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Linux & Microsoft as a Cold War?
I confirm writes "The BBC's Bill Thompson summarises the GNU/Linux vs. Microsoft struggle as a "cold war", and in one choice quote says:"It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control."
I'm not sure I accept Thompson's conclusions, however: "So now would be a good time to start thinking about how we persuade governments that market in software may eventually need to be regulated, just as the market in electricity, water and food is, and that that regulation may well include a statutory duty to disclose source code and allow it to be used elsewhere." "
Regulation is the worst possible scenario for OSS, regardless of any pretense towards open sourcing software. Regulation means bureaucrats, who wield great power, and who will be attractive places for people like Microsoft, who possess vast fortunes, to spend it. For instance, imagine that they mandate open source, but then throw in a requirement that the programmer assume responsibility for its performance, or become liable in other ways. Then, the only people who would be able to participate would be companies with deep pockets. Like Microsoft.
Microsoft = Totalitarian Dictatorship? As if we didn't know that already
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Sounds like hes on the socalist side of the fence ( to use his analogies )..
Free people dont want ( or need ) government intervention...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
To get everyone to release source code, just make the copyright laws do what they were intended to do in the first place: no binary files should have copyrights, only human-understandable information should be copyrighted. The same goes for encrypted or otherwise copy-protected information. Those are protected by trade secrets. The purpose of copyrights is to ensure that the ideas embodied by those works would be available for future generations, which doesn't happen if only the executable binaries are publicly available.
I think that while MS may be somewhat totalitarian in their practices, a better parallel to the Cold War would be capitalist versus socialist ideals. In this scenario, it is obvious that MS is the pinnacle of capitalist practices, while the Linux community is much closer to socialism - shared effort for shared gain, group ownership, etc. Think about that one ...
***
...we impose one with government regulation? This guy sounds likes a Republican.
Sounds like a BBC writer had a deadline to fill with sensational pap. If he wanted controversy, perhaps Microsoft=Catholicism and Linux=Scientology would have made for a more interesting read.
I just submitted this as a story, but it's relevant. A leaked email from SCO shows that SCO received around $100m from Mircosoft. The Register has the details.
The war is cold only because Microsoft is unsure of how an overt war would be seen by regulators and clients. But cold wars can be damaging - just look at Africa and South America in the last decades.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
.. MAD factor in?
MAD = Mutually Assured Destruction
I personally don't want to run BSD, do you?
RMS has always distanced himself from the Open Source movement because (he says) we avoid talking about "freedom, about principle, about the rights that computer users are entitled to".
He's right. We do avoid that. But not because we don't care about "freedom", "principle" or "rights". Speaking for myself, I trust that anybody who's ever heard me speak or read my writings on the First or Second Amendments knows that I am quite passionate and vocal about freedom and rights; like RMS, I defend them even when they are unpopular with my audience. Other Open Source advocates don't seem to me to be any slower than I to speak the language of "freedom" and "rights" when they judge it is appropriate.
But "when they judge it is appropriate" is a very important qualifier. There are two different kinds of reasons an open-source advocate might avoid speaking about RMS's `freedom'; either disagreement with his goals, or a judgment that doing so is ineffective, is bad tactics.
The difference is important, and this is where RMS misrepresents what we are about. He would have you believe that the FSF and OSI have diverged over vast matters of principle, when in fact the OSI (and the Open Source movement as a whole) is carefully designed to be able to include people with beliefs like RMS's.
The Open Source Initiative does not have a position for or against RMS's goals. Please don't take my word for this; go look at our advocacy materials on the Open Source website, especially the part in the FAQ where it says "Open Source is a marketing program for free software".
Now it is true that some individuals associated with OSI occasionally argue with some of RMS's goals and principles (and one of those individuals is me). But the OSI is a big-tent organization; we have never condemned RMS's principles, and never will -- because we don't need to!
The real disagreement between OSI and FSF, the real axis of discord between those who speak of "open source" and "free software", is not over principles. It's over tactics and rhetoric. The open-source movement is largely composed not of people who reject RMS's ideals, but rather of people who reject his rhetoric.
Is this justified? Well -- consider the 180-degree turnaround in press and mainstream perception that has taken place in the last fourteen months, since many people in our tribe started pushing the same licenses and the same code we used to call "free software" under the "open source" banner.
Where we used to be ignored and dismissed, we are now praised and respected. The same press that used to dismiss "free software" as a crackpot idea now falls over itself writing laudatory articles about "open source". And the same corporate titans who dismissed RMS as a `communist' are lining up to pour money and effort into open-source development. Our market share and mind share have both zoomed to a level that would have seemed the stuff of delirious fancy as recently as January of last year.
Have all the opinion leaders and executives who have turned around suddenly seen the pure light of the GNU manifesto? No; instead, they point to the work of Open Source advocates to explain their conversion.
OSI's tactics work. That's the easy part of the lesson. The hard part is that the FSF's tactics don't work, and never did. If RMS's rhetoric had been effective outside the hacker community, we'd have gotten where we are now five or ten years sooner and OSI would have been completely unnecessary (and I could be writing code, which I'd much rather be doing than this...).
None of this takes anything away from RMS's prowess as a programmer or his remarkable effectiveness at mobilizing other hackers to do good work. Emacs and gcc and the GNU code base are an absolutely essential part of our toolkit and our cultural inheritance, for which RMS deserves every praise (which is why I led a standing ovation to him at last LinuxWorld after observing that "without RMS, none of us would be here today"). But as an evangelist to the mainstr
Calling for legislation to step in, is almost always a bad idea. We may be dreaming of an open source friendly regulation, but this is unlikely to happen. We simply don't have the purchasing power that Microsoft and others have with our politicians, so we'll end up having a heavily regulated market with anti-competitive, pro closed-source rules. Remember DMCA?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
...and it isn't simply MS bashing.
Investing in Microsoft is risking having your own money used against you in the marketplace.
...for every product that wishes to receive copyright protection, just as the details of an invention are provided before giving a patent. It would be far easier to catch copyright violations and find security flaws, and the code could actually be used as a basis for further software advancement rather than as a black box that lives and dies with the publisher.
nux is a feudal state with Linus as their King, he dictates what people do and has executive powers over the direction linux
goes. sure, you could fork your own state, but the food (developers) and land (users) is limited, and you're likely to be screw
ed over by another state (sco).
yeah, cause analogies are always correct.
btw is slashdot broken, i post like once per week and keep getting 'call it a night cowboy!'
Soviet Union was communism in economy, totalitarism in politics.
US is capitalism in economy, democracy in politics.
Microsoft is capitalism in economy, totalitarism in politics.
Free Software is communism in economy, democracy in politics.
Communism is a good thing, unfortunately it appears way too often accompanied by totalitarism which wastes all profit communism could provide, and gives otherwise very good ideals a really bad name.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I am strongly opposed to the idea of regulating software for the general market. Even though certain things like power, water, and transportation may need some kind of regulation, the price we pay for uniformity is inefficiency, bloat, and increased cost. Regulation tends to involve tax advantages for companies in compliance, which tends to stifle innovation by advantaging the status quo.
However, I am not entirely opposed to regulating software for government use. This makes a lot of sense to me, actually. If you want to get the government contract, you should have to meet certain standards, especially security standards. A business could do this, so there's no reason the government couldn't. The possible advantages would be an optional but well recognized standard that companies could meet if they wanted but are capable of declining if they so choose. I do think a open-source clause could be a good thing.
The drawback here is that powerful (read "rich") parties would probably be able to write the regulations so that they are biased towards particular kinds of software, if not particular brands. They could also probably prevent an OSS clause from being adopted, if not actually requiring close source.
Any time we experiment with giving the government more control over anything, we need to be very careful. Governments do not relinquish their powers. They always and only expand them. Regulating software, even in a limited capacity, sounds to me a lot like the proverbial foot in the door.
thats true.
Fair and balanced.
But it's not really a war between opposing sides. It's a war between the furture and the past. And the past is doomed to failure, simply because the technology curve has progressed to the point where large chunks of the software ecology are essentially free. Microsoft and Oracle unhappily sit right in the middle of this territory. Apple, IBM do not. I wrote about this in an editorial last year.
My blog
It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control.
Yes, and so does the human nervous system. So that must mean that we are all Stalinists! I wonder why Fascist/Hitlerian was left out, as the command structure there is exactly the same as in a Communist system.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
When you say you don't like Microsoft, you really don't like the choices millions of people make. I've been in this business long enough to know an analogy to war is ridiculous. You seem to believe that any choice of Microsoft is illegitimate and that open source can't fight fair in a free market, which is the big joke. Linux is doing great without the government, thank you.
