Slashdot Mirror
Slides Of Microsoft Anti-GPL Advocacy
An anonymous reader links to these slides outlining Microsoft's position on Free software licenses, in particular the GPL, writing "Regarding the latest memo from MSFT, the current politics is to be against 'copyleft' type licensing... Protecting freedom is fundamental for Free Software and MSFT knows that. They don't want licenses that protect our freedom." Makes an interesting companion piece to the anti-OSS memo mentioned the other day.
What good is this to my lynx browser?
Kidding aside..
It's just a bunch of jpg's on a non MS site. Just pointing out the obvious, what verification do we have these came from M$?
Please tell me and don't mod down, I think I have a very valid question here.
A lot of time, softwares are developed by the Academia and heading straight to the consumer. And those software are usually distributed freely for non-commercial use (sometimes they are free for all).
Apparently the Industry (a.k.a. Micro$oft) want the finding and development to go through the industry first.
One motive: MONEY
Yes, you too can believe anything and everything that is posted on the internet! Especially when someone claims it was created by MSFT! Anyone can whip up some slides, take pictures of them, and post them on a random web site.
Diversity is good, but GPL is the wrong route as it kills diversity.
No, it doesn't kill diversity. It kills MS's "embrace and extend", and *that* kills diversity.
And why should they care about your freedom unless there is money to be made in the process? They are, after all, a business, not a charity.
They want a liscense that protects their freedom to charge for their work!
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
It seems someone at Microsoft has sat down and thought long and hard about this. I'm certainly not one of MS bigger fans, but I think they pretty much got this one right.
Naturally, they don't like the fact that they can't take something under the GPL and integrate into their own products, like they have with BSD-licensed code. And, on some level, they have a very good point about products of research that are released under the GPL. The only value they have to any company working on a closed-source product is as an example, while a BSD-style license would have allowed them to take the existing code and adapt it.
In this aspect, the GPL actually harms interoperability and if the purpose was to give the research results a wide impact, releasing them under the GPL would be counterproductive.
I live under no illusions that all software will one day be open source, and perhaps it would be a good thing for people to think an extra time about the consequences of their choice of license.
For standalone programs, the GPL makes a lot of sense, but perhaps BSD-style licenses are more appropriate for prototypes and example implementations. Perhaps also the operating systems themselves, but that's a harder call.
Slide 1: Title of the presentation with Microsoft logo
Slide 2: The Software Ecosystem
The flow of shared knowledge goes in a circle.
Diagram shows customers to government to academia to industry and back to customers.
Slide 3: The Business of Software
subtitle: Source Code Licensing
another diagram showing the interactions between source code - Core IP on the left and business model with usage rights and binaries on the right. Arrows showing development, support, deployment, and audit connect the two.
Slide 4: The Open Source Software Model:
complex mix of elements
has produced some great software
has both benefits and drawbacks like any model
Diagram showing "development model" surrounded by "philosophy", "business model" and "licensing"
Finally, somebody please mirror these images, the bandwidth on that site is getting sucked dry.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
See, Microsoft is a Big Evil Company. Their interest isn't making money, it's robbing people of their freedom. Withness the Internet Explorer debacle. Microsoft knew that I wasn't going to make them a nickel, but they released it for free so that they could take away our right to someone else's browser. Shit howdy, man, they don't care if they lose every nickel they've got so long as they get to keep robbing us of our rights!
Don't you see, man? They're eeeeevil. So evil that anyone who alleges that they did something evil is automatically right. So evil that when they release good software we must overlook the fact that the software is good and instead focus on how they are bad.
Microsoft operates the world's largest kitten and puppy grinding facility! Fact!
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
here
Bandwidth sponsored by danish research funding...
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
of refusing to give software away for free in order to drive a competitor out of business, and I, for one, applaud them for taking this courageous stance for capitalistic freedoms.
Shoe? Meet other foot.
KFG
> This statement is slashdot idiocy at its finest.
> GPL'd software isn't "free", it comes with strings
> attached. What's wrong with pointing that out?
The GPL is one of the few licences that enforces a user's freedom, rather than the developer's. The BSD licence maintains a developers right to take and use code, the GPL keeps maintains a user's right to look inside the code they are using.
> Microsoft doesn't really need to any help to
> make OSS advocates look stupid, the overeager
> religious zealots do that job just fine.
Microsoft dislikes the GPL so much because it gives freedom to users rather than developers.
We all know MS is bad and they are hard at work on Evil Master Plan v1.0, but where I seriously see Linux going in the next few years is gaining ground on other unix vendors. At my workplace we use AIX and Solaris running Apache and a large number of Java Apps. There is no reason we could not use Linux. I am told making the switch is in the project plan for within the next 5 years.
I am looking forward for linux to become the definitive unix because at that point we can really start inovating and changing the commands we all know and love. For instance, besides for backwards compatability there is really no reason why no two console tools can't support the same set of regular expressions or command line options that are standard (maybe -V is always version and -D is always debug, etc). I'd also love to see something along the line of perl6's attributes for return codes for commands, e.g. after running cvs update it would be cool if it not only returned 0 for success, but if there was some way to tell if it actually updating any files (I know I can do this by parsing its sysout, but I'm trying to make a point that commands could return more complex structures that we could programatically interrograte).
I love grep, sed, bourne shells, and the gang but it would be very cool if the typical command line experience was a little more cohesive.
I've used linux and various unixes for about 5 years now and fee pretty comfortable, but maybe this is where we could really shine.
I realize there are plenty of efforts to modernize shells and command line tools, but I don't forsee them making much ground as if linux was drastically different from what I used at work, it probably we be a plaything at home, rather than a platform for study and to increase my skills.
It seems clear to me that the command line is superior to gui in terms of speed and efficiency for knowledgable users. What I'd like to see now is a set of tools (and shell) without such a drastic learning curve and also without loosing the power that unix has.
And yes, I realize that this is probably an impossible dream as OSS was forged in chaos. But who knows, stranger things have happened.
I'm glad some people finally understand that the battle isn't about markets or choosing a software license, but freedom. All to often people think that free markets are about markets, and not freedom. But just the opposite is true, when a society has healthy freedoms - the markets tend to take care of themselves.
There is an old saying, a nation can't be half slave and half free - but only all slave or all free. Unfortunately, alot of people don't understand this about copyright controlls. They think that choosing a software license is like going to the store and choosing between pears and apples or between painting your room yellow or pink - that it's just about preference. Well, it is not, and it is so fusterating to see how people refuse to consider the long term consequences of their own belief systems.
The simple truth is copyright controlls are untenable without massive free speech restrictions like the DMC0A (and beyond), and information is so easy to manuipulate and change form - that it can't be controlled unless all of it is controlled.
Source Licensing Debate (continued)
Slide 10:
Areas of Concern
Box to the left of text contains 4 boxes saying:
General Public License (GPL)
Ecosystem Health
Commercial Software
Government Policy
Read the interview with a former microsoft developer on kuro5hin for an insight into maybe why this is so.
Executive summary: Microsoft employees are arrogant assholes. (insert sweeping generalization disclaimer here)
Quote from interview: Microsoft constructed an enabling environment for socially obnoxious behavior: it was welcomed and rationalized into positives. If you were late for meetings it meant you were busy doing important work, if you were extremely confrontational it meant you were passionate about your job, if you required subordinates to work long hours it meant you were committed to the product, if you turned down everyone you interviewed it meant you weren't soft, and so on. ... And some of that behavior trickled out into meetings with customers and partners, where they were correctly seen as negatives and helped foster the anti-Microsoft attitude. But since Microsoft kept hiring and promoting obnoxious people, they kept being obnoxious.
Now this is just one former employee's opinion. But in sales meetings I have had with Microsoft, (I'm an IT manager for a 13,000 user college), I've seen the same attitudes.
> ...you don't really have much more freedom than with closed software, infact, in many cases you have much less.
How is this possible? Closed source software never allows you to even see their source code, much less modify or redistribute it. Further, more and more closed source license even limit how you can USE the software. They often don't allow you to even install the program on more than one machine at a time.
The GPL places NO restrictions on how you can use the program. As long as you don't redistribute, you have complete freedom to make any changes to the program to suit your needs. You can make unlimited personal copies and run on all of own machines.
Only when you decide to redistribute a GPL'd program does it limit your freedom. Commercial software never allows you to redistribute it.
