, and we are our strongest user base. What can they do?
So why should we be scared again?
-gThere once was a saying, "nobody gets fired for buying IBM." and for some ITs the same applies to MicroS**t software.
MS will keep trying, perhaps be a little more sophisticated in their efforts, but you can rest assured that Shared Source(tm) is a word that will be in the permanent IT vocabulary. We'll all be repeating it as if it actually meant something.
So back to this Permanent Underclass thing. Yes, some people are afraid of Linux, and mostly because they're afraid of change, afraid of the extra work they think they will have is they switch to Star Office for the secretary pool. Or Samba for their file and print servers.
MicroS**t seems to be dipping their toes in the waters, testing to see when the laughter will die down and people begin to actually believe their crap.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
As a long-time supporter of the +/-1 moderation option for fitting/gratuitous Simpsons references, I have to ask: should it apply only to the parent reference, such that responses-in-kind are considered exempt from the proposed moderation blessing/curse? :P
And the relevance is... what? That's not what code forking is. By definition, a fork will lead to differences (some good, some bad), which means the better analogy is "Having multiple vendors offering incompatable products for a (hopefully) low price is worse than having one vendor offer a unified and consistant standarized program at a slightly higher price." And yes, sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's bad... depends on the situation. After all, when Micro$oft changes a standard slightly, we yell, scream, and complain, but when different *nix vendows offer slightly incompatable versions, it's good.
Yes, I'm aware there's a difference between the RPM/DEB/Tarball "fork" and a completely broken implentation of a standard. I have to question, however, how people are supposed to all make a living if they sell the exact same product... oh wait... software wants to be free. Well, until food wants to be free, stop telling programmers to live on charity.
Score:
(-1 True)
(-1 Challenging the mob)
(+1 Writing micro$oft with a $)
(+1 Natalie Portman (yes, this is the only reference)
(+1 Goatse.cx (see above))
Total: +1
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
But the point is that it's very easy to accuse any software company that they have broken GPL. You don't really need any proof, you can just say "hey, your implementation looks a little bit like ours, I bet you stole some of our stuff", and the software company doesn't really have any way to defend itself.
The converse is also true. Anyone or any company can be sued because another company or developer decided that someone's implementation looks a lot like theirs. It's happened in the past (once to a friend of mine) and will probably continue. Flip through some case law books and you probably will find a few suits where Microsoft was the plaintiff in such cases (I know they filed one such suit and won, but can't remember which it was), so why would the point be any less valid on the other side of the GPL "fence"?
Honestly, anyone can sue anyone else for anything in the USA...it's whether or not they win and how much it costs the defendant that matters.
NOTE: The CDE was originally developed from X Windows (X Windows is released under the BSD license).
UPS Sucks
Yes, it's quite obviously what the french call "propaganda".
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
I would think that many companies coding for the government would intentionally make their code poorly documented or use obscure methods so as to eliminate the potential for your example (competeing companies would have to place a higher bid to cover the cost of researching the coding methods before modifying it).
:-)
Intentional or not, the code I am upgrading is poorly written (full of global variables, nested macros and the stupid DOS GUI was interlocked with even the lowest-level modules). I couldn't use more than about 4 functions "as-is." Most of the stuff I just had to rewrite using the old source code as a guide. You're right in that, if there is a follow-on for an upgrade, the government is not required to give it to us, but probably would because nobody knows that code as well as I do. However, government contracts usually require a ream of documentation to be delivered with them, so yes, you can write bad code, but usually somebody else can figure it out.
Are you saying the government buys a unique compiler for each program it contracts?
No, but in this case it was specified in the contract. Part of the development price was the purchase of an IDE. I think a government shift to Linux would actually help Borland tremendously now that they have Kylix and are moving towards a C++ release of the same. I would love to have a reason to tell our customer that we absolutely have to get a copy of Kylix
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
The one problem would be porting proprietary windows programs written for gov use. Unfortunately I'd imagine most of the developers would charge an arm and a leg for porting it. With something like Wine though, this would be less of an issue.
I write Windows programs for the government (Air Force) and I know WINE won't run my app. However, the porting problem is not as great as you imply. You are thinking the contractor has proprietary ownership of code written for the government. This is only true if the government buys commercially available software, for which there are always competitors. When I write code for the government, they pay me to write it, so they own that code. At the end of the project, I deliver all of the source code to them, and in this case even the Compiler/IDE (C++ Builder) because they paid for that too. In fact, the program I am ready to sell off is an upgrade of a program written by one of our big competitors. The upgrade contract was given to us. If the goverment decided to move to *NIX, they would probably go competitive with most of the ports, so if we asked for too much money, they would just award the contract to another contractor. Personally, I would love to see them move to a standardized *NIX solution. I think they are entirely too dependent on MS right now.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
In an educational environment, I can't see this being a big problem. If Microsoft chooses to release source "under glass" to a university/educational institution for the purposes of education, then they can hardly turn around and accuse anyone who uses this education of being a pirate. The release of the code to demonstrate implementation of a particular software concept implies the belief that the programmer X plans to use it to implement this software concept elsewhere. This of course assumes that programmer X isn't just copying the MS code line for line. Its only really when MS code gets into the wild via illegal methods e.g. when that MS server was cracked. That's when it becomes a problem.
"The GPL simply asserts that if someone wants to use some IP for free, they in turn must not charge for source to the resulting IP. They can still charge big bucks for the development work involved."
A sort-of example was posted a while back on slashdot when Kevin Lawton was hired by Mandrake and paid for his current development efforts with regards to bochs. The software was then subsequently licensed under the LGPL.
No thanks. I don't smoke anymore.
Um. I want more stuff for less, when possible. Screw the overly expensive, monopolistic bastards. Capitalism hard at work, I think I'll stick to supporting the competition for higher quality and lower prices.
Monopolies suck. They should go to jail. Directly to jail. Without passing go. Without collecting two hundred dollars. (Sad, pathetic attempt at humor. *dies*)
That's what the preview buttin is for, I guess. :P
How many managers would rather hire programmers and manage them over buying some proprietary software and supposedly be done with it?? I realize there's more to the arguement but how many PHB's do?
I thought the terms were that you had to release the changes if you are distributing the software. I didn't think you had to release the change(s) if you are just using the software yourself without distributing the modified software.
And code means nothing to someone who isn't a programmer (management). I could care less about having the source. I care about what works now, and will continue to work. Not what may work now with this patch or in the next build.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
If its released under the BSD license then its hardly stealing. Its perfectly legal.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Forking is bad in Windows, because of the way that the registry is set up. It's designed so that you can have Windows and Office and Media Player and everything is happy, but if you'd prefer to go with the Corel Suite and Winamp and stuff like that it gets all unhappy. I don't have this problem with Linux. The standard workstation install of Red Hat 7.1 comes with over a dozen mail readers, and this is OK. Also, thanks to a standard library base, instead of DLL Hell, all of my redundant programs work fine side by side. I can use Pine, Mutt, and Elm at the SAME TIME. I can even use Konquerer and Mozilla side by side. The layered structure that forkability demands is a strong advantage, and choice is NOT a bad thing.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
The way most such contracts for custom development work at the moment, though, is that the customer has the right to run the program they paid for and normally to modify it at will but the developers also get to keep their source code and can later modify it and sell it to someone else.
--
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
They are telling us that if you incorporate source under the GPL into your products, you have to make them free as well. Which may be bad for your business model. Granted.
But in the next step they are saying: Our 'shared source' is better because it does not have this limitation. They aren't telling you that it doesn't need to have this limitation, because you can not use their source at all!
So basically they are trying to tell us that "If you use my free source, your source has to be free, too" is worse than "You may not use my source at all".
Just one thing I'd like to note: the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" mentality is one of the good, not bad, elements of the Open Source movment. Both the conventional Capitalist closed-source system and OSS ultimately depend on people's greed, and therefore benefit from the human drive to satisfy that greed. As a proponent of the OSS system, one doesn't receive money from one's activities, but you do receive the equivalent of a nearly unlimited license to use and redistribute a vast amount of software, which in the end can amount to the same thing.
On the other hand None the less isn't three words. Go figure.
Ain't English grand?
Oh, and you're welcome.
KFG
And I'm afraid you make my point. Even most OSS developers have little understanding of what the GPL means and that it is fully compliant with, and reliant on, standard intellectual property law.
Under the *terms of the license* use is unrestricted.
In other words, the author has granted you the right of unlimited use through the 'failure' to restrict it.
It is still his choice, his permission that has been granted, and his license that you are bound by.
Since the copyright is his, and his alone, he could release it under any license he desired and if you agreed to it you would be bound by that license instead.
What's more the GPL does not restrict releasing the SAME code under multiple licenses, * by the author*, who has, and retains, full rights to the code even after he has released it under the GPL.
See Perl.
KFG
I am meerly pointing out their equal validity and basis in current intellectual property law.
KFG
Thank you for taking the trouble for posting that for me.
Once again my point is made that even OSS developers have little knowledge of just what the GPL is, or is NOT.
The GPL requires the current state of intellectual property law to be in effect. The total lack on intellectual property laws would look nothing like the GPL, nor would such absence achieve what the GPL is attempting.
The point of the matter is, and this is the bone of contention amongst "free" software advocates who belong to different camps, the GPL is not INTENDED to free the programer. It is intended to free the CODE!
It is the INFORMATION that "wants to be free", and the information, and the GPL, could really give a damn about what your personal motivations are. The GPL is there specifically to *subvert* certain individual motivations, which is exactly what the "GPL is a virus" people, and MS object to.
Nonetheless it accomplishes this subversion entirely within, and entirely dependant on, the current state of intellectual property law.
Why is this such a hard concept for some people to grasp?
KFG
Which part of "We don't like monopolies" did this guy not understand?
Actually I think you've missed the point of the article. I'll address your points one at a time.
When it comes to forking of a code base, the benefit of having one company provide a solution is known throughout the industry. The forking you mention of Microsoft products is to address different sectors of the market. It is a controlled division, and all of the forked streams are under the same central management. Thus constomers can build their infrastructure around these streams with the confidence that Microsoft will not abandon the platform they are based upon. This is not the case with OSS. FOr example, in the KDE vs. GNOME debate, the two streams are incompatible (to a large extent). Either one could be eliminated in favour of the other should the dynamic of the open source community change. Also, this is only one example. In the community atmosphere of OSS, you inevitably have differing opinions. This is good in some cases, but not all. With the centralized, shared source approach, upper management can make a decision and force the issue - something that's good for the company, the product, and the customers. In OSS, the differing opinions often lead to splintered development efforts travelling in opposite directions, confusing users and diluting already scarce developer resources.
The viral nature of the GPL is also an issue for most customers. The GPL only protects intellectual property belonging to the public domain - essentially ensuring that IP that is in the public domain cannot become privatized. However, IP is a fundamental building block of today's knowledge based ecomomy. Although the patent system and other legal issues surrounding IP need to be reviewed, the concept of creating something and making money from it is core to success in today's economy. The GPL removes that right from the creators of the product. SO, I would argue that the GPL does not encourage the creation of new IP, it discourages it, since by it's very nature, the creator can not in any way profit from it's creation.
This leads me to my next point, that the majority of software developed is developed for specific customers. However, the majority of revenue generated from software development is not. Without designing software that can appeal to a large base of users, there is no economy of scale possible. Companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and other large software development houses are able to create large, complex, pieces of software because they are able to generate enough revenue to pay for the necessary R&D. If you remove thier ability to leverage the creation of their software, and force each customer to pay the entire costs of the software they need, I think you will find the pace of software development in the industry overall will slow to a halt, and the result will be software created only for those orginizations large enough to afford custom-built software.
I think Microsoft's point in this article was that although there is a place for OSS, there is also a place for traditional closed source development. Their new initiative, "shared source" is an excellent way to leverage some of the ideas in the open source movement and apply them to closed source development. In the market today, companies understand that other companies need to make money, and are willing to pay for their software. Shared source is an excellent way for customers to have an influence in the development process, to understand how the software the buy works, and build upon it. I think it's a great step forward for a company that has been so secretive and controlling to date.
In this context, it's not surprising that, as early as 1995, Bill Gates wrote in his book The Road Ahead about what he called the "Internet gold rush" and predicted both enormous long-term advances and substantial short-term setbacks, saying "Gold rushes tend to encourage impetuous investments. A few will pay off, but when the frenzy is behind us, we will look back incredulously at the wreckage of failed ventures and wonder, 'Who funded these companies? What was going on in their minds? Was that just mania at work?"
OK, although I've never read it, I'm sure Gates' book does indeed have this in it. It's just too big of lie to get away with, at least in this day and age. But this just reminds me so much of this part of 1984:
For example, it appeared from The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.
Just a silly coincidence, I guess. Also, who was this speaker's audience? I mean, he makes this big deal that Gates foretold an Internet boom and bust all the way back in 1995!!! Was the Internet even invented back then? Wow, Bill, you had the courage to predict that a new technology would be exploited by many for business purposes, and that many of these businesses would be cheap, fly by night operations who would fail quickly. Somebody call Nostredamus and let him know his services are no longer required.
Where did you get this quote from? It didn't appear in Craig Mundie's speech.
anybody who has time to sit and read this whole thing must be unemployed or between projects.
---
Don't post on slashdot. Get back to work.
Shhhh. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!. Do NOT interfere with the affairs of the Ministry of Truth if you do not want a visit from the thought police!
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
Code forking can be good, and it can be bad. Temporary forks to get around beuracracy are good. For example SGI's XFS linux kernel. Eventually Alan Cox or the appropiate maintainer will merge SGI's Linux code with the main kernel tree and XFS will be in the main kernel in a manner similar to Reiser. Due to the neccessity to remove third party code from XFS code, the fork was a neccessity.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
This is not so easy, especially in larger projects. And if something is interesting enough, it is bound to be large.
It will not work on large projects, because you have to ask every author for permission. If e.g. Linus tried to release Linux under a different licence for someone, he would have to contact every contributor and ask them if it's okay with them. Possible in theory, but not in practice.
The paradigm shift that is at the core of phase three is the focus of the Microsoft .NET strategy. .NET is a set of Web services that are user-centric rather than device-centric.
So, if the software is user-centric, then I should be able to just license software to myself (NOT my machine or hard drive) and use MS stuff on anything I have? If I buy a new PDA, and I (for some reason) have WinCE, my license should carry over? I should never have to pay for the OS software just because I bought a new computer?
Every time I hear someone quote from that damn book, all I can think of is L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology goons. I think it's the fawning tone toward "The Founder"
My guess is that someone at Microsoft read up on his Chinese philosphy, thought of OSS/Linux, and promptly shit his pants.
-- null
Most software licenses actually don't provide any sort of warranty for "mercantability or fitness for any particular purpose." I did tech support for a software development company, and once had to deal with a guy who claimed that installing our software had munged all of the data on his hard drive, rendering it useless. Apparently during the installation process, the system hung, and when he reset the system it wouldn't boot. His closing remark was "I am sending the drive to a data recovery company, and will send (name of my employer) the bill."
I laughed a lot about this, first because I knew that it was pretty unlikely that our installer had anything to do with his data loss, and also because his attitude was so indignant. In the end, our lead developer and co-founder of the company replied and basically said "if our software caused problems like this, we would be bankrupt and out of business by now due to the ensuing lawsuits." But even there, he acknowledged that in fact the user license specifically states that we don't warrant the software for anything at all, and that we're not responsible in any way for problems that it might cause with your system.
Imagine if I could sue Microsoft for time lost, data lost, and sanity lost due to having to reboot my Windows 95 box six times a day.
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
"Having multiple vendors competing to offer us the best product at the lowest price is worse than having one vendor who can sell the product to us at monopoly prices."
Well, to a manager it would be more interesting to purchase all the subsystems from the same vendor than try to mix and match components from multiple vendors. Believe me, i would choose the former, not to create another monopoly, but to reduce my headaches and also to hold just one entity responsible if some screw up occurs, and not having to run around 5 different vendors who just end up blaming each other and pointing fingers at each other than fixing the problem. Believe me, it has happened and since risk mitigation being such an important factor in project management, unless my manager is Alan Cox himself, he is going to choose multiple solutions from the same vendor. Single accountability.
Not flaming..just facts.
Rapid Nirvana
Was there a Q&A? Did anyone take him to task on any of this? Did the MBAs in the room buy his BS?
As good as the arguement presented appears to be, there are some fundamental flaws in it. Flaws that become more obvious upon realizing that the software industry, the computer industry, was not ever supposed to be an industry within itself. But rather an industry that simply was to supply the tools that other industries could use to improve their industry specific production. And for the consumer, improve their use of time in dealing with information. Gaming is entertainment more than it's a tool for productivity, know the difference. Instead what we have is an industry that sees itself as the master race of all industries, by way of owning the tools used, owner and controller of all other industries.
The evidence of this is found in the research that has shown that the claimed new digital economy hasn't happened, but instead all that shows up is that the industry of computer is the only industry having had a notiable increase. With the exception of one other industry, the biotech industry, which does use computer to make such advancements. But the Biotech industry holds in common with the computer industry the element of the IP gold rush greed.
Research of the Department of Labor, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Here's the NYT article that mentions the research and it's findings
(you have to register, but it's free)
In a Productivity Surge, No Proof of a 'New Economy'
So what this does is show that the computer industry has been withholding the technology from all other industries, in IP greed. What the GPL does is to counter that, to somewhat put the computer industry in it's proper place, not as the master race over all other industries, but as a secondary tool manufacture for the primary value producers of physical consumable products.
In other words, the computer industry is suppose to be an industry intended to assist other industries, not own them or the Intellectual Property they produce (in the form of industry specific knowledge integrated into software that is then IP owned by the software industry.)
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!
I tend to see this sort of behavior strewn throughout game development. Another line from Black Island, "Baldur's Gate", "Baldur's Gate 2", "Icewind Dale", and soon, "Neverwinter Nights". While I have played only the former myself, the latter ones show signs of using upgraded core features of the first game, enhanced, revised, and better. These games have similar themes, however, and are good for comparing similar titles within the same genre. Also noteworthy, "Quake", "Quake 2", "Quake 3" (who didn't see those comming? ;). Similar rendering engines, upgrades (not complete rewrites) from the former in the series.
I, for one, would absolutely adore getting my hands on the source code for an advanced graphics rendering engine, not to sell a game, but so I could see how it's done. There are Open Source engines out there, but compared to what's been developed commercially, there isn't a comparison. I have a feeling that's why (beyond standard proprietary protectiveness over their work) you can't find the source for any advanced and commercially used graphics engines in the Open Source community. It'd be too easy to take that code, and with (comparitively) little work, come up with theme, plot, story, and make your own game for sale ;) This also doesn't mean that you can't license said rendering engines from their designers. That I wouldn't know about.
I don't understand why MS is taking such a vocal stance. Hypothetically, couldn't MS implement all their server-side stuff using GPL'd and/or BSD licensed software and *not* have to redistribute it? As long as the software is never distributed, MS could stand to capitolize on it without ever having to reveal a single line of source.
Now, they start moving on to the negative points of OSS. Not that I don't think OSS has it's problems. In some of these places I think microsoft may have some points - but they often exaggerate them or extend them to places where I don't think they are applicable.
Of course, it's their new strategy when dealing with competition. Exaggerate, Extend, Extinguish. Sound familiar?
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
What is so hard about that? If you don't like it, write it from scratch yourself.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
You assume that the engine is all of the code in a game. This may be true (although I doubt it) of a FPS game, but in many other types of games, the "engine" either doesn't exist or is a relatively minor part of the game. In a golf simulation, for example, the rendering engine makes up less than 20% of all the code. The rest is made up of user interface, physics, and rules. For a puzzle game, it's even more skewed away from the rendering engine.
You know what the best thing about this reply is? The sig...
Seriously, it's worthy of it's own thread!
-Jedi
"I love deadlines. I love the "whooshing" sound they make as they pass by." - Douglas Adams.
"buckle your seatbelt, dorothy - kansas is going bye-bye."
