Slashdot Mirror
Record Companies Sued Over Charley Pride CD
DevNova writes: "This posting describes a woman in California suing Fahrenheit Entertainment, Inc. and its label Music City Records over CDs she has purchased which use a proprietary music encoding scheme that prevents them from being listened to without the user identifying themselves. These CDs won't play on standard CD players, are not encoded in the popular MP3 format, and will not play on a computer until the user enters personal information. A large part of the suit is that Fahrenheit discloses none of this information on the packaging."
firrrst poooost!!!
a first timer?
stupid lameness filter - Im gonna loose this one because of the stupid wait period
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
g g
o / \ \ / \ o
a| | \ | | a
t| `. | | : t
s` | | \| | s
e \ | / / \\\ -- \\ : e
x \ \/ --~~ ~--| \ | x
* \ \-~ ~-\ | *
g \ \
o \ \_// ((> \ | o
a \ . C ) _ ((> | / a
t
s /
e | ( C__)\__/
x | \ | \\__// (/ | x
* | \ \) `---- --' | *
g | \ \ / / | g
o | / | | \ | o
a | | / \ \ | a
t | / / | | \ |t
s | / / \/\/ | |s
e | / / | | | |e
x | | | | | |x
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
The nerve. They must know her name and info so
they can sell her MORE crappy music.
Sort of like DVDs vs. DIVX.
she just doesn't want anyone to know that she bought a charley pride cd.
I guess it makes sense to try out their new protection schemes on music no one is going to listen to anyways.
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
g g
o / \ \ / \ o
a| | \ | | a
t| `. | | : t
s` | | \| | s
e \ | / / \\\ -- \\ : e
x \ \/ --~~ ~--| \ | x
* \ \-~ ~-\ | *
g \ \
o \ \_// ((> \ | o
a \ . C ) _ ((> | / a
t
s /
e | ( C__)\__/
x | \ | \\__// (/ | x
* | \ \) `---- --' | *
g | \ \ / / | g
o | / | | \ | o
a | | / \ \ | a
t | / / | | \ |t
s | / / \/\/ | |s
e | / / | | | |e
x | | | | | |x
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
This is some ghetto ass charity give away cd, right? How good could it be? You didn't pay for it, and it's likely to be a bunch of artists who's songs are either on the radio all the time or unheard of. I'd love to see someone try and release a commercial product with this scheme. If record companies are so bent out of shape about making money, this crap will never fly.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Whatever format this CD uses, I can't see Sony etc scrambling to follow this. Joe User is at least more receptive to privacy concerns than intellectual property issues.
:)
Off topic, maybe its just me, but I kind of enjoy watching big media cos get shafted with lawsuits these days
i am a musician and i give away all of it. i dont sell it.
this is the only way to keep out controls like this.
this shit is just going to get worse, and it makes me very quiet, i feel like everyone around me is a little fascist now. i won't take an opportunity in music although it's not likely i'd get one anyway since i don't look like britney spears.
i guess that i am willing to get sick and die and not go to a hospital, or to have my own teeth fall out because i don't have benefits, so a corporate system doesn't own me.
in a few months my honeymoon will be over.. if i don't post anymore it means i am gone for good.
Goat sex free since 2001
Well I dont'th ink its a bad idea as long as I can get a list of everyone who buys this crappy music, or other crappy music for that matter. Its these kind of people who watch the VMA's. Oh well I guess everyone can't listen to Tool, Deftones, and Rage Against the Machine...
For the love of humanity take off your clothes!!
It's one thing to sell CDs that require that the user identify themselves. However, if you're going to make such demands of the customers, at least have the decency to warn them before they purchase your product. What ever happened to the concept of informed consent and truth in advertising?
******
"What makes you think I care about your opinions?"
..Nothing like waking up in the morning and keying in your social security number so you can listen to that new CD.. You're morning relief is sampled by the 'smart toilet' and sent in to the lab for analysis.. The bio-metric toaster needs a finger print confirmation to make toast for you, and a quick retinal scan to send your dreams in to 'Global Corp' .. Why remove the wiring harness ever? But we did away with Piracy! Now everybody is RICH! Hoo-Ray!
air and light and time and space
But the margin is protected by the DMCA and so is to small to write the solution.
So, does this mean that if the cramped label somehow managed to display all of this information alongside the parental ratings and the UPC code in 1-point type, everything would be OK?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
These CDs won't play on standard CD players, are not encoded in the popular MP3 format, and will not play on a computer until the user enters personal information.
Actually the suit says that they won't play in standard Audio CD drives in computers, not that the CD won't play in a stand alone CD player. I should hope that the music stores them selves would refuse to carry something that won't even play in a regular CD player.
Ad in classifieds: Pandora's Box (no box) $5
The letter makes no mention of the CD not working in normal audio players. Apparently the CD will not work in CD-ROM drives, but allows the user the ability to register with the record label and download a proprietary encoding of the song to play on their computer.
This could be good for those of us who have CD-Burners.
If some sort of precedence in a court of law is found in this case, it may prevent companies from making this type of CD, or at least provide proper labeling of these "BAD" cd's. I know I'd be able to stay away from these types of CD's.
Let's hope she wins over corporate America, and help all of us who burn CD's like mad.
Go see ramdac
There is definitly no way that any company should be able to collect information about a person that has purchased their CD. If this was a promotional CD I could see the point but if you purchase something it becomes yours (and you are free to do w/it whatever you wish) you paid a fee to give you rights. They are invading your privacy.
The fact that they are hiding this from view is an obvious attempt at actually selling the CDs. No one is going to buy the god damn things b/c of this crap. Hell, I hate to shop at Radio Shack b/c of the fact that they ask for my private information and seem to feel it is their god given right to have it. (No, I will NOT give them any of my info even if I purchase my items w/a CC -- this usually really irritates the clerk -- the information they need is how much the item costs, how much I paid, and that's it)
I am sick and tired of this crap. If I don't want to be known I don't have to be. Once you buy something you own it. That's it. Their ownership of the item stops when money exchanges hands.
Fuck that.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his books, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
This is SCHWEEEEEET! I'd like to see the end result of this one :)
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
They're probably using this as a test for the RIAA...and they knew no hacker would try to break it cause no hacker would ever want to.
I can hear the sales committee to RIAA 6 months later.."See, our propritary technology hasn't been cracked - it's safe to implement for all CD sales...
Two weeks later...teenage munchkins find out they can't listen to Limp Bisquit and break the encoding...end of story.
Funny as hell...why Charley Pride? Covering Jim Reeves, no less?
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Chuckie is well known in his own field (blues/country, if I recall correctly). This isn't a mix CD or a giveaway, and Mr. Pride himself agreed to be the guinea pig for this CD format a while ago. I hope it costs him dearly in terms of sales.
Virg
I couldn't tell from the artice, does the cd play on NON computer cdplayers?
in a sad, sick way, it makes me glad that my band broke up... that way I don't have to put up with shit like this from the inside, much less the "real world".
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
Suing for the $20 a CD costs? It costs more in court fees to sue. How can she expect to get any more than the price of the CD? And why not simply return it? I understand that this may be out of principle, but she'd have more of a case if she bought 100 of these cds only to find out they couldn't be played in a standard CD player.
CDNOW does mention the protection scheme in its synopsis of the CD. But they do call it a "ham-handed and unjustifiable response to the problem" of piracy.
Read between the lines. The cd works fine if you just want to listen to the tunes. If you want to get some EXTRA features that are included at no extra charge, you have to give up something in exchange. What's wrong with that? If you don't want to listen to the extra encoded stuff, don't.
My wife just bought a cd (arg! I can't remember the artist name, Toby sumthin-or-other, your basic country crapola [metal rules, imho]). Anyways, there was NO indication anywhere on the cd that it was copy-protected, but it absolutely could not be backed-up with ezcd (she likes the security and convenience of having copied-cd's for use in the car, and leaving the original at the house). After a couple of tries, I moved on to attempting to just rip the tracks to
My point (having wandered a bit away from the original topic), is that more than one record company seems to be trying to sneak this sort of crap past consumers.
This posting describes a woman in California suing Fahrenheit Entertainment, Inc. and its label Music City Records
Hmmm.... Music City Records... Is it ironic that MusicCity is also a decentralized filesharing service based on the same technology as KaZaA?
Would it be further ironic if somebody figured out how to decrypt Circuit City DIVX movies and encode them with a DivX MPEG-4 codec?
Will I retire or break 10K?
if you ask me, this is what you get when you buy cd's by someone named "charlie pride"
"Warms my heart to hear" or :)
"Restores my faith in humanity" or
"Makes me feel like taking a dump"
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
Open Source Software:
:-)
... that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects.
...to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company.
... FUD tactics can not be used to combat it.
... Linux outperforms many other UNIXes ... Linux is on track to eventually own the x86 UNIX market ...
A (New?) Development Methodology
{ The body of the Halloween Document is an internal strategy memorandum on Microsoft's possible responses to the Linux/Open Source phenomenon.
(This annotated version has been renamed ``Halloween I''; there's a sequel, ``Halloween II'', which marks up a second memo more specifically addressing Linux.)
Microsoft has publicly acknowledged that this memorandum is authentic, but dismissed it as a mere engineering study that does not define Microsoft policy.
However, the list of collaborators mentioned at the end includes some people who are known to be key players at Microsoft, and the document reads as though the research effort had the cooperation of top management; it may even have been commissioned as a policy white paper for Bill Gates's attention (the author seems to have expected that Gates would read it).
Either way, it provides us with a very valuable look past Microsoft's dismissive marketing spin about Open Source at what the company is actually thinking -- which, as you'll see, is an odd combination of astuteness and institutional myopia.
Despite some speculation that this was an intentional leak, this seems quite unlikely. The document is too damning; portions could be considered evidence of anti-competitive practices for the DOJ lawsuit. Also, the author ``refused to confirm or deny'' when initially contacted, suggesting that Microsoft didn't have its story worked out in advance.
Since the author quoted my analyses of open-source community dynamics (The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Homesteading the Noosphere) extensively, it seems fair that I should respond on behalf of the community.
Key Quotes:
Here are some notable quotes from the document, with hotlinks to where they are embedded. It's helpful to know that ``OSS'' is the author's abbreviation for ``Open Source Software''. FUD, a characteristic Microsoft tactic, is explained here.
* OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat.
* Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence
*
* OSS is long-term credible
* Linux and other OSS advocates are making a progressively more credible argument that OSS software is at least as robust -- if not more -- than commercial alternatives. The Internet provides an ideal, high-visibility showcase for the OSS world.
* Linux has been deployed in mission critical, commercial environments with an excellent pool of public testimonials.
* Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.
* OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
* The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale.
How To Read This Document:
Comments in green, surrounded by curly brackets, are me (Eric S. Raymond). I have highlighted what I believe to be key points in the original text by turning them red. I have inserted comments near these key points; you can skim the document by surfing through this comment index in sequence.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
I've embedded a few other comments in green that aren't associated with key points and aren't indexed. These additional comments are only of interest if you're reading the entire document.
I have otherwise left the document completely as-is (not even correcting typos), so you can read what Bill Gates is reading about Open Source. It's a bit long, but persevere. An accurate fix on the opposition's thinking is worth some effort -- and there are one or two really startling insights buried in the corporatespeak.
Threat Assessment:
I believe that far and away the the most dangerous tactic advocated in this memorandum is that embodied in the sinister phrase ``de-commoditize protocols''.
If publication of this document does nothing else, I hope it will alert everyone to the stifling of competition, the erosion of consumer choice, the higher costs, and the monopoly lock-in that this tactic implies.
The parallel with Microsoft's attempted hijacking of Java, and its attempts to spoil the ``write once, run anywhere'' potential of this technology, should be obvious.
I have included an extended discussion of this point in my interlinear comments. To prevent this tactic from working, I believe open-source advocates must begin emphasizing these points:
Buyers like being in a commodity market. Sellers dislike it.
Commodity services and protocols are good for customers; they're less expensive, they promote competition, they generate good choices.
"De-commoditizing" protocols means reducing choice, raising prices, and suppressing competition.
Therefore, for Microsoft to win, the customer must lose.
Open source pushes -- indeed relies upon -- commodity services and protocols. It is therefore in harmony with consumer interests.
History:
The first (1.1) annotated version of the VinodV memorandum was prepared over the weekend of 31 Oct-1 Nov 1998. It is in recognition of the date, and my fond hope that publishing it will help realize Microsoft's worst nightmares, that I named it the ``Halloween Document"'.
The 1.2 version featured cleanup of non-ASCII characters.
The 1.3 version noted Microsoft's acknowledgement of authenticity.
The 1.4 version added a bit more analysis and the section on Threat Assessment.
The 1.5 version added some bits to the preamble.
The 1.6 version added more to one of the comments.
The 1.7 version added the reference to the Fuzz papers.
The 1.8 version added a link to the Halloween II document.
The 1.9 version adds a note about HTTP-DAV support.
The 1.10 version adds more on the ``who do you sue?'' question.
The 1.11 version adds perceptive comments from the Learning From Linux, page by Tom Nadeau an OS/2 advocate.
The 1.12 version adds illuminating comments by a former Microserf who wishes to remain nameless.
The 1.13 version adds a comment on ``unsexy'' work based on some thoughts by Tim Kynerd.
The 1.14 version adds a bit of cleanup.
The 1.15 removed font changes that made the HTML hard to read on large screens. }
Wow, who would've thunk it?! Copyright control and protection mechanisms might hurt sales? While completely unrevolutionary to anyone who has actually USED Napster or other file sharing P2P networks, I'm sure this will just be an extraordinary revolution to Hillary Rosen and her cronies. Don't want to screw yourselves out of a bunch of extra profits? - just screw the customer out of their legally provided rights...
I noticed at the very end of the complaint that a jury trial is requested. This is good because if that request is granted, it will mean that regular Joes and Janes will be the ones deciding this case, and juries have traditionnally tended to lean toward what they personally feel is right, not what is legally right.
Natuarally the defendants will do everything hty can to block a jury and have just the judge.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
There was no disclosure on the packaging about the protection, and "rip-proof" means for the average user, a stripping away of fair-use rights such as making an archival copy in case the original blows up.
People do not like to lose the rights they once had. Imagine someone taking away your right to drive a car, for example.
I hope this case goes far, since the DMCA already has gone too far.
... as long as the CEO of Fahrenheit Entertainment is willing to web-cast the details of all the music (s)he listens to.
Actually at least a month before this CD was released there was an article on CNN and i think MSNBC had it to, explaining the whole thing. It's not secret or anything. Actually i submitted it to slashdot but it was rejected becuase discussing weeners who paint their gameboys blue or something was more important that day.
From the press release:
"that electronic music files made available for download pursuant to purchase of its CD are proprietary in nature, that such electronic music files will not work on portable MP3 players"
While there are certain aspects of this Lawsuit that I would definately like to see successful in a court, it makes me a touch ill that included in the lawsuit is the fact that the encoded version of the CD is NOT mp3.
MP3 as an encoding format has pretty much captured the market, but I certainly don't want it to be REQUIRED by law. bleh.
-Patric
Vinod Valloppillil (VinodV)
/ interview):
... BIND has absolutely dominant market share as the single most mission-critical piece of software on the Internet. Apache is the dominant Web server. SendMail runs probably eighty percent of the mail servers and probably touches every single piece of e-mail on the Internet
... is the common UNIX/gnu/make skillset that OSS taps into and reinforces. I think the whole process wouldn't work if the barrier to entry were much higher than it is ... a modestly skilled UNIX programmer can grow into doing great things with Linux and many OSS products. Put another way -- it's not too hard for a developer in the OSS space to scratch their itch, because things build very similarly to one another, debug similarly, etc.