So please tell me one instance where a closed source application has even a single freedom that the GPL doesn't already give you.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Okay, maybe I'm dense, but how does your line of reasoning go? The only restrictions I see in the GPL are that 1) You have to make your source available under the GPL if you make a modified version and you choose to distribute that version to the public, and 2) programs that use GPL'ed code fall under the GPL.
That's it. You can use the program on as many machines as you want, give copies to your friends, all legally. You can even make modifications and keep the source to yourself, so long as you also keep the binaries to yourself. There is nothing in there to prevent you from being selfish. Heck, for most purposes you don't even have to accept the license. You can decline the GPL and still use the program all you want, you just can't legally modify it.
Compare this to Microsoft's licensing policies. Let's take a specific example: Windows 98 OEM version. That Windows disc that came with your computer can only be used legally on your computer. If you replace, say, the motherboard, it's not the same computer anymore, and you no longer have the right to use that copy of Windows 98 on any computer at all. Similarly, if you sell the computer that the disc came with and build a new one, you cannot use it on the new computer, even if you wiped the old one clean before you sold it. And there are lots of other restrictions, too -- read through a Microsoft EULA some time. If you actually take the time to understand it, you will find that there are about a zillion restrictions on how you can use the program. And of course you are not allowed to modify it, and couldn't if you wanted to, unless you are a wizardly programmer who can read binaries and reconstruct the original source code from them.
Compare this to the GPL, where there are only those two restrictions, and they only apply to developers. And the GPL is probably the most restrictive open-source license: others, like BSD-style-licenses, or the Zlib license, place effectively no restrictions at all on your use of the program. So, please explain to me: how is it that you have less freedom with open software than with closed?
I must conclude that this AC is a troll. Dang. Oh, well, I've got karma to burn.
First off the number of software companies vs other sectors is really small. I work as a porogrammer / sysadmin at a manufacturing plant. Do we really care if it is bad for microsoft when we use GPL software. No we care about reducing overhead thus lowering the cost of manufacturing thus allowing us to take bigger price cuts on our products while maintaining the same level of profit. Linux makes us competitive in our industry and this is why we use it, religion is not the issue but simple economics is. Furthermore do I want to sit at home each night and write some code for MS so that they might be able to sell it back to me and or overcharge my company for it. No thanks I will choose the GPL!
Got Code?
No the GPL ensures that some slug is not going to compile in my library and try to sell me back my own code. The GPL is my reward in knowing that I not going to be taken advantage of.
Got Code?
To me, the citizen, GLP'd research/programs/code/technology/whatever ensures that imrpovements in the whatever are kept in the public domain, which benefits those of us that made the investment in the whatever in the first place. As a developer, if I'm going to be contributing to an open source project, I'd rather have it be a GPL or LGPL'd one to make sure that my contributions stay with the project and aren't taken into something that I don't approve of. Now if it's something that I'm writing for myself, I'd rather have the option of dual liscencing the project to allow me to choose the best usage for my project at that time, while still keeping it available for others to see and use, as I allow.
Different schemes for different purposes, but if it's public financing that helps create something, then the public should have continuing access to that something inperpituity.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
In the sixth slide, it says that the GPL is 'Known in the OSS community as a "viral" license.'
Totally regardless of whether or not the GPL is viral, isn't this the description that Microsoft came up with?
I'm confused. Who first described the GPL as viral? MS? RMS? Somebody else?
Also here.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
What makes you think that I want you to have my code in your closed source project. I could give a rats ass if you like my choice in licensing. It is my code not yours, if I want to use the GPL then by god I will use the GPL.
Got Code?
At my workplace we ... run[ning] . . . a large number of Java Apps. There is no reason we could not use Linux.
My understanding is that the Linux threading model (pthreads actually map to processes that share memory space instead of "true" kernel threads) doesn't really work well with Java, since it's easy to generate Java threads, they map to processes, and you swamp the computer. The next Linux (2.6 or 3.0 whatever it's called) I believe has better threads, something more like kernel threads. Please someone corect me if I'm wrong, I'm interested in this too.
but it would be very cool if the typical command line experience was a little more cohesive.
I love the command line too, but there are limitations. The data is constrained to be a stream. All data has to be marshalled and unmarshalled to the constraints of the the streams. The only "metadata" organization you can have is whitespace and maybe some headers. These are constrained to be in the same stream and need to be extracted from the normal data. Pretty much the entire reason for awk is parsing the output of commands and rearrange them to be the proper input for other commands. Having all these commands constrained to streams makes for a lot of interoperability but you lose a lot of context. The simplicity of a stream is somewhat countered by the occasional need to use another tool (like awk) within a pipe. I wonder what an XML-aware toolchain would look like. Would having the extra context of XML input/output improve certain tasks (after the learning curve) or would the complexity be too heavy for even power users to use on any consistent basis? Might be an interesting research project for some school.
The other major limitation of the pipe heavy shell is that the pipe has no knowledge or control of internal program state. You can control initial program state (inputs, command line args) but thats it, everything else is pretty much controlled by the program's internal state machine, and not by you. Again awk helps a little - a pipe friendly program that allows programming looping and conditional constructs, but you're stil limited. AppleEvents are very interesting. They allow you to pass data, structured data, from program to program, and allow the script to interact with the programs internal state while it's running. I'm sure VBA is something like this as well, but I have no experience with it.
I'm not sure if Linux can ever have this. Too many disparate developers. No one to really "bless" a single scripting language, so there are multiple. Linus has repeatedly said he doesn't really care about the userland, so it won't be from him, maybe RedHat will bless something. But that still doesn't mean developers will use it. Both Apple and MS have certification programs. To get an Apple/MS logo, you have to submit it, and follow some APIs, including AppleEvent or VBA compatibility. Linux doens't have that, won't have it any time soon, and probably never will.
And so this article *really* lends credence to the anti-OSS memo. ;)
Aren't some of these articles and whole lot of fun?
I've been wondering why, and how, ms keeps slipping up and these "unintended discharges", i.e. "Halloween" memos, now this (if it is authentic), etc. Is it a clever marketing ploy? Or is it a sign of rot from within? If or when the so-called mainstream press starts to pick up on these stories, ms will be even more worried, and I predict even more unintended releases.
By contrast it's child's play to make closed software unavailable, even if it is to some extent accessible. One result can be that the dominant form of software can be completely unavailable and still block out other software from getting serious mindshare.
Is war peace and freedom slavery, too? I'm sure many people will read your remark about GPL having 'much less' freedom and nod foolishly because that's what they want to believe, but in a practical sense only the GPL is really effective in competing against closed software. And what is wrong with competing against closed software? I thought that was the whole point for the proprietary guys?
closed source != not free to redistribute
closed source != commercial
Please be specific when posting a difference in opinion.
It's dirktorn@microsoft.com
Repeal the DMCA!
Linux community and many open source projects simply use GPL without much thinking, but that prevents people from writing commercial software and using that existing code in their code.
Microsoft's licences also mostly prevent people from writing commercial software (or any other software) and using Microsoft's existing code in their code. Believe it or not, Word isn't released as public domain.
GPL gives you a lot more freedoms than Microsoft's licensing does. If you feel it's still not enough then I have sympathy with that, but suggesting that Microsoft have a point about the GPL license being restrictive is absurd.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> closed source != not free to redistribute
> closed source != commercial
Fine, but how does this give you more freedoms? You can't make changes since you don't have the source, so it doesn't really help if you can redistribute or if you didn't pay.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
However, I'm not a lawyer (obviously) -- it would be nice to hear from someone a little more versed in this kind of thing...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Finally, somebody please mirror these images, the bandwidth on that site is getting sucked dry.
Do a gnutella on Microsoft Slides.
I'm quite open to the idea that governments should consider creating software under X11/BSD-style licenses. But I think working with software under Microsoft/Sun-style "shared source licenses" is completely unacceptable because those kinds of licenses favor a single vendor; this should not only be discouraged, it should be made illegal: no government sponsored researcher should be permitted to create software under such agreements. The GPL may not allow commercial use of software developed by researchers, but it is equitable and fair to all commercial competitors.
Now, I gather in the US, the present legislation means that publicly-funded software development must be placed in the public domain, which would seem to exclude the GPL.
The question though, is much more fundamental; should publicly-funded software development be "public domain"?
On one hand, people have paid the taxes that funded the development, so they should get all the benefits. The most efficient way of doing this is to make the software Free and make sure that derivative products stay Free. And, as a bonus, it doesn't even stop proprietary software manufacturers from learning from it.
On the other hand, proprietary software manufacturers pay taxes too, so they should have the same rights.