And this committee for patriotic software, should it ever be enacted, will be the downfall of open source. It will be just another control point for power and allow the morality police a central point of control. It will become a do-nothing political body like all the rest.
start thinking about how we persuade governments that market in software may eventually need to be regulated
Bad idea. If it needs to be regulated then I believe that your product is inadequate. If your product is the best, then the market will decide. Think about it for a minute. You have a free operating system with free applications that you claim to be superior to everything else yet, you then want/need government regulation and mandates to require people to use your "better product"? That just doesn't make sense.
I don't care what monopolistic practices Microsoft pulls, short of government mandates requiring Microsoft's use. If the product is truely better it will be chosen over others. The price is already right.
Microsoft would have thousands of nuclear weapons, except they would constantly explode in their own silos. Everyone would have an easy to use rifle (with baby blue color theme), but only a handfull of people will be able to keep the rifle out of enemy hands, everyone else will just leave it lying around outside cause they're too lazy (or stupid) to secure it anywhere.
Linux would have some great weapons but only 20 people would know how to use them, 12 of these people would have them loaded correctly, 5 will accidentally shoot themselves in the face, 2 would use the guns of the people who shot themselves in the face, and continue to shoot those people in the face, and the last person would develop a new loading mechanism and distribute it to everyone so they now have to figure out how to load it all over again.
free people don' need roads, hospitals or schools. Free people are enough rich to pay for that, and don't have to pay for people not enough rich to be "free", hey ?
I don't agree with a gouvernment regulation for software. Not because I'm a rich anarchist, but just because free softwares are already what a social thinking would ask for : software reachable and usable by all.
Subject: Pig iron [Was: Article: Gates memo calls for security focus]
Oh yeah? Well, fuck you too! And don't say you weren't asking for this!
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Good, strong point. There is nothing wrong with making your software's source code public to the world, unless you're Microsoft. It'll tag a lot of coders to fix that shit. =/
Just as he said; it's still possible to sell your software and have it open-source. It's actually better for business... because there is always just someone out there who is better than you -- Even if you're God.
"But once we see an open source alternative to Quark Express running on those Linux boxes, or Postgres databases replacing Oracle, and an open source digital music store that challenges iTunes, we can expect to see Adobe, Apple and the rest of the software industry piling in too."
What? iTunes is free. Maybe we can't mess with the code for it, but I don't think a lot of people care. And if it's free music, we have KaZaA of course.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
software is cheap, free (open-source) software isn't.
When you try to write an opensource software you will many hurdles, but you should be willing to face them.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
As a professional opinion writer I feel threatened by people like you who give their opinions away for nothing. I read views like yours but I recognize them for the threat to my lievelihood that they are.
And that is why I hope a crazed axeman hacks you to pieces.
This opinion is shareware. If you use it then please BUY it. Thank you.
I disagree strongly that government regulation mandating open-sourcing is the key to solving the issues related to SCO/Linux/Microsoft, and although I agree with the basic points about FUD being the primary weapon of SCO/Microsoft, as well as the potential benefits of open sourcing for large corporations, I find very little in his article to support his assertion that this sort of regulation is the right direction.
Frankly, if open sourcing is going to be key for economic viability in the marketplace, the correct capitalist response would be to let market pressure bury those companies that don't do it, not to impose regulation. I can see regulation protecting open-source companies from FUD assaults, which are inherantly detrimental to a free and open marketplace... but not regulating the production and distribution of software.
Utilities like water and power require regulation because they are infrastructural supplies that aren't optional, nor does there exist (or can there, really) much of a competitive market in them to control excesses. With software, this is not really the case. Even for fundamental software like word processors and database tools, there is a robust marketplace with tons of options.
Fundamentally, Marx's critique of unconstrained capitalism wasn't wholly off base. But America isn't unconstrained... consumer protection laws and so forth counter the excesses of capitalism here. The government's role here should be protection laws that preserve an open marketplace (no FUD attacks) and regulation where infrastructure is privatized.
This is what I think, anyway.
The joke of Linux being a communist virus is an old dead one. The nature of open source frees you from the binary code being forced and imposed upon you.
The IT media use any obscure metaphor they can lay their hands on.
I always thought F/OSS was the communist side :)
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
If you read some of Bill Thompson's back catalogue, it seems that the man is obsessed with regulation as a cure-all solution (see here, here, or here).
It is a widely-held British viewpoint. Whenever there is some new perceived problem with the internet (a global network), politicans here start publicly calling for new government regulations. They know how pointless it is but want to be seen aligning themselves with the popular stance.
- Brian.
Where does this assumption that anyone has a right to source code come from? If somebody doesn't provide source code, your right is to not use it, don't buy it! It's as simple as that. If open source can't win economically, then using goverment power to force a win is no win at all. (Using OSS to create closed source in violation of licence is a seperate issue.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Last time the DoJ stepped in to deal with Microsoft being a monopoly and engaged in anti-competitive activities ...hmm, yeah, that worked out real well. Glad to see Microsoft no longer has a stranglehold on the market and doesn't have restrictive deals with other players in the tech industry.
Quite frankly, right now this is just a war of attrition, and I think Microsoft realizes they can't win with their current market strategies. If Linux was run by a single company responsible to shareholders, then Microsoft would probably have things back to business as usual, but I still don't think Bill & Steve have figured out just how to really deal with Linux as a competitive force.
The Open Source community has shown the ability to organize and get things done (yes, I know, this isn't the case in all projects, but it has gotten substantially better). And as long as the Open Source movement stays on the current track that it's on it's only a matter of time before the average consumer begins to recognize projects as Mozilla, Open Office, and the Linux OS as something they should look into using over Windows.
The fact that I can get my Mom to recognize how cool Mozilla is compared to IE/Outlook is and that she can get everything done on an install of Mandrake 9.2 is proof that progress is being made.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
WordPerfect was the premier word processor for lawyers until early 1993 when Attorney General Janet Reno declared all Justice Dept computers will use MS Word and no other.
In exchange, Bill Clinton supported a woman's obligation to choose abortion, in case one of you greasy palmed MS employees/geeks ever mates with something better than a dog.
And that's how our gov't standardized on MS Office. Don't like it? Tuff, the truth hurts.
While government and legislation power can be wielded in a bad way, most modern democratic states would be able to wield it in the favour of the people - at least a lot more in favour of the people than the board of Microsoft would! I think the slashdot crowd is extremely black or white on this one: Either you have extreme liberalism (as of today), or you have complete stalinist regulation (as of.. soviet russia). What about regulations like "every government system has to be open source" or "government funded schools have to use open source" or "every government-funded computer program has to be released under the GPL" or even "the government does not trust any closed source app"? That's also regulation. And it is good (tm).
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
Of course, for this to work, copyright terms need to be returned to something reasonable, but that's a different problem.
The problem with OSS, like the free market, is that it it requires inefficiencies. In a free market we may have 10 companies producing a product that only requires 2, or things being produced that are of no value at all. Sure, eventually the free market will sort out the inefficiencies, but the command economy tends to not have them at all. We see this now with companies refusing to hire anyone. New employees are sort of needed, but they would still represent an inefficiency. So no one is hiring. With MS and SCO, they can control development and focus efforts and consumer attention on a single product. Closed source companies do not have four competing GUIs and three competing APIs.
I personally find the free market, and by extension OSS, to be exciting and wonderfully innovative. However, it is easy to see how the Mr. Tators of the corporations would find such a free for all of ideas and strategies to be as disturbing as a bunch of upstart, uneducated, uncultured colonialist believing they were anything other than agents to be used a the King wished.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control."
Centralized control is not so unique to communist political structures. Fascism has a pyramidal hierarchy. And when legislators listen to corporations first, that is also a command economy.
So it is not ironic at all.
This not only affects Linux, but any Open Source application. The last Government contract I worked on, we wanted to deploy an Open Source monitoring agent since the deployment of a "major vendor" product was not going to happen for some time. The response from IA (Information Assurance) basically was "has it passed Common Criteria evaluation and can you show us proof?" The answer was no, so the app was not deployed. We even provided the source code for "review".
I think the tools are already in place within segments of the US Government to stop the deployment of OSS by simply pointing to http://niap.nist.gov and saying "It's not on the Approved List". Most OSS does not have the deep pockets of IBM and Oracle to afford CC evaluation (SuSe and RedHat respectively). Now whether Microsoft had anything to do with this I cannot say, but I think it is not simply a matter of development models, but security models as well. And even in the case of a OSS product sucessfully passing CC evaluation, some agencies are not happy. Read the latest version of the DISA Unix STIG and see what they say about SuSe Linux (they complained that no US (NSA) Protection Profiles were used in the evaluation. So does that mean it is less secure and should not be used?
