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Shared Source vs. Open Source
leonbrooks writes "Microsoft are fond of touting Shared Source as being "as good as" Open Source, with a view to muddying the waters as much as possible, and so keeping as many people away from the benefits of Open Source Software (OSS) (particularly Software Libré AKA "Free Software") as they can.
This new article analysing the differences arrives just in time for Microsoft's Australia-wide series of "Competitive Hour" misinformation sessions on Open Source, and includes a handy list of potentially showstopper questions.
We'd like your help in putting these and other questions to the speaker during such misinformation sessions, with the dual aim of opening the eyes of many of the audience, and reporting back to us what was said so that we can refine the questions to close whatever loopholes are employed in evading these important issues."
In Spanish is libre, and not libré. (libré would be past participe)
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
why don't they just give it an open source license?
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but it tastes like crap on a bun, it's probably a bad licensing scheme.
"...I'll need guns" --Chow Yun-Fat in 'Replacement Killers'
shared source is a step in the right direction. i'm just not sure which direction.
I write code.
Stop sabotaging my business, okay? I'm just trying to eek out an honest living, is that so wrong!? ...billg
As a geek, I'm convinced Open Source will eventually vindicate over Closed Source -- no matter what. Whatever argument Microsoft could come up with, there'll always be a better counter argument. IMHO, the only thing their $50 billion could buy is better software, and this will work only on the short term. But I'm prejudiced...
So my question is: Would it be possible for Microsoft to kill Open Source solely through a media campaign?
I was very impressed by the 12 year old who wrote that detailed analysis. His educated reference to Star Trek really helped me to understand the situation, and make an informed decision. After all, anything written by a group called "The Cyberknights" has GOT to the authoritative!
I work on a scientific project that is supossedly an "open source" project. In reality, it is really shared source. What it comes down to is users from the community reporting bugs and even submitting patches that are never incorporated into the code. The "czar" of the project often refuses to apply these fixes or doesn't do so in a timely manner. It just doesn't work and is just about as pointless as not having the source at all...
It appears that Microsoft's famously successful Embrace and Extend strategy can apply to concepts as well as technologies. Expect to see Shared Source (i.e., Open Source with proprietary extensions for improved performance on Windows only) heavily promoted as a new Windows development tool.
While this is a very informative article, I get a very 'preaching to the choir' felling about it. The bias seeps through and undermines the effectiveness of the article. I think the best advocacy of open source software could be realized through: 1. case studies of successful industry/governemnt deployment of oss. 2. summary of development/use of open source superstars like apache, postgres, etc. of course, its always fun to pick at ms, but the idea is to change minds, not appear dogmatic.
Any-one fancy going throug the M$ code and looking for patent violations, M$ still has a lot of finincial muscle.
Great, now they know what questions to expect. Billiant!
Hasn't the OSS done battle with the SS once before?
In the lecture of John 'Maddog' Hall on the history of open source (this weekend on Fosdem), his slides had 'livre' software on it. Several times...
Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
Unfortunately, the "picking up your marbles" article uses nonstandard terminology and thus may end up confusing many readers. For example, it seems to equate "Free Software" with copylefting licenses (like the GPL), and "Open Source" with non-copylefting licenses (like the BSD license). That's extremely confusing; the standard definitions for both Open Source and Free Software include both the GPL and the BSD licenses. Also, "Shared Source" is still proprietary; trying to claim it isn't just confuses things. Proprietary software comes in at least two varieties: secret source, and "shared source". Licenses are confusing enough without using nonstandard, inconsistent terminology. Hopefully, the article will get updated - it makes interesting points, and the shifting terminology is unfortunate. For the moment, I would recommend Bero's article instead if you're looking for an article opposing "shared source".
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
"Can I provide this fix to others? If not, why not?"
I'd recommend losing the bit about the Borg on that site unless it's a page meant only for geeks and techies -- name-calling cheapens the rest of your arguments. It doesn't matter that they started it. </FourthGradeTeacher>
Just point out the uselessness of Shared Source and the piles of responses to Microsoft FUD.
woof.
A very nice and concise review and discussion. The questions, in particular, are a great preparation for a rebuttal. Polite and informed disagreement will go lot farther in an audiences opinion than shouting "LINUX ROXORS". In extreme situations, it may still be necessary to fall back on that technique :^)
You shank my Jengaship!
What kind of paperwork, NDA's, and other obligations do I need to sign on before looking at the shared source? With GPL I can look at the license (and only that!), and know that if I do not like the source I see, I can put it down, not use it, and be free to continue my life as if I had never seen it.
That document was poorly written, I was expecting a business quality doco. The linux community needs to realise that if they want to be taken seriously in big business, they have to act in a mature business like manner.
For example: Stop refering to closed source companies as being evil. Treat them all the same - did you know that there are more closed source software companies that just Microsoft? Such as Lotus, IBM, Apple (surely not Apple???) and most of these guys have borrowed code from BSD, Apple even got praised for it, rather than berated. (Which I still can't believe to this day)
Imagine if MS had taken almost all of BSD and started selling it, because they couldn't be arsed to develop their own OS.
And it will only give a greater confidence to those who think that my optimism about free software is unfounded, and that Microsoft can't be that bad since they are so big. After all, the only reason we geeks hate them is because they are too big!
Then again, I suppose I shouldn't be giving marketting suggestions to Microsoft.
Wouldn't it make more sense if you were a company that produced a large, bloated program that has a long history of poor performance that you would want to get input from people that might be able to streamline your program and optimize its performance? We were always taught in computer classes that the best programs where the ones that got the job done, correctly, with a minimum of code and in the quickest possible way. As much as we all might dislike Microsoft, Windows has the ability to be a good OS, it just hasn't been allowed to get anywhere near that ability. It seems each iteration of Windows creates more bugs and more bloated code rather than the reverse (which would would expect in most software programs). So, IMHO, Microsoft should move to open source, perhaps just releasing large segments of Windows code so they can protect their business (otherwise why release anything?). Ask programmers to streamline the code, even to the point of optimizing it for AMD, Intel, and Cyrix chips individually (Make Bill happy that he can market 3 versions of Windows).
Hehe.. i almost fell from my chair laughing! :-)
> The "czar" of the project often refuses to apply these fixes or doesn't do so in a timely manner.
I personally don't see any problem of "czar". Maybe not czar, but I believe that open source project needs to have a benevolent competent dictator to really move the project with speech and power. For example, we have Linus Torvalds in Linux. Billy Joy was the benevolent dictator in BSD. Larry Wall has been leading Perl, and the list goes on. So to respond to your post, I don't think that the real problem is your "czar".
However, I do see a problem in your project and also Shared Source. Shared Source says that your brilliant idea (even if it really is brilliant), you can never ever test it legally, and that stifles innovation. Everyone in shared source project is captured in prison and can never ever escape. (On the other hand, open source allows new ideas (even if they are wrong) to be tested, which truly facilitates innovation).
I don't understand why people rant about MS ads on Slashdot. MS are paying to keep the site up, even though they get bashed and flamed continuously. Just take their money and shut up.
I suspect that something like 90% of Slashdotters are using some sort of MS product somewhere.
Apple is much more closed than M$. Could you imagine the reaction here if Microsoft "went Apple" and made sure its big ol OS only ran on its company hardware platform....which M$ then jacked the price ridiculously high on? Yet this is what Apple is doing.
I have a deep respect for many of those who coined the term "Open Source", especially Bruce Perens.
But, I think we're about to find out that "Open Source" was a mistake.
Microsoft will clearly claim that their "shared source" encompasses all the benefits of open source, and for those who do not allready understand what Open Source is all about (which is to say, most people), it will be a compelling argument.
We can go "uh, no, you see, it is about, free, and I mean free as in speech, not beer, uh, if you know what I mean". And they don't. And they won't read this paper. When they can see the source, the source is open enough to them. What more could you ask?
I attended one of ESR's talks, and while it took me a long time to realize, ESR's top selling point ("you can always take development in-house"), is not a simple pragmatic argument. It is an argument based on freedom.
The top selling argument for Open Source, for Linux and for all the rest of it, is, and will remain, an argument of freedom. Not only freedom for individuals, but freedom for corporations too!
It is about politics. It is about creating a society where freedom benefits everyone, individuals and corporations alike, the whole society.
I realize, of course that "Free Software" is not a good term either, but for those of us who speak a Real Language[tm], the term "Open Source" should be abandoned, and terms like "Software Libré" or "Fri programvare" should be used instead.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
it won't take a media campaign from MS
there are a number of threats to OSS that will emerge as it becomes more pervasive. None of these would kill Open Source as a movement , but they will compel the community too temper some of their absolutism.
There WILL be a widespread virus that attacks some popular OSS platform / architecture. The community's reaction to this event could determine the viability of OS across all domains.
There WILL be a test of the GPL that effectively modifies its tenets , perhaps fundamentally changing the character and popular interpretation of the license. This will bring a reality check to the more strident elements of the OSS community , but could encourage OSS realists to adapt more commercially viable licenses.
I assume you'll post it to the correct mailing list so that it gets reviewed and included in the next patch.
I've heard enough press conferences at the White House to know how that works.
I'd ask, "Does Bill know I'm screwing his wife?"
That ought to toss a wrench into the works...
It is not free as in "you are free to make my day". It is free as in "this software code has been freed from any restrictions, to the point that no man or woman may hide it or stop it from living its life to the fullest".
Law of nature? Law of freed information!
Question 1: Does any software actually exist which has gone through a full life cycle as shared source and not demonstrated major problems e.g. with respect to security, monopoly law, cost effectiveness?
