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The Open Source Evangelists Respond
EconomyGuy writes "Looks like the some big players all got together to respond to Microsoft's recent claims about the GPL. CNet is running a story about it, or you can read the response right here. If names like ESR, Linus, RMS, and Perens can all agree on something to say, then Microsoft's plan to split the community just might back fire on them."
Bruce Perens and Richard Stallman are agreeing on something!
I prefer my news "from the goat's ass". So I would have accepted your submission.
All your source are belong to us !!
That just goes to show how dumb you are.
Have you seen any slashdot stories recently that wern't festering days old horse shit?
You talk as if everyone and their brother is running linux. I think you will find that they are not. Most are using MS products; that doesn't sound like 'global enthusiasm' to me.
We are your father
If you're gonna be in jail, is being hung such a bad thing? Being HANGED on the other hand....
microsoft's own damnable arrogance and consumer-unfriendly software renting schemes will sooner or later drive them into the ground, i swear this to you. Nobody but the most blind microsoft fundy listens to stuff like this and believes that microsoft is serious. it's obvious to anybody with brain cells that microsoft is scared to death of open source because they can't do anything about it, short of putting hits out on the top coders which they have not yet done to my knowledge.
So it's great that some people have shot back at microsoft, but let's face it, it wasn't exactly needed because any reasonable person knows that it was all fud to begin with. how does that old joke go? "How do you know steve ballmer is spreading FUD?" "his lips are moving." damned straight. Linux is looking better every day (and i'm not a leftist.)
ed edwards
ESR, RMS, Linus, etc. It's like a human Beowolf Cluster!!!
May I have your attention please,
.....we're gonna have a problem here.........
...........
may I have your attention please,
will the real bruce perens please stand up,
I repeat will the real bruce perens please stand up
Ya'll act like you never seen a slash poster before
mouse all on the floor
like mom and daddy just burst in the door
and started whoopin yer ass worse than before
they first had endorsed
buyin' ya a crappy computer (aaaaaah)
It's the return of the...
"awww..wait, no wait, you're kidding,
he didn't just say what I think he did,
did he?"
and Mr. Cray said...
nothing you idiots, Mr Cray's dead
he's locked in my bassment
microsoft women love Sig '11
chicka chicka chicka bruce perens,
"I'm sick of him, lookit him
walkin around, grabbin his GNU know what
flippin' to GNU know who"
"yeah, but he's so smart though"
yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose
but no worse than what's goin on in your sister's webcam (eheheheh)
sometimes, I wanna get on ZD and just let loose
but cant, but it's cool for RMS to hump a dead GNU
My mouse is on your link, My mouse is on your link
and if you're lucky, I might just give it a little click
and that's the message that we deliver to little kids
and expect them not to know what a free software is
of course they're gonna know what Microsoft is
by the time they hit 4th grade
they got MS-NBC, dont they?
we ain't nothing but omnivores
well, some of us carnivores
who read other people's mail like crackwhores
but if we can read your e-mail like it's available
then there's no reason that a man can't forge spam from your account
but if you feel like I feel, I got the antedote
trolls wave your penis birds, sing the chorus and it goes........
I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so won't the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so wont the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
Sig 11 don't got to cuss in his posts to get Karma
well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too
you think I give a damn about my Karma
half of you trolls can't even stomach me, let alone stand me
"but bruce, what if you win, wouldn't it be weird"
why? so you guys can just lie to get me here
so you can sit me here next to Natalie here
shit,Enoch Root's momma better switch me chairs
so I can sit next to trollmastah and Post First
and hear em argue over who modded it down first
little troll, flamed me back on IRC
"yeah, he's fast, but I think he types one-handed, hee hee"
I should download some audio on MP3
and show the world how you released it BSD (aaaaaah)
I'm sick of you little troll and l33t groups
all you do is annoy me
so I have been sent here to destroy you
and there's a million of us just like me
who post like me, who just don't give a fuck like me
who code like me, walk, talk and act like me
and just might be the next best thing, but not quite me......
I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so won't the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so wont the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
I'm like a head trip to listen to
cause I'm only givin you things
you troll about with your friends inside you rabbit hole
the only difference is I got the balls to say it
in front of ya'll and I aint gotta be false or sugar coated at all
I just get on the web and spit it
and whether you like to admit it (riiip)
I just shit it better than 90% you trollers out can
then you wonder how can
kids eat up these posts like gospel verse
it's funny,cause at the rate I'm going when I'm thirty
I'll be the only person in the chat rooms flirting
cyberin with nurses when I'm jackin off to porno's
and I'm jerkin' but this whole bag of viagra isn't working
in every single person there's a bruce perens lurkin
he could be workin at Micron Inc., spittin on your SDRAM
or in the printer queue, flooding, writin I dont give a fuck
with his windows down and his system up
so will the real perens please stand up
and click 1 of those fingers till you drag up
and be proud to be outta your mind and outta control
and 1 more time, loud as you can, how does it go?
I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so wont the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so wont the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so wont the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm Bruce Perens, yes, I'm the real Perens
all you other Bruce Perens' are just imitating
so wont the real Bruce Perens please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up
haha guess it's a bruce perens in all of us........
fuck it let's all stand up
O'Reilly: Okay, let's not be too rough with Microsoft here, I still sell a lot of books about Microsoft products.
Perens:Yes, when you're not being a parasite on the free software community.
Torvalds: Come on, guys, we're going to try to be positive here. Instead of focusing on bad things about Microsoft, let's look at good things about Linux.
Stallman: You mean, "GNU/Linux"...
Someone named them Bruce?
- 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?"
This has taken a long time.
There is not much more that Microsoft can throw at this community. In the years that I've been reading slashdot. I've seen the average age drop. The amount of MS Serf spy's increase. I now have a desktop I don't have to configure with VI. I've enjoyed Oracle on Linux. I fell in love with Java on Linux. Seen Linus go from THE guy on a mailing list to Information Systems Rebel Icon. I've seen OS2 die... Then come back. ( useless interjection ).
Microsoft has accused the community of being a bunch of hackers and failed. Reported Open Source as being buggy only to have software developers around the world installing Linux looking for a stable plateform. Microsoft has givin the vibe that Open Source is not suited for security applications. When Net Admins have favored the security of Open Source for years. (BSD anyone?) Do i need to say anything about benchmarks? This is now the last real volly. We are no longer cannon fodder.
So is that it?
The Open Source sprit wins after decades of floating around?
Not really.
Now come something interesting... Can we get the implications of using open source libs in company applications. What about taking a Function out of a opensource application. Is it okay to just put "Stole from [ProjectName]"? These are the rules that need to be understood by companys. How will using opensource java classes affect my customer? With out the anwsers to these question outlined more then "free like beer" companys will stay away. Lets remember that the Homer in us thinks "Hmm Beer" for about 30 secs after hearing the word 'beer'.
Just my 2 cent's
Last one in jail is a fascist.
LWN.net has a list of companies that are successful with open source, meaning profitable on this weeks front page.
"Sleepycat Software has been doing nicely with the Berkeley DB for years.
Digital Creations has built a solid business on Zope, and was briefly profitable before taking a new investment and launching into another expansion phase.
Prosa srl was doing well before its acquisition by Linuxcare, and is now reborn from the ashes of that mess.
Cygnus Software was an open source company way back before most people had heard of free software, and did very well.
Red Hat, which bought Cygnus, is closing in on profitability.
Cybersource has been doing well in the support business for years (see this week's Letters to the Editor Page).
It is not much of a stretch to include O'Reilly & Associates on this list.
Let us express our apologies right now to all of the profitable companies that we left out. "
And yeah, it is like shooting fish in a barrel.
~^~~^~^^~~^
As a friendly aside, your all over the map, flyboy. But then my spelling and grammer isn't pretty. Here's an effort to interpolate a point from your post and respond to it. If I missed, feel free to let me know.
1 and 2) Cygnus had revenue from supporting gcc and other tools they bundled with gcc, but they made their money from gcc none the less. Where you have them pointed in different directions, this is the same as O'Reilley and RedHat.
Many suggest this kind of model for OpenSource gaming where the engine is free and the artwork/etc you own. This is all perfectly acceptible in the Open Source way for all but the most greedy communists. Everyone wins, and so do individuals who acctualy innovate and contribute technicaly rather than politicaly.
3) You missed that Mandrake and at least 10 other distros makes money off of repackaging RedHat. Individualy and accumulatively their support to the community is larger than you estimate. They are large and powerful without losing their agility and ability to innovate. Thats how they've caught up on Microsoft so fast, so soon. It may or may not be superior but it is definately competitive.
4) Even moreso than simple support extensions, the contribution of making technology accessible to people is a valuable commodity. I'd pay money to save hours of work (that they did) to figure out how to work something. People pay me to save them time in a simular fashion. This buisness model feeds on the instantaneous increase of efficiency at the moment increases. Since there is a lot of inefficiency out there to trim, this model will survive for a long, long time.
RMS probably does hate O'Reilly for being a parasite. The beuty of open source is that we are more intelligent collectively than individualy. MS's buisness model is even moreso dependent on them individualy being the smartest, which is why I don't have faith in MS's monopoly or stock for the next 20 years.
