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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.
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...
So where are you going to work next? Hint: make sure it's somewhere where experienced managers are on the look-out for hackers to tell them how to run their company.
(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.
Hmm.. this is tricky. I believe that the GPL does not require that it be the only license that you release your code under. So the NSA could release just their modifications as public domain software (even tho it wouldn't be terribly useful by itself, at least it would be there) and still include them in the GPL'd Linux distribution. You still wouldn't be able to co-opt the distro, but the public would have complete and unfettered access to the NSA's work.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
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
ADA Core Technologies
Cygnus (well, now they are bought out by RedHat)
I'm guessing MandrakeSoft is
Many, many consultants
Apple
IBM
Engineering and the Ultimate
ADA Core Technologies - http://www.gnat.com/
Well, you said it. RedHat is not profitable, period. - What's your point? Cygnus certainly was for a long period of time. The fact that RedHat hasn't gotten there yet doesn't mean that noone else has.
IBM _does_ make money on open source. They make money selling hardware that runs open source. People are buying and adding to mainframes to run Linux. That's making money. They developed the software, and people bought the hardware to run it - that _is_ an open source business model.
Apple has released a lot back to the community, including an open-source streaming server.
I alsoaven't yet haven't heard about any of the embedded Linux people going under.
The people who didn't make money on Linux are those who were banking on Linux taking over in less than 5 to 10 years, especially those counting on it taking over the desktop, and grew their companies too fast. For example, you have Eazel, which may have had a good idea, but they hired marketers and PR people and had an office over a year before they released 1.0. In addition, their business model was based on the rapid ascension of Linux on the desktop, which hasn't happened yet. VA Linux Systems tried to be the IBM of Linux, doing just about everything, and found out that it wasn't a profitable method. They tried to grow too fast and do too much. I'm guessing Penguin Computing is doing much better because they offer most of the same services as VA, but through partner arrangements. They are focused, and they know that they serve a specialized market.
Other companies weren't making any money before Linux, and still aren't, like Corel and SGI, although SGI has the potential to do so in a year or two, if Intel ever ships Itanium.
So, money can be made in Linux, but the key is to have good, sound business practices, and to know where you stand. If you understand you serve a specialized market, you can make money by being a free software builder. If your business is based on the assumption that everybody is going to switch their desktops to Linux next year, you're hosed.
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.
Most code written has no market value after the first sale. Most is written to solve a specific problem, for a specific business. It just isn't mass marketable.
You can charge anything you want. The greatest volume of written software is for custom applications. If I write an interface to take data from your legacy b-trieve database, and integrate it to SAP, nothing stops me from selling it to you for $30,000. You gain a functioning data set, and the ability to fix the code without me.
Yes, GPL'ing my code means that you can re-sell it. So what? You're probably not in the business of selling code in the first place, or you wouldn't have hired me.
Meanwhile, I'm away on a Geek Cruise and the code crashes and burns. You can't find me and your business is down. Since you demanded GPL'd code, I wasn't able to restrict you (and more importantly, the replacement programming consultant) from looking at the source, and fixing it.
That's an example of GPL'd code helping the little guy. Another example is when you decide to modify the code I already wrote for a better gee-whiz gismo. The next guy doesn't have to start at zero.
Sure I can. If it's my code, I can release it under every license I want to. Remember, it's my code. Now, if I took somebody else's GPL'd code and used it, I'm bummed for proprietary stuff, unless I look up the original author and get him to license it to me another way. Which he can certainly do. He'll probably want some money, but then, so do I (from customers)
Yes. Ever heard of IBM? Their heavy iron is now available with GPL'd Linux. IBM wrote drivers, and they're GPL'd too. You can go to 3com.com and download GPL'd drivers.
You have to click to agree to the GPL, however :)
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
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
This would be true except for the fact that it is wrong. Nice troll though.
B.G. and company were convinced both TCP/IP AND the Internet were just toys of academics and poor college students.
Want proof?
Do you even KNOW what Bill's original concept for MSN was? Hint: it had NOTHING to do with ISPs, PPP, TCP/IP or anything else. It was an AOL/Compuserve clone and nothing more.
Do you even KNOW how long 3rd party vendors were selling TCP/IP stacks (a.k.a. Winsock) for DOS/Windows before MS ported BSD sockets and included it into Win95?
Next time, before opening your pie hole, check your facts.
> 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!
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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)
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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?
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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.
Commercial, broadcast television works because it's a highly regulated market, and is highly protected by IP laws. With cable and satalite TV you actually have to pay for the shows you get in additions to the ad revenue they bring in.
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
cipher to neo after the latter took the red pill.
--
"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.
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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!
"In other words, the computer industry is suppose to be an industry intended to assist other industries."
What is this "the computer industry is suppose [sic]" crap? The only thing the computer industry is supposed to do is make money.
As for the productivity issues, the bottom line is that measuring productivity is more voodoo than economics.
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 ...).
Give him his +1.
-Pat
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.
Why not create a govt agency or a private company that certifies proprietary code as GPL-free? You give them the source code, they compare it to the source code of similar GPL products, most likely using automation and a good string matching algorithm, and if the algorithm finds no nontrival matches in the code, then the program is good.
:)
Of course, the code-checking engine would have to be open-source so companies could be sure that it didn't steal code
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.
They're startups, they're supposed to lose money initially. Startups succeed when you go from losing money to breaking even to turning a profit. They fail when they lose more and more money. Redhat is breaking even, which means their revenue is rising faster than their costs and we can assume they'll proceed on to profitability. Microsoft is making money, but making less every year. Their costs are rising faster than their revenue. Factor in their impending breakup, dozens of lawsuits getting thrown at them, and a few other things, and their long-term outlook isn't very good.
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.
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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?