Slashdot Mirror
MS Rails On Open Source, Appeals To Gov't Greed
Bill Harper writes "Open source software is a 'waste of money,' a Microsoft executive has said. He goes on to say that governments planning to use it will damage their own economies and that giving away source code is shooting yourself in the foot. What's interesting though is that this is just the latest in a series of nonsense arguments put forward by MS in Asia because it's scared of Linux stealing the market. An early one was that open-source software is anti-competitive!" Funny thing is, the MS executive (Chris Sharp) used to work for Red Hat.
"Funny thing is, the MS executive (Chris Sharp) used to work for Red Hat."
Funny? It's scary more than anything, as it'll just make what he says seem more 'credible'. Of course, he's just some greedy bastard, and it's good to see him not working for an OSS company anymore, but it doesn't help Linux much in this propaganda campaign.
the painful lesson that they will have to transform from a company that create standards to being one that contributes to them.
They honestly believe that having tons of cash will buy them anything but open standards and architecture eventually win out. They always have, they always will. They are just throwing up their arms in exaperation because they just don't get it. They will,..soon enough
Doesn't Microsoft also claim that their software shouldn't be used in mission-critical systems? Wouldn't you think that government systems quality (usually) as mission-critical?
Hooray for hypocracy.
governments planning to use it will damage their own economies
...And governments using MS products aren't damaging their own economies by exposing themselves to 31337 h4x0rz, virii, spyware, seineewerasreenigneepacsten style backdoors, and other closed source, proprietary crap that only Microsoft can spoonfeed to us?
*rubs index finger and thumb together* This is the worlds smallest violin, playing a sad, sad song for you, Microsoft.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The "waste of money" argument does not hold water. Instead of the government earning X% on the profits of closed-source companies, every dollar spent by anyone on OSS development is potentially a dollar the government doesn't need to spend, and that the community does not need to duplicate by spending said dollar.
From the government's point of view, the ROI on OSS is orders of magnitude greater than that of closed-source software.
It's a vastly more efficient utilisation of resources.
'"If you are compelled to give back to the community, then you don't have the opportunity to benefit from that knowledge,"'
-Chris Sharp
translated:
f**ck you all. We're only here for the money.
And if you want to start a company in this world and make money while giving away source code, go right ahead. Lots of companies are doing just fine that way. It's only the proprietary, lock-em-up, IP theft is a crime!, sign this NDA! crowd that will fall further and further back.
MS sounds like tired old prostitute complaining about women that give it away.
Open source is a good source of business revenues if you're in a country with cheap labor where you can more or less limitlessly hire support people.
If you're in a country where the labor is more or less expensive, and moreover if your employees are not support people but software engineers, then the financial outlook is questionable. For people and companies not wanting to move into cheap support, but stay in higher-paid research and software development going into open source does not make a whole lot of sense.
The government should care little about the source. They should mandate open standards. If you decide that your document standard will be the OpenOffice Writer XML-based standard, documented and open, then you can use either OpenOffice Writer for that (free) or any closed source utility that will save to desired format, but perhaps offer some other advantages.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
After reading this article, it sounds like Microsoft, atleast in the Asia-Pacific region, does not have any advantage in the market over OSS.
Perhaps its about time for Microsoft to realize the playing field has changed and it should figure out (like IBM, Novell, etc..) how to utilize OSS instead of trying to fight it.
In my part of SE Asia, piracy must be a very powerful ally of M$. People have grown so accustomed to M$ products and proggies running on windows 'cos they know where they can get them - and they've all been so "trained" in them cos of their "availability". And I would think that much of the general comp literacy in the region is due to this ally - I wouldn't be surprised if M$ sees this region as rather "safe" since Linux is kind of a "hardcore" "server" "alternative" solution.
oh yes i must also mention that after all those years of "free education", M$ started "cleaning up" several years back. Talk about traitors.
...they just don't get it.
They don't get it? Hell, I'm the one that doesn't get it! What is it beyond the 50 billion(not that this money actually exists) in the bank that they want?? This is all very psychotic to me. Dudes, cash out, hit the Riviera, French, Mexican, Mayan, whatever. They must be doing this for a good laugh, watching us wetting our pants everytime they speak. There's just no other reason. Maybe it's some "wag the dog" thing. What are they distracting us from?
What?
One minor quibble. Microsoft doesn't create standards, they impose them.
At least it's good for the US's economy. M$ is basically funnelling money from around the world back into the US, which has a lot to do with why the rest of the world (at least EU, Latin America and Asia) are so hyped about an alternative. Especially nowadays with Bush increasing anti-American sentiment like never before seen.