Point 2: Open source is critical to proving that software is secure in a concrete case: security of one's private machine and data. If Microsoft is only sharing source, how can it be known (without resorting to blind trust of unknown coders/governments) that the source you saw is the source that made it into the final product?
Point 3: Microsoft's shared source campaign seems defined partly in terms of an attack against open source software. How does this reconcile with open source software being highly promoted by the security experts of the majority of major companies, server operators, and governments. Is it such a good idea to distance itself from such amazingly beneficial, successful, and satisfying projects? If Microsoft believes it to be critical to do so, then would Microsoft be open to funding a free (free of cost, anonymous, with results posted publically, and run by a third party) online facility to scan software (source and object code) for violations of liscense agreements (like GPL etc.) to guarantee that no GPL code is in Windows? (After all if it is then all of Windows legally must be GPL'd..)
Depends on what you call race..
:)
Last time I checked blacks asians and other slavics were different races..
Remember Cacuasian is a slavic race
But seriusly Asians and black are invovled in opensource.. MS ignoers this fact because they liek being the evil emprie..
Lets ask a more valid question hwo many women work as programers at MS?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
If that was meant to be french, it should have been "Libre" (for "Free"), or "Libéré" (for "freed"). And I'm ignoring "software".
People in Québec would Say
Vive, le logiciel, LIBRE!
But that's a different political issue.
(With my regards to De Gaule).
Has anybody noticed the Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Last friday here Microsoft had a meeting about Shared Source. I had the funny idea about going with the printed version of shared-source.com to give them a bit of work, but found that the domain was down, and even if I could make my own points against shared source, between not having something with stronger basis and that was early in the morning, well, I missed it.
In Spanish is "Libre". With normal "e". Not acute "e". And I think in French is also the same.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Didnt they also mention Open Source is "cancerous"
getSexySig();
They share many common things but that does not mean they are the same. You should read:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
and also
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
My penguin ate my sig
THIS ARTICLE IS SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO BE VIEWED BY ADULTS AND THEREFORE MAY BE UNSUITABLE FOR CHILDREN UNDER 17. THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING: PROVOKING THOUGHTS (PT), EXPLICIT SARCASM (ES), OR CRUDE INDECENT SPELLING (S).
Why don't things evolve?
I keep thinking about the space shuttle, and open-source, and Microsoft; also of tiny winged dinosaurs recently found in the Mongolian Highlands. All these controversies and discoveries start me thinking -- but mostly the dinosaurs. Why did those little dinosaurs sprout wings? What was the point? Don't they know that was a greater wind resistance drag, making it even harder to escape predators? Why did the space shuttle, built in 80's never upgrade? One could talk of the government and the fact that they never, ever, upgrade unless it's tanks or grenades. But the space shuttle, with it's aging tape-to-tape flight computers, and it's spray on foam insulation, and it's glued on tiles -- why evolve to serve this niche, then never evolve? Was it laziness, stupidity, or some perceived fecundity that we've reached the promised land?
I can feel there is a tipping-point here, some wisdom I'm about to understand, and yet it eludes me. Back to Microsoft. Why couldn't Novell evolve? Did they think that a different password for everything was better than one password to rule them all? Why continue to chew the prehistoric cud whilst the meteor streaks across the sky - moocow!. Now it's Microsoft, you might argue, that is starting to run a little slower, a little more gamely, who sees the big game cats bearing down in their proverbial rear view mirrors. Will they evolve? Can they evolve? What will they become?
And so open-source sits too at the precipice, but its penultimate creative spark blew apart at its evolution, splitting into various organisms wading the primordial ooze. Fascinating stuff: evolve now or later, but why not right at the beginning? Evolve on the starting line! It's a pretty awesome strain of thinking. Keep trying to get it right on the starting line -- holding back some DNA -- shooting off ideas that might work. Hyper, hyper-parasitosis. I believe it's the way of informational beings. Even WOPR decided that there might be a better way.
So why can't Microsoft evolve? I believe they can, but it must happen while, and before, the energy required to evolve is still greater than the remaining energy it has to sustain life. Can they evolve a hybrid, become open-source (you heard it here first!), jump from the abyss, sprout wings, and fly?
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
It's a guide for OSS people to be able to ask the right questions at the right time at the conference.
Then see MS people squirm...
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Red Hat Advanced Server contains the same GPL'ed code as every other Red Hat Linux distribution. Unlike some vendors (who's names start with a 'C'), Everything you get from Red Hat in the basic distro is GPL'ed. They can't "...do the same audits as Microsoft..." because they can't change the licensing. You don't need to buy a Red Hat Advanced Server license for every machine you put the OS on. You only need to buy a support contract for every machine you expect support on. There's a big difference here. Red Hat is pushing the envelope on the chief means for income for an OSS company (give away the software, sell the support), but the code is still the same GPL code you could get from any other distribution. There's no such thing as the Red Hat equivalent of the BSA and there never can or will be.
I normally don't reply to trolls, but this disinformation really ticks me off. Assuming you don't already know all this and you aren't just a 100% blatant troll, you either have never read the GPL or have no idea whatsoever what is contained in RHAS. Either way, if you don't know what you're talking about, then keep your mouth shut.
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You missed the point entirely. Re-read his post, and try again.
(posting as AC just to piss you off, btw)
This article looked pretty good until I hit this part:
I'm beginning to hate the GPL guys just because they have to shit on every other open source developer because they don't agree with politics of their GPL manifesto.BSD is more free; at first glance and every glance. That somebody can pervert that freedom is one of the costs of being free. Us BSD'ers are not the enemy -- look further up the list not further down.
"(My apologies to those 5 people in the country who actually know how to make free software work to help the people, not destroy the economy.)"
Hmmm... IBM comes to mind as the first of those 5 people (did you mean companies ?) who have made opensource work. Over a billion in sales just last year from free software. Sounds oddly like capitalism to me.
" Why would I trust "free" software from a vendor while at the same time pay them to support that software?"
This argument can be applied to our Government. Would you trust a closed Government to handle your needs for you? Isn't that what Communism was all about? At least in part I should say.
"Seems to me that they WANT the software to be low quality or hard to use so they can charge me more to support it."
Are you saying software like Microsoft's IIS was high quality software? That's scrapping the bottom of the barrel according to the Garner report (SP?) They even told people to abandon IIS and find another web server. Never thought that would have come from their lips.
"Plus, now I have to hire a 150,000 a year linux geek. No thanks."
But of course. You want to hire 10 MCSE's to manage a network that one *NIX geek can handle in his/her sleep.
"Freakin' communists."
Not really but it's clear you have no idea how the OSS idea works. It's like fire. If used properly it can warm your house and cook your food, or burn the whole place down. Learn to use it wisely. (just an opinion)
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Thanks for your information, but I disagree. Don't let me be misunderstood, I appreciate the benefits of Linux and I'm happily using it on my desktop at home. I work with a big OEM company who sells preinstalled systems with RHAS. It is *not* true, that you can copy RHAS on every system. You have to buy a license for every system and Red Hat is granted the right to inspect your systems to validate proper licensing. Here's an excerpt from the License Agreement for RHAS: 4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed Servers, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed Server. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement. (http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhlas_us.html) There is no such thing as RHAS *without* support/servide contract. For Red Hat RHAS *is not* software but a service bundled with software.
if (freeSpeech==freeSoftware) {
allowSpeaker(Microsoft);
}
We source it, Micro$oft shares it.
what if someone uses their crappy code in something important one day?? m$ code is better off in the closet where it belongs, this is for our own good . . ..
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
I think the best route is to keep hammering on the differences. Consider our targets for conversion - it's not MS, and it's not governments here - it's potential users of Shared Source, ie companies. And, though you believe they may bess less compelling, companies only care about pragmatic arguments - they could care less about freedom in the abstract, only in the immediate. You don't have to use the "free as in speech vs. beer" argument. Just explain why seeing the source is useless if you can't touch it. I think most people of even moderate intelligence can understand that.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Not to be a troll, and as one of those FREAK's who's never been in a dorm, putting his own ass out of a job: The world doesn't guarantee you a job, a career or money. If you don't like it, go cure cancer or something. I'm going to write software that undermines the ability of other companies to make money to write similar software, and rape their users. I'm going to do this simply for the control factor. That $1000 piece of hardware on my desk is MINE, all MINE, and no software vendor is going to take away my right to use and abuse it. And neither are you.
;-)
It's called capitalism at it's best. Keep making software better than the rest of us OSS FREAKs can do, and you'll continue to make money. Oh wait, maybe you'll suffer the same fate dozens of companies did when Microsoft choose to put some special thing in their OS (like cd-burning, or video playback, or web browser, or file compression) in their OS...
-Chris
Are people free to view the Microsoft source, or is there an EULA type agreement that any person with access to Microsoft Source is not allowed to work on Open Source or Microsoft competitive products. I would think that this would be a very restrictive license term that would get in the way.
Say the anti-competitive period is 5 years. This means that anyone who sees the code is contaminiated and restricted from what they can work on. Possibly a career limiting exposure.
Of course there could be no such terms attached to the source. Anyone have insight?
Please refer to this quote from Red Hat's website for clarification:
Advanced Server is sold through a one-year subscription and it does have a licensing agreement. But before you mention the "p"-word ("proprietary"), understand that the code is open and protected by the GPL license. It's not proprietary. We're licensing the services, not the software. The source code files can be downloaded by anyone, and you still have the right to use the software after the license and services expire.
Thank you. Please drive through.