Where's this quote from? I know I've heard it before but I can't place it! Argh!
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Err... No. Not quite. There is not much trouble talking/transferring to either MACs or Windoze from an open source unix or linux. You are complaining about between one closed platform and another.
Zero Sum (don't amount to much). [root@localhost]
This is important. Please note that open source software does not require that you give your software away for free. You are quite free to develop it for a significant price, making all your profit from this development. Microsoft seems to ignore this.
.com business models that proved the least successful during the past year."
;-)
Awesome! I spotted that same point but in a different way.
Quoting from the article: "In this sense, open source software based on the GPL mirrors the
But that is only true if the software is being developed for commercial reasons. The whole argument actually spins on that sentance. Cheeky buggers!
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
I focus primarily on Microsoft's misunderstanding of open-source software.
Forgive me, but I feel it unwise to assume MS doesn't understand such concepts as OSS and what the GPL represents. In fact, I think their understanding of them is why they attack them - they rightly perceive them as a threat to their business model.
They commonly misrepresent and/or inaccuratley describe such concepts in these speeches, but I think that is primarily intended to foster a misunderstanding of the subject in the audience - which is far more insidious, and far more dangerous.
Dude, you should see me with PowerPoint! ;-)
That makes no sense.. If it frequently creates better software than the alternatives and it is beneficial to both the developer and the end user, it would seem as though it is actually a better development model.
Well, it clearly is a viable method. I don't know if it's obvious that it's generally the best way. Anyway, that's not crucial to my point.
I've never even heard point four argued... I've seen it argued that it is a viable business model, but that's different than superiority
Eric Raymond has been arguing for years that doing otherwise is suicidal. Slashdot doctrine for years has been that it is superior. The speech is saying that creating free software is a lousy way to run a business. I agree and so far no one has demonstrated otherwise. (Repackaging or installing Linux doesn't count.)
Copyrights and patents are evil, but only if left unchecked.
I agree. So do CmdrTaco and Hemos, although you'd never know that by reading their site. Like I replied to someone else, the vast majority of free software creators feel the same way. It's Michael, Jon Katz and the other leeches who use free software to justify their mentality that they're entititled to everything for free.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
But the reverse is not true; a GPL'd program is not in the public domain. Placing something in the public domain means that it's there for people to use as they see fit, including modifying it and charging for the copyrighted, modified version -- the original is still in the public domain, of course.
The GPL explicitly prevents this. The viral nature of the GPL means that modifications to GPL'd programs as also GPL'd. (The intentions of the GPLs creators seem to be that this even applies to linkable modules. Although Linux has a permission, courtesy of LT, for things like device drivers. See here for comments on this.)
So, if the government wants to create a modified version of a GPLd program, for the public good, there's a potential conflict.
This is a good example of where the use of free in the FSF's definition of free software becomes rather questionable; it's not so free as ye olde traditional public domain. The GPL provides a benefit in terms of preventing incompatibilities, drift and hidden extensions. Something which is a good thing. It also prevents free use of publicly available information, which is not so good and something public institutions need to keep a wary eye on.
Stupid crackhead moderators. You WILL pay in metamod...
I have to ask... Is code sporking acceptable to M$?
Marge! We need more strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate ice cream!
I'll just have to file for the sayGoodbye() function. What should I file it as..."Universal method by which a computing device indicates the cessation of activities is imminent." that should work.
----
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
Which is why we have fifty versions of rougelikes lying around, becuase forking is not only highly discouraged, but bad for consumers. I absolutely desipise having to choose between Nethack and Slash and Angband. Its definately taboo...
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Lord! They had another kid? I shared the same experience (sans insightful question) 3 years ago at Linux Expo at Duke. I was conversing with Mad-Dog at a booth and L., his wife and an occupied stroller came through. Ten minutes later my wife and I shared the lift with the Torvalds to the second floor and she notices that he showed great family qualities in light of his success. I just do not understand socks and sandels... /. /.
is Dale Bozzio really missing?
The MS weenie made valid points and did not seem to attack by name. I applaud Alan's response, but it seems a little venomous.
Hey call the Red Hat Seattle office and ask if they are running MS based OS at that "office". 1-800-884-9842
hmmmpf... got a surprise for ya:)
/.
/.
is Dale Bozzio really missing?
This brings to mind the definition for success in a free market economy: whoever provides the best quality for the lowest price gets the dough. Are you saying that it's unfair to make MS compete on the basis of product quality? Make no mistake, if the source code for Windows was out there in the wild, users would gravitate towards the fork that worked the best for what they needed. If MS refuses to provide a version that works better than those of competing distributors, whose fault is it when they fall by the wayside?
Microsoft couldn't compete because they spend MILLIONS a year in R&D and development. I would argue that they spend more developing their products than all of the open source communities, combined. If they were to open up windows, sure, there'd be lots of distributions out there. But what's to stop one distro from downloading the EXACT MS code, bundling it up, and selling it for half of what Microsoft sells it for? Come on, guy, think about this for just a minute! Microsoft has to pay to develop code. That's how their business work.
But OK, so Microsoft GPL's their code. By giving it away for free, you've got to know that as soon as they do, they'll be about a thousand knockoffs of their most popular products because the market is there, and if a company has to pay to check out the source code, they can still make a bundle selling it. Microsoft might not go out of business, but they'd be seriously hurt if they don't have anything other than their name to offer.
It's become hackneyed on Slashdot forums for posters to (pre-emptively) bash anyone who attacks MS for bashing MS. Every MS (or Intellectual Property, Napster, 2600, Patents, whatever) story posted sees a rash of post saying 'oh here comes the anti-MS bashing. everyone on slashdot bash MS for making money.' But it seems there are at least as many defenders as bashers, so part of their criticism (the part about everyone at /. doing some groupspeak MS bashing) rings hollow. I suggest that everyone from both sides argue the issue with facts (and hopefully references; hypertext is a wonderful thing!) and reason . . . not attacks on other people's tendency (fictional, in any case) to bash. Perhaps if you seriously examine everything you are going to say and look for some hard evidence to support it, you might find you are less certain about the convictions you hold. (A good thing for people across the spectrum, being open minded.) And in closing, in the words of Oliver Cromwell (how 'bout him for a target to bash) "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken..."
Welcome to Microsoft's Shared Source Philosophy, where you too can be an "intern" (i.e. our debugging bitch) at Microsoft, but receive neither pay nor college credit for it.
Fools. You MBAs will believe anything that comes from our mouths.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
I can see it now...
The MS History Revision Server!
Don't let those pesky facts ever get in the way again! Would be hugely popular with corporations everywhere I'm sure...
Reminds me of a Bob-ism: You'd pay good money to know what you really think!
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
When the game you are playing is setup to be tough and possibly fail, maybe it's time to change the rules. The best thing might be to start doing open source development and support under the form of legal business organization known as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. And to accomplish the same thing with telecommunications, to provide a more open, useful, and affordable broadband infrastructure, use the 501(c)(4) nonprofit mutual cooperative structure.
Open source software might very well in the long-term be unprofitable, and to this I say a hearty "so what?". People need to understand that making profits and having ownership in a for-profit sense is not the only way to achieve financial and community success. Nonprofit organizations may pay salaries to their employees, sell products for revenue, and provide tax deductions to their contributors. Someone ought to look at the 990 tax return of the FSF sometime to see just how well this model works. Richard Stallman's nonprofit organization is actually doing rather well, and should serve as a model to people of what can be possible. People who want to make a living in open source might want to consider forming a nonprofit with a focus on development of software, support of it, and education to others in development methods.
As for broadband, if people wanted to, they could build their own networks under the auspices of a 501(c)(4) mutual cooperative organization which gets a CLEC certification. CLEC refers to (c)ompetitive (l)ocal (e)xchange (c)arrier, which is to say that such an entity is able to buy bandwidth at a wholesale price from an ILEC (i)ncumbent (l)ocal (e)xchange (c)arrier like Ameritech or Pacbell. It might even be possible to offer voice service through a structure like this.
Instead of playing the same for-profit game as everyone else, maybe it's time folks considered playing the nonprofit game as a vehicle for the many levels of success all of us in the open source game aspire to.
Is anyone else wondering from which side of the MS anti-trust case Craig got his arguments?
The rules to making money in a capitalistic society are: produce something that people want, and produce it at a price they are willing to pay.
---
Kev
- Tune in next time for.. a clever sig.
Ten years ago, they would have been one of those "guaranteed to be there companies". Not just as a hardware vendor; they once had a great deal of software too.
As a manager, I view Open Source Software as no more of a risk than the commercially available alternatives.
Not even the people at Psychic Friends Network know for sure who is going to be around in ten years.
Closed Arcitecture Engineering results in a level of Instability, Insecurtity, Distrust, and Incompatibility that Open Arcitecture Engineering will never have to deal with.
While both Linux and Windows have both had security problems, Linux can be fixed within days as opposed to Windows which is fixed at MS discretion (which may be never if the problem isn't drawing enough attention).
While overly perinoid people could be suspicious of both Linux and Windows OS's. Linux source code is freely available to those that want to look in it to see whats going on, not windows.
Evolutionarily speaking, Windows is like the Neanderthal Man. NonAdaptable. Eventualy after it has had its day in the sun, it will die of like all the other closed arcitecture systems that couldnt adapt. While Linux is happily chugging away, slowly but surly, adapting to encompass every nook and cranny of Cyberspace.
RA7
-
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
The reasoning goes something like this: proprietary software -- selling copies of bits you write once and keep a monopoly on through copyright law -- is certainly more profitable in the short term. Monopolies usually are. However, open source is a phenomenon that isn't going away, so the copyright monopoly isn't perpetual. Given sufficient time, any useful software functionality can and will be reproduced with open source. Once this happens, your software is abandoned by a free market in favor of the cheaper alternative, and you either write new software or sell support.
On its face, this only seems to imply that selling a particular item of proprietary software is unsustainable in the long term, which any dolt could have told me. MS doesn't make its money selling DOS, but by selling progressive upgrades from that original product. However, this means that you can only make money selling bits as long as you can code new useful features faster than the open source competition, and can maintain a large enough lead that people will pay you for earlier access to your innovations. One can perhaps argue that you then aren't in the software business so much as the R&D or predicting-the-future business, but I won't.
Instead, I'll point out the other big claim supporting this notion: open source breeds open source programmers. You don't have to be a master programmer to be a programmer any more, because you don't have to be good enough and dedicated enough to make it your living. It's vastly easier to add a missing feature to a program than to write the program from scratch -- and this lower barrier to entry becomes an incentive for more people to learn how to program. Therefore, the open source community grows, perhaps exponentially. Now, your software company has to hire more and smarter programmers to stay far enough ahead of the open source competition to keep your upgrades saleable. But the open source community, in theory, can continue to grow long after the resources of any particular company are exhausted on programmers' salaries.
This is what has MS worried: for the time being, their lead is comfortable. But the open source community has just started to really gain steam in the last four or five years, and MS already relies on creative stock option tricks to pay its armies of programmers.
In the end, this ever-accelerating race against open competition is supposed to kill proprietary software firms. Selling support is a perfectly viable business model in this environment -- not, mind you, a quick ticket to untold billions in profit. The support companies, in this model, are not the engines of open source so much as the axle grease; the community drives the software forward collectively and spontaneously. Almost nobody really wants to write documentation or do tech support full time, so that's a niche that somebody can get paid to fill. But even if all the Red Hats and Ximians were to fold tomorrow, the Debians and GNUs and volunteer kernel hackers would be essentially unaffected.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Cox's software-development-as-service model isn't necessarily a better business model than selling proprietary software. Just in the long run, it's the only one that will survive.
Good point. What's really bizarre is that MS is saying that it is "effectively impossible" for software companies to use GPL'd code in their proprietary products. Well, duh. It's also impossible (not just effectively, but absolutely) for those same companies to include Microsoft's source code in their products. Sounds like the pot calling the kettle a food contact surface to me.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
This customer then pays for the delivery of the software. Open source software (and indeed, GPL'ed software) does not affect this proven business model at all. The only problem would be that the customer could then freely redistribute the software or modify it without paying the developer. This essentially prevents the developer from selling the exact same software to another customer.
Thank you for your insightful post. I learnt a lot from it.
I'm a freelancer. In the past we might need to charge our customers extra money if they want the source code of our development, not because we are greedy, but we must cover the cost of development in adopting expensive proprietary tools and ensure higher chance of reusing those tools in on-going maintenance and enhancement.
After adopting GPL'd software, we no longer charge extra money in giving our code, because we've already saved a lot of money in the development, as well as the money saved on using Linux servers(that's a lot of saving). Our customers are happy to have cost saved and while having everything they pay for.
To our big surprise repeat business is increasing. It's amazing we don't need to lock our customers with proprietary code to have more repeat business. Those marketing guys might not have thought of this before.
However, I've a major concern when dealing with customers who do not want to disclose their source of the development. In theory I can sign NDA to protect their secret, but it doesn't bypass GPL which require them to disclose the source on request. One of our customer told me that major banks are forbidden their staffs looking at GPL'd code as they don't want to disclose the code of their end products, in any circumstance.
Sorry for the naive questoin, but what can I do in this case? Should I just switch back to proprietary software for these customers? Or is there any way we could protected coded developed by GPL'd software?
Thanks
I just read this on AltaVista, and one quote pointed to a reaction needed by the legislators. So should we send someone to the 'Hill in our defense?
.wma files on CD, and when the computer crashed I couldn't use them again. The next time the computer crashed, to get the software preinstalled on my system back, I needed to buy some of it! And when I reinstalled Virus Scan - off a pre-made cd from HP - I couldn't update it to the version I had because the subscription expired.
So Microsoft is going to make a push for laws against Open Source software? Giving things away is like dot com's who failed? What about Internet Explorer - it's far from Open Source, but it's free software.
Basically it comes down to this, MS sees free software as a threat, not because of its customer base or licenses; but because it doesn't let them have power. New file types they want to push (asf, secure mp3s what ever) can't be pushed if they loose ground on the user end.
I got rid of windows (as a whole system of thinking) because the open source model is built not for the developer like everyone thinks, but it's built the end user. Joe Schmoe like me who would like to just fuck around! I like being able to do things I should be able to do for free.
Windows isn't a OS it's a business model. For every thing I would like to do, I need to spend anywhere from $20 to $50 to be able to do it. On a Windows system, you need to spend money just to change the look of it! CD burning in windows could cost a fortune - but the software is the same on *nix and free!
MS wants to own your whole computer! I'm still mad about backing up
Windows is one big rip off - you want better defrag? Buy it! Want a better ? Buy it? It makes me sick.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Two statements that need to be discussed:
:)
1. "Open Software is insecure."..Microsoft has one of the LEAST secure OS's (yesterday the root exploit on ALL Windows 2000/IIS 5 servers was discovered).. yet they say open source is insecure? Patches to open software are consistantly released sooner than those to closed software.
I think they may have been thinking about insecure in the MPAA/RIAA sense of the word
If my taxes are going to pay for the government to participate in the software industry, then I damn well better be able to use the product of what I've paid to develop.
Fortunately for us Free Software lunatics, many of us pay US taxes as well. And we demand that code that goes into Public Domain go under this brilliant license, before it is made worthless.
If a company says it can innovate -- let it! Make code using the productivity-enhancing GPLed code, as Free Software writers have had to do with proprietary code. Public domain code shouldn't just be the playthings of a few corporations; it should also be for people of other, less developed countries. That the vision I have for my country.
Unfortunately, we have to stop this discussion now. We've been Godwinned!
RW
RW
Heh... Been to places like Bali?
"Ooh look... Win2k Advanced Server for 40000 rupee... that's what? AUD$8?"
Depending on how well the label on the cd has been copied you can sometimes read the "Please do not make illegal copies..." message.
Think about how many dozens of MS employees must have read the text of this speech before it went up on their site. Notice that not once in the entire text of this speech does he use an apostrophe.
Now why the heck would you take advice on intellectual property and business models from a company that can't even create grammatically correct English text? Why would you buy software from these guys?
Please show me just 1 peice of software that M$ makes or has stolen , or bullied away from it's developer that doenst have a technically superior open source equivalent. Just 1? I dont think so .... so assuming i am right , all M$ is saying is that THEY will be better off without open source.
Do u think the comapnies that wrote most of the software included in Windoze really shared from the success of M$ ?
This is simply another fear based propaganda message for the evil empire
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Wow, you want to tell me that MS invented C++? How facinating, where did you got this info?
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Couple of points:
Win2K has one version, the difference is in the tweaking done to the version you have, and what extra software you get with it.
Win2K DC is a customized version of Win2K, that the OEM change to take advantage of its hardware.
If I open source a new cool browser, and a company add some features, and sell it, then they *deserve* it.
My code is still there, anyone who wants it can take it and use it. However, if they feel that the addition to the browser that the company made is worth their money, they are welcome to pay for it.
Again, it's a matter of choice, you can get the free version, without the additions, or get the compnay's version, and pay for the additions.
GPL prevents this choice, thus limiting the scope of my code reuse.
MS comment about GPL underminning commercial software is quite correct, btw. As are you when pointing out that most commercial software development is done for spesific customers.
MS bussiness model is the one that is being undermined by GPL, and I think that they meant bussiness that makes their money of selling their software would be hurt by it.
Bussinesses that makes their money writing software to clients always give the source as well as the binary to the client, so GPL is less of an issue here.
OSS allows you to sell your software, but consider the situation with linux distributions. You *can* buy them, but most people don't.
You can get them for free from a friend, or from the net, or from a Magazine's CD.
I can order them from cheapbytes and pay more for S&H than on the disk.
(Yes, I know that some people buy them, a large precentage doesn't, however)
This mean that you lose a *lot* of paying clients, not a good thing to tell your boss, you would agree.
One last thing, about source forking. I want my software to work on all version of linux, can I have that? Most likely not, because of the forking.
(Yes, this isn't *that* big a problem, but I'm making a point here).
I think that that was what MS meant.
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
The difference is that you get to choose, you can not use or buy a commercial software, you can't choose not to sponsor goverment software.
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Yes and no.
Being able to program is helpful in a sys-admin, it's not a neccesity, or shouldn't be.
Knowing the system well enough is enough.
Here we get into an interesting problem, what, exactly, is programming.
Does writing perl script or VBS files constitue under programming?
Being able to script stuff and do some basic programming *is* a required skill for a sys-admin.
Being able to create applications isn't, that is the domain of developers. No one says that you can't have someone who wears two hats, but that is beside the point.
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Adapt to *what*?
RH (and other linux companies that release GPL programs) doesn't makes money, MS makes billions a year.
That is largely because selling GPL is like selling ice to escimos.
*Why* should I pay for something I get for free?
So RH has to work much harder for their money, and they *still* don't make a profit.
MS makes a lot of dimes.
Explain to me the bussiness model of selling GPL software, please. And how you can profit from it.
Support doesn't count, BTW, commercial software makes money from support as well.
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Now, if I could do that *legally*...
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Not at all.
First: I believe that getting the source is the standard in customized applications, probably also transfer of copyright, as well.
Second: The GPL required General Public discoulsoure (You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. )
So you don't want to use GPL if you don't want to expose the code.
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Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
No, the GPL spesify 3rd party as well.
Qoute:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
That kill GPLed customized applications, I guess. You don't want the competition to see your code.
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Um, I've heard that most (all?) MS applications are being written in C++ & Objective C.
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Internet Explorer.
MTS
COM+
MS SQL Server
Four of them right out the top of my head.
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Which witch watched which watch?
Oh how I laughed my ass off when I read this article. Yes, Microsoft is trying to say that they need to adapt their business model if they want to keep making money, but I think that anyone can see that this is M$ bluster.
The business model I am speaking of for Phase 3 is the Commercial Software Model. The taxonomy of this model is built around 5 key elements:
Community: a strong support community of developers
Standards: promote collaboration and interoperability while supporting innovation and healthy competition
They put the two things of which they have least at the top of their list. At least they have their priorities right, even if they can't achieve them. For Christ's sake, Age of Empires II was brought out because the original wouldn't run on Win98! Interoperability be damned.
