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Round Table On Approaches To Source Code
Gandalf61 writes: "On siliconvalley.com, they've opened up a roundtable discussion concerning MS's Craig Mundie's recent attacks on the GPL. It's titled 'Code War,' and a panel of other-than-MS luminaries is on-board, and attacks on Mundie's the over-the-edge 3 May speech have begun. Mundie started the discussion, and one reply is now posted by a panel member, shredding the MS view of reality ... This looks to be fun." Since this submission rolled in, a number of posts have appeared in this moderated discussion set to continue for the next few days; RMS withdrew from the panel shortly before it began, though, and the result is a discussion which is engaging but perhaps not as fiery as it would be with Stallman in the ring. It's downright civil so far, in fact; hopefully it's a good environment for FUD-busting.
With the headway made by GNU/FSF, I find it hard to believe that in ten years, the average computer user will still be the same old ignorant follower. I don't blame people for using what's easy, Windows IS easy. But with the curve of advancement of free software, I don't think the closed-source model will be effective at creating top-tier software.
With the recent move by Red Hat I'd guess that "Enterprise" solutions will include Red Hat Linux far more often in the future. As GUI's improve, the useability of Linux(or BSD) will reach the grasp of people who really know little or nothing about computers. At this point, Microsoft will be at a head: Either change their business model or improve their software.
Seeing as Microsoft is at an inherent disadvantage, I don't expect their software to rise to the level of OSS. It's just not feasible for them; They don't have the manpower.
You're right, they're not going away. But I'm hoping for some positive changes with their policy(lack thereof, really) on Open Source software.
digitalunity
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
> There are companies like Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com/) for example who are developing a proprietary product, and have made the following statement: if our company ever goes belly up - the whole software will be released open source.
Think of it as an insurance policy. The kings of Roman "client kingdoms" used to will their kingdoms to Rome in the event of untimely death, in order to prevent usurpers from offing them. (The usurper would be disappointed in his aspirations when a couple of legions showed up on his doorstep to collect the imperial inheritance.)
Maybe Trolltech has something similar in mind? "Cut off my air supply and your problem gets even worse."
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think I understand Mundie's/Microsoft's argument re: GPL software. It basically comes down to their view of what they call the "ecosystem" of software. In their view, government and universities (funded by taxes and philanthropy) should do fundamental research, which should then be placed in the public domain where commercial interests are free to exploit it. In this view, the GPL (at least if used by these groups) is indeed a threat, for it prevents the commercialization (at least in the Microsoft way) or this research. It is certainly consistent with a certain world-view, and makes a certain amount of sense, however I think it is really an outdated view. Traditionally this made sense because one of the roles of government has been to promote the economic prosperity of its country's industries. One way of doing this was to fund research that would give a competitive advantage to companies within its borders. Now, however, most large companies are transnational, with less loyalty to their home countries than they once had. From a public policy point of view, the question is does funding the research of these corporations still provide the maximum social benefit (for our country)? I would have to say that increasingly the answer is no. I would say that the benefit of having freely available (as in GPL) research now outweighs the benefit of whatever economic benefit a company such as Microsoft would receive from the ability to commercialize such software. This benefit is both in the increased intellectual freedom that free software provides, and in the economic benefit to thousands of businesses that can improve their bottom lines by using free software.
P.S. I hope this made sense, because I slept late and now I'm late for work and writing this way to fast when I should really be eating breakfast and getting dressed (though not at the same time).
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
I am not sure if this will actualy help anything. Open Source fanatics will never come to terms with the corporate software environment and the corporat software people will never come to terms with giving away there "property" for free. I know companies like Sun and IBM have come around but I dont see companies like Microsoft turning around because they dont sell PC's or Servers or Workstations. There "bread and butter" is closed source software. Some companies that can afford to open up some software to gain a new market for there hardware will come around and see the light of open source software but I dont see companies like Microsoft ever coming around. It is very good to discuss the differences but I dont think much will come out of it.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
If Microsoft's main intention seemed to be to create good software, I think that most people would be less opposed to closed source. But Microsoft's intentions seem to me to be extremely hostile
[source]
We're hearing the same arguments over and over about how evil MS is for being anti GPL. To each their own, but in MS' case, their bread and butter comes via the way of the developers, whom they pay top dollar to develop.
In opposition to this you have the GPL horde (and I don't mean it in a negative sense) that are mainly doing this on their own free time, with little to no support being offered. They are not as concerned with showing revenues gained to those who invested money in their stocks to make products to get the jobs done.