~^~~^~^^~~^
Oracle
IBM
Electronic Arts
Loki
These all build profitable software on top of Free Software quite successfully. One great lie that tends to be perpetuated in these discussions is the idea that if you build tools on top of Free Software that you have to give those tools away.
Microsoft could even safely assimilate an LGPLed network access layer if they really wanted to.
You might not be able to make yourself a new Robber Baron by creating the next DirectX. However, you can still make money making the games that would use such a beast.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Declaring which state that your licence is valid under is actually the exact opposite of localization. Localization implies that each community gets to judge the licence on their own terms.
Guido is specifically trying to STOP that from happening here (apparently).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Redhat has managed to overlap the user friendliness of WinDOS since version 5.0.
Once you've installed the OS, WIMP is WIMP. If you're going to whine about something not being a clone of msword, you would do no less whining if the 'alternative' were StarOffice under Windows itself.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yes but GvR has no reason to love the GPL (the current Python license isn't GPL compatible) and he still signed his name to the article. I would have liked to have seen a prominent BSDer on the list, but that's probably a little over the top. After all, a lot of those guys agree with Mundie's criticisms of the GPL (they would disagree with most of his other points, however).
Mundie's remarks have definitely backfired. Mundie got to speak to one small room of people, and the rebuttals have been seen everywhere. News agencies are falling all over themselves to print lucid, well-written, and oftentimes very biting replies to Mundie's remarks.
It has long been known that GNU/Linux is basically immune to being bought, bankrupted, or stolen, but now it appears that GNU/Linux is immune to FUD as well.
Fah, I need to triple check before submitting, because I agree 100% with what you have said. If Guido would have taken care of the licensing issues before he started work on Python then the whole problem wouldn't have happened.
This is one of the things that the FSF does right. They get all of the legal ducks in a row before they start hacking.
My point was that Python's license is a BSD style license (and not even GPL compatible there for a bit), so it wasn't his software or license that was under attack. He had no need to pitch in with the rest of the GPL advocates. His software is part of the BSD style crowd that Microsoft seems to approve of. He could have done what Ransom Love did and say that perhaps the GPL isn't such a good idea after all. The fact that he didn't do that is heartening, and shows that the rift between GPL advocates and BSD advocates isn't as big as the flamewars on Usenet make them out to be.
Thanks again for your hard work Bruce. Keep it up.
If you want to give me free Chevy trucks, I guarantee you I can make money off them!
Let me know when these companies top bleeding cash and start becoming profitable.
Oracle sells a GPL'ed database?
IBM sells a GPL'ed database?
Electronic Arts and Loki sell GPL'ed games?
I don't think so.
Go back under your bridge, troll.
I don't want a blueprint. I want a pre-built truck.
"If names like ESR, Linus, RMS, and Parens can all agree on something to say, then Microsoft's plan to split the community just might back fire on them."
Does anybody have links to rebuttals from the likes of Theo da Raadt or Jordan Hubbard?
I went to their websites and didn't see anything. Did they rebut Mundie, or just not think it's important?
When you say Microsoft has an intention of splitting the community. Which community are you talking about?
They certainly never intended to split the GPL community. But they did attack the Open or Free Software community, which has always had a large chasm between GPL and BSD licenses.
Seeing a number of GPL supporting noteworthies agreeing that the GPL license is good does not surprise me. On the other hand, seeing BSD camp members saying Microsoft's attack on the GPL was wrong would be news.
Eerily, it's like The Justice League of America vs. The Legion of Doom
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
$0.02
-l
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Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
What did you expect them to say? That was the proper P.R. move at this point. They were expecting us to be a lot more brash than we were.
By the way, I am brought in to talks with Fortune 100 corporations through my job, so those CIOs and CEOs are being reached - not that I agree with the assertion that they are the only important ones. IBM representatives are doing some of that CIO lobbying, as well, as are a number of the other evangelists. Maddog, ESR, and O'Reilly all make regular appearances in executive offices.
But this is not where the real battle lies. It is on the intellectual property law front that we will win or lose. P.R. efforts are important to that, but let's not let them distract us from the real goal.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Spin it again...
The problem is tho...
Who forms the head?
;)
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
> * Yes, Mozilla is _vastly_ better in the 0.9 release. I know that. But in the meantime, the company has still seen it's market share go from nearly half to zero.
Mozilla's a browser. Netscape's _server_ market share, according to Netcraft, is about 6% and has been for a couple of years, and was never close to 50%. It's not like people were buying Communicator much before it went Open/Free, even when it was supposed to be free for evaluation purposes only (and was competing with Mosaic).
http://www.netcraft.com/survey/
--
rant
We band together only when we need to. Its only when the Common Enemy uses our "disunion" as a tool (in this case, FUD) against us that we must turn on the Common Enemy and remove its threat. Then we can get back to our infighting in peace. ;-)
--
You know, you gotta get up real early if you want to get outta bed... (Groucho Marx)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Right. Because having RMS, Linus, and ESR sign a document may be impressive, but it will be even more impressive if 15,000 /. users sign it.
The enemies of Democracy are
Forgot about this one --
Hmmm... funny... you know, last time I looked at the definition of opensource on www.opensource.org and the last time I looked at the GPL license, GPL'd software and Open Source software were both, by definition, free as in price as well as free as in liberty.
Nonsense. You really should read them again before acussing Bruce of semantic waffling.
There is nothing that says you can't charge for your software, in the GPL or the Open Sfotware definition. However there is an implied result that it may not be to successfull, since anyone you do sell the software to can turn around and distribute copies for free.
Nevertheless, you can buy a copy of Debian on CD for a cost substantially above the cost of pressing the CD.
The enemies of Democracy are
Please, Bruce, explain how a license that explicitly says that others can copy your work for free is compatible with a business that sells software.
He didn't say it was. He said it is compatible with business. If the only business involving software development that you can imagine is one where you sell individual copies of your software, then that's your problem.
So yes, one type of business doesn't work very well with the GPL. So what? In the space of business models, most of them don't work for one reason or another. That doesn't mean those reasons are incompatible with business. It means you need to think of another model.
If I'm going to give it away, I'm going to give it away no strings attached.
That's your choice. I like the "so long as you keep it free, too" string to be firmly attached, myself.
The enemies of Democracy are
Thus, it is a very well written letter, and encouraging to see such a wide range of signatures, but unfortunately not really written to the same audience as Craig's comments were directed towards.
--
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Parens is correct. However he mispelled ISR's, Linux's, and PMS's names (respectively). I was in taco's spelling class, where they teach you those finer points of distinction.
One of the most interesting things about open source is how much of suckers a large percentage of the open source world is. Let me take a little piece of the article as an example:
In contrast, the business model of Open Source is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators.
In a nutshell what this is saying, and yes I'm putting words in their mouth, is that there's too many programmers out there. Let's reduce the cost by putting them out of work. In fact even sweeter lets entice them into a cause so much so that they dedicate thousands of hours of their life so that we as a business can save money on our software (perhaps eliminating a couple of programming positions while we're at it). Open Source=Programmers out of jobs. I find it humorous how much devoted career programmers applaud these fanatics not realizing that it's directly undermining their worth in society.
Excuse me for stating the obvious, but if these open source fanatics truly believe you can charge for software that must be freely available, they must seriously have mental deficiencies. Do they really believe this crap?
The other interesting thing is the name brand recognition all of the signers of this document are making on the backs of all of the open source programmers out there. Have you ever noticed how these guys are constantly bringing out whitepapers basically claiming credit for all of the work that every open source programmer is doing (cough cough...ESR...cough cough)? This gives them money in the bank in that they're so well known they can do speeches, or in the case of ESR they can collect payouts from companies like VA Linux. How ridiculous.
Wow, that's sure an impressive list of open source advocates. But, just as noticible is the lack of people from the BSD camp who have endorsed this statement. I'm curious: is this because they weren't invited or consulted? Is this because the BSD community thinks this statement is silly? Help me out here.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
* Note that I didn't say EMBRACE and EXTEND...
--
RMS signing a document full of the term "Open Source"!
Quick, someone check the weather in hell...
Stuart.
What did the C-Net article say? That the response was ``exactly the sort of discussion that Craig was trying to foster'' (or something like that, anyway; damn my short-term memory problem!). I, for one, quite seriously doubt that Microsoft is interested in any discussions about OSS at all. They have to be wishing that it'll all just go away if they bad mouth it enough.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Larry Wall, of course. ;-)
domc
This reminds me of a Voltron episode when all of the tigers form together. Am I alone here?
domc
Not to be too pedantic, but Parens is a Latin word, meaning parent (it also means obeying). I don't see any word in my dictionary that could become perens, and Whitaker's Words also says that perens isn't a word. Of course, it could be wrong, but the only thing I could think of that could look like perens and mean traveling is periens, which you might think would mean traveling (because per=through and eo, ire, ivi, itus sum=go) in fact means dying. I'm ready to be corrected, but I don't think this is valid.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
And besides which no one around here has ever written any CGI. In fact, I'm sure there aren't dozens of people who have scripts laying around that would do exactly this job. No definitely, not.
...
--
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 think most people give and take without money being exchanged a lot more than you imply. If the whole idea of having "communities" or friends that you've only met online bugs you, well, I think its your loss.
