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MS "Software Choice" Campaign: A Clever Fraud
Bruce Perens writes "Microsoft's new "Software Choice" campaign is all for your right to choose... as long as you choose Microsoft. It's too bad that Intel and the U.S. Government couldn't see through the rhetoric. Read the full story at The Register." Note that California will soon be considering - like Peru - a law to mandate open source software in government. The gloves are off - on both sides.
Find out how much money Microsoft has given to California legislators, then look at how much money the Open Source Movement has given and you'll easily figure out how this vote will go.
It'll never reach the floor for a vote.
It's really easy to get hung up on the "Microsoft doesn't get uptight about the idea of patented technologies being in open standards" strawman that gets dragged out every time they launch an initiative.
It's about choice, people, every bit as much as the Open Source camp purports to be. Locking patented technologies out of open standards means that you cannot choose the best technology for a given task because of someone's arbitrary complant about the 'freeness' of a part of it. To me, that's as chilling as saying we must all be locked into proprietary software, and it worries me when I hear the people supposedly on this side of the argument trying to determine my rights for me.
There are no laws mandating free software.
There are considerations for laws blocking out proprietary software.
Big difference, ya know.
Why should entire nations be bound to EULAs and license agreements made by a single company?
That company would be able to dictate national policy in almost all technological and many economical matters.
The worry used to be about separating church and state.
Now we worry about big business and state.
Btw, by your comment "I thought you guys were all about freedom", that heavily implies you are not an OSS supporter.
Do you think "embrace and extend" is the way to go?
What about when Microsoft "embrace and extend"s the next killer app you wrote in your spare time?
I was getting into BEOS, then Be died and took my hope for an excellent OS with it. OpenBeos is making huge strides, and I plan on supporting that with one PC at first, then others as it matures.
My point though is this: I am all for choice. MS could do alot for the industry if they'd actually cooperate with Open Source rather than try and be the Only Source.
OS X is an excellent example of a *nix that is user friendly. Part Open and part closed, it shows that choice isn't about locking you in. Its about inviting you in.
OpenBeos is where its at. :)
that releasing government software under GPL doesn't prevent the authors to also release it under a different license. In much the same way that Trolltech released their software. In this way you can guaranty that the taxpayer can profit without having to pay for it twice and if a software company
would like a different license they can pay for it.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Just a few commnets on "Why so buggy?"
1) Microsoft lets the world know about their problems. Other companies like Sun force customers to sign NDAs before agreeing to fix known critical problems. Of course, the Sun issue was with hardware, but Sun HID the problem.
2) Security *WAS* a low priority compared to features, but that is changing. MS is not a heavy handed beurocracy and many decisions are made by individuals at the bottom of the organizational chart. It takes time for 40,000 programmers to change the way they work, but it is the new high priority. BTW, most of the design for XP was made a year or more before releasing the product.
3) "Trustworthy computing" means that MS will be focusing on both improved quality and improved security, but this could be a 10 year process.
4) W2k and XP are substantially higher quality than Win95...that is a trend that was ignored.
5) Over time, with the Online Crash Analysis, the end user problems that MS hasn't seen in the past will now be seen and fixed.
6) The assumption that money fixes bugs is incorrect. If one programmer works on a piece of code for 5 years and the code is very complex, you can't just hire an additional programmer to jump in and help fix bugs in this complex codebase. There is a time factor involved. Infinite money will not fix even one complex bug instantly.
But there is something that Microsoft says that always bothers me.
Many, including Microsoft, state that "choice" for the producers of software should include a choice between licenses like Free Software and "Microsoft EULA Software". But I find this hard to swallow especially in this context. Free Software and MS-type software are not equivalent choices the way a blue car and a red car are equivalent choices. The MS-type software can potentially give the copyright holder great powers over your computer, your software, your information, and you personally (I almost downloaded MoneyDance the other day, until I noticed the "Arbitrarion clause" where I'd theoretically waive my right to a jury trial. No thanks!). GPL-type software does no such things.
And of course corporate copyright holders will choose the most restrictive licenses, most beneficial to them. Normally this isn't a big problem, because you can avoid the software completely like I did with MoneyDance. For a government "of the people, for the people", however, the government should NOT support any software that limits user's rights beyond copyright law, and should definitely consider granting additional rights. The government should also not implicitly support the "unsigned contract" fallacy of licenses.
Going back to the MoneyDance/arbitration example, let's pretend that you have to buy MoneyDance in order to file your taxes with the government because they won the bid. Now we have the strange situation where the government is basically forcing people to waive some of their constitutionally-granted rights in order to fulfill a constitutionally-authorized responsibility. Not good!
A quote:
Microsoft is trying to force the idea that all licenses are equivalant. In fact they call Free Software a "development model". Something that's only important before the software is handed over to the user. But we know better. Licenses like Microsoft's that attempt to limit use of the software is definitely more than a development model. They affect you every time you start the software (if you assume the license is binding, which you pretty much have to do unless you have a lot of money and lawyers).
The government should choose a license category, just as they can specify any other aspects of the software. And Microsoft could deliver GPL software just as easily as they could deliver MS-EULA software.
Another quote:
Since the copyright, etc., laws are the same for everybody, what Microsoft is saying by "choice of protections" is "choice of licenses".