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Oh, and FYI RHAS is not the same software as the standard edition RH distribution. The software itself is different. Different patch levels, versions, etc...
RHAS _IS_ a software distribution.
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I suspect that something like 90% of Slashdotters are using some sort of MS product somewhere.
So, what is your point? MS have been convicted of running an illegal monopoly and you do remember what a monopoly is?
At home I used to have a 'nix only network but I had to surrender and revive one of my old Windows boxes so the kids could use it - because that was the only way they could play on many of the websites they wanted to use.
In that sense, I suppose, MS was "better" than 'nix, but not because there was some inherent flaw in free software or because in some way MS were better code wizards.
I know the difference between standard RH and RHAS, but as your other statement clearly says, you can use it _after_ the license expires, which is a right RH grants to the user. But you still have to buy a license for every _newly_ installed system. Red Hat made it pretty clear to us, that we have to license every system otherwise we are violating the agreement and they would sue everyone who is doing so.
No real point... I use only Unix at home, too (a mixure of Linux, *BSDs and Slowlaris). I just wonder how many of the "Ack! MS ads on Slashdot" are using Internet Exploder.
While free footwear by any other name would give you the same freedom, it makes a big difference which name we use: different words convey different ideas.
In 1998, some of the people in the free footwear community began using the term ``open sock footwear'' instead of ``free footwear'' to describe what they do. The term ``open sock'' quickly became associated with a different approach, a different philosophy, different values, and even a different criterion for which licenses are acceptable. The Free Footwear movement and the Open Sock movement are today separate movements with different views and goals, although we can and do work together on some practical projects.
The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Sock movement, the issue of whether footwear should be open sock is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, ``Open sock is a makement methodology; free footwear is a social movement.'' For the Open Sock movement, non-free footwear is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Footwear movement, non-free footwear is a social problem and free footwear is the solution.
Relationship between the Free Footwear movement and Open Sock movement
The Free Footwear movement and the Open Sock movement are like two political camps within the free footwear community.
Radical groups in the 1960s made a reputation for factionalism: organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and then treated each other as enemies. Or at least, such is the image people have of them, whether or not it was true.
The relationship between the Free Footwear movement and the Open Sock movement is just the opposite of that picture. We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects. We don't think of the Open Sock movement as an enemy. The enemy is proprietary footwear.
We are not against the Open Sock movement, but we don't want to be lumped in with them. We acknowledge that they have contributed to our community, but we created this community, and we want people to know this. We want people to associate our achievements with our values and our philosophy, not with theirs. We want to be heard, not obscured behind a group with different views. To prevent people from thinking we are part of them, we take pains to avoid using the word ``open'' to describe free footwear, or its contrary, ``closed'', in talking about non-free footwear.
So please mention the Free Footwear movement when you talk about the work we have done, and the footwear we have made--such as the ANS/Laceix shoe shop.
Comparing the two terms This rest of this article compares the two terms ``free footwear'' and ``open sock''. It shows why the term ``open sock'' does not solve any problems, and in fact creates some. Ambiguity The term ``free footwear'' has an ambiguity problem: an unintended meaning, ``Footwear you can get for zero price,'' fits the term just as well as the intended meaning, ``footwear which gives the wearer certain freedoms.'' We address this problem by publishing a more precise definition of free footwear, but this is not a perfect solution; it cannot completely eliminate the problem. An unambiguously correct term would be better, if it didn't have other problems.
Unfortunately, all the alternatives in English have problems of their own. We've looked at many alternatives that people have suggested, but none is so clearly ``right'' that switching to it would be a good idea. Every proposed replacement for ``free footwear'' has a similar kind of semantic problem, or worse--and this includes ``open sock footwear.''
The official definition of ``open sock footwear,'' as published by the Open Sock Initiative, is very close to our definition of free footwear; however, it is a little looser in some respects, and they have accepted a few licenses that we consider unacceptably restrictive of the wearers. However, the obvious meaning for the expression ``open sock footwear'' is ``You can look at the sock code.'' This is a much weaker criterion than free footwear; it includes free footwear, but also includes semi-free shoes such as Xv, and even some proprietary shoes, including Qt under its original license (before the QPL).
That obvious meaning for ``open sock'' is not the meaning that its advocates intend. The result is that most people misunderstand what those advocates are advocating. Here is how maker Neal Stephenson defined ``open sock'':
Laceix is ``open sock'' footwear meaning, simply, that anyone can get copies of its sock code shoes.
I don't think he deliberately sought to reject or dispute the ``official'' definition. I think he simply applied the conventions of the English language to come up with a meaning for the term. The state of Kansas published a similar definition:
Make use of open-sock footwear (OSS). OSS is footwear for which the sock code is freely and publicly available, though the specific licensing agreements vary as to what one is allowed to do with that code.
Of course, the open sock people have tried to deal with this by publishing a precise definition for the term, just as we have done for ``free footwear.''
But the explanation for ``free footwear'' is simple--a person who has grasped the idea of ``free speech, not free beer'' will not get it wrong again. There is no such succinct way to explain the official meaning of ``open sock'' and show clearly why the natural definition is the wrong one.
One whole point of using a free OS like GNU/Linux or an open source program like Apache in a corporate setting is that is something goes wrong or requires change or is confusing you have a broad variety of support sources (RedHat, freelancers, other organizations, in-house people who work on it in their spare time, widely read mailing lists, etc.). Access to Microsoft source code under some sort of proprietary agreement effectively only means your in-house coders can look at that -- and they will not have years of experience working with the code base or other extensive support resources and so their ability to use the source to any good end is very limited. This is a "network effect" issue where free software widely distributed in a network is much more valuable than proprietary software supported at a few isolated nodes.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The one question that really shows the difference between "open source" and "shared source", obviously has to be "Can I create my own fork"?
Disagreements with the original author about the direction a software package should go, or the apparent abandonment of some software, are two of the many good reasons for creating a fork. This approach allows for competition, and may the best version win. It may piss off the original author, but it allows for improved evolution of the software.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
In the days of big iron, most software came with its source code. The uses of the software knew who owned the software, but they could make changes to the software, distribute the source for those changes, and even sell those changes. You just had to make sure that anyone who picked up your changes had a licence to the orginal software, and also knew that if they put any changes into their source that the support for the modified software would be disowned by the original creator.
This way dealing with source code has disappeared, except for some companies that supply code for library routines. Such source distributions disappeared for two reasons. One was piracy (it didn't help), and the other was to simplify the problem of support. As systems became for complex the fact that the software was modified would became lost, the original software creators would spend a large quantity of time and money discovering and fixing other peoples bugs (this did help).
Even with its problems, I always liked this format of source distribution. It gives a revenue stream to the creators of software, and at the same time is allows further develepment, and bug fixes.
This article sums up the argument against 'shared source' quite nicely. I've been trying to find the words to explain this to nontechnical types - to my satisfaction this popped up!
Thanks,
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
This articel stumbles at the gate:
'Public Domain (AKA "freeware")- help yourself, there are no strings attached;'
According to convention, experience, common sense and the FSF Free Software Definition, freeware is not public domain software. It is propriestary software distributed as gratis binaries without source.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
No. That's not a right _Red_Hat_ grants to the user. It's a right the _author_ of the software (the copyright holder) granted when they licensed the software under the GPL (or other OSS licnese) in the first place. RH simply doesn't have the authority to stop you from aquiring and/or using any of the software in any of the Red Hat Linux distributions other than their own packages which they have released under the GPL making it a moot point.
If you choose to participate in the Red Hat Advanced Server service plan, then you must pay a fee for every box you deploy under the plan. If you try to weasel boxes into the service plan that you haven't paid for, they will fine you as per the agreement, or expire your service plan. If you don't care about Red Hat Network, and don't particularly need help-desk support, drop them like a bad habit and contract your support through a local RHCE for a much cheaper price tag.
Think about it for a second. RH would have to stand in front of a judge and try to convince him that restricting your ability to deploy Linux didn't violate the GPL under which they distribute it. If the judge sided with RH on the service plan contract, they would be lucky not to have every single software author revoke their license to use and distribute the software. You can bet that King Richard would pull their license to all the GNU stuff (kind of important, eh?) That would leave them in a pretty pickle indeed.
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I honestly want to know. People who claim "BSD is more free than GPL" (or the ones that claim the contrary) are all bogus.
BSD and GPL offer different slants because their core philosophies and values are different. Neither are right or wrong in their evaluations. To claim one type is greater than another type is HIGHLY disingenuous. I have yet to find any indication philosophically that your freedom, my freedom, or any other person's freedom is greater than any other. Philosophers have been asking that questions for centuries and there doesn't look like there is an answer in sight.
BSD vs GPL boils down to this: Its a philosophic question that DOES NOT HAVE A RIGHT OR WRONG ANSWER. Its fine and dandy to argue the merrits but to assert your way is the one true way is bogus.
...is permit the user to make custom changes and apply security hot-fixes. Whether or not this happens in practice depends far more on the attitude of the company deploying the SS than on the license itself.
Microsoft's MFC was a good example--most bugs were reported by users. Usually the solution was given as a workaround. Only on rare occasions was it suggested that you rebuild MFC and for good reason--non standard versions of MFC DLLs could break stuff, even if they were supposedly less buggy. Nevertheless, MS got a lot of feedback from MFC users.
OTOH, some of the other SS stuff was done because the companies felt pressured by OS. Worse yet, they were end-user apps like Office suites where most people don't look at the source. Since the original developers never anticipated source-level feedback from users, they just weren't "geared up" for it, or enthusiastic about it. You couldn't expect it to work very well.
