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Halloween X Author Mike Anderer Speaks Out
cdlu writes "Mike Anderer, author of the now-famous Halloween X document, has spoken out at NewsForge. Among the highlights is a prediction by Mr. Anderer that Microsoft has many more disruptive lawsuits planned up their sleeves."
What exactly does he mean by this? Traditional EULAs push liability onto the user as well.
Did anyone else read this interview and get the feeling that Anderer spoke a lot but didn't really say anything specific or all that relevant?
nude mac desktops
What an asshole.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
In a world where there are $500 million dollar patent infringement lawsuits imposed on OS companies (although this is not completely settled yet), how would somebody like Red Hat compete when 6 months ago they only had $80-$90 million in cash? At that point they could not even afford to settle a fraction of a single judgment without devastating their shareholders. I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue. All of them are not asking for hundreds of millions, but most would be large enough to ruin anything but the largest companies. Red Hat did recently raise several hundred million which certainly gives them more staying power. Ultimately, I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space.
This attitude is wrong at SO many levels. New players can't enter the OS space NOT because they will have to compete against marketing schemes/ad campaigns of a richer company BUT because they'll be sued into oblivion by the competition.
It is being assumed here that a company with $85 million in the bank won't be able to survive because they don't have money to survive a LAWSUIT...the quality of their products/service/innovation apparently doesn't even enter the equation anywhere.
litiguous fucking bastards
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Do you recall reading that leaked memo (Halloween X)? A lot of us doubted its authenticity in light of the atrocious spelling and grammar.
For this article, ol' Mikey must have used a spell checker. Heck, given his grammar problems, he must have had someone proofread it for him. Hmmm, ghostwriter?
Perhaps being an (ex-)man of SCO and a friend of Darl McBride (in case he has real friends) is enough for many of us. But there is more in it. If you actually read the article, you will find plenty of reasons to consider this guy a major asshole. Here is a short list:
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
No offence, but what mad weed are you smoking? Windows isn't a monopoly even though it runs roughly 95% of desktop computers?
You don't have to have 100% marketshare to be a monopoly. Simply saying "now there is an alternative, kind of, for some people, if they're willing to do complex and expensive migrations means Windows doesn't have a monopoly" is one of the most incredible pieces of doublethink I've seen for along time.
Not only is it important that MS is recognized to have a monopoly, but that there is nothing legally wrong with having a monopoly as long as you are playing fair in the market and maintain the monopoly without interferring in the market. However, once you try to use your monopoly position to prevent entry to the market or to squeeze others out of it, or otherwise use the monopoly position to maintain that position, then it's considered to be a illegal practice, which is what the cruft of the MS trial was about.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
> Even with respect to driver support for more recent desktop peripherals? My scanner didn't
> come with a SANE driver on its CD, and there exists no such driver in SANE CVS either.
Rather than just stating that it doesn't, think about why it doesn't. Is
it because of the technical superiority of Windows? Or the superior innovation
coming out of Microsoft? Do you think they wrote all those drivers themselves?
Or, is it because the Windows monopoly is, like most monopolies, self-perpetuating?
Since they have the monopoly, not only do the realities of the market make it
more likely that Scanners, Inc. will write a Windows driver before, or perhaps
to the exclusion of all others; it also means that Microsoft is in a position to
illegally abuse their monopoly by REQUIRING that Scanners, Inc. play by MS's
rules if they want their scanner to work on Windows at all.
The playing field is not level at all, as should be obvious. Vendors bend over
backwards to make their devices work within the bizarro world that is Windows.
Counterwise, most of them expend no effort whatsoever, often denying even
basic documentation that would cost them nothing to provide, to the development
of Linux drivers. The very existence of drivers for ANY sufficiently complex
devices is a small miracle, and should be taken as testament to the innate superiority
of Linux and her developers.
Once the Windows stranglehold is broken, just you sit back and watch what Linux
turns into when the playing field is leveled.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Firstly, I admire Mike Anderer for speaking up for himself. Although he is apparently very well known in the insider community of IP-financing he was unknown to the rest of the world prior to ESR's Halloween X release. Being catapulted into the public eye in such a way is not easy for anyone, even more so when the response of the public at large is quite venomous.