On the other, other hand, most corporations of Microsoft's size actually pay very little in the way of tax, and will employ embrace-and-extend strategies given half the chance. Eventually, this screws over the state and therefore the people as a whole.
For these reasons, it's my belief that publicly-funded software development should be licensed under GPL-like licenses, unless there's a compelling reason not to do so. And the original developer and a proprietary software manufacturer are always at liberty to agree a mutually agreeable alternative license if the main license doesn't suit the latter party.
An example of code which should probably be released under a LGPL or weaker license would be software to handle a new file format or a new network protocol. In these cases, it's probably more efficient to license it under a more PD-oriented license such as the LGPL or BSD license so that the code may be re-used and the likelihood of incompatible deviations from the reference implementation greatly reduced. In brief; "use the right license for the job" - even RMS wrote something along these lines, but I can't seem to find it right now...
--
Yeah, I'll give you this, but really the restrictions harm nobody but greedy people. It's the developer's freedoms (greedy developers) that are infringed. That's the whole point. From the point of view of the user or a civic-minded developer, there are as many freedoms as any other licenses, but with more benefits (as in the benefit of being able to use other's modifications). From any perspective aside from that of a greedy business, the GPL is superior.
So it could be argued that GPL is not suitable for certain things. STuff like protocals, audio/video codex, and device drivers.It could be, but I sure won't do it. Perhaps a BSD licensing for core protocols right now is important, because as you say, it is necessary to get commercial interest to get a sufficient "critical mass" to make something like Ogg a standard. Okay. Right now.
But that's only because right now there aren't enough free software users to be able to call the development shots with our force of numbers. As the free software pool grows, the harder it is to re-write that code base. That means that commercial interests will have to be able to make a *really* impressive application to expect people to pay for it. And that's in the best interests of the users as well.
As far as poor BeOs not being able to use linux drivers in their OS... huh? Why should they? If they want to use, they have to share. What's wrong with that? And if they can't build a replacement OS that has the broad range of features and compatibilities as linux, or other free Operating Systems, then more the fool them for trying to get into a dying business model. Maybe they should have found a business model that leveraged free software rather than trying to compete with it. Let Be be a lesson to other commercial software companies.
We sometimes have to remind ourselves that the entire computer industry would not be where it is today without the openness of computer programers back in the early days. This open spirt existed way before any GNU license existed, and that was good enough for us then, good enought now.Absolutely! Now you are sounding like a free software convert. Oh. Wait. You mean public domain. Yeah... you are right. In some ways, this would be ideal. In fact, I would imagine that most free software people would rather not have to copyright software and just let it be in the public domain. But the problem with that is that when that used to be case (your "early days" of the computer industry) commercial entities would rape the public domain software by taking the software and modifying it in ways that locked you into a vendors product, be it hardware or software.
Thus, it became necessary to protect ourselves from greedy and unethical businesses. *That's* why there is a GPL. Yeah, it would be nice to imagine that all software could be free. Really free. Public Domain. But history proves that greedy people can't stop using public domain software to take away users freedoms. So users have to take matters into their own hands.
To clarify, I think Microsoft biggest fear is to be in a world where all code is saturated by a gnu encumberance, and one could not modify any code without being forced to publish the modifications.Absolutely. And they should be, because that's how it's going. They are greedy monopolists locked into a dying business model -- that of extorting their customer base. Good riddance, I say.
A world so utterly GPL that it collapses upon itself into stagnation.I'm not sure this follows. In fact, I'd argue that because of the large base of GPL code from which to build, it allows for people to innovate more easily. The infrastructure is already there, and someone with a great idea sitting in front of a computer in the Congo can implement it. Without a huge company behind them. Then we'll see stuff *really* start happening.
Don't waste your tears on Microsoft. As they sow, so shall they reap.
That's a peculiar point of view, since the only thing the GPL does (and it does it very thoroughly) is require that the code and ALL DERIVATIONS remain out there and accessible in a practical sense. That is ALL that is being required. It, and anything you do with it, cannot be bottled up. All the things done with it must remain not merely accessible but AVAILABLE.
:)
Yes, there's just one basic requirement. Now, a requirement, restriction, licensing term, whatever you want to call it, is why it is not free is the sense of public domain. Free software imposes its own sense of copyright, but it is still copyright, and they will sue you for infringing on it. I only understood this when I realize copyleft is just a politicized synonym for copyright.
See GNU license. (" To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights." -- mild doublespeak, no? To protect your freedom we must limit it by requiring you to acquiesce to this license.) Notice that the document invokes that hoary old term "copyright" more than a dozen times.
I'm not critizing free software -- really I think it's quite clever, inspired even -- but I believe it is merely a form of licensed software with really liberal "fair use" provisions. The copyright's holder's right to force you to comply persists throughout, so I think the political pitch is slightly misleading. I don't think it's some gross violation of freedom, but then neither is "closed" software -- if you don't like it, write your own "free" or even (gasp) public domain software.
One of the main points in M$'s argumentation is that the GPL hurts the industry, because you cannot write commercial apps based on GPL software, but the GPL is not the only Open Source license and most reasonable OS libraries are licensed under the LGPL or similar licenses that allow developing commercial software.
Open source developers simply have to choose an appropriate license for their project when they start. And if they find out that they chose wrong there is still the possibility to change the licensing terms. A very prominent example for such a license change is the Wine project that changed it's license from X11-like to LGPL recently.
If a company finds an OS library useful for their own project, but they cannot use it, 'cause it's GPL, they can still contact the author and ask for different licensing terms. They'll probably have to pay for that then, but they'd have to pay for a commercial product, too. So even GPL'd libraries are not really a hurdle for commercial software development. A good example for such dual licensing is ReiserFS, which is published under the GPL, but sold under different licensing terms to companies that want to use it commercially.
For me, the most interesting slide was the bottom half of img_0224r.jpg, (Areas of Concern) where it says: "Primary research results placed under the GPL are precluded from commercial use: TCP/IP example".
I'm wondering if this translates to "We are concerned, because we can't charge people royalties for every packet they send." I would have loved to have heard the commentary that went with that slide.
Public domain is more or less equivalent of abandonware with source.
This sig no verb.
I think sarcasm is becoming lost in its true intended form. Granted one cannot hear a physical tone of voice in text. But I think my statements were just outlandish enough so no one could ever take them seriously. Silly me.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
...why GPL is bad weren't too blurry to read.
That's okay, the logic was just as blurry.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
I've always HATED the stupid "M$" text that people use when talking about Microsoft. They want to make money - good for them. HOW they go about it has proven problematic/wrong/illegal/whatever, but the motive is the same for all companies - make money.
No one is suggesting propping up a company at the expense of another - certainly not in this thread.
Please lose the $, or use it evenly:
$un
Net$cape
$ear$
$BC
$pirit
$am$ Club
$heraton
etc
creation science book
I'd disagree. I think Microsoft sucks less now than it did previously.
Microsoft's worst (alleged or proven, I don't care) dirty trick, IMHO, was Windows telling me that Digital Research DOS was incompatible. That kind of behavior made me a happy OS/2 user for years until I had it pounded in my brain (by IBM, nonetheless) that IBM really is a big, nasty corporation.
I actually don't see anything wrong with MS's attitude toward OSS or Shared Source. They're afraid of the GPL for the same reason that Apple (all worship Apple, benevolent charity and protector of good!) built OS X on top of BSD. Microsoft--get this--is in it for the money. Just like RedHat is. If RMS could sue Microsoft for having GPL'd code in the NT source base it would really cramp MS's style. That, frankly, is frightening to anyone who doesn't totally subscribe to RMS' goal of eliminating software copyrights wholesale.
As for the interview with the ex-developer (NB: here I go again with ad hominem arguments) don't you think that it's a little easier to criticize Microsoft after you've worked there 10 years? MS probably made that guy filthy rich. Give me millions of dollars and I'll gladly drive the high moral ground in my brand-new gold plated gas guzzling SUV.
This is not to say there are no "arrogant assholes" at MS: the interview appears to be written by a prime example. Many sales people (your contacts) also fit that bill. This is merely to point out that MS, as a corporation, has similar goals to those of most corporations. (Similarly, Slashdot, like Usenet in the grand old days, is filled with self-righteous idiots. Oops, ad hominem again! Or is that ad homini?)
Partially - it depends on the product. Certaily the OEM version will have more restrictions because the OEM got a lower price. My storebought Win2k doesn't have the restrictions you're talking about - I can wipe it from a machine, sell the machine, and reinstall the Win2k disc on a new machine. I paid $190 for that version tho, which is probably much more than Compaq paid for a 98 OEM version. Lower price = more restrictions.
creation science book
-> Not mentioning the benefit that (only) open source is free-as-in-beer.