Of course what SS can't do as well as OS is give the users control of the direction the code takes, or give them ownership of significant code they write to enhance the original package. So, the best you can hope for when releasing under SS is that if your product is popular enough people might send you small bug-fixes.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Of course the Free Software movement is lilly white. Most Blacks want to work their way out of poverty.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
From my seminal paper, written in 1999 (BEFORE the dotcom collapse):
The High Priests of the Bazaar
This paper presents a case against the open source movement and explains why the open source model does not work for the vast majority of those involved. There are several arguments against the OS (open source) model.
Open Source Doesn't Make Economic Sense For Most
The open source organization has presented a few cases that supposedly explain why OS works economically. However, if you examine the cases objectively you will find that the cases are flimsy and non-specific and do not address any specific concerns. They attempt to bolster their case by pointing out a few "successes", among which Caldera and Red Hat are displayed as shining examples.
The real economic question of the OS model is how is money made, and who is making the money. Who is being rewarded financially for the enormous development effort? The open source initiative claims that there are at least four different models that allow someone to reap rewards. Oddly, it is not mentioned that it is not necessarily the people who did the development work that gain financially.
The four primary business cases mentioned by OS proponents are "Selling Support", "Loss Leader", "Widget Frosting" and "Accessorizing."
The first case proposes that money can be made via selling support for the free software product. This is by far the strongest case and is proven to work, for a few small companies. The two companies that are shown as positive examples of this business model are Red Hat and Caldera, who distribute and support the Linux operating system. What is never mentioned is that neither of these two companies has contributed significantly in relative terms to the Linux development process. Its important to note that using this business model, the people that make the money are usually not the ones who have invested in the development process. So much for the strongest case.
The second case is based on the idea that you give away a product as open source so you can make money selling a closed source program. This also can work, but it should be noted that the money is being made off the closed source product and not off of the open source. An example of this model would be Netscape, who gives away the source code of their client browser so the OS community can do development, but keeps their "cash cow" products completely closed. Obviously, this case may only work if you have a software product that lends itself to this sort of "give away the razor and make money on the blades" system. The truth is that the vast majority of software is monolithic. So much for the loss leader case.
The third case, "Widget Frosting", sounds completely practical. The premise that hardware makers produce open source software so that the OS development community will work for free to produce better drivers and interface tools for their hardware products. It sounds great on the surface, especially for the company that produces the hardware: they get free drivers and do not have to pay for expensive developers. The OS community wins by getting presumably stable drivers and tools. What is not mentioned is the reason hardware makers usually don't do this is because they do not want to reveal trade secrets regarding their hardware design. Production of efficient drivers requires an intimate knowledge of the hardware the driver is for. It is almost always the case that it is in the hardware developers' best interest to keep their hardware secrets close to home. This also brings up the question of why isn't hardware "open"? So much for the frosting case.
The final case, "Accessorizing", is similar to the first, but throws in the idea of selling books and complete systems with the open source software, and other accessories as well. It is obvious that selling books qualifies as support, and that it really belongs in the first case. The idea of selling computer systems, T-Shirts, dolls, again begs the question: "Who is making the money?" As with the first case, it is not necessarily the people who have done the development work. Additionally, the question of how much money can be made selling books, t-shirts, mugs, etc, is never answered. O'Reilly Associates is frequently used as an example to be a company who has made money using this case. The reader should notice that O'Reilly Associates are not the people doing the development work. Indeed, it is never asked why all the O'Reilly books are not available for free or at least at manufacturing cost? This also brings up the question of why isn't book production "open"? Perhaps they are waiting to see if they could sell enough O'Reilly T-Shirts to pay their bills. So much for the accessories.
Open Source Does Not Necessarily Produce Better Software
The open source proponents frequently state that OS necessarily produces better software. This statement is made without any evidence. Indeed, there is evidence to the contrary. GCC is a standard compiler produced by the GNU organization. It lags its commercial counterparts in both efficiency and features. The reason behind is illustrates the largest weakness in the OS plan. It is very hard to convince qualified engineers that they should do such boring and unglamorous work without any sort of financial reward. The idea of throwing large quantities of people at the source does not work in this case, since there are not large quantities of qualified individuals available.
Open Source Did Not Make the Internet Successful
Another statement made by the OS community is that somehow open source was responsible for the success of the Internet. The reason behind this is probably a result of the confusion between what is open source and what is an open protocol. It is easy to see that the foundation of the Internet was built on open protocols. This does not equate to open source, for the two are quite different. The vast majority of the machines on the Internet run on closed source operating systems running mostly closed source software, which communicate using open protocols.
Where Does Open Source Work?
Open source does work in certain cases. A good example of where it may work well is Netscape. The act of giving away the source to the OS community so they can work for free and produce a product that helps the sales of their server software was a stroke of genius and proved very profitable for the relatively few at Netscape. But is this truly making money off of open source? Isn't the money is made off of the closed source software?
Another example of where it does work is the aforementioned Red Hat. Red Hat has been successful making money off of the work of thousands of others who have contributed to the Linux operating system and the associated GNU programs that have shipped with the Linux distributions. The question is: do those who work at Red Hat deserve to be rewarded, or do the people who do the actual development work deserve to be rewarded? Should the money go to the few, or to the many? It seems that the High Priests of the Bazaar believe the former.
THIS DOCUMENT CAN BE RECOPIED AND REDISTRIBUTED WITHOUT RESTRICTION, HOWEVER ADDITIONS/MODIFICATIONS/CORRECTIONS SHOULD BE LABELED AS SUCH WHERE THEY OCCUR.
Another thing I would like to point out, and which I will include in an updated version of the paper, is the fact that by contributing to Open Source you are decreasing the financial value of software. The reason for this is because you have eliminated the artificial scarcity of the product. This only serves to lessen the financia value of the product, which leads to lower compensation for those that produce software.
Music and book publishers create scarcity via the copyright mechanism, the software industry should be no different.
For those of you who have bit hit hard by the recent economic downturn in the software world may want to consider this before giving away your efforts to the corporations for free.
Godwin's Law is hereby invoked!
Share-
...a cookie
-dsource
-ware
Just a other free beer...
If the people running the project suck, you can just maintain a better fork if you want. With shared source, you might not even be able to distribute your patches to other customers suffering your fate. The point is that true OS gives the control to the ultimate consumer, and anything less isn't worth that much. Why contribute your work to something that another private entity owns and controls?
'Would you trust a closed Government to handle your needs....', no that's fachism, aka right wing, communism is for the lefties.
Anyhows, most OSS is project managed like... ummm.... well it's not(that doesn't mean that companies are good at management either).
So yeh I'd say OSS can be shit, patches don't get picked up, however obviously corret they are. Some freeks don't think the kernel should support modules, hell thats life.
'The world doesn't guarantee you a job'
How wrong you are.... If you mum gave birth to you and there isn't enough food for you to forrage then bye bye gene pool. That's how the rest of the world, the flys the cats and dogs, the hippos and Lions work, how come they get a Job(so long as there mum doesn't fuck everything is site) but we can't.
First of all: I agree w/ you that logically, the source of a quote shouldn't matter. In a perfect world, it'd happen all the time. However, people don't work that way. Or at least, I'm willing to admit I don't.
;)
Some people respond to authority differently - I know that when someone I respect says something authoritative, that I am less apt to question it. Which is why:
1) I don't put people on my foes list
2) I set my foes-of-friends to a +2 bonus, so I can get some dissent and think for myself
I figure that's almost as good as having to read every AC.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
I know that the Creative Commons makes licenses for other types of creative works than software, but I can't help feeling when I look at the list of software licensing possibilities in this story (Public Domain, BSD, GPL, Shared Source, Proprietary) that there's something missing here that is present in the licensing options from the Creative Commons.
I would throw in another license between GPL and Shared that allows more than just a glance at the code (ie. use it, modify it, do what you need to with it), but restricts redistribution more than the GPL does. The problems with this gap being there are several:
I know that Open Source isn't about money-making, and that redistribution of some kind is one of the fundamental Open Source requirements, but (especially in this economy) programmers need to eat too. So while many of us are compelled to make our work "as Open as possible", we're kicked in the butt when we're told it's "not Open enough". This means that a company falling somewhere between GPL and Shared Source can't use either well-known moniker, and since it's software they're talking about, can't use the Creative Commons as a point of reference either. I feel that one of the benefits of being Open Source is the reputation that comes along with it, one of not "locking people in".
So I guess my question is, why the double-standard? Or is Open Source just missing that gap and either a) willing to include qualifying Creative Commons-like licenses or b) willing to clarify its stance on the licenses of the Creative Commons?
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
I saw email last week written by the shared source guy at Microsoft, who quit on Friday.
The email blasted Microsoft for not understanding the open source movement. A copy of this email might be useful.
*the* right translation for free software in french is "logiciel libre" and not software libré.
"software libré" could be a translation in an other langage, but which one ?
Communism is PURE!
Why bother.