Secondly, I get the impression that Mike Anderer is almost there, almost beiginning to fathom the changes in the software industry which he has referred to. He is not simply stuck in the old-style IP tradition which became utterly dominant in the last 20 years-no he was one of the architects of this development.
Secondly, For people like him compatibility, exhangability and interoperatibilty means cross-licenscing. According to this view if companies want to exchange documents between various applications cross-licensing agreements must already be in place which allow for this to happen.I can imagine that for many companies, during the time frame where the IP hegemony system was comming into being(early 80's), the idea of cross-licenscing as the way to enable open exchange and interoperation was quite obvious and even common sensical.
What people didn't realize then, and which many fail to still realize now, is that all of the problems of compatibility, exhangability and interoperatibilty are created by this IP regime to begin with. Only when one sees that these issues are contrived issues, issued which have no technical merit, and are issues which themselves promote and prolong their own very being, does one begin to see how self-servingt the IP regime really is.
Mike Anderer has been in the buisness of creating the need for his own buisness for the last 20 years- and he is not alone. He is but one of an entire industry of IP tychoons which arose in the ecosystem of IP. HE and people like him worked to develop the IP system and these same people then provided the solutions to the self-created problems which the IP system inherently produces-one could view this as a form of autopoesis.
Thirdly, his confusing of the GPL with public domain is pre-programmed. The notion that something can be licensced in such a way that this license itself cannot be bought or sold contradicts, in it's very roots, what licensces have always traditionally meant. The price of the GPL is priceless -and the free software community will stand forever in debt to the brilliance of this licensce. Mike Anderer cannot really grasp this concept fully without fundamentally re-evalutating what licenscing means-and this is of course the fundament of his occupation for the last 20 odd years. For him to fathom this sea-change in the software industry it is necessary for him to understand the incredibly subtle, yet profoundly deep difference between the GPL and public domain/propietary IP.
Understanding this difference means relinquishing the defining oppsoite self-definition of IP-IP has always defined itself through it's opposition to it's other(andere)- public domain. The two notions need each other and exist for each other's benefit. The temporary evil of IP find's it's absolution in the eventual transition to public domain. The defered time, the temporary evil-to-be-covercome, constitutes the horizon of the economy of relative value which is traded in the IP system.
The GPL is never public domain and is never to be bought or sold-it is a-economic in the strictest sense of the word. For Mike Anderer to understand this he would need to call into question the raison d'etre of his entire proffesional life and therein lies the damning self-service of the IP industry.
You're right - and another poster made the same point. Money has a lot to do with politics. All I am pointing out is that there appears to be a lesser evil. Or look at it my way: when they screw up, just keep voting the bastards out... better to keep spinning the wheel than give up! If you believe our chances with Kerry might be better - even microscopically better is enough to justify it.
It's a big government. It took political attention span to stop the antitrust case, not the other way around.
Monopolies are terrible for the economy. Showing you're serious about economic policy might be very good for a sitting president with problems like Bush.
You can make criticism of Bush look like a reflex on Slashdot, the same way everyone paints the readership as Linux zealots or anti-Microsoft... But pardon me for being blunt, I call it rude and ignorant.
It seems to annoy people when a group develops a consensus on something - even when they are correct. Even when what they disapprove of is particularly egregious. Microsoft doesn't deserve scorn, here or wherever thinking people discuss things? Hello? SCO?
You know what you sound like to me? "If you want to take shots at Hitler... have at it... that's practically required here at soc.culture.jewish."
And we, on Slashdot, should be called "partisan" (or the same implied) as if the political developments of the last 4 years don't suitably justify it?
Sorry, just have to get that off my chest. Snidely poking at a consensus opinion (without appearing to worry on wether it's correct) just makes you look ignorant. Say why you think Bush gets short shrift, if you feel differently.
Don't you think there's a reason people here (and in general anywhere people are more educated than average) dislike Bush?