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Free Software As Nigerian Scam
djeaux writes "In the November 4 issue of Syllabus, Howard Strauss, manager of technology strategy and outreach at Princeton University, presents 'The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet' in which he scattershoots at open source software. The Nigerian scam is part of his imagery, leading to a great quote: 'While you are installing your free open source software you may want to write Mrs. Ahmed a check. Her $8.5 million will help pay for the real cost of that free software.' Elsewhere, Strauss describes the open source community as 'a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.'" Not everyone at Princeton agrees.
Actually, at my school, one of the database professors has her students do service learning projects for non-profit agencies. The one I did last year turned out pretty well, was a phenomenal success for the agency, and I continued working on it for the non-profit in question as part of my co-op.
- No more institution centric home page
- There should only be one portal. (don't want the students using Yahoo! or
Excite - we want them to use our portal)
- There must exist -complete- customization available to the user. Otherwise, they will continue to use another portal that allows them to do what they want.
- Replaces your desktop
Some of the neat terminology Howard creates: Cameos: Small pieces of data from larger data set and most important, the most important challenge isn't technical, it is requiring all data owners to work together.Congrats Howard, get your closed source, proprietary formats working together. GOD this guy is listed as a futurist! Here's another damn article about portals in 2015. JEEZ give it a break.
and as for programming experience
- 4 had 1 year
- 10 had 2-4 years
- 31 had 5-9 years
- 40 had 10-20 years
- 16 had 20+ years
Then there is the Boston Consulting Group's Hacker Survey, which found Occupation ChartHardly what Howard Strauss's article portrays.
Fear not. This particular personage works for OIT (Office of Information Technology), a bunch of folks who mess up the networks they're supposed to manage so badly they've been summarily banned from the CS Department.
Did I mention that I love my regular internet service outages?
The CREN "Tech Talks" that Strauss has hosted have been sponsored by Microsoft. A Softie probably took him out for lunch, he felt good and sleepy and wrote this.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
source:
http://www.marietta.edu/~mcevents/IMC_2_12_03.pdf
manager of Technology Strategy and Outreach at Princeton University.
A graduate of Drexel University and Carnegie Mellon University
previously employed by the Johnson Space Center of NASA and by Bell Telephone Laboratories
And the scariest one of all:
Strauss has authored several IT courses and is an information technology consultant for many companies and universities.
Yikes!
I'm posting AC because I'm at Princeton. I did some checking around. According to our campus directory, he works in the Enterprise Infrastructure Services department of our IT division (OIT--Office of IT). And while the article credits him as "manager of technology strategy", I cannot find him on the OIT org. chart that you can find in our OIT's annual report. He must be some underling who's bitter.
I intend to write his boss. I mean, I appreciate satire and parody, but as everyone has pointed out, his article is just malicious and factually false. It's filled with ad hominem attacks at students, hackers, the whole open source community. All based on a ridiculous metaphor that doesn't hold. Hell, it doesn't even make sense. If he hates young people so much, why in the world would he work in an "outreach" capacity at a university?!
Interestingly, his department is responsible for serving the notorious PeopleSoft management and purchasing software here....roundly hated by every administrative person I know at Princeton. I only mention this because he specifically mentions PeopleSoft. OIT at Princeton is definitely a mixed bag--some outstanding services, people, and liberties (including, yes, plenty of linux support)--and some horrible policies and red tape (like, charging for every ethernet box they activate--both for students and in the depts!--AND charging for every device attached to the network! They nickle and dime like crazy).
This guy is not a professor.
ECMAScript is the non-trademark name for standardized JavaScript. SMIL doesn't appear to be supported by Mozilla yet, and I think most of what it can do can be done in ECMAScript + those other technologies (except changeing the volume on sound clips)
ECMA's the slightly less stupid name for Javascript/Jscript.
.swf and I'm sure you'll be able to export to SVG from Flash one of these days, but they're two different ideas. SVG is there for those occasional situations where you have to chose between destroying the continuity of the document with embedded Flash or writing a morass of scripts that will crush the souls of everyone involved.
And SVG doesn't surpass Flash, it's an entirely different concept. SVG is making vector graphics and animation usable as design tools. In the effect it'll have on the functionality of a lot of web pages, especially when viewed on handhelds and phones, it's definately a revolution, but it's not anything like an improvement on Flash.