As for hero worship, spare me. I would've posted something similar even if it had been an some anonymous slashdot poster. Asking for a simple cgi script on slashdot is like asking to borrow a pencil in high school. Not a big deal.
...
--
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 my analogy may be bad, but yours is worse ;).
There's nothing unethical about using a script
that someone gives you, while the same can't be said for copying homework. And since the person
giving the script probably already had it written (I've seen dozens of "add your name to this petition" pages), its not like it would be that much work for somebody to point Bruce to a copy of one. Sending a link or already written script isn't that much more work than lending a pencil.
...
--
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
Oh my gosh, what a bunch of spaghetti logic. What these luminaries really should have done is all chip in for a real PR flack, because they just exposed a hand of jokers.
Seriously. The "this is the kind of dialog [paraphrased]" quote says it all. MS employs some of the brightest spin doctors in the biz. The Mundie speech was probably engineered to elicit this very response, so that the spin doctors could get inside the Open Source PR thought cycle.
Now that this watered down, weak screed from inexperienced open media warriors has laid down exactly where they're inept at a media fight, MS now knows exactly how to attack. And their media army is quite more experienced at this sort of thing.
What needs to be done is the assembly of a proficient, professional PR effort. We in no way could outspend them in an attack or a push, but we certainly could employ or at least get volunteer skilled spin people to defend and counterstrike. Part of the MS spin strategy might be to distract or otherwise deplete the heroes of our cause. A third party needs to be esatblished to insulate the media efforts from the actual operations of Open Source.
This "Old monkish coder" as PR flack will only take us so far....and if overextended....maybe painted into a corner.
The points brought up in the article are all very good ones that needed to be expressed. Their delivery, however, was wholly incompetent. We need somebody on this who knows how to craft rhetoric to it's full potential and impact. Something that an 8th grader could read and understand, and bring out the Henry Flemming in all of us.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
I'm pretty sure the enemy right now is either "hackers on the Internet", "child pornographers on the Internet", or maybe "Arab terrorists". No disrespect to folks of Arabian extraction (or the real hackers out there either) - this is the media stereotype of "the enemy", not, of course, the real enemy.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Although I'd sign such a statement as quickly as anyone, I actually prefer the way you did it this time, Bruce. I agree with the viewpoint that the original Microsoft screed was aimed at CTOs/CIOs, and I think that you have a better chance of convincing those folks with a statement signed by luminaries they've actually heard of.
Yes, that's an undemocratic and somewhat elitest viewpoint, but that's the way upper execs think. After all, they already know (or can find out) that plenty of random people on the 'net like open source/free software and are using it every day. That's not going to be the deciding factor when they choose what to use for their businesses, though (unfortunate, but true).
Although there's no reason you couldn't run an open sign-up at the same time, and refer from the "short list" to the open list, but then feathers will get ruffled as people try to figure out why they weren't worthy of the short list.
Heck, maybe more important than including Linus, RMS, et al. would be to get big business users of open source/free software to sign something. Rather than being reactive to Microsoft's attacks, perhaps we (by which I mean mostly you, Bruce, since I imagine most of these people won't return my emails :) should go on the offensive, presenting an in-depth look at businesses that are significantly improving their operations with open source/free software. I know there's a bunch of testimonials littered about in various places (unixvsnt.org used to have a bunch, your writings have several I imagine, etc.) but it would be nice to combine them all together and beat the media about the head with the rolled-up newspaper of real users solving real problems without Microsoft.
Although I think this was a great comeback to Mundie's speech, I think in the long run this community needs to be less reactive, or else the Microsoft PR machine will be able to spin things the way they want fairly often, through virtue of always getting the first shot. A series of forward-looking investigations into why open source/free software works might even get Microsoft on the defensive, which would be the best thing to happen since the antitrust trial.
Just some thoughts, thanks as always for your sterling work on behalf of our fractured, feisty, but mostly good-hearted community.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
If the GPL is the gospel for OSS, does that make the BSD licenses heretical Apocryphal gospels?
Please do remember that the license stated that the laws of Virginia would govern. And Virginia is a UCITA state.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
> "Microsoft, it's time for you to join us."
"Come over to the Dark Side, Microsoft!"
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
huh? This won't happen through any technical changes. That is pure FUD. The only way this is going to happen is if consumers decide they won't pay for software. Thats their decision. I hope proprietary software does become economically untenable.
No, it's not compatible with business
Erm.. you redefine business to mean "selling proprietary software". Then you "prove" that the GPL is incompatible.
Unfortunately, both steps are flawed.
Businesses USE free software, MAKE MONEY, and then MODIFY IT and MAKE MORE MONEY. They can even keep their changes inhouse if they feel it gives them a competitive edge. Generally, to reduce maintenance pain, it is worthwhile to give back to the community. This is the type of business that open source is far better for than closed source.
On the second point, it is perfectly possible to sell proprietary software and also give away GPL'ed software. Or even sell GPLed software, by getting the work funded before it is released.
You don't seem to understand that something can be bad for one business, and good for another.
You don't seem to understand basic economics. Not everyone can win. In the case of open source, the consumer gets all the surplus. So? How is that bad? Maybe some businesses which fail to respond to changes in the market go under. So? Thats bad management, not some inherent evil in the GPL.
You want to use a closed licence or the BSD license. That is fine. Why do you feel the need to attack other peoples choice of license?
I think the real problem for you is this:
You make money out of proprietary software. You don't want to change. You can see that the market for proprietary software will shrink as the coverage and quality of open source increases.
The world, and the market is constantly changing. Deal with it.
If they were to get the GPL struck down as being illegal (there are sillier laws on the book) then basically most of Open Source is dead.
Doubtful... wouldn't affect the BSD license, or other couple dozen open source licenses.
While it's true that you've named a bunch of competing projects, and their adherents may be a bit overzealous, do remember that they are still a bunch of people who have banded together to produce:
a text editor
a desktop environment
In fact, the whole point of open source is to band together to achieve a common goal. It's not a perfect situation, but it's not bad.
And hey, we just saw Stallman named an Open Source Evangelist! If that can happen, maybe we're closer to getting along than it seems.
You've got it. Open source is a dead on competitor with proprietary close source software. What you have to realize is that you can't win if all you are trying to do is sell software. In the business world, software is an expense, nothing more. It may give a company a competetive advantage, but if it does, I can gaurantee it is not off-the-shelf at Best Buy software. It's a high-investment internal development effort. Even if it does contain GPL code, no one is going to let it out the front door into their competitors houes.
Seriously, how many general ledger, accounts payable/receivable, and payroll applications do we need? How much profit does the latest and greates word processor contribute to the bottom line? If I can run my eCommerce site on Linux and Apache, why should I increase my expenses to by your software?
If you don't have an answer, don't try to compete. If you do have an answer, and it makes sense to me, and I can get that amazing functionality you described by investing half of what you charge for your product in custom enhancement of an open source product, I've cut my expense 50% over whatyou would have charged me for the first sale, PLUS I'll never have to pay your exhorbitant "upgrade" prices at arbitrary future dates.
The problem is not that those other vendors "have NOTHING to loose by supporting it", it's that I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by supporting it. Once businesses understand this, and further understand that the stronger their participation, to stronger their influence on the end product, the more they will realize that they really have no need of "software vendors". Custom development houses, maybe, but not software vendors.
How often to parents and children fight?
:)
What about siblings?
Cousins?
Now... what happens when someone picks a serious fight with a member of the family?
I think we all agree (at least on some high essoteric level), we just prefer to fight with family
"No one can push your buttons like a family member. Of course thats because they installed them!" --unknown
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
A Swedish translation of the statement can be found at: http://www.samurajdata.se/opensource/tillsammans.h tml.
/cj
This raises an excellent point. A while back I was working at a tech consultancy that really did the bleeding edge stuff everyone talks about. One day we see an article touting this new study by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) which said basically that wireless was going to be the next big thing. Mind you, this was less than 6 months ago, so none of us at the office thought it particularly newsworthy, nor that it needed to be stated so verbosely in a hundred page "study". We laughed it off as just another example of Andersen being 18 months behind us.
What one of the senior guys pointed out was that we, the geeky tech types, were not the target audience. Instead, Andersen was using this study to prime the pump for its own wireless implementations by planting the seeds in executives' heads. Their name is respected, so CEOs read what they have to say, and then think of them when they finally decide to hop on the wireless bandwagon.
MS is doing the same thing. I was at the Mundie speech with friends and all of us remarked that it was more a press conference than a speech. They're starting slowly on what will be a larger process of "educating" the people who matter. No you, not me, but the people who have the power to make those purchasing decisions.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
wookin' pa nub in all the wrong pwaces
Yes, there is:
Which effectively reduces the market price down to nothing, as anyone can sell it.
Therefore, that software then becomes free as in price after their first release. After one copy sold.
Also, no royalties are required for the sale.
So please tell me how they can make money selling that software under an Open Source license.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Tell ya what. Here's an open invite to Bruce to come and convince Sierra to open-source all their stuff.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Microsoft deceptively compares Open Source to failed dot-com business models. Perhaps they misunderstand the term Free Software. Remember that Free refers to liberty, not price.
Hmmm... funny... you know, last time I looked at the definition of opensource on www.opensource.org and the last time I looked at the GPL license, GPL'd software and Open Source software were both, by definition, free as in price as well as free as in liberty.