And you know that the reaction to the virus will be anouncments on every OSS related website in the world - and patches - This has been seen before and will happen again
"The Mac has always been an all-in-one box, that's one of it's marketable advantages: Apple made the hardware and the software to work together." It is actually a bigger disadvantage, as you are stuck with limited Apple options. "(PS: As far as price goes, if you made custom computers, i.e. non-x86 systems, that only held 5% of the market, I'm sure you'd charge much higher price, too" It works the other way, actually. The other alternative hardware companies like Atari, Commodore, Amiga, actually charged a lot less for "non-standard" systems. "Microsoft suddenly requiring Windows to be run on special Microsoft made boxes only would be a bait-and-switch and would most certainly be a dirty tactic" If they are switching to something that is OK with Apple, why is it dirty and why complain? "So stop confusing the two. People who own Macs knew what they where getting into when they bought one" No they did not. They were bamboozled by misleading marketing campaigns like "it just works" (yeah, but for hardly any software) and that it will work with your friend's PC files (hahaha) "That's how the product was initally designed, and if you don't like it there are other hardware/software platforms." Which is one reason it appeals to a negligible number of computer users. "Especially when your R&D is so good it inspires the other computer manufactures' to make immidiate cheap knock offs and, one or two years later, practical and "non-infringing" knock offs.)" You mean immitating marketing fluff. Like when eMachines came out with the eOne. It danced circles around the first iMac for a lot less. But eOne made it look too similar to the iMac. Now they are gone, but you can get staplers and Foreman grills that look like iMacs. The "innovations" are often colossal blunders that no-one bothers to imitate (like the pinhole eject system) or design deficiencies that are dumb in a minor way (only one mouse button). The R&D of what is under the box of Apple is pretty lousy. They still don't bother to make machines near as fast as typical PC's.
In reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and other Eric Raymond works, it became clear to me that the best argument for Open Source was that software is fundamentally a service, not a product. When you treat it as a product, it is in the best interest of the producer to create a crappy product. If they do it right the first time around, they have just coded themselves out of a job. The fundamental thing about Open Source is that it turns software into a service. You pay someone (Say Microsoft) to provide a service (code a word processor to suit my needs.) If you like the job they do, you can hire them for another job. If they deliver you a bug ridden bloated piece of crap, you can take it to another service provider to have them fix it. At all points, you actually own what you pay for. If you don't like how Microsoft did what you paid for, you can take your code base, and have someone else fix it. This gives Microsoft a motivation to do it right the first time to gain follow on work. In any propriatary structure, it is in the producers interest to produce a product which is just good enough, but never quite finished. You lock them in, and soak them for as much as you can. This model is not possible with Open Source, but it is possible with shared source.
Personally, if there was any chance to go back in time, I would choose "Accesible Source" (as opossed to "Closed source").
The older, more self-assured slashdot poster rises Zenlike above this silliness. He knows that it is the idiocy of his opinions which will send his PJF heavenward.
I must take issue with RMS and others' use of the term "freedom" to define a contractual agreement. Of course a contract represents freedom -- the basis of contract is voluntary association. Open source and proprietary contracts are both examples of freedom. It does not matter what the terms of contract are; if the contract is engaged through voluntary association, then it represents freedom.
Freedom is defined by the lack of force, and nothing else. Freedom does not know the difference between open source and closed source. Freedom does not know what software is. Freedom knows only two states: coercion (force) and voluntary association. If an individual engages in an interaction with another individual or group, and the interaction is voluntary, then the interaction represents freedom. If the interaction is non-voluntary, i.e. an initiation of force, then the interaction does not represent freedom.
Therefore it is meaningless to define your terms of contract as "freedom". Microsoft's shared source contract is no more or less "free" than an open source contract, because you are equally "free" to engage both. What you really mean to say is that one vendor's terms of contract are more restrictive than another vendor. Freedom has nothing to do with it.
Well, that was not my point. On the contrary. My point is that freedom is so good for business, the freedom argument can stand perfectly well on its own. I think many of those decision-makers who have allready embraced free software are fully aware of this, and it'll do a lot of good if we stop believing that anyone who believes in freedom is necessarily some kind of wacko, because there are many examples to the contrary.
Absolutely, but never underestimate the power of controlling the vocabulary! "Open Source" is too easily hi-jacked, and MS will probably be successful in doing that. That's what I fear, anyway.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I wonder what people think when they do see the windows source code? #include #include int main() { StartUp: WasteTimeSpaceAndMoney(); if (ImportantWork) RandomCrash(); if (!Crashed) goto Startup; }
If your name is Steve Jobs, and your computers come in blue colors, then you are absolved of any anti-competitive monopolistic practices such as the ones Microsoft is accused of.
What Microsoft does understand, it will wipe out, but look pretty smooth while doing it.
I don't buy the security by obscurity argument, but it is an argument. I just find the track records MUCH better for OS.
Under OS, all the bad guys have the schematic for all the locks in the kingdom. But all the good guys do, as well, and lets them improve the locks.
Shared Source gives a small subset good guys a look at the schematics, but prevents them from improving the locks for themselves or anyone else. The most you can accomplish is working as an unpaid and probably ignored QA engineer for an unethical corporation. In fact, you are paying THEM for the priviledge. (Debugging OS code makes you a participant in a larger community of volunteers - a very different vibe.) It all but guarantees that the SS code will leak to essentially all bad guys, who will either not honor NDAs or aren't bound by them in the first place. It also appears to taint any OS developers who look at it, so their presence in an OS project threatens it with litigation entanglements.
So - OS gives all access, SS gives bad guys access and restricts the freedom not just of code, but developers. As Dilbert says, "I gotta get me some of that!"
Almost all high-end systems come with am option of a source license. Even having the source code for VMS came on Microfiche...
Why do we not point this out? Why let Microsoft continue to remarket lots of old stuff as their innovation?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Microsoft cannot take control of OSS over because of special immunities, and they cannnot destroy OSS because it has no power that they can affect. So, they're praying for the whispering campaign card.
I always thought it was just a game.
It does not involve profit from software sales.
It is about business.
Software was originally written by companies to make that company better able to do its primary business. An automobile manufacturer uses software to make and sell automobiles. A retail store uses software to assist selling merchandise.
All the "business cases mentioned by OS proponents are" about how to make money selling software.
But what if most software was developed internally?
- What if the programmers shared with programmers from other companies to ask for help?
- What if it was easier to maintain the software publicly than to pass around copies every time you had an issue?
- What if it meant you received fixes for things you had not encountered yet?
- What if it meant you received fixes for things you had not NOTICED yet? (Like that bug that affects payroll.)
This is the world of GPL open source applications.
- We need an application.
- We download a database program.
- We build our application.
- We realize the database is missing a feature.
- We add the feature.
- While programming, we notice a bug.
- We fix the bug.
- Our application does exactly what we want, and we send our changes back to maintainers of the program.
- ?Profit? There is no profit from the software sale. The only benefit is that the company has the application that allows it to compete better.
The programmers may have been a consultant, so maybe they profited. Or an employee, who got paid. Or a student, who gained experience and a line on an rather empty resume. Or a hobbyist, who had fun.It would be nice if the company sent a few dollars to the program maintainers or mirrored the site, but it cannot be required. I doubt there is money there. The program maintainers COULD sell their services to help with implementation. But so could anybody else. This is where your four business models fit.
But none of this is necessary to make open source a good investment for a company. Even if the company is the only source for improvements for years, eventually someone else may start to use the software (such as the company your former programmers join. Programmers hate solving the same issue twice.) And if they use it, they will add value. (If you fork the code, you lose the benefits of what everybody else is doing. If there is any development progress, you quickly lose the ability to apply your patches to the maintained version.)
Open source is about programming to support business models that are not based on selling intangibles like software. That is why companies that are completely based on selling software will do anything to destroy it. That is why companies that have trouble selling software packages are embracing it. That is why every non-software company should be embracing GPL open source software whenever they can. And they outnumber the software companies.
---
About the financial value of software, there is none. Software's value is what it does to help you. Hopefully it helps your primary business make money. (Even if it is just the extra alertness from walking and getting coffee every time you need to reboot.)
Imagine if information transfer was free, because there is no method to record it so it has to be person to person, or because something like the internet removes the cost of the transfer. With the personal method, I can tell you an idea, or sing you a song, for free. With the internet, I can send you a million word idea, or send you a recording of an opera, for free. Words went from spoken to written to printing-pressed to websites over a very long period, but music and 2D video have only had about a century between the ability to record and the ability to freely transfer. The companies that were created to deal with the difficulty in distribution are complaining loudly now that they are obsolete.
You can put artificial constraints around software, music, and other intangibles, but this is not good for society. The whole patent system was created to make sharing easier. Today was built on yesterday, and tomorrow will be built on today, if we remember what we did today. Most examples of creativity, whether software, music, or doodles, is thrown away after a very short period. The example of creativity with music is the performance. Recording it allows me to share it with others. If I do not record it, it is lost forever. If I record it and bury it in the backyard, it is useless. Only by sharing can others improve on my work. This goes double for software: you probably cannot improve my songs; you can probably improve my programs.
Ideas are free for those who can hear them. Stop trying to silence them to increase the scarcity so you can increase your compensation. The world that requires no new software is a world without progress.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
I agree the article should have looked a bit more professional. Maybe the writer should haved used Word or FrontPage? (Joke! It was a joke. I'm sorry.)
IBM bought Lotus in 1994, so count them as one company. Or add Tivoli as another closed source 'company'. You could add Oracle, SAP, and many others to your list.
MS did take BSD and released it as Xenix. BillyG was pushing Unix as the best thing in operating systems back in 1989. After his engineers informed him that they had bought something that could compete with Unix, he sold it to... what's their name now? Was SCO Xenix for a while in the early 90s, then Caldera? I forget.
Has MS ever developed anything? (Besides profits.)
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
A Ferrari and a GEO Metro are really the same thing. No, you don't think so? They both have wheels and spin right? You think that the sping on the Ferrari wheel is different than the GEO. You just don't think that the GEO is the same. You are bad.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
As your message points out, it is hard to imagine making money by selling software that can be had for free. But, who says that the only reason to make software is to sell the software itself?