What they want is the benefit of Open source but maintain market dominance and stifle innovation. Shared source means having thousand of programmers debug their code, while gaining nothing from it. They want to make money by selling faulty goods and have unpaid enthusiasts fix it for free. Sounds like a good business model to me.
Healthy competition? Netscape, Mac, Linux. And standards? How many f$cking bugs fixes do they need to bring out before their software does what it is supposed to?
Yes, M$ need to change the business model, they need to extend their time to market and get their product to work before releasing it rather than build a marketing buzz and, once it is released, fix it (or not as the case may be).
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
I loved this part, too. My instant thought was, "how does he explain commercial television, then?"
Clearly, the shows we watch on commercial television aren't produced for free. They're very expensive to the television networks. But those networks show their valuable intellectual property to millions of viewers every night without charging viewers a dime. This shows that advertising can successfully pay for valuable content. His off-hand dismissal of dot-coms who "gave away" their valuable creations because they believed in the folly of advertiser support at best ignores the facts and at worst is a patently self-serving straw man argument.
He might as well say that the dot-coms were doomed because there is no Santa Claus. The argument would have just as much relevance.
The United States Government can not have Copyright Protection? What about State governments?
Here in Canada, our government can (and does) have copyright protection -- this extends to Provincial governments as well... Crown Corporations -- such as Canada Post or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation -- may own copyrights.
Parliament can copyright under The Queen's Printer for Canada (the provinces do it under "The Queen's Printer for Ontario" or whatnot, as far as I'm aware.) For instance, there are many documents published by the Government (or by Parliament) that are free for public distribution but subject to particular terms. These documents are (c) the Queen's Printer (for Canada or for the Province.)
Presumably if the government or some entity established by Parliament released software for the public's use under the GPL the reliance on copyright would be satisfied.
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Craig Mundie is speaking to a business school during this speech. How many business school graduates are seriously going to be interested in "community, improved feedback, (or) augmented debugging?"
:)
Artists, which many programmers who write programs under the GPL deservedly see themselves as, are always going to less interested in the monetary implications of their work...
However, the type of person who is typically attracted to business school (and this is a generalization I'm sure will get me in trouble, but I'll continue, anyway) often has no artistic ability, little concern for the improvement of society, and sees the world in a narcisstic fashion.
Microsoft is more a business than a creator of beautiful software. We all knew this already
"In this sense, open source software based on the GPL mirrors the .com business models that proved the least successful during the past year."
Does this mean that there are going to be banner ads in the 2.6 kernel?
Kenny
if someone is going to mention GPL one more time today, I'm going to scream.
Isn't there some important news, like PCI plugin cards that let you run Seti@home clients, or an 'Ask Slashdot' of someone wanting legal advice or just to know whether to get a CS at all?
btw. did anyone think that ESR's pre-speech analysis was a little, well early? It almost sounded like he was scared anyone was going to take this M$ dude seriously.
MS will bribe whomever they have to in order to ensure that all software approved for use in government work is non-GLP'ed. And once official institutions like the US government start to back away from free software, the press will begin to malign it as well (the press, after all, rarely contradicts what "official" institutions do). After that, free software will be so marginallized that anybody who uses it will be looked down upon as suspicious and untrustworthy. Just wait and see.
I'm no open source zealot, but I would hate to see the above scenario come to pass. Unfortunately, there is nothing anybody can do about. MS has the cash to make sure their voices are heard and everybody else's are drowned out. It's over before it begins.
I'm a customer. Where's my source?
-------------
Chad Robinson, Sr Research Analyst, RFG
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
Unfortunately, this issue is not that simple; I believe that you misunderstood some aspects of the speech.
For example, take a look at this Slashdot article. I happen to know that the accusation was FUD. But the point is that it's very easy to accuse any software company that they have broken GPL. You don't really need any proof, you can just say "hey, your implementation looks a little bit like ours, I bet you stole some of our stuff", and the software company doesn't really have any way to defend itself. As a result of this, Microsoft and some other companies have strictly forbidden their developers to even look at GPL software because it might lead to very nasty and unfair lawsuits.
This effectively creates a shield between GPL and proprietary software developers (and please, don't start saying that the latter are all evil), which I believe to be a very unhealthy thing. Closed-source developers are forced to fear everything that has to do with GPL to protect their company, this is the actual viral nature of GPL.
Now, I am not saying that GPL is bad, I'm just asking people to pay attention to some serious collateral damage it creates.
When men used to be men
Depends on your definition of "engine". it maybe be custimary to just have an engine for rendering, but my personal definaition of an engine is any app that does one specific part of a larger program.
Sort of like a subroutine in source, except my engine is always running and is crutial to the overall program.
So back to the original point, "the quake engine" was made open, so many FPS(and some others) could take advantage of it, but well, a golf simulator, physics and the bsic rules of golf never change. why wouldn't you put in the engine? so all that would be left would be the interface, and the charactors, and the setting and, oh wait, same as with the quake engine.
Same thing with a card game. You have an engine for a deck of cards, which lets you draw, discard, whatever. i could make a poker game based on that engine, someone could make a competing game, or make solitare.
That is open source games to me.
-stfrn
"It'll be like stealing candy from a baby... why, that look like a lark!" - Mr. Burns.
"Olgh uphmums blee obbob ugh mumble mumble urriighleh ummum blabla uuuh uhh gargh grunt auugh blergh that bebbbebeb hettettet eep euauauoi gurg urgh ugga bugga. So i think you agree with me that it's better to give all your money to us? Or else whole world will be doomed."
Alan Cox managed to decrypt Craig's text and successfully commented it: "Apparently Craig ... has problems"
I couldn't figure did he mean Craig has problems others than just being MS employee..
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
hmm... The problem I see with people releasing code as 'free' in your sense is it provides no incentive to companies to make their own code likewise free. You have to remember that corporations are obligated to (try to) profit as much as possible.
Its a tragedy of the commons thing... I write a |337 program, release it as public domain or whatever, and, say, microsoft (woo hoo, M$ bashing!) goes and takes it and incorporates it into one of their products, putting their own license on it. Now I've just done work for M$ and they haven't compensated the community at all.
GPL gets around this by requiring that users of the code likewise GPL, so we don't get this tragedy of the commons, so to speak.
And we demand that code that goes into Public Domain go under this brilliant license, before it is made worthless.
How would it be made worthless if it were made public domain without going under 'this brilliant license?'
I use ONLY Opera on my Windows 2000 machine, and the exec's speech came throught without a single 'garbage character' in it. There's almost nothing I want to do that doesn't work with Opera these days, except for a few sites designed by boneheads who 'test' for a browser type and kick me off.
On the matter of fvwm, I agree: it's the window manager I use on all my freenix machines (which are now all NetBSD except for one slack box). I'm kind of disappointed that fvwm1 is pretty much abandoned now, though, as I find .fvwmrc cleaner to maintain than .fvwm2rc. But that's just me being reactionary.
If you want to run NT 3.51 (it's far superior to 4.0 in many regards) Symantec's last generation of PC Tools for Windows came out on it. They called it 'NT Tools' and it consisted of the same superior 'explorer' file manager (plus other stuff) that was part of PC Tools for Windows 3.1 but extended to NT. It looks like Win95's file manager. It has the added plus that it reaches out to FTP sites within the same 'file manager' frame. Kinda similar to how Midnight Commander seamlessly links out to FTP sites.
PC Tools for Windows 3 kept me from hating Windows 3.1 for a long time. Maybe it's why I stuck with it as long as I did (the first Yggdrasil Linux distro back in '93 did exert it's pull, of course...)
I think Red Hat has done a spectacular job exploring the open source type of business model. Breaking even is just the first step to turning a profit, and I believe they will eventually be a profitable company. According to statements recently made on /. by a Red Hat executive, they continue to meet their quarterly objectives for growth and improvement.
It has been a learning experience for a lot of people to market open source products. A lot of old "Cathedral" type notions have had to be dismissed. I think Red Hat has also done much for the business world to accept the Linux community and the business model, and I thank them for it.
So the changes are PD. They're still not much good without the rest of the code.
Reboot macht Frei.
Hey, call me when RedHat or any other OS company even gets close to being as profitable as Microsoft is.
The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.
Hehehe ... off-topic , sure as hell Gore is very much off-topic now and hopefully will stay there.
The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.
Cornelius Vanderbilt: "See, we have this proprietary track gauge that only our railroad cars can fit on... and all these little guys want to sell you this track gauge that ALL of their cars can share... but the difference is that we have some nice goons on their way right now to break all of their kneecaps... It's all right here in my book 'The Track Ahead'" ;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So if their business model stops them from being able to profitably use GPLed components in their software... they shouldn't use GPLed components in their software.
If they want their software to be closed, they should develop it themselves. If they want to take advantage of GPLed open source software they can - they just have to play by the rules.
Forking also gets a bad reputation because it leads to upfront confusion and worries about choosing the wrong version. If I choose to run a BSD system, which one should I choose, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, BSDi, etc. Perhaps at this point my requirements are flexible enough that any of them will do. Perhaps I get it down to two that fit my current needs, how do I choose? Do I flip a coin? Then there is the worry about future use. I choose OpenBSD now because it best fits my needs. But six months down the line FreeBSD comes out with a feature that will help me but the OpenBSD people don't like it enough to incorporate it. I could switch but perhaps I still find that I need a feature of OpenBSD that FreeBSD doesn't support. In my experience, this is a major reason that forking frustrates people so bad.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
It depends how paranoid you get but their is more to this, I think.
I reckon this is the point of a fairly large wedge that Microsoft want's to put into the door that is being opened by GPL.
They attack the commercial viability of an industry based on GPL, basically their is none.
This is aimed at the Government, "Hey do you want a sector of the economy that is very profitable, then stick with us or... well Mr President you'd have to be a sucker to go with GPL"
Microsoft is looking for protection from products built under the GPL model.
Its all about economics!
I put it another way. I tell my boss that he can choose to use Windows, and I can choose to get another job. When he asks why I then start to explain that I refuse to work with Windows because of their security, performance, and support. I explain that outside of managing Windows desktops (which I don't do) I can do anything in UNIX better then he can get it done in Windows, and prepare to back up my claims.
As for MS press goes, I simply explain that MS has lost my trust and that I no longer trust anything they say.
--
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
I was there this morning and was one hour late for my exam. Personal stuff aside though, he did make some interesting points (not), and perverted lots of the facts. Some things not on the published speech, I think, were some of the numbers. He basically made the 200 official contributors to the Linux kernel represent open source, then went on to show how there were 1.35 million tech workers in paying tech industries that contributed $38 billion in taxes. Meaning: Research cannot continue without taxes, and open source development doesn't pay taxes therefore the whole system must collapse like the recent .com's! DOES THAT MAKE ANY SENSE? Didn't thinks so.
pax.exe has also nice contents :)
but try to copy pax.exe to tar.exe and see what happens :)
Reposted : My thoughts.... e:My thoughts.To Hack or Not to Hack, hack,period (Score:) Most people do not understand the purpose of DeCSS, as it was written to get access to legal purchased DVDs, of which you have a legal write, under archival copyright laws, the DMCA, to reproduce, from the master DVD a copy, but since it was written for the sole purpose of copying via a LinuX required computer, and that their was no issued driver from this established "open source" protocol, MS's Billy-Boy Gate's ( and Pauly Allen ) and the DVD manufacturers have committed a RICO act( world criminal issue, FTC, SEC, WIPO ) for the sole purpose of destroying the "open source" movement, as has just been declared by MS VP, paraphrasing that LinuX "open source", we write HOLIX tm (Hm), will destroy satellites" and start WWIII, and are total criminals....So all you "open sourcers" are you ready now to disconnect yourself, once in for all from Gate's and his fascist "Win-Nosers" and Microsoft-heads", that have destroyed 50 % of the world's productivity, namely the handi-capped who absolutely can not have their computers crash. So all those that do not realize that a "declaration act of war" has been declared against the 70 percent of the world now using some form of UNIX/LinuX, "open source", you better understand this, by law all dedicated users producers of MS Windows products are legally and criminally responsible for any action that MS Gate's and Allen have committed under a RICO act, and further, those that have agreed with their acts are guilty of "associative RICO", with fines and jail time, so I would be careful what I state in ICQ, chat-rooms, and insta-messaging, as it is legal admissible as empirical evidence, especially under RICO, as my RICO experts have informed me....THE "HyTDRA Hacker", very old 2600/c member ( Phone Phreaker, originally )and proud of it....P.S. DSD will soon replace DVD, as it can store 64 times mor music and video on a standard CD-Rom....so the issue is moot, period, I now own the challenge to Gates' and Allen's usPTO.con ( not a mistake on .con ) as I now own I.P.T.A., the new and only legal I.ntellectual P.roperty T.rade A.uthorty on the Internet ( filed under the powers of the DMCA, see you in the Haag and Madrid, partner, two months from now Gates and Allen, your busted ), go to http://www.genaltered.com hot link to HOLO~NEO Proc.....you will find the truth there
Nano tech groups
Nano tech groups
Disaster area or not, this matter was going to come to a "boil" eventually, however in our case, with HOLO~graphic protocol, we are niether software or hardware but a new type of protocol, HOLO~Ware tm (Hm), it can emulate software or hardware functions, yet with its on non X86 "Open Source" protocol, it can process 4096 bit/tasks per second on its opto-buss, so how does the Gatesian mentality apply to us as we are developers of Analog linear computers, ( the experimental X-29 jet has three on-board Analog computers ( not digtal ) to control its "fly by wire " controls on its kanarded mini-wings ) so I guess MS VC "Mud Head" has got us good, me thinks not, as Analog computers are not in their catagory, but we can do more because we operate as a Analog super or quantum computer, goto http://holix.airweb.net and http://www.genaltered.com for the future, got 11.2 year cycle Sun flares....not a good place to be on "two milk Cans and some erector set pieces", a $ 20 Million idiot...Ha Gates and Allen better stay out of my Analog territory , if they know what is good for them...and I do mean that, I still will see on you for RICO in the Haag, "Billy-Boy" and Pauly..
Nano tech groups
Reminds me of Stockwell Day (Leader of the Canadian Alliance party)..
:o)
/. story submission :o)
Last year, he (informally) said that the Government should hold a referendum on an issue if 30% of the population signed a petition about it..
So the TV show 'This Hour has 22 Minutes' held an on-line poll to force a referendum to force Mr. Day to change his first name to 'Doris'..
They succeeded in getting the 30%
I'd be willing to try the same thing with a
A code fork is a tool, nothing more.
You make it sound as if there were code knives and code spoons as well...
(Sorry. I've just seen it like ten times in the last two days and had to rant about it.)
;)
It's 'no one.' 'No one.' Two words. Not 'noone.'
If that was just a typo, I apologize for ranting. But I've seen it too many times for there not to be a significant portion of the population which thinks it's a word. It's not!
Thank you for your time.
I use the GPL, and am going to continue to use it.
I stand to gain more from acknowledgement of what my software does than from metering and selling the software itself.
I have the _right_ to set my own terms on my own property. It is _their_ rules that so rigorously define my code as my property. I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep if it was as free as air. _They_ are the ones who put such incredible weight on my right to dictate terms and conditions by which my work can be used.
Because of this, my right to use whatever the hell terms I want is almost absolute- and if I choose to contribute to the pool of GPLed free software, they have no business bitching about it.
we demand that code that goes into Public Domain go under this brilliant license
Then you are demanding the impossible (which I suppose might not be too surprising). If code is public domain, there are no copyright restrictions on it whatsoever. There is no licensing, there is no copyright ownership. It is in the public domain, and may be used however any member of that public sees fit.
Now if code is instead put under "this brilliant license," then it is most certainly not in the public domain. It comes with copyright restrictions - you cannot use it except as provided under the terms of the license. This, I believe, is what Microsoft is objecting to: the failure to release taxpayer-funded source code into the public domain, choosing instead to license it under a more restrictive license.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't see how this is applicable, as there doesn't appear to be any transfer to copyrights to the US government involved (which is what that section of the law allows). Instead the US government is producing code and licensing it under the GPL. However, code produced by the US government cannot be copyrighted by the US government. Thus it cannot be licensed (since only a copyright holder may release code under a license).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You speak as if companies are some sort of independent entity. Companies are always owned by people (either stockholders individual owners). In addition, companies are run by people. Thus, if companies benefit, people benefit by definition.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
But how easy is it for someone *ELSE* besides Microsoft to write drop-in replacements for those layers? If the info needed to do so is not readily available, then its the same as having a monolithic system, for all practical purposes.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Funny how he talks about foolish business practices such as giving something away now in hope of getting paid for it in the future, considering the fact that for the past 4 months or so almost every consumer product has offered a $400 MSN rebate.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I read it just now up till the point where he starts to quote Bill Gate's "The Road Ahead" then I paused, snorted and decided I'd try to read it again when I wasn't at work and could shout at the screen about how stupid MS is.
When I read things like this, I have the feeling that MS is either very stupid or very scared. I almost get a sense from MS of the kind of ignorant dispair you get with press releases from Soviet-style governments. In 20 years will places like Sovietski.com be selling MS apparel and glassware like they do with the Russians/Eastern Europeans?
System adminstrators are there specifically to tell the system EXACTLY what to do. They do this in the place of those that may to be able to or care to do this.
Programming is nothing more than creating a reusable form of "telling the system EXACTLY what to do". It is a skill that a real system administrator should have. It is an ability that should separate those who are in control from those who are not.
Those that cannot program really don't have full control over the machine and don't deserve to be called administrators.
Simply, "programming" enhances control. "Control" is what system admins are PAID for.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Therefore...
Also, this stuff is essentially what that other guy from Microsoft said, a while back, and is very remeniscent of the suggested course of action in the Halloween Documents. Seems like those have been approved.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Shared source sounds to me like: "You bought my product - here is the source code. You can't give my product away and you can't give the source code away either. However, you can tailor it to your own uses and fix bugs."
I used to work on a system like this (Banner by SCT.) It is a student record system. You get the source code and have to compile everything yourself. If you want to modify it - have at it. If an upgrade breaks your mods, tough.
This model works great for the people who have the software - kinda like an exclusive club. And the company still makes $$$ cause what they are selling you is the software (and then ripping you a new one for upgrades/maintenance).
This would satisfy one of the main complaints against closed-source software - "if it breaks I can't fix it."
As for the redistribution, well that is more the free software instead of the open software angle. However, there is quite a community of users of Banner who are great about sharing mods they've made.
I don't know how MS would license their Shared Source - if you get the source, you can't distribute mods to it, you can't do anything in your life similar???
Not too mention the big fat pile of money they spent on Hotmail (which apparently gives out free email accounts).
It's not Microsoft's software that makes me sick, it is the smug assurance Microsofties have that everyone that doesn't work for Microsoft must be an idiot. Microsoft treats their customers like thieves and continually insults their intelligence, and then they wonder why so many people are willing to download and use a Unix re-hash written by a Finnish undergrad and supported over the Internet instead of their (arguably) easier to use software.
Linux will continue to gain marketshare until Microsoft finally learns what customer service really is about (and no, it's not about making it hard for them to make MP3s).
The issue with games isn't so much that the development cycle is so short, it's that there's some much artistic content in games these days.
Games consist of an engine and some content. The content is generally a lot of work, not usefully designed by a community, and has little reuse value (in the sense of code reuse). It's also generally encoded to avoid spoiling the plot.
Engines are a good candidate for open source development, except that, since the engine is really used directly by game developers (and only somewhat indirectly by players), the usual userbase of the programmers themselves isn't really there. The game developers are hard to convince to use open source engines, especially because they tend to want to make it as difficult as possible to get the content out (other than playing it), because the proprietary engines are ahead, and because the in-house engine developers tend not to mind that the game gets spoiled for them so the developers can ask for the features they actually want.
Got me? But I do remember Gates calling the internet a "fad". Look up the original edition of "The Road Ahead".