Some Governments could simply point to the US and say "we won't adopt OSS because the US doesn't". Just a thought
The BBCs Bill Thompson is suspected of being RMS
whats interesting to me is
"It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control."
yet
Allchin has previously stated the opposite analogy about linux and other open source software. That open source is somehow anti-american, anti-capitalistic and in general a socialist form of software.
The conflict.
It's as if you can't have capitalism and democracy at the same time. The conflict arises because capitalism relies on "property", in this case, intellectual property. Democracy relies on free speech. So what happens when free speech is at the same time intellectual property? Then its not really free, nor is it really someone elses property. So how can you have free speech and intellectual property at the same time? Ingeniously, by making the owners of the free speech the public.
My employer pays me to work on software used in open source operating systems like Linux. It keeps me employed so you can count me as one on the side of "good for the job market". Face it. If it wasn't Linux it would be BSD or something else. There are lots of people who believe that one (Microsoft) size does not fit all. If you want Linux to be crushed start thinking of alternatives.
TT
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", is such a wonderfully accurate and applicable model of human nature.
That and Marx basing his entire model on the assumption that economics is a zero-sum game - in other words, no one can get rich without "stealing" from someone - usually the "workers".
So, except for utterly ignoring human nature and being founded on completely incorrect assumptions, I guess you could say communism is a "good thing" (You related to Martha Stewart in any way?)
You might have a problem convincing the Kulaks Uncle Joe killed of that, or maybe the victims of the Khmer Rouge, or the protesters of Tiannamen Square or those that starved to death in Mao's "Great Leap Forward", or the victims of biological and chemical experimentation on humans in North Korea, or thise living in a stagnant economy and repression in Cuba.
...and they just see Open Source as something to promote on the basis of the political aspect. Doesn't everyone think that the quality of the software is what's important not the philosophy behind writing it? Either way the consumer pays for it and they couldn't care less whether it's open or closed source. The press has latched onto Linux and open source as the only alternative to Microsoft products but that's plainly not true. There's definitely room in the market for a closed source Windows competitor, IMHO.
i wish i had mod points to mod the grandparent down and parent up
...or at least points out the obvious ;o)
the grandparent is obviously a partisan troll (modded up by partisan moderators), but the parent actually shows some insight
I utterly hate the analogy that FOSS is communistic. First of all, last time I checked, FOSS hadn't killed hundreds of millions of people as communism had. Second, it doesn't work on a philosophical level.
Communism is based on a centralized command system in which the state controls the means of production in the name of the people. Of course, this never works out as only a fool would automatically presume the interests of the state and the interests of the people are exactly the same.
In software development, this is closer to the closed source model - the state (ie Microsoft) orders that a task be done and the apparatchiks do it. Granted, Microsoft doesn't kill those that fail, and Microsoft is nowhere near as corrupt as the former Soviet Union, but the overal concept of centralization remains the same.
FOSS development is more like anarchocapitalism than anyone else. No one is forced to open their code, but programmers like myself do so because that's how we rationally get the most benefits. Granted, I could sell my products and perhaps make some money, but I couldn't recoup the costs of development without putting as much time into marketing as I do programming - and I don't care to do that.
The essence of capitalism is free exchange - which is why capitalism requires a free society in order to function well. Without the concept of the right of property, the GPL or other FOSS licenses would be meaningless. If I can't "own" my code, I can't dictate the license terms, and we're back to the state of nature. In the state of nature, everything is free for the taking - so long as you're cunning enough to take it. The whole reason government exists is to prevent that from happening by creating the social contract. (Which is why the statement that sacrificing liberty for security is wrong - that's the whole point of government itself, but I digress.)
FOSS devlopers give out their code because it provides them with the greatest rational benefit, not because some centralized authority tells them they must. That isn't communism, that's capitalism, and that's why the FOSS development model is doing exactly what capitalist economies do to state-planned economies - dynamically growing faster and more agile with each passing day.
I really think that we'd be better off if journalists were regulated by the government.
Since RMS coined the term "free software", there has been talk about the semantic problems inherit in the term "free software." I've thought for a long time that RMS made a basic mistake when he coined the term "free software." The term has problems. I want to discuss two in particular.
First off, in the English language, the adjective "free", when paired with an inanimate noun, means free of charge. It does in every other context. If I say that I got a "free toaster", then you will assume that I meant that I didn't pay anything for it, not that the toaster comes with special rights. So the very term for the movement is equally open to deliberate misrepresentation, and simple misunderstanding. If you want a meme to become widespread, but it can't be understood without a semantic interpretation, then you have a problem.
The second problem is that "free" is not really an attribute of the software. Free software is "free" because of a choice by the copyright holder.
So why not "freed software" instead.
This term would solve both problems. On the one hand, it would extinguish the erroneous interpretation that the software is merely "free of charge", because the word "freed" is never used in that context. At the very least, someone who never heard that term would wonder (and perhaps ask) what it specifically meant, instead of immediately reaching the erroneous conclusion (which works against the movement) that "free software" is about zero-cost or public domain software, based on the way the word "free" is used as an adjective in the rest of the English language.
On the other hand, it correctly attributes the action of making software into "freed software" to the author/copyright holder. Freeing someone is considered to be a noble gesture. An act not just of giving, but of elevating he whom is freed. A freed slave becomes a freedman. I truly believe that the act of releasing software under the GPL is a noble gesture. It is an act of giving to the community. The term "freed software" would refocus the emphasis from the software to the programmer. And that's a good thing. What we need now isn't more free software. We need more people to make the transition from keeping their software proprietary to releasing their work as freed software.
I also believe that a great deal of the success of the term "open source" is because it is semantically correct -- the opposite of open source is closed source. That's something that people intuitively understand. I'm wondering if a careful redefinition of the free software movement as the "freed software movement" would have the same effect for RMS's ideals and goals.
Comments and criticisms welcomed.
Think for yourself.
Theo is running a pretty successful dictatorship.
Linux is a successful democracy then? And Microsoft is successful...
I guess this means that software development and government are two completely different animals (duh).
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
How about beefing up liability for closed source applications -- in a manner that users cannot "opt out of" by shrink wrapper -- but leaving open source applications with effective immunity? The argument being, that effective 3rd party oversight protects the open source user.
Think about that: Soviet Union and United States never really fought directly anywhere (well, very few times and most of the public never knew about this). Their playground was Koria, Vietnam (where Soviets were sending in weapons, ammunition and training), Afganistan (where Americans did the same thing). More indirect battles were fought in the central Africa. Countries like Angola changed their eligence style of government there within period of two weeks , of course at the cost of millions of lives of local natives. What about South America? The communist gangs in Peru, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Columbia and others did not just "came out" without support of the old Soviet Union. Nowdays these same gangs are into drugs, robbery, kidnappings and absolute terrorism for money. Now lets take a look at the world of Microsoft vs. Linux. These have never fought their direct battles either. GPL has never been tested against Microsoft EULA (oh I wish there would come a day when such test would be possible). The companies that support and endorse Linux have funded or persued anti-Monopoly lawsuits against Microsoft, and as we recently found out it is Microsoft who funds and persues the lawsuits that came on us from the face of SCO. And think about it too: SCO has not dared to sue Linus or any of the special groups surrounding Linux (OSDL, FSF (GNU), the Open Group, Kernel development team, whoever else). Instead they choose to fight their battles via the third parties and the users, or code contributors. So far the battle is fought on the sidelines. There will be a day when Microsoft and FSF, OSDL and others will be in direct lawsuit against each other.
They claim to be "objective", but most of the time they put their own spin on things when they're not just making up the news.
In the US, we have chosen a system where the strong get stronger, and corruptly use that strength to crush rivals. Paying off legislators, dumping product below cost, price-fixing, cannabalizing, all have the effect of destroying competition and limiting choice for you and I. Make no mistake, this is why M$ is so strong. They have destroyed countless businesses and lives by bulldozing competitive balance, with their radical self-interest.
About half the population instinctively hews to the strongest --in any struggle-- simply because they look like they're going to win. This is anti-progress and anti-intellectual, but has been the case since the beginning of time.
So, let's do the math and see what happens: M$ continues to grow and destroy competitors (Real, Oracle, Ericsson, Nintendo), until M$ is our only source for software, computers, phones, gameboxen, internet, news, etc. One provider for everything. Do you think they'll care about you, then? What if you object to their billing? They cut you off and you're dead. Now we are actually patenting nature's genes, and patenting general business processes?! Mathematically, the only environment that can result from our current business climate, is a single provider for everything, and only two classes: royalty and peasant, the complete opposite of what The Party would have us believe. Which class will you be in? If your house is not presently in the top 5% of your city, guess what? Do you think that they're going to make you rich, if you support them? Has your position actually improved in the past three years, or did they screw you?
