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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." "
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 ...
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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.
Regulation of software is just asinine. This suggestion stems from a basic misunderstanding of economics.
The reason power and water are regulated is that they are industries wherein the cash flows and flows after an initial huge investment in infrastructure, and little else is needed. Also, they are industries wherein a monopoly is very easily attained, as 3 or 4 sets of power lines and water mains for an area from various companies is just asinine. This is called a natural monopoly. So, the government steps in to keep these natural monopolies from strangling customers and holding power hostage for exorbitant fees.
Software is so totally different though. Multiple versions of software are far from redundant, and actual R&D is necessary in order to stay current. Software is not a NATURAL monopoly business.
Only requirement for good karma: be pedantic as much and as often as possible.
Microsoft however, with it's deep pockets, would be able to fairly easily maneuver around this regulation with little-to-no hassle, paying people to overlook it or otherwise passing laws to alleviate the weight of the law on companies such as themselves.
Regulation bites. I work in the banking industry - very, very, very regulated (which is fine from a safety and soundness standpoint - we don't want to revisit the bank failures of the depression).
The worst part of government regulation is when the regulators have to "have something for the report" - that is when they start creeping past the scope of what they're supposed to be trying to do.
For example, with the Year 2000 deal, the government thought that it would be a good idea to mandate that all banks be ready, and then to regulate them as such. For our small bank, my project was more than 50% work for the government in documenting stuff instead of working to make sure that everything was good to go.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
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.
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.
Subject: Pig iron [Was: Article: Gates memo calls for security focus]
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.
Being held liable for how secure your software is would ruin everybody.
Well, all the developers, anyway. Users would benefit from such a regulation, and if handled properly, this could work. Whether it's a "cap" or just related to disclaimers about intended uses of products, limits could be placed on the liability. There are problems to be solved (how do you handle the case of an individual developer vs. someone like Computer Associates?), but claiming that requiring developers to be liable for damages caused by flaws in their products is the same sort of protectionism we decry in large corporations in other industries. No one seriously suggests that automobile manufacturers shouldn't be liable for certain flaws in their products it may cost them a bundle but the result is safer cars.
That said, a source code disclosure requirement is not that distant from current copyright regulation. Currently, rights holders are legally required to deposit two copies with the Library of Congress. Note that this is not a requirement to have a copyright on your works in general, there are just penalties associated. Interpreting or amending the law to include source code is not that far of a reach.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
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.
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
Yeah, regulation can stifle innovation, but at the risk of sounding glib... it can enable innovation too. Depends how great the need for regulation is and if it's the "right" sort of regulation. One example is splitting up the radio spectrum early last century so that radio, TV, etc. could be developed without worrying about stations stomping on each other.
So maybe a little regulation might help. Maybe not. Who really knows?
yours
Regulation stifles innovation. Imagine there was a regulation that said all medicines needed to be at least X safe. Both farmaceutical companies and Uni researchers are screwed. Being held liable for how safe your pharmaceuticals are would ruin everybody. That's just one example of a regulation that would mess everything up, but just about anything would be terrible. Keep it free.
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I basically agree that regulation would not be a good thing in this field. Just wanted to point out that this argument is not a good one.
There are, in fact, excellent reasons to regulate software for safety reasons in some fields; medicine and process control are two of the obvious ones. The problem is that unlike pharmaceuticals, for instance, software is not in fact one field, and so you can not regulate it as if it was.
Software is a medical technology (and should be regulated as such); it is a accounting mechanism (and should be regulated as such); it is a childrens toy; it is a power plant safety implementation; it is an artists tool. Software is by its very nature everything to everybody. You can't regulate it as software.
What you can (and probably should) do is to regulate its use in any of these fields as that field seees fit (or not regulate at all, as the case may be). When it is to be used in medicine, regulate it as a medical technology. When it is used for process control, demand the same the same level of testing and validation as you do of the pressure valves and pipe fittings.
So, yes, regulation of software is not only necessary, it is a benefit. Trying to regulate all software just as software, on the other hand, is a nonstarter.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
> Developpers would slowly but surely stop developping new ideas for fear of
> being fined/sued/thrown in jail. OSS would trickle to almost a halt.
Just like all the car companies have closed down because of safety standards, right ? Bah...
The test for liability of a manufacturer is simply, were they negligent ? There's more than enough wiggle room there to allow manufacturers to safely innovate while clamping down on those that are grossly dismissive of safety concerns.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
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.
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.
Just like all the car companies have closed down because of safety standards, right ? Bah...
They have dumbass. They have either closed, or development became so expensive and unprofitable that they've been bought out by larger manufacturers.
Next time you use an analogy, try to get your facts straight.
Kaiser, AMC, Nash, International Harvester, Studebaker... The list goes on.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Spoken like a true loser/script kiddie/whatever -- completely unprofessional. Software developers should take pride in their work, and shouldn't release things that they aren't proud to claim. And the "and if they relied on it oh well, their fault...". What kind of an attitude is this? Is this the basic open-source "it's free software, so don't complain if it doesn't work" attitude? Or is this guy just a bigger loser than most?
If this idiot's opinions are indicative of how the open source community views their work, then the world is right to avoid it as much as possible -- and it should be shunned by true professionals that do care about the quality of their work...
computers cannot kill or injure people
Have you no sense of history? Do a search on the Therac-25, and let me know when you want to retract your statement...