Bruce didn't disagree with the principle, but I think we have to be careful. By definition, "intellectual property protection" (I assume they mean copyrights and patents specifically) takes away certain freedoms from society. If you want "strong" protection you are saying "give the copyright/patent holders more power to take away more freedom". That shouldn't be in a free society's interests.
In conclusion, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the government to mandate "limits on the limits" of licenses as part of the requirements. In fact it's necessary for them to fulfill their responsibilities to the public. Microsoft's rhetoric makes it seem as if all licenses are completely equivalent. But they're not of course, otherwise why would we be even having this discussion?
You're ranting. How do we know you're ranting? I mean apart from the length and lack of citations? By the tunnel vision.
:)
Consider the fact that the majority of lawyers in Washington DC work for Microsoft
Clearly, this is false. There are far more lawyers in DC than that. Not to mention other lobbyists. Lots of well-heeled entities want to effect government policy. Computers are not the whole ball game. You are in need of a wider focus for your paranoia.
we need to outlaw corporate contributions to campaign parties.
Again, you are thinking too small here. To accomplish what you want, first eliminate corporations as they presently exist. Then eliminate political parties as they presently exist. The root of your problem is wealth concentration.
Fault this description if you can: There exist two organizations in the United States of America whose primary goals are self-perpetuation and the accumulation of political power. Together, they control well over 95% of nationally elected officials, and nearly as high a percentage of state and local office holders. They have written themselves into the tax code so that the money they receive as income is not taxed. No other competitor has been able to seriously challenge either of these groups in almost a century, let alone both combined. They are, hands down, the most powerful and dangerous organizations in the U.S. today. Their names, as you will have guessed, are the Democratic and Republican parties.
For instance, why should political parties be part of the tax system? Much less appear on the tax return form incarnated as a little check box that allows money to be diverted from the taxes you pay to support the programs of the government to a fund for political campaigns? Only the Reps and Dems are large enough to qualify for those funds. Not even the Reform party, large though it was in its heyday, could manage to keep qualified.
Or, on the subject of corporations, why should any human's compensation for an identical length of time worked be more than about 100 times what any other human is paid? That's a fundamentally non-capitalist notion, but lets answer the question anyway. What justifies that? For instance, if a corporation pays its lowest-paid worker $20,000/year, how can anyone, no matter what he does for the corp, be worth >$2,000,000/year?
And another thing, . . . No, I'm getting off on a rant here. I'd bettered stop.
No, not like Peru at all. Had you read the Peruvian congressman's letter you would not have made this mistake. The Peruvian bill clearly calls for free software ("software libre"), not open source. The freedom-minded perspective (what the other movement dismisses so glibly) is of the utmost importance for a proper understanding of the significance of the bill. Congressman Villanueva, the author of the letter to Microsoft and a major backer of bill #1609, understands the difference between the two movements and which is more appropriate for government to back (our government included). Congressman Villanueva takes the time to correct the Microsoft representative when Microsoft tries to slip one by him by referring to "open source". I suggest you read the letter to Microsoft and learn about the difference between the two movements. You might also want to read the Slashdot entry where these issues were discussed at length.
Digital Citizen
Ok, that's reasonable for a registry corruption, but there's still the fact that, as the author states in his article, "The registry file is a single, very vulnerable, point of failure." This is a design flaw, and while you can backup the registry, it's still generally acknowledged as a design flaw that hasn't been corrected. Single points of failure at this level simply shouldn't exist, because they don't need to. The proof is in *NIX, which has it's various config files. Granted, this has its problems too, but those are also design flaws. It's a benefits tradeoff, and your free programs to backup the registry are just workarounds.
Oh, and the "free" that "we all want" is probably free as in Freedom, not as in beer.
You also neglect this technical problem in XP: "If you say no to some of the requests, some functions of Windows XP will not work (such as networking)." If you deny internet access to many components, XP will cease to function properly. Did you notice the long list he had of components that needed 'net access? Windows Media Player!?! That's a technical flaw that's borderline malicious. There is also no technical solution things like "Run DLL as an app" not telling you which DLL needs to be run. These programs should not be calling home unless they need to in order to function properly for the user's benefit. They way they work now is simply frivolous.
There's also that technical problem of the large number of Internet Explorer bugs that remain open. Granted, you can solve these by working around it using Mozilla, but given the massive market share of IE, the requirement that IE be bundled in with every copy of windows, and the general mindshare of IE, I'd say this is a pretty big flaw.
Funny, I don't see Apple mentioned anywhere in the article. Let's talk about Redhat or Debian instead. They don't own much of anything when you update. Neither does FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Hey, for that matter, neither does Apple really. They own nothing. They've given you the source to their entire OS subsystem. There's no clauses in iTunes that give Apple permission to modify the contents of your hard drive without your consent. There's no automatic mac.com registration upon install. Apple's entire marketing message is that the computer empowers the user, and that the user can actually use their computer to be productive. Apple doesn't want control over their users, they honestly want to empower them, which is why they've made OSX the great system that it is. Microsoft, on the other hand, has never shown any leanings in this direction. Honestly, when you look at it, Windows is the only OS in the world that really tries this hard to be owned by someone other than the user.
You acknowledge that the article contains valid points, which is true, but you seem to forget just how valid those points are. I agree with you about the backups, but the registry is still a big issue (especially because most XP users don't even know it exists) and the privacy issues are a major concern. By turning its users in to slaves, Microsoft is hurting everyone, themselves included.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."