So tell me now: how can monopolies possibly be a good thing? What's wrong with treating Winduhs like a utility, which must be overseen in the public interest, given that it is unbiquitous? Some act like there'll be a giant bureaucracy to do this, but have a look at the first chart in this article.
No, look at it carefully. ZERO private-sector jobs in February, and 21,000 government jobs, after three years of Bush "economics"!! And as a bonus, we slingshot from a $350bb surplus, to an historic $550bb deficit in just three years!! This is the opposite of what you promised us!! We've been not only robbed & raped by these dirty-tricksters, but insulted as well. We know where the money really goes.
Until these conservatives can actually run an economy without stealing our Treasury, they should shutTF up. I call on all Party members to exercise some of that 'personal responsibility', and write a nice fat check today to the U.S. Treasury, to help cover our childrens' new debt.
And from now on, insults, smears, and ridicule, will be met with the same. We're learning your nasty tricks.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
Actually, if you think about it, open-source has more of a socialist / communist leaning. Microsoft is more like the Nazi empire :).
(Honestly, OS uses the idea that software shouldn't be controlled or owned by one entity, but shared by all. Microsoft uses anti-OS propaganda and descrimination against the OS groups)
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
I'm not quite sure I understand your post, but I think that you need to RTFA.
It actually implies that MS is the one that parallels the Communists, while
Linux parallels the American system.
Honestly, RTFA would be a good thing to do before calling something irrational.
"For the moment, the battleground is the legal action which the SCO Group, which currently own the Unix operating system which inspired Linux, has begun against Linux users and distributors."
Clever phrasing dont you think?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Microsoft who funds and persues the lawsuits that came on us from the face of SCO
I was thinking about recent relevations along this front.
1) A legitimate memo surfaces that links MS to SCO funding.
2) SCO and MS state that MS only funded the publicly known 10 mil for licensing purposes and the memo is false.
3) SCO and MS state that the memo is false because the person that wrote it was mistaken.
From the above evidence, my guess is that
(1) is correct - It was a legitimate memo
(2) is correct (sort of) - MS only directly funded the publicly known 10 mil
(3) is incorrect - The person who wrote the memo (a) is no dummy (b) was intimately involved in the proceedings (c) was unlikely to be mistaken concerning goings on.
All of which point to the possibility of MS leaning on others to fund SCO.
Who would the "others" be?
Look at the top handful of institutions that get MS's investment/financial services business.
My guess is that connections to one/several of those institutions were the impetus in providing the funding mentioned in the memo.
Essentially, US exports of tangible goods are in decline, and it seems ludicrous to think that providing a management layer for organizations that actually exist overseas can last forever. Do we actually believe that workers in India will not someday discover that if they managed their own companies, then they would not need the US at all? Perhaps this is a bit of an oversimplification, but I think that the point resonates in the hearts and minds of people concerned about economic sustainability for the US. So we're going to support Microsoft, dammit, because OSS is the way to seal America's fate as the country that contributes only intellectual property to the world and gets essentially no compensation in return.
As a supporter of OSS, this notion frightens me. But I have yet to hear an argument that this is not as serious as I fear.
Clearly written by someone who doesn't work in the industry. While there is control from the top and heirarchy, it definitely is not always a "command economy". In my experience and reading, many companies have project teams that come up with ideas, that are then built into products via a competetive process, not a "command" process.
Seems to me someone had their OSS hat on too tight--there are certainly benefits and advantages of OSS, but statements like this take it too far and destroy any credibility you might have to talk about the real issues.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
"It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control."
;-)
No it's Linux that's communism. Sure, you've got "power of the people." But the quality of life is inferior to those living under imperialist opression
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
Regulations are going to favor something standardized. Since MS ends up, at the core level, as being very standard (my Windows XP Pro is using pretty much the same files as any other, considering they are all up to date), they are going to be favored by any regulation verus something which is non-standard and fragmented (different distros, different companies, etc).
I never understand people who whine about Windows and think Linux should be what everyone uses. Linux is good for people who know how to use it and customize it to their needs, but your average user needs less complexity, not more. But, if you make something less complex, experts arent going to like it because it doesnt work exactly how they want. You cant be all things to all people.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Well, it's a little bit of an oversimplification to contrast "centrally designed" software with OSS. Centralized control is bad for an economy, because an economy is made up of people with varying goals. But when there is a common goal, centralized control can be a good thing. Think military, sports teams, etc. Or designing a huge application.
But.... IP law, even though it's perceived as "pro-business," is a broadly socialist concept; the government grants arbirary privileges that a copyright owner could not enforce by themselves. In this sense, government already regulates the software market. The failures of the current scheme should not be used to justify extending government control.
The emergence of Free Software is a market response to overpriced proprietary software, to API's designed to generate consumer and developer lock-in, and to the anti-consumer license provisions that it leads to.
Free Software and proprietary between them cover the market well, and it's probably the best compromise we can come up with. In other words, don't expect commercial software to ever be as nice as you want it to be. Just make sure that Free remains Free.
The FSF position is far more concerned with money. "Is my code being exploited for money?" My code is free, and anything containing it must be free as well.
Take a look at any discussion here where it comes up. The two positions are quite clear. I don't get why the two sides seem to have such a probelm with the others position. They are not incompatible, just different.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Software is already regulated in some fields, such as when it is part of a medical device. See, for instance, FDA-imposed design controls on medical devices "automated with computer software" in 21 CFR 820.30. FDA has stated that "Software must be validated when it is a part of the finished device. FDA believes that this control is always needed, given the unique nature of software, to assure that software will perform as intended and will not impede safe operation by the user." (in their final rule on that "Quality System Regulation"). The regulations call for extensive documented verification and validation activities.
From a social contract point of view, you are right in that the very nature of government is to sacrafice certain freedoms in exchange for protection. The quote, however, says nothing about permanant security. The quote, by TJ and often misquoted is "Those who sacrifice essential liberty to gain a little temperary security deserve neither". Basically, if you want to take away freedoms, this should be done as a well-thought out procress that does not destroy the ideals of the government and ensures survival rather than in an ad-hoc reactionary fashion (e.g. patriot act).
Just my 2 cents.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
There's no doubt that OSS command and control is decentralized, if that's how you care to view things. But so is Microsoft's, since it is ultimately controlled by the "proletariat" of the stockholders.
This is all a rather silly way of looking at things, in any case. I don't think the metaphor is useful.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Communism is an economic model that was developed by an economist(surprisingly). He never killed anyone, and he felt that the system, with the agreement of the people, would greatly benefit society. He didn't come to expect just how brutal and corrupt the human mind can become.
The times when Stalin ruled the Soviet Union were certainly tough. Killing so many people was ironic for a communist state, as it was the ultimate abuse of the 'human resource'. Therefore, this type of socialist GOVERNMENT, as brutal as it was, is titled Stalinism. Modern North Korea has often been compared to this.
There are many reasons why the Soviet government was so tightly closed. One might be that there was a war going on here or there.
I do agree that FOSS is quite chaotic.
>The essence of capitalism is free exchange
The American government doesn't have many good capitalists then, if they keep slapping on resource tarrifs for its neighbors' trade items.
The 'Philisophes' during the Enlightenment pressured the remaining totalitarian leaders to respect the people's rights more. The leaders who did so (ie. Catherine the Great) were loved by the people, and even got a big name in history.
And you got somethin against totalitarian government. I suppose I do too.
When I read that comment about MS being compared to socialism, I thought the author has it backwards.
Linux is much closer to the communist model. Everyone works for free and no one has a financial incentive to work harder.
Regulation controlled by business/religious special interest is terrible, will stifle innovation, enhances control of society, protectionist (but not isolationist), and does resemble the Stalinist/Maoist, and for the past couple decades a Capitalist model of a command economy in the USA and EU (No wonder the Chinese Government is so accepting of the new Capitalist economic model). Just say three times very fast Power to the Party in escalating volume and excitement, and PLEASE, don't get lost in a Blutarski Collegiate reverie of younger days (unless of course you are that young and vacuous). Some folks look at Patent and Copyright laws today as a way to regulate who keeps market share, and telecommunications (today a joke in the USA), gnetics (own the natural now by law), nanotech (governed by techno idiot politicians), .... Regulation cannot be blamed, but
intent, interest, and implementation does screw-the-pooch
for the rest of US, EU, and the future. Things will go on, but they
will be crippled, mangled, deranged, and debilitated costing money,
lives, hopes, and dreams. Only the religious and plutocratic
terrorist will live happly ever after with control of others for
some time.