/ homesteading-15.html):
Aug 11, 1998 -- v1.00
Microsoft Confidential
Table of Contents
Table of Contents *
Executive Summary *
Open Source Software *
What is it? *
Software Licensing Taxonomy *
Open Source Software is Significant to Microsoft *
History *
Open Source Process *
Open Source Development Teams *
OSS Development Coordination *
Parallel Development *
Parallel Debugging *
Conflict resolution *
Motivation *
Code Forking *
Open Source Strengths *
OSS Exponential Attributes *
Long-term credibility *
Parallel Debugging *
Parallel Development *
OSS = `perfect' API evangelization / documentation *
Release rate *
Open Source Weaknesses *
Management Costs *
Process Issues *
Organizational Credibility *
Open Source Business Models *
Secondary Services *
Loss Leader -- Market Entry *
Commoditizing Downstream Suppliers *
First Mover -- Build Now, $$ Later *
Linux *
What is it? *
Linux is a real, credible OS + Development process *
Linux is a short/medium-term threat in servers *
Linux is unlikely to be a threat on the desktop *
Beating Linux *
Netscape *
Organization & LIcensing *
Strengths *
Weaknesses *
Predictions *
Apache *
History *
Organization *
Strengths *
Weaknesses *
IBM & Apache *
Other OSS Projects *
Microsoft Response *
Product Vulnerabilities *
Capturing OSS benefits -- Developer Mindshare *
Capturing OSS benefits -- Microsoft Internal Processes *
Extending OSS benefits -- Service Infrastructure *
Blunting OSS attacks *
Other Interesting Links *
Acknowledgments *
Revision History *
Open Source Software
A (New?) Development Methodology
Executive Summary
Open Source Software (OSS) is a development process which promotes rapid creation and deployment of incremental features and bug fixes in an existing code / knowledge base. In recent years, corresponding to the growth of Internet, OSS projects have acquired the depth & complexity traditionally associated with commercial projects such as Operating Systems and mission critical servers.
Consequently, OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft -- particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat.
{ OK, this establishes that Microsoft isn't asleep at the switch.
TN explains the connection to Java as follows:
Okay, what does this basically mean? Microsoft perceives a product to be a ``threat'' if it presents itself as any of these:
a revenue alternative -- somebody might spend money on a non-MS -- product
a platform alternative -- MS might lose its monopoly position
a developer alternative -- people might actually write software for a non-MS product. In their minds, any alternative is a threat. Therefore, freedom of choice is a source of fear and loathing to MS. The idea that there may be zero (or negative!) costs with leaving MS and migrating to another platform scares the daylights out of MS. }
However, other OSS process weaknesses provide an avenue for Microsoft to garner advantage in key feature areas such as architectural improvements (e.g. storage+), integration (e.g. schemas), ease-of-use, and organizational support.
{ This summary recommendation is mainly interesting for how it fails to cover the specific suggestions later on in the document about de-commoditizing protocols etc. I'm told by a former Microserf that the references to "Storage+" here and in the executive summary are much more significant than they seem. MS's plan for the next few years is to move to an integrated file/data/storage system based upon Exchange, completely replacing the current FAT and NTFS file systems. They are absolutely planning on one monolithic structure, called "megaserver", as their next strategic infrastructure. The lock-in effect of this would be immense if they succeed. }
Open Source Software
What is it?
Open Source Software (OSS) is software in which both source and binaries are distributed or accessible for a given product, usually for free. OSS is often mistaken for "shareware" or "freeware" but there are significant differences between these licensing models and the process around each product.
Software Licensing Taxonomy
Software Type
Commercial
Trial Software
X
(Non-full featured)
X
Non-Commercial Use
X
(Usage dependent)
X
Shareware
X-(Unenforced licensing)
X
Royalty-free binaries ("Freeware")
X
X
X
Royalty-free libraries
X
X
X
X
Open Source (BSD-Style)
X
X
X
X
X
Open Source (Apache Style)
X
X
X
X
X
X
Open Source (Linux/GNU style)
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
License Feature
Zero Price Avenue
Redistributable
Unlimited Usage
Source Code Available
Source Code Modifiable
Public "Check-ins" to core codebase
All derivatives must be free
The broad categories of licensing include:
Commercial software
Commercial software is classic Microsoft bread-and-butter. It must be purchased, may NOT be redistributed, and is typically only available as binaries to end users.
Limited trial software
Limited trial software are usually functionally limited versions of commercial software which are freely distributed and intend to drive purchase of the commercial code. Examples include 60-day time bombed evaluation products.
Shareware
Shareware products are fully functional and freely redistributable but have a license that mandates eventual purchase by both individuals and corporations. Many internet utilities (like "WinZip") take advantage of shareware as a distribution method.
Non-commercial use
Non-commercial use software is freely available and redistributable by non-profit making entities. Corporations, etc. must purchase the product. An example of this would be Netscape Navigator.
Royalty free binaries
Royalty-free binaries consist of software which may be freely used and distributed in binary form only. Internet Explorer and NetMeeting binaries fit this model.
Royalty free libraries
Royalty-free libraries are software products whose binaries and source code are freely used and distributed but may NOT be modified by the end customer without violating the license. Examples of this include class libraries, header files, etc.
Open Source (BSD-style)
A small, closed team of developers develops BSD-style open source products & allows free use and redistribution of binaries and code. While users are allowed to modify the code, the development team does NOT typically take "check-ins" from the public.
Open Source (Apache-style)
Apache takes the BSD-style open source model and extends it by allowing check-ins to the core codebase by external parties.
Open Source (CopyLeft, Linux-style)
CopyLeft or GPL (General Public License) based software takes the Open Source license one critical step farther. Whereas BSD and Apache style software permits users to "fork" the codebase and apply their own license terms to their modified code (e.g. make it commercial), the GPL license requires that all derivative works in turn must also be GPL code. "You are free to hack this code as long as your derivative is also hackable"
{ It's interesting to note how differently these last three distinctions are framed from the way the open-source community generally views them.
To us, open-source licensing and the rights it grants to users and third parties are primary, and specific development practice varies ad-hoc in a way not especially coupled to our license variations. In this Microsoft taxonomy, on the other hand, the central distinction is who has write access to a privileged central code base.
This reflects a much more centralized view of reality, and reflects a failure of imagination or understanding on the memo-authors's part. He doesn't grok our distributed-development tradition fully. This is hardly surprising... }
Open Source Software is Significant to Microsoft
This paper focuses on Open Source Software (OSS). OSS is acutely different from the other forms of licensing (in particular "shareware") in two very important respects:
There always exists an avenue for completely royalty-free purchase of the core code base
Unlike freely distributed binaries, Open Source encourages a process around a core code base and encourages extensions to the codebase by other developers.
OSS is a concern to Microsoft for several reasons:
OSS projects have achieved "commercial quality"
A key barrier to entry for OSS in many customer environments has been its perceived lack of quality. OSS advocates contend that the greater code inspection & debugging in OSS software results in higher quality code than commercial software.
Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence in customer's eyes that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects. At this time, however there is no strong evidence of OSS code quality aside from anecdotal.
{ These sentences, taken together, are rather contradictory unless the ``recent case studies'' are all ``anecdotal''. But if so, why call them ``very dramatic evidence''?
It appears there's a bit of self-protective backing and filling going on in the second sentence. Nevertheless, the first sentence is a huge concession for Microsoft to make (even internally).
In any case, the `anecdotal' claim is false. See Fuzz Revisited: A Re-examination of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities and Services .
Here are three pertinent lines from this paper:
"The failure rate of utilities on the commercial versions of UNIX that we tested . . . ranged from 15-43%." "The failure rate of the utilities on the freely-distributed Linux version of UNIX was second-lowest, at 9%." "The failure rate of the public GNU utilities was the lowest in our study, at only 7%.
TN remarks:
Note the clever distinction here (which Eric missed in his analysis). ``customer's eyes'' (in Microsoft's own words) rather than any real code quality. In other words, to Microsoft and the software market in general, a software product has "commercial quality" if it has the ``look and feel'' of commercial software products. A product has commercial quality code if and only if there is a public perception that it is made with commercial quality code. This means that MS will take seriously any product that has an appealing, commercial-looking appearance because MS assumes -- rightly so -- that this is what the typical, uninformed consumer uses as the judgment benchmark for what is ``good code''.
TN is probably right. This didn't occur to me because, like most open-source programmers, I consider programs that crash and screw up a lot to be junk no matter how pretty their interfaces are....
}
OSS projects have become large-scale & complex
Another barrier to entry that has been tackled by OSS is project complexity. OSS teams are undertaking projects whose size & complexity had heretofore been the exclusive domain of commercial, economically-organized/motivated development teams. Examples include the Linux Operating System and Xfree86 GUI.
OSS process vitality is directly tied to the Internet to provide distributed development resources on a mammoth scale. Some examples of OSS project size:
Project
Lines of Code
Linux Kernel (x86 only)
500,000
Apache Web Server
80,000
SendMail
57,000
Xfree86 X-windows server
1.5 Million
"K" desktop environment
90,000
Full Linux distribution
~10 Million
OSS has a unique development process with unique strengths/weaknesses
The OSS process is unique in its participants' motivations and the resources that can be brought to bare down on problems. OSS, therefore, has some interesting, non-replicable assets which should be thoroughly understood.
{ TN comments:
An interesting piece of terminology -- ``non-replicable assets'' -- implies that Microsoft's modus operandi typically involves copying anything that others do. }
History
Open source software has roots in the hobbyist and the scientific community and was typified by ad hoc exchange of source code by developers/users.
Internet Software
The largest case study of OSS is the Internet. Most of the earliest code on the Internet was, and is still based on OSS as described in an interview with Tim O'Reilly (http://www.techweb.com/internet/profile/toreilly
TIM O'REILLY: The biggest message that we started out with was, "open source software works."
Free Software Foundation / GNU Project
Credit for the first instance of modern, organized OSS is generally given to Richard Stallman of MIT. In late 1983, Stallman created the Free Software Foundation (FSF) -- http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/fsf/fsf.html -- with the goal of creating a free version of the UNIX operating system. The FSF released a series of sources and binaries under the GNU moniker (which recursively stands for "Gnu's Not Unix").
The original FSF / GNU initiatives fell short of their original goal of creating a completely OSS Unix. They did, however, contribute several famous and widely disseminated applications and programming tools used today including:
GNU Emacs -- originally a powerful character-mode text editor, over time Emacs was enhanced to provide a front-end to compilers, mail readers, etc.
GNU C Compiler (GCC) -- GCC is the most widely used compiler in academia & the OSS world. In addition to the compiler a fairly standardized set of intermediate libraries are available as a superset to the ANSI C libraries.
GNU GhostScript -- Postscript printer/viewer.
CopyLeft Licensing
FSF/GNU software introduced the "copyleft" licensing scheme that not only made it illegal to hide source code from GNU software but also made it illegal to hide the source from work derived from GNU software. The document that described this license is known as the General Public License (GPL).
Wired magazine has the following summary of this scheme & its intent (http://www.wired.com/wired/5.08/linux.html):
The general public license, or GPL, allows users to sell, copy, and change copylefted programs - which can also be copyrighted - but you must pass along the same freedom to sell or copy your modifications and change them further. You must also make the source code of your modifications freely available.
The second clause -- open source code of derivative works -- has been the most controversial (and, potentially the most successful) aspect of CopyLeft licensing.
Open Source Process
Commercial software development processes are hallmarked by organization around economic goals. However, since money is often not the (primary) motivation behind Open Source Software, understanding the nature of the threat posed requires a deep understanding of the process and motivation of Open Source development teams.
In other words, to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company.
{ This is a very important insight, one I wish Microsoft had missed. The real battle isn't NT vs. Linux, or Microsoft vs. Red Hat/Caldera/S.u.S.E. -- it's closed-source development versus open-source. The cathedral versus the bazaar.
This applies in reverse as well, which is why bashing Microsoft qua Microsoft misses the point -- they're a symptom, not the disease itself. I wish more Linux hackers understood this.
On a practical level, this insight means we can expect Microsoft's propaganda machine to be directed against the process and culture of open source, rather than specific competitors. Brace for it... }
Open Source Development Teams
Some of the key attributes of Internet-driven OSS teams:
Geographically far-flung. Some of the key developers of Linux, for example, are uniformly distributed across Europe, the US, and Asia.
{ It's very interesting that the author recognizes this, but doesn't go on to discuss either Linux's edge in internationalization or the extent to which Linux's success overseas (especially in Europe) is driven by a fear of U.S. technological domination. This omission may represent an exploitable blind spot in Microsoft's strategy. }
Large set of contributors with a smaller set of core individuals. Linux, once again, has had over 1000 people submit patches, bug fixes, etc. and has had over 200 individuals directly contribute code to the kernel.
Not monetarily motivated (in the short run). These individuals are more like hobbyists spending their free time / energy on OSS project development while maintaining other full time jobs. This has begun to change somewhat as commercial versions of the Linux OS have appeared.
OSS Development Coordination
Communication -- Internet Scale
Coordination of an OSS team is extremely dependent on Internet-native forms of collaboration. Typical methods employed run the full gamut of the Internet's collaborative technologies:
Email lists
Newsgroups
24x 7 monitoring by international subscribers
Web sites
OSS projects the size of Linux and Apache are only viable if a large enough community of highly skilled developers can be amassed to attack a problem. Consequently, there is direct correlation between the size of the project that OSS can tackle and the growth of the Internet.
Common Direction
In addition to the communications medium, another set of factors implicitly coordinate the direction of the team.
Common Goals
Common goals are the equivalent of vision statements which permeate the distributed decision making for the entire development team. A single, clear directive (e.g. "recreate UNIX") is far more efficiently communicated and acted upon by a group than multiple, intangible ones (e.g. "make a good operating system").
Common Precedents
Precedence is potentially the most important factor in explaining the rapid and cohesive growth of massive OSS projects such as the Linux Operating System. Because the entire Linux community has years of shared experience dealing with many other forms of UNIX, they are easily able to discern -- in a non-confrontational manner -- what worked and what didn't.
There weren't arguments about the command syntax to use in the text editor -- everyone already used "vi" and the developers simply parcelled out chunks of the command namespace to develop.
Having historical, 20:20 hindsight provides a strong, implicit structure. In more forward looking organizations, this structure is provided by strong, visionary leadership.
{ At first glance, this just reads like a brown-nose-Bill comment by someone expecting that Gates will read the memo -- you can almost see the author genuflecting before an icon of the Fearless Leader.
More generally, it suggests a serious and potentially exploitable underestimation of the open-source community's ability to enable its own visionary leaders. We didn't get Emacs or Perl or the World Wide Web from ``20:20 hindsight'' -- nor is it correct to view even the relatively conservative Linux kernel design as a backward-looking recreation of past models.
Accordingly, it suggests that Microsoft's response to open source can be wrong-footed by emphasizing innovation in both our actions and the way we represent what we're doing to the rest of the world. }
Common Skillsets
NatBro points out that the need for a commonly accepted skillset as a pre-requisite for OSS development. This point is closely related to the common precedents phenomena. From his email:
A key attribute
Whereas precedents identify the end goal, the common skillsets attribute describes the number of people who are versed in the process necessary to reach that end.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
A very influential paper by an open source software advocate -- Eric Raymond -- was first published in May 1997 (http://www.redhat.com/redhat/cathedral-bazaar/). Raymond's paper was expressly cited by (then) Netscape CTO Eric Hahn as a motivation for their decision to release browser source code.
Raymond dissected his OSS project in order to derive rules-of-thumb which could be exploited by other OSS projects in the future. Some of Raymond's rules include:
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch
This summarizes one of the core motivations of developers in the OSS process -- solving an immediate problem at hand faced by an individual developer -- this has allowed OSS to evolve complex projects without constant feedback from a marketing / support organization.