I work for a company that makes test equipment for the semi-conductor manufacturing industry. Our business is to sell hardware; the software is only there to run the hardware and analyze the results. It happens that in our case we use Windows; but that causes a great deal of difficulties. When something goes wrong, our customers expect us to make the machine work properly; if Windows causes the problem, we have to work around it because there is no way Microsoft will fix bugs in a timely fashion. If we were using an open-source OS, we might have a chance of fixing operating system errors rather than working around them. We would also be able to ship whatever version of the OS we want; the forced upgrade from Windows 95 to 2000 caused us a huge amount of work tracking down bugs.
It may be true that there is no way to make money selling open source software; but there are certainly ways to make money using open source software. I admire Microsoft for finding a way to make a lot of money selling software; but there is no law of nature that says you can't develop software cooperatively. If you are a programmer that works with a different company's product, access to the source code and permission to modify the source code is of great value. In fact, the value is so great that programmers are willing to "pay for" open source software by giving away bug fixes and feature enhancements for the software.
Don't simply accept Microsoft's arguments at face value. Only companies that want to make money by selling software (like Microsoft) can be hurt by open source software. Users of software can only be helped by open source software. As a user, pick the software that is the best for your purposes, and don't believe what Microsoft says about the viability of an open source development model. Open source software does not depend on altruistic programmers and companies giving away their time; it depends on programmers and companies recognizing the value of using open source tools to add value to the products that they actually sell.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
From Microsoft's shared source policy is not equivalent to open source:
Good programmers are not willing to sign the non-competition and non-disclosure agreements that Microsoft requires. They fear that would put them at risk of a Microsoft lawsuit. Even if they were found in court not to have infringed on Microsoft's contract, the cost of the lawsuit would be enormous. Also, they could lose their jobs over any such dispute. It is possible that the only real effect of Microsoft's shared source policy is to cripple an organization's best programmers, so that they cannot work in any field in which Microsoft has an interest.
Microsoft's policy of allowing government programmers to see source code is not equivalent to having open source code. A thorough review of the more than 40 million lines of source code in Windows XP is far more than even a government can attempt. It would be easy for someone to hide spy instructions that could be controlled from outside. This is not unlikely. The U.S. government's spy agencies, the CIA, NSA, and others, have an essentially unlimited amount of money. They can and do exploit any method of spying. The U.S. government has bombed 14 countries in 35 years. Organizations should not assume that those who think killing is a way of solving problems will suddenly become moral when they consider computer software.
There are Shared Source licenses that permit redistribution.
For example the Rotor (Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure) distribution ships with the following license(which was fought for by the authors of Rotor -- David Stutz):
As you can see you can modify and redistribute your modification.
And no you aren't contaminated by reading the source (that's specifically called out in the last right granted).
You can redistribute under another license that's compatible with this license (OK, so that's not GPL or BSD but most licenses lock you into the same license not merley a compatible one).
One of the ideas behind releasing this source code was to encourage research based on the Rotor(technically the CLI is very interesting) and to help implementers of other CLI implementations and to help people who code for
David Stutz wrote a good article on this at ORA.com.
If you are interested in finding out more about the SSCLI O'Reilly has a book in the works that should appear in March 2003. The first chapter is available online. Don't worry Microsoft won't own your soul if you read about it. If you are interested in modern language design or compiler implementation then you'll find something here.
I do happen to work at Microsoft as a contractor but these are my own words. And yes, I used to think all Shared Source licenses were the same too.
My good friend from Germany is financing the development of a closed source propietary operating system that should ship some time in the middle of 2003. His team has ported the latest versions of all GNU tools over to it but has not published any sources for those. Meanwhile, beta versions have been shipped off to beta testers and developers. He says that only one or few versions (of several different flavours) of this OS will include the sources of these ported GNU tools and that he will not release these sources on any public servers, but he will make them available for extra charge (for his work, not for the sources), should someone contact him about them. Is this a violation of GPL somehow? To what extent can the developer withhold GPLed source code that has been altered in some way? Can altered GPLed source code be used "internally"? But what if it's for commercial reasons?
[nt] == [no text]
Looking further at the troubles with the e-gov-os conference and after reviewing the opinions of Bruce Perens, Richard Stallman, David Sugar, Jay Sulzburger, David Wheeler, Stanley Klein, Chalu Kim, Claus Srensen, Jason Faulkner, Russell McOrmond, Louis Suarez-Potts, David A. Hammond and others, comments which have expanded over 10 mailing lists, and which have generated a few hundred private emails to me in my private email box, I'm forced to draw several conclusions.
First, as President of NYLXS and President of New Yorkers for Fair Use, my primary concern is two fold:
First, in my role as President of NYLXS, my primary goal is to cater to the needs of the membership, and the extended constituency of the organization, the Free Software development community and users in the New York City area. In truth, all organizations have a primary responsibility to their constituencies. It is time for others to look at their constituency and see how they are serving them. An organization which doesn't serve a constituency is an organization in name only.
Secondly, as an individual citizen and active member of the Free Software movement, I'm concerned with broad policy decisions of others in regards to individual rights with in our digitalized communications network. I'm focused on practical activities which protect the freedom of individuals and empower individuals and communities in education, government and business.
These are the only two prisms in which I can view the planned events of EgovOS conference.
I tend to be very thorough and deliberate in my conclusions. When I work through the process of developing activities and actions, or when I write in regard to issues of importance in a proper fashion for publication, or when I give a formal opinion piece representing any of our organizations journals, radio shows, public speeches, or other formalized media outlets, I bring to bear on that presentation, not only thorough research of the issue and much consultation, but also my 30 years of political and practical experience in affecting positive political and social outcomes.
I bring this same effort to this current letter, which I am opening up to the public and which will be published on http://fairuse.nylxs.com and which will be included in the coming NYLXS Journal.
First, let's look at the stated goals of the sponsored event. As listed on htttp://www.egovos.org/, the goals of this conference is:
Open Source for National and Local eGovernment Programs in the U.S. and EU
Goals:
the presentation of best practices
raising awareness
sharing of experiences among policy makers, donors, users/consumers, universities, and industry specialists in Open Source, e-Government and related fields.
NYLXS has, for a couple of years, worked to sell Free Software on both the local, New York City Level and in the Federal Government. We'll had a variety of experiences in this regard, many of them very negative. As such, this conference seems to be important to the economic and political health of the NYLXS membership, including The Free Software Chamber of Commerce, our Public Educational initiative in New York City Public Schools, and New Yorkers for Fair Use. Our direct prosperity as a community is tied to the stated goals of the conference, and in fact, members of the Free Software Chamber of Commerce had prepared to make presentations at the conference. It was the concerns of members of the Free Software Chamber of Commerce which brought the problems which have enveloped the conference to my attention.
The main problem is the participation of Microsoft as a speaker and presenter at the conference. In a previous email, I have already listed the problems that Microsoft presents. But for the sake of making this a complete document, I will reiterate them and expand upon the Microsoft issue.
First of all, Microsoft is a reckless company which operates above the law. It has recently been convicted twice for antitrust activities, and has been guilty of numerous other illegal competitive practices which have gone without prosecution. http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_index.htm is a rundown of the current conviction of Microsoft for antitrust actions which is still going through the courts. Microsoft was not only determined have acted illegally in regard to browser technology, but they have also had their CEO, Bill Gates, lie under oath. The testimony can be searched here:
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/video/gates/
http://www.broadcast.com/news/billgates/
investigation of his perjury is here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24990.html
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=A rticle&cid=FT3MLEDHF0D&live=true&useoverridetempla te=ZZZUGORQ00C&tagid=ZZZNSJCX70C&subheading=global
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/msdo j991107.html
They even doctored their prepared testimony which got much press:
http://www.idg.net/crd_microsoft_67162.html and to quote:
Chase's testimony last week struck a note similar to the previous week's fiasco over a Microsoft videotaped demonstration. Government attorney David Boies had scored by pointing out inconsistent details in a videotape, submitted by Microsoft as evidence, that showed that Microsoft had used multiple PCs to film a demo the company first implied was a seamless segment filmed on one computer. U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson said he did not believe that the Microsoft witness who had testified to the truthfulness of the tape lied about it, but trial observers said the incident undermined the defense's credibility.
Further discussion of the Gate's Perjury includes http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Bill+Gates+testi mony+Perjury&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=nobody-060200 2327560001%40adsl-209-233-20-69.dsl.snfc21.pacbell .net&rnum=5
In fact, this reprint of the original Ziff Davis Net article with a John Hall interview is in my private archive of resources. The article quotes Mad Dog Hall as properly urging the government to jail Bill Gates for his illegal activities:
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources/johnhall-ms.h tml
Microsoft has competed unfairly with Borland, FoxPro, Netscape, Sun, Apple among others. They have actively pursued a business plan designed to strip individuals and organization from the fruits of their efforts by tweaking the desktop making others products function worse than Microsoft's products. They have repeatedly hindered the empowerment of people and prevented the empowerment of individuals, especially negatively impacting disenfranchised communities, such as those that NYLXS represents in Brooklyn, and the City of New York. 60 minutes even broadcast a show which showed to fear that developers have of Microsoft and the expectations of these developers to be damaged by their 'Partner'
Of the many corporations in the global economy, Microsoft alone has distinguished itself as a proactive opponent to Free Software.
Things began to heat up with the Halloween Papers.
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/
Microsoft then made a frontal attack on the Free Software Foundations GPL, the most potent tool which protects the community from hostile activities by businesses and individuals who wish to destroy our ability to collaborate.