Regulation in a true democracy where Businesses, Institutions, Religions, Special Interest Groups (including foreign, ecology, animals, ...),
individuals acting/working to promote special interest and
dynastic/aristocratic political plutocratic oligarch groups (short
phrase Bullshit Artist), ... are disenfranchised, because
only a Citizen is allowed to participate in a democracy.
A building, property, wealth, thing, object, organization, institution can never be a Citizen. In the USA and EU these non-human ...
non-citizen (Bill Gates is Citizen Bill, the CEO is Microsoft not a
citizen) things do control the nation and law (PA1/2, DMCA, WTO, MS,
GM, IBM, ... manymanymanymore).
BACK to main point, I have said for a few years:
____ Patents and Copyrights are not bad, but they are sorely abused by the willy-nilly application and approval process that exist today and stand a good chance of being a perpetrated crime on future expansion and improvements in humanity's future. Many (not all) business executives and politicians (of the Ned Ludd [1779] ilk) walk hand-in-hand promoting revolting exploitation of nations/people and plunder for irresponsibility (at least) and/or criminal theft (by Common Sense, if not the law). I can think of no law created, on science, technology, citizen-rights, security ..., in the
USA in the last twenty years that was, as stated by others
significantly, not flawed by political temerity, special interest,
and foolish expediency.
____ Iconoclastic (Yep, BUSINESS is a religion for some.) assaults by concepts like Open Source, Open Standards, General Public License (GPL), Open Community of Consensus/Interest, ... are the nascent nexus of a great future
for the USA, business, humanity, innovation, success, .... There are
new business models/architectures developing that will replace
Keynesian definition of economies and markets of the last couple
millennium. J.M. Keynes may have written down the definition/theory
in the last century, and others wrote such wieners as Trickle
Down and Supply Side, but in application they are
all failing the economic requirements of today and will fail US in
the future.
____ The new open global market will of necessity be far more Open Community in structure than the legacy Keynesian and stovepipe management structure embraced today in national/regional businesses. SCO, Microsoft, IBM, ... and many other USA businesses will either
embrace fast paced Open Consensus Community change models
that manage concepts, directions, performances, resolutions,
developments, shifts/jumps, ... or become a preserved tr
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Comparing the software industry to the Cold War is not going to make sense of journalists and Slashdot pundits adhere to a sixth grade understanding of political theories. The BCC columnist is partially correct when he compares Microsoft to the Soviet Union. But it's important to understand that the Soviet Union used a form of "state" communism that is totally different than forms of anti-statist communism (i.e. sharing without governments being involved). And if the journalist wants to compare Microsoft to the Soviet Union, he should also mention that contemporary American capitalism is awfully similar to the Soviet model. It is a looser system, but there is lots of command and control, especially in the government-run defense industry, which has a huge impact on the rest of the economy.
If you are going to make an accurate analogy, you should compare Microsoft to the authoritarian, centralized Soviet Union. Open source and free software, on the other hand, is more anarchist. The anarchist nature of the free software movement has been noted since the whole damn thing took off. And there is much free software out there being developed by anarchists, most notably the software that runs the Indymedia network.
Regulate this, bitch!
I am SO tired of people crying to the federal government because they don't want to take responsiblity for their own lives. Grow up, and keep you own rule and regulations to your self and stop imposing them forcibly on everyone else, through laws, just because you can't run your own life!
Remember in the US what the government does to one it has to do to all. If they don't the lawyers make lots of money makes sure they do. Getting the goverment involved in regulating software like a utility company would be the worst thing to happen to computers and software.
Do you want Bush whose cutting the IT R&D budget (www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1540372,00.asp) for his pet programs to be controlling what software is or isn't? I sure don't.
I believe it was Upton Sinclair who said that "The problem with socialism is that it takes too many of your evenings." He meant that if the government either owned or closely regulated almost everything, you and I would have to spend all our time watching it. In the real world, people don't do that or, if they try, the bureaucrats don't let them have any power. The result is the horror that was the USSR.
But precisely the same is true with libertarian/laissez faire approaches. If nothing I buy is regulated, I have to spend all my time discovering, for instance, which brands of milk are watered down, filled with chalk and made from sick and drunk cows fed brewery waste. (That was a 'free enterprise market-driven solution' that food regulation banned.)
The solution is a pragmatic approach that looks at what works, not at what fits someone's 'oh so consistent' ideological package. And in general, pragmatic means a mix of regulation and freedom.
Unfortunately, CmdrTaco, the author of this posting, seems to be the sort that wants everyone to march to his (open source) music. If you write code, he says, you ought to have "a statutory duty to disclose source code and allow it to be used elsewhere." If that wasn't so stupid, it would be scary.
Does that mean cops smashing down the doors of our homes and hauling away our computers for "failure to disclose the source." What sort of sentence does he propose for these "criminals." Will they become "enemies of the people?"
That is dumb. I no more need to have access to the source to choose good software than I need access to all a car manufacturer's engineeering data to pick a good car. And mandating open source is no more the answer to software woes than mandating that we open our homes to any and all that knock is the solution to homelessness.
The old adage that "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" applies here. CmdrTaco's call for mandated open source is as dumb (and Stalinist) as the claims by Microsoft and SCO's execs that open source is communistic. We shouldn't be ideological. The software world has room for both closed proprietary and open source software.
...when RMS stands up and declares, "Mr. Gates, tear down this blue screen!"
if that is exactly what happened in the Eolas patent overthrow.
And who said the British could tell us what to do with our economy?
The Linux (GPL) philosophy is not communist, you superficial idiot.
Communism = if I earn 7 dollars and you earn 3 dollars, we get 5 dollars each.
GPL = if I earn 7 dollars and you earn 3 dollars, we get 10 dollars each.
Sharing software is not like sharing pizzas. We can both use software, but only one of us can eat a pizza.
Second, communism fails IF it doesn't provide an incentive for people to work, or give back. But GPL does.
In a communist system, the smart guy (called the "cheater" in evolutionary terms), i.e. the one who does not work, just fares better than the one who does. It scores more "points" in the tit-for-tat game of life. (see "THe selfish gene" by richard Dawkins)
Therefore, a successful system must use some trick to FORCE people to work. GPL uses the law to force people to give back, so it doesn't suffer from this problem.
Making software companies expouse their source code and eventually contribute it to the public domain would be a wonderfull change. It would both increase productivity and give us as individuals more control over our enviornment.
Of course many people would object that such regulation is invasive government intrustion into private buisness. There is a simple answer to this, make the copyright system work like the patent system. You may invent something and not tell anyone about it, however, if you want patent protection you must register your advancement and thus help all civilization. Make a similar rule for copyright. You must openly disclose your code if you want any copyright protection. This is no more government intrusion than exists now.
I have been in favor of this idea for sometime...although I am somewhat doubtfull if it will ever be enacted.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Although the writer of this article delves into the conflicting philosophies behind the two participants in this "war", he deliberately limited himself to only one "battle".
To truly appreciate the war, you have to look at all the engagements so far:
Although Linux has been around in at least a primitive form since 1992, it is only recently that large companies have been looking seriously at Linux as a replacement for Windows. Why is that? Well, as any reader of Slashdot could tell you, one of the biggest reasons is Microsoft's horrible record in security and stability issues. Many companies got fed up with cleaning up after the "virus du jour" and realized that money they don't have to pay maintaining and fixing Windows is money that gets added to their bottom line. Bill Gates is on record many times saying that bugs in his software were not a big deal and that he wasn't going to be concerned about them. So, frankly, it looks to me like Microsoft fired the first shot and they fired it squarely into their own foot!
A second reason that companies are looking at Open Source software happened just recently. Microsoft's new licensing plans, coming at a time when most companies and indeed, the entire US economy, were reeling under a recession, was designed solely to boost their revenues by increasing the costs of their products. Microsoft made it more costly to use their products at a time when most companies were already losing money so, of course, they started to look for a cheaper alternative. Thus, Microsoft fired the second shot and they fired it squarely into their other foot!
The third major conflict in this "war" is the only one covered by this article. The claims by SCO are, if not initiated by Microsoft, are certainly supported by and will tend to benefit Microsoft. In the course of doing this, however, they are making many more poeple aware of Open Source software. Only time will tell whether this will be a "head shot".
And what have Open Source supporters been doing during this time? Well, aside from a lot of verbal sniping at Microsoft in places like Slashdot, they have done nothing but continue to write better code. Linux and other Open Source products are now, IMHO, in some cases much better than Microsoft's efforts.
So, in the end, this war actually consists of one side (Microsoft) doing almost all the shooting while the other side (Open Source) is doing nothing more than what the first side (Microsoft) was founded to do originally; produce software.