{ TN remarks:
In other words, open-source software is driven by making great products, whereas Microsoft is driven by focus groups, psychological studies, and marketing. As if we didn't know that already.... }
Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
Raymond posits that developers are more likely to reuse code in a rigorous open source process than in a more traditional development environment because they are always guaranteed access to the entire source all the time.
Widely available open source reduces search costs for finding a particular code snippet.
``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.''
Quoting Fred Brooks, ``The Mythical Man-Month'', Chapter 11. Because development teams in OSS are often extremely far flung, many major subcomponents in Linux had several initial prototypes followed by the selection and refinement of a single design by Linus.
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
Raymond advocates strong documentation and significant developer support for OSS projects in order to maximize their benefits.
Code documentation is cited as an area which commercial developers typically neglect which would be a fatal mistake in OSS.
Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
This is a classic play out of the Microsoft handbook. OSS advocates will note, however, that their release-feedback cycle is potentially an order of magnitude faster than commercial software's.
{ This is an interestingly arrogant statement, as if they think I was somehow inspired by the Microsoft way of binary-only releases.
But it suggests something else -- that even though the author intellectually grasps the importance of source code releases, he doesn't truly grok how powerful a lever the early release specifically of source code truly is. Perhaps living within Microsoft's assumptions makes that impossible.
TN comments:
The difference here is, in every release cycle Microsoft always listens to its most ignorant customers. This is the key to dumbing down each release cycle of software for further assaulting the non-PC population. Linux and OS/2 developers, OTOH, tend to listen to their smartest customers. This necessarily limits the initial appeal of the operating system, while enhancing its long-term benefits. Perhaps only a monopolist like Microsoft could get away with selling worse products each generation -- products focused so narrowly on the least-technical member of the consumer base that they necessarily sacrifice technical excellence. Linux and OS/2 tend to appeal to the customer who knows greatness when he or she sees it.The good that Microsoft does in bringing computers to the non-users is outdone by the curse they bring upon the experienced users, because their monopoly position tends to force everyone toward the lowest-common-denominator, not just the new users.
Note: This means that Microsoft does the ``heavy lifting'' of expanding the overall PC marketplace. The great fear at Microsoft is that somebody will come behind them and make products that not only are more reliable, faster, and more secure, but are also easy to use, fun, and make people more productive. That would mean that Microsoft had merely served as a pioneer and taken all the arrows in the back, while we who have better products become a second wave to homestead on Microsoft's tamed territory. Well, sounds like a good idea to me.
So, we ought to take a page from Microsoft's book and listen to the newbies once in a while. But not so often that we lose our technological superiority over Microsoft.
ESR again. I don't agree with TN's apparent assumption that ease-of-use and technical superiority are necessarily mutually exclusive; with good design it's possible to do both. But given limited resources and poor-to-mediocre design skills, they do tend to get set in opposition with each other. Thus there's enough point to TN's analysis to make it worth reproducing here. }
Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
This is probably the heart of Raymond's insight into the OSS process. He paraphrased this rule as "debugging is parallelizable". More in depth analysis follows.
{ Well, he got that right, anyway. }
Parallel Development
Once a component framework has been established (e.g. key API's & structures defined), OSS projects such as Linux utilize multiple small teams of individuals independently solving particular problems.
Because the developers are typically hobbyists, the ability to `fund' multiple, competing efforts is not an issue and the OSS process benefits from the ability to pick the best potential implementation out of the many produced.
Note, that this is very dependent on:
A large group of individuals willing to submit code
A strong, implicit componentization framework (which, in the case of Linux was inherited from UNIX architecture).
Parallel Debugging
The core argument advanced by Eric Raymond is that unlike other aspects of software development, code debugging is an activity whose efficiency improves nearly linearly with the number of individuals tasked with the project. There are little/no management or coordination costs associated with debugging a piece of open source code -- this is the key `break' in Brooks' laws for OSS.
Raymond includes Linus Torvald's description of the Linux debugging process:
My original formulation was that every problem ``will be transparent to somebody''. Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. ``Somebody finds the problem,'' he says, ``and somebody else understands it. And I'll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge.'' But the point is that both things tend to happen quickly
Put alternately:
``Debugging is parallelizable''. Jeff [Dutky ] observes that although debugging requires debuggers to communicate with some coordinating developer, it doesn't require significant coordination between debuggers. Thus it doesn't fall prey to the same quadratic complexity and management costs that make adding developers problematic.
One advantage of parallel debugging is that bugs and their fixes are found / propagated much faster than in traditional processes. For example, when the TearDrop IP attack was first posted to the web, less than 24 hours passed before the Linux community had a working fix available for download.
"Impulse Debugging"
An extension to parallel debugging that I'll add to Raymond's hypothesis is "impulsive debugging". In the case of the Linux OS, implicit to the act of installing the OS is the act of installing the debugging/development environment. Consequently, it's highly likely that if a particular user/developer comes across a bug in another individual's component -- and especially if that bug is "shallow" -- that user can very quickly patch the code and, via internet collaboration technologies, propagate that patch very quickly back to the code maintainer.
Put another way, OSS processes have a very low entry barrier to the debugging process due to the common development/debugging methodology derived from the GNU tools.
Conflict resolution
Any large scale development process will encounter conflicts which must be resolved. Often resolution is an arbitrary decision in order to further progress the project. In commercial teams, the corporate hierarchy + performance review structure solves this problem -- How do OSS teams resolve them?
In the case of Linux, Linus Torvalds is the undisputed `leader' of the project. He's delegated large components (e.g. networking, device drivers, etc.) to several of his trusted "lieutenants" who further de-facto delegate to a handful of "area" owners (e.g. LAN drivers).
Other organizations are described by Eric Raymond: (http://earthspace.net/~esr/writings/homesteading
Some very large projects discard the `benevolent dictator' model entirely. One way to do this is turn the co-developers into a voting committee (as with Apache). Another is rotating dictatorship, in which control is occasionally passed from one member to another within a circle of senior co-developers (the Perl developers organize themselves this way).
nobody will use this, what a stupid idea.
dont have too much Pride when they pull crap like this. Pun intended.
*
If I really told you how to do it I would have to:Answer: D!!!
DING! DING! DING!
Your'e a weiner!!
If you're not on somebody's shit list, you're not doing anything worthwhile.....
So the next question is :
Is filing a lawsuit to stop the data collection and to stop this practice in fact a violation under the DCMA, and an illegal lawsuit?
you know somebody is going to try to argue that point, and may even find a nitwit judge to agree.
- - -
Radio Free Nation
an alternate news site using Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Motivation
e ading/), discusses the difference between economically motivated exchange (e.g. commercial software development for money) and "gift exchange" (e.g. OSS for glory).
/ interview):
:-) MS is going to claim a huge increase in IIS market share. This is because IIS5 is built directly linked with the NT kernel and handles all external TCP traffic (mail, http, etc). MSOffice is also going to communicate through IIS when talking with NT or Exchange, thus allowing them to add all internal LAN traffic to their usage reports. Let's see if we can pop their balloon before they raise it. }
This section provides an overview of some of the key reasons OSS developers seek to contribute to OSS projects.
Solving the Problem at Hand
This is basically a rephrasing of Raymond's first rule of thumb -- "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch".
Many OSS projects -- such as Apache -- started as a small team of developers setting out to solve an immediate problem at hand. Subsequent improvements of the code often stem from individuals applying the code to their own scenarios (e.g. discovering that there is no device driver for a particular NIC, etc.)
Education
The Linux kernel grew out of an educational project at the University of Helsinki. Similarly, many of the components of Linux / GNU system (X windows GUI, shell utilities, clustering, networking, etc.) were extended by individuals at educational institutions.
In the Far East, for example, Linux is reportedly growing faster than internet connectivity -- due primarily to educational adoption.
Universities are some of the original proponents of OSS as a teaching tool.
Research/teaching projects on top of Linux are easily `disseminated' due to the wide availability of Linux source. In particular, this often means that new research ideas are first implemented and available on Linux before they are available / incorporated into other platforms.
{ This from the same author who later insists that the Linux mob will have a hard time absorbing new ideas!. }
Ego Gratification
The most ethereal, and perhaps most profound motivation presented by the OSS development community is pure ego gratification.
In "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Eric S. Raymond cites:
The ``utility function'' Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers.
And, of course, "you aren't a hacker until someone else calls you hacker"
Homesteading on the Noosphere
A second paper published by Raymond -- "Homesteading on the Noosphere" (http://sagan.earthspace.net/~esr/writings/homest
"Homesteading" is acquiring property by being the first to `discover' it or by being the most recent to make a significant contribution to it. The "Noosphere" is loosely defined as the "space of all work". Therefore, Raymond posits, the OSS hacker motivation is to lay a claim to the largest area in the body of work. In other words, take credit for the biggest piece of the prize.
{ This is a subtle but significant misreading. It introduces a notion of territorial `size' which is nowhere in my theory. It may be a personal error of the author, but I suspect it reflects Microsoft's competition-obsessed culture. }
From "Homesteading on the Noosphere":
Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.
...
For examined in this way, it is quite clear that the society of open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture. Within it, there is no serious shortage of the `survival necessities' -- disk space, network bandwidth, computing power. Software is freely shared. This abundance creates a situation in which the only available measure of competitive success is reputation among one's peers.
More succinctly (http://www.techweb.com/internet/profile/eraymond
SIMS: So the scarcity that you looked for was the scarcity of attention and reward?
RAYMOND: That's exactly correct.
Altruism
This is a controversial motivation and I'm inclined to believe that at some level, Altruism `degenerates' into a form of the Ego Gratification argument advanced by Raymond.
One smaller motivation which, in part, stems from altruism is Microsoft-bashing.
{ What a very fascinating admission, coming from a Microserf! Of course, he doesn't analyze why this connection exists; that might hit too close to home...}
Code Forking
A key threat in any large development team -- and one that is particularly exacerbated by the process chaos of an internet-scale development team -- is the risk of code-forking.
Code forking occurs when over normal push-and-pull of a development project, multiple, inconsistent versions of the project's code base evolve.
In the commercial world, for example, the strong, singular management of the Windows NT codebase is considered to be one of it's greatest advantages over the `forked' codebase found in commercial UNIX implementations (SCO, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, etc.).
Forking in OSS -- BSD Unix
Within OSS space, BSD Unix is the best example of forked code. The original BSD UNIX was an attempt by U-Cal Berkeley to create a royalty-free version of the UNIX operating system for teaching purposes. However, Berkeley put severe restrictions on non-academic uses of the codebase.
{ The author's history of the BSD splits is all wrong. }
In order to create a fully free version of BSD UNIX, an ad hoc (but closed) team of developers created FreeBSD. Other developers at odds with the FreeBSD team for one reason or another splintered the OS to create other variations (OpenBSD, NetBSD, BSDI).
There are two dominant factors which led to the forking of the BSD tree:
Not everyone can contribute to the BSD codebase. This limits the size of the effective "Noosphere" and creates the potential for someone else to credibly claim that their forked code will become more dominant than the core BSD code.
{ Wow. This is an insight I never had -- that forking can actually be driven by the belief that the forker could accumulate a bigger bazaar than the current project. It certainly explains EGCS and the BSD-spinoff-group-of-the-week phenomenon, though probably not the Emacs/XEmacs split.
OK, we've learned something now. This may in fact explain the couinterintuitive fact that the projects which open up development the most actually have the least tendency to fork... }
Unlike GPL, BSD's license places no restrictions on derivative code. Therefore, if you think your modifications are cool enough, you are free to fork the code, charge money for it, change its name, etc.
Both of these motivations create a situation where developers may try to force a fork in the code and collect royalties (monetary, or ego) at the expense of the collective BSD society.
(Lack of) Forking in Linux
In contrast to the BSD example, the Linux kernel code base hasn't forked. Some of the reasons why the integrity of the Linux codebase has been maintained include:
Universally accepted leadership
Linus Torvalds is a celebrity in the Linux world and his decisions are considered final. By contrast, a similar celebrity leader did NOT exist for the BSD-derived efforts.
Linus is considered by the development team to be a fair, well-reasoned code manager and his reputation within the Linux community is quite strong. However, Linus doesn't get involved in every decision. Often, sub groups resolve their -- often large -- differences amongst themselves and prevent code forking.
Open membership & long term contribution potential.
In contrast to BSD's closed membership, anyone can contribute to Linux and your "status" -- and therefore ability to `homestead' a bigger piece of Linux -- is based on the size of your previous contributions.
Indirectly this presents a further disincentive to code forking. There is almost no credible mechanism by which the forked, minority code base will be able to maintain the rate of innovation of the primary Linux codebase.
GPL licensing eliminates economic motivations for code forking
Because derivatives of Linux MUST be available through some free avenue, it lowers the long term economic gain for a minority party with a forked Linux tree.
Forking the codebase also forks the "Noosphere"
Ego motivations push OSS developers to plant the biggest stake in the biggest Noosphere. Forking the code base inevitably shrinks the space of accomplishment for any subsequent developers to the new code tree.
Open Source Strengths
What are the core strengths of OSS products that Microsoft needs to be concerned with?
OSS Exponential Attributes
Like our Operating System business, OSS ecosystems have several exponential attributes:
OSS processes are growing with the Internet
The single biggest constraint faced by any OSS project is finding enough developers interested in contributing their time towards the project. As an enabler, the Internet was absolutely necessary to bring together enough people for an Operating System scale project. More importantly, the growth engine for these projects is the growth in the Internet's reach. Improvements in collaboration technologies directly lubricate the OSS engine.
Put another way, the growth of the Internet will make existing OSS projects bigger and will make OSS projects in "smaller" software categories become viable.
OSS processes are "winner-take-all"
Like commercial software, the most viable single OSS project in many categories will, in the long run, kill competitive OSS projects and `acquire' their IQ assets. For example, Linux is killing BSD Unix and has absorbed most of its core ideas (as well as ideas in the commercial UNIXes). This feature confers huge first mover advantages to a particular project
Developers seek to contribute to the largest OSS platform
The larger the OSS project, the greater the prestige associated with contributing a large, high quality component to its Noosphere. This phenomena contributes back to the "winner-take-all" nature of the OSS process in a given segment.
Larger OSS projects solve more "problems at hand"
The larger the project, the more development/test/debugging the code receives. The more debugging, the more people who deploy it.
Long-term credibility
Binaries may die but source code lives forever
One of the most interesting implications of viable OSS ecosystems is long-term credibility.
Long-Term Credibility Defined
Long term credibility exists if there is no way you can be driven out of business in the near term. This forces change in how competitors deal with you.
{ TN comments:
Note the terminology used here ``driven out of business''. MS believes that putting other companies out of business is not merely ``collateral damage'' -- a byproduct of selling better stuff -- but rather, a direct business goal. To put this in perspective, economic theory and the typical honest, customer-oriented businessperson will think of business as a stock-car race -- the fastest car with the most skillful driver wins. Microsoft views business as a demolition derby -- you knock out as many competitors as possible, and try to maneuver things so that your competitors wipe each other out and thereby eliminate themselves. In a stock car race there are many finishers and thus many drivers get a paycheck. In a demolition derby there is just one survivor. Can you see why ``Microsoft'' and ``freedom of choice'' are absolutely in two different universes? }
For example, Airbus Industries garnered initial long term credibility from explicit government support. Consequently, when bidding for an airline contract, Boeing would be more likely to accept short-term, non-economic returns when bidding against Lockheed than when bidding against Airbus.
Loosely applied to the vernacular of the software industry, a product/process is long-term credible if FUD tactics can not be used to combat it.
OSS is Long-Term Credible
OSS systems are considered credible because the source code is available from potentially millions of places and individuals.
{ We are deep inside the Microsoft world-view here. I realize that a typical hacker's reaction to this kind of thinking will be to find it nauseating, but it reflects a kind of instrumental ruthlessness about the uses of negative marketing that we need to learn to cope with.