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
Be reasonable people.
Microsoft is luseing marketshare. It's OS and Office Suite sales are down and it is actualy lusing money on the software side of it's business.
To top it off you have this Linux thing which regardless of how you slice it will dictate that companies like Microsoft will make less money off each copy sold. If they adopt open sorce it means they will actualy sell fewer copies even if more people use the code.
What do you want tthem to do? Just role over and take it up the tail pipe? Of course not. They are going to go down fighting. They will not let us eat there lunch onchalenged.
This "brutal asoult on logic" is a perfect reasonable response from any company in the situation MS is. They need to do this in order to stall enogh people long enogh to let MS migrate into businesses that will be lucretive in the future. the sale of desktop OSs and comodity apps is not one of those businesses and they know it better than we do.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
But if there was no intellectual property (IP) law, the GPL would not be *needed*. All code would be free for everyone to use.
Oh, come on. Without IP law, source code would only be free if you could obtain it via legitimate means (e.g. without illegally breaking into a server to steal it).
you could still ... reverse engineer it
IANAL, but IP law does not prevent reverse engineering (in America, anyway). It does happen, but as a practical matter, it's very difficult to do.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Forget Noone... lets start doing Nooners...
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
In addition, please take to me to the Sun pages for Security advice, or Checkpoint's (I couldn't find any, and I have partner access), or Redhat (there's no dedicated security pages - it's under "errata") and say that Microsoft doesn't take security as seriously or more seriously than these other respected companies.
Andrew van der Stock
Replace "businesses"/"companies" with "individuals". Same difference. The point is that government is not here to help some people at the expense of society as a whole.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
In any case, it's not Bill Gates' book - Nathan Myhrvold ghost-wrote most of it. (Myhrvold is credited as co-author in later editions.)
Yes, but that has nothing to do with forking. That has to do with code being available at zero cost. Given that, code forking is a non-issue for the given reason. Not given that, why even talk about code forking.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I would say the RIGHT to fork is good, even though the act may be good or bad depending on the use.
The right to free speech is a good thing. Although the use of that right can definitley have undesirable results.
It's a freedom thing.
On the flip side, you have this accumulated pile of MS code (xx million lines in Win2K + Office, + others) which you can't see, unless you agree not to use it without, I would assume, a hefty licence fee to be paid. If you don't want to live with paying the vendor money, find the code elsewhere.
Hrm, finding a trend here, aren't we? :)
--
So a Micros~1 lackey is out there spreading FUD against Open Source in general, and the GPL in particular. "Use GPL software," warns Microsoft, "and you could be forced to throw your valuable intellectual property [sic] away."
Quelle surprise.
Microsoft likens the support of Open Source projects to the dot-coms that cratered over the last year or so. They make particular hash of Open Source-based companies hoping to sell their services. "You can't make money supporting Open Source products," warns Microsoft.
However. I casually observe that the whole raison d'être of Microsoft's .NET initiative is to sell software services. It is, of course, in their best interests to construct this system such that only Microsoft gets to control how the infrastructure is deployed, and who gets to use it (and how much tribute they'll pay). So that there is no question about who gets to exercise this control, they are compelled to spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing this infrastructure on their own.
...Whereas one of these fresh-faced business school graduates could root around in the Open Source commons and use its resources to construct an equivalent, if not superior, solution for free, cutting Microsoft out of the deal entirely. Moreover, because the code itself isn't being distributed -- the code is being executed on a remote server on behalf of a user, but never actually being distributed anywhere -- intellectual "property" disclosures "forced" by the GPL are not an issue. (This is true of GPL v2.0, anyway; GPL 3.0 is reputed to be addressing this question.)
I am therefore not surprised Microsoft is trying to scare new business leaders away from Open Source. 'Cause if those graduating kids ever figure out they can out-flank Microsoft without spending a dime on fundamental R&D, it would be a devastating tragedy for American businesses... run by Bill Gates.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I hav no idea what you just said. What are you talking about?
In this example, the code which my tax dollars are paying for (NSA Linux) is not being released into the public domain. It's being released as GPL'd code, as required by the GPL on the Linux kernel.
This means that my tax dollars are paying to develop code which is inaccessable to me and anyone else who wishes to use a license other than the GPL.
Where do you get the idea that public domain code is only accessable to a few corporations and isn't exportable?
Well roll up your sleeves and fork the fvwm1 code, man!
;-)
That's the beauty of Free software.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this part added in a much more recent edition of Gates' book? Even in 1995, Gates
> viewed the Internet and the World Wide Web as nonentities.
Probably. Gates did not acknowledge that the Internet was worth his attention until December of that year.
What is more chilling is that Mundie quotes the opinion of a businessman as if it were undisputeable fact -- Mundie states that we've just been thru the popping of a speculative bubble, & to prove it he quotes Gates from 1995, as if the man were a genius or a prophet.
Just how well Gates understands the Internet is a matter still open to debate. But by quoting him in this manner, Mundie provokes us to ask just how much of a cult of personality exists at Microsoft. And if this cult will handicap Microsoft from understanding how the industry is actually changing.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
> If Microsoft was so ignorant of the Internet, then why was it a node on Usenet in 1981?
I said *Gates* not Microsoft. Gates was dismissive of the Internet until his public announcement that MS would start targetting the Internet in December of 1995.
In answer to your question, MS had a Usenet node in 1981 probably because their sysadmin wanted access to help maintain their Vax. This doesn't mean that Gates had a clue about the Internet until almost too late: rumor is Gates heavily relied on Nathan Myhrvold for technological advice, & Myhrvold told him to ignore the 'Net. (That's probably why Myhrvold left shortly after the start of the MS offensive to embrace, extend & extinguish the 'Net.)
Your point still does not answer why someone would treat Gates' opinion as fact -- especially when Mundie offers no further proof that Gates was truly insightful about Internet business -- & not just lucky.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
As has been mentioned (many times) before, we're at step 3.
Understand that the very nature of Free software means that it can't get "gotten rid of", no matter how much money Microsoft throws at fighting it. The way things are at the moment, Free software just can't lose. Take a step back and realise that "losing" means being removed from society, so that it can't be used by anyone, and not having a small market share. Even if Free software doesn't end up with huge market share, informed people can still use and develop it, no matter what goes on in the rest of the software world. This is a very good thing; Free software is gaining popularity and momentum because lots of people are starting to see this.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
--
I've read Title 17 from beginning to end, and what you are talking about doesn't exist.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a copyright is.
A copyright does not give you the right to copy and distribute a work. What a copyright gives you is the right to exclude others from copying and distributing a work. This is what is meant by the term exclusive right, and is very different from the concept of owning a work. Ownership of a work in the abstract is not recognized by copyright law. Copyright law defines two distinct types of ownership -- Ownership of a copyright over a work, and ownership of a copy of a work. There is no concept of ownership of a work.
For example:
Bob Writer writes and distributes a GPLed program.
Joe Patcher writes a patch for that program.
Bob Writer, having written the original program, has the right to exclude others, including Joe, from distributing the original program and any other derived works. Bob Writer offers the program to the world under the conditions of the GPL, thus agreeing to a limitation of his right to prevent others from copying and distributing his work, so long as those others adhere to the conditions of the GPL.
Joe Patcher accepts the program under the conditions of the GPL, writes a patch, and applies it to the original program, creating a derivative work.
Now there are TWO people who have the right to exclude others from copying and distributing the derivative work. Neither Bob nor Joe own the work. Each hold the right to exclude others, including each other, from distributing and copying the work, with the exception that Bob has already granted Joe the right to redistribute and copy the original program, or any derived works, but only under the conditions of the GPL.
Bob holds the copyright on his work, and Joe holds the copyright on his work. The GPL does NOT change the basic nature of copyright law. Specifically, Bob Writer has no right to use Joe Patcher's patches unless Joe Patcher agrees to permit Bob Writer to do so. The "original author" does NOT automatically "own" derivative works, as you claimed.
There are now a number of things that could happen.
Joe could decide to exercise his right, under the terms of the GPL, to release his patched version under the GPL. In this case Joe would retain ownership of the copyright on his patch.
Joe could also offer to sell or donate the copyright interest in his patch to Bob, in which case Bob would be the sole owner of the copyright over the derivative work.
Now let's say that Bob wants to sell his program to Microsoft, so they can integrate it into Windows and sell it without the source code. Bob is perfectly free to sell Microsoft the original program, but not Joe's derivative program, because Joe has the right to exclude others from copying and distributing his work; the patches, unless he agrees otherwise.
If Bob and Joe get together, they can both agree to sell the derivative work to Microsoft, but neither can do it alone, because each one has a copyright on the part of the work that they did.
This is no different then if Bob and Joe had collaborated on the program without using the GPL. Basic copyright law still applies to the ownership of copyrights over GPLed works!
Of course, when you have a major project, with dozens or even hundreds of contributors, it becomes effectively impossible for the original authors to distribute the program under any terms other than the GPL, unless the original authors are VERY careful to retain full ownership and/or control of the copyright on all contributions.
Which is either a defect or feature, depending on your point of view.
No, under copyright law the use of software is by default unrestricted.
17 USC 117 (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. - Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) [you are making a backup copy]
This covers the case where you "make a copy" of a piece of software by loading it into a computer, and make an "adaptation" of the software by executing it, thus changing the variables in the software.
Unless you agree, as part of a contractual license, to restrictions over your right to use a piece of software, you have the right, by default, to use the software, by virtue of your ownership of the copy. Right of first sale.
I made another posting elsewhere in this article that addresses some of your other points. Feel free to comment here or there if you think I have erred.
Steve -- what section of the copyright statutes assign the copyrights of derivitive works to the original copyright owner?
Well, as I said, I can imagine that GPLed software can use stuff from the public domain. But what about /usr/src/linux/3c59x.c? That was written by Becker at NASA and appears as a standalone piece of software, but also claims GPL. Since that was developed by the Federal Government, it can't have copyright protection and should therefore be public domain, shouldn't it?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
This is the best answer I've ever seen (although it still doesn't answer the NASA question). Good links and all.
Attention moderators: while I appreciate the 5 you gave me, save a few for this guy, too.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
This guy can't even get recent economic history correct. There were true recessions under both Presidents Reagan and Bush the elder. They both happened in the past 20 years. The juries still out on the current economic situation. Its hit tech stock hard, but it hasn't spread into a true recession yet. In fact, current signs make seem to hint that the economy is going to level off without ever hitting a recession.
Of course, calling these economic problems a recession is in Microsoft interests. It makes it much easier for Microsoft to explain their stock's poor performance.
...
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
Well the jury may be out on OS business models, but Red Hat is supporting quite a bit of research and development. And they are expected to turn a profit by the end of the year. Not bad for a relatively young company.
So the business model for supporting research may be different under OSS, but that doesn't mean it won't work.
...
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
I'm a little confused here: who are your customers? Are they the end users (i.e. the banks) or a reseller who is selling your software to the banks?
If it's just the banks that don't want to disclose their source code, then you can still use GPL without placing them under any special obligation. The burdens the GPL puts upon someone (e.g. having to disclose source) only apply when someone also takes the advantages of GPL (e.g. redistributing the software). GPL is always an option for the user, never a requirement. If they don't like the terms of GPL, they can just use the software in accordance with the rather limited rights (and limited obligations) stated by copyright law, and completely ignore the license.
In summary: a bank can hire you to write GPLed software, or software that includes GPL components written by someone else, and then use that software without ever having to give anyone the source code. Really. If the banks think otherwise, then they need to get better informed.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There are two fundamentally different contentions in the MS speech, which are not very well separated. They are:
...this implies that OSS should be banned or restricted.
1. OSS is not a viable model, because you need intellectualy property to charge money and pay for R&D.
2. OSS poses a threat to commercial software even for the companies that do not participate in it.
The second contention is found in this quote:
It [OSS] also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.
Oddly, the two contentions blatantly contradict each other, when they are juxtaposed explicitly. If OSS is not a viable development model, then it poses no threat to commercial software. Because if OSS is not a viable model, then it will be unable to produce a competitive product; if it does produce a competitive product, then contention #1 is mistaken.
It is also odd that it is Microsoft, not OSS, that wants to violate property rights. Fundamental to the notion of property rights is the ability to dispose of your own property in any way that pleases you, including giving it away or even destroying it. It would be a serious violation of intellectual property to prevent the owners of code from distributing it as they see fit.
Funny how Microsoft has never complained about the Public Domain aspect of government-developed software, but the GPL gets them hysterical...
The reason they never complained is because Microsoft can freely use/abuse public domain software, incorporate it into their products or take ideas from it, and nobody can complain (after all, it's public domain).
If they try those same stunts with GPL, suddenly they're in violation of a license.
In other words, they don't have free reign over other people's inventions/work.
--
Michael, in your comments you state For example, Mundie says forking code is bad. Here's the same thought translated into manager-speak: "Having multiple vendors competing to offer us the best product at the lowest price is worse than having one vendor who can sell the product to us at monopoly prices."
Is that really the same thought? I don't think so. From my understanding, forking code is where source code diverges along different development lines. The resulting applications may have some code in common, but possibly key parts are different. Interoperability, or even basic compatibility is not assured between these two related products.
Your manager-speak example addresses sole-source procurement and monopolistic behavior vs. open-market competition, rather than divergent development forks. To my mind, both are undesirable. But they're not the same thing, or even the same concept.
Microsoft does not develop custom projects. They develop general use products for the public.
:->
Not entirely true. They have a consulting arm that writes custom Visual Basic for Applications code and stuff like that to implement M$ prodcts in businesses.
Stop laughing!! That's custom development!!
My journal has hot
> Kudo's to the author for the clever linking of GPL with a negative tem like 'viral'.
Some of us advocate the term 'inductive' instead. Partly because it's less negative; partly because it's more accurate.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Have you looked at the new RPG Grimoire?? They are talking about releasing one game a month for about twenty bucks a piece. The reason?? A reusable engine. That could just as well be an open source engine....
The truth of it is that most PC games are too damn long because they have no replayability. Most modern games have an enjoyment cycle that is approximately 10 hours beyond the tme required to play the demo.
They see the GPL is a "brand" and they are attempting to "dilute" it.
"Shared Source Software" or OSS?
-b
Anyway, my thoughts on the speech were basically the following:
This is a syllogism (I think) and it's a bad one, as most can probably tell, and not just because VA and Redhat are not competitors in the same way Adobe and Macromedia are.
Mundie also used some extremely misleading statistics at the beginning of his remarks about OSS vs. (MSFT + Source Sharing). He states that There are only really 200 or so serious kernel constributors, and in the next breath says there are 1.3 million developers in the entire closed source software industry, the implication being that OSS is puny in comparison and a backwater project doomed to obscurity and/or failure. Pretty shaky logic, so hopefully those NYU B-schoolers could see the gaping holes.
Best part of the speech by far was the Q&A where one guy asked if MSFT had learned anything from OSS development given that it had produced a fine OS with just 200 dev's while it's taken MSFT 10 years and a few thousand trained monkeys. Now that was funny!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
wookin' pa nub in all the wrong pwaces
My idea is that this will eventually mirror the sort of thing that happened to SGI. They had great, but v expensive boxes and software that did amazing stuff. Then along came commodity boxes (macs included, more or less), that could do most of what SGI could, at a much much lower price point. This included both workstations and 'super computers' for rendering.
Part of this was good cheap software that did most of what the expensive Alias or Softimage could do. SGI suffered and are continuing to suffer because of this.
I think we are seeing the same thing here. Free/Open software does most of what Microsoft software will do. I see microsoft as the 'high end' of all this. Generally their office software is better, and their operating systems is probably easier to use. The integration of components is better. But it is becoming a bad value proposition.
It is expensive, and the free stuff is pretty bloody good. Certainly good enough for many many applications.
Now, Microsoft has going in its favour its lockin, but even that is being eroded by things like Wine and the ubiquity of the Office 97 file formats. They are becoming the new standard file types, and many programs will read and write them.
Goodbye Microsoft, it was good while it lasted. They are going to have to re-invent themselves like IBM did, and SGI are trying to do. .NET is probably a good effort in this ... I wish them luck.
It's always amusing to see this argument. I don't know if you've ever READ Microsoft's End-User License Agreement, but it specifically discounts all notions of liability. If Windows blows up you CAN NOT sue Microsoft. That whole idea is just a warm fuzzy.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
If Microsoft was so ignorant of the Internet, then why was it a node on Usenet in 1981?
If Microsoft was so against the forking of UNIX, then why did they develop Xenix? Microsoft is a big, big company and sometimes does a lot of inconsistent things because of it. It's even harder to keep straight when they attempt to revise the actual events that happened.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, but if I was IBM, I'd be pretty damn arrogant too.
IBM is way behind in terms of Linux compatibility and support of GPL'd code
Behind who? That they support Linux at all puts them ahead of most companies. I'd like nothing more than get Solaris the fsck off my server without killing the Sun Rays, but Sun barely supports their own products, let alone Linux (or NetBSD). If it was a Netfinity, or AS/400, or whatever, at least there would be a chance I would see some support eventually.
IBM is no different to any other corporation.
Except they're bigger, older, and smarter than most. If Linux will make them money in the long term (smaller software development investment, greater external support), they'll probably go for it, even if there isn't an immediate payoff. I wouldn't even be surprised to see them support Linux just so Microsoft would lose money.
If they were to release the source code for Windows, there'd be absolutely no reason for anybody to buy Windows, period.
:)
Well, except that no one would be able to get that shit to compile
- bridgette
The real reason that Microsoft is 'attacking' GPL is not only because they cannot steal the code, legally, but because of their fear that the government will support GPL code. Take for example, this:
"Today, any government putting work under GPL is walling it (the work) off from commercial business,"
Which begs the question: What govenments are actually allowing public research to be released exclusively under the GPL? Are any major govenments even considering such a policy?
I don't forsee any capitalist countries doing this and I would drop dead of shock if the US adopted such a policy. After all, they would want domestic buisinesses to use the research to make a profit, create jobs, enhance the GDP and such and requiring the GPL would make this a bit more difficult (but by no means impossible). A point that could easily be beat to death in one tenth the verbiage of the Mundie speech.
Since there is little or no risk of any major govenments requiring that publically funded research be released under the GPL, the govenment research angle was just an excuse to indulge in an anti-GPL rant.
- bridgette
Speaking of blurring definitions. You should hear what microsoft calls open source software. A coworker was using a technet training cd, and it had a slide show with voice accompanyment. There was mention that win2k can connect to a unix server running samba which is a "freeware program". while that is technically true, it shows how they are completely unable to grasp the concept that something can be both free and Free. All he could grasp was that it was free(beer)ware.
i guess it is just impossible to M$ to comprehend anything that does not (a) shaft the customer (b)rip off the customer (see a) or (c)guarentee them billions is revenue (see b)
----------------------
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
"There's a big difference."
I think that was point.
War is necrophilia.
I don't play tennis so it's unacceptable to me that my taxes go towards building and maintaining tennis courts. I don't have children so it's unacceptable to me that my taxes go to schools.
Unfortunately un the US we don't get to pick and choose how our taxes are spent. You don't "Damn well" get to do jack shit. You pay your taxes and you try to influence your legislators on how the money is spent. In this regard you are damned lucky. Your corporation is the richest and most powerful ornanization on the planet and can buy as many politicians as you want. We will yell and scream that we pay taxes and we want the govt to do this and that but when it comes to delivering the bribes we are powerless.
Your bosses will deliver the bribes and get what they want that's the way the system works.
BTW. I have no qualms about preventing businesses from profiting from govt work. It's supposed to be govt of the people not govt of the corporations. The corps can afford to do their own development without needing the govt. In fact anytime a bunch of CEOs get together they start griping about how inefficient and wasteful govt is and how we ought to just turn over the reigns to business and let them take care of everything. Of course when the time comes to ask for a handout they are first in line.
War is necrophilia.
The fat lady sings!
//Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
"A generic baked bean manufacturer does not worry a great deal about IPR."