Photo #22 (bottom): "Open standards have become a point of confusion".
-> So the correct thing to do is use Microsoft's proprietary standards?
Photo #24 (bottom): "All software companies must carry significant legal overhead to protect against GPL infection".
-> Otherwise all companies (not just software ones) must carry significant legal overhead to protect against BSA raids.
"90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad reputation." --Henry Kissinger
In fact, had many of the doubters looked through the slides they would have found an MS webpage URL on the last one. Checking this URL shows that it is indeed an MS page. Currently it redirects directly to a page on "shared source" and licensing that includes a pointer to a word doc covering MS's analysis of the GPL.
The slides are a dumbed-down, idiot's version of the longer discussion and look to be developed for marketing presentations - probably directed toward upper management types considering the pros and cons of the issues. The slides present a view that the GPL is probably good for some (individuals, small developers) but bad for business and "innovation."
One implication is that if code is GPL'd, companies can't grab it (e.g. government produced data and software) and then proceed to profit freely from releasing it through closed licensing schemes protected by the DMCA. Innovation seems in the context to consist of taking ideas and data from tax-dollar funded sources (academia and gov't) and passing it on to the customer, efectively making the user pay twice for the right to use the product. There is nothing revolutionary or self-evidently out character for MS in the slides except perhaps an unusually "liberal" view of OSS, and a blundering failure to appropriately present the "ecology" of innovation
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
You can look at the GPL and write your own proprietary implementation. But a lot of source code from companies like Microsoft and Sun software is licensed under agreements that "contaminate" you; that is, you can't develop a competing implementation because the presumption will be that you copied stuff from their source code. They also contain lots of other clauses that "infect you", like with an indefinite possibility of getting dragged into a law suit between Microsoft or Sun and a third party.
As far as poor BeOs not being able to use linux drivers in their OS... huh? Why should they? If they want to use, they have to share. What's wrong with that? And if they can't build a replacement OS that has the broad range of features and compatibilities as linux, or other free Operating Systems, then more the fool them for trying to get into a dying business model. Maybe they should have found a business model that leveraged free software rather than trying to compete with it. Let Be be a lesson to other commercial software companies.
Actually, thsi *did* happento me! I used to work for Be Inc, and I wanted better support for my 3com 3c509 based isa card. BeOS had a driver, but it was in house home brew hack, and I wanted to have it work liek my slack box. So I took Donald Beckards driver, and we developed a wrapper for it so the driver thought it was talking to a Linux kernel (but was really BeOS 4.5). To make a long story short I had to remove the driver from the official Be website, and later from other sites..... as a result of the GPL. So I'm sure you can understand my sentiments about the subject. My supperiors actually were contacted by RMS himself to remove the BeOS wraper based driver. When I caught wind from up above, I sent email myself to RMS, and got a reply. I wish I still had an archive of the email, but let me just say RMS's notorious optinions bleed thru, plus a few attacks at BeOS being inferior due to not being OSS. Technically my wrapper violated the a GPL clause about linked libraries having the notion of being "derivitave", and thus "extending" a GPL'ed work... even though the driver was just linked in... it was linked to the BEOS kernel, and that was *not* available for Beckard to look at.
I hope this little story was interesting, because it really happened, and to me (and one other guy at Be). Now look at Microsoft, back in the mid 1990's they took code from BSD to implement a native IP-tcp/udp stack. Most people would say that was good for Microsoft. Linux also took lots of code from BSD, and that was percieved good for Linux. So I wonder when writing code as GPL ever was *better* that writing it as BSD style.
But the problem with that is that when that used to be case (your "early days" of the computer industry) commercial entities would rape the public domain software by taking the software and modifying it in ways that locked you into a vendors product, be it hardware or software.
I actually think that helped more than hurt the industry, and that the OSS movement would have continued anyways. Vendor lock in can also be called vendor inovation, and many new good things came from the way ATT licensed UNIX to various vendors. Don't forget that this same vendor lock in is also what gave us the broad spectrum of advanced hardware platforms with tailored software. This same advancement in vendor lockin also spured OSS inovation. Just look at NetBSD that is able to boot 31 various platforms.
In some ways the proprietary sector can benifite by the GPL, like SGI has with XFS. If can let the community have XFS, and eat its cake too since if IMB wanted to fix XFS those changes would go back to SGI. As a greed software company that would be good. In general that is how the GPL works by supporting the greed in society. My father used to tell me that communism would never work just because of the old maxum that: "If every human on Earth had exactly one acre of land to use as they wish, and never any more or less... jsut one acre. There would always be some people who want *two* acre's of land". The GPL works the same way for greed developers/companies. Considering that the above maxum is practically a constant truth, the GPL fundamentally doesn't work. What I'm saying is that since people are greedy: developers want the GPL, and consumers want to rip off the GPL. In fact, for people who want to steal gpl code, there really isn't much stopping them, especially not the GPL. This is like arguing that copyright laws is going to prevent teenagers from tradings mp3's on p2p networks. People are going to do what they want to anyways, and we BSD folks simply don't understand all the fuss about the GPL politics.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Our Linux production servers run heavily threaded Java apps. We end up with tons of processes thereby making top mostly unusable, and we had to write scripts to kill all the "threads" in a "process", but aside from those minor annoyances they work pretty well.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Computers are cheap enough, and powerful enough for individuals to be thier own research and development shop, bypassing both Academics and Industry and directly publishing.
THIS IS WHAT I BELIEVE TO BE the issue here with objections to the GPL.
I don't think the powers that be, namely Microsoft, believe that the individual has the right to create software, manufacture it, and then NOT COMPETE on the same terms as Microsoft does.
(i.e. freely distribute it.)
They are trying to convince us that, only Academia, and Industry can be the focus of great ideas, and therefore they should only be the ones that decide how we are to value Intellectual Property legally.
I think this is VERY similair believe it or not to what the RIAA is trying to fight.
Think about this:
A independant band, decides it wants to make music and sell it on the internet, with no distributor. (They build a web site and sell there own music through P2P technology.)
No Recording studio. (i.e. they hook up a bunch of Mac OS X machines with Cubase and make there own recording studio...)
Enter the RIAA. They see the internet as a possible tool for making them irrelevant, therefore they lobby and inact laws to make it illegal to use P2P technology to distribute Music over the internet.
With such technology illegal, they can preserve thier tight hold on distribution, and insure no indepedant bands become to widely popular or compete with thier distribution network.
----With a twist
Independant software developer, Linux Torvalds, builds and designs an Operating System kernel, and publishes it directly on the internet.
(He decides he will distribute it for free and NOT sell it.)
He has no research facility, he uses no Academic or Business computing facilities to make the software, instead, he uses and builds his own tools and buys the required hardware himself...(or uses his Dad's computer at home.)
10 years later, after giving it away...enter Microsoft.
Microsoft decides this software will destroy its distribution and control over the entire US software industry. They lobby to enact laws including the DMCA, to stop free software.
They begin Marketing and FUD campaigns with there customers to educate them why it is better to pay for software, and to make illegal not to pay for software, and only software built through IP property sources such as Academia->Industry->User.
More importantly, they say that this change toward OS will destroy the future economy. The facts in the internet boom do not bear this out by the way.
I would like to remind people here, that the internet boom was due to ENTIRELY FREE SOFTWARE released under the GPL: (i.e. the orginal CERN HTTP server and Web browser...)
Did the last 5 years destroy the US software industry? In 1998 for example, did you find it HARD to feed and clothe yourself because this software didn't go through Microsoft's slide presentation of ACADEMIA->INDUSTRY ?
I am starting to see a pattern, all of it do to the internet. Which, I hope everyone can see here is ACCLERATING the pace of technology through:
Sharing information for free. Free OS's accelerate the use of software, making it penetrate new markets much more quickly as there is no cost barrier.
A good example of this is web server/web browser software. They are free, and they created a HUGE demand in hardware, short term anyway, both for servers and of course for workstations to run browsers adequately.
I believe, information sharing for free generates FAR MORE revenue opportunity than through what Microsoft has proposed in those slides.
However, that opportunity is now no longer centered strictly around the manufacturer of the software.
I believe that we are at the tip of the iceberg here. I further believe that eventually, software ALL software will be so easy to produce due to tool advancements, better education that it will, like hardware become a commodity item.