The really interesting thing about these two statements is that they imply that Microsoft should give up on FUD as an effective tactic against us.
Most of us have been assuming that the DOJ antitrust suit is what's keeping Microsoft from hauling out the FUD guns. But if His Gatesness bought this part of the memo, Microsoft may believe that they need to develop a more substantive response because FUD won't work.
This could be both good and bad news. The good news is that Microsoft would give up attack marketing, a weapon which in the past has been much more powerful than its distinctly inferior technology. The bad news is that, against us, giving it up would actually be better strategy; they wouldn't be wasting energy any more and might actually evolve some effective response. }
The likelihood that Apache will cease to exist is orders of magnitudes lower than the likelihood that WordPerfect, for example, will disappear. The disappearance of Apache is not tied to the disappearance of binaries (which are affected by purchasing shifts, etc.) but rather to the disappearance of source code and the knowledge base.
Inversely stated, customers know that Apache will be around 5 years from now -- provided there exists some minimal sustained interested from its user/development community.
One Apache customer, in discussing his rationale for running his e-commerce site on OSS stated, "because it's open source, I can assign one or two developers to it and maintain it myself indefinitely. "
Lack of Code-Forking Compounds Long-Term Credibility
The GPL and its aversion to code forking reassures customers that they aren't riding an evolutionary `dead-end' by subscribing to a particular commercial version of Linux.
The "evolutionary dead-end" is the core of the software FUD argument.
{ Very true -- and there's another glaring omission here. If the author had been really honest, he'd have noted that OSS advocates are well positioned to turn this argument around and beat Microsoft to death with it.
By the author's own admission, OSS is bulletproof on this score. On the other hand, the exploding complexity and schedule slippage of the just-renamed ``Windows 2000'' suggest that it is an evolutionary dead end.
The author didn't go on to point that out. But we should. }
Parallel Debugging
Linux and other OSS advocates are making a progressively more credible argument that OSS software is at least as robust -- if not more -- than commercial alternatives. The Internet provides an ideal, high-visibility showcase for the OSS world.
{ It's a handful of amateurs, most of us unpaid and almost all part-time, against an entrenched multimillion-dollar propaganda machine run by some of the top specialists in the technology-marketing business.
And the amateurs are ``making a progressively more credible argument''. By Microsoft's own admission, we're actually winning.
Maybe there's a message about the underlying products here? }
In particular, larger, more savvy, organizations who rely on OSS for business operations (e.g. ISPs) are comforted by the fact that they can potentially fix a work-stopping bug independent of a commercial provider's schedule (for example, UUNET was able to obtain, compile, and apply the teardrop attack patch to their deployed Linux boxes within 24 hours of the first public attack)
Parallel Development
Alternatively stated, "developer resources are essentially free in OSS". Because the pool of potential developers is massive, it is economically viable to simultaneously investigate multiple solutions / versions to a problem and chose the best solution in the end.
For example, the Linux TCP/IP stack was probably rewritten 3 times. Assembly code components in particular have been continuously hand tuned and refined.
OSS = `perfect' API evangelization / documentation
OSS's API evangelization / developer education is basically providing the developer with the underlying code. Whereas evangelization of API's in a closed source model basically defaults to trust, OSS API evangelization lets the developer make up his own mind.
NatBro and Ckindel point out a split in developer capabilities here. Whereas the "enthusiast developer" is comforted by OSS evangelization, novice/intermediate developers --the bulk of the development community -- prefer the trust model + organizational credibility (e.g. "Microsoft says API X looks this way")
{ Whether it's really true that most developers prefer the `trust' model or not is an extremely interesting question.
Twenty years of experience in the field tells me not; that, in general, developers prefer code even when their non-technical bosses are naive enough to prefer `trust'. Microsoft, obviously, wants to believe that its `organizational credibility' counts -- I detect some wishful thinking here.
On the other hand, they may be right. We in the open-source community can't afford to dismiss that possibility. I think we can meet it by developing high-quality documentation. In this way, `trust' in name authors (or in publishers of good repute such as O'Reilly or Addison-Wesley) can substitute for `trust' in an API-defining organization. }
Release rate
Strongly componentized OSS projects are able to release subcomponents as soon as the developer has finished his code. Consequently, OSS projects rev quickly & frequently.
Open Source Weaknesses
The weaknesses in OSS projects fall into 3 primary buckets:
Management costs
Process Issues
Organizational Credibility
Management Costs
The biggest roadblock for OSS projects is dealing with exponential growth of management costs as a project is scaled up in terms of rate of innovation and size. This implies a limit to the rate at which an OSS project can innovate.
Starting an OSS project is difficult
From Eric Raymond:
It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard tooriginate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.
Raymond `s argument can be extended to the difficulty in starting/sustaining a project if there are no clear precedent / goal (or too many goals) for the project.
Bazaar Credibility
Obviously, there are far more fragments of source code on the Internet than there are OSS communities. What separates "dead source code" from a thriving bazaar?
One article (http://www.mibsoftware.com/bazdev/0003.htm) provides the following credibility criteria:
"....thinking in terms of a hard minimum number of participants is misleading. Fetchmail and Linux have huge numbers of beta testers *now*, but they obviously both had very few at the beginning.
What both projects did have was a handful of enthusiasts and a plausible promise. The promise was partly technical (this code will be wonderful with a little effort) and sociological (if you join our gang, you'll have as much fun as we're having). So what's necessary for a bazaar to develop is that it be credible that the full-blown bazaar will exist!"
I'll posit that some of the key criteria that must exist for a bazaar to be credible include:
Large Future Noosphere -- The project must be cool enough that the intellectual reward adequately compensates for the time invested by developers. The Linux OS excels in this respect.
Scratch a big itch -- The project must be important / deployable by a large audience of developers. The Apache web server provides an excellent example here.
Solve the right amount of the problem first -- Solving too much of the problem relegates the OSS development community to the role of testers. Solving too little before going OSS reduces "plausible promise" and doesn't provide a strong enough component framework to efficiently coordinate work.
{ These three points are well-thought-out and actually improve on my characterization in ``The Cathedral and the Bazaar.''. The distinction he makes between `Large Future Noosphere' and `Scratch a big itch' is particularly telling. }
Post-Parity Development
When describing this problem to JimAll, he provided the perfect analogy of "chasing tail lights". The easiest way to get coordinated behavior from a large, semi-organized mob is to point them at a known target. Having the taillights provides concreteness to a fuzzy vision. In such situations, having a taillight to follow is a proxy for having strong central leadership.
Of course, once this implicit organizing principle is no longer available (once a project has achieved "parity" with the state-of-the-art), the level of management necessary to push towards new frontiers becomes massive.
{ Nonsense. In the open-source world, all it takes is one person with a good idea.
Part of the point of open source is to lower the energy barriers that retard innovation. We've found by experience that the `massive management' the author extols is one of the worst of these barriers.
In the open-source world, innovators get to try anything, and the only test is whether users will volunteer to experiment with the innovation and like it once they have. The Internet facilitates this process, and the cooperative conventions of the open-source community are specifically designed to promote it.
The third alternative to ``chasing taillights'' or ``strong central leadership'' (and more effective than either) is an evolving creative anarchy, in which there are a thousand leaders and ten thousand followers linked by a web of peer review and subject to rapid-fire reality checks.
Microsoft cannot beat this. I don't think they can even really understand it, not on a gut level. }
This is possibly the single most interesting hurdle to face the Linux community now that they've achieved parity with the state of the art in UNIX in many respects.
{ The Linux community has not merely lept this hurdle, but utterly demolished it. This fact is at the core of open-source's long-term advantage over closed-source development. }
Un-sexy work
Another interesting thing to observe in the near future of OSS is how well the team is able to tackle the "unsexy" work necessary to bring a commercial grade product to life.
{ Characterizing this kind of work as ``unsexy'' reveals an interesting blind spot. It has been my experience that for almost any kind of work, there will be somebody, somewhere, who thinks it's interesting or fulfilling enough to undertake it.
Take the example of Unicode support above. Who's likely to do the best, most thorough job of implementing Unicode support, of the following three people?
Joe M. Serf's boss assigns WUS (Windows Unicode Support) to him.
Ana Ng lives in Malaysia and really needs good multiple-language support in order to be able to view information in a variety of Asian languages.
Jeff P. Hacker lives in Indiana and is fascinated by the problem of providing robust support for multiple alphabets.
It's likely to be either Ana or Jeff (all else, including skill sets, being equal), because they're scratching their itches. It ain't gonna be Joe.
Now, which development model is more likely to pull Ana or Jeff into the development effort -- closed source, or open?
Easy question. }
In the operating systems space, this includes small, essential functions such as power management, suspend/resume, management infrastructure, UI niceties, deep Unicode support, etc.
For Apache, this may mean novice-administrator functionality such as wizards.
Integrative/Architectural work
Integrative work across modules is the biggest cost encountered by OSS teams. An email memo from Nathan Myrhvold on 5/98, points out that of all the aspects of software development, integration work is most subject to Brooks' laws.
Up till now, Linux has greatly benefited from the integration / componentization model pushed by previous UNIX's. Additionally, the organization of Apache was simplified by the relatively simple, fault tolerant specifications of the HTTP protocol and UNIX server application design.
Future innovations which require changes to the core architecture / integration model are going to be incredibly hard for the OSS team to absorb because it simultaneously devalues their precedents and skillsets.
{ This prediction is of a piece with the author's earlier assertion that open-source development relies critically on design precedents and is unavoidably backward-looking. It's myopic -- apparently things like Python, Beowulf, and Squeak (to name just three of hundreds of innovative projects) don't show on his radar.
We can only hope Microsoft continues to believe this, because it would hinder their response. Much will depend on how they interpret innovations such as (for example) the SMPization of the Linux kernel.
Interestingly, the author contradicts himself on this point. A former Microserf tells me that `throw one away' is actually pretty close to a defined Microsoft policy, but one designed to leverage marketing rather than fix problems. The project he was involved with involved a web-based front-end to Exchange. The resulting first draft (after 14 months of effort) was completely inferior to already existing free-web-email (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc). The official response to that was `` That's ok. We'll get the market share and fix the technical problems over the next 3-4 years''.
He adds: Internet Explorer 5, just before one of its beta releases had about 300K (yes, 300K) outstanding bugs targeted to be fixed before the beta release. Much of this was accomplished by simply removing large chunks of planned (new) functionality and pushing them to a later (+1-2 years later) release. }
Process Issues
These are weaknesses intrinsic to OSS's design/feedback methodology.
Iterative Cost
One of the key's to the OSS process is having many more iterations than commercial software (Linux was known to rev it's kernel more than once a day!). However, commercial customers tell us they want fewer revs, not more.
{ I wonder how this answer would change if Microsoft revs weren't so expensive?
This is why commercial Linux distributors exist -- to mediate between the rapid-development process and customers who don't want to follow every twist of it. The kernel may rev once a day, but Red Hat only revs once in six months. }
"Non-expert" Feedback
The Linux OS is not developed for end users but rather, for other hackers. Similarly, the Apache web server is implicitly targetted at the largest, most savvy site operators, not the departmental intranet server.
The key thread here is that because OSS doesn't have an explicit marketing / customer feedback component, wishlists -- and consequently feature development -- are dominated by the most technically savvy users.
One thing that development groups at MSFT have learned time and time again is that ease of use, UI intuitiveness, etc. must be built from the ground up into a product and can not be pasted on at a later time.
{ This demands comment -- because it's so right in theory, but so hideously wrong in Microsoft practice. The wrongness implies an exploitable weakness in the implied strategy (for Microsoft) of emphasizing UI.
There are two ways to build in ease of use "from the ground up". One (the Microsoft way) is to design monolithic applications that are defined and dominated by their UIs. This tends to produce ``Windowsitis'' -- rigid, clunky, bug-prone monstrosities that are all glossy surface with a hollow interior.
Programs built this way look user-friendly at first sight, but turn out to be huge time and energy sinks in the longer term. They can only be sustained by carpet-bomb marketing, the main purpose of which is to delude users into believing that (a) bugs are features, or that (b) all bugs are really the stupid user's fault, or that (c) all bugs will be abolished if the user bends over for the next upgrade. This approach is fundamentally broken.
The other way is the Unix/Internet/Web way, which is to separate the engine (which does the work) from the UI (which does the viewing and control). This approach requires that the engine and UI communicate using a well-defined protocol. It's exemplified by browser/server pairs -- the engine specializes in being an engine, and the UI specializes in being a UI.
With this second approach, overall complexity goes down and reliability goes up. Further, the interface is easier to evolve/improve/customize, precisely because it's not tightly coupled to the engine. It's even possible to have multiple interfaces tuned to different audiences.
Finally, this architecture leads naturally to applications that are enterprise-ready -- that can be used or administered remotely from the server. This approach works -- and it's the open-source community's natural way to counter Microsoft.
The key point is here is that if Microsoft wants to fight the open-source community on UI, let them -- because we can win that battle, too, fighting it our way. They can write ever-more-elaborate Windows monoliths that spot-weld you to your application-server console. We'll win if we write clean distributed applications that leverage the Internet and the Web and make the UI a pluggable/unpluggable user choice that can evolve.
Note, however, that our win depends on the existence of well-defined protocols (such as HTTP) to communicate between UIs and engines. That's why the stuff later in this memo about ``de-commoditizing protocols'' is so sinister. We need to guard against that. }
The interesting trend to observe here will be the effect that commercial OSS providers (such as RedHat in Linux space, C2Net in Apache space) will have on the feedback cycle.
Organizational Credibility
How can OSS provide the service that consumers expect from software providers?
Support Model
Product support is typically the first issue prospective consumers of OSS packages worry about and is the primary feature that commercial redistributors tout.
However, the vast majority of OSS projects are supported by the developers of the respective components. Scaling this support infrastructure to the level expected in commercial products will be a significant challenge. There are many orders of magnitude difference between users and developers in IIS vs. Apache.
{ The vagueness of this last sentence is telling. Had the author continued, he would have had to acknowledge that Apache is clobbering the crap out of IIS in the marketplace (Apache's share 54% and climbing; IIS's somewhere around 14% and dropping).
This would have led to a choice of unpalatable (for Microsoft) alternatives. It may be that Apache's informal user-support channels and `organizational credibility' actually produce better results than Microsoft's IIS organization can offer. If that's true, then it's hard to see in principle why the same shouldn't be true of other open-source projects.
The alternative -- that Apache is so good that it doesn't need much support or `organizational credibility' -- is even worse. That would mean that all of Microsoft's heavy-duty support and marketing battalions were just a huge malinvestment, like crumbling Stalinist apartment blocks forty years later.
These two possible explanations imply distinct but parallel strategies for open-source advocates. One is to build software that's so good it just doesn't need much support (but we'd do this anyway, and generally have). The other is to do more intensely what we're already doing along the lines of support mailing lists, newsgroups, FAQs, and other informal but extremely effective channels. A former Microserf adds: As of NT5 (sorry, Win2K
For the short-medium run, this factor alone will relegate OSS products to the top tiers of the user community.
Strategic Futures
A very sublime problem which will affect full scale consumer adoption of OSS projects is the lack of strategic direction in the OSS development cycle. While incremental improvement of the current bag of features in an OSS product is very credible, future features have no organizational commitment to guarantee their development.
{ No. In the open-source community, new features are driven by the novelty- and territory-seeking behavior of individual hackers. This certainly is not a force to be despised. The Internet and the Web were built this way -- not because of `organizational commitment', but because somebody, somewhere, thought ``Hey -- this would be neat...''.
Perhaps we're fortunate that `organizational credibility' looms so large in the Microsoft world-view. The time and energy they spend worrying about that and believing it's a prerequisite is resources they won't spend doing anything that might be effective against us. }
What does it mean for the Linux community to "sign up" to help build the Corporate Digital Nervous System? How can Linux guarantee backward compatibility with apps written to previous API's? Who do you sue if the next version of Linux breaks some commitment? How does Linux make a strategic alliance with some other entity?