In that sense if a non-programmer wants to help the FOSS movement then translating a how-to, a man page or something else is a great way.
Sending money to Redmond, Washington, United States does not help your economy, unless you are in Redmond, or to a lesser degree in Washington State.
It's good for the economy when things like steel and coal and fabric gets cheaper, because it means a better standard of living for consumers. Businesses also become more efficient; when their raw material costs go down, they either make more money or drop prices, both of which are good for the local economy.
So if cheaper steel is good, why on earth is cheaper software bad?
But Microsoft is trying to assert that if you wnt any chance of growing your own Microsoft, you need a strong IP regime.
But the simple fact is that there will be no new Microsofts. The existing one will make very sure of that. Only people who completely change the rules and play a different game entirely can hope to succeed against a compaany with half the money in the world.
If your local economy actually DID 'hit gold' and come up with a wonderful new software idea, it's virtually certain that Microsoft would simply subsume it into Windows. This has happened many times over the last twenty years; Microsoft has put company after company out of business by leveraging Windows. (Stacker, Quarterdeck, Lotus 1-2-3, Netscape... the list goes on and on.) The Windows software ecosystem has very little diversity; there are a few big companies and a lot of small ones, but very very few midsize ones. The sharks eat them instead and get bigger.
In other words, with Microsoft already existing in the world, the chance of creating your own local Microsoft is ZERO. The creation of the closed source software industry was a very special event that will only happen once; it will not be repeated.
There can still be small software niches, of course, ones that are too small for Microsoft to bother with. But if you grant that you most likely can't make huge piles of money, why not give away the code for free and sell services and support instead?
As a government, why not encourage consulting-type technology businesses like this? Service businesses can make very comfortable amounts of money. While they don't have the huge potential upside of being able to sell, over and over again, a product that costs them nothing to duplicate, they don't really have that upside ANYWAY because of Microsoft. The open-source industry is still forming, and there's lots and lots of room for new companies.
If you REALLY want to help your economy out, get behind open source and PUSH. Your local government spending $5,000/year for local companies to support and fix their Linux servers is a HELL of a lot better for your economy than is sending a check to Microsoft. Money that goes to Redmond is gone; money that is spent locally stays in your local economy.
Now, if Microsoft offered solutions that were wildly better than their open-source counterparts, it might make financial and economic sense to buy Windows. If you can be twice as productive, say, on a Windows box, and the total cost of Windows is less than twice that of Linux, then it's an overall win to buy Windows. I'm setting aside control and forced upgrade issues, along with many others, but economics is ultimately about cost, and you can abstract all those factors into cost of ownership.
But if, as I believe, Windows' overall advantage over Linux is slim at best, then it's just wasteful to send money to Redmond when you can spend it locally instead.
There's one other scenario, too... you may be so technically savvy you that you don't NEED support. In that case, you you can drop your computing cost to ZERO. This is STILL better for the local economy, because that $200 you don't send to Redmond is money you can spend at the county fair.
In a world with free alternatives, paying for Windows is very much like a tax. Taxes are always harmful (at least directly) to an economy, because it's wasted money...profit that didn't get reinvested.
I've lost track, was that the study Microsoft did, or the one they paid for or both?
Uhm, actually no. Mozilla IS netscape, just a few genereations and a name change later, with much more added to it. And the relationship between Open Office and Star Office is mostly the same.
The exception being the one about Unix. Wich is not to good a point as Linux is a POSIX compliant os same as Unix.
Of course you are almost certainly a 3rd rate troll, or just possibly a employee of a comercial company threatened by OSS who failed to do his/her research and is now sitting there with egg on his face.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Seriously, selling products for less in other countries encourages businesses to leave the united states.
I can't blame a company who outsources work to another country because its less expensive.
I can BLAME an American company who intentionally lowers prices in other countries and rapes us here in the states.
I'm trying to argue both sides here - but Microsoft does offer free support and such free, comprehensive Linux support doesn't exist.
I call bullshit.
Microsoft's knowledge base is nice, yes, but honestly, it's there out of strict necessity. And it's not as good as Google anyway. For both Linux and Windows, Google is the way to go.
If you have a real problem with Windows, it won't be on support.microsoft.com, it'll be on Google. Probably Google Groups. And probably with a bunch of people with titles like "Microsoft MVP" chiming in with their two pence, all wrong and clueless. Guess why? Because nobody knows how the software works. And these real problems don't get solved.
How do you solve the problems? By calling up Microsoft. They'll charge you hundreds of dollars, to be refunded if they decide it's a bug in their software. You will be on hold for hours on end, and their support is far from helpful.