In the end, these slides represent the fear of the software industry. That is, that software, I mean software that drives the revenues or the control of government, will no longer be ONLY AVAILABLE through research institutions or industry.
In fact, software will be very prevalent and easy to come by and cheap to come by, through the internet. For free or at very low cost.
So what will happen 10 years from now?
Here are my predictions, and I am gearing my company up for this NOW:
1) Most if not all software, will be sold on a labor basis, not on a shrink wrap basis.
That is, you hire someone to write your software because all of the software for doing business is basically free. (i.e. you use open source business apps which are standardized and since everyone uses them, it is easier to exchange documents with your vendors over the internet. If they don't have the software they can just download it.)
2) Shrink wrap software will exist, but it will be for vertical niche's, and highly focused.
(i.e. Mathematica for example).
But, in the end, software that has built billion dollar industries, will become free. The reason is the internet allows people to organize, much as what a company does for profit, but at a much lower cost. Which is an interesting thought?
What will happen to companies if the internet is ultimately allowed to evolve through the free use of information? Perhaps, dare I say, companies will become obsolete? After all, why pay a corporate board to organize people to produce information, like software, when the internet can do it much cheaper!
Finally, gaming will be one of the last strongholds of mass market shrinkwrap software.
Even there, you won't actually buy the software you will be provided the software with a monthly subscription which may include a internet connection with the game believe it or not.
3) Linux WILL BE ON THE DESKTOP. In your server room, and well if it isn't...
The sheer pricing pressures you will experience in trying to compete with your competitors who don't have those sorts of costs will compell you to load Linux or be pushed out of your own market.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I don't see how you can see this as anything but a *plus* for GPL. If Be used GPL drivers to get a wide compatibility base without giving back improvements or new networking features, that's a bad thing. The GPL prevents that kind of thing. And that's better for users... they would get Be's improvements available in anything that used the GPL drivers. The only people punished here is Be -- because they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
And that's the whole GPL thing... it's *user* centric, not business-centric. And as a user, I see that as a plus. In fact, the GPL gives you the ability to do what you did... just not redistribute it. So the GPL protected your right as an individual user to do just what you did. It protected your individual freedom without letting a company profit from stealing without giving back.
Don't forget that this same vendor lock in is also what gave us the broad spectrum of advanced hardware platforms with tailored software. This same advancement in vendor lockin also spured OSS inovation.The vendor lockin didn't spur OSS, it created it. Users don't like being locked in. They like choice, and given none by the vendor, they find ways to create choice. Hence OSS.
I'll give you that vendor lockin caused the software industry to advance quickly. But the availability of high-quality GPL code make the economics of the situation different now. With such a large base of good-quality GPL code, GPL can advance as fast (or faster) than commercial interests to meet a goal. And as that happens, the added code is in GPL. Which accelerates the pace of the GPL side. Soon, I don't think it will be possible to compete against GPL. I just don't. The manpower necessary to clean-room implement all the stuff that GPL code does won't be worth it. Not for a operating system, certainly. Maybe only for standalone apps and vertical markets. And even then, the vendors will have to move fast to keep from being overtaken by GPL. Note that again, that's in the best interests of users.
In fact, for people who want to steal gpl code, there really isn't much stopping them, especially not the GPL. This is like arguing that copyright laws is going to prevent teenagers from tradingBut that's not illegal! You can use any GPL code you want for any purpose. Unless you want to redistribute it. If you want to redistribute it, then you'll have to GPL everything. If you've redistributed it for the purpose of getting money, then you have assets and a business infrastructure that can be challenged in court.
The fact is, the GPL has been very effective in stopping people from using GPL code illegaly. Your example is one. Epson's printer drivers is another. nVidia's use of GPL code is another. The GPL *is* an effective tool to protect users rights.
I see why you are unhappy with GPL, but you are pointing the finger of blame the wrong way. It's not the GPLs fault that its license isn't compatible with Be. It's *Be's* fault. They made the conscious decision that they could make a better OS without using GPL code. That's fine. That's their right. But if they can't pull it off, it's not the fault of GPL for not letting them save themselves by stealing code. It's their fault for underestimating the size of the task or the cost of accomplishing those goals. Poor business planning, period.
And I'm even sympathetic, because I liked Be. I wanted it to succeed. But they chose wrong. It happens in business. But it's not the GPL's fault. Maybe its even a good object lession: work with free software, not against it.
m$ willingly and knowingly violated federal law, violated court orders, and lied under oath.
netscape and sun didn't.
that's why m$ deservingly gets the label, while other companies (who haven't violated the law) dont'.
Why does people always miss out half of the equation when talking about the GPL in comercial surroundings? The GPL doesnt help people selling the same product multiple times or to take somebody elses work and make money of it. It doesnt help someone to take a project, twist it and screw the initial developers (think kerberos etc.). The GPL dont ease up the software companies ongoing efforts to screw people up with endless upgrades and "almost good, next version will work, i promise" kind of software.
The GPL is constucted to benefit users and not the vendors that want to sell you the same product with a new clownsuit ten times. All people and companies and governments use software, thats a pretty much established fact. They dont do software and they dont benefit from paying more for things than necessary.
As i see it software buisiness as it looks today is like the spinneries in england in the 1800. It is going to be raplaced sooner or later anyway. Todays constant upgrades and paid servicepacks is an artificial market not based on realworld logic.
Software companies like IBM, RedHat, Sun etc who provide services and really do something for what you pay is the future. Software compenies like Microsoft just sell the same things as many times possible and preferably without even having developed it themselves. They are moving themselves into a corner where they dont research and invent things but is merely a proxy for other peoples ideas that they "borrow". Now they even want government funded code for free to be able to sell it to the people who paid for it, the taxpayers. The GPL fosters interopability and adherence to standards because you cant hide alterations in code you have to show openly. The BSD license and others lets you screw the authors royally up the poopchute.
Overall the GPL license the license that benefit users of software the most. As a nice side effect it fosters adherance to standards witch in turn lets more people into the race even if they dont use or make GPL code themselves.
The only looser of the GPL is those who work once and want to sell the product over and over.
HTTP/1.1 400
You are going to and have taken so much shit in response to this post, but you are right.
Both RMS-zealot "Free Software" (free as in communism?) and Microsoft's restrictive EULAs are against freedoms. The whole idea of licenses in general is rather rotten, I think, but there's still tons of licenses that are more free than the GPL.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
There is a damn good reason for them to dislike the GPL, because it would destroy their entire business model and radically change, if not destroy, their entire business model.
Most of the ideas in that presentation were rather sound.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Slide "0223r" states the GPL is "For protecting the individual programmer" and "Against ownership or commercialization of software".
The GPL is in place to PROTECT THE END USER so that, as the fable goes, he can get working printer drivers, etc. It's not to protect the programmer at all but the user!
Also, if the GPL is so much against commercialization of software why are so many companies using linux and/or GPL'd software like Apple (GCC), TiVo (Linux), etc?
-- iCEBaLM
Yes you can. This was settled in court back in the IBM vs. Phoenix case.
Myth - If you use and modify GPL code inhouse, you have to give away all your code.
Truth - If you use and modify GPL code inhouse, you are free to keep it inhouse.
GPL only comes into effect if you want to distribute your GPL based code outside your organisation.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Just some nits.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
As for NSA Secure Linux, which is GPL, it's a set of relatively minor mods to Linux. There's no new technology that you can't use if you reimplement it, and the code is useless outside the Linux context anyway. The whole purpose of NSA Secure Linux is to give people something to try that implements a mandatory security model, so that they can find out what it's like and figure out how to live with a tight security system. (There's no "root". What does that mean to the sysadmin?) It's the same technology NSA has been trying to get adopted for twenty years. Yet Microsoft has lobbied heavily to stop NSA from doing further work in this area. That could be construed as weakening America's defenses in time of war.
I meant "completely destroy their industry" or something like that.
Shit and perdition!
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
How does closed source give you any more of "the ability to do what [you] want" than the GPL? I can see BSD or Public Domain letting you do more, but closed source? How?
Since you don't care about source code, I can only assume you're not making derivative applications. So what freedom is the GPL taking from you?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I always though that most computer companies,
IBM, Solaris &co made most money from support, not software of hardware sales.
Few companies are and where in the pure software game.
Install[piece of crap] shield is a good example.
You more-or-less have to go on a training course to use it, coes the documentations crap, it's a freek piece of software etc...
(I'm not sure why people ever used install shield to start with)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
However, if they want to take the test code the researchers built based on the papers they wrote, and slap a company logo on it and resell it to consumers, who are also taxpayers, then that *is* stealing.