{ Who do you sue if NT 5.0 (excuse me, "Windows 2000") doesn't ship on time? Has anyone ever recovered from Microsoft for any of their backwards-incompatibilities or other screwups?
The question about backward compatibility is pretty ironic, considering that I've never heard of a program that will run under all of Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, and NT 4.0 without change.
The author has been overtaken by events here. He should ask Microsoft's buddies at Intel, who bought a minority stake in Red Hat less than two months after this memo was written. }
Open Source Business Models
In the last 2 years, OSS has taken another twist with the emergence of companies that sell OSS software, and more importantly, hiring full-time developers to improve the code base. What's the business model that justifies these salaries?
In many cases, the answers to these questions are similar to "why should I submit my protocol/app/API to a standards body?"
Secondary Services
The vendor of OSS-ware provides sales, support, and integration to the customer. Effectively, this transforms the OSS-ware vendor from a package goods manufacturer into a services provider.
Loss Leader -- Market Entry
The Loss Leader OSS business model can be used for two purposes:
Jumpstarting an infant market
Breaking into an existing market with entrenched, closed-source players
Many OSS startups -- particularly those in Operating Systems space -- view funding the development of OSS products as a strategic loss leader against Microsoft.
Linux distributors, such as RedHat, Caldera, and others, are expressly willing to fund full time developers who release all their work to the OSS community. By simultaneously funding these efforts, Red Hat and Caldera are implicitly colluding and believe they'll make more short term revenue by growing the Linux market rather than directly competing with each other.
An indirect example is O'Reilly & Associates employment of Larry Wall -- "leader" and full time developer of PERL. The #1 publisher of PERL reference books, of course is O'Reilly & Associates.
For the short run, especially as the OSS project is at the steepest part of it's growth curve, such investments generate positive ROI. Longer term, ROI motivations may steer these developers towards making proprietary extensions rather than releasing OSS.
Commoditizing Downstream Suppliers
This is very closely related to the loss leader business model. However, instead of trying to get marginal service returns by massively growing the market, these businesses increase returns in their part of the value chain by commoditizing downstream suppliers.
The best examples of this currently are the thin server vendors such as Whistle Communications, and Cobalt Micro who are actively funding developers in SAMBA and Linux respectively.
Both Whistle and Cobalt generate their revenue on hardware volume. Consequently, funding OSS enables them to avoid today's PC market where a "tax" must be paid to the OS vendor (NT Server retail price is $800 whereas Cobalt's target MSRP is around $1000).
The earliest Apache developers were employed by cash-strapped ISPs and ICPs.
Another, more recent example is IBM's deal with Apache. By declaring the HTTP server a commodity, IBM hopes to concentrate returns in the more technically arcane application services it bundles with it's Apache distribution (as well as hope to reach Apache's tremendous market share).
First Mover -- Build Now, $$ Later
One of the exponential qualities of OSS -- successful OSS projects swallow less successful ones in their space -- implies a pre-emption business model where by investing directly in OSS today, they can pre-empt / eliminate competitive projects later -- especially if the project requires API evangelization. This is tantamount to seizing a first mover advantage in OSS.
In addition, the developer scale, iteration rate, and reliability advantages of the OSS process are a blessing to small startups who typically can't afford a large in--house development staff.
Examples of startups in this space include SendMail.com (making a commercially supported version of the sendmail mail transfer agent) and C2Net (makes commercial and encrypted Apache)
Notice, that no case of a successful startup originating an OSS project has been observed. In both of these cases, the OSS project existed before the startup was formed.
{ There are at least two counterexamples to this: AbiWord and Ghostscript. }
Sun Microsystem's has recently announced that its "JINI" project will be provided via a form of OSS and may represent an application of the pre-emption doctrine.
Linux
:-). }
7 14-phq.html: "By the end of the year ... Samba will be able to completely replace all primary NT Server functions." { The Samba URL is wrong. See http://samba.org.au. }
The next several sections analyze the most prominent OSS projects including Linux, Apache, and now, Netscape's OSS browser.
A second memo titled "Linux OS Competitive Analysis" provides an in-depth review of the Linux OS. Here, I provide a top-level summary of my findings in Linux.
What is it?
Linux (pronounced "LYNN-ucks") is the #1 market share Open Source OS on the Internet. Linux is derives strongly from the 25+ years of lessons learned on the UNIX operating system.
Top-Level Features:
Multi-user / Multi-threaded (kernel & user)
Multi-platform (x86, Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC, SPARC, etc.)
Protected 32-bit memory space for apps; Virtual Memory support (64-bit in development)
SMP (Intel & Sun CPU's)
Supports multiple file systems (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, Ext2FS)
High performance networking
NFS/SMB/IPX/Appletalk networking
Fastest stack in Unix vs. Unix perf tests
Disk Management
Striping, mirroring, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS
Xfree86 GUI
Linux is a real, credible OS + Development process
Like other Open Source Software (OSS) products, the real key to Linux isn't the static version of the product but rather the process around it. This process lends credibility and an air of future-safeness to customer Linux investments.
Trusted in mission criticial environments. Linux has been deployed in mission critical, commercial environments with an excellent pool of public testimonials.
Linux = Best of Breed UNIX. Linux outperforms many other UNIX's in most major performance category (networking, disk I/O, process ctx switch, etc.). To grow their featurebase, Linux has also liberally stolen features of other UNIX's (shell features, file systems, graphics, CPU ports)
Only Unix OS to gain market share. Linux is on track to eventually own the x86 UNIX market and has been the only UNIX version to gain net Server OS market share in recent years. I believe that Linux -- moreso than NT -- will be the biggest threat to SCO in the near future.
Linux's process iterates VERY fast. For example, the Linux equivalent of the TransmitFile() API went from idea to final implementation in about 2 weeks time.
{ All true. I couldn't have put it better myself
Linux is a short/medium-term threat in servers
The primary threat Microsoft faces from Linux is against NT Server.
Linux's future strength against NT server (and other UNIXes) is fed by several key factors:
Linux uses commodity PC hardware and, due to OS modularity, can be run on smaller systems than NT. Linux is frequently used for services such as DNS running on old 486's in back closets.
Due to it's UNIX heritage, Linux represents a lower switching cost for some organizations than NT
UNIX's perceived Scaleability, Interopability, Availability, and Manageability (SIAM) advantages over NT.
Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities
{ We sense a theme developing here...
To put it slightly differently: Linux can win if services are open and protocols are simple, transparent. Microsoft can only win if services are closed and protocols are complex, opaque.
To put it even more bluntly: "commodity" services and protocols are good things for customers; they promote competition and choice. Therefore, for Microsoft to win, the customer must lose.
The most interesting revelation in this memo is how close to explicitly stating this logic Microsoft is willing to come. }
Linux is unlikely to be a threat on the desktop
Linux is unlikely to be a threat in the medium-long term on the desktop for several reasons:
Poor end-user apps & focus. OSS development process are far better at solving individual component issues than they are at solving integrative scenarios such as end-to-end ease of use.
{ The easy and obvious counter to this is to observe that Microsoft is pretty bad at `end-to-end ease of use' itself; what it's good at is creating systems that look at first sight as though they have that quality, but don't actually deliver on it (and, over time, have a far higher total cost in productivity lost to bugs and missing features than does Linux).
Though this is true, it evades an important issue -- which is that Microsoft's own meretriciousness on this score doesn't make its criticism any less valid. Open-source development really is poor at addressing this class of issues, because it doesn't involve systematic ease-of-use-testing with non-hackers.
This genuinely will slow down Linux's advance on the desktop. It is not likely to stall it forever, however -- not if efforts like GNOME and KDE get time to mature. }
Switching costs for desktop installed base. Switching desktops is hard and a challenger must be able to prove a significant marginal advantage. Linux's process is more focused on second-mover advantages (e.g. copying what's been proven to work) and is therefore unlikely to provide the first-mover advantage necessary to provide switching impetus.
{ There's a hidden presumption here that innovation and ``first mover advantage'' are the only ways to defray the perceived cost of switching. This is a dangerous assumption for Microsoft; it may be that the superior reliability and stability of Linux is sufficient.
Even granting the author's presumption, the possibility that Linux can grab a sufficient `first-mover' advantage is not safely foreclosed unless the open-source mode really is incapable of generating innovation -- and we already know that's not true. }
UNIX heritage will slow encroachment. Ease of use must be engineered from the ground up. Linux's hacker orientation will never provide the ease-of-use requirements of the average desktop user.
{ My previous comments on ease-of-use engineering, and the open-source community's way to beat this rap, apply here. We need to wrong-foot Microsoft by building systems that use openness to support users readily evolving their environments to optimum, in the way that the Web does. }
Beating Linux
In addition to the attacking the general weaknesses of OSS projects (e.g. Integrative / Architectural costs), some specific attacks on Linux are:
Beat UNIX
All the standard product issues for NT vs. Sun apply to Linux.
Fold extended functionality into commodity protocols / services and create new protocols
Linux's homebase is currently commodity network and server infrastructure. By folding extended functionality (e.g. Storage+ in file systems, DAV/POD for networking) into today's commodity services, we raise the bar & change the rules of the game.
{ Here, as in the earlier comment on how Linux can win, we start to see the actual outlines of a Microsoft strategy emerge from the fog of corporatese. And it ain't pretty; in fact, it's ugly enough to make it appropriate that it's pushing midnight on Halloween as I write.
What the author is driving at is nothing less than trying to subvert the entire "commodity network and server" infrastructure (featuring TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, POP3, IMAP, NFS, and other open standards) into using protocols which, though they might have the same names, have actually been subverted into customer- and market-control devices for Microsoft (this is what the author really means when he exhorts Microserfs to ``raise the bar & change the rules of the game'').
The `folding extended functionality' here is a euphemism for introducing nonstandard extensions (or entire alternative protocols) which are then saturation-marketed as standards, even though they're closed, undocumented or just specified enough to create an illusion of openness. The objective is to make the new protocols a checklist item for gullible corporate buyers, while simultaneously making the writing of third-party symbiotes for Microsoft programs next to impossible. (And anyone who succeeds gets bought out.)
This game is called ``embrace and extend''. We've seen Microsoft play this game before, and they're very good at it. When it works, Microsoft wins a monopoly lock. Customers lose.
(This standards-pollution strategy is perfectly in line with Microsoft's efforts to corrupt Java and break the Java brand.)
Open-source advocates can counter by pointing out exactly how and why customers lose (reduced competition, higher costs, lower reliability, lost opportunities). Open-source advocates can also make this case by showing the contrapositive -- that is, how open source and open standards increase vendor competition, decrease costs, improve reliability, and create opportunities.
Once again, as Microsoft conceded earlier in the memo, the Internet is our poster child. Our best stop-thrust against embrace-and-extend is to point out that Microsoft is trying to close up the Internet. }
Netscape
In an attempt to renew it's credibility in the browser space, Netscape has recently released and is attempting to create an OSS community around it's Mozilla source code.
Organization & LIcensing
Netscape's organization and licensing model is loosely based on the Linux community & GPL with a few differences. First, Mozilla and Netscape Communicator are 2 codebases with Netscape's engineers providing synchronization.
Mozilla = the OSS, freely distributable browser
Netscape Communicator = Branded, slightly modified (e.g. homepage default is set to home.netscape.com) version of Mozilla.
Unlike the full GPL, Netscape reserves the final right to reject / force modifications into the Mozilla codebase and Netscape's engineers are the appointed "Area Directors" of large components (for now).
Strengths
Capitalize on Anti-MSFT Sentiment in the OSS Community
Relative to other OSS projects, Mozilla is considered to be one of the most direct, near-term attacks on the Microsoft establishment. This factor alone is probably a key galvanizing factor in motivating developers towards the Mozilla codebase.
New credibility
The availability of Mozilla source code has renewed Netscape's credibility in the browser space to a small degree. As BharatS points out in http://ie/specs/Mozilla/default.htm:
{ The link to the BharatS quote is broken. }
"They have guaranteed by releasing their code that they will never disappear from the horizon entirely in the manner that Wordstar has disappeared. Mozilla browsers will survive well into the next 10 years even if the user base does shrink. "
Scratch a big itch
The browser is widely used / disseminated. Consequently, the pool of people who may be willing to solve "an immediate problem at hand" and/or fix a bug may be quite high.
Weaknesses
Post parity development
Mozilla is already at close to parity with IE4/5. Consequently, there no strong example to chase to help implicitly coordinate the development team.
Netscape has assigned some of their top developers towards the full time task of managing the Mozilla codebase and it will be interesting to see how this helps (if at all) the ability of Mozilla to push on new ground.
Small Noosphere
An interesting weakness is the size of the remaining "Noosphere" for the OSS browser.
The stand-alone browser is basically finished.
There are no longer any large, high-profile segments of the stand-alone browser which must be developed. In otherwords, Netscape has already solved the interesting 80% of the problem. There is little / no ego gratification in debugging / fixing the remaining 20% of Netscape's code.
Netscape's commercial interests shrink the effect of Noosphere contributions.
Linus Torvalds' management of the Linux codebase is arguably directed towards the goal of creating the best Linux. Netscape, by contrast, expressly reserves the right to make code management decisions on the basis of Netscape's commercial / business interests. Instead of creating an important product, the developer's code is being subjugated to Netscape's stock price.
Integration Cost
Potentially the single biggest detriment to the Mozilla effort is the level of integration that customers expect from features in a browser. As stated earlier, integration development / testing is NOT a parallelizable activity and therefore is hurt by the OSS process.
In particular, much of the new work for IE5+ is not just integrating components within the browser but continuing integration within the OS. This will be exceptionally painful to compete aga inst.
Predictions
The contention therefore, is that unlike the Apache and Linux projects which, for now, are quite successful, Netscape's Mozilla effort will:
Produce the dominant browser on Linux and some UNIX's
Continue to slip behind IE in the long run
Keeping in mind that the source code was only released a short time ago (April '98), there is already evidence of waning interest in Mozilla. EXTREMELY unscientific evidence is found in the decline in mailing list volume on Mozilla mailing lists from April to June.
Mozilla Mailing List
April 1998
June 1998
% decline
Feature Wishlist
1073
450
58%
UI Development
285
76
73%
General Discussion
1862
687
63%
Internal mirrors of the Mozilla mailing lists can be found on http://egg.Microsoft.com/wilma/lists
{ Heh. The `egg' machine, it turns out, is a Linux box. }
Apache
History
Paraphrased from http://www.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html
In February of 1995, the most popular server software on the Web was the public domain HTTP daemon developed by NCSA, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. However, development of that httpd had stalled after mid-1994, and many webmasters had developed their own extensions and bug fixes that were in need of a common distribution. A small group of these webmasters, contacted via private e-mail, gathered together for the purpose of coordinating their changes (in the form of "patches"). By the end of February `95, eight core contributors formed the foundation of the original Apache Group. In April 1995, Apache 0.6.2 was released.
During May-June 1995, a new server architecture (code-named Shambhala) was developed which included a modular structure and API for better extensibility, pool-based memory allocation, and an adaptive pre-forking process model. The group switched to this new server base in July and added the features from 0.7.x, resulting in Apache 0.8.8 (and its brethren) in August.
Less than a year after the group was formed, the Apache server passed NCSA's httpd as the #1 server on the Internet.
Organization
The Apache development team consists of about 19 core members plus hundreds of web site administrators around the world who've submitted a bug report / patch of one form or another. Apache's bug data can be found at: http://bugs.apache.org/index.
A description of the code management and dispute resolution procedures followed by the Apache team are found on http://www.apache.org:
Leadership:
There is a core group of contributors (informally called the "core") which was formed from the project founders and is augmented from time to time when core members nominate outstanding contributors and the rest of the core members agree.