Apparently he is not aware of the Bush's baked beans commercial...(he's Canadian right?)...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"It also requires you provide the source _at_cost_ not for free"
*Huh*? I thought it says that you *may* charge something for the cost of distribution. But that's option. I downloaded several Open Source projects yesterday and didn't pay a dime for the source. How could this be if it was "required"?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
BSD licence? What for? Isn't it normal for public institutions to release things under the public domain? What does the BSD licence offer that the public domain doesn't?
------
Hmm wouldn't it be funny to find one of the first
editions and show it to some wellmenaing journalists together with the part out of the Mundie speech?
Nasty, but i think Microsoft spinmeisters would approve of such tactics.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
IE.
I'm not saying I like that fact, but there is no open-source equivalent to IE.
I'm hoping Mozilla can surpass it, but it doesn't look like it will anytime soon.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
No, under copyright law the use of software is by default unrestricted.
As much as it seems you'd like to argue, you and the parent poster are saying the same thing. Since the GPL adds no restrictions, you get unlimited use from copyright law.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Slashdot tends not to accept things you actually wrote, just links to other places. But that would be a great thing to put on Kuro5hin.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Software sales- write once, sell a zillion copies, further revenue depends on reproducing bits and selling more of them which is relatively easy, high leverage, high revenues per employee, high return on capital
Software development- write once, paid once, further revenue depends on the ability to write and ship more code-- something notoriously difficult and full of uncertainty, low leverage, revenues per employee capped by individual programmer productivity and billable hours, marginal return on capital.
To sum up, it's a lot better business to sell millions of copies of the same thing than to go try to develop millions of one-off pieces of software. Right? And open source software-development-as-a-service Cox is talking about sure seems to me to be the latter.
I haven't seen an open source advocate compellingly address this issue.
--LinuxParanoid, paranoid that Linux has some rough road ahead...
And at Microsoft, they're committed to security. :)
Exactly. Nothing to do with price.
,rather than the current motivation of its producers.
Many Open Source apps are produced with profit as their chief aim - eg, Red hat Linux, Zope, Akopia Interchange. Many others are produced fo other reasons. Some are produced for educational and altrustic means but later their development becoms primarily commercially driven.
The chief aim of Open Source software might be profit. It might not. Whether it is Open Source depends on whether iots license conforms to the OSD
BBut now Microsoft says code forking is bad, so that means it is really good?
Bsically, its a last resort. If the main branch of the project isn't accepting your changes, or the software has problems satisfying two different audiences,
So forking is a fix to a problem. It would be nicer if that problem didn't occur, but if it does, its nice to know that forking is an option.
In that sense, think of it as being like heart surgery, war, or riot police infiltrating your house. Nobody, when offered either of these, would say `woo-hoo, hope they do a baton charge!. But sometimes, under some stances, according to some views, they are necessary.
Like with all three cases above, froking should never be done unnecessarily.
Christ! Closed soruce folk! Open Source folk! Read the bloody dictionary!
commercial (k-mûrshl)
adj. Abbr. com., coml., cml.
Of or relating to commerce: a commercial loan; a commercial attaché.
Engaged in commerce: a commercial trucker.
Involved in work that is intended for the mass market: a commercial artist.
Of, relating to, or being goods, often unrefined, produced and distributed in large quantities for use by industry.
Having profit as a chief aim: a commercial book, not a scholarly tome. Sponsored by an advertiser or supported by advertising: commercial television.
Notice anything about being `sold for profit' isn't in there? But you can bet your arse that Red Hat Linux is produced to generate income for Red Hat.
THE OPPOSITE OF OPEN SOURCE IS CLOSED SOURCE. THE OPPOSITE OF COMMERCIAL IS NON-COMMERCIAL. THE STATUS OF AN APPS SOURCE CODE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT BEING COMMERCIAL OR NOT
Thanks. Sorry to yell, but the continued misuse of this word by just about everyone is beginning to piss me off.
Once upon a time /. was full of people who could think about issues by themselves and discuss them. Obviously this has now changed, as the editors feel a need to tell us what to think of an article inside the post itself. Here we have a piece on what the VP of a major IT company thinks on some issue. Now we've decided that due to which company he works for, we should all trash him before we read the article.
---
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Microsoft is also being a huge hypocrite whenever they talk about code forking. Hello? Windows 95/98/ME vs. NT/2000? Oh, and there's Windows XP/2002 now -- a professional vs. consumers product fork in grand NT tradition.
...). I wouldn't really call these code forks either, because it's more of a case where some versions are optimized differently or, have features disabled, rather than truly different code paths.
The isn't a code fork. A code fork happens when two groups take the same source code and branch off in different directions, which often leads to incompatibilities between the branches. Windows NT was not a fork off of the consumer Windows code. It was a seperatly developed kernel which had a common look and feel as well as a level of binary compatibility. Microsoft is trying to do the opposite of a code fork by bringing these two product together into one OS (Windows XP). Windows XP is available in different packaging (Consumer, Professional, Server
Code forks may very well result in better software in some cases. But in the short run they often make life confusing and difficult for both users and developers.
It's also hard to see where truely forking the code fits into a profitable business model for a software company. Which is what the speach was about.
It is no more viral than the commercial license which seeks to 'infect' your pocketbook. Over, and over, and over again.
Most comercial licenses aren't viral. You get what you pay for. Unless you pay for the rights to reuse the code you don't get those rights. GPL's viral aspect is that if you add on to GPLed code, you have to release the derived work under GPL. Seems fair enough. Where it can be a royal pain is with device drivers under Linux. IF a device driver is a kernel loadable module, then it doesn't have to be GPLed, otherwise it does. The problem is that Linux doesn't have a binary driver interface. You are very limited in the kinds of drivers you can write as loadable modules. In the end, if you want to release a binary driver you'll likely end up writing your own little binary interface to the kernel which you'll have to release under GPL. Oh, and expect it to get broken on a regular basis as the kernel goes through even minor revisions.
Linux developers have ever right to make it hard to write binary drivers. If I don't like it, I can even fork the code an make my own "Linux" that has a binary driver interface. Just don't try and tell me that GPL is no more viral than commercial software.
. Using a layered model, where each piece of the picture is an independant piece, gave us things like the Window Manager in X, and the filesystem drop-in replacements, and the standard file i/o device drivers, and so on.
I'm sure there examples where Windows isn't as layered, as some UNIXs in certain areas, but NT uses a layered approach in most areas. You can drop in a new file system in NT. The device driver interface is devinately layered, and is more versitile than most UNIXs I've worked with, although adding plug and play stuff make it considerably more confusing in Win2000. You bring up some good ideas in your post, but I don't think issue number 2 is that sound.
and OSS supporters will still hate Microsoft (well....what do you expect? most only care about the free-as-in-beer aspect of open source anyway).
I think this is an exaggeration. I thnk many of us care about the free-as-in-choice aspect. MS is not about choice - when they say 'windows everywhere' they *mean* 'nothing else anywhere'.
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
He's basically saying that a software company (not a services company, i.e. RedHat) can't use the OSS model as is. In order to gain the benefits that OSS provides, Microsoft has divised Shared Source. This will basically give developers access to the source code to promote the development of services and applications on top of the source. Of course, if MS used the GPL to get the source out there then they would be forced to distribute the source to everyone for free.
This creates a larger software base and which in turn promotes the use of Microsoft software. Microsoft still gets paid and developers get better tools to work with.
In the end you still have to pay for MS software and OSS supporters will still hate Microsoft (well....what do you expect? most only care about the free-as-in-beer aspect of open source anyway).
Of course, Microsoft could work like IBM does and spend a tiny percentage of it's research dollars on a couple of open source projects and maybe open up some old software while they're at it. Then watch all the slashdotters ooh and aah over Microsoft and consider them the big corporate supporter that open source has always needed....just like they think of IBM now.
ÕÕ
ÕÕ
One danger of proprietary software never mentioned is software with bad user interfaces. Many windows-based companies (including the one I work for--unfortunately) regard the creation of usable, intuitive, GUI's with extreme apathy. One of the worst offenders of all these software companies is the one that Mr. Mundie works for (i.e. Microsoft). What no one seems to understand is that a well designed interface has a direct effect on a person's productivity. Well designed interfaces reduce learning curves and increase efficiency. Poorly designed interfaces waste time and energy in both the learning process and in the every day usage of the program. I'm sure that if someone was able to do a study of the lost productivity that resulted from Microsoft's myriad UI mistakes over the last ten years, I would have no doubt that the figure would run into the hundreds of billions dollars. Think about it--something wastes 10 seconds of your time 50-100 times a day for years on end. That's a whole hell of a lot of work your employer lost. With open source software, even if a software vendor has programmers whose UI design stupidity surpasses Microsoft (if that could actually be possible), the customer can hire their own programmers and UI specialists to redesign the interface so that it doesn't waste ridiculous amounts of their employees time and the company's money.
But everyone seems to be forgetting about a very simple observation from The Cathedral and the Bazaar: even though forking is possible, it's highly discouraged; it's one of the stronger taboos in the open source community.
The evidence that this taboo is still in effect is plentiful. So the chance of code forking should not be seen as an additional danger of OSS, since it only happens when the open source development model is already breaking down. In other words, it's a symptom, rather than a problem.
How dare you damage my IP rights? I am clearly the innovator when it comes to hello world programs, and I cannot allow this serious breach of my rights to go unanswered! In several respects your code closly follows the logic I freely innovated in code I wrote in the early 70's, for which I just 2 weeks ago got a patent for.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Yes, he did do a 180 in "The Road Ahead", but is was shortly after the first version.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
My point still stands, I think, that GPL code is not walled off from corporations as claimed by MS. They are as free to use it as anyone else. That they may want to have a business plan they would like to bootstrap with tax money is irrelevant.
Imagine if all gov't code were to be released under the BSD license. This would lead to special interests asking for certain types of code to be release. Perhaps they want a kick ass TCP stack written. They get the DoD to write it, and release it under BSD license. Now they have subsidized the cost of their own R&D efforts.
I'll grant that neither license will destroy IP. But as long as my money is being forcibly taken from me, I would like just as much right to force GPL upon gov't software.
t
1. "Open Software is insecure."..Microsoft has one of the LEAST secure OS's (yesterday the root exploit on ALL Windows 2000/IIS 5 servers was discovered).. yet they say open source is insecure? Patches to open software are consistantly released sooner than those to closed software.
2. "open-type" software licenses (the ones that allow all of the source code to be obtained) are bad. MS uses the BSD tcp/ip stack on all versions of Windows... without "open-type" software, MS would have no.. NO networking (at least no TCP/IP).
I guess when scared, people will say anything.....
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Universities have VERY odd IT situations. Kerberos, for example, is maintained by the Kerberos team in MIT IS. I believe that before Transarc was created for AFS, CMU IT was maintaining it.
There are a lot of IT projects going on at schools.
For example, there is a project at MIT to get Athena running under Win2K. The idea being, the more modular W2K with it's Kerberos support would be a reasonable candidate for porting a lot of the software over.
I'd imagine that a lot of research universities have strange projects going on. Let's be serious, W2K has what, 19m lines of code, or was it 26m? Either way, it's a bit too intense for a programming class.
Operating Systems classes are likely to be very esoteric, and OSes like Minux are great because they are small. In order to play around with an OS, you need something to work with. All of the layers of MS code don't make this likely, as there is too much in there and too many performance tweaks. You couldn't get into it as a student.
On the other hand, access to the network stack, etc., may be terrific for a research group wanting to test something, and not wanting to code for Linux (very common in Uni research, but MS has benefits in terms of access for students).
I would suggest that this is being used by researchers or IT staffs to provide unique and strange benefits, not for undergrad work.
Alex
Companies benefitting may result in some individuals benefitting but society as a whole may be worse off.
Rich
This brings to mind the definition for success in a free market economy: whoever provides the best quality for the lowest price gets the dough. Are you saying that it's unfair to make MS compete on the basis of product quality? Make no mistake, if the source code for Windows was out there in the wild, users would gravitate towards the fork that worked the best for what they needed. If MS refuses to provide a version that works better than those of competing distributors, whose fault is it when they fall by the wayside?
We're seeing the same thing with the different Linux distros. The Linux companies are competing with each other to come with a more compelling product (in terms of price, quality, or both) than their competitors. This is the sort of competition that MS hasn't has to face since they locked up 90% of the PC market, and now they're shitting bricks over the fact that they might actually have to work to compete in terms of quality and price. Nobody gets a free ride, not even monopolistic corporations.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
No one is making MicroSoft use the GPL. If they want to use it, they have to follow the rules set down by the author. GPLd code is still intellectual property. What MS is suggesting here is that they should be able to use that IP without following the stipulations of its authors, yet at the same time they don't want anyone to be able to use their IP unless they follow their stipulations (which involve a lot of $$$).
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Worse would be a requirement that all software developed under government contract had to be open source. That's a real threat.
Microsoft is trying to crank up its revenue per seat, and if they face price competition, they'll have trouble doing that.
I sure as hell hope you've been paying the french royalties then.
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
For example, Mundie says forking code is bad. Here's the same thought translated into manager-speak: "Having multiple vendors competing to offer us the best product at the lowest price is worse than having one vendor who can sell the product to us at monopoly prices."
This is entirely untrue. Multiple vendors can compete without code forking. For instance, Corel's WordPerfect competes with Microsoft's Word....however they did not originate on the same code base and thus there was no fork. Another example is Linux competing with Windows NT, there was no code fork there either.
A few months ago an actual code fork did occur when Samba-TNG did split out from Samba. But their aims aren't to compete with each other. Samba-TNG is trying to make a completely Windows 2000 compatible implementation of the SMB protocol, while Samba was less interested in full Win2k compatibility.
This "translation" into "manager speak" is downright wrong. You may not agree with all of Microsoft's business practices, but not everything they say is related to these practices. Code forking is one of those things.
shoeboy% strings FTP.EXE |grep Copy
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Yep, nuff said.
The trouble is that while the Open Source community knows this, Windows users are oblivious of there being any open source code in Windows.
Pretend you're a Windows user. How would you view these copyright messages? There's no "View -> Copyright messages" menu item (indeed for ftp.exe, there is no GUI.) Using the command line options for ftp.exe and the ftp commands, I couldn't find a way to display this copyright message. "more ftp.exe" doesn't work, either.
While it might be within the requirements of the BSD license (which I believe applies in this case), as far as Windows users are concerned, this is Microsoft's wonderful TCP stack. This hardly seems fair - credit where credit is due.
- The GPL asserts that any product derived from source code licensed under it becomes subject to the GPL itself. When the resulting software product is distributed, the creator must make all of the source code available, at no additional charge. This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor.
This, of course, is much less desirable than being able to sell the fruits of someone else's laborI/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
One thing that I noticed in the speech was the following comment:
Microsoft misses (or ignores) two major points here. One, which is pretty clearly an ignored point rather than a missed one, is that the "software as adjunct to hardware" model is still very alive and doing well. Vendors like Sun, IBM, Palm, and Apple certainly seem to view Operating System software as being primarily a means to sell hardware, rather than as a direct major revenue source. And then, of course, there are all the component manufacturers, who would dearly love not to have to write drivers for their hardware.
The more important point, though, is that a key advantage of the whole Open Source/Free Software idea is that it's no longer necessary for a single company to do all of the development singlehanded. What the companies are sharing isn't just their IP, but also the IP of all of the people who have shared with them. Shared code means shared development costs, so each company only has to make a partial contribution to the overall package. The fact that the Free/Open Source software market has so many small firms competing effectively with much larger ones is evidence that it's possible to do well without a massive up-front investment. None of the big Linux companies has done the majority of the development on the packages in its distro. Every one of them has contributed some here and some there but gotten most of its product by using other developers' shared code.
That's what Microsoft is really scared about. As long as software development is limited to single companies, it's a natural ground for monopolism, as a single company with huge resources has a huge competitive advantage. By sharing development costs, though, Free/Open Source development lets small companies compete on a level playing field with giants like Microsoft.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
- Some of the 'flaws' of forking mentioned are actually 'flaws' of having multiple choices in general, regardless of whether those choices were generated due to code forking or independant code bases competing with each other. Thus they are 'flaws' that are shared by the closed-source world as well a the open source world.
That's a flaw that Microsoft has been working hard to fix for many years in the closed-source world (see: Netscape, Borland, Novell and that pesky Apple ...).
Oops - IE malfunction. Meant to say that Godwin doesn't apply if it's a topical comment. Few people knew propaganda as well as Hitler.
It's mainly a safety valve to prevent long flamewars comparing Bill Gates and Hitler, etc.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
From Wired:
Nathan Myhrvold preferred a psychoanalytical take, attributing the government's crusade to the impulses of a collection of "very successful people whose deepest regret is that they're not as rich as Bill."
It's not that people who don't work for Microsoft are idiots. It's that they don't have the proper frame of reference on "Bill", and therefore don't, can't, understand.
Classic cult mentality. Makes you wonder what's going on in MS Recruiting.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Not Godwin: Quoting Mein Kampf when discussiong propaganda tactics.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Microsoft seems to use and resell open-source software, BSD in particular.
In windows 2000 I found these copyright notices on the files finger.exe, ftp.exe, nslookup.exe, rcp.exe, and rsh.exe
finger.exe Copyright (c) 1980 The Regents of the University of California.
ftp.exe Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
nslookup.exe Copyright (c) 1985,1989 Regents of the University of California
rcp.exe Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
rsh.exe Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Seems a bit disingenuous (to be charitable) to me.
Hugh Crawford.
Online sales only grew
Television and radio, and much of print media failed because they followed the advertising model.
The United States will never work as a country because it gave away much of its land free to early settlers.
The Soviet Union triumphed because it applied a unified, coherent model of process and organization across its broad domain.
The automobile never caught on as a technology because multiple vendors expanded on its open engineering platform in incompatible ways, while the horse, built on a standard plan, was flexibly sized from pony to draft horse for every scale of use.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Indeed. To the less-clued, "Shared Source" sounds a lot like "Open Source". It's a tougher E&E, because it's purely a matter of mind-share, but they're pretty good at that sort of thing.
btw, not to start a flame-war or anything, but couldn't RMS use this as evidence of why "Open Source" should be shunned in favor of "Free"?
If you look at where the money is, you can see that many monied interests wanted to improve things for themselves, often with no regard for others [I am positively shocked by this idea! Aren't You? Say it isn't so!]
Take a look at this summary of Psychology and Industrial Efficiency by Hugo Münsterberg (1913). As Münsterberg himself put it: 'We ask how we can find the men whose mental qualities make them best fitted for the work which they have to do; secondly, under what psychological conditions we can secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and finally, how we can produce most completely the influences on human minds which are desired in the interest of business.' This is not unusual for that period.
In a modern context we have the example of the microserfs and Microdroids, as seen here
Even during the DotCom Craze we have examples of the tremdous loyalty seen at one time at Amazon.com, as documented on slash here (Original site here) Another example are the Romans who prosecuted anyone who who not do pagan sacrifice for the cult of the Emperor (the state). This was bad news for the Christians for a while.
Bottom line, the cult of the current belief systems, as expressed by the dominant powers, hates anyone who would or could be a threat to them. This applies to Romans, business men, the Spanish Inquisition, politicians, and for that matter whatever clique of individuals that has control in an area.
Of course taking this too far, what we do is discredit ideals like friendship and loyalty. Who deserves your loyalty and friendship, ever? Who indeed?
To only see the mechanism in the thing you love to hate most is small minded indeed.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
LOL! I had completely forgotten about that. That's a riot.
Question is, of course, is if the basics of propoganda, as detailed above, are in fact relevant when talking about Microsoft.
Or do we automatically turn a blind eye to the abuse if it bears some resemblance to those tried and true historical examples?
The trap here is that if we turn a blind eye, then we permit the abuse we abhore happen again. But of course, we can over-react.
The best reaction is to determine the truth, and recognize that some people could use those techniques one way or another, especially if their intent is to destroy.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
the mental health industry were to help government and big business control populations and to control markets
Ok ok - Xenu is that you?
This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it.