I spent over six months with Microsoft support on a single issue a few years ago; I still see the problem today, so their solution obviously didn't work, but we just learn to live with the problem.
More recently we experienced a bug with Windows 2000 Server SP4; it just kept rebooting randomly. Turns out this stems from a fix of a vulnerability in SP3 and below. Microsoft support was useless and to my knowledge they haven't actually fixed the new bug. Google Groups, on the other hand, helped us find the problem (we just use SP3 now, vulnerability and all).
I've set up GNU/Linux in mission-critical situations. When problems come up, IRC or Google or Google Groups has always had the answer. The three have a combined 100% track record. Why? Because the developers listen, and if not, you can always look at the source code. (You'd be surprised how easy it is to find the problem in the source code going by nothing more than an error message.)
In my experience, GNU/Linux support costs all of $0. But if I had a scary manager who wanted support, I could always recommend one of the zillions of companies selling Linux support. I doubt any would be as good as newsgroups, but they can't hurt. They'd certainly be more helpful than Microsoft, since in my experience Microsoft support is nothing more than a waste of time and patience.
I thought I read fairly recently that custom software development for specific businesses was still the largest paying sector in the IT world in the US. Open standards mean more jobs for us slashdot nerds! Case in point: I wrote the first version of the Quality Assurance database at my work in VB because I already knew it, and it was fast and easy. I got promoted (largely because of my badass database!) and got my own desk and everything! Guess what, that desk had it's own computer, I wouldn't want to piss off the BSA, and I certainly didn't want to buy another copy of VB (one of the techs was making nicer UI's for the DB so I couldn't just uninstall) so I went python(I friggin love that lang BTW) and now I am writing version 3.0(don't ask) entirely in Python and it will friggin rock. I could confidently say that open source software has not only provided me with the tools to be incredibly productive, but given my employer a productivity boost to go along with it.(we used to write the test data on paper and have the night tech enter it into an Access DB which took at least an hour a night) Not to mention that it will ensure that some python kiddie gets a job when I leave. How could this possibly be a bad thing???
governments that standardise on open-source software are hurting their local software vendors as they can't make the money needed to invest in their own software products.
You'd expect a government to buy direct. The only "local" software vendor here is Microsoft.
building open-source software is a "waste of money" and that a company was in effect giving away its intellectual property, preventing it from getting future benefits. "If you are compelled to give back to the community, then you don't have the opportunity to benefit from that knowledge,"
Their benefits are (1) The free use of software that they CAN imrove on, (2) The use of those improvements in their own line of business (If you need a new feature or bugfix in a commercial product, your options are limited, as in your only option is to wait and see), and (3) The use of improvements made by businesses who are using the software because of your improvements. Etc.
even companies that support open source are just as motivated by commercial interests as any other commercial software vendor.
Yeah, what's wrong with expecting a little well earned profit?
Intellectual property rights fuel sustained innovation
Need is a pretty big motivation to innovate. Some call it the root of all invention. You keep your IP rights, enough to relicense and enforce against commercial pirates. And open source won't prohibit you from making commercial software, on your own, and seeing how far those IP rights get you when nobody wants to pay to use your software because you're competing with Microsoft. And how was 15 years of DOS, an OS that was a decade outdated when it was created, defended heavily by litigation and anti-competitive tactics, and based entirely on the works of others any without credit or compensation, a shining example of innovation fueled by IP rights? Quite the opposite.
Or what about the fear of patent litigation if I invent something that someone else invented independently? Non-innovators need not worry about such things.
With open source, there is no way to make more software
??? With FUD, there is no way to make more sense?
Open Source has NO interest in MS except with regard to APIs and protocols to enable OSS to talk with proprietary MS protocols. Other than that, OSS does not care that MS exists or not, it has no interest in defeating MS is some kind of software war and is here to stay whether MS like it or not.
MS should now accept this, just like they had to finally accept that TCP/IP became the globally accepted way of networking computers together about 10 - 15 years ago.
A rational adult company would recognise that it now has some serious competition for market share and would begin to take positive steps to secure its userbase - for starters, spending some of those huge cash reserves to improve the products that are out there already, make them better and more secure and, yes, lower their prices to make them more value for money.
Additionally, an adult company would accept that it's products have to work with competitors products and take action to ensure that (some of) its APIs are open or that it adopts more open standards within its products.
The problem is that at the moment, the only damage MS is doing is to itself. This "spoilt brat" behaviour is lowering its public image even more and giving some of its customers another excuse to adopt OSS in favour of its own products.