Dispute resolution:
Changes to the code are proposed on the mailing list and usually voted on by active members -- three +1 (yes votes) and no -1 (no votes, or vetoes) are needed to commit a code change during a release cycle
Strengths
Market Share!
Apache far and away has #1 web site share on the Internet today. Possession of the lion's share of the market provides extremely powerful control over the market's evolution.
In particular, Apache's market share in web server space presents the following competitive hurdles:
Lowest common denominator HTTP protocol -- slows our ability to extend the protocol to support new applications
Breathe more life into UNIX -- Where Apache goes, Unix must follow.
3rd Party Support
The number of tools / modules / plug-ins available for Apache has been growing at an increasing rate.
Weaknesses
Performance
In the short run, IIS soundly beats Apache on SPECweb. Moving further, as IIS moves into kernel and takes advantage deeper integration with the NT, this lead is expected to increase further.
Apache, by contrast, is saddled with the requirement to create portable code for all of its OS environments.
HTTP Protocol Complexity & Application services
Part of the reason that Apache was able to get a foothold and take off was because the HTTP protocol is so simple. As more and more features become layered on top of the humble web server (e.g. multi-server transaction support, POD, etc.) it will be interesting to see how the Apache team will be able to keep up.
ASP support, for example is a key driver for IIS in corporate intranets.
IBM & Apache
Recently, IBM announced it's support for the Apache codebase in its WebSphere application server. The actual result of the press furor is still unclear however:
IBM still ships and supports both Apache and Domino's GO web server
IBM's commitment appears to be:
Helping Apache port to strategic IBM platforms (AS/400, etc.)
Redistributing Apache binaries to customers who request Apache support
Support for Apache binaries (only if they were purchased through IBM?)
IBM has developers actively participating in Apache development / discussion groups.
IBM is taking a lead role in optimizing Apache for NT
Other OSS Projects
Some other OSS projects:
Gimp -- http://www.gimp.org -- Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an OSS project to create an Adobe Photoshop clone for Unix workstations. Feature-wise, however, their version 1.0 project is more akin to PaintBrush.
WINE / WABI -- http://www.wine.org -- Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is an OSS windows emulation library for UNIX. Wine competes (somewhat) with Sun's WABI project which is non-OSS. Older versions of Office, for example, are able to run in WINE although performance remains to be evaluated.
{ This URL is wrong. See www.winehq.com. }
PERL -- http://www.perl.org -- PERL (Practical Evaluation and Reporting Language) is the defacto standard scripting language for all Apache web servers. PERL is very popular on UNIX in particular due to its powerful text/string manipulation and UNIX's reliance on command line administration of all functionality.
BIND --http://www.bind.org -- BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon) is the de facto DNS server for the Internet. In many respects, DNS was developed on top of BIND.
Sendmail -- http://www.sendmail.org -- Sendmail is the #1 share mail transfer agent on the Internet today.
Squid -- >http://www.squid.org -- Squid is an OSS Proxy server based on the ICP protocol. Squid is somewhat popular with large international ISPs although it's performance is lacking.
{ This URL is wrong. See http://squid.nlanr.net. }
SAMBA -- http://www.samba.org -- SAMBA provides an SMB file server for UNIX. Recently, the SAMBA team has managed to reverse engineer and develop an NT domain controller for UNIX as well. SGI employs one of the SAMBA leads. http://www.sonic.net/~roelofs/reports/linux-19980
KDE -- http://www.kde.org -- "K" Desktop Environment. Combines integrated browser, shell, and office suite for Unix desktops. Check out the screen shots at: http://www.kde.org/kscreenshots.html andhttp://www.kde.org/koffice/index.html.
Majordomo -- the dominant mail list server on the Internet is writtenentirely in PERL via OSS.
Microsoft Response
In general, a lot more thought/discussion needs to put into Microsoft's response to the OSS phenomena. The goal of this document is education and analysis of the OSS process, consequently in this section, I present only a very superficial list of options and concerns.
Product Vulnerabilities
Where is Microsoft most likely to feel the "pinch" of OSS projects in the near future?
Server vs. Client
The server is more vulnerable to OSS products than the client. Reasons for this include:
Clients "task switch" more often -- the average client desktop is used for a wider variety of apps than the server. Consequently, integration, ease-of-use, fit & finish, etc. are key attributes.
Servers are more task specific -- OSS products work best if goals/precedents are clearly defined -- e.g. serving up commodity protocols
Commodity servers are a lower "commitment" than clients -- Replacing commodity servers such as file, print, mail-relay, etc. with open source alternatives doesn't interfere with the end-user's experience. Also, in these commodity services, a "throw-away" "experimental" solution will often by entertained by an organization.
Servers are professionally managed -- This plays into OSS's strengths in customization and mitigates weaknesses in lack of end-user ease of use focus.
Capturing OSS benefits -- Developer Mindshare
The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale.
{ That is, Microsoft is being both out-thought and out-marketed by Open Source -- and knows it! }
How can Microsoft capture some of the rabid developer mindshare being focused on OSS products?
Some initial ideas include:
Capture parallel debugging benefits via broader code licensing -- Be more liberal in handing out source code licenses to NT to organizations such as universities and certain partners.
Provide entry level tools for low cost / free -- The second order effect of tools is to generate a common skillset / vocabulary tacitly leveraged by developers. As NatBro points out, the wide availability of a consistent developer toolset in Linux/UNIX is a critical means of implicitly coordinating the system.
Put out parts of the source code -- try to generate hacker interest in adding value to MS-sponsored code bases. Parts of the TCP/IP stack could be a first candidate. OshM points out, however that the challenge is to find some part of MS's codebase with a big enough Noosphere to generate interest.
Provide more extensibility -- The Linux "enthusiast developer" loves writing to / understanding undocumented API's and internals. Documenting / publishing some internal API's as "unsupported" may be a means of generating external innovations that leverage our systems investments. In particular, ensuring that more components from more teams are scriptable / automatable will help ensure that power users can play with our components.
{ How curious. This paragraph only makes sense if Microsoft has "undocumented internal APIs" to document. Didn't Microsoft executives testifying in a federal restraint-of-trade lawsuit deny this under oath in 1995? I wonder if perjury charges might be in order... A former Microserf tells me that Microsoft departments see themselves almost as separate organizations. Parallel (and competitive) software development spurs both groups onward. The 'surviving' product is then what MS releases. This internal adversarial approach is taken so far that many crucial components do not have documented APIs -- primarily to ensure that the Dev team is not broken up and moved to other projects. MS is protected against perjury charges by the simple fact that their APIs are not even documented for internal MS use, so they are not holding anything back from competitors. }
Creating Community/Noosphere. MSDN reaches an extremely large population. How can we create social structures that provide network benefits leveraging this huge developer base? For example, what if we had a central VB showcase on Microsoft.com which allowed VB developers to post & published full source of their VB projects to share with other VB developers? I'll contend that many VB developers would get extreme ego gratification out of having their name / code downloadable from Microsoft.com.
Monitor OSS news groups. Learn new ideas and hire the best/brightest individuals.
Capturing OSS benefits -- Microsoft Internal Processes
What can Microsoft learn from the OSS example? More specifically: How can we recreate the OSS development environment internally? Different reviewers of this paper have consistently pointed out that internally, we should view Microsoft as an idealized OSS community but, for various reasons do not:
Different development "modes". Setting up an NT build/development environment is extremely complex & wildly different from the environment used by the Office team.
Different tools / source code managers. Some teams use SLM, other use VSS. Different bug databases. Different build processes.
No central repository/code access. There is no central set of servers to find, install, review the code from projects outside your immediate scope. Even simply providing a central repository for debug symbols would be a huge improvement. NatBro:
"a developer at Microsoft working on the OS can't scratch an itch they've got with Excel, neither can the Excel developer scratch their itch with the OS -- it would take them months to figure out how to build & debug & install, and they probably couldn't get proper source access anyway"
Wide developer communication. Mailing lists dealing with particular components & bug reports are usually closed to team members.
More component robustness. Linux and other OSS projects make it easy for developers to experiment with small components in the system without introducing regressions in other components: DavidDs:
"People have to work on their parts independent of the rest so internal abstractions between components are well documented and well exposed/exported as well as being more robust because they have no idea how they are going to be called. The linux development system has evolved into allowing more devs to party on it without causing huge numbers of integration issues because robustness is present at every level. This is great, long term, for overall stability and it shows."
The trick of course, is to capture these benefits without incurring the costs of the OSS process. These costs are typically the reasons such barriers were erected in the first place:
Integration. A full-time developer on a component has a lot of work to do already before trying to analyze & integrate fixes from other developers within the company.
Iterative costs & dependencies. The potential for mini-code forks between "scratched' versions of the OS being used by one Excel developer and "core" OS used by a different Excel developer.
Extending OSS benefits -- Service Infrastructure
Supporting a platform & development community requires a lot of service infrastructure which OSS can't provide. This includes PDC's, MSDN, ADCU, ISVs, IHVs, etc.
The OSS communities "MSDN" equivalent, of course, is a loose confederation of web sites with API docs of varying quality. MS has an opportunty to really exploit the web for developer evangelization.
Blunting OSS attacks
Generally, Microsoft wins by attacking the core weaknesses of OSS projects.
De-commoditize protocols & applications
OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
David Stutz makes a very good point: in competing with Microsoft's level of desktop integration, "commodity protocols actually become the means of integration" for OSS projects. There is a large amount of IQ being expended in various IETF working groups which are quickly creating the architectural model for integration for these OSS projects.
{ In other words, open protocols must be locked up and the IETF crushed in order to ``de-commoditize protocols & applications'' and stop open-source software.
A former Microserf adds: only half of the reason MS sends people to the W3C working groups relates to a desire to improve RFC standards. The other half is to give MS a sneak peak at upcoming standards so they can "extend" them in advance and claim that the `official' standard is `obsolete' when it emerges around the same time as their `extension'.
Once again, open-source advocates' best response is to point out to customers that when things are ``de-commoditized'', vendors gain and customers lose. }
Some examples of Microsoft initiatives which are extending commodity protocols include:
DNS integration with Directory. Leveraging the Directory Service to add value to DNS via dynamic updates, security, authentication
HTTP-DAV. DAV is complex and the protocol spec provides an infinite level of implementation complexity for various applications (e.g. the design for Exchange over DAV is good but certainly not the single obvious design). Apache will be hard pressed to pick and choose the correct first areas of DAV to implement.
{ What wonderful, scathing irony! Four days after Halloween I hit the net, Greg Stein (an ex-Microserf, no less) announced working HTTP-DAV support for Apache as open-source software. }
Structured storage. Changes the rules of the game in the file serving space (a key Linux/Apache application). Creates a compelling client-side advantage which can be extended to the server as well.
MSMQ for Distributed Applications. MSMQ is a great example of a distributed technology where most of the value is in the services and implementation and NOT in the wire protocol. The same is true for MTS, DTC, and COM+.
Make Integration Compelling -- Especially on the server
The rise of specialty servers is a particularly potent and dire long term threat that directly affects our revenue streams. One of the keys to combating this threat is to create integrative scenarios that are valuable on the server platform. David Stutz points out:
The bottom line here is whoever has the best network-oriented integration technologies and processes will win the commodity server business. There is a convergence of embedded systems, mobile connectivity, and pervasive networking protocols that will make the number of servers (especially "specialist servers"??) explode. The general-purpose commodity client is a good business to be in - will it be dwarfed by the special-purpose commodity server business?
System Management. Systems management functionality potentially touches all aspects of a product / platform. Consequently, it is not something which is easily grafted onto an existing codebase in a componentized manner. It must be designed from the start or be the result of a conscious re-evaluation of all components in a given project.
Ease of Use. Like management, this often must be designed from the ground up and consequently incurs large development management cost. OSS projects will consistently have problems matching this feature area
Solve Scenarios. ZAW, dial up networking, wizards, etc.
Client Integration. How can we leverage the client base to provide similar integration requirements on our servers? For example, MSMQ, as a piece of middleware, requires closely synchronized client and server codebases.
Middleware control is critical. Obviously, as servers and their protocols risk commoditization higher order functionality is necessary to preserve margins in the server OS business.
Organizational Credibility
Release / Service pack process. By consolidating and managing the arduous task of keeping up with the latest fixes, Microsoft provides a key customer advantage over basic OSS processes.
Long-Term Commitments. Via tools such as enterprise agreements, long term research, executive keynotes, etc., Microsoft is able to commit to a long term vision and create a greater sense of long term order than an OSS process.
Other Interesting Links
http://www.lwn.net/ -- summarizes the weeks events in Linux development world.
Slashdot -- http://slashdot.org/ -- daily news / discussion in the OSS community
http://www.linux.org
http://www.opensource.org
http://news.freshmeat.net/ -- info on the latest open source releases & project updates
Acknowledgments
Many people provided, datapoints, proofreading, thoughtful email, and analysis on both this paper and the Linux analysis:
Nat Brown
Jim Allchin
Charlie Kindel
Ben Slivka
Josh Cohen
George Spix
David Stutz
Stephanie Ferguson
Jackie Erickson
Michael Nelson
Dwight Krossa
David D'Souza
David Treadwell
David Gunter
Oshoma Momoh
Alex Hopman
Jeffrey Robertson
Sankar Koundinya
Alex Sutton
Bernard Aboba
Revision History
Date
Revision
Comments
8/03/98
0.95
8/10/98
0.97
Started revision table
Folded in comments from JoshCo
8/11/98
1.00
More fixes, printed copies for PaulMa review
Table of Contents
Halloween Documents Home Page
Halloween II: Linux OS Competitive Analysis: The Next Java VM?
Halloween III: Microsoft's reaction on the "Halloween Memorandum" (sic)
Halloween IV: When Software Things Were Rotten: Vinod Vallopillil's boss calls us "Robin Hood and his merry band." We return the compliment.
Halloween V: The FUD Begins!: The Sheriff of Nottingham rides again. In this exciting episode, the things he doesn't say are more interesting than the things he does.
Halloween VI: The Fatal Anniversary: First Mindcraft, now the Gartner Group-Microsoft leaves a trail of shattered credibility behind it.
Before emailing or phoning me with a question about these documents, please read the Halloween Documents Frequently-Asked Questions.
Links to press coverage
opensource.org home page
Fahrenheit Entertainment, Sunncomm and the RIAA have announced a lawsuit filed against Ira Rothken of The Rothken Law Firm and his unnamed client for attempted circumvention of a copy protection device. Attorneys for the plantiff claim that by attempting to use litigation to remove a copy protection method the defendant is effectively circumventing that method and thus in violation of the DMCA. They also argue that if their clients were forced to identify products protected by this device it would weaken the effectiveness of the device and could ultimately lead to circumvention; therefore the defendant should be liable for contributory circumvention of a copy protection device.
The RIAA was not available for comment, but the FBI has raided the offices of The Rothken Law Firm on a sealed warrant in search of evidence.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Sir, I would like you to slurp on my happy pole while fist your mother with both hands. Then you should put both of my big cheese encrusted balls in your mouth and gargle. If you are interested, please meet me at the nacho stand.
Perhaps CDNOW could add a "Copy-Protected?" field in the searchable database. Then we could all de-select it (like some de-select Katz) and know that the CDs we buy are, in fact, real.
sulli
RTFJ.
I recently picked up Travis' new CD: The Invisible Band. Guess what, it's copyprotected too! I have half a mind to strip the songs via "other" methods and return it to the store saying that it won't play in my CD player.
Pretty bad when you are trying to support a cool band and they end up shooting you in the back.
The judge could aware punitive damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is over and above the compensatory damages (which could include not only the original purchase price, but legal fees, lost wages while in court, etc.)
Besides, some lawsuits happen because someone feels that there is an injustice in the world, not out of some sense of personal greed. If you don't understand this, ask some of your Democratic friends to explain it to you.