And, later:
This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor.
While most of this article can be dismissed as the usual FUD (blaming dotcom failures on free software models?) which we've all seen and heard before, and how awesome Microsoft is because they "protect their intellectual property", the above two lines reveal what they really really hate about open source: they can't steal it!
Read that second line again. There are two critical assumptions here. 1) commercial software companies should have every right to incorporate OSS into their products; and 2) by incorporating free code into commercial products, it then becomes their own ("fruits of their labor" - never mind the countless numbers who worked on the code to release it GPL in the first place!!!), and thus they should have every right to close it, and charge for it.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! MS and friends (all the execs who will show up eager-eyed at Stern) are planning to pound on the GPL, steal code from the public domain, and then charge the people who wrote it to use it.
Where do you want to go today? NOTE: Going anywhere is subject to the restrictions listed in the EULA, to which you agree in its entirety simply by wanting to go anywhere.
NOTE2: Going places is copyright, Microsoft, 2001. Any attempt to go anywhere will be viewed as circumvention of our intellectual property rights, and you will be prosecuted.
NOTE3: 2+2=5
czep
Dictionaries are for loosers.
Seriously. This comment should be an article in itself. Submit to Features perhaps?
sulli
RTFJ.
Microsoft is in trouble because their #1 competitor is FREE.
Think about business models. There is one market that cares that OSS is free as in speech (i.e. they can tinker and optimize), and there is another market that cares that the OSS is free as in beer. I like Windows NT and especially windows 2000, but if I need to optimize my OS I don't use it. If I don't want to pay for my OS and still be legal, then I don't us windows.
As far as I'm concerned, the MS OS monopoly is a sinking ship. The fact is that GNU Linux already makes a better server and in my opinion, development platform than any propietary OS. All MS can do is hope that it gets enough marketshare in the PDA market as well as the .net ASP market.
Linux may never catch up to windows in the desktop market, because of the potential decline in the market and the fact that 99% of the population are familiar with windows and don't want the hassle of something new, BUT... Linux will continue to be 1 step behind windows, and should MS ever stop pumping so much effort into the desktop, Linux will overtake windows on the desktop.
Keeping
It is interesting that he completely omits the main point of his speech (the alleged threat of GPL & OSS) from the first half; he presents his speech as being largely about economic viability of the technology industry. Slowly but surely, he swivels the turrets until he reaches his target: GPL.
All this posturing seems strange to me; not that Microsoft has never postured themselves (that is, after all, the cornerstone of their success), but I am surprised that they should make such public cries against GPL/OSS (I know they're not the same, but I will refer to them alongside for a while). What is their objective? FUD alone? It seems like their best FUD is to continue to dismiss OSS as a cheap, flimsy imitation of a 'real,' commercial system. Most MSFT-philes I know still follow that doctrine and slurp it up happily. If it's simply more FUD, it's taken a sharp turn, which I will call Microsoft FUD 2.0.
Are they trying to actually wage some sort of legislative war, perhaps trying to prompt some sort of legislative orders that state-sponsored groups like universities and research labs should not use GPL? Allchin said as much, but this seems like a completely absurd objective--it will not fly. Organizations which have received the benefits of these tools for decades are not likely to shed them.
The best guess I can come up with, certainly described by others, is that as they embark upon a strange journey to change their licensing structure, they want to pull what ESR properly termed a 'shell-game,' and hope people focus their IP lawyers' attention on the implications of the GPL, while at the same time signing onto costly and convoluted licensing agreements for HailStorm/other services.
But I admit, from a strategic standpoint, I don't understand what this sudden anti-{GPL|OSS|etc} blitz is all about. It seems to me that by raising these arguments, they actually bolster the validity of these solutions.
Sorry for this incoherent ramble...what do you think?
The following was posted *yesterday* on the FreeDevelopers list. I am not posting it as an Anonymous Coward, because I badly need karma points :-)
From: "Eric S. Raymond"To: wire-service@thyrsus.com Subject:
Breaking story: Beware the Microsoft shell game
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 17:40:03 -0400
A few hours ago, a friendly journalist tipped me that Craig Mundie of Microsoft is going to make a major speech in New York tomorrow attacking open-source software -- specifically, attacking the GNU General Public License. This speech is probably intended to define Microsoft's party line on open source, and to shift the terms of the debate over it to one that Microsoft thinks it can win.
I haven't seen the speech; the friendly journalist told me it was embargoed. But I'm expecting it to be a masterpiece of FUD. You watch; it's going to be a studied and ingenious attempt to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of software users and the public -- and to obscure Microsoft's underlying motives by cloaking them in affected concern for the public welfare.
This is a heads-up to journalists, industry observers, and the public -- as you listen to that speech tomorrow, don't get taken in by Mundie's shell game. Keep your eye on the pea. As the perceptive gentlemen of "The Economist" observed earlier this week [1] Microsoft's real agenda will be to preserve its monopoly, whatever the cost to software developers and the public.
So I can predict with fair confidence some of the things you're going to hear -- perhaps not as explicit statements that can be refuted, but as hints and allegations, a studied and careful attempt to disinform without telling explicit lies.
First off, expect Mr. Mundie to try to blur the distinctions between open-source development, use of the GPL, wholesale copyright-law violations like Napster, and outright software piracy. These are four different phenomena; a lot of open-source software doesn't use the GPL, most open-source developers are supportive of intellectual-property rights including copyright, and the open-source community as a whole has historically taken a definite stance against software piracy. We only give away our own work, not other peoples'.
Nevertheless, expect Mr. Mundie to lump all these phenomena togetber and hint darkly that Linux is the spearhead of a conspiracy to destroy trillions of dollars in intellectual-property assets. He probably won't come right out and accuse us of being Communists; that trial balloon popped when Jim Allchin floated it a few weeks ago with his "un-American" crack and got laughed out of town. But he'll let the implication hang there and hope it sticks.
What he'll hope you don't notice is that the "assets" he's mainly interested in protecting are Microsoft's -- and not just the $26 billion it has in the bank, but the far more important asset of over 90% desktop market share and tight control of its customer base through proprietary lock-ins.
It's that lock-in, that control of customers, that is what open source threatens most. With open source, customers can have real choices; they don't need to be locked into a perpetually more expensive upgrade treadmill, they can own and inspect and modify the software they depend on, they can have real security because they can know exactly what's running on their machines.
That choice is the fundamental threat to Microsoft's business model, and it's the reason they're getting clobbered by Linux in the server market (every month, more Linux installations come up on web servers alone than in Microsoft's entire Windows 2000 customer base). So it's not just individual open-source projects like Linux and Apache Microsoft has to defeat -- it's the open-source way of thinking about software.
One way to defeat it is by making people afraid of it -- by conning potential corporate purchasers into believing that using open-source software on their machine somehow means the GPL will force them to publish all their software or business secrets. Craig Mundie will try very hard to make you believe that. It's not true, but a company that blatantly falsified videotape evidence in a Federal antitrust trial is not going to balk at lesser falsehoods.
Another way to defeat open source is to co-opt it. After Craig Mundie gets through trying to make you fear and distrust open source, he will tout Microsoft's new so-called openness. He will doubtless talk about how Microsoft is willing to share source code with large customers and universities. And he'll talk up the "open" services like SOAP that are part of Microsoft's .NET plans (about which more later).
What Mr. Mundie will hope you don't notice is that Microsoft wants all the "sharing" to be in one direction. What they're doing is what we call "source under glass" -- you can see it, but you can't modify or reuse it in other programs. They want to be able to get the huge benefit of having thousands of outside people review their code without allowing any of those people to use what they learn on other projects.
We in the open-source community see this for what it is -- a counterfeit, a trick, a scam. It's aimed at recruiting free labor for Microsoft without giving the outside contributors any stake in or control of the results of their effort. In true open source, all parties are equal. When I give you my software under an open-source license, you have exactly the same rights as I do. That's what I trade you in return for your help in testing and improving the software. That's the voluntary cooperation that built the Internet.
Mr. Mundie also doesn't want you to notice, or remember, Microsoft's long history of perverting supposedly "open" standards into customer lock-in devices, by poisoning them with proprietary extensions that only closed Microsoft software understands. A notorious recent example is the games Microsoft played with the Kerberos security protocol. It would take a really cockeyed optimist to believe that Microsoft doesn't have similar maneuvers planned for once the .NET
protocols get established, if they do.
Finally, Mr. Mundie will doubtless wind up his exhortations with a paean to the glories of .NET, Microsoft's attempt to turn itself into
the worlds's biggest application software provider. Stripped to its
essence, under this plan you mostly would give up buying software and
instead rent networked services from Microsoft by the month.
There are two things Mr. Mundie hopes you won't notice about *this*. One is that .NET is born out of fear. Microsoft's strategists aren't
stupid. They can see the trend curves, that falling hardware margins
are spelling the doom of any business model based on expensive
packaged-software licenses. They know the revenues from their
own software business have actually been declining for three quarters
now,
covered only by creative accounting practices for which Microsoft is
under a federal fraud investigation separate from the antitrust trial.
More fundamentally, those strategists have read Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma"; they can see that open-source software in general and Linux in particular are an unstoppable technology disruption that will sooner or later reach the heart of Microsoft's business -- and that the only way for Microsoft to survive is to dodge the bullet, to be in a different business before that bullet hits home. Hence the push to become an ASP.
But the more important thing he hopes you won't notice is that in the brave new .NET world, you would lose even the meager rights you have
now under Microsoft's End-User License Agreement. You would own
nothing. You would instead become ever more dependent on Microsoft to
provide the basic services that your computer and your business rely
on to function. You would have to absolutely trust Microsoft to
neither deliberately violate your privacy for business advantage nor
to leave your vital data exposed to crackers like those who break into
Microsoft's own servers every few weeks.
Keep your eye on the pea, gentlemen and ladies. Because that is what Microsoft is really after -- a fast exit out of the packaged-software business, a lock on your critical data and network services, and an indefinite extension of the coercive monopoly position described in Judge Jackson's findings of fact. Higher prices, fewer choices, worse lock-in, and Microsoft uber alles for ever and ever, amen.
[1] A Kinder, Gentler Gorilla?"-- Eric S. Raymond The right of self-defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." -- Henry St. George Tucker (in Blackstone's Commentaries)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
But you can. You can go get the original, public domain code, and do with it what you want.
However, if you want to use MS's particular implementation, well, that's a bit different. The basis for it may well be public, but their own additions are their own creation, not public funded, and thus not publicly available, necessarily. And if there were no MS changes, then grab the original PD code, and you're good to go.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
The majority of software developed for profit is developed for specific customers.
Can you provide support for this claim? That's rather surprising to me.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
In ESR's editorial on this very speech he warned that he would try to group OSS, Napster, and software piracy under the same heading.
Yes, but what makes it easy for them is that Taco and his staff have spent years jumbling Linux, Napster, cracking, filterware, Aqua themes, Lego and Jar Jar Binks into one fuzzy "movement". Bruce Perens was the one person who prominently spoke out against it.
For me, the bottom line is I'm going to go home and code for fun. I don't see anything in this speech that makes me question that. What I do see criticizes my quitting my day job to make to start a software firm that makes money by selling stuffed monkeys (I agree) and criticizes Jon Katz's using my generosity to justify illegal MP3 distribution by his kiddie fans (I again agree).
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
To my mind, #1 and #2 are clearly true. Proponents of #'s 3, 4 and 5 love to piggyback their ideas on the success of Linux, Apache and FreeBSD, without any real justification. Yes, Linux has shown that community development works. It hasn't proven it superior. There's no a priori reason to think that giving away source is a sound business decision, and the people who have tried have hardly convinced me. (Red Hat sells code mostly written by others and now has cut their losses to the point that they round off to zero? Wow!!) And the "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" mentality not only isn't proven by the fact that Linux is good, it's laughable to most of the developers actually creating free software.
It seems to me this speech is mostly targeting arguments #4 and 5. I'm inclined to agree with Microsoft and my objection is with the people who invoke Perl and BSd to defend Eazel and Napster.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
So that explains why when I installed Win95 over my PC Tools enhanced Win3.1 setup that it didn't look any different. I was really surprised and thought that MS had completely ripped Central Point off but I guess they licensed it.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Oh great! So the new Microsoft's strategy is to FUD only the GNU license and to leave the BSD license alone. Now any self-respectful open-source programmer has no choice but to use the GNU license!
Thanks for the "inside" insight there. I was basically just speculating. Your story is interesting, but I would think that many companies coding for the government would intentionally make their code poorly documented or use obscure methods so as to eliminate the potential for your example (competeing companies would have to place a higher bid to cover the cost of researching the coding methods before modifying it). Sure, this is somewhat unethical, but what in business/government isn't?
Are you saying the government buys a unique compiler for each program it contracts? That's kind of funny. I think Borland would be hurt by a gov switch to GNU more than Microsoft in that case.
That is a pretty weak argument. Money invested in domestic software would be split amont domestic and foreign dividends. When a free (beer) solution is used, the money saved goes directly to lessen the tax burden. Not to mention that any government effort put into the code benefits the populous. Of course, if you take Microsoft's argument that Open Source ends up costing more than a proprietary solution because of more expensive maintanence, this isn't the case. I think most of us can agree, however, that that is a bunch of FUD. Obviously taking the time/cash to develop a .gov *nix distro would save millions of dollars in taxpayer money (from all of the win liscenses). Not to mention that it could be ported to most any existing government system. The one problem would be porting proprietary windows programs written for gov use. Unfortunately I'd imagine most of the developers would charge an arm and a leg for porting it. With something like Wine though, this would be less of an issue.
But it also allows the developer to put the code out into the wild for the customer's competition to see, poke, prod and attempt to break. If I was contracting a programmer to write specialized code for my company I would want the ability to control exactly where that code could be published, especially if it was code I considered core to my business.
Interesting point. I have a couple of comments, though. First, is it in the developer's best interest to reveal this code to the general public? Probably not, if it is a written-to-order solution. Second, the GPL only requires the customer who receives the binary to have access to the source, not the public at large. I am not sure if a contract with the software author could specify this or not and still be GPL compatible..
finally, and most importantly, the customer recieves the benifit of having a copy of the source code for their application. If the vendor tanks or if a conflict arises, the customer still has the source code to work with. I would think that is a better situation to be in than to be stuck with binaries only and no support...
The clip is just a few minutes long.
In the future, read the posts you're replying to.
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Simple, make the manager feel stupid without them realizing it was you who did it. Managers NEVER want to admit their wrong, so the will go along with what you said, and play like they never said what they did. At least that has always been my experience in corp. America....
:)
They are much more worried about looking stupid in front of their upper managers, so you can normally correct them before things get out of hand.
The real danger is the managers who have no contact with the tech staff.
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Hey, at least I didn't use the BLINK tag!
-
Microsoft would not benefit from Open Sourcing its software, but it will try to give its customers some of the benefits of Open Source where practical.
-
Microsoft does not want parts of the "intellectual commons" to be GPL'd, particularly government funded basic research. The would rather preserve the "important tradition of commercial companies having the opportunity to benefit from and apply this public knowledge."
I don't see anywhere that they object to GNU software in general. Their points are both quite reasonable. I can't imagine Microsoft being more profitable after Open Sourcing their software. I agree that the intellectual commons should be unencumbered, though I am more concerned about patent restrictions on it.I don't think Microsoft was complaining at all about the prices private entities decide to charge for their work. They find the price of GPL code too high, so they don't use it. I find the price of Microsoft code too high, so I don't use it. Microsoft licenses their code how they like, and so do I. We both have the opportunity to tell our government how we'd like them to handle the works they produce for us.
If you don't like the rules, don't play the game. If you don't like the license, don't use the code. It couldn't be any more simple.
I think MS should just stick to "stealing" (I know, not the right word, but I can't think of a better one) BSD code and never mind the GPL.
This guy also seems to think that the GPL "destroys" IP... I guess he's never read the Preamble to the GPL, which talks a lot about protecting rights and preserving them for others.
Also, comparing the GPL to the recent .com bubble-burst is quite laughable: The GPL, as well as Cygwin and other companies that make their money (yes! it can be done!) on GPLed software were around well before the .com's were.
Some of the most successful OSS technology is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL.
That's funny: one the one hand the GPL is "the most successful", on the other it's "doomed to failure".
I could go on and on and on ripping this apart...
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Yeah, but there's no guarantee IBM will be supporting Linux in 10 years. Remember OS/2? Microchannel architecture?
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
What I don't get is the argument we've all heard over and over again about jeopardizing intellectual rights of entities that utilize the GPL. If you're so hip to protecting intellectual rights, you shouldn't be using other people's copyrighted software at all. If I release something under the GPL, it IS my intellectual property, appropriately copyrighted as such. I give others the privilege, not the right to use it. Don't complain about the terms of my license, instead, right your own software that you can copyright and protect under whatever license you want.
You don't see us complaining about Microsoft's license... oh, yeah, right.
What is going on is really that market mechanisms force the "incremental price" of delivering a piece of software to an additional customer to zero, reflecting its zero incremental cost. That's what should happen in an efficient market, and open source happens to be the mechanism that makes it happen.
Microsoft is scared of this. They like to paint the free market mechanisms that are undercutting their business model as some kind of "un-American socialism". But open source is doing what the free market should be doing: driving profits to zero. What is "un-American" and anti-free-market is the artificial maintenance of disequillibrium wages.
Microsoft already enjoys enormous advantages over any competitor, through their installed base, network effects, business relationships, marketing muscle, brand name recognition, and willingness to engage in unfair business practices. Yet, open source already threatens their products. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft actually were willing to compete equally and fairly in a free market.
hmm, sounds familiar
Craig Mundie speech
A common trait of many of the companies that failed is that they gave away
for free or at a loss the very thing they produced that was of greatest value -
in the hope that somehow they?d make money selling something else.
Microsoft vs USA Findings of Fact
Despite the opportunity to make a substantial amount of revenue from the sale of Internet Explorer, and with
the knowledge that the dominant browser product on the market, Navigator, was being licensed at a price, senior executives at Microsoft decided that
Microsoft needed to give its browser away in furtherance of the larger strategic goal of accelerating Internet Explorer's acquisition of browser usage share.
a) wait() for your children to avoid those creepy zombies (shiver)
b) don't while(1) fork(); It's not cute.
--
"Fuck your mama."
That's easy: explorer.exe.
The number of shortcuts and features in the desktop interface are immense. I can copy paste out of a web browser, right click on the desktop to create a text file. Open the new textfile and paste in the text.
Then I can highlight the title of the block of text, copy it into the clipboard, close the file (still with 'generic' filename), highlight the icon for the file, press F-2, which turns the filename blue so it can be renamed, and right click to paste in the text out of the clipboard as the file's new name. The 'F-2' trick is something Microsoft (apparently) licensed from Symantec that first appeared in Central Point Software's 'PC-Tools for Windows' enhanced file manager for Windows 3.1.
I say apparently because Microsoft licensed a LOT from Symantec/Central Point back in that era. A lot of User Interface functionality they bring in comes from outside (the 'borg' thing).
Back to the main point: there's NO other file manager that comes even close to good old 'My Computer' and the Win desktop in terms of ease of use. Midnight Commander is another powerful contender, mainly because it runs on every OS I use anywhere (including the OS/2 boxes which I'm occasionally sentenced to use at work, and the build of it I smuggled into my ~/bin directory on Solaris.) Free software efforts under KDE and Gnome can try, hopefully they'll get there someday, but they're not there now.
Oh, and I suspect the people at Symantec have benefitted immensely from the Cross licensing of their code into Windows, though I don't know any of them personally to ask. (I'm just the dumb putz who still likes to write assembly code for 8 bit chips, after all).
A lot of 'code that will be around forever' that I used to use on Linux back in the 1.2 days won't even build anymore, at least not in the forms I so carefully stowed away as source code in the confidence I'd be able to keep using it. Mostly I am referring to sound editing and manipulating tools that I used to like to fool around with, that were apparently the 'fun' projects of students who grew up. Linux multimedia seems to die with each major revision of the sound drivers, at least in my fairly humble opinion.
"Phase 1: In the early ?90s it was all about static information. The nascent World Wide Web was catapulted to the world stage as millions of individuals and businesses began to tap the potential of the medium."
"Phase 2: The late ?90s saw the birth of the online transaction and the promise of Internet-based business models. Both were about connectivity, but now the static distribution of information was replaced by business-to-customer or business-to-business transactions. For the general public, Amazon.com came to personify the Internet transaction. Revenue models based on advertising sales vs. product sales came into vogue and Yahoo became the poster child for this model. The interesting part of this model is the shift of focus away from the technology IP to content IP as the revenue engine for a company."
"Phase 3 is what is being worked on now. It?s all about connecting the currently separate complex systems of information and transactions and bringing that power to the individual in a readily accessible format on a variety of devices."
I'm glad to see that M$ knows the history of (and future of) the internet and decided to let us in on it. I don't know what I would have done if I thought the Internet would continue to evolve into a system with many unique parts instead of being one uber collective with a brand name on it.
"Sometimes nothin' is a pretty cool hand." - Cool Hand Luke
This is completely misleading.
Innovation happens in a marketplace built on open standards where vendors can compete. Look at PC hardware: PCI, DRAM, chipsets. etc... Sure, there's IP in there, but there is also standards that allow them to mix and match. No-one can compete without standards to allow interoperability.
Microsoft's R&D completely ignores interoperability, and based on monopolistic market position, imposes their own "innovations" as "standards." That is not healthy! That is not what successful companies in "the last twenty years" have been built on, other than Microsoft. There can be only one successful company of this kind in a monopoly. So the argument boils down to "What's good for Microsoft is good for America"...
He completely ignores the critical role that standards play, in setting the rules for competition in any healthy marketplace.
The internet is built on: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, ...
Yes it is true that no one company owns these, or can make money on them. That is part and parcel of why they succeeded as interoperability tools, and it is the interoperability and vendor neutrality which made them enabling technologies for the internet revolution.
That revolution has created revenues for many many companies like CNN, MS-NBC (!), E-bay, UPS, etc...
By your own admission, you agree with points 1 and 2:
* 1: Free software solutions are frequently a better alternative to the proprietary alternatives. * 2: Both users and devlopers benefit from access to source.
However, you disagree with point 3:
* 3: Community development is a superior method of development.
That makes no sense.. If it frequently creates better software than the alternatives and it is beneficial to both the developer and the end user, it would seem as though it is actually a better development model. Is it more cost effective in the long run? Maybe, maybe not, but Free Software isn't about cost, it's about benefit.
* 4: "Open Source" development is a superior way to run a profitable software business.
I've never even heard point four argued... I've seen it argued that it is a viable business model, but that's different than superiority. To be honest, the best business model I can think of is to monopolize something which everyone consumes and requires a minimum of investment to create and distribute.. You know, something like "intellectual property". I doubt anyone will argue that actually doing something (ie, offering a service) is superior to raking in cash for nothing..but which one favors the consumer?
* 5: Copyrights, trademarks and patents are all evil. I should be able to do anything I want.
Copyrights and patents are evil, but only if left unchecked. The danger isn't in not being able to share something someone else created, but rather, not being able to share what you've created. How long is it until you have to sign license agreements to even learn computer science? When will parody and criticism be finally wiped existence? At the current rate of tradepatentsecretcopymarking, not long..
shoeboy% strings FTP.EXE |grep Copy
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Yep, nuff said.
Just how much needs to be copied for something to be a violation of IP laws? (and I recognize the answer might be different for copyright laws vs patent laws.) With the sheer gigantic volume of stuff that's been created over the years it's pretty much a guarantee that by random chance if I generate a small sentence that it matches some portion of some IP work somewhere. If I make up a guitar 'riff' of about 6-7 notes then by random chance it's probably already been done once in some song somewhere. And your hello world program was probably already done in just that way, with just those choices of variable names, at some random point in the past by some random person who may have put it under an IP law.
How does the IP law deal with this? As time goes on, does the ideaspace of possible new texts shrink noticably, or does the near-infinite size of the space make the problem irrelevant?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It seems to me that Microsoft does tend to abandon platforms frequently, and tends to force upgrades of programs where the new versions aren't available in some of the streams, which is essentially the same as abandoning the stream, although they may actually intend to release new versions eventually.
On the other hand, neither KDE nor Gnome will ever go away, not become unsupported, because the direction of the open source community as a whole is totally irrelevent; each of these has its own community, which prefers it, and which will continue to use and support it.
As evidence for this, I should mention that even much older and less popular alternatives continue to be supported. I'm now using fvwm, like I have been for the past 6 years, and it has continued to meet my needs and be supported despite the fact that it's mostly ignored by the rest of the world.
I realize it's hard to grasp. After all, this is Microsoft we're dealing with.
Code forking, by itself, is neither good nor bad. A code fork is a tool, nothing more. So, just like any tool, it can be used for both good and bad things. And just like tools, how they're used can be seen differently by different people. Someone forking code for frivolous reasons could be seen as making a "bad" code fork, whereas someone with strong technical reasons for forking the code could be seen as making a "good" code fork.
The fact that Microsoft says code forking is bad is meaningless. It's making a generalized statement. And, as you may be aware, generalizations are oftentimes either bad or outright irrelevant (this one included).
So, is code forking bad? No.
Is it good? No.
It simply is. It's the way that it's used that matters.
This is a common misconception. The good/badness of forking has always been debated. I am of the opinion that forks are very good. I have always hotly debated anyone who thinks they are evil. Code forks brought us egcs, OpenBSD, Samba 2.2, Apache (it's actually a fork from NCSA), PCMCIA kernel support (it got merged in in 2.4, but it existed as a "popular" fork of 2.2 for a while), Real-Time Linux, and probably a lot of other things I can't think of right now.
The _ability_ to fork also brings good things. For example, many people produce kernel "forks" which are small, but useful, until the given functionality gets rolled into the mainstream kernel. These mini-forks are really what give free software a competitive edge.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Oh good, so it'll be all over in a year or so. That means Linux should be gone by 1992 and Apache by 1996.
Oh, wait, reality check.
They ask software developers to give away for free the very thing they create that is of greatest value in the hope that somehow they'll make money selling something else.
We're not asking just anyone, only people who use our code. But that's not the point: apparently Microsoft thinks that giving something away of great value is bad. I'm such a bad person.
Didn't Microsoft give a away a web browser of great value in the hope that somehow they'll make money selling something else?
This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it. It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.
Hm, you could argue that the GPL is some sort of customer lock-in. I'm glad Microsoft would never use such tactics! Or undermine the independent commercial software sector, Netscape is flourishing!
Shut up Microsoft. We never said that Free Software was the key to solving all the problems of the world. We just like the choice and freedom and wish to protect that freedom which companies such as Microsoft itself are trying to take away from us.
We like that better than money-hungry megacorporations who tells us what to do and what not to do. But indeed, we should understand that from your perspective, there's nothing wrong with those.
When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it.
Kudo's to the author for the clever linking of GPL with a negative tem like 'viral'. But is there really any serious business that decides to utilize some existing GPL'd codebase and does NOT understand the obligations in doing so? He makes it sound like a business extends existing code for a profitable venture and then suddenly realizes, "Oh God! We have to give up all our hard work!! Damn those OSS zealots!! They tricked us again!!"
Unlike the Msft attitude of "Windoze everywhere" and "why would anyone use anything else" - you don't have to use GPL code. Just write your own from a clean start - or just pay Msft or someone else.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It is not public domain. It is the fully copyrighted work of the author who *allows* you to use it *under license.*
...
Actually, the GPL places no restrictions on *use* of GPLed code:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted
Yahoo news has an interesting take on this. Its a pretty well-informed rebuttal of Microsoft's FUD.
...
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
One argument I've seen against Open Source before is "There's nobody to sue if it blows up and costs you thousands of dollars". And that's true for sure with the GPL, as it says, it comes with no warranty.
But insurance companies routinely insure against flooding, earthquakes (and these days even alien abduction). Are there any that will insure against Apache blowing up? If not, there should be. It would be a steal for them. Charge $20 a year that version XXX of Apache is insured against flaws YYY and ZZZ. This wouldn't include anything the administrator does to screw it up (like driver's insurance doesn't insure you if you trick out the brakes on your car). I'm sure the insurance rates would be far lower than the equivalent cost of buying IIS from Microsoft, and it would be a struggle to win a court case against Microsoft, whereas an insurer would have to pay out if you did nothing wrong.
Just an idea bubble.
Oh, and one more thing. All these people who talked about wanting to have someone to sue if things went bad -- why didn'tcha sue Microsoft when their faulty software allowed the various email virii to propagate? If that wasn't Microsoft's fault, what will be? Windows crashing? Word files getting corrupt? I personally can't recall anyone ever successfully suing MS over faulty software -- I can't even remember anyone trying...
If Microsoft was so ignorant of the Internet, then why was it a node on Usenet in 1981?
(See the map - here)
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The reason they never complained is because Microsoft can freely use/abuse public domain software, incorporate it into their products or take ideas from it, and nobody can complain (after all, it's public domain).
If they try those same stunts with GPL, suddenly they're in violation of a license.
In other words, they don't have free reign over other people's inventions/work.
Which were paid by our taxes, so we should be able to use them without constraint.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Everything created by the Feds exists in the public domain, yes; but public domain works can be used in GPLed programs. For instance, there are a great number of public domain "Hello World" programs out there. For instance, this one, which I hereby donate to the public domain:
#include <iostream>
using namespace std::cout;
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
cout << "Hello World!" << endl;
return 0;
}
Now let's say that I want to write a piece of GPLed software, such as the following:
#include <iostream>
using namespace std::cout;
int sayHello(void)
{
cout << "Hello World!" << endl;
return 0;
}
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
return sayHello();
}
... As can be seen, the second GPLed piece of software uses a line of code that's in the public domain. This doesn't make the second piece of software non-GPLed; it just means that the line containing the cout statement is in the public domain and, once removed from the software, is still public domain and not GPLed.
I believed that Microsoft was just bleeding $$ but this indicates a more serious situation in Redmond.
Now, I just have to say:
Thank you Microsoft for giving us this free PR and credibility.
If anyone is still ignorant about the OSS movement, they will now feel the urge to find out what it's all about.
This is the most stupid move that Microsoft have ever done since it's just giving us even more attention.
Once again, thank you Microdoft we really needed this extra and free PR.
//Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
So I can get technical support from MS about Windows 3.0 driver I'm having problems with?
I don't think so.
Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred.
Thus, the modifications are public domain, even if it's not explicitly stated.
Of course, once incorporated into a GPL work, the work as a whole remains under the GPL.
------
Microsoft today unveiled details about the latest product line of software geared to dominate the enterprise market. Aptly named "Closed Source Code 2000", Microsoft is marketing the product to compete with GPL, and BSD based Open Source
products that have capitalized a substantial market share.
"By continuing to create pre-compiled, closed source executables, we see a great demand for revenue, and a large portion of the open source market making the switch to CSC2000. Its just hip to have the words "Source" in your products. So amidst all the confusion and bickering surrounding the licensing amongst the Open Source community, we are kind of sneaking by delivering high quality
products in the same fashion as we always have, but we've made it more hip by incorporating the words "Source Code" in our products, we will
guarantee 100% market share by 2021." stated LeRoy Jones V.P. of Marketing.
As usual we are the first to report the news in its entirety so here are the terms of Microsoft's CSC2000 licensing.
continued
Nobody expects the GBonic Inquisition.
Want Root?
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
We tried not to run this, but there are too many submissions to ignore.
How many is too many? I have 100 friends and some stories about my website, my hobbies, my cat...
The Good Reverend
I'm different, just like everybody else.
Giving away your code for free, or even letting other people copy your code is usually NOT a viable business model. Microsoft does not develop custom projects.
Using an 'open' license does not force you to give your code away for free.
Have you taken the time to read the GPL (as an example of a open license)? It says that you can charge for the pleasure of distributing your code.
If you don't like the GPL, then write your own - the NineNine License.
Admittedly I've never charged people to download my software, (distribution is ~2c/download, most was written because I wanted it), but I do get paid because of it. Take for example Clatter. Because of it I landed a job with an company friendly to open licenses and I've been paid to support my software.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
Bzzzt. WRONG. If you are the author you're perfectly free to relicense the same software under a non-GPL license and demand $$$ in return. Trolltech does that with Qt.
This "you can't reuse your own software" nonsense is the kind of bald-faced LIE M$ will be feeding upon the PHB's of the world. We need to be around to give them the Truth instead.
Like IBM?
offering them? Selling them you mean
Like creating stable OSes*cough* *cough*
I don't see how that is an asset of Shared Source(TM) So, having 2 separate programs sprouting from a single program, both having the same basic functionality but different advanced functionalities is a bad thing? I know I prefer having the choice between 2 or more programs, that way I can pick whichever is most suited to my task. But well, let's take the arguments one by one:
- multiple incompatible version of program.
Yes, that's called "having the choice".
- weakened interoperability.
then again, that's 2 different programs, so no inter-operability is needed, else the 2 set of features would have ended up in the same program (unless they are antagonists, and in that case, you anyway have to pick one).
- product instability.
Huh?!? Why does forking induce instability?
- inherent security risks.
Since when has obscurity meant security? Sounds like bugs that are visible by many an eye are more likely to be seen than otherwise.
Don't want your code to be released under the GPL? Don't use GPL'ed code in the first place. The GPL doesn't prevent people from charging for the product at all. (agreed it might not be very efficient) They don't ask to give it away for free, and no one forces developers to develop OSS or GPL'ed Software. *cough* *cough* Kerberos *cough* *cough* And, needless to say, the fruits of the labour of others upon which the later work is based. If you do'nt want to share your work, don't use the work others shared.
Blah, enough wasted time reading M$ propaganda. Back to code...
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
I don't think that assessment is wholly accurate. Let's assume that whatever code that is produced under gov't contract is available to any and all. Now suppose that GPL is not used. The code is available to all. It is not 'walled off.'
Now a company takes this code and begins selling it. That's no good, since people can get it for free.
So the company takes the code, adds to it, sells that version, but doesn't release their new version of the code. What has been taken from the public? Nothing. The original, tax-payer funded code is still available. But the new, corporately funded changes are not. But those were never the people's to begin with, so nothing is lost.
So, it's not clear to me that GPL'ing gov't projects adds security to the public's access to it's 'own' code. And it could be argued that this would hinder the transfer of research from the gov't realm to the private realm, since companies will be less eager to utilize work that then hinders and/or destroys their business model.
Just some thoughts...
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Adapt or die.
Given the nature of the organizations you just mentioned, you should probably amend that to "Adapt, die, or sue".
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
You can make a tremendous amount of money even if you sell a highly visible product at a loss - sell a profit-making complement too.
Gllette spent millions developing the Mach 3 razor and sells each one at less than 20% of the manufacturing price. They make money selling replacement blades above cost. It works, its worked for decades.
RedHat sells RH Linux below cost ($0). But compared to Windows, it's cheap to develop - you take other people's innovations, add a few, and package it in a useable format. Then you sell services above cost - no OS is so easy to use that there are no support issues. RH Linux is a loss-leader to get people to establish a relationship with the company. It would make sense that if I need high-level support for RH Linux, I would turn to RedHat, since they know the product better than anyone esle. IBM has the same business model now - they want to sell you a complete Linux solution - they've largely given up on PCs to be a services company.
This sounds stupid, but service/support is a better business than proprietary software. All of your costs are marginal - if you sell n hours of support for $r/hr and you pay $e/hr to the support guy, you make n(e-r) dollars, which is always a positive number if e>r. Software costs d dollars to develop, where d is a very fucking large number. If n people buy it a cost c, you make (n*c - d). This can be negative if not enough people buy your product. This is a gross oversimplification, there's overhead in support, and some neglible marginal costs in selling software, but this is why there are so many little support shops - you don't need to invest a tremendous amount of cash upfront.
Microsoft is one of the few large companies on the face of the earth whose only product is proprietary consumer software. Oracle, IBM, Apple, you name it, all sell something else besides software - consumer software is a ridiculously risky business. They've managed to succeed by becoming a monopoly and essentially forcing people to buy their products. They used illegal pricing games to drive the competition out of business - offering "competitive upgrades" on competitetors products, giving away IE, breaking cross-platform compatibility and so forth. They can't use the same strategy against Linux because you can't undercut it on price, so they've resorted to their other famous tactic, FUD.
Also, he seems to deliberately confuse free (speech) with free (beer), probably as a subtle way of cultivating FUD about the viability of Linux vendors. You know, because your company's chosen Linux services vendor - say, IBM - could go under any day now.
Whatever.
I'm fortunate to work in a place where the management is technically inclined, and will laugh this off like the desperate raving that it is. I have to wonder what sort of effect this has on suits who don't know any better, though. Has someone like ESR put up a response yet?
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
From the speech: Furthermore, it (Open Source Software) has inherent security risks and can force intellectual property into the public domain.
As opposed to Microsoft's approach to security documented here (Article from the Registry: "Microsoft tells U.S. Air Force to bug off).
With an attitude like this, he has no basis what so ever in talking about security risks!
-----------------
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
We tried not to run this, but there are too many submissions to ignore.
Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? Can we have a pool, Dad? ... and so forth.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
To play devil's advocate a moment, "a vendor that's guaranteed to be around in 10 years" sounds good to a manager too.
But if there was no intellectual property (IP) law, the GPL would not be *needed*. All code would be free for everyone to use. That's the whole point of the GPL -- to make software free for everyone to use as they wish. The GPL is just a trick to use IP law against itself. It creates nearly the same situation that would exist if there were no IP law. The only 2 exceptions I can think of are that GPL code cannot be mixed with closed-source code (evening the playing field for itself) and that the source must be easily obtained (without IP, it could be hidden, but you could still "steal" the original source or reverse engineer it).
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
But now Microsoft says code forking is bad, so that means it is really good?
No, it's still bad. It just that Microsoft is claiming that Open Source is responsible for code forks.
Ironically, this is about as far as you can get from the truth while still being slightly based in it. You see, without access to source code, you can't have a code fork. What's there to fork if only the one party controls the code? However, to say that Open Source causes code forks is ridiculous.
You see, without the release of the original AT&T V7 source code to UNIX, there could have never been forks in the UNIX code base. What happened is that each proprietary UNIX vendor decided to add missing features to their systems to encourage people to buy their hardware. Without adding nifty new features to UNIX that other vendors didn't have, you didn't have as compelling a reason for customers to buy your hardware. Once you got them used to your API's you got to sit back and enjoy vendor lock-in. It was the lack of cooperation between vendors and their unwillingness to give their additions back to the community that led to the forking of UNIX.
Nowdays, in the BSD worlds, you still have code forks over political/philosophical differences. These led to the FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD camps. The difference between what happened to the commercial UNIXes and the modern BSDs is that the modern BSDs can take advantage of what their rivals have done! While there is different focus in what they are improving, each group gives its contributions back to the whole BSD community. This means that security audits in OpenBSD can turn up flaws that can be patched in FreeBSD. New ports done by NetBSD often turn into the basis of new OpenBSD ports. Heck, even Darwin may have contributed a good HFS+ filesystem layer that the others can adapt.
Microsoft is also being a huge hypocrite whenever they talk about code forking. Hello? Windows 95/98/ME vs. NT/2000? Oh, and there's Windows XP/2002 now -- a professional vs. consumers product fork in grand NT tradition. If you've ever once looked through MSDN, you've probably seen the functional documentation about how this or that function does one thing on 95, another thing on 98, and yet another thing on NT. Don't even get me started on WinCE, either. Microsoft is the pot calling the kettle black. However, since the forking of UNIX has long been one of it's greatest derided problem, and since most people aren't really aware of the differences between Windows versions under the hood, they can get away with it.