Nice semantic waffling there Bruce.
Although Microsoft raises the issue of GPL violations, that is a classic red herring. Many more people find themselves in violation of Microsoft licenses, because Microsoft doesn't allow copying, modification, and redistribution as the GPL does. Microsoft license violations have resulted in civil suits and imprisonment. Accidental GPL violations are easily remedied, and rarely get to court.
Yes, that's because people were stealing their intellectual property. If you don't want to pay them for their stuff, don't use it. Use something else.
It's the share and share alike feature of the GPL that intimidates Microsoft, because it defeats their Embrace and Extend strategy.
No, I think it's more likely that it's because there's the chance (especially with RMS's push to move away from the LGPL) that at some point in the future, you won't be able to develop for Linux without putting your software out under the GPL as well. Which means you may as well stop running a software business the moment Linux reaches the point where it seals up the market.
Microsoft's Shared Source program recognizes that there are many benefits to the openness, community involvement, and innovation of the Open Source model. But the most important component of that model, the one that makes all of the others work, is freedom.
Different aims -- the MS program allows developers to see under the hood so that they don't have to rely on the docs. That's it. That's all it's for. And frankly, that's all it needs to be.
We urge Microsoft to go the rest of the way in embracing the Open Source software development paradigm. Stop asking for one-way sharing, and accept the responsibility to share and share alike that comes with the benefits of Open Source. Acknowledge that it is compatible with business.
No, it's not compatible with business
By DEFINITION, other people get the right to copy, distribute and publish your work the moment you release it under an open source or GPL license. If your business is based on selling software, that means that the moment you release your work under such a license, you've just lost your revenue stream. Which means that your shareholders have every right to take you and string you up.
Please, Bruce, explain how a license that explicitly says that others can copy your work for free is compatible with a business that sells software.
You don't seem to understand that something can be bad for one business, and good for another. As a developer, I would release my software under the BSD license, or as closed-source software. Nothing in between. Why?
Because I want compensation for my work. The cost of living in today's economy is not zero, no matter what you may have seen on Star Trek.
If I'm going to give it away, I'm going to give it away no strings attached. Which means that others can use my work freely.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The (for all I know unintentional) B5 reference aside;
So why does NATO still exist?
Frankly I hadn't heard of you till this recent Microsoft thing.
Thanks for doing what I couldn't see any of the other people on that list doing (taking the initiative).
From some commentary or other, recently; Python is compatable with the GPL except for one point, that it specifies that it is covered by the law of the State of Virginia, this protects it from UCITA or something. GPL people don't like the localisation this implies , I can't remember why.
nooooooooooo, this is about open source.
The point was that different camps can get together and fight the common front. Only problem is that the document has mainly people who were on the same front anyway (the people Perens has contact with, I expect).
The common enemy is now war itself.
(optimist)
They're trying to find something else to blow up.
(pecimist)
"...when faced by a common enemy?"
You mean..The Judean Peoples Front???!!!
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
um.. genius. i beleive he was referring to the webhosting companies that are using apache. this is a subtle way of implying that you can take opensource software and make money with it.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
i can give you the designs for a car. designs that have been looked over and poked at by skilled car designers all over the web. you can take that design and use it how you will. if you try to sell that design you might be successful a few times but people will catch on. if you take that design and find a novel application for it. exploit that application in a unique and innovative way.. then hey you might make money.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
No - The People's Front of Judea! The Judean Peoples Front disbanded at lunch.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
My main concern is with the GPL. Those that put their code under the BSD don't care if there code is used in proprietary applications. But what about those that licensed their code under GPL thinking that their code will always be free for open use.
Of course this is to say that MS does succeed in getting the GPL made illegal or at least not enforceable. Which hopefully will not be likely.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
They were expecting us to be a lot more brash than we were
And I thought it was a very appropriate letter.
Please do be careful, since it does seem that MS is trying to get you into some sort of trap.
I believe the original poster is correct in saying that MS is aiming at the top execs, but I would also say they are aiming at two other groups. The non-techies and the congress. They want the non-techies (general public) to have a bad association with Open Source, kind of like the association to Communism. Thus, when you have public opinion on your side (whether correct or not) you can then persuade the Congress to pass a law in your favor.
This is where the main damage can occur. If they were to get the GPL struck down as being illegal (there are sillier laws on the book) then basically most of Open Source is dead. You may get the die hards still developing and maintaining the software, but the industry will love to take it and abuse it.
So what I'm saying is that this is a very dangerous war. MS is a very strong (and smart) opponent, and must be dealt with cautiously.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
MS is fighting to prevent you from freely receiving and communicating information. The ability to pass knowledge from one person to another and from one generation to another is what separates us from animals. Ms is fighting the very core of what it means to be a human being. This my friend is much more severe then a couple of people being hung.
War is necrophilia.
Because we are pack animals like brown bears or wolves.
War is necrophilia.
Being a software maker these days is a dismal business plan for anybody. If by some chance you can make a product that catches on becomes popular you can be guaranteed that either.
1) Somebody will sue you into oblivion.
2) An open source project will try to duplicate your product and give it away for free.
3) MS will duplicate your product and give it away for free.
4) All of the above.
Unless you are already established you have better chance of making money by buying lottery tickets.
War is necrophilia.
"The success of software companies like Red Hat..."
If RHAT is a success, I'd really like to hear their definition of a company in trouble...
Reading their 10k report:
"We have incurred operating losses in six of our previous seven fiscal years, including our most recent fiscal year ended February 28, 2001. We expect to incur significant losses for the foreseeable future, as we substantially increase our sales and marketing, research and development and administrative expenses. In addition, we are investing considerable resources in our Red Hat Network initiative and to expand our professional services offerings. As a result, we cannot be certain when or if we will achieve sustained profitability. Failure to become and remain profitable may adversely affect the market price of our common stock and our ability to raise capital and continue operations."
A company that cannot be certain "when or if we will achieve sustained profitability" is hardly anyone's idea of success! They would have been much better leaving any mention of OSS companies out as they have a rather disturbing tendancy to lose money at the moment - rather focus on the benefits of the OSS coding philosophy and hammer all the IIS hacks home.
Still, I guess they had to say something to make Bob feel good.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
"How many times have users had to upgrade Office because the Word file format changed?"
As far as I know, the format itself has never changed. I know people still using Word 5 on Windows 95, and while they don't have all the bells and whistles of Word 2000 or Word 2002, it's possible for them to open documents created with the later versions (though some text formatting features specific to the new version may be lost...). Isn't the whole point of the purchase of the "next version" so you get some of those bells and whistles? I hardly think Microsoft has been holding guns to people's heads saying "You must upgrade or else." I know someone will bring up the idea of them not supporting legacy products after releasing new versions - but that is there perrogative. The amount of engineers required to support every version of every product would be overwhelming - even for a huge company like Microsoft. Would you really want the job of sittng around doing tech support for Microsoft B.O.B.?
So Microsoft views GPL as an 800lb gorilla squatting between them and global domination...?
They are right about one thing: Open source is an "intellectual-property destroyer". (They neglect to point out that intellectual-property is an innovation destroyer).
Indeed I was. The problem is that you assume that every company that has an interest in developing software also has in interest in selling software and that is far from the trueth.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Microsoft, hmm, sounds familiar, don't they have a project on Source Forge?" Ahhh, that'll be the day.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I dont know if the few hundred thousand web hosting companies in existance would agree that Open Source makes for a lousy business model. Even if Eazel was keeping their source closed and giving away their lame file browser for free in the hopes of selling services it would still be a lousy business model, it has nothing to do with their source being open.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Wow.. seems any dissenting opinions of slashdot are immediately a "troll"..
The unibrain of slashdot just fell an IQ point.
It's all on the subject line :)
However, they will notice that M$ considers Open Source a serious competitor. And most likely they will adopt that assessment!
A second point is that a clueful CIO/CTO will NOT make low-level decisions like which OS to run on webservers. They will have a team study the issue and make a recommendation which s/he most likely will accept.
It's alot more about user mindshare. For servers, *IX has a real following amongst sysadmins so winds up on alot of machines. If only KDE/gnome had the same following on the desktop ...
The Economist has been running stories about open source responses to Mundies' claims, see last week's story. Idon't think the NY Times is capable of doing a good story on this.
Now I wonder what Microsoft's next move will be.
What I don't quite get is the number of people who insist that the GPL is compatible with building software for a profit. It is incompatible - you must sell services or hardware or something other than the GPL'd software to make money.
Quite true, the GPL is incompatible with selling software for a profit. However, this is not the only buisiness use of software. Most buisiness use of software isn't the selling of licenses, but rather the actual utilization of software for some for the purpose of producing some OTHER product or providing some OTHER service. The GPL is completely compatible with this sort of usage. The GPL is only incompatible with buisiness that sells software, like, say Micro$oft. Most buisinesses don't sell software, they sell something else.
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
I'd agree with you that building and then selling GPL-based software for a profit is not a particularly attractive business model (Cygnus has done OK, but margins aren't as lucrative as a pure software sale, and ramping up that sort of business means ramping up people (because it's really a service business, not a software business.))
.NET.