Technically, you could turn a SVG file into a
It's not an animation tool, trying to do Homestar Runner in SVG would kill you and be so inefficient that you'd be better off doing the whole thing with animated GIFs.
" *LIKE* open source, but the existing mechanisms for testing are really terrible, even if the bug repair response can be great. And since there's no accountability, there's little enforcement for responsibility...we KNOW that the developers of applciation X will probably fix that big hole in the security layer, but there's always the chance that they'll say "screw it, we want to work on the new stuff, fix it yourself." This is not the news you want to hear when a bug is holding up your business...that you will either have to hire an expensive programmer who knows the code, or a cheap programmer who will take weeks to get it done."
Just like proprietary software, open source software varies widely in its quality, and in the maturity of the development process. There are projects (like MySQL, Apache, gcc, Tomcat, Mozilla, etc.) that have astoundingly good regression test suites. Heck, check a change into the Mozilla source code tree and it'll automatically be compiled and regression tested (hundreds of tests) on all supported hardware and OS platforms, with a pretty web page pointing out who broke what when, not to mention a killer defect tracking database. Of course, there are also open source projects that aren't as mature, but then there are proprietary products with bad quality as well.
In my experience the code quality of open source projects is better than proprietary code, because the developers are more afraid of having "the world" see bad code than they are of having "their boss" see bad code. Peer pressure, in this case, is a wonderful thing. Also, engineers on open source projects are typically more responsive than in closed source software product companies, because they can be (no marketing or management barriers) -- only the smallest software companies are as responsive to customers as open source developers, for the same reason.
The 'danger' in using an open source project is that you might use a project without many other users, or have problems that nobody else cares about, in which case you'll have to fix it yourself. You can manage this by making sure that the project is active, and that your application is "typical." If you're company 1M using Apache, there's no risk. If you're company 1 using RandomProject, you're going to run into bumps. Of course, the same is true of proprietary software products, though it's a little harder to find out the real situation, particularly with small companies, so you have to do some digging.
The 'danger' is using a closed source product is that you can't fix the problems yourself, only beg a vendor to fix them (which they often charge professional service fees for!), if they decide to fix the problem at all, on their time schedule. You can manage this by making sure that you pay maintenance, and that you completely rewrite the software license to ensure that the product conforms to the documentation, and that there are response times and financial to give some teeth to make sure that the vendor has the right incentives to make you successful. Never, ever sign a software license as written by any software company -- they're absurdly slanted towards the vendor.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
If I interpreted him correctly, his idea seems to be that the lure of open source software is the lack of licensing cost but this lure is too good to be true. As a result IT managers should not shrink from spending large amounts of money on propritary solutions.
He points out that the actual cost of managing and supporting an open source solution is not free. Thank you Capitan Obvious. Any IT manager worthy of the title would understand this. In fact a proper IT manager would factor in support costs, licensing cost, expected lifespan, risk to operation, expected user base, security and many ofther factors before making a decision on a particular solution. In some instances open source would be chosen, in others not.
To make a case against open source software, Strauss could have chosen some of those factors and provided examples where open source failed. He could have provided hypothetical situations in which the ability to modify source would be dangerous. Instead he chose the "Attack by Bad Analogy". While an analogy can be useful to illuminate a line of reasoning in an argument, it is no replacement for an argument. Indeed, an over-reliance on analogy is generaly a signal that the person lacks a clear understanding of the issue being debated. I would certainly expect better from a publication whose intended audience is involved in higher education.
Strauss goes on to discourage the use of student written software and the idea of user customization. Again, lacking any clear argument, anaolgy is used.
The ability to evaluate software solutions and choose the best fit for the problem is a critical skill for IT managers. A useful article could have explored the particular issues associated with evaluating open-source soultions. Instead a poorly argued rant occupies the space. Hopefully Strauss's article is the exception rather than the rule for the pulication.
I get just as good support from OSS (perhaps better) as I do for 'commercial' software.
I also tend to get bug fixes faster and mroe timely than I do from commercial software vendors.
Of course YMMV, but personnally I tend to find OSS offers a better quality of support all round. Sure I can't sue anyone, but then in the 10 years or so I've been using OSS I can't think of any reason why I would want to. Now if think of the times I'd like to through a shed load of lawyers at a commercial vendor (no, not necessarily M$)....
Perhaps its because it is a 'hobby' for alot of the OSS people, they take a greater pride in their work and become more emotionally attached to the work and therefore 'care' more about the product.
Persoannly I'd like the man justify his claims