No, it is not stealing. You also can take the test code and use it for free... or you can put it into a product. If you pay Microsoft for it, it is because you are too lazy (or more likely, too smart) to spend your time adapting the research code for your own use.
Microsoft in this case would add value. If they didn't, NOBODY WOULD PAY FOR THE SOFTWARE!
Stealing would be taking the code and hiding it so nobody else could use it!
The only good weather is bad weather.
The problem is that MicroSoft might "add value" by doing what everybody here calls "embrace and extend". I personally feel this is done accidentally more often than it is done for sinister purposes, but the end result is the same.
I argue that this is itself a strawman argument. It matters not what Microsoft does with the government funded software - what counts is what *everyone* is allowed to do with that software.
The fact that Microsoft is a monopoly is the only reason that they can play a lot of their predatory games. One could argue that Microsoft in particular should be denied the use of taxpayer funded software as a penalty for monopolistic abuses, or one could argument that whatever use they do make of it should be monitored for monopoly abuses. But this applies only to a monopoly, which Microsoft happens to be.
In fact, it is unfortunate that Microsoft's name is used in this argument. The licensing of government software affects anyone who may want to use it, not just one company. Anti-Microsoft arguments, however valid, really add nothing to the debate over what is the best license to use for government subsidized software.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Yeah, I'll give you this, but really the restrictions harm nobody but greedy people
What's with this greedy people? Why do I assume that you really mean folks like me who actually have to support a family by writing code! And who could not make that money if my code had to be distributed with source, and the source had to be available for free?
In many areas, all that would mean is that other people would take my code and use it to compete with me with no recompense. An industry built this way would simply fail. Open source relies upon the good will of people to produce useful things. And it sometimes works - there are lots of fine people producing good stuff. But there are also lots of things not being produced in open source - because it isn't "cool" to do so, or it isn't as much fun. And a lot of open source is far less usable than commercial equivalents, because open source people get more plaudits (which is the coin of the realm) for writing code than for writing documentation. And it is more fun to come up with a clever application than it is to produce installation software for it that allows idiots to use it.
GPL is fine for those who want to freely give of their time. It is a charitable thing. However, as in other areas of human endeavor, charities do not supply everything needed! They are good at what they choose to be good at and in areas where they can attract interest.
A GPL economy is an imaginary economy. It assumes that everyone who writes code can afford to do it for free, or that if they choose to sell it there is nobody to come along and compete with them with their own code, reducing their income. It is a utopian concept, and like most utopias, it works best at the small scale, and fails entirely when called upon to address the real needs of real people.
Let me give a real world example. One thing I do is write code for the Health Insurance claims processing industry. How many people are willing to do this for free and GPL the results? I sure am not. If I didn't get paid for it, I wouldn't do it! If I didn't need an income, I would be happy to spend some of my time writing nifty kernel goodies in open source, or doing some other cool thing. But in the real world, somebody needs to write that health insurance software, and that somebody wants to be paid, and that payment won't happen if the code is GPL'd.
Now... imagine that the government produces some of this software. It would probably be a result of somebody's research. It would probably be ungeneralized, poorly documented and not very friendly to install. It might also have the very best algorithms for some parts of this (there really is some magic in this area).
If this is GPL'd, that software will probably never be used. Why bother? It would cost a lot to bring it up to commercial standards. And once you did, you would have to release the source for your competitors. People generally don't make investments with the intent of taking a loss! They have to recoup that investment. And they do that in many areas via exclusivity - in software, by protecting their intellectual property.
Now, in another universe, that software is truely free - it is public domain. Several companies might pick it up and incorporate it into their products. The successful ones would make it more usable, more general, better documented. etc. There might be several that would compete. The result would be a reduction overall in the cost of processing health insurance claims - a positive good. The only objection I can see martialed to this is that somebody is *gasp* making money, with their own efforts, but using somebody else's product(for which that someone else was compensated by the government).
So what's the problem?
I think a lot of GPL advocates need to grow up and recognize that it isn't a panacea, but rather one more form of restrictive license - appropriate for certain endeavors and totally unappropriate for others.
And for those who think that all source code should be freely available... well, I'll bet you still believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy!
The only good weather is bad weather.
Seriously, this demonstrates a larger trust issue. No one inside of M$ will take credit for that kind of thing and no one will believe anyone outside of M$ when they pubish that sort of thing. Why is this true? Because Microsoft is dishonest, that's why. How simple.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not only are MS and Linux free to choose how to express themselves, their customers and users are, too!
and I'll add to it: Customer freedom leaves M$ two choices, adopt free licenses or fail under an obsolete business model. Freedom is the ability to do what you want, fiscal reward for your activities is not a given.
Microsoft thinks that they are entitled to income based on their "correct" business model. Most of the presentation was about software philosopy and why the GPL is wrong. It's funny how M$ overlooks their own strident propaganda while spending billions to promote it.
The only way for M$ to remain relative and profitable is for them to free their source code NOW. The longer they wait, the more pollished their "competitor's" free code becomes, the less credit anyone will give them when they see the light. Only swift and positive action will resotore faith in anything M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I am sorry, did I say that GPL was taking something from me?
No.
My point was that all closed source is not bad. To used a tired example:
Should the programs that run aircraft control towers be GPL?
If so, give me a specific reason why, that is not tired OSS socialist rhetoric, but is in fact to do with the function of this particular software itself.
...
Slide1: Embrace
Slide2: Extend
Slide3: ???
Slide4: Profit
It definetly has worked in the past for ms products.
Shadus
Some evil smelly hippy must have managed to slip into the presentation and take pictures of the secret Microsoft manifesto using SOVIET RUSSIA era spy equipment.
:P
The only photo they didn't manage to take was the one of the map of Western Europe....
Because on very rare occasions, one hears a phrase like "virus used for good." Cancer, by contrast, is always bad. Haven't you heard about any of those projects where they plan to employ a virus in a positive way? (Either figuratively or literally.)
See since a virus (in the real world) is this little clump of DNA that reprograms cells, it's conceivable (though difficult) that you could make a virus that reprogrammed (only some of) someone's cells to do something good (like if they weren't working right). Or much easier would be make a virus that only attacks a specific organsim that you want to kill.
Cancer refers to a condition where some of your cells are broke and they're copying without bounds, theoretically consuming all your body's resources eventually, and making lumps where there should be no lumps. It's bad. It's always bad. There's no good there.
The main difference is that "virus" refers to a little programmable clump of DNA whereas "cancer" refers to a (always bad) condition.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
We all know MS is bad and they are hard at work on Evil Master Plan v1.0
This actually comes as something of a relief. We know it always takes Microsoft until at least version 3.0 to get everything to work.
Does this
The bottom line is this: There are certainly reasons why businesses or individuals would not want to release their software under the GPL, but Microsoft wants to convince you of more than this. They want you to avoid using GPL software even if it's appropriate, they want governements to discourage (or prevent!) its use in acedemia even if it's appropriate, and they want to stamp out any and all development under the GPL on Windows.
But why not allow the consumers to fork over cash for no added benefit? Are you their keeper? I asserted earlier that the GPL license assumes that consumers are dumb. This seems to prove the case.
If it is bundled with some other product, so what? What is wrong with this?
As far as wilful misrepresentation, it only works if the customer is dumb, or if the issue is of insufficient importance to matter.
Or it may be that the consumer is unaware of the free software. In that case, the added value produced by the company is the advertising that resulted in the purchase of the software.
So again, I do not see anything wrong being done with the government produced software. It is *still* available to anyone that wants it. For those who don't go to the trouble of finding it or applying it, a commercialized closed-source version of it works.
For that matter, with public domain software, there is *nothing* preventing an open source group from *also* picking up the software and immediately GPL'ing what they have, and then developing from there.
In other words, taxpayer produced software should be free. Really free. And that means public domain - license with no strings at all.
The only good weather is bad weather.
This would be fine if all situations were guaranteed to be symmetric. But that is very unlikely! Much more likely is I spend years (or my customer spends hundreds of thousands of dollars) developing the code, and then someone else simply takes it - perhaps makes a cosmetic mod - and then is in competition with me. However, they have the hundreds of thousands that *they&* didn't spend on sofware available to their marketing and support efforts. This gives them an advantage of me!
In other words, in general GPL favors the pirate over the originator. GPL only works for *voluntary* effort or in conjunction with other sources of profit (Service Contracts, Training, Hardware).