That's what irritates me most about this. MS is completely misrepresenting the truth. It's not that code forking is suddenly good because MS is demonizing it. It's that the situation isn't as bad as it once was, it's that it isn't that different from their own products, and it's that it was the commercial interests that caused the problem in the first place.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Let me get this straight. We tried not to run this, but there are too many submissions to ignore. Tried not to run this? So it's all right to post a preview of a speech, along with ESR's preemptive strike against it, but there's no need for another post once the speech is given? At least Slashdot readers know a big story merits hearing from both sides. Too bad the Slashdot crew is clueless in that regard.
Also, the government using the GPL is completely correct because it was paid for through tax money. Saying that it is "walling if off from commercial business" is a half truth. It is mandating that commercial business may not wall it off from the people that paid for it.
t
But now Microsoft says code forking is bad, so that means it is really good?
One thing from this article, and others that gripe about the GPL, is the basic fact that GPL'ed code doesn't go where it isn't wanted. Microsoft clearly isn't speaking about its own business practices when they warn against the GPL - they've obviously been staying away from it so far. What they're doing is using their weight, their influence, to warn companies away from supporting the GPL.
The GPL is very easily avoided. Yes, it's viral - if a license can be considered 'viral.' It does 'infect' the derivative works. That's what it's for. Microsoft is right when it says that this makes it more difficult to sell products - and certainly if a product can't be sold, it could be viewed as 'removing incentive.' (Odd that such a phrase, commonly used to argue against higher taxes, would be used to argue against reducing the so-called "software tax.")
But, as others have touched on, GPL'ed code isn't forcing itself down the throats of commercial developers. No one is forcing anyone to take the metaphorical hypodermic full of GPL. Think you can make a better grep, and sell it? Fine. Provde it. But don't use GNU grep code without giving back.
More importantly, it should be noticed that Microsoft objects to GNU software because it takes a price - a price that is paid to the community at large, not to a specific individual or company. GNU software may not charge for anything besides the distribution costs (not that it couldn't!) but it does charge you with the responsibility to give back.
These are things we all know. Microsoft isn't willing to pay that price. The so-called Shared Source is an attempt to appease the desires whetted by the OSS movement. No one is allowed to give back to the community once they look at this source code.
The biggest shame in this whole situation is that Slashdot may be the most public place for OSS and Free Software advocates to respond to these nonsenses.
I just got through reading Mundie's comments all the way through. I found little if anything with which to disagree.
"Having multiple vendors competing to offer us the best product at the lowest price is worse than having one vendor who can sell the product to us at monopoly prices."
You are looking at things through Slashdot colored glasses. Mundie wasn't referring to monopoly vendors or even competing vendors offering products implementing the same standard. He was referring to competing vendors all trying to push slightly different standards, with no clear winner. Interoperability is a costly problem. Transferring files between Macs and PCs causes problems all the time, and that's just two platforms.
Most importantly, Mundie stood up for independant developers. There is one fault I can find here. I think reducing or eliminating the cost of MS development tools would be much more beneficial to independant developers than revealing source. I would much rather get MSVC 7.0 for the price of the CD than look at source code that belongs to MS.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This story was, so I just replied to it and attached my message. I really do not sit around hoping a story like this gets posted. :)
(Moderators, mod this down if you wish, I don't care, but you are better off modding up more useful articles)
--
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
For example, the original purposes of the mental health industry were to help government and big business control populations and to control markets. The classic historical example of this is Nazi Germany.
After the war, many companies wanted to make use of the techniques to improve their markets, politicians wanted to advance their causes etc, all taking a page or two for the Nazi play book. But they did not want the stench of the association.
Now we all know that these are honorable men, and that these end goals of control and manipulation have been set aside by the vast majority of governments and organizations around the world.
But here and there we see a hint of the old technique. You redefine the word. You include just enough of the truth, and twist it with a lie, that it requires a sophisticated understanding to spot what is wrong.
to quote Hitler (full chapter here): given variously as (depending on translation:" ... all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan." (or alternatively) "... an effective propaganda has to limit itself to just a few points and must keep repeating them in the form of catch phrases for as long as it takes to have ascertained that even the very last person understands under these words what one wants him to understand." The full chapter makes fascinating reading, especially when comparing it to MS Marketing FUD and tactics.
Ultimately a lie *will* backfire, however, because people see through it and hate you for it. It may take a while, a long time.
Therefore the best PR campiagn is not based in lies, but is uses real truths.
But the MS marketroids resort to twisting and distorting the facts
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
From the speech: "Despite the demonstrable success of the computing industry and the IP-based economy, and the clear failure of newer firms that gave away products for free"
;)
Yes, MS has been quite smart about not giving software away for free!
Well, except for that whole Internet browser thing.
And Outlook Express.
And perhaps a bunch of little utilities that come with the OS
Oh, and all those fonts and clipart from their website.
Hmm... what was MS saying about the folly of giving away IP freely?
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Somebody was sitting around with the ctrl key already pressed and just waiting for Slash to post a MS story... =)
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
The primary point of this article is that Microsoft is simply saying that they need to maintain a viable business model. Giving away your code for free, or even letting other people copy your code is usually NOT a viable business model. Microsoft does not develop custom projects. They develop general use products for the public. If they were to release the source code for Windows, there'd be absolutely no reason for anybody to buy Windows, period. It could easily be re-copied, and re-packaged. They're NOT in the custom software business, so while companies like RedHat can make a tiny bit of money (and I do mean Tiny) from doing some custom projects, Microsoft is not structured like this. They DO sell the exact same software to millions of people. It makes no sense, whatsoever for Microsoft to open source their products. That's all this article is about.
That's a bit specious, considering that software developed by the government is required to be public domain. Does that mean the NSA's mods are not GPL, but Public Domain?
The Public Domain nature of taxpayer-funded development of software is why TCP/IP is an open protocol. Funny how Microsoft has never complained about the Public Domain aspect of government-developed software, but the GPL gets them hysterical...
---dragoness
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this part added in a much more recent edition of Gates' book? Even in 1995, Gates viewed the Internet and the World Wide Web as nonentities.
-A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
What you fail to realize is that the whole concept of copyright protection is something that the governement/people gives to businesses so that the people will benefit. Not so that companies can benefit -- that's just the means to the end. Microsoft is implying that the government needs to protect the means, even if the end is no longer being achieved. But that doesn't make sense to the people unless there is some benefit the people will get. But Free Software already provides that benefit.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I've wondered how the NSA (as well as Becker's drivers) can put stuff under the GPL. Without Copyright, there is no GPL. But the Federal Government can not get copyright protection. Everything produced by the Feds exists under the public domain.
I can imagine that a GPL project can incorporate stuff from the public domain (just as commercial software can), but I can't see how things like Becker's drivers alone or NSA patches can be GPLed. MS ought to be free to use any of that code in any way they see fit.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
They're NOT in the custom software business, so while companies like RedHat can make a tiny bit of money (and I do mean Tiny) from doing some custom projects, Microsoft is not structured like this.
This is true. However, no where are Microsoft, the members of the RIAA, the members of the MPAA, or any other enterprise ever given the guarantee that the business model that they have freely chosen will always be profitable. Times change. Technologies change. Markets change. Adapt or die.
Change and progress are good. They wash away the dead wood institutions in our society, while vital ones adapt and prosper.
How to fight this? Explain that the GPL puts no restriction on the use of the software. If you can get GPL software you are free to use it as you see fit. The only things the GPL restricts are copying, distribution and modification.
On the other hand Commercial software, especially Microsoft software has harsh limits on how it can be used. Hence the term "End User License Agreement". Tell 'em they'll never have to click through one of those for an Open Source product.
Next mention that the only way you'll be affected by the GPL is if you want to copy, distribute or modify GPL software. You can use a GPLed editor like GNU Emacs on a GPLed system like Linux to write proprietary software if that's what you want to do. If you're not writing software that links with or uses GPLed code, selling or giving away GPLed software you don't have to worry.
Explain that when Microsoft's code leaves their building it's "hands off". You can look, but you can't touch or even show other people. Their "shared source software" is at best a learning tool for other people. At worst it's a means of trying to get cheap student labour to find and fix their bugs for them.
As for standards, explain that Microsoft is infamous for embracing a standard then extending it so that nothing works with it. Explain that this would be fine if it weren't for their monopoly which basically makes an open standard into a Microsoft standard. Tell them that by its very nature, Open Source software is open standard. If you want to know how something works, just look at the source.
Finally explain that the only reason Bill Gates and Microsoft can give so much money away is that they've made such obscene profits on their software. Explain how if an Open Source company were on 95% of desktops it would never have that kind of power because everything it made would be open and freely available. Explain how many eyes make bugs shallow. Then say "if you love something, set it free". *grin*
Any other suggestions?
Frankly, it doesn't much matter to me whether MicroSquish code is ever available under an Open Source license. Mozilla has shown us that opening your source code doesn't necessarily make for a better product.
What's wrong with windoze, is not that I can't read the source. What's wrong with it is that it's unreliable, unsecurable, incompetently designed, and bloated as all get-out.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They also gloss over the fact that if you write original (not derived from any other product) code and release it with a GPL license, you're absolutely free to license it out to someone else under a different license. If a company wants to use it in a proprietary product, they can come and offer you a shitload of money for you to allow them to do so.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Linus, as usual, used his own metaphors, to enlighten the press and non-geeks. IOW, he simplified my question, de-jargoned it and answered it plainly and honestly. His metaphor was a tree with branches, and that brought up the 'splinter' comment.
What wasn't reported in the article, was how he ended his answer, and I clearly remember this: That was also the year I recognized why I admired and supported the OSS movement.
When Gates was done with his speech, he was hustled off-stage by an army of handlers and into a waiting limo, looking neither left nor right, and interacting with none of his so-valued cutomers.
When Linus was done, he and his wife and children hung around the show floor. His wife pushed the stroller around, and, despite the press and admirers, he kept his focus on them. After the show floor closed, there was a gathering sponsored by one of the early Linux companies. Linus was there with his wife and kids. They mingled for about two more hours, then someone suggested Buster's for video games and more beers.
In contrast to Gates, his handlers and the limos, the last I saw of Linus that night, he was piling with his wife and kids into a mini-van, on their way to Busters', with mad-dog and a bunch of geeks (Can I bum a ride? situational carpool).
NO MATTER HOW GATES AND COMPANY SPIN IT, _THAT'S_ THE TRUE SPIRIT OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE....and that's why we will win, AND THEY WILL LOSE.
Hell, they already have.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
I didn't have a huge problems with the first half, other than a few veiled hints at where the article was going. I did get a chuckle when I read the paragraph talking about .net.
Now, they start moving on to the negative points of OSS. Not that I don't think OSS has it's problems. In some of these places I think microsoft may have some points - but they often exaggerate them or extend them to places where I don't think they are applicable. Some things they say:
Unhealthy forking that leads to incompatability. At first, I thought "This is stupid, it doesn't happen". But in one way it does. Look at the different releases of redhat. A program compiled for RH 7.1 most likely won't work with redhat 6.2. Now, I don't call this "forking" as much as I would call it "Upgrading". Microsoft has exactly the same problems with their operating system upgrades as well though. The difference is, when you upgrade an operating system or one software component, often you have to upgrade others. With OSS it's easy, get the source and recompile. With MS it costs money. His point on the GPL and including other peoples code is ridiculous. I'm glad he gets his information on licensing of the GPL technically correct, but what he is complaining about is just silly. In the proprietary world you can't include someone elses proprietary code in your program and release it, right? So why would he even care that he can't take GPL code and include it in his proprietary code? Whats the point here? If you want your code to be proprietary, just write it all yourself. To those who write and release proprietary code, GPL code is nothing more than "someone elses proprietary code". Now him saying "The viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it" is just plain FUD. Sure, if you take the damn code and use it in your code, it affects you. If you just use GPL software as 'end-user' software, you have no problems.
They talk about open source business model being support or hardware oriented. They claim that it will fail due to the falure of similar attempts earlier by other companies that are support or hardware specific. For sure he can't be talking abut SUN (who still makes a great amount of money by selling hardware and developing enterprise quality operating systems). This model does work. But the good thing about OSS is that it is not tied to a company. It existed before the companies sprung up to support it and it will exist even if some or many of the companies die. It will always provide a valuable product to the community and end-users who rely on the product. When companies like microsoft die, you are stuck with a pile of binary garbage that will never be maintained, upgraded or fixed.
Ok, their real point here is that mass-marketed products tend to not do so well with either of these models. I think Microsoft may be partially right here. For example, selling PC games (not online type games) will never work in a "support" model, nor would it work in a "hardware business model" either. The only way to really support cool single-user games that require lots of R&D, quick development times to be competative, etc is to support them by paying customers. This is why I think the number and types of free games doesn't even come close to the numbers and quality of commercial games.
Free software is better suited for cool apps that have longer development cycles, like a word processor, or operating system. Things that aren't "completely redone" every few months like computer games are. Ok, maybe even computer games will start slowing down once we achieve near-realistic graphics and people can focus primarily on content. But for some reason or another, I think the game industry still has quite a bit of evolution to go through though.
Microsoft's primary business model is *not* games though. It is Operating Systems and Office Applications. Given time, and number of upgrades, I believe OSS products WILL catch microsoft products. Right now microsoft does have the lead in end-user software such as word-processors. Already, we notice that micorsoft is digging and clawing for new ideas to "differentiate" or give a "competative advantage" to their products over others. The failed "Paperclip" is one example of an attempt to differentiate office from other products. The question is, how long can microsoft continue to justify paying more and more money to upgrade their apps? Microsoft themselves know this is a dead-end. This is why they created ".NET"! There's no need to force people to upgrade if they pay monthly fees. If they can change the thought process of the users that "Users don't own software" "Users buy a service", their business will live into the future.
--
Twivel
Open-Source is a threat to Microsoft's business model and, as a business, Microsoft is making the decision to attack its biggest threat. This will include exaggerations, leaps in reasonings, and a lot of FUD. The important concept to take away from today's meeting is that Microsoft is *very* smart. They understand open-source. They understand the weaknesses of the open-source community. And they are attacking them with full force.
Gathering thoughts from a few open-source hackers at this meeting today, it seems Microsoft is leading a 3-pronged attack:
What Microsoft is doing is simple: they are taking away the easy open-source arguments, and muddling the complex ones. Whether you think their message rings true or not is irrelevant: they are making a solid marketing case. The Open-Source community had better be ready to respond.
Before I begin, I should point out that open source means different things to different people. I will assume that Microsoft is talking about Open Source that meets the Open Source Definition. That is, the source code must be freely available. The software must be freely redistributable. Other users must be allowed to modify this code and distribute them under the same license. Note that there is no limit on charging for distribution, though specific open source licenses may indeed prevent this. Also, once you have distributed the binaries, you must also distribute the source if requested.
Microsoft points out that open source often leads to forking of the code base. This is indeed sometimes true. However, shared source/commercial source does not prevent this. Witness Microsoft's operating systems. Windows CE, Windows 9x (including ME), and Windows 2000. In fact, Windows 2000 is perhaps even a clearer example of a code fork as it is available in at least four different binary versions (Windows 2000 Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Dataserver), each with a slightly different code base. Even ignoring this, each one of Microsoft's operating systems shares a common lineage, MS DOS, though Microsoft has sometimes started fresh.
The viral nature of the GPL, the Gnu Public License, is the next thing Microsoft takes issue with. They point out that once software is licensed under the GPL, all derived software is also so licensed. This is absolutely true and is certainly something that companies need to be aware of. However, there is a flip side to this argument. Say I write a new browser and release all the source code under the GPL. Now, my intellectual property is protected in the event that a company comes along, takes my source code and makes minor modifications and then sells it for $250 a piece. Saying that the GPL is a threat to intellectual property implies that the GPL abhores intellectual property and this is certainly not the case.
Microsoft also points out that the GPL undermines commercial software development. This is somewhat true. If I GPL a word processor, I am quite unlikely to be able to sell thousands of copies of it because anyone who purchases a copy can turn around and distribute it for free. However, Microsoft seems to be ignoring one thing. The majority of software developed for profit is developed for specific customers. Programmers or development houses are contracted to develop a specific solution for a specific customer. This customer then pays for the delivery of the software. Open source software (and indeed, GPL'ed software) does not affect this proven business model at all. The only problem would be that the customer could then freely redistribute the software or modify it without paying the developer. This essentially prevents the developer from selling the exact same software to another customer.
This is important. Please note that open source software does not require that you give your software away for free. You are quite free to develop it for a significant price, making all your profit from this development. Microsoft seems to ignore this.
--
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
And indeed that many OSS people seem to only be vaguely aware of, is that the GPL *depends* on intellectual property law to function.*
It is not public domain. It is the fully copyrighted work of the author who *allows* you to use it *under license.*
It is no more viral than the commercial license which seeks to 'infect' your pocketbook. Over, and over, and over again.
The GPL 'infects' your code by allowing you to take is WITHOUT financial recompense, which it would be perfectly within the rights of the author to demand, and asks only that if you modify the code to give those modifications back under the same terms that you obtained the original code * for free.*
Noone holds a gun to your head and tells you to use GPL code. If you don't like the terms of the license, don't take the code. Just as some say about commercial licenses. If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it.
GPL code HAS a pay structure. Don't dance if you don't want to pay the piper, who in this case is only asking to be allowed at the banquet table.
The irony is that MS is bashing a license that is * totally in keeping* with its own from a legal standpoint, and only exists BECAUSE of such intellectual property laws as protect MS's rights.
If the GPL destroyed intellectual property it couldn't, itself, exist.
KFG
Sound anything like, oh say, IE?!
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
All in all, I found what was said to be rather accurate, and it is interested to see Microsoft moving itself towards a Shared Source model. 2 years ago, I never saw any source. I found it kind of humerous that they included their "samples" as a significant contribution of source code, and that they boasted that "100 universities" had the source code. But all in all, it was rather rational.
This is coming from a guy who volunteered for the GNU booth at LISA (sysadmin conference), writes GPL'ed software at home, advocates Free and Open Source software at work, and teaches free classes on programming twice a week in his free time. Honestly, this article seems like a nice concise representation of the issues that we are facing in the technical world, and the licensing tradeoffs as well. It is a remarkably centered piece, especially considering that it's coming from Microsoft. Maybe it's coming from their Biz department, rather than Marketting.
However, I wouldn't take the article as a sign of the impending doom or non-use of GPL'ed software. As another /. reader said, it's good to view GPL'ed and OpenSource software as software belong to a single company (GNU?), namely, the company consisting of all contributors.
I believe quite strongly that Free and OpenSource software will overcome Microsoft.
First, the very thing that allowed Linux to exist in the first place, the life blood of Free/OpenSource Software, namely, communication, is becoming cheaper and easier. We are watching a bandwidth and connection revolutions. As barriers to communication come down, the success of Free and OpenSource software will increase.
Second, as more and more people become involved in the computing world (and they are coming, they are definitely coming- just look overseas) and the online world, the # of Free and OpenSource developers will increase. I believe that our numbers as Free/OS software developers are, and will, increase faster than the # of employees at Microsoft.
That KDE and GNOME (particularly KDE) would cease development because OS/Free software isn't a viable business model would be a faulty conclusion. KDE is not a business. Go to the KDE web page and tell me that they're running a business. It's very clearly a community.
We can build our own operating system, and as developers, it's just sort of our nature to do so.
Anyways, Kudo's to MicroSoft for a well written summary, and a "Yay" if they actually follow through on their commitment to share their source.
Back to my side of the fence: Yay KDE! Yay GNOME!
I think is what Mundie is trying to announce. Of course their 'Shared Source' is a load of crap, but I get the hint that Microsoft is truly starting to realize that a lot of their potential developer base gets more serious systems development done with OSS tools and libraries. They're trying to treat the Open Source philosiphy the same way they treated Java. Embrace Open Source and 'fix' it, until it benefits Microsoft.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
By making the source under glass more readily available, is MS undermining a persons ability to work on open source projects.
If more people are allowed to see the source does this increase the likely hood of IP litigation if programmer X has been in the vicinity of MS source and later works on an open source project?