But this ignores a subtle but critical distinction. You may not be able to sell software, per se, but you can sell a software-based service. Which is exactly what legions of dot-coms that use Apache and other open source tools. And which is exactly where Microsoft is headed with
A software service has equal leverage as a business model to a software sale, and a more predictable revenue stream.
--LP
You mean that they've started giving away their support incidents? I don't think so...
DB
Of course, to be consistent with Shared Source, what they mean by "fostering discussion" ought to be:
we talk, you listen.
--
Too stupid to live.
Too stupid to live.
Too stubborn to die.
You know, like two of the signee's on that press release -- Red Hat and VA/Linux.
I wonder how many Slashdot readers today were yet to be born when Chuck Hammill gave his From Crossbows to Cryptography speech at the Future of Freedom Conference back in November 1987?
A new kind of meat designed to appeal to vegetarians.
True... but while some of them are a bit extreme (ok.. most of them), you also have Tim O'Reilley, Bob Young, Larry Augustin, and those who aren't CEO's, but also arent seen as insane, such as Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum. (Does anyone see Miguel de Icaza as insane?)
All of the people who responded, zealot or not, have a strong interest in Open Source, and do represent the closest thing to "leadership" I can think of... at least in the public mind. And that show of unity among the community "leaders" is, IMHO, enough.
You're right. After releasing statements that refute Microsoft's arguments, we should have sent a pro-GPL speech to the same CEO/CIO bunch. You can'd play second fiddle to Microsoft and win. We'll have to send the message to the CEO/CIO that OpenSource is good and why. Without that the CEO/CIO won't listen to us because we never talked in their direction.
You will never get away from it. Even if you bring together 20 people who have the exact same thoughts and ideas they will somehow, someway, form groups that not everyone will fit into.
All that happened here was that each of those listed above forgot their special group (linux, OpenSource, GPL, etc) and formed a new group to attack a common enemy. When that enemy is beaten or destroyed they will quickly fall back into their respective groups to wildly hack about at everyone and everything.
A more concise version would be "Dangerous, my ass!" -- but that would be either redundant or inaccurate, depending on where the tattoo goes.
...when faced by a common enemy? Whether as hackers banding against the evil forces trying to quash open source, one city's sports fans against another, nations, or multinational alliances, it seems we can only get over ourselves enough to cooperate when we're threatened. Make no mistake, I support every word of this statement and am amazed by the signatures on it - the policies and strategies espoused by Microsoft are a threat to us all and need to be taken seriously. I just wish we could get together more often on things that weren't as directly threatening, with less venom and bile directed at each other (Perl vs Python, Emacs vs Vi, Gnome vs KDE, Red Hat vs. Just About Anybody, ad nauseum), instead of waiting for Big Evil Threats from Outside to remind us that we're all in the same camp.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
thanks.
-Jon
this is my sig.
"Microsoft, it's time for you to join us."
Talk about embrace and extend! Ha ha ha, eat it Microsoft, eat it!!
This post initially angered me, but on thinking about it, I think it's a fair post that deserves a fair response.
...
The open-sourse crowd as a whole really, truly does not want to destroy software companies. Maybe Stallman does; certainly the original GNU Manifesto was rather hostile toward the whole idea of making money in the software biz, though I think even he has mellowed over the years. But the rest of the signers have no desire to see software companies go out of business en masse.
What they do want is for software companies to play fair, and to respect other people's ideas of how intellectual property should be disposed of (e.g., the GPL) even when it conflicts with the established business model. Ultimately, the blame for failing software companies doesn't lie with the GPL: it lies with a) anti-competitive business practices from giant companies like Sun, Oracle, and (especially) Microsoft that quite naturally crush small companies before they crush large ones, because small companies are more vulnerable, and b) mindless VC's (who are hardly ever techies themselves) who are much more interested in cashing in on whatever they perceive as the Next Big Thing than they are in really understanding how the software industry works.
A) is too well documented to require further discussion, IMO. B) is not so well understood. The problem is that the Next Big Thing usually turns out to be a Not Quite So Big Thing, and even when there's still money to be made, the sheeplike mentality of the VC's requires them to drop their investments and find Another Next Big Thing to pin their hopes on. A lot of dead "dot-bomb" companies were actually on the verge of profitability when the VC's panicked. Meanwhile, the likes of Microsoft keep going through sheer inertia, no matter how lousy their products, because the VC's and other business droids all use Windows and Office
In short: it's not the GPL that hurts programmers. It's morons in suits.
I urge you not to get out of the software business. It's still one of the biggest, most stable, and most important industries in the world, and will remain so for a very long time. Suits, VC's and all, it's still a better place to work than 99 44/100 % of everything else.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The GPL only requires that the source is released if the binary is released. Let's say you develop a Really Cool(TM) application for which businesses are clamoring. You show them demos showing how slick it is and how it will revolutionize their own business. Then you tell them you won't release it (binary, and thus under the GPL, source code as well) until you get $X (presumably enough to cover cost + profit). You don't care if this business wants to cough it up themselves, partner with other businesses, or get X number of people to contribute $1 each, but once you get $X, you will release it.
Updates could be handled the same way, but with the risk that somebody could enhance your product before you did.
IIRC, MySQL used to work somewhat similarly before it was GPL'd (maybe they still do?).
--
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
Actually, you can sell GPL'd software. RedHat and every other Linux distro does it all the time. I could download some GPL'd program and sell it to a friend without breaking any rules. I could write a GPL'd program and sell it. I'm obligated to give the source code to the people I sell it to, not anyone else.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
I think, rather than being depressed by how we have a tendancy to compete with one another, we ought to be impressed by our ability to recognize when there is a threat that is larger than all of us.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Red Hat 7.1 Standard Edition: $39.95
Micro$oft Windows ME: $162.85
RMS, ESR, and Linus agreeing: Priceless
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Although it would have been nice to see more signatures from more major projects, I have to say the response was written beautifully. A job well done!
They even made ESR and RMS agree on something!
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
see...
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
>>"Microsoft, it's time for you to join us."
>What they really meant to say was:
[snip]
No, what they really meant to say was "resistance is futile". The irony of the Borg icon strikes again.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Oh cool! Bruce Perens. I've been waiting for... oh... wait a second. Your user # is really low. You must be the real Bruce Perens. Do you know where the imposter is? I want his autograph.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
while it would be hard to reach these people and to be heard clearer than microsoft, a chance does present itself:
- the people signed on this response are a well respected and interesting group, joining forces.
- the response itself is well phrased and contains some good points about microsofts strategy and how their words and their actions don't seem to meet.
- after the antitrust trial, the public is more aware that there is possibly something wrong with microsoft.
so, if we're lucky, it could reach the general media. this could then end up actually serving to expose open source and its freedoms to the public and to contrast it with microsoft strategy.
hopefully, they may have set themselves up for something they haven't prepared for... (but let's not underestimate ms marketing/communication/fud skills)
The two great secrets of success are: don't tell anyone everything that you know.
.... for businesses. There are many people, especially executuves that do not understand the GPL and therefore are afraid of it. Worse, since it is the most visible open source license, many equate OSS with GPL.
The computer industry has been living with the GPL for 17 years. The companies most at risk to "GPL pollution" into proprietary code are those that do not understand the GPL nor recognize that GPL code is everywhere and readily available to their programmers. Now many, but certainly not all, programmers understand the GPL. The ones that do know how to deal with it. The ones that don't, or are malicious or are in trouble on their project and just happen to find some GPL code to solve their problem are a risk. The way to deal with this is to ensure that a company has a GPL policy that is widely communicated. Also, the senior technical people should be watchful during code reviews as to what is being put into their components.
An interesting aside....what does MS propose to do exactly about this "virus"?
1. Shut down the economy while we all review trillions of lines of code *including* all Microsoft code looking for GPL pollution.
2. FUD the GPL away.
3. Buy the Free Software Foundation and rework it.
4. Encourage its and programmers everywhere to understand it and deal with it like we have been for 17 years.
Microsoft, you still have all of your lifelines.
Use your think time carefully as well!
Army No. Va.
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
Whoa! I use Office 2000 and some of my collegues have Office 97. I guarantee that 2000 files are not 100% compatible going back to 97. XP is even worse.
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
Here's a business plan for getting paid for writing software but also guaranteeing that everything useful becomes open source.
Software comes in many versions, it looks like a tree, and each branch takes so long to create. Developers charge by the hour so each branch will cost so much. The developer puts the software on an ASP. The ASP charges users a flat monthly fee. The ASP lets people use any revision over the net, but not look at the code or binaries. The ASP tracks what users use and pays the developers of whatever gets used. Once any root-to-leaf has been paid off in the version tree, that version becomes open source, free.
Whaddya think?
It does require effort to band together, and unless there's a common aim - real or artificial - the returns aren't going to make it worth the effort.
I feel the same way about this "fostering discussion" comeback comment as I feel about that second letter from the DVD-CCA to Professor Felton at Princeton stating that they didn't really intend to sue.
Except that it's about a million times more pathetic.
A statement that addresses businessmen, while important, is only part of the picture. My feeling is that equally important, if not more important, is the simple show of unity (I would say solidarity were I more of a radical ;).