People who are against regualtion forgets that the software market is already highly regualted, through patents, copyright and EUALs.
.NET? All of those are illegal, thanks to government regulatioin. (Well, actually I'm not sure if that last EULA term will stand up in court, but the first two definitely have.)
Want to install your copy of Windows on an extra machine? Want to reverse-engineer the code in your DVD player? Want to publish a benchmark about the poor performance of Microsoft's
Mandating that source code be published is, of course, what RMS argues for. The GPL is a way of using the existing regulations to enforce it. Unlike him, I'm not sure that the GPL is the only acceptable model for software, but his position is no less extreme or dependent on governmet regulation than the existing situation.
What the govt. should do (but won't, of course) is make copyright and patent protection dependent on source-code publication. After all, this is the supposed purpose of copyrights and patents: you share your idea with the world, and in return get a time-limited monopoloy on it. So software companies could choose: free as in beer or (eventually) free as in speech.
Even lame arguments about how perfect Communisim is "good" do not mean Free Software is Communism.
Communism requires the goods being produced to be distributed to those who need it. As far as I can tell this requires a tolitarian state in order to enforce it.
Free software is written explicitly to satisfy the ego and desires of the author. Next time you accuse it of being Communist, I would like to ask you where the regulations are to force those authors to write documentation or otherwise serve the people better and more fairly. Without such regulations it is not Communist.
I also want to point out that the GPL is an extremely clever creation of capitalist greed. It allows an individual to advertise themselves, to get their work used and perhaps relied on, without the fear of others stealing their work and depriving them of potential income. The real Communists are all the dweebs who post here and whine that they cannot steal GPL code and make money off it. Too f**king bad, why don't you negotiate with the author and perhaps PAY them for the right to do what you want. Anybody who believes they have the right to the code because they can see it is a Communist in my book.
In the early 80's hardware was expensive and software was still mostly "free" because you had to implement it on your own and could still see what other people had done. Then IBM invented the PC and the costs of computing plummeted... Bill Gates pressed this even further by working with other companies to "clone" IBMs hardware out from under them. The ensuing price war left only one standard platform left...the WINTEL PC.
Now we've come full circle. MS is in the same position IBM was as the draconian Monopoly. Just like MS reduced the cost of hardware by providing a consistant platform and allowing cutthroat competition [and more than a little kingmaking] OSS and Linux have now stepped up to provide competition in the OS space using all that cheap hardware.
MS is foolish and powerhungry...that's not good business. They succeded in their goal of a PC on every desk. This is capitalism, Billy G has got is reward...he's not OWED anything more than money he's already got for his contribution to society. He's not owed a continuous income model...that's the fundamental flaw in their business logic. MS should be looking for a Apple-type model...working to shrink volumes and increase or maintain profits. Their growth is unsustainable and Wall Street should quit while they're ahead. OSes have become as novel as the Dram market...most normal people just don't care...it's part of the scenery now.
What's needed is for the rich old guys to simply retire with more money than God and stop trying to wreck the world's systems for the rest of us. Get off the stage, it's time for other people to play now!!! They're old, obsolete, and making fools of themselves now!!!
Excellent points. Please don't post in bold next time.
in any attempt to regulate and unregulated industry, the first attempt is always santed towards the biggies in that industry. After several years they might get it right, then again maybe not. So all regulations will be written in M$ favor due to donations to politicians, oh, a use for that huge amount of cash on hand, and they WILL use it.
This is a very bad idea.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Sorry to play devils advocate here, but regulation is needed. My argument lay on a fundamental concept of communications. There is a reason, no matter what phone you purchase, you are able to call any other phone in the world. There's also a reason for federal regulation on phone companies enforcing that their service may at the least have enough bandwidth to carry voice across the lines. Basically, avoiding legal speak, in the event of an emergency, a civilian must be able to contact authorities or medical assistance, via 911 for example, provided they have a phone. Be it a satellite phone, cell phone, AT&T built land-line phone, GSM phone etc.
I argue that any application that can even be used as a form of communications, to imply a listener, be public and open. Such as document formats, which have the intent to be displayed on other computers is a form of communication. Network protocols, all of them need to be open and standard. Web services are especially communications and conformance to standards should be regulated and enforced. Hypothetically, when your local police station may start accepting emergency pleas via their web-page, is it right that their web-page is only supported with Microsoft Internet Explorer?
If the government is to regulate any part of the IT industry, I feel it's crucial they regulate the communications concepts therein. Such regulation shall be restricted to only apply to compatibility and the assurance that all computing devices are able to accurately parse and rely the ideas and intent of said communications.
I don't want the government regulating much of anything else I do want the government to demand that any form for communications, file formats, protocols, specs shall be open and free for all to inspect and implement on any computing device. Further, all forms of communication must be designed for the ability to be implemented on all computing devices and their logical environments. (This will take care of Microsoft saying "OK, We'll do that, but we'll wrap our implementation so deep into our OS that you can't implement it unless you are using Microsoft products.)
Just my feeling on it. Lots seem to fear government regulation. The government isn't that bad, and those that do not trust the government turns a blind eye towards the corruption, abuse and illegal behavious of international corporations. Corporations sole intent is to profit, at any expence, the government is supposed to protect the people. If it weren't for government leglislation we'd all be working 24x7 and with no benefits for 25 cents a day in the most dangerous conditions imaginable.
Just to put this back in the Software discussion, I believe this is happening to Microsoft.
There are many people there, perhaps even Bill Gates himself, who sincerely believe that they are serving a higher purpose to develop and deliver computing for the masses, to get rid of the mess of different standards and incompatability and hard to use systems, and build the perfect computing world for the masses, and that everything they do is benevolent. But internally they are in dreadful fear of losing power, of being vulnerable to the many who hate them because they took their property and redistributed it. Strict benevolent logic also makes them attack things: "eliminate this competitor and nobody will have to think about interfacing with their software, simplifying the standards and making the system more efficient". Or more lowly beauracrats (programmers) in the system who say "Obeying this Kerebos standard is such a pain in the ass, if I make this change here I know it will break it completely and I won't have to think about it ever again and I can spend more time drinking vodka (or beer since this is Seattle)".
According to the definition, any non-violent rivalry could be called a Cold War .
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
You could choose which side of the road to use each morning. Some on the left and some on the right. You could choose to stop for green and go for red. People could sell diesel as gas. It would be OK to make fuel tanks out of chewing gum.
A society can only function because it has rules. Similarly a 'wired society' can only function if people respect the rules (protocols) and behave responsibly. Unfortunately the internet is not yet real enough and we get huge abuses of the norms that make a society work (stuff like spammers, "improved" protocols and the like).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Software for process control in the pharmaceutical industry is already regulated. It is known as "CFR part 11" and if your software doesn't complies, you can forget selling it anywear near the pharma businness.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Miles per gallon is important to consumers. A car that cannot be driven 300 miles on one tank will not sell. Most cars are just under 30 miles to the gallon, so a 12-16 gallon tank is sufficient. Buyers of sports cars and large vehicles (trucks, SUVs) expect 16 mpg, and the large vehicles have large tanks to maintain the 300 mile criteria. [My sports car can reach 300 miles on highways. City driving uses much more gas.]
Emissions were regulated. Most people do not want a cloud of black smoke, but it required legislation to make a difference. The States made it as a profit center by charging for extra stesting and stickers. Citizens were aware of the issue because of the extra stickers, and because they were responsible for more money if their car did not pass. So the manufacturers had to satisfy the buyers.
Regulating software would need to be done the same way. It is not enough to penalize the manufacturers; the users must feel the penalties. The laws would need to penalize a user for having a PC that spams or is used for a DOS attack. Unfortunately, it is difficult to verify the packets originated at a specific IP Address. What if you happened to check sco.com on the day of a DOS? Were you part of the attack, or just wondering if the website survived?
Once these issues are resolved, and the users feel the penalties, then they will demand that their software protects them. Software like MSWindows, where it is impossible to load a firewall before loading the network drivers, would disappear.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
MSFT is fascism in economy: centralized, closed, and even the theoretical goals are self-centered (at least in commumism, while bad in practice, the theory is good).
Open source is democracy in both politics and economy; I cannot see how to make a difference between the two. Economy is part of politics, and democratic politics results in an economy where the ultimate goals are the interests of the people at large, not those of a small group of rulers.
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The parent is expressing the addatude of many commertal develupers from the 1980s.
In the 1970's "public domain" software was pritty much nothing to worry about. Only a tiny handful knew about or could take advantage of the public domain.
Near the end of the 1970's this was no longer the case. More and more people were discovering public domain and more commertal programmers came to fear and loath the online world for it.
People talk about how open source is good for the job market, but I've yet to see how that could be.