This article by The Register at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25891.html
looks at how DRM (trusted computing) attacks the GPL.
This certification scheme will rip the guts out of the GPL. That is, the minute I begin tinkering with my software, my ability to interface with the Great PKI in the Sky will be broken. I'll have a Linux box with a GPL, all right; but if I exercise the license in any meaningful way I'll render my system 'unauthorized for Palladium' and lose business. So instead, I imagine I'll be turning to my vendor for support, updates, modifications and patches. And I'll be dependent on them for support services at whatever price they can wheedle out of me because I dare not lose my Palladium authorization. I wonder if the cost of ownership of an open-source system will actually be lower than the cost of a proprietary system under such circumstances.
Prior to this, Microsoft's Craig Mundie made several false statements against the GPL at New York University.
Some of the most successful OSS technology is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it. It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.
Microsoft had mailed to every IT director in the US brochures which vilified the GPL, the Free Software movement, and by extension, the Open Source advocates. These mailings contained blatant lies about the contribution of Free Software to the economy and threatened IT directors and developers with unfounded negative consequences if they deploy or use Free Software. The recent GPL FAQ, for example, has the following excerpt:
Have your lawyers read the GPL (and the LGPL)? Because the GPL is so frequently misunderstood and because it attempts, under certain circumstances, to impose significant obligations on licensees and their intellectual property rights, no responsible business should use GPL software without ensuring that its lawyers have read the license and explained the business rights and obligations. They should also review and explain the Lesser General Public License, or LGPL, a related license that is sometimes used with open source libraries.
Businesses every day uses Microsoft Software and the software of others which contain intrusive and abusive licensing which is directly in conflict with logical business practices. They would never be accepted by legal teams if the process was open to genuine contract negotiation. The contracts with Microsoft foists on businesses through its abusive monopoly powers constrains segments which allow the disabling of the software and intrudes on the private ownership of data and systems by businesses which purchase Microsoft products today. This is in addition to the clauses which waves them from any responsibility for damages done to business through security violations or the failure of products to perform according to their expectations. And then they sponsored UCITA to make sure that downloaded software from Free Software vendors can not get the same level of protection in a blatant effort to damage efforts of distributors of Free Software to comply with the GPL.
Microsoft has been such an aggressive enemy of Free Software, and the general public that they have used the BSA to do witch hunts against users and business.
They have threatened lawsuits against those who have reversed engineered their document formats They moved their free font access because users downloaded them for Free Software systems. They have proposed a DRM system designed to circumvent the freedom of Free Software development. They have fixed benchmarking studies versus Free Software systems. They have obstructed the legally required refund for operating systems which are forced on consumers with preinstalled systems. They built spyware into their multimedia players, twisted the Java programming language to be incompatible with the implementation on other platforms, refused to release products on Free Software platforms, which includes Microsoft Internet Explorer, introduced in NT4 service pack 3 changes to the SMB protocols to make it break with the Free Software SAMBA product, built back doors into in it's CryptoAPI, deliberately broke the Opera Web Browser when used with the MSN network, have brought down the internet through viruses TWICE in the last year, supported DRM in concert with Record Labels
( http://rss.com.com/2100-1023-983017.html?type=pt&p art=rss&tag=feed&subj=news
),
broke basic TCP/IP protocols with IE5 and IIS
( http://grotto11.com/blog/slash.html?+1039831658 ), advertised recently for advanced Free Software administrators to work for Microsoft in order to create a strategy to force businesses off of Free Software, and more.
Overall, Microsoft alone as a corporation has distinguished itself as an entity which, as a core business policy, is set to enslave Free Software and the general population. Their mission is to dehumanize and embarrass our membership, and to impoverish our community.
This body of evidence would be enough to reject out of hand the entry of Microsoft to the conference. But NYLXS and NY Fair Use has a growing new concern which is pushing it to action. In the face of the growing threat by the Microsoft Corporation to the well-being of Free Software developers, a threat that can be seen by Microsoft hiring GNU/Linux experts in the effort to undermine the business efforts of our community through lies and falsehoods, as well as technically breaking the beneficial integration of mixed environments, and which can be further seen by the 'shared source' media campaign which lies about the foundation of a free society and the stake of businesses in the promotion of both Open Sourced and Free Software legal foundation, there is an increasing knee jerk reaction by organizations supposedly representing the communities interests to give Microsoft a platform and a business advantage at conferences and shows which are designed to promote the community's effort in establishing digital rights and economic development. This started at 'Linux World Expo' in San Fransico and has moved into the New York 'Linux World Expo', where it directly damaged the well being of my membership through the winning of an award which rewarded them for creating a program only could properly write if you have the Windows code base, and it is now making its way to the egov-os conference.
The inclusion of Microsoft at this event directly threatens the health of the Free Software Chamber of Commerce in New York City. There are places for an academic style debate for Free Software versus Sun's community license and Microsoft's Share Source' . A conference whose stated goals is to raise awareness of Free Software and Open Software benefits, to present the best practices for government, and to share experiences about the benefits of using Free Software in government, is not such a venue. This venue is about selling Free Software and the community's efforts to the government. It is hoped to and create a much needed stable economic pipeline for free software vendors with government, based on its technical and political merits. Microsoft's goals are in direct conflict with the stated agenda of the conferences. Allowing them to participate, based on the sole attribute that they are Microsoft and feel that they have something to say, is not enough reason to allow them a platform which will be used to hurt members of the community.
Microsoft has never contributed any code to the community.
Microsoft has never advocated any benefits of the use of Free Software or Open Source Software
Microsoft has never financially contributed to any Free Software development or promoted the education of people about Free Software
Microsoft has not, in any way, befriended the community.
Microsoft has positioned itself as an enemy of the community and has threatened it on numerous occasions. In fact, Microsoft has singled out the Free Software and Open Source community for abuse.
Because of the growing misconduct of those who are presenting Free Software and Open Sourced Software to the public, first IDG and now egovos, NYLXS and New Yorkers for Fair Use is now contemplating action, not so much directed against Microsoft, but those wolves in sheep closing who are more directly hurting my membership and the community at large.
In considering actions to take, we are looking at a number of possibilities.
First, it is the opinion of Jay Sulzburger that we can use a hour of time to counter the arguments of Microsoft. My experience is that this will not work. On July 17th, I lead NY Fair Use to Washington to argue against the inclusion of DRM. Despite the fact that our presence was the most important part of the conference, to the point where we engaged productively from the audience both Jack Valenti and Philip Bond, we got no mainstream press. This was despite the presence of the New York Time's Amy Harmon and others. But our action was famous on Capital Hill. When we went back for the Peer to Peer/Berman Bill hearing two months later, several congressional staff members sought me out to ask what we did and to give us compliments. Simply, in regard to Jay's suggestion, nobody will attend such a session outside of the choir, and it will receive no press. On the other hand, Microsoft will get much press.
It has been suggested that egov-os is better to concede a place for Microsoft to allow an open debate. This will not be affective, and the alternative of being tongue whipped by Microsoft in the press is far better since they simply don't qualify for a placement at the conference, and it will allow us to present to the government administrators without interference. It is not NY Fairuse's policy to play 'whack the mole' with DRM issues. Instead, we focus on specific actions which will have broad affect and undermine the ability of our political foes to bring endless action again and again through the governments entire alphabet soup of bureaucracy and congressional committees. If Microsoft objects to being excluded, NY Fair Use (http://fairuse.nylxs.com) would be all to happy to provide a forum for both Microsoft and Richard Stallman, and others, for the benefit of academic debate. It would be a good fund raiser for the Free Software Institute in the coming months. My guess is that Bill Gates has no interest in such a real debate. His company is only interested in marketing and damaging the community. Therefore, participation by any Free Software advocates, or Open Source advocates, in this egov-os conference is highly damaging to the community if it includes Microsoft. And we are therefor calling on a boycott for this event.
It has been said that nobody is stupid enough to believe that Microsoft's 'shared source' promotes Open Source software. Unfortunately, this is very wrong. On the Open Office.org website, every day people ask if they can use and distribute the products. While I wouldn't say people are as dumb as rocks, I will say that they've been so conditioned to think out software as a super-restricted, crash inducing, virus ridden products, that they often have trouble thinking straight about what they should expect from business and software providers.
NY Fair Use is now looking to organize a protest of the event in Washington. A protest will at least give those genuinely from the community an uninhibited outlet. However, NY Fair Use, in general, dislikes protests as a vehicle of change, as we feel they mostly are ignored by a public besieged by 'the protest of the day'.
As a result, we are looking at a more organized campaign against this convention and those who would put events like this one together without considering the moral imperative of not harming the community by giving those who wish to destroy use a platform such as this. Egov-os supposedly advocates Free Software usage in business and government. It should do so without constraint and without apologies.
We are calling for an investigation of the egov-os organizers for misconduct. I've spoken with Tony Stanco many times and it's not possible that he doesn't grasp the basics of the issues outlined here, or how including Microsoft will negatively affect our community. Therefor, the invitation of Microsoft to this conference must be either a direct payoff, or self promotion. Since they are moral equivalents, they are both both equally condemnable.
We insist that Microsoft should not be given any platform at this event, because it is their purpose to undermine the community and its efforts. Since this is not being promoted as an academic debate, but instead is a marketing tool for Open Source and Free Software, we reject any arguments which are based on the concept that we should open the floor to them in order to dispel Microsoft corporate lies. This venue does not have the most basic format to handle this problem.