I notice that you do not attack IBM for using GPL'd UNIX to increase their *hardware profits (others in this thread have noted this). In fact, on Slashdot there is generally great cheering (which I agree with) when another hardware manufacturer adapts an open source solution.
Another way of saying this is that GPL results in programmers being paid nothing to enrich hardware makers, or software companies going bankrupt while enriching the hardware makers.
Selective condemnation is an interesting attribute of the same people who usually favor utopian solutions (for a related discussion, see
www.tinyvital.com/blog and www.tinyvital.com/PCD.htm).
GPL *removes* the ability to compete over software features. With GPL everyone can take advantage of the functionality created by anybody. Thus it *ends* competition, leaving the only competition to be in the areas of servicing and marketing. This naturally benefits the large companies over the small, as the large can afford better marketing.
In such a world, software innovation will die!
The only good weather is bad weather.
And is there nothing wrong with supporting a family selling copies? Is code a special kind of beast where it is okay to sell the original but not the copy?
Work for hire is one mode that programmers may want. But they may also want to be able to invest their *sweat equity* (capital) into their code, and then get a *return on their investment.*
At one time, I had a business which made small hardware widgets (ham radio repeater controllers with embedded processor). The key proprietary component in this was the software. Anyone could copy the hardware and compete with me, but it took real, rare skills and real cost (which I had already invested via my time) to produce that software. I was not about, and would never, give away that competitive edge for some GPL utopia. In that case, others would simply take my work, dupe my circuit boards, and hit the market with an unfair capital advantage over me - the creator.
Your argument is inherently anti-capitalist and anti-freedom. The only people who have freedom in this case are those who *chose* to GPL their *own* (not taxpayer supported) and those who take that code under the GPL license.
Those who take the code may or may not contribute to the GPL process. They may simply take it parasitically (as many of us do when we use Linux but don't contribute to the Linux project). In the case of Linux, that is okay - because it is expressly in the interest of those who contribute to Linux. If it wasn't, they'd be fools to GPL it!
Your doctor example has nothing to do with software, except in the case of a consultant working for a client. So let's take the latter case... assume I am a consultant producing code for someone (work for hire). I would have no right to withhold it the source from my client (unless that was in the contract, which in fact is not at all unusual). But somebody would have to GPL the software. This simply pushes the capital expenditure burden from me to them, but the economic effect hits me as well as them - if they cannot operate economically in a closed-source, no-piracy mode, then they won't pay me. And for most software, this is a reality.
Utopianism is a good way to come up with creative ideas, but unfortunately (as in this case) it always results in overapplication and nonutopian results. For some of the consequences of utopianism, see my blog my blog.
The only good weather is bad weather.
> I am sorry, did I say that GPL was taking something from me? No.
You'd better go re-read the thread. The original post that I was responding to stated: "...you don't really have much more freedom than with closed software, infact, in many cases you have much less."
I wanted to know how the GPL gives you less freedom that closed source. You're response was that closed source != commercial. True enough, but not really rebuttal to "closed source gives more freedom than GPL".
I supposed if I were saying "GPL monotonically better than closed source" you'd have a point. But the topic at hand was freedom, not "which is better".
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Wait! That's not what I'm saying! My definition of greedy people is those people that want to use the efforts of other (by taking GPL code) and not returning the favor (contributing back). Those companies that want to use software as leverage to lock you into an upgrade cycle. (read: Microsoft). I'm in the same boat as you. My point is that if you want to use GPL software you have to give back. That's all. If you want to use GPL, you have to share. Period.
It's not such a white and black situation as you describe. Even in a mostly-GPL world, there will be plenty of non-GPL code. Your vertical market (health) will probably be largely non-GPL. Or in the industry I'm most familiar with (insurance).
And even in those markets, GPL code is still useable for non-distributed code. If there *were* a good health care app that you wanted to modify for in-house use, you could. Legally. Just not sell it for profit (as a greedy corporation would).
But in the real world, somebody needs to write that health insurance software, and that somebody wants to be paid, and that payment won't happen if the code is GPL'd.And there would still be a market, even in an all-GPL world, for you to be paid to customize a GPL'd health app for your company.
Now, in another universe, that software is truely free - it is public domain. Several companies might pick it up and incorporate it into their products. The successful ones would make it more usable, more general, better documented. etc. There might be several that would compete. The result would be a reduction overall in the cost of processing health insurance claims - a positive good. The only objection I can see martialed to this is that somebody is *gasp* making money, with their own efforts, but using somebody else's product(for which that someone else was compensated by the government).Aha. But can't you see that this situation is *worse* than the GPL one? Imagine there is a mediocre health care claims processing application out there. Then some insurance company picks it up and modifies it. They turn it into a great application, but one that only processes insurance claims for their company. They then turn around and release that software. Now, sure, there is a better claims processing software, but its locked into a particular company.
Certainly, that's good for the company, but it's bad for the user. In this case, the companies that process those claims. They would rather see the app turned into a good application for processing any claims. But the changes to the app that make it great for the one particular company are hidden. Can't get to them.
The GPL protects us from that kind of thing, and its better for it. It doesn't restrict your company's right to modify it to do anything you need it to do, but it prevents a greedy company from using that public domain software as a weapon against you.
Think on it a while, and see if GPL automatically means no software development. I think it doesn't. Most software development is in-house anyway, and GPL doesn't restrict in-house use. I firmly believe that GPL will drive more innovative software because it gives a larger platform to build from.
It doesn't really matter -- we are arguing in a vacuum. This is going to happen regardless. The economics of it we'll see soon enough.
However with MicroSoft it usually means that their "bugs" *become* the standard, making the original free code useless because it no longer is the standard.
I however have some problems with making rules that only apply to MicroSoft, or only apply to a "convicted monopoly". The next monopoly could easily use the same techniques until they get convicted. Also the monopoly is easily powerful enough to make shell companies or otherwise evade the rules. I would prefer global rules that are fair, allow competition, but prevent MicroSoft style lock in. It is hard to figure out such rules. One idea I like is that a requirement be made for all government purchases that all communication protocols and storage formats used by the purchased product must include sample public-domain source code provided to read/write/communicate with the product. Companies can still do clever things inside their products, or even have different (ie better & faster) secret implementations of the interface code, but this would avoid the lock-in problem. Notice that I think public domain is better than GPL in this case. It may be that even Linux will need a few parts changed to public domain for this, but it would all be for the best in the end.
Remember I am not arguing against GPL in general, but rather against forcing publicly developed software to be licensed as GPL.
Aha. But can't you see that this situation is *worse* than the GPL one? Imagine there is a mediocre health care claims processing application out there. Then some insurance company picks it up and modifies it. They turn it into a great application, but one that only processes insurance claims for their company. They then turn around and release that software. Now, sure, there is a better claims processing software, but its locked into a particular company.
But your argument sets up a straw man. It assumes that only one company can take the free, but mediocre software and improve and sell it. If there is a big enough market to justify investing in the software, then other companies will also come in and either use the free software or write proprietary closed-source software. If there is not a big enough market, then your examples actually shows the good side of non-GPL - it shows that someone will at least provide good claims processing software, but you have to pay for it.
This is better than just having the mediocre software out there, since it adds choices: the mediocre software is STILL THERE, and now there is a better, but more costly proprietary choice also!
BTW... I wrote a longer (and more trollish) discussion of this, which addresses your other issues in more detail, and put it on my blog for those who are interested.
The only good weather is bad weather.
The fact of the matter is that I was a Be user. I bought 4.0 and 4.5. And I couldn't get my ISA NIC to work either. I had to buy a PCI one.
So I was impacted by this same issue. But that has nothing to do with the utility of GPL code.
All excellent points. When you can devise rules (as you did) to achieve anti-monopolistic results in a pro-active manner, you have done well!
However, in the case of Microsoft, that didn't happen. In fact, I have often argued that Microsoft owns a natural monopoly (using the economic sense of the term) and thus a desktop operating system monopoly would have originated with or without Microsoft. However, once such a monopoly has arisen, one needs to take measures to minimize the damage that may result as the company uses monopoly rents to unfairly compete in other markets.
BTW... I wrote a longer (and more trollish) discussion of the Free Software movement and put it on my blog for those who are interested.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Its a matter of perspective.
You see: "GPL license is too restrictive to allow Be to use the code".
I see: "Be's licensing lacked the freedom to allow it to use the GPL code".
The problem as I see it, isn't GPL, but Be. Of course, that's a matter of perspective. In the end though, given that whole story, my reaction wasn't "Damn GPL!", it was "Damn Be!".