That is probably becouse you missunderstand them. They are saying open source is good for the market. Not the job market but the market as a whole. Your seeing it in a very narrow context.
Your not talking about the job market as a whole but the job market for application programmers in your field.
However it's commertal software that threatons the job of the avrage system admin.
Application programming is much like publishing a book. The industrys aren't that diffrent.
(However books are usually done by individual writers and programs by programming teams.
However book writing teams and individual programmers do exist)
You (or your team) writes something (program or book) and gets someone to publish it.
If you do a poor job you don't get published.
The danger you face from GPLed software is that you can't thow out low quality garbage when users can buy better software.
However...
Killing Linux and the GPL won't save your lazy butt. If anything the crushing of the GPL could make things worse for you.
First SCO is trying to make all that GPLed code revert to public domain.
Second while MOST programmers would stop writing code if they can't GPL many would be content to continue to code into the public domain.
Tell me now.. Why should any programming team hire you when they can pull code from the public domain?
If anything the GPL increases the demand for commetral develupers.
If you want to make a commertal application today you have to start from scratch. You can't download a GPLed version and enhance it.
But if the GPL becomes unenforcable you can.. or better said your BOSS can. You however are out on the street begging for spair change.
See it's not Linux or open souce that is a threat to your job. It's free software in what ever form it takes.
As Murray Rothbard has explained, within one continuous corporation, operations are essentially communistic. This sets a practical limit on the size of any corporation, as when corporations grow large enough, they start to collapse from their own internal inefficiencies. Corporations, up to a certain size, function well because they are not "an island unto themselves" and have to buy things from outside sources, hence have prices to allow them to determine cost-efficiency.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I feel like a Wessie writing graffiti on the wall of Windows. Ahh. To wave the flag of freedom. With the penguin on it....
It's scary how many people jump on the regulation bandwagon just to spite Microsoft. You think you're going to get something for nothing by having the government prescribe OSS, the "one true way".
This is so wrong, I don't know where to begin. There is no one true way; choice is the key.
Give the developer the power choose whether or not he wants to release binaries, source code, whether to charge for either, and how they may be redistributed.
Give the user the power to choose the software product that best fits their needs, based on their own criteria. One user may choose less functional software because the source is available, while another use may choose proprietary software because it does exactly what they want. In some instances the best product may also be open source, but it's really a case-by-case thing.
When you let companies compete for customers, everybody wins. The role of the government should be to reduce barriers that limit user choice - within reason. They shouldn't try to stop temporary momentum (i.e. IBM 20 years ago, Microsoft ten years ago, or Google today), but if a company has a monopoly then, sure, regulate the types of contracts and exclusive agreements they can enter into. Regulate the business side, but don't regulate the types of products they can create to give them an artificial disadvantage over their competition. Forcing the market leader to produce inferior products doesn't help users.
You talk about freedom. Freedom doesn't mean forcing everybody to follow your "one true way" because opening the source code may have some perceived benefit (to you); it means giving people the freedom to choose.
People often promote some kind of government regulation in the mistaken hope that the people in charge of enforcing it will share their ideals, only to find out too late that they have little control over who will enforce it.
Case in point: feminists in Canada helped push for laws which gave customs agents the power to seize "obscene" materials at the border. They were all for this because they hated pr0n. It's sexist, it makes objects out of women (insert C++ jokes), it causes rape, yada yada yada.
Guess what? When the law went into effect, it was the middle-aged, mostly male customs officials who had to do the inspections and decide what was obscene. ("So what do you do for a living?" "I read pr0n all day!") Turn out that they were stopping a lot of gay/lesbian magazines from crossing the border, which was making it hard for the gay/lesbian bookstores to make money. While the big mags (Playboy, et al.) got through OK. The feminist crowd cried foul; they felt that only heterosexual pr0n was bad.
(I imagine the Customs Office was like, "I inspected this lesbian magazine, but I'm not sure if it meets the government standards." "Well, we'd better have everyone else read it too, so we can reach a group consensus...")
This is a bunch of BS! As much as I hate Microsoft, to liken them with a "stalinist" system is total crap. Nobody is making anyone buy Microsoft products - maybe in the communist Great Britain, where the government runs every aspect of society that may be the case, but for a brit to take the stage and teach us americans about free market economics...that's just ridiculous! I mean look who is speaking....a BBC employee!
...yet another fucking moron advocating even *more* government control of my life. Talk about striving for a command economy and government dictation in how I'll run my life; the hypocrisy of his absurd statement apparently didn't occur to him before he rushed off to print.
I don't need more laws, thank you. And with those laws another bunch of fucking idiots trying to tell me what I can and can't do with my life.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Much like the old Soviet Union was the Evil Empire per former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
I'm waiting for legislation to ban M$. When does the bombing start?
Bill Thompson has been a technology moron with the BBC for a while now - read his past columns. He has an obsession with regulation in general, particularly governmental control of the Internet; this is part of that.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
please remind me where Marx wrote "an important part of communism are biological and chemical experimentations (experiments?) on humans".
if you throw that many different TOTALITARIAN regimes in one bag with the label of Communism, that is generalisation.
you made the precedence. now somebody can do the same and say: the third reich and south african apartheid were capitalism, therefore capitalism is evil.
Regulation of source code will only harm the software industry and is a bad, bad idea.
Only two things are needed to enable true competition...
1) Software patent reform - Software patents will destroy innovation (in the US anyway). These offer nothing more than weapons for megacorporations with deep-pockets like MS and IBM to use against smaller ISVs and OSS.
2) Require all common business document formats including word-processors, spreadsheets, presentations and all media formats to be fully documented and in the public domain - NO CLOSED DOCUMENT FORMATS!!!
Microsoft should be free to keep their OS and application software closed-source if they so choose. Who cares! What Microsoft must be forced to do is compete based on the quality of their software products, not because they own the formats of the files their monopoly software reads and writes.
The OpenOffice project, for example, could produce a much better product if they weren't forced to reverse-engineer MS's document formats. Opening the formats will enable OpenOffice to fully compete with MS Office, and it ultimately will enable Linux to compete with Windows on the desktop.
Computers still are primarily document production tools for business and education. Document formats are the primary lock-in mechanism for Microsoft. Remove this monopolistic, anti-competitive, mechanism and barriers to competition and to freedom of choice fall as well.
Mr Gates! Tear down that wall!
that is what TRIPS - Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights is for. it obliges the signing countries to respect patents and copyrights. Software is not the only thing that the US does export. entertainment (Hollywood) is also a major exporter. that is why legal standards in other countries (movie piracy in China) have an impact on US trade saldo.
on the other hand TRIPS causes bio-piracy. a US company can patent genes of a plant, let's say, from Guatemala. if Guatemala signs the TRIPS agreement, it's people will have to pay royalty for that gene. poor people can not afford to apply for patents.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
"So now would be a good time to start thinking about how we persuade governments that market in software may eventually need to be regulated, just as the market in electricity, water and food is, and that that regulation may well include a statutory duty to disclose source code and allow it to be used elsewhere."
So you're telling me that MS is more like Stalin, and yet your conclusion is to employ socialist regulation as a solution to get to a more "capitalist" solution. There is a serious flaw in your analogy. The flaw is that you assume everyone is forced to use MS. Actually, people have choices, such as Linux, MacOS, BSD and a variety of proprietary systems. Regulation is not about freedom. The proposed regulations forces OSS on the public, which is a violation of individual rights. But then again, people have been in favor of violating Bill Gates' rights for years now, so this attitude doesn't surprise me.
Vote for Pedro
Oh, did I tell that due to the fact of globalization of OSS, and due to the fact that we cannot live/survive without software anymore - all borders must be opened and all national goverments must be no more different than state (like Nebraska in US) or province (like Alberta in Canada) local governments.
And of course, all documents arount the world must be under Creative Commons.
Did I miss anything?..
Less is more !
thing is, this isnt a political campaign, maybe with some people, there's a political agenda for it, but linux torvalds never intended for this to spark politics. he was basically making something that would work.
so to call this a cold war and other political euphanisms, is off..
it's just technology people, not two governments and countries.
and dont argue with me about all the political crap surrounding linux's existance, because that doesnt matter in what I'm saying, linux isnt a political move, or else it'd just be as shoddy as windows.
With Bush declaring that mercury and arsenic are vegetables, and the USDA insisting that testing some cows that can't walk and no cows that can is effective enough, plus those electricity problems in the northeast and California, I'd say the software industry could withstand a little US style "regulation".