If, for contractual reasons, it is impossible to remove them from the conference, we ask the organizers to give NYLXS's subcommittee, New Yorkers for Fair Use, both the keynote and the Microsoft slot in the speaking arraignments. David Sugar will represent NYLXS, and I will represent NY Fair Use.
Finally, the website for the event needs to have on the front page a clear statement that it has determined that Microsoft's 'shared' code' program to be directly in opposition to both Free Software and the Open Source ideals, in that it does not promote the empowerment of the community through the freedom of innovation and digital systems ownership by individuals, the government or businesses.
I do not expect that these suggestions will be taken by Bruce Perens, or the other organizers of the egov-os events. So I expect that we will have to work to oppose the event.
Ruben Safir
President New Yorkers for Fair Use
http://fairuse.nylxs.com
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Think about it: If you remove any of the restrictions imposed by the GPL, it still qualifies as a Free Software license. If you add any restriction not present in the GPL, it doesn't.
And no, I don't think you should take that too serious.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
So yeh I'd say OSS can be shit, patches don't get picked up, however obviously corret they are.
And, of course, Microsoft has a far better record at fixing flaws in its software than open source projects like Apache do. </sarcasm>
Your problems with open source seem to apply just as much, if not more so, to commercial software. Except for the whole, knee-jerk 'communism' reaction. I'm guessing you're a troll, rather than merely an idiot.
Hey Kreskin, all that shit has already happened.
Using the same reasoning, sustaining war or at least the realistic threat of war would be good because the military are a major employer of soldiers.
I'd be much happier with the idea of paying most of the soldiers to do something constructive instead, and let the military antagonism drop, wouldn't you?
`We' generally don't, modulo a vocal few, but the focus on Microsoft is because they are closed, poor sports, and weighty enough to cause real harm to everyone else, especially competing closed-source software houses. Think Lotus 1-2-3, which was killed by poor sportsmanship despite being technically superior to Excel at the time, likewise WordPerfect (ain't dead yet, but a shadow of its former self).
But why are you so concerned about Microsoft?
This monomania with sales is getting wearing. There are many other ways to make money. Most vertical markets can sharge heaps for the software anyway, and in fact the vast majority of their money is made on services. They would often be delighted if the software itself was made free and others maintained most of it for them. Most consultancies would rather gouge their customers for service than ship the bulk of that money to someone else overseas. Vertical markets and consultancies are well on their way to being the only games in town, and were before OSS became a big player - oh, and why is that? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
By way of explanation, I'm a language bigot. I speak about 30 words each of Spanish, French, Italian, Indonesian. If it helps, I also speak C, ForTran, Pascal, CoBOL, Python, Ruby, BASH, awk, sed, PHP, SQL and numerous assemblers. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The email I got over this is universally positive. Linux Australia's webserver is taking a shellacking (the Debian-on-Alpha server isn't raising a sweat - thanks Digital-now-Compaq Australia and Spice for that - but the hit counters are), more people have seen one of their new banners in one day than the old banner in the last 2 years.
However, I fear universally positive responses, because it indicates one of the same weaknesses suffered by closed source software: the problem is being approached with what amounts to a single mindset. The occasional negative response, even if utterly without merit, is a good indication.
While not knocking the positive responses I did get (they're all going into version 2 of the doc when it gets rewritten presently, and credited), I've learned a lot of stuff from watching NoCoward's arguments going down in flames despite an amazingly energetic personal defense of them. The special thing about NC's stuff is that nobody would have raised much of it if we hadn't had such a manic devil's advocate on the case. This saves a lot of messing around and egg-on-face in the field, and makes the approach so much more effective.
So... I'd like to take this chance to thank NoCoward for his/her helpful input, and if (s)he wants a spot in the credits for version 2, including a mention that (s)he disagrees with every word of it, email me and it shall be done. Version 2 is likely to be published in Australian Developer magazine before it hits Linux Australia's webserver.
There will always be a place for people who swim against the flow. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...but I think you need to meet more of the people at the creative hub of marketing. They're in the `You wanna see something really scarey?' category. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Association with well-known situations can often perform more instruction in one line than the remaining four pages of the article. Think of it as tab-completion for concepts. In the bad old days it was called `a parable'.
It was an improvement on `Shelf Company 27005'. (-:
Locally, we have (unrelated) companies named TwoBlueDots and BlueSkyFrog which are doing a roaring trade. I'm a long way from king of the flippant names hill.
Is NineNine better? I keep thinking of scarlet inflatables.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What he said was:
How I and DeputySpade interpret that is "the licence says Open Source but the project manager treats it like Share Source". Assuming that we are correct in our interpretation, DS is indeed technically correct - although I don't see the need for calling simplexMethod a `gonad'. It might be politically infeasible for SM to take over or fork the project (e.g., PM is up the management tree from him). OT3H, if he came back as an AC and somehow named the project, someone in a different situation may well be able to fork off with it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...prepare to vi! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and OpenOffice.org, and Mozilla, and others, and PostFix's licence is closer to GPL than to BSD. But I guess the BSD packages leaped out at you for a reason. (-:
I personally think that people should have complete choice in their licencing, and that variety is the spice of life, and I am pleased that there is much excellent BSD stuff out there too, but I always licence my own stuff GPL unless it is to be reintegrated with a BSD-ish system.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
When you are monetarily rich, your money works for YOU, not the other way around.
Not. You have indeed been very helpful so far.
I haven't really needed to, many others have swarmed in and done th job for me. Think of it as an Open Source Debate. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Microsoft sell the GNU C Compiler at a profit (as part of SFU). Would you like another run-up at that statement?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
How I and DeputySpade interpret that is "the licence says Open Source but the project manager treats it like Share Source".
/me mutters something profound about humorless slashdot mopes
This is exactly right. The poster is either using a poorly managed OSS project as evidence that SS doesn't work (Not sure how one makes that logical connection, but whatever...) or he's saying that neither open source, nor shared source is better than closed.
I might add that obviously the word 'gonad' was a central component of the point I was making and therefore the entire post should be moderated accordingly.
This space intentionally left blank
it wouldn't be libré, but libre. just like in spanish (nods to the guy/gal who posted that).
We have one of those. He goes completely troppo/postal when people don't accept everything he says, too. It's quite a circus.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Why do we have to assume that the model for development will either be all open or all proprietary. If there are people making a software product similar to yours and giving it away for free, then your company is screwed. You will need to come up with something new that is valuable to people. If you can't then why should people give you money at all? Where does the money go when you buy proprietary software anyway? It damn sure doesn't go to the programmers.. they get a salary, but they have to sign an ip agreement and a non-compete, so they can't do anything on their own. Software companies do the same thing that any company does.. returns profit to the shareholders. Saying that paying for software protects the developers is like saying the RIAA protects artists. These companies exist to take advantage of their talent. Developement in an open source world will still have a proprietary component, because there's always some sort of hole that needs to be filled by someone who will only do it for money. People will go from paying because they dont' know any better to paying because the product is really worth it.
My Blog
Smells like a troll... I meant job as in the capitalistic go to a building or work from home, and collect a paycheck job, not a find your place in your own ecological niche job.
Perhaps if you carefully inspect both article and posts you will see that I don't have any problem with that, nor have I ever claimed it to be a problem. The problem is that they are doing this and telling other people not to because the GPL is `viral'. Clear?
Show me where I claim that, and I'll freely recant. If you can't, you recant.
And yes, I've seen which axe you're grinding too.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Again, show me whare I claim that them selling GPLed software is bad, and I'll recant. Otherwise, I want a clear statement from you that you've been a zealot and you made a mistake because of that.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I guess I misunderstood what you were trying to say. I don't apologize (not because I'm an asshole, but hey, who isn't) but because you're brevity in most of the cases left much of what you were trying to say a complete mystery to me.
I had to try to piece together what you were trying to respond. I suppose I come from a lineage of long-windedness and am not too polite dealing with people that are more reserved in the quantity of response they give.
No offense man, and I see your point (finally after your last two posts). I must sound like a complete jackass... I suppose every time I say anything that can even remotely be perceived as pro-microsoft, I feel the Torches and Pitchforks coming after me. Perhaps I'm a bit too jumpy and defensive. I'll work on it, I promise!
Thanks for clarifying and you brought up some interesting points!
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
Yup. (-:
OTOH, if I was expecting perfect comprehension, I'd have been posting to the wrong forum (on the wrong planet). And you did come good in the end.
You're an ogre? (-:
Just MESHO again, but in order to be pro-MS you need a rosy-glow view of capitalism, and to not have understood very much about Bill Gates, Microsoft, how they came to be where they are, and why.
Bill's first product was vapourware, written largely by others who didn't get very much credit, delivered late, full of bugs, and over-priced. There has been no fundamental change since. Bill still throws a hissy fit when people want to share software. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
NOTE: No warranties, either express or implied, are hereby given. All
software is supplied as is, without guarantee. The user assumes all
responsibility for damages resulting from the use of these features,
including, but not limited to, frustration, disgust, system abends, disk
head-crashes, general malfeasance, floods, fires, shark attack, nerve
gas, locust infestation, cyclones, hurricanes, tsunamis, local
electromagnetic disruptions, hydraulic brake system failure, invasion,
hashing collisions, normal wear and tear of friction surfaces, comic
radiation, inadvertent destruction of sensitive electronic components,
windstorms, the Riders of Nazgul, infuriated chickens, malfunctioning
mechanical or electrical sexual devices, premature activation of the
distant early warning system, peasant uprisings, halitosis, artillery
bombardment, explosions, cave-ins, and/or frogs falling from the sky.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...