And I'm *glad* they couldn't use it. It wouldn't be morally right to take other people's drivers and use it to make money off of. That's why I value GPL. It's a buy-in. When I add s/key support to a program, or I fix a parsing bug and return the patch, I've paid may fee to allow me access to all the GPL stuff out there.
Really, if you think of it that way, there is a cost associated with GPL -- the cost of contributing improvements. In that way, it really doesn't differ from commercial software.
Why didn't anyone get pissed off that Be couldn't use Microsoft's drivers for the 3c509? They would have the same rights to steal Microsoft's code as Donald Becker's.
I guess that just highlights the subject of the very parent post: the GPL isn't free. There is a real cost associated with it. For those that' won't share code. For users, it's better than free.
No, I was selling radio control systems. The primary added value was the software, which I wrote. I was the efficient producer of that software - anyone can make the hardware, but I made the software back when it was early in the technology cycle for that environment.
As far as demanding control over my customers... give me a break! If I sell you a little plastic widget, you can do whatever you want with it. But you have no rights to the injection mold that went into building it. Software source is the injection mold. Binary software is the widget. Please explain why software is different??? Oh year, because you can cheaply duplicate the source - but ONLY if you can get hold of it - which is exactly why people need to keep it proprietary.
Economics is about the management of goods and labor, and ultimately about capital and more abstract things. You need to understand the concept of capital. Software *source* is indeed capital. It is tangible and very rare. The fact that it can be *stolen* and then duplicated is irrelevant. You argue that software isn't scarce. If you believe that, try duplicating my controller software. Good luck! The reason you will have trouble doing so is that *I* have the source code and you don't, and the binaries are also hard to duplicate because they are burnt into EEPROM's inside of secured microcontrollers.
As far as freedom, I don't include the right to deprive others of their freedom. They already have their freedoms. When I write software, they don't suddenly acquire *more* freedoms unless I give it to them. YOU are the one who is talking about removing freedom: my freedom to create things and not have someone else reduce its value by copying it. If I *choose* to release it with GPL, that is *my* free choice. It is not your free choice to force me to release it that way!
Nobody is forced to buy my non-GPL software. That is their freedom. My freedom is my right to release it under whatever license terms I want (within the law).
The only good weather is bad weather.
In the free software world it's the pirates who try to use commertal software as if it were free (as in beer) and reverse engenear it (free as in speach) and patch it (free as in sidewalk.. )
But it is theft.
In commertal software it's legal to do exactly the same thing to free programs.
The short and simple.
Jack writes commertal code
Zeek writes free software.
Zeek makes a game Jack makes some changes and sells it Zeek pirates those changes.
Jacks the theaf but Zeek gose to jail.
This is becouse Jack os getting paid for Zeeks hard work and Zeek dosen't get to benifit from it. Jack's getting ALL the benifits and NONE of the labor.
That said I do release some of my code in public domain becouse sometimes I do benifit from Jack using my work.
I don't actually exist.
I agree that there would almost certainly be some software monopoly even if MicroSoft had not succeeded. Despite all the bitching about him, I suspect we are pretty lucky we got Bill Gates. Some other people (Steve Jobs, perhaps Scott McNealy of Sun) may have been much worse. Other ones that seemed likely were IBM or ATT (they may have been stopped by the previous monopoly convictions), Lotus, Digital Research (makers of CP/M), Borland (which once controlled the compilers). I also think the Unix market was sabotaged by other vendors that were fearful of Sun becoming the monopoly, and they did not realize the growing threat from MicroSoft.
It's sick that I can counter myself.
So here we go.
Yes I can benifit from somebody using my code in a commertal product.
Let's say I'm a gammer and I make a game that has a huge number of sweet graphic and sound hacks. But maybe the game sucks.
Then Jack makes a great game out of my code now I get a great game with sweet hacks. Even if I'm paying for if had I not done the work I'd never have such effects.
I benifit. Now let's say I run Linux and the commertal gamed using my hacks won't run on my box even under wine. Now I can't benifit unless I get the code and port it to Linux myself.
Or I'm a commertal software develuper now I won't get paod becouse anybody can use my hard work for free.
Maybe I'll get extra traffic to my website. Maybe I don't need it.
Maybe I'll get recognised as a great programmer. Maybe I'm already recognised. Maybe I'm in a diffrent profession and don't need the recognition. Maybe my code sucks.
It's up to me. It's my code after all.
I don't actually exist.
There are lots of choices that are made for consumers by manufacturers. A hardware vendor may choose to preload an OS if that is their strategy.
However, you are really addressing Microsoft, which as I have said is a special case. It is simply not relevant to the issue of whether the government should restrict its citizens from using government developed software in a private product.
Your car question puzzles me. It is *my* argument, so why do you assert it?
The only good weather is bad weather.
Our Linux production servers run heavily threaded Java apps.
Does the "thread really is a seperate process" mess with things like signals as well?
You certainly raise a more interesting and valid argument for open source than I have seen so far in this discussion, so I will comment on that.
First, a comment. I do not assume a perfect free market. Markets are in general the best known economic decision mechanism, but they aren't perfect. Microsoft is a good example - it has a monopoly. Many free market people (including far too many of my ideological comrades in conservatives) seem to have almost a religious belief in the power of the market to always produce the right result, and thus make ignorant arguments about the Microsoft case (fortunately Judge Bork is much smarter in his arguments).
I have another essay in that blog about the failure of the free market in health insurance... and how conservatives are wrong in most of their arguments. So no, my arguments make no utopian free market assumption. In cases given, the assumption is valid. In other cases, it may not be.
What I do dislike is government interaction where it is not totally necessary. Government can only operate through the implied use of deadly force (at the extreme) and thus has vast powers that should be used very rarely. Furthermore, government mandates are usually worse than the market - government tends to be stupid, slow moving, extremely bureaucratic, and often corrupt (I suspect that you in particular would enjoy my quasi-humorous essay on the subject of bureaucracies).
Now to address your point about open source proving code ownership, and that being pro-capitalist. I believe that in balance, this point fails. The reason is that while open source allows one to prove code genesis, the only value of this is to prevent criminal theft of trade secrets. But it the process it decapitalizes the code as an asset, which I think is an even worse outcome. There are other (admittedly imperfect) remedies for trade secret theft, but any forced decapitalization of code is disastrous.
In the case of privately developed software, the owners of that software can *choose* whether to let open source or closed source protect their interest in the software, and I think that is a maximal freedom approach. IOW, if you believe that *your* commercial or personal interests are best served by GPL'ing your code... go for it! I have no problem with that. If you don't, don't. You may want to BSD it. More likely, you will keep it as a trade secret.
Since government produced (or commissioned) software is the main subject of this discussion in Slashdot, I have *no objection* to anyone taking *that* software, putting a different name and a flashy package on it, and selling it for a zillion dollars. Or, more accurately, I don't like people doing that but I don't think it appropriate to sacrifice anybody's freedoms to stop them. Their behavior may be immoral but that's their problem, not ours.
Thus I think government produced software should, in general, be released to the *public domain*, not GPL or BSD or any other non-public domain license. The government's interest in the software ends at that point. Then, whatever happens to that software is up to whatever any person or group (including corporations) wants to do with *their copy* of it. Nothing in public domain release prevents the software from remaining open source, or from GPL or BSD or other trees being derived from it. Only modified versions of the software can be closed source, because the original source is freely available from the government or archives.
I also believe the government should be allowed, with suitable oversight (this is a whole discussion in itself - how to do that with minimal corruption), to contract for closed source or even proprietary software.
Several decades ago I worked for a military consulting house and we were paid by the government to develop closed source software for them. They got the benefit of cheaper software and our expertise, and we got an asset that kept our tiny consulting company alive.
I don't thing my example should be the rule, but I do think it should be totally prohibited (perhaps, again, with suitable oversight).
The only good weather is bad weather.
The second slide already showed how broken their perception of open source is. Their second slide was a comparasin of "commercial" source vs "open" source as if they were mutually exclusive groups when they are not. Take a Linux distro company like Redhat for example. They are commercial. They make money reselling stuff that's open source. Whether something is Commercial or not is not really a property of the code itself, but of how people obtain it. Redhat's SRPM of the linux kernel that lives on the install CD is commercial. A downloaded tarball from www.kernel.org is not, even if it's exactly the same version number, with the same verbatim GPL boilerplate licenses all over the source code, and 'diffs' show it to be identical code to what's in the Redhat SRPM. Whether it's commercial or not is a property of the distribution technique by which you obtained the product, not a property of the end product itself.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.