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Author was way off*. Open source software is closer to socialism than anything, while proprietary software is pretty much capitalism. If you don't think so, look at the philsophies underpinning both of these:
--Socialism--
Egalitarian
Communal
Sharing/common good
--Capitalism--
Elitist
Driven by profits
No such thing as a common good
If you look at these traits, you would find that open-source software is closer to socialism and proprietary software is closer to capitalism. That's economics.
If you look at the political dimension, you would find that both open-source software and proprietary software are libertarian (to a large degree).
So to sum up, open-source software would be libertarian+socialism** while proprietary software (as exemplified by Microsoft) would be libertarian+capitalism. This basically means that, under the political compass two dimensional system, open-source software would be near the bottom left, while the proprietary one would be the bottom right.
(* The confusion over proprietary software and capitalism arises because Microsoft is thought to be a monopoly by some. Because of that, some people (namely capitalists) don't consider MS to be capitalist. These capitalists would argue that capitalism needs free markets and perfect competition. My theory is that free markets lead to monopolies or oligopolies and if this is true then these capitalists' reasoning is baseless. This is exactly what happened in the case of MS. MS was a small company competing under perfect competition at one time. It simply monopolized the market like all businesses attempt to. Therefore, one CAN consider MS to be capitalist, even though it has monopolize many of its markets)).
(** When I say libertarian+socialism, I'm not talking about libertarian socialism (which is anarchism), although it is close. Open-source software is not anarchist because there are rules (the existence of copyrights means that the person who wrote the software has more power than someone who did not. Under anarchism, you wouldn't have this situation because copyrights do not generally exist under many anarchist systems. If open-source software had no copyrights (i.e. author who wrote it has no more rights than someone who did not write it), then open-source software can be considered anarchist. From my view, public domain software is basically anarchist)).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
What makes this different from Open Source software? From what I see, I'd say damn little, except that the better open source projects seem to do a better job of fixing their stuff than do the proprietary guys. Why did Stallman and company rewrite so many Unix tools in the first place? Because the proprietary versions were, and pretty much remain, crap. There was no incentive for the vendors to improve their software and the free software folks took up the challenge and responded brilliantly. Look at gcc, vim, flex, bison, gawk, and less to name a few vastly improved versions of standard Unix utilities.
Besides -- you're missing the whole point of the open source movement in the first place. The idea is that if you use open source software and you have problems with it, you can always fix them yourself. You don't have to depend on the originators to do that for you. And if you don't possess the necessary competencies to do that, you can always hire somebody who does. Hope this helps you clear your mind about what the debate is about. It's certainly not warranties.
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
Blair Broadcasting Corporation?
Just wondering if you were paying attention to the whole David Kelly fiasco.
While every government attempts to influence/control the BBC, it's also obvious that many employees of the BBC strongly resist it.
The cold war analogy is obvious. On side has a dictator and fearless leader (Bill) with a cult of personnality, a bunch of "apparatchik" party members (MS employees), a reward system for those apparatchiks (stock options), a taste for systematic territorial conquest (buying up or crushing every potential competitor), an Iron Curtain (MS lawyers forbid MS programmers from looking at GPL code for fear of code pollution), inferior technology compensated by brute force, a tendency to rewrite history (MS invented multimedia, multitasking, windowing systems, personal computing...), the list goes on and on....
No offense, but your post sounds just like the principle of peaceful coexistence that was espoused as a solution to the Cold War (can't remember which side pushed it). But it just meant the war didn't get hot, well not globally just in local spots.
MS vs Linux has some aspects of a Cold War in that at the moment it seems like it will be a long drawn out standoff between two different world views. Neither view is, I think, totally correct. Ideally, one would expect that Linux, Windows and OS X will coexist, each with significant market share, sniping at each other until one day something will come from nowhere like a Mongol invasion sweeping all before it.
Of course, if you added up all the opinions on this topic all you'd have is just a lot of wasted electrons ... probably including this post.
Bitter and proud of it.
computers cannot kill or injure people
Horse manure. It is very obvious that you have never done any coding for an embedded industrial or medical control system. Inadequate software can and has resulted in deaths (and thank God it wasn't my code).
Granted that, outside of fiction, I have not yet heard of a computer picking up a knife and stabbing someone 37 times in the back (worst case of suicide they'd ever seen).
And capitalism is not in the least elitist. The paper boy, the owner/operator of the corner grocery, the local landscpape expert, the software consultant - these are every bit the capitalists that Bill Gates is. Indeed, the ability to produce value efficiently is a wonderful equalizer, constantly raising up the capable and bringing down the arrogant. So many of todays billionaires started with essentially nothing, and so many of tomorrow's billionairies have essentially nothing today.
And so far as socialism being egalitarian, communal, and sharing in the public good? Well, perhaps you could point out a good working example. All I can think of is Stalin and the twenty million Russian corpses he left behind.
Methinks that is the essential difference between paid-for and free (as in beer) software.
I would also add that the right to an opinion, at least one that anyone will listen to, is not free. It isn't even cheap.
I reserve, however, the right to express astonishment, which under suitable circumstances is much more productive than the right to complain.
I have a problem. I am astonished at the problem. You fix the problem so you don't get astonished by the same problem. We both gain. I gain from your efforts, but as far as you are concerned, that is an irrelevant side effect.
You can buy commericial software and you do have the right to complain. But, unless it's very expensive, it's unlikely the complaints will do much if any good. The nature of support for commercial software tends much more to convince users that whatever they are experiencing is a user error rather than computer error. Also whoever is fielding the calls is in no position to actually do much of anything about it. But whoever is fielding the calls does have to listen, at least until (s)he finds an excuse for "We don't support that".
It will be interesting to see how industry (I don't mean IT) figures out how to pay for free software.
I've been using OSS software for 7-8 years, but also ocasionaly use MS software.
I believe that both models are flawed because:
MS - Their anti compatitive tactics slow down inovation and smaller contributers to the software market
OSS - in the world of capitalism nuthin can be free!
Software is not free, to me the source code to build that software is free but as soon as you download the source, built it into software and start using it for your own benefit it should be paid.
this is the reason i think its flawed because this simply rule has been abused ever since OSS started.
Cheez
Tuga
Businesses run by unimaginative people with lots of political pull LOVE regulation. They LOVE being granted monopolies and "reasonable rates of return" that are set by the regulators that hope to get jobs in industry after leaving.
What private individual wouldn't love to get a 10% ROI guaranteed by the government (risk free) except those that are really daring and want to make more... 10% risk free is pretty good...
Some people LOVE regulation, it just isn't the cutthroat capitalist OR anyone that actually cares about the common welfare.
I don't agree with the one statement that users of software would need to pay any type of statutory amount in order to have OSS. Copyright is a construct of the government. Most other forms of IP require that the process be divulged. Only software publishers are allowed to keep their secrets and have the government their IP.
Regulation is often seen as meddling by the very same people that need to have regulation to do anything at all. When did american car companies improve the safety of their cars. After regulation or after they countless reports that their car were deathtraps?
Your industry wouldn't be as regulated if your industry behaved. They have however a proven track record of needing a nanny. Goverment does not come with a crystal ball that can detect wether Bank A has at time period X responsible management. They must treat all the same. We, the people, demand that they do this. As you said we don't want another depression thanks to bad bank management.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is nothing but M$-Windowz users snapping ack..
Governments have already taken many steps backwards using the power of regulation. Witness extended copyrights, lengthy patent protections, DMCA prohibitions reverse-engineering.
Many of us who believe free and open source software could provide efficiency and productivity increases world wide are becoming cynical of government regulation as it has been as much a force for encumbering as it has for freeing.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This could be true. However the conclusions are wrong. If anything, Microsoft would be on the capitalistic side and Linux would be on the idealistic side. Like communists the followers consist of intellectuals who decide what is good for the masses (the workers in communism) from an ivory tower position, have a superiority feeling over the uneducated and base their ideology on ideas that get reinforced by preaching for their own following and shielding themselves from reality. ...', just like communism blamed the unwillingness of workers in capitalist countries to overthrow their governments and adopt communism on religion.
They are convinced they are right, but day to day reality contradicts them, so they blame this on education, saying 'if users were smarter
[Giving more info to an AC agreeing with me.]
The 300 miles per tank standard is for highway driving. City driving assumes driving shorter distances with more gas stations, so a lower miles per tank is acceptable.
Hummers are definitely in the large vehicle category. They have 32-33 gal tanks. The deisel gets 12-15 mpg; the gas engine gets 8-10 mpg. Even the gas engine Hummers should be able to drive 300 highway miles on a tank.
In contrast, the Geo Metro has a 10 gal tank, and gets 36-39 mpg. This incredibly fuel efficient car gets just under 400 miles per tank. The car would need to be filled slightly less often than the Hummer, but a tank's worth of gas would much less expensive.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.