Mundie's statement directly attacks free software/open source as fragmenting. Perens et alii's response not only shows that the Linux business community is united, which would not be such a big deal, but also that people like ESR and RMS are also on their boat. Don't underestimate that. It's BECAUSE they are "the worst people" that their signatures on this statement are going to carry huge weight. You think that those signatures will lessen the impact of the statement in the business community; on the contrary, there are business leaders galore on the statement; ESR and RMS add political weight, conceptual weight, and further, unify even the far fringes of the Linux/open source/free software community under this statement.
It is a great show of solidarity.
Seriously.
you raise a disturbing possibility, but then you leave it at that. how does the MS rejoinder, which seems to me pathetic in the extreme, since it is obvious to anyone with even an iota of intelligence that no one on either side expects a dialogue, show that the open source/free software advocates have stepped into an MS PR trap? That's my first challenge.
Second challenge, please explain better why you think that "spin" is necessary. Spin is alien to the entire thrust of open source/free software, as your other respondants have noted. How are you going to spin a response which is basically nothing but facts? Are you enough of an expert in these matters that we - or, more importantly, Bruce Perens - should be worried by what you say?
No more challenges than these. If you can respond, maybe you're not a troll.
It's time to fight fire with marshmallows.
Only problem is, is that it takes something like this to get ESR and RMS in the same room by choice. :-)
With the big Open Source guns coming out together, though, Linux, et al. definitely stand a chance against the behemoth.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
I'm not a Linux big wig, but I'd sure as hell love to sign that document!
Can you imagine Microsoft's reaction if a couple million people added their names to this document?
Basically, your business has to be service oriented rather than product oriented. Despite what most people in the technical industry think, lusers do not want programs - they want capabilities. They don't even really want to use the damn machine in the corner of their cubicle, and the best thing a programmer can do is to make it as pleasant an experience as possible.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. AOL gives their software out for free (though, sadly, only as in beer), yet charges for a service. This is reasonable and sane, and has made them lots of money and market share. Contrast with .NET and you'll be a little more educated.
To sum up, unless you're Stallman (who, he says, gets paid to add features to GNU programs), or Linus (who has a service-oriented position), you're not going to make any money writing Open Source for the world. But you can use Open Source software to solve problems, and that is where you can get yer business. Especially since it's a lot more fun to work on something because you need it.
see: http://www-910.ibm.com/news/management.nsf/frontpa ge?openview&2
--
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
Not trying to argue the point really, but MS singled out the GPL. You can't build your software on top of GPL'd code and then sell it as a proprietary product. Clause 2b("You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. ") of the GPL expressly forbids this.
What I don't quite get is the number of people who insist that the GPL is compatible with building software for a profit. It is incompatible - you must sell services or hardware or something other than the GPL'd software to make money.
So unfortunately, in a limited sense, MS is right. The GPL is incompatible with selling software as a stand alone product. I doubt if anyone can seriously refute that statement, but I would be very interested if someone could.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
This all of course assumes that you want to run a software business. Most of the software produced does not have *any* sale value be it closed or open source simply because it is not produced for sale. As a model of choosing what software to use to run your business with opensource is a better model on many levels and that is where most of the money in any economy is at and that is why opensource is better for a country and an economy then closedsource. So the question is not are there companies making money by making opensource software the question should be are there companies that are making money by using opensource software. And the answer there is yes a great many companies are. This is what is important.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Now, I realize that more than one person could be sifting through the queue at once and tossing out articles, and that what strikes the fancy of any one of those people could differ with the phases of the moon... but rejecting an article from the author only to post it when submitted by someone called EconomyGuy is certainly without rhyme or reason...
You have to admit it's pretty funny though. =)
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
I always thought that they were generally in agreement in all their views. Although, Linus isn't quite the Free Software fanatic that RMS, ESR and Perens are.
--
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Nobody's insisting that "free software" is the most sensible way to run a software business. That is something you said in your haste to sound intelligent.
To the contrary, Microsoft *is* insisting that "open source" is a legal danger to intellectual property. If Microsoft could snap their fingers and outlaw "free software" they surely would.
Open source evangelists are doing exactly what Microsoft knew they would - defend themselves against groundless claims. They are not trying to "kill" Microsoft, unlike what Microsoft is trying to do to them.
Your opinion about the "most insightful" part of Mundie's speech only proves how ignorant you are. Your parroting of the Microsoft party line indicates you are incapable of fathoming an independent viewpoint.
What's a second? An hour? A day?
It has much more to do with
the Earth's rotation than with cesium.
Open source evangelists DO NOT ASSERT that open source is a superior business model. Stop saying things that aren't true.
O.S. evangelists KNOW that open source is a superior DEVELOPMENT MODEL. Hundreds of thousands of skilled intellectuals contributing without direct compensation, 24 hours a day but each on their own time - can any company beat that model?
Too bad opinion wasn't open source, you might actually get a better one!
As for your sig, it's only *natural* for someone like Helen Keller to think that security and superstition don't exist, being blind and all.
What's a second? An hour? A day?
It has much more to do with
the Earth's rotation than with cesium.
[ . . . ] when Jim Allchin attacks Linux, he's not going after Linus and the kernel people. He's trying to reach about a hundred CIO/CTO's who can force their company to use Win2K servers on their boxes. All of MS's anti-Linux speeches are designed to get a very small audience to hold the line on Linux growth within the corporation. Of course it pisses you off, but that isn't the point
There is a lot more to it as well in the following paragraphs.
Point Being, the attack and response should not be against each others egos, but for the hearts and minds of the people who really count, who make the high power decisions. I note that
Late Tuesday, Microsoft responded to the open letter. "We appreciate the dialog on this issue--it's exactly the type of discussion Craig was hoping to foster," the company said in a statement.
Somehow it feels like MS is trying to try to trip up the evangistas into being too brash, by seeming to be so reasonable.
And utterly un-repentant.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Maybe Taco felt that having authored the story, it was a conflict of interest in the submission queue....besides, don't you have enough karma? :-)
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Why don't they reveal the VHDL/Verilog source code for the Transmeta processors. Why not GPL it? If Linus says that Open Source is that damn great, how come they don't use it for Transmetta processors?
Why would companies pay developers when their's a chance that some Open Source geeks created a similar software and are giving it away for free? They'll only need an employee who's computer proficient to modify a few things.
:)
Hey now, Open Source is great, companies whose sole interest is to make money will save millions of dollars because of Open Source. Meanwhile, developers will starve to death
While it is formed from a verb stem, the present participle functions as both a verb and an adjective. If I had to choose I would call it an adjective, because if Bruce were the object of a transitive verb in that sentence you would write "Brucem parentem [video]" or something like that. ("I see Bruce passing away." -- after all "pereo" means "to perish", not "to travel".)
I do not have a signature
The main problem with MS is not a technical but mentality. If you see the world through the overgrown ego as they do - expect to have some surprises in life. Their 'Napoleonic' mentality will bring them down. The response is pointing MS to the right direction, but I doubt some how that Bill or Steve are capable of getting it. I just wonder, if anybody worked for them - how mach freedom the developers have in Redmond. dba
look - clueness newbies do not "RPM" anything on a command line.
I tried Mandrake. Look, Linux is great for it's purposes. But it's still too hard.
If the energy spent making fun of people that can't figure it out were put toward improving it, it would have eclipsed Macintosh for ease of use already.
What they really meant to say was:
"Microsoft it's time for you to grow up and stop being a bunch of whiney bitches. All we hear from you is: 'Our product is better, linux sux'. You don't hear people from the Linux community bashing Windows do you?"
p.s. linux 0wnz m$
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
"Microsoft is entirely backwards compatible with its document format, which I know for a fact, because I often took paperwork from school (word 97) and printed it at my house (word 2000)."
*bzzzt!* Wrong.
Sure, that's true for realtively short documents without fancy formatting. Try sending intensively-formatted-and-edited, macro-containing, manual-length documents back and forth and see how far you get.
In just one example, Word 97 often won't allow footers containing sequential page numbers that have been entered in Word 2K to format properly and vice versa. And TOCs can be a real headache.
~sabine
From the C|Net article:
Late Tuesday, Microsoft responded to the open letter. "We appreciate the dialog on this issue--it's exactly the type of discussion Craig was hoping to foster," the company said in a statement
Microsoft's arrogance just comes into full view with this statement. They're essentially taking credit for the Open Source response!
Completely astounding.
--
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
... but will it get the exposure necessary to make an impact on normal people (ie non Slashdot nerdz)? Surely everyone has heard of Microsoft's little speech, as it was broadcast on many news channels, but will we see the same exposure for this rebuttal? Me thinks not. It sucks, but I can't see MSNBC headlining this...
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Agreed. I submitted this interview/article about a great fellow in our community, Loïc Dachary, (well ok my community) and it was rejected. I believe my problem was in mentioning the fact that I've worked with him. I guess being an insider isn't all that it's cracked up to be. :-)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
There's a vocal minority on each side that makes lots of hostile noise about the other license, but I think most in the free software community are more relaxed about it. In certain cases like Ogg/Vorbis, RMS even advocates BSD. I don't know a lot of people who would eschew BSD-licensed software just because they prefer GPL or vice versa.
I don't follow you. Do you mean because they use Apache? That's great for them but I don't see where that has anything do with the question of how best to run a software maker.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Microsoft deceptively compares Open Source to failed dot-com business models. Perhaps they misunderstand the term Free Software. Remember that Free refers to liberty, not price. The dot-coms gave away goods and services as loss-leaders, in unsuccessful efforts to build their market share. In contrast, the business model of Open Source is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators.