Sure MS may have issues via way of security, and bugs, but don't kid yourself cause many open source programs have those same bugs hence all those advisories on Bugtraq.
Why is everyone against someone else making money with their business model? No one tells the GPL developers what to do with their code, in fact some make money off of writing Unix based apps, albeit miniscule in comparison with MS. IBM, Sun, HPUX, all have variants which is pay for play *Nix, and Sun is similar to MS, so what's all the rage about.
Want Root?
Anyone know why Stallman quit the discussion before it got started?
-Karl
What about the Scheme license? That is GPL, with the exception that you can link Scheme in (and include the header files) without any need for your other stuff to be under a free license. In other words, if you make a change to Scheme, you have to release it under the GPL, but you can freely use Scheme even in proprietary stuff.
This would seem to fix Microsoft's worries. But it also makes it impossible to release a slightly incompatible Scheme (if MS really does "embrace and extend" they might be expected to try this). So I'd be interested to know whether MS considers the Scheme license to be a Pac-Man cancer or whatever. I'd even be interested to know what Brett Glass thinks of it.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
No, in a publically held corporation, profit is the main purpose. Microsoft's profit-making methods might be offensive or maybe even illegal, but their purpose is indeed to make money for their shareholders (including first and foremost, BillG).
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Wouldn't it be much more interesting if some guys from Unisys joined, to defend their way of handling the GIF format? Or someone from AOL, I think it would be nice to see MS and AOL defend one point of view together. Maybe a discussion about standards in instant-messaging systems *grin*.
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
An average (mean) does not imply anything about half the people (whether IQ is actually distributed in a bell curve where the median and the average are close together is probably more of a function of test design and scoring technique than actual intelligence). Now if the WAIS IQ had been designed so that 100 indicated the median IQ, your statement would be correct.
And yes, computers are extremely complex and most people do not understand them even a little. Frankly I don't see that this is any different between Windows and Linux, both are pretty hard to use when you can't find the "any" key or you plug the power strip into itself. One thing our culture lacks, however, is a large, mature base of people who have been using something like our current systems since they were quite young. When that happens (and unless there are major strides in computer technology in the next ten years it will happen in about ten years) you will see that our cultural literacy regarding computers will go way up. Or at least, it's my opinion that it will.
I do not have a signature
There's one true way to figure out who's right.
Wait for about 10 years. Compare the state of free software to the state of "shared source" or whatever they call it this week.
I'm willing to bet that gcc will still be in wide use, Emacs will still be a choice editor (along with vim, of course), Perl 7.0 or later will have an absurd marketshare, and Apache will still be serving up data (not sure about http, but the Apache team is a forward thinking bunch, and I'm sure they'll adapt).
I'm also willing to bet that Microsoft will still be alive and strong, copyright law will be even further adulterated, and the USPTO will still be granting dumb patents.
I also suspect that in 10 years we'll still be arguing over free software. Microsoft will claim that free software is bad for business, we'll point out that it's actually not bad for anything but their profits, and the cycle will continue.
-John
It is interesting that what people should have for intentions are often not what their actions accomplish.
Profit should be Microsoft's intention. But there have been so many instances where the company's direction didn't seem to be motivated by profit.
For example, why did Microsoft become involved in a highly public argument with the Justice Department? Was that really necessary for profit? It seems instead to have weakened the company. The purpose of fighting the Justice Department seemed to be to establish that the company could continue to be abusive, not to make more profit.
Bush's education improvements were
I thought this was especially interesting:
It's a very common 'technique' among codependents to bust down anyone who they percieve as 'needing them', in order to perpetuate the pattern of being needed. Perhaps what's going on here is Mr. Gates
This is my guess, also. Bill Gates has been doing Microsoft exclusively since he was a teenager, and he has never given himself a chance to grow up. He is still acting out in an angry, socially backward way like a teenager might. He doesn't seem to realize that the situation in his life has changed.
Bush's education improvements were
There are two issues here. First, a lot of people in the world community want to stop a major abuser. Who wants to be a dog on a leash, and change direction every time Microsoft yanks his chain?
Second, many people feel that open source software is just better. Who wants to use sausage software? If you knew what was in it, you probably wouldn't want it.
For me, the most important issue is not between open and proprietary software, it is between living peacefully in the world and abusiveness.
People say bad things about Microsoft on Slashdot, but the full truth is much worse. Microsoft is so abusive that I have never known or heard about anyone who understood the complete scope of Microsoft abusiveness.