(Not to right-wing moderators: I have 50 Karma points, so I can afford to lose two or three for being honest here.)
RIAA: All your rights after you bought this cd are belong to us.
.jpg because of pr0n pics are being traded.
Fahrenheit: Someone set us up the worst idea ever.
Consumer: Main screen turn on [then enter my SS#, then my DOB, then my mothers maiden name, then my biometric information]
RIAA Again: Gentelman... all your standards are belong to no one
-=Nothing useful to post, just want to let you know=-
Actually I 99.9% agree with the case against napster and I can't believe I'm downloading unsaid music videos now, but this is out of control.
Trying to kill the mp3 format because of P2P is like trying to kill
Lets all switch to our own formats that only our own computers can read... fu** everyone! Like Bush said yesterday, scared people build walls, confident people tear them down [not his line, of course]
Get your Unix fortune now!
I'm worried that all the recording companies will do is add in the fine print at the bottom of the back side cover that says something like "This CD is protected by the use of the FairUseSucks System and may not play on computers without entering personal information. Please visit www.weownj00.com for our privacy policy; opening of this package indicates your agreement to this policy". Bingo, they have just gotten out of a lawsuit.
At this point, one would then need to envoke the infamous time-shifting case to fight back for fair use.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
That is what they are really doing. ALOT of people buy cd so they can use them in their car and computer. They are selling what is thought to be a regular cd when it is really an "crippled" version of a cd. That is really what is going on here. I hope she wins
What can we do about this? We can support companies who make CD-ROM drives that are not affected by the protection. (Several of these have been "discovered" recently.) We can lobby Congress and ask for a bill that gives us our fair use rights again. We can buy a $30 Discman clone and use that to play CDs, like in the good old days. There's no easy answer, but to paraphrase the old cliche, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
-all dead homiez
The solution to this is really easy enough- Don't buy any cd that you know uses this technology. Ifyou buy one by mistake, return it, and write a letter to the record company telling them exactly why you will never purchase product from them again. I recently went through a similar experience when a flawed copy protection scheme went bad- I could no longer use the software I had purchased legitmately. I had to get a cracked version for a while (which was hassle free btw.)I ended up politely ranting at the CFO of the copy protection software company. Granted the CFO of Time-Warner might not drop you an email,but sooner or later they will drop stupid sh*t like this when they realize that people will not buy a flawed product.
my all out orgy with your sister, George W and a goat named Maisy.
I noticed the complaint letter doesnt list a dollar amount for damages. This is good because the defendants wont be able to offer a cash settlement very easily, like in many other cases. The woman here wants them to fix the problems for the better of the public and doesnt appear to want money in return.
Reminds of a case several years ago when families were suing automakers for problems with airbags killing loved ones. People were suing for tremendoesly large cash settlements, and getting them, but the airbag problems were going unchecked, as newer cars still had the same problem. One man (who himself was a lawyer) lost his wife in an accident because of the airbag in one of those newer vehicles. He sued, but emphasized that settlement would only be reached if the auto makers fixed the airbag problems and refused cash settlements. The judge ruled in his favor and ordered the automaker to repair the problem.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
The real damage here, is that being done to his reputation among his listeners.
Not that I was likely to do so anyway, but knowing that his recent CD's are broken would give me a strong inclination not to buy them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
how am I supposed to listen to one of these copy-protected CDs? I only own 1 CD player other than my PC, it's a 4yr old portable. I know I'm not alone here.
We are all saying that the disc wasn't labeled correctly to show the end user that it was fu**ed, but what about the Audio Compact Disc Label?
The label that all CDs carry if they are using the standard shouldn't be on this disc.
This isn't an audio CD if it doesn't play in my car, dvd player, sega dreamcast, etc.
So, does it have that label? And if it does can't philips (or sony?) sue them?
Get your Unix fortune now!
The judge might award the lady for damages ensued, all $17.99 of it...
Next time just return it please...
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Could it be possible that if you do not install their software and then call for a regular windoze cd player it would work as on a regular sound system's CD player?
If people just try to click on a data and audio CD that got a AUTORUN.INF only the promotional software will run.
Am I dumb or what?
CDNOW says: One non-musical caveat: The CD is copy-protected, and cannot be played by anything but a standard audio player. If you wish to use your computer to listen to the music that you purchased on CD, you'll have to go to the website of the company providing the protection technology and download, one at a time, Windows Media file versions of the 15 tracks (and if you own a Mac, you're simply out of luck). Intellectual property holders have legitimate concerns about piracy these days, but this is a ham-handed and unjustifiable response to the problem So it will play on a standard audio CD player. How long before CD-Drive manufacturers add a "pure audio" mode to drives?
Day One
"Hi, I bought this CD yesterday but cannot get it to play on my PC at home. The other CD I bought yesterday plays fine, so this must be defective. Can I get a replacement?"
Day Two
"Hi, I got this replacement for a CD that wouldn't play on my PC yesterday and this one seems bad, too. Might be a bad production run of CD's. Can I try another?"
Rinse well, repeat as necessary until all CD's of that recording are sent back to label marked "defective".
Next will come registering DVD movies. Then web-enabled devices such as game stations. Eventually anything with a microchip and the potential of connecting to a network will require registration.
Imagine registering your web-enable toaster before getting your toasted Pop-Tarts.
--- igiveup ---
Anyone who is active in EFF / CAFE involved in this yet? (sheepishly -- I pitch in with $$)
...in this lawsuit was, I'm sure, working up the gumption to admit that she actually bought a Charley Pride album. Shudder.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The replies are redundant and predictable:
- "If I can hear it, I can copy it."
- "This will be cracked within minutes."
- "I am boycotting the RIAA, I will not buy any more music CD's."
ummm that is "*BSD is dying troll found dead at Studio 54"
> it makes me a touch ill that included in the lawsuit is
> the fact that the encoded version of the CD is NOT mp3.
This is a bit of an overextension of what was said. The gist of the suit (on this point) is that due to the fact that the CD is unplayable in a computer's CD-ROM drive, they decided to provide encoded files that the purchaser can download to listen to on the PC (a good thing). However, their encoding on those audio files is proprietary (a bad thing, since they can't be used on a personal MP3 player) and they require entry of much personal information to get the files (a very bad thing) and they don't bother to tell anyone about this issue before they buy the CD (a very, very bad thing). She's not insisting that the company make the files available in MP3 format. They are (by the wording of the suit) allowed to do just what they did. The reason for her suit is that they didn't notify her that they were doing any of it, and because of it she was unable to make an informed decision about whether she wanted to buy the CD in the first place.
Virg
Deceptive practices indeed!
I think this is a worthwhile fight to have, and might even be inclined to donate my lunch money to help this "cause."
(Now, my drinkin' money, on the other hand, is sacred. The only cause that goes to is getting me drunk. But I'm sure I can do without a few lunches, to "fight the good fight"...)
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
sue the bastards for thinking they can seripticiously do anything they want because they so big and bad....
-teknopurge
TechieNews Network help us beta!!!!
Website Hosting
Come on...she is not being FORCED to register nor is information being collected without her information. This is not like, e.g. companies violating their stated privacy policies. Moreover there is likely no representation that the CD will play on a computer 'anonymously'. At BEST she should be entitled to a refund. I'll this woman doesn't even listen to Charlie Pride. If ever I could imagine a frivolous lawsuit, this is it. Wonder why I don't here the slashbots squawking their usual song about frivolous lawsuits ?
Really?
Think of this: if you went to the record store and told them that you dropped and broke your CD, here are the pieces and the receipts, and could they please replace it - do you think they'd give you a new CD? Or would they laugh you out of the store? Suddenly, it looks like you bought something physical after all, and not the license to listen to the music on the CD, doesn't it...?
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
I'm a right-wing nut (libertarian, actually), but I agree with the principles behind this suit. If the company implies that you can download music from the CD, you should be able to and without restrictions.
Right-wing nuts believe in honesty in business, and that's what this case amounts to.
D
How much sound quality would be lost if one plugged the "out" on a moderatly good stereo into the "in" on a moderatly good sound card and recorded that way? The sound is going from digital to analog and back to digital, but it's never leaving the wires. As long as one made a "master" copy at full sampling rate, then made one's recordings from that, I would not think you'd loose much.
I'm just curious, because all these protection schemes seem to leave out the idea of a direct, hardware to hardware, copy being made, once the "appoved" player has decoded the sound. Since most decent sound systems are component systems, I don't see them removing the "out" from stereos, and since more and more people are playing with amatur video editing, I don't see them getting rid of the "in" on sound cards, so all of this is really kinda futile. At least that is how it seems to me, I might be missing something.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
If the clerk asks what is wrong, you tell them your only cd player is your computer cdrom and your cd program can't play it. If they press further, you prefer a cdplayer program with a buffer and the music is noisy and distorted with it turned on.
People go out of your way to test the unmutilated status of audio cd's you buy. If it won't rip, it is broken, return it.
Just because people listen to country dosn't mean we shouldn't stand up for them.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
The only person in the world that bought the CD is suing. That's gonna drive the cost of his next recording up.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
That would have been much funnier if you had used the right abbreviation. Zero out of three tries, even.
DMCA DMCA DMCA Digital DMCA DMCA DMCA Millennium DMCA DMCA DMCA Copyright DMCA DMCA DMCA Act DMCA DMCA DMCA
Use a CD player with digital out and a sound card with digital input.
If the CD carries the "compact disc - digital audio" logo which you see on most CD cases, and so does the drive, then it should work without all this crap.
The record company is in direct violation of this. This is one they want us to forget.
My CD-ROM tray is empty, a victim of a broken record in-dus-try
I bought Charlie Prides latest, but it wasn't like a regular C-D
The wrappin said nothin' about this copyright protection scheme
oh, this is worse than my wife leavin' me
you see these companies suing geeks and fucking them. and you wonder why nobody ever fights back well (with exception to Felten, and if I am forgetting somebody else, I'm seriously sorry.)
I think the majority of geeks out there don't care to expend money on a lawyer and start suing companies back. It's your $10 vs their $1000.
But now this battle is hitting the mainstream. I'm not accusing the plaintiff in this case of being what I am about to describe, but this is just something I thought of.
There are plenty of people on welfare or otherwise who sue at the slightest thing (mcdonalds coffee trash, plenty of smaller things) and really have nothing better to do than spend their check on overprices cheap consumer goods and get drunk all day. To fund this, they bring lame lawsuits to court with lawyers who work on commission or something. Now these people are going to be hitting the courts to mess with these big companies. And these people really don't have anything better to do than sue and bug their lawyer all day about the status of the case. So then there will be a large army of people suing these stupid companies that are trying to push us around, hopefully.
At least these people will be giving back to society for once.
trying to sneak this sort of crap past consumers.
.
Well there you have the *real* crux of the problem. When see your involvement in this world, and the art you appreciate, as a function of being a consumer then they have you. When you stop to realize, that you are allowing your community, your government to enforce/condone and prosecute based on these kinds of fascist-business laws (intellectual property laws in general) you are in for a very serious uphill battle.
These publishing houses, *MUST* be made accountable to the public they wish to serve. They must not collude (RIAA) to abridge the rights of citizens.
If you think that your 'voting with your dollars' will make change - forget it. This is the way the USA presently works, and it really only works if you have *LOTS AND LOTS* of dollars. Otherwise you have no rights - your rights only exist in relation to your function in the economy.
Thats just plain wrong. The USA is a Plutocracy, and crap like this (extortion of people in the marketplace) is allowed to persist - you can forget about any 'human rights' and Really start considering yourself a consumer instead of a citizen
Whats my point? Please dont call yourself a "consumer", and dont call me a "consumer" when you do so you give up your power in the struggle, you accept the pretence (above) as being the frame of debate (the 'playing field' or 'perspective') to those who will justify this type of corporate action in the name of 'free markets' (etc), and you re-enforce the myriad of propaganda-enforced memes and words used in your culture. The last 15 years the USA has been bombarded with images/language and crap that tells its citizens they are 'consumers' their involvment in the world around them is embodied in the way they shop - this is a terribly impotent position. When faced with the power struggle that is described in this article, the corporate interests will *always* be served when you accept the master|corporation|king|church - slave|consumer|fife|congregation relationship.
If you think it dosnt matter; your wrong, go read some Chomsky.
I hate to shop at Radio Shack b/c of the fact that they ask for my private information and seem to feel it is their god given right to have it
Your experiences with Radio Shack must be very different from mine. They have never acted toward me like it was their god-given right to know my name and address. They do ask me, and I find the question somewhat annoying, but I Just Say No and they never press the issue. I see Radio Shack as being no different than the neighborhood drug dealers. They're just soliciting; they're not forcing me. As long as they don't try to "make me an offer I can't refuse", I don't have a problem with them. I disagree with them, but they're not hurting me, so we don't have a real problem.
So if you ever go back to Radio Shack and buy something and they want your address, or if a guy at the bus stop asks you if you're "looking for anything", Just Say No. It might work for you. It always works for me.
Because if so, you have just commited a serious crime. One that is punishable by heavy duty jail time. By linking to a web site which distributed circumvention technology, you are just as guilty as the criminals who are distributing the circumvention tech. At least according to the precedent set in the 2600 lawsuit.
What if a computer CD-ROM drive is the only means you have of playing an audio CD? Is it then your fault that you cannot use your purchased CD?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I've seen alot of posts saying "Alright! The average Joe is finally becoming aware of copyright abuses!" which may or may not be true in this case. When the problem finally affected her personally, she took matters into her own hands. Kudos to her in either case, because the more things like this happen, the more challenged the legitimacy(*cough*) of the DMCA becomes. Now we gotta wait till the next Britney Spears CD or the next Limp Bizkit CD gets this copy protection crap on it, because then we'll see some REAL outcry... maybe that's why the chose Charley Pride: his CD would be a good test-case without angering a large segment of the demographic.
"Cut word lines. Cut music lines. Smash the control images. Smash the control machine." - William S. Burroughs
Then, "do you have yet?"
"a what?"
She then handed me a bag with a cue-cat in it . . . just a couple of weeks before they folded.
I'd almost forgotten I'd wanted one to manage my library . . .
hawk
-Dave
could they have possibly made this
article
harder on my eyes to read? damn.
I think we'll see more of this in the next few months. It may anger some people, but most will probably just enter the info like a bunch of sheep. So the publishers will give it a try, and see how far they can push the limits on this one. i had the same problem with a Sex in the City DVD lately. I tried to play it on my laptop, but it wouldn't work without installing a program, and entering personal information. BTW, the program fucked up my computer. i had to reinstall the whole OS. One thing's for sure- I'll never buy from the publisher of that disk again.
> Hell, I hate to shop at Radio Shack b/c of the fact that they ask for my private information and seem to feel it is their god given right to have it.
/. in the real world.
So don't give it. When they ask for your name, reply with: Cash Customer
Address:
Kind of like applying the anonymous coward concept from
Just another mad yank trying to sue someone... where's the news?
-- Mike
1) Play with standard CD player.
2) Run output to a good reel to reel deck (can be as high or higher quality than a CD, so losses are minimized).
3) Run back into soundcard and encode as desired... burn a real CD, even.
Not that anyone does this, but it could be done.
Is your band's music on the internet? If so, where? If not, why not? I'm a bit curious, since it doesn't seem that too many "amateur" bands are posting their music this way and having them do so would be a good argument against the all-out attack on the mp3 format.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We DO have the RIGHT to TRAVEL.
2 .html
http://www.ptialaska.net/~swampy/interest/travel_
You can find more links via google : q=right+to+travel
When you "buy" software, you are actually purchasing the license, aka permission, to use it.
Similiarly, if you have a "driver's license" that means you DO NOT own your car.
This record company should be made an example of - someone with very high-end audio equipment should record the full contents of this CD, encode them, and ACTIVELY distribute them on the net.