Huh? What's happened to all the theology about the distinctions between Open Source and Free Software? The two seem to be used interchangeably. (Maybe RMS was so pleased they said "GNU/Linux" that he let that one slide.) But that slight of hand is important here. They counter the attack on "Open Source" with something about "Free Software" and then jump back to the "business model of Open Source." And then back to Linux (which was largely created before anyone with an "Open Source business model" got involved) and then on to the GPL.
Now, I thought the most insightful part of Mundie's speech was the analogy of free software companies to dot-coms. Both had schemes where they would give away the uniquely valuable things they created (services, content, software) and make money from tangential activities (ads, selling information, stuffed monkeys). Both had plans that seemed awfully silly once the avalanche of clueless money stopped. Sorry, guys, Santa Claus has moved on. People will still make and give away free software but continuing to insist that it's the most sensible way to run a software business is starting to look pretty threadbare.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re Cygnus: See above. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Cygnus' revenue come from proprietary extensions to gcc?
Re Red Hat: I know Red Hat employs Alan Cox and supports a lot of other development, including RPM and GTK. But they're still fundamentally repackaging and selling other peoples' work. They're not CheapBytes but they're hardly earning a living from the code they write.
Re Prosa, Cybersource and O'Reilly: Again, they make money by supporting products they don't actually make. In fact, RMS denounced O'Reilly for profiting from free software by selling "unfree" books.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Open Source Advocate Has Yet To Rebut Craig Mundie
Jeff Parns considers himself a model for free software advocacy: helping out at installfests, answering questions on the Central Kansas Free Unix User's Group mailing list, working in his spare time on a user-friendly graphical interface to cron. Why, then, has he yet to write a long-winded essay rebutting Microsoft exec Craig Mundie's recent remarks about open source?...
Honestly, these Microsoft speeches are really a windfall for open-source advocacy windbags. They're so utterly foolish that responding is like shooting fish in a barrel. (I'm talking about the "Open source destroys intellectual property!" stuff, not the part about it making for a lousy business model, which happens to be entirely true.) The Eric Raymond / Bruce Perens line went over as long as nobody had actually put their theories to the test, but it must be a tough sell to convince companies to follow Netscape* and Eazel into oblivion.
* Yes, Mozilla is _vastly_ better in the 0.9 release. I know that. But in the meantime, the company has still seen it's market share go from nearly half to zero.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
It would be a nice feature if Bruce could set up a system so that we could all sign our names.
I bet John Carmack would sign something like this. He could be another great name to add for people who use GPL'd software, but release proprietary products: proof that GPL'd code doesn't "infect" the whole business.
Plus he released Quake under the GPL.
Here is is then: Borg penguin logo
this "share and share alike"
:-)
and inviting the enemy to join ranks... is the open source community at it's best.
it feels good to be good.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Red Hat is a consulting company, not a software company. While they have yet to post profits on a given quarter, they were close last year, and their annual revenue now is strong ($100M per year). They expect to make a profit this year, and are well on their way.
Yes, they have their shit together, and that is why they are able to make the GPL work. It also lends credibility to their support on this document... (Unlike Caldera whose support for the GPL has been waning along with thier business. Their spinoff, Lineo is doing pretty well, though.)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
...of a common enemy, out there and openly declared.
-Rob
The open source issue requires not only some knowledge of what software really is and does, but also knowledge of business law, licensing agreements, and the history of not only MS but the whole software industry to have a proper perspective & make a reasoned, analytic judgement. Consider also that everyone knows MS, while most think Linux is something you use to take down Yahoo & EBay, and you have your answer.
In a world where there're much sexier stories, like car wrecks and the death of has-been star's girlfriends, what else would you expect? The real world just wants to go online & buy a book, and doesn't really give a shit about who's monopolizing who. What pisses me off is that MS knows this & most of us seem not to.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
It's competition, and competition is what makes people strive for excelence. One person, I can never remember his name, once said that the reason why open source is advancing so quickly is because we are chacing tail lights, ie trying to catch the big players that have got a head start on us. So what do we do when we over take? Do we just stagnate and plod along? No we compete with ourselves, so all of these parallel open source projects are a good thing, and will hopefully keep us advancing at the same pace. No one can deny that these are not good products. It doesn't matter if you like GNOME more of KDE more, they are both very good.
PS, Go GNOME. :)
Just as a regular small-sized geek, normal people ask me every day "Why should I make my source code freely available? What if someone else steal my code to do a better product?"
I've looked for many answers, but one that I never found was: "Because too many people could do that, and they'll end up in competition with each other".
Let me explain: I develop a program which does something. I sell the whole thing, and make the source code freely available. If anybody wants to use it to write a better program, they could. Should my concern be "they'll use my work and get my money!"? I don't think so: as they could do it, there are thousend of people that could do the same thing. On the long run, we could have either thousend of competitor trying to make money, of thousend of developer trying to work under the same roof for the improvement of a good software.
Something that people forgets when they are afraid of "competition", is that there is almost never A single competitor, but many of them.
...sorry for the not-so-geek-and-pure-free-software-compliant definition, I'm just saying what I'm living and facing every day, not what theory of free source tells me that I should face.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
The letter was well done, explained the GPL, and did not have a negative tone to it.
Microsoft really doesnt have anything to fear from linux, as m-soft is slowly starting to move more profit schemes into the home-OS as opposed to Server OS (where most of their money came from traditionally)
-
then again, I would never buy from a company which gives its core (and most expensive) product away....
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its about giving your most expensive product away for free. Webhosting companies tend to charge for their services. (aside from geocities, and the few others, which can only survive as subsidiaries of huge conglomerates
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The debate between Microsoft and the open source community is really about the wrong things. For most users, the don't care about 'freedom' or what methodology is used to develop their software. They want software that will do the job for them. Even if most software users aren't aware of it, what they really need is software that adheres to open standards. Few software packages do that today, even in the open source community. For example, MySQL is terrible at implementing the SQL standard. MySQL may be the worst example I can come up with, but my feeling is that the major WWW-Browser (Netscape Navigator) does not implement standards well either (but my major area of expertise is databases so I may be wrong about Netscape). Even though the open source community is performing badly regarding this, Microsoft (and most other major commerical software companies) are even more worse, just like posters have concluded. If I were to base an application on either MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle or some other product that is bad at implementing the SQL standard, I will stand the risk at sometime in the future rewrite parts of the application if I have to change database product. This is the case no matter if it is open source, a commercial product or if I developed the database layer myself. Standardization is SO important for software users. It is far more important than the question if it is open source, 'shared source' or whatever. It is sad that few customers realize that.
IMO... The Cold War at least made better movies (Call me Bond... )
it just picks it's friends. Visual Basic causes the same problem... it brings programming the the inept.
Along the same line, I wonder why the Apache and Samba team's names are not there too, given that they are two of the most visible posterchildren of the free software community.
And, yes, good point about BSD people not being there. I wonder why too, although BSD generally has kept a discrete profile, while Linux advocacy has attracted attention. This might explain it.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Someone set up us the open source
--
Do I play Hockey?
Posting at -1 since April 18/01.
Do I play Hockey?
What you say!!
It makes a difference if all the services you like to use on the internett uses propietary protocols and fileformats. (immagine if microsoft designed http and html)
It makes a difference if you work on/with computers and want to use the best system for the job, not the system with the best marketing team.
Please note that your name is not the one mentioned in the writeup.
Poser.
Dancin Santa
Is there someplace where other people can add their signatures to this document?
No, I think a dialog is exactly what they are hoping for. As long as people are discussing the issue, the government won't support open source, and especially not GPL which is what had already happened. It's like when big tobacco asks for a dialog on whether smoking causes cancer - they don't hope to win the debate, they just hope to stretch it out as long as possible.
C'mon, guys, it's "Gandhi."
Microsoft, it's time for you to join us.
Quick, someone make a Borg Penguin logo.
--------------------------------
(1) That's "global" in the sense of "worldwide", not "universal". Certainly there is worldwide enthusiasm for the idea of free software. And yes, you are right, that enthusiasm is not universal.
(2) No, not everybody is running Linux. Linux != free software in general, however, and this discussion is about free software, particularly the GPL. A great many people are using free software, and virtually everyone on the internet interacts with it.
So, in short "global enthusiasm for free software" is not the same as "everyone and their brother is running linux". Please check your troll at the door.
This statement is a model of good writing: it's clear, accurate, to the point, elegantly phrased, and neatly addresses every issue that Mundie's speech raised. Your rambling criticism does its authors a disservice.
Explain, please: how is the statement "weak"? Would you prefer that they had responded with Mundie-style drivel? Would you rather that the response read like a flame on Slashdot? Thanks goodness our "open source luminaries" can come up with better writing than you just did, or than I am right now! Sheesh!
A number of the free software evangelists, in informal discussion, felt that the proper response to Microsoft would be to stand together. Mundie's speech shows that Microsoft's strategy is to keep us divided and attack us one at a time, until all are gone.
Right on.
The current global enthusiasm for both free and open-source software amounts to diddly if the proponents of these ideas can't present a united front. When the software community responds to something like Mundie's speech or the DMCA with a thousand flame wars in the underbelly of the Internet...well, guess what: nobody cares. When we respond with consensus -- especially with such a thoughtful, articulate, and nail-on-the-head treatise as this one -- then we have a chance of getting somewhere!
My thanks and respect to this document's ten signers. I wish I could sign it, too, or at least give them all +5 karma.
Share and Share alike sounds just like grade school children sharing their lunches.
Microsoft's Shared Source? Its just the playground bully,
forcing the little kids to "share" their lunches with him.
Sir Jimbo
"Who is more foolish, the fool, or the fool that follows him?" - Obi Wan Kenobi
I think the best thing about this response is it sounds reasonable and sane and is not rabid anit-Microsoft/IP vitriol. I am really happy to see the open source movement present itself well to the public. (Even if it took a while to write.)
I'm curious to see which if any "mainstream" news carriers pick up this story. Craig's letter got coverage in the NYTimes. Will this letter appear beyond CNet, /.,and ZDTV? Maybe with AoL/TW weighing in against M$ CNN might pick it up.
This is what saddens me in the FUD war. When computer science visionaries speak, geeks listen. When M$ speaks, everyone hears.
BSD dosen't use the GPL. This about GPL.
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
BSD uses the BSD licences not GPL
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
--Benjamin Franklin, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.
I hardly ever post in places like Slashdot because the flamers are so aggressive and there always seems to be such a mob psychology here but I think I really have to speak my piece here. Of ******course***** Linus, Bruce, and Eric are going to gang up on Microsoft because they have made their careers trashing that company and they all do things that compete with it. But they never say that in their speeches, all they do is talk about the supposed purity of open source as if they have no vested interests. I think they might be as guilty of spreading FUD as Microsoft, probably more so, because they do not tell about the things the GPL is intended to do, like destroy all software companies not just Microsoft. I was just laid off from a dot.com that is failing because the VCs do not believe that anyone will buy software anymore, they think that they can either get it for free or rip it off or do a copy under the GPL. I am taking a long vacation and staying with a friend and deciding whether to get out of the software business. I think the answer is yes because so long as there are Stallman and Perens around only Microsoft is going to be able to make it, the small companies will not. The GPL hurts programmers and I can't believe that people are believing Stallman and the others when they lie about it. Does anyone need a sysadmin?
To: The board of the Interstellar Alliance of Planets
Dear Gentlemen, Our unanimous decision to keep the small uncivilised planets and solarsystems just that, uncivilised, is under severe attack it would seem. In my position as Chairman of this Board, I would like to focus your attention on one of the very least civilised planets in our quadrant, a planet named 'Earth'. As we anticipated, our 'divide and conquer' tactics have been very succesfull on this primitive lump of dirt. The human race inhibiting this planet excells in such a vast quantity of selfdestructing skills that our agents hardly have work enough to keep them on our payroll.
Officer Gates, Lieutenant Case and General Bush are indeed hardly neccesary on this planet since selfdestructive behaviour has been typical of their behaviour after the Great Maker created them and forgot all about them.
However, recently the Cooperation/Division index has been soaring high in powerfull spikes. It's almost as if our C/D index is reversely related to their so called NASDAQ index but anyway... It would appear that a certain band of rebels has seeded the idea of Cooperation in humans' minds. Stallman, Torvalds, the Madonna with the big boobs and several others appear to be uniting people and making them cooperate with each other FOR FREE!!
It is obvious that this trend is DANGEROUS. Humans, nor any other species, can NOT cooperate, as it will eventually make them realise that when they work together in EVERYTHING they can achieve greatness!
Gentlemen, this requires strong actions. We have sent officer Gates on a mission to break up this band of rebels for once and for all, before this trend will give humans the gift of awareness. General Bush is quietly backing him in the background after already having been in action recently to get this freedom limiting DMCA law forced in. We thought this alone would be enough to disencourage the humans, but it seems they just cannot be discouraged by stupified laws anymore.
Gentlemen,
We will meet in the next year and evaluate if we need to exterminate this race as a whole before they manage to board spaceships and carry this trend towards other starsystems.
PS: I still say we should have flattened that 'Finland' country when we scouted this planet!!! That's the source of all these troubles!
So, they're saying is "Craig was only trolling, and you guys ate the bait", but what is stuck in the grey unwashed masses' memory is some unspecified feeling that there is something fishy with free software licences.
Anyways I don't care. I don't give a damm what other people run on their computers anymore. Linux works well enough for me. I won't force the other suckers to get off MS-products, it's their loss. But they better not step on my toes.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Sincerity of message and professionalism will get one farther in corporate America than you think. One needs only speak to the right people and of course those right people need to be in the right places as well. It is dificult but, in time it will work.
As for ease of use. One need only look at a Distro like Mandrake 8.0. It is an extremely easy release to install and configure. Out of the box it will configure sound and most other hardware, like a parallel Zip drive.
The LUG I head uses it on our Linux Lab and the shear number of easy to use tools make it perfectly simple to setup many services. For instance at our last meeting we configured Samba in about 3 minutes simply by opening a web browser and using Webmin 0.80. Several people in the LUG were impressed at the speed of configuring that service.
As for the feel of the install. I am quite sure that someone with little to no computer skill could easily install Mandrake 8.0 and begin to use it right away. These days Mandrake has so many easy to use configuration tools the OS resembles the relative ease of Microsoft Windows.
With an OS like that the only thing really holding Linux back is the perceived idea that most Linux Users are unlcean, unshaven, hairy code barbarians destroying all that does not fit their 'idea' of what an OS is. Once we can change that perception Linux will make great leaps and bounds in corporate America.
Do you want to know how I know this? Well, I know people that are clean shaven, bath regularly and also have great personalities and happen to be serious about Linux. These people work at some very large Multi-national corporations, much like myself. These companies that we work for are taking very serious looks at Linux for things other than simple little web servers.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I am personally very impressed with the professional representation that has been made within this letter. What we need to do, as open source software users, is to band together and to work towards opening the eyes of our companies CTOs and CIOs.
This does not mean bashing the products that many of us are forced to use in our daily work days. This means to carefully offer up solutions to problems using Linux/BSD in a professional manner. Simply put, advocating the use of open source and free, as in liberty, software requires calm and rational reasoning.
One great avenue of advocating Linux/BSD is to form a users group in your area. While it is not an easy thing to do it can be used to greatly open the eyes of the people that attend because they have an inkling of interest. You would be surprised at the number of, "WOW! Linux can do that?!" that are prevalent at a LUG meeting.
If you choose to start a LUG be professional about it. Plan meeting times and agendas, put together thought out plans of action. Impress your members and they will mention it at their offices. The more your LUG is mentioned around their offices, the more likely that someone with decision making powers will show up.
The most important thing is to stop with the bashing. So what if Windows crashes, everyone already knows that. So what if Windows has security issues, people are already used to that. Show people that Linux has fewer security issues, when configured properly. Show people that Linux does not require regular reboots. Stop doing this by exclaiming the shortcomings of Windows. Do this by showing the strengths of Linux.
As users of solid, open source software we should work from a common vision. One of growth through education and hard work. Instead of the rabble-rousing vitriole that many of us spit out today.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I work at a Fortune 20 company with a substantial Microsoft installation. Luck would have it that I work closely with the team that is attempting to deploy Active Directory for a subset of the enterprise. Because we are so large, there are one or more Microsoft people on site most of the time.
To ease the hideously complicated and error-prone process of deployment, the Microsoft folks very seriously and innocently suggested that we greatly flatten our well designed, international DNS structure. They wanted us to reduce the number of levels to two, even though we have hundreds of thousands of nodes.
What was really funny was that they just didn't get it. It seemed that, in their minds, any external, non-Microsoft controlled standard, no matter how excellent, should be bent to simplify their software's deployment. The concept of any real interoperability was completely foreign to them.
It's easy to be angry at Microsoft for their tactics and their business practices. I pitty them in many ways. As the hammers start to fall, they are truly and honestly suprised by the impacts. They just don't understand.
Not trying to argue the point really, but MS singled out the GPL. You can't build your software on top of GPL'd code and then sell it as a proprietary product. Clause of the GPL expressly forbids this.
Two words: Dynamic Linking.
You can USE GPLed software all day as infrastructure and not have to GPL your own so long as you dont combine your code with theirs (read insert source or statically link). You can build modules and whatnot that go into GLPed projects. You can do many things with GPLed software as long as you dont co-opt it and still keep your source proprietary(not that I would).
What I don't quite get is the number of people who insist that the GPL is compatible with building software for a profit. It is incompatible - you must sell services or hardware or something other than the GPL'd software to make money.
The GPL in no way keeps you from making money. It says if you want your code intermingled with mine you have to let me see yours. AND THEN YOU CAN EVEN SELL THE BINARIES! You get patches, R&D and sales research done free thus saving you money. Nothing about the GPL keeps you from making money with your proprietary software if you are just going to use it.
So unfortunately, in a limited sense, MS is right. The GPL is incompatible with selling software as a stand alone product. I doubt if anyone can seriously refute that statement, but I would be very interested if someone could.
No they aren't. They just have limited(by choice?) imaginations. And hope all CIOs/CTOs do too.