Everyone who is knowledgeable about this seems to have a different set of Microsoft abuses to mention. Bruce Perens says in the SV.com Roundtable, "... you [Microsoft] have used your dominant position in the marketplace to force out competition through the
If Microsoft's main intention seemed to be to create good software, I think that most people would be less opposed to closed source. But Microsoft's intentions seem to me to be extremely hostile. If you follow the effect of their actions carefully, the company's main purpose seems to be to abuse its users. A case might be logically made that, for Microsoft, making a profit is secondary.
Bush's education improvements were
We're coders of the round table
We dance when e'er we're able
We do subroutines
And demo scenes
With perl code impecc-Able.
We dine well here in Camelot
We eat pizza's and coffee and read spam a lot
In short set a goal, take 4 steps forawrd, then 3 steps back; eventualy you'll get there and desensitize people along the way. Forcast: the tools clause will be dropped in the final release, but will be standard in all beta licienses for a while. Eventualy they'll say "nobody is useing the open-tools and ban them in future productions licienses.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I personally can't see why on earth Craig Mundie would agree to join this panel, unless he has some personal reason to. However, I also can't see what actual purpose Craig Mundie's recent speech and Microsoft's recently inflamatory (IMHO) license agreements serve. To me, they are both not just FUD, but blatant flamebait. The only people who (as far as I am aware) know of either know about alternatives to Microsoft software anyway.
The reason why no one objects to Oracle is because they're not attacking open source/free software for no real reason. Their software works with a lot of other software, both open source and not. "Other" software companies seem to have more a live an let live opinion of open source. (Something to the effect of: we're selling/licensing our software in the way that we think gives the best profit, and if other people want to do it differently, then that's their choice.)
1. Open Source = GPL. They'll start with general statements about open source being viral. When challenged, they say "Oh, that only referred to the GPL." So go re-read to the original statement: "Open source" was in the prominent position; if "GPL" was mentioned at all, it was in a subordinate clause where execs who don't know much about it will assume it is a synonym for "Open Source." This makes Mundie's rebuttal "There is more than one Microsoft license" rather humorous: We knew that Craig, do you know there's more than one open source license? Obviously, MS has no objection at all to the BSD license, because they can copy that code right into their proprietary code, modify it to create incompatibilities and copyright or even patent the result -- but you won't see discussion of even BSD out where it non-techies might see it and get distracted from learning "Open source bad"...
2. Use of GPL tools will infect your program and require that it become GPL'd. That is exactly what the Microsoft beta license discussed in the forum was intended to imply. Not so. You can write proprietary code using Gnu tools running on Linux and LGPL + proprietary libraries, and it stays proprietary. What you cannot do is incorporate the GPL source into your code, or modify the LGPL library without releasing the modifications. If you want to write proprietary library code, you just have to put it in a separate library (and of course, not start with open-source code). So where is the problem? Unless it's the sort of problem that a thief has with an unpickable lock?
Now, don't get me wrong here. MS has the right to keep its source code secret, release it with a ban on copying or modifying it at all, require the development team to sacrifice a fatted calf to Lord Gates before starting work, or to specify which tools can be used. No problem there, if you don't like it just don't work with MS code. I could easily understand if they required the use of MS tools only on beta code, or even released code. But the coincidence between the wording in the license and Mundie's misleading public statements make me rather suspect that paragraph of the license is just another attempt to imply something which anyone who reads the (L)GPL licenses knows just isn't so.
There does indeed seem to be an anti-intellectual property strain among the open-sourcers. But even the GPL does not cancel intellectual property rights, it only (very aggressively) keeps others from claiming GPL'd work as their own. Mundie is trying to confound the "information should be free" rhetoric of some open-sourcers with the much more limited actual effect of the licenses -- and he is too smart to make this mistake by accident.
The "ownership" of source code is not really a danger to companies who work with more consultancy related business. We often see large websites or applications build on free software. But for these companies it all comes down to providing a fair service to the clients. Including customisation, design etc... Those companies working in this market only have to worry if they provide poor service. All programmes I know (including myself) have used "others code" as a foundation for their work. Usually coping 80% from previous work. This original material comes from examples, Internet and other programmers, so in reality most code is shared at some level anyway. We would never get anything done if we didn't start by coping a bunch of code into our project. (Just check your own include files - how much is your original work?) How often do you create a piece of code that is so special that you would call it your "personal intellectual property"? Bottom line is to focus on the service - the project - rather than some piece of code underling it...
Saggi
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com