The fact that the music is crap shouldn't stop us. Let's make this the most pirated CD in history.
I'm sure someone will be twisted enough to try that tack- and you're going to be sorry you mentioned it even in jest!
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It has been nine months since the election
It has been eight months since the supreme court made their decision.
Get over it. Gore lost. Out of the first two counts Bush has won both. You cannot keep counting until Gore wins one and then say that should be the only one that counts.
Just because you don't like someone doesn't mean that they were not fairly elected.
Take your Michael Moore crap and go back to your delusional little world.
I have a feeling that the little decoder app or whatever you need to download to get the extra stuff on the CD is Windows only.
Great. Not only are we being told that we cannot make legal copies of CDs we purchase, we're being told that we need to use Microsoft Windows in order to utilize the entire CD. That is pure bullshit. *sigh*
All they need to do is be "burnt" once (and there's a LOT of people out there now with PC's using them as CD players (at work and home)) and they'll look for the warning label- just like I and many others do for Aspartame.
They'll see a drop of something like 10-30%, possibly more, probably real quick on their sales if they did that; and that's why they're not even putting it on the packaging in the first place.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
In other news, song swapping reached a record high level on the Internet in August as 3.05-billion files were swapped using various systems. The peak for the "Napster era" was 2.79-billion files, but, of course, the RIAA took care of that problem.
...is how most of you people on slashdot think that the world owes you everything for free. If someone creates something like music, literature, software, etc. and wants to sell it and make money from it that IS legal. What is not legal is copying and distributing this copyrighted material without permission. Hence the term copyright. Just because there was no copy protection on CD's up till recently doesn't mean it was legal to copy and distribute them.
Don't give me your sob stories about I want to use them for myself, etc. I doubt most of you ONLY do that. And if you do what's so horrible about logging on and downloading the files to use?
I respect anybody who wants to give something away for free, but I also have to respect somebody who wants to sell it. If you don't want to pay that price then don't and quit whining.
Considering that the consumer appliance vendors are now selling quite a few home entertainment system solutions that have ONLY a DVD player for playing movies OR music. Those CD's are going to rebound real quick because of that oversight.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Paypal? I saw a site that asked for a donation with Paypal. I was inclined to contribute, but Paypal wanted SO MUCH personal irrelevent information (well beyond what is needed/customarily used for credit card transactions) and wanted to set up a permanent account that was linked my credit card info and I just said forget it. I was willing to do a one time thing. I didn't want personal info andmy credit card info all stored in one place, long term, with a company I have no reason to trust (my default is to DIStrust companies until proven otherwise).
Anway, it is ironic to mention paypal, considering that part of this case involves the privacy aspects of having to turn over personal info to play a song on a PC. Just as Paypal requires you to give them lots of info they hold on to, just to donate $25 to someone.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
IBM and Intel both support Linux, but also support fair-use restriction technologies (which subject one to the DMCA) that hurt Linux.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
hehehehe
Doing an end-run around the Manager popping the CD into a player problem is easy, as someone pointed out earlier- bring a laptop with a good CD or state that you are using the CD playback on your DVD player and insist that he test it on several of those. In most cases, the manager will pull the stuff in a heartbeat if it's not proplerly and prominently (No fine print will go here on that) labeled "Only Audio Player Use" because they don't want to mess with the hassles of customer returns on the product- it eats into his store's margins severely. They will then be bargain binned and/or returned (Usually the latter) at that point.
The problem with the having to waste part of a day to screw this scheme up is not a problem unless you actually LIKE them telling you how and when you're going to listen to the copy of the music that you've bought. It's only a problem if you don't care what they do to you. Standing up against BS of this kind is never convienent. Standing up to things like the this crap, DMCA and UCITA has it's price- if you don't value your freedoms enough to be put out for a little bit, then you don't deserve them.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
when you purchase a CD? I'm a large MiniDisc user, myself. Especially since the advent of MDLP. But lately, at least one out of every ten CDs I pick up has an SCMS copybit, which supposedly makes copying the CD to a MiniDisc impossible. Hell, I /never/ use the CD after the initial MiniDiscing and mp3-encoding. But evidently you aren't /actually/ buying single-user rights to the music contained on the disc. Does anyone know of some sort of EULA by the RIAA? For the time being, I'm glad Sony at least 'includes' little hacks on the players that still manage to let them digitally record CDs, even if there aren't track marks.
Let's not. Charlie Pride sucks ass!
So far, we have been ABLE TO listen to CDs on our computers, etc. Whether this is a RIGHT that we obtain from purchasing a CD is an entirely different issue.
The fact that you have been able to use CDs in this way up until now creates the expectation that this particular new CD (from the same manufacturer) can also be used in this way. The labeling does not do anything to correct the impression.
So the CD violates the "implied warranty of servicibility and fitness" - for the purpose SHE intended when she bought it - and is thus a defective product. Because this was done deliberately, the company has DELIBERATELY shipped a defective product. There's lots of nice stuff in consumer law and case-law about that. B-)
Further, if they put the CD logo on the case (I don't know if they did) it is being advertised as conforming to the Red Book standard - which it obviously does not if the error correction code is not correct. That would be false advertising as well.
Could get VERY interesting.
(IANAL)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
see subject
The shareholder is always right.
What happens when you play a country music song backwards?
Your pickup truck starts working again, your dog comes back to life, and your wife decides to not divorce you.
Let me get this straight:
Now lately, they've added a new twist: They collect information on you when you try to play your CD.
And then you claim to be deceived.
If it's just now that you think you are being deceived, and that the only issue to you is that your CD has some sort of odd protection on it, I'd think that you were more deeply deceived than you think.
Listen to free music. Go to MP3.com, or one of the other various music sites, and download good music. It'll take some sifting, but you'll find it; it's all there.
Learn about propaganda. Learn how it touches your mind. Then steer the hell clear of it! Otherwise, expect more messes like the one you find yourself in.
While you would lose a little bit of quality (as you would converting them to ogg or mp3 anyways) you would have a leagle copy that can be passed on to other people.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
I have several friends who are veterans of the 'big' music industry, and now release their stuff on their own private labels and sell them over the web. They can sell the CD's for less because they cost less when you don't have to pay some old bastard a fat check for him to sit at his desk and sign stuff.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Even then that may not work. Best thing is to always buy CDs from a local (in the same state or within 100 miles of your home) merchant with credit card. If the merchant refuses to refund, then inform your credit card company of the issue and to deduct the charge from your next bill. The credit card company is legally required to do so if the charge exceeds $50. If the card company is going to stand on ceremony with respect to the $50 floor, you could buy several copies of same CD in the same purchase. If one works on your PC, don't unwrap the others, and return them (making sure that unwrapped CDs are returnable under your merchants return policy)
If they all fail, then return them all. This is better, in that if say Tower Records finds themselves frequently eating $50 worth of unsellable (is that a word?) CDs, they'll soon get the hint and either require cash for the copy protected CDs (your hint that to not buy them), provide a warning, or stop selling them.
mp3s sounds like shit. great you can fit 200 songs on a cd, too bad its heavily compressed and very lossy.
you live in the uk or europe right? too bad its not like the US where you can kill someone for stealing your stuff.
Has anyone thought of contacting the big chain stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy and requesting that they not carry these CDs? From the retailer's perspective, these are not good business as a sale may be lost either from people passing over the protected CDs or from people returning the CDs. On top of everything, these guys hate it when a music/movie/software company bullies them around.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Suing is trivial, since the cost of a CD is negligible compared to that of a lawsuit.
However, the company is committing a fraud by marketing a device in stores next to redbook-CDs, not stating that it *ISN'T* of the same standard. The personal information part of it doesn't bother me, it's the fact they didn't state the restrictions. If they said, in a little box in the lower righthand corner, the restrictions, on the outside of the jewel case, then fine. let them do that. Just watch them appear on fuckedcompany next week.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
allows the user the ability to register with the record label and download a proprietary encoding of the song to play on their computer.
Which doesn't help you at all if you're on airplane with a laptop.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Put your damn sig where it belongs... I'm tired of seeing it.
just searching on google for mediacloq brings a lot of articles (1450), so it does not seems to be a fair new system?
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
nt.
Okay... I've looked over this and have a concern about the strength of this suit...
We look at the post at politechbot and it says that "Fahrenheit and Music City never disclosed on the shrink-wrap of certain "impaired" CD(s) that consumers couldn't listen to music on their computers anonymously". Yet there is a statement on the outside plus further info on the inside(as mentioned by bigdavex) though neither spot mentions logging as being required. There IS at least some warning...
The Politechbot post says that it "will not work on standard audio CD players found on millions of personal computers", yet the warning on the outside says that "(i)t is designed to play in stardard Audio CD players only"...
Politechbot says that "electronic music files made available for download pursuant to purchase of its CD are proprietary in nature, that such electronic music files will not work on portable MP3 players". The warning on the outside says that "(l)icensed copies of all music on this CD are available for downloading." There is no statement that the files in question are MP3 format.
While I'm still attempting to bend my mind around the PDF file of the actual suit (lawyerese is not the same as English IMOBO), my concern is that there may have been sufficient errors made by the filing attorney to have his case been fatally flawed from the start. What is to prevent the defendant from failing to have the suit dismissed at the start, and by following through to the end, achieving a favorable precedent for this technology?
The existance of a precendent (which all lawyers just love) makes it that much harder to fight this technology since any future suits against it will see the defendants simply standing up and saying "Your Honor, we have a precedant saying X, this suit is sifficiently similar as to be covered by X, we would like it to be summarily dismissed."
Is there a lawyer out there who can put my fears to rest??
Go to MP3.com
Even MP3 is not pure, read this. I like Fabrik Nos (listening to RantRadio.com), and SteveE makes some good points.
PREMIUM ARTIST SERVICE. That's just bullshit!
Someday, Barnaby.
(Equity Lord? The Diamond Age?)
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
If I were here in person I would beat the living shit out of you, and I don't care who knows it, and fuck karma too.
Goat sex free since 2001
What kind of logic is that? DVD's are not the same format as records - of COURSE it won't work. CD-Rom drives played audio CD's from DAY ONE. This record company is changing the rules saying that CD-ROM drives are no longer allowed to play audio CD's anymore. This is like changing gas so that it only works on passenger cars and minivans, and won't work in SUV's or pickups.
Buying a nice CD at the local music place, possibly listening to it at home (I currently use a Sega Mega CD as a CD player), or listening to it at work (I just bung the CD in a CDROM drive and expect it to start playing), or maybe listening to it on the go (I have an MP3 player that plugs into the bottom of my Ericsson T28) should not be a battle between me and the music companies. If you want to lock down your music, fine, just don't expect me to bother trying to play it. Thus, don't expect me to buy it.
I do exactly the same thing. I BUY ($) a CD, then I make a backup of it. The original that I BOUGHT ($) goes in a box. The backup gets used. Pay attention RIAA, I won't pay for a CD I can't backup. If I can back it up, I will BUY ($) it :)
Summary:
Can Back Up = $
Can't Back u = NO $
I haven't been asked for my personal info at the shack for some time now, but there's a computer store chain in Las Vegas that tried to. I told the clerk he didn't need my address and phone number, and he replied "Well what if there's a problem with the card?" and I said the little card authorizer gizmo will tell him if there is, and no other merchants ever ask me for that information. He disappeared into the back room for a moment, and returned with the news that his manager had approved the sale without collecting the personal info. I said fine, then he tried to make a lame joke, "You're not a criminal, are you?" and I replied, laughing, "No, I am not. Nor am I a customer of yours." And I put down the cable I was going to buy, and put my card back in my wallet.
"But I was just joking!" he said, as I headed for the door. "Yeah I know, but it wasn't funny."
I like to think I made an impression on the PFY running the checkout, but I doubt it.
Edith Keeler Must Die
A curious as it sounds, doesn't it strike you odd that someone would sue over an $18 CD?
Nope. At worst, you'd take it back.
You wouldn't sue because what are the damages? At most, $18.
So it is possible the RIAA is essentially suing themselves to get a particular legal precedent? Are they looking for a judge to say:
"Consumers have no right to expect an MP3 of their CD"
I'm just speculating, but this doesn't add up.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
YOUR A RETARD!
That they're going to be using consumer's computer's without their consent to send out information - to some hard-coded server.
:)
If I ever wanted script-kiddies around, this would be the server I'd want them to take down. When the CD doesn't get a confirmation, does it refuse to play? If so, I'd love to sue for them selling something that's unusuable
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Actually, the fascism comment comes from my thoughts on things that are not necessarily related to the music biz.
However, the mentality that permits more and more of this sort of thing does lead to fascism in my opinion.
This is a deeply held belief and that's why I jumped out at the AC. More politely phrased disagreement I tend to reply to..
The demand that the user identify himself or herself is a little checkpoint, especially when computers are connected to the Internet and the cd can't be played on a cd player.
If this propagates, a known criminal on the run can't listen to his own music collection if it might tip off the police. Or a pirate might get fined off his or her credit card or debit account, like the speeders in the rental car.
The more checkpoints we accept in our daily lives, whether they exist on a computer or at a "sobriety checkpoint," the more fascism we are tolerating in our lives. People who go along with this unthinkingly are at least collaborating with the fascists, because they are a security risk to people who think outside the increasingly tiny legal box.
It's a long conceptual jump from typing your name in to listen to music, to going along with a national ID card/chip. But it's a jump that can happen overnight.
Goat sex free since 2001
No.
Maybe they should have named their company "Fahrenheit 451" instead.
There were a few albums released by BMG in Europe during 2000 that used this protection scheme (one was by Finnish posers HIM, as I recall; the rest was obscure stuff). I was working in a record store at the time, and we had perhaps an 85% returns rate on that album (ie, 17 of 20 people came in and returned it because they either objected on principle or were having problems playing the CD on regular home equipment). BMG eventually re-released most of these albums without the copy protection, and hasn't made any more attempts in that direction that I'm aware of.
Hate to burst your bubble there, but a "wav" file ripped off of a CD is an exact copy a track from that CD. Unless your CD is scratched beyond belief or your ripper is worthless, there will be no loss in quality whatsoever. Any "audiophile" claiming that they can tell the difference between a CD and a "wav" file is full of it. Of course, somebody could come along and point out that you could encode a "wav" file at 8000 Hz, 8-bit, mono -- that would indeed sound worse than a CD (or most MP3's, for that matter), but hey...
Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.
musiccity records OWNS the musiccity network.
I went looking for evidence. The "about this company" pages of musiccity.com and musiccityrecords.com do not mention any affiliation, but the fact that both the label and the network are headquartered in Nashville supports the assertion. Nevertheless, doesn't the availability of Charley Pride's music on the MusicCity Network make this whole issue a moot point?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I say that we all should go out and purchase this CD (or any other "protected" disk), try to play it on all CD audio players in your house/car/work/etc. If it fails on any one of them take it back to the store and demand a new, non broken disk or your money back. Repeat indefinitly(sp).
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
As I understand it, while file swapping is on the rise, so are CD sales!!
Soon the RIAA will wake up to the fact that their precious "right" to collect revenue on their artists' creations is not in jeopardy from song downloading; in fact free downloading exposes more people than ever to new bands and artists.
And the end result will be that file swapping will eventually be accepted by even the RIAA.
I hope.
Oh, fer cryin' out loud, I never said, nor even implied, that !=MP3 is bad and MP3 is good, and I don't want any legal precedent for the particular format for online offerings. That was the point I told the original poster that he/she missed. I couldn't care less what format they offer as long as they say they're doing it. More to the point, I'd rather they just didn't fsck with the CD in the first place, so if I care to I can rip whatever format I please. I don't rip CDs to MP3 to begin with, because I'm an audiophile, but if I went out and bought an MP3 player and then found that a particular CD couldn't be converted to that format (and the company didn't tell me that up front) I'd have a right to be bent out of shape.
Virg