My personal belief is that MS are very close to having to adopt a major tactic change (for the better) in order to stay in business in the future (and they know it). I'm sure that very soon we'll see the patent litigations start against the likes of SAMBA and those that built FAT/NTFS support into the kernel but I really don't see how backwards engineering will be seen as infringing a patent when tested in court - I also suspect (and hope) that one or more of the big Linux players (IBM?) will step forward with the money for OSS to fight these litigations - if not, then I believe the community itself will find ways of raising money to fight them. After all the court cases are done, MS will just be perceived as inflexible and (more) arrogant and lose more customers as a result.
The article just indicates how desperate MS are getting (in terms of trying to stop OSS) and very soon they'll realise that they just have to accept it and work with it or give up with software completely.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The micro-economic argument would go like this:
The cost to produce one additional unit of software (marginal cost) is very near zero. Furthermore, the average cost per unit at higher levels of production is always decreasing. The fixed costs of development are spread over ever increasing copies of software, which each have negligible cost to produce.
Software development is a contestable market. That means that new companies can enter and exit the market at an insignificant cost. (Anyone can write software at home and distribute copies over the Internet.) In a contestable market, if the average cost curve has negative slope where it crosses market demand (guaranteed for digital copies, since the slope is negative everywhere), there is a "natural monopoly". The "natural contestable monopoly" firm must set output and price at the point where their average cost curve crosses market demand, where profits equal zero. At a lower price, the firm takes losses, and at a higher price, it invites competition. Even then, a firm that can incur lower fixed costs (zero for open source) can outcompete the others. The price would tend to move to where marginal cost (near zero) meets demand.
Essentially, profit-seeking companies must innovate first, before a zero-development-cost solution becomes available. They must continue to innovate, and always ensure that the consumers are willing to pay more for higher quality and additional features, otherwise they sell fewer copies.So open-source won't kill the industry. It is the heel-nipping dog that will drive the industry towards more innovation and greater consumer satisfaction. Unfortunately, there is not much room for either profit or error, unless your company has just invented something totally new. In that case, a patent can provide breathing room, though piracy still puts limits on pricing.
Also, though 100 families may become unemployed when an open source project is completed, 100 million can now become more productive at near-zero cost. The hundred can now move on to a new project with no competitors.
"This quote is a product of the Frobozz Magic Quote Company."
I don't buy it. That's the same argument that a farmer using manual laborers would use against the automation (and associated massive efficiency increases -- we now produce far more food per worker) of farming.
Industries always improve efficiency. As a matter of fact, that's one of the key reasons for having free markets. As part of this process, people get put out of their jobs and forced to find new work. Perhaps reimplementing word processors isn't a viable job any more, and programmers will be forced to work on, say, font creation software.
Until that day when there isn't a thing in the world that computers could potentially be made to do that they can't do, there will be jobs for every software developer in the world.
Also note that there are more people working on custom code and vertical-market code than horizontal-market code. Horizontal-market code derives the most benefit from open-sourcing -- if you're doing up a custom forum system, *some* of the work may be done for you if you start with an existing base, but it's unlikely that everything is complete.
I think that you should be more concerned about improvements in ease of programming. If everyone had to code in assembly, it would take many more man-hours to write a package. High level languages like Java, SQL, and perl allow people to produce software much more quickly. This *does* affect vertical-market and custom development.
May we never see th
Taxes tend to have a negative effect on the growth of the economy. You have to have some taxes or you can't run a government at all, and there are certainly important programs that must be funded, but governements should try to save money wherever possible. If I'm not giving my money to the governement, I'll spend it myself, and I'll spend it on things that will drive the economy towards making more goods that I want to purchase.
I'm no economist, but I believe that when governments decide where the money gets spent, you create artificial economies that can collapse when political tides change. There are buying fads as well, but I believe they have less of a deterimental effect on the economy.
By investing in Open Source solutions for software, governments help create a body of software that can be used by all other governments. Keeping it open gives us a way to directly help governments in smaller countries by making top quality software available for them. This is all done without any extra cost. It's sort of foriegn aid as a by-product of smart shoping on our governments part. Since most governments face similar organizational problems, there is bound to be tremendous overlap in the software requirements they all have.
Open Source software is more secure, in general, than commercial softare because it is open to public scrutiny and analysis. I think it's frightening to imagine viruses taking over government computers and opening them up to manipulation by criminals. It seems that creates all sorts of potential problems that are best avoided.
In summary, I think that the best decision any government can make is to use Open Source Software whenever it meets the requirements of the situation. It's the best thing for the economy and for the taxpayers.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra