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When Think Tanks Attack
x1048576 writes "The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is only one of a dozen different think tanks that have attacked Open Source. Why are all these think tanks so down on Open Source? Well, the Small Business Survival Committee is concerned that using open source will expose small business to the risk of lawsuits. Citizens Against Government Waste is concerned that the government might waste money on Open Source. Defenders of Property Rights is concerned that Open Source might be a threat to intellectual property rights. However, I was able to detect a common theme to all their criticism. They all seem to be funded by Microsoft."
They have to get their funding from somewhere... and I think that the large majority of it isn't coming from Open Source. That kind of lobbying costs money you know!
~/words_by_grainfed.txt
I for one think that the public criticism of the Open Source developer community is healthy. While we never like being ridiculed or having our flaws pointed out, it does have one advantage: increased introspection.
M$ is playing the same card every corporation and goverment has done in history: taking advantage of people's fears of what they don't understand.
Which is nice.
the good text is at the bottom, imho. start here:
They have a word in Washington for the corporate-sponsored outcry, the grassroots movement that isn't: AstroTurf. By far the most comical example of this is to be found at the Freedom to Innovate Network (Fin), a "non-partisan, grassroots network of citizens and businesses who have a stake in the success of Microsoft and the high-tech industry". Fin doesn't try particularly hard to appear independent--its website, after all, is housed on Microsoft's own--but it has as its online centrepiece a lengthy collection of testimonials from activist groups with vaguely alarming names: the Centre for the Moral Defence of Capitalism, Frontiers of Freedom, Defenders of Property Rights. Their comments appear unsolicited and independent: it certainly looks like there is a groundswell of support for the beleaguered computer giant.
In the spirit of fair use, visit the website for the full story. It's interesting but don't take it as a rallying cry. Just remember to wonder why you see a think tank write a paper next time. In fact remember to wonder why the next person you see says something, in general.
Just curious...
When old IBMs, Apples, and even Commodore 64s were in the offices of the 80s... was the risk of lawsuits, wasted money on computers, and digital property rights really an issue?
If not,... why now?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Where are the lies?
It's all opinion.
Think tanks have turned innovation, insight and thinking into a source of income, and they're seeking to commoditise it.
Put simply, free-thinking outside of a think tank is seen as a threat to their own jobs. In their opinion, open source development should be best left to companies that develop software, in the same way that opinions and insight should come from them, and them only.
Their biggest threat here isn't open source software, it's open source thinking.
Particularly if they are a small software house. I think its a common misconception here that OS threatens the big players most. It doesnt. They may start using OS tools but will keep getting the big enterprise contracts. If I am a small or niche vendor though and a viable free as in beer OS solution then I can pretty much kiss my business goodbye and find something else to do. I think there is a significant risk of OS polarizing the market into 'pure' OS and the big corporate vendors and taking out all the middle players.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
When think tank, funded by MS, attacks, it's more dangerous than ususal think tank, because it's unpredictable like monkey with a bomb.
... I don't feel like repeating the rest, I'm lazy..
Actually, they're pretty predictable.
-Open source == giving away for free what american companies (yes, remember, no software is made outide of the US of A) could have made money on in foreign markets
-copyright bla bla bla
-
By the way, monkey with a bomb, nice image...
I really agree with you way of thinking, spend money improving you own product, than diss the competition.
The truble is they (MS) might spend there money rather well this way with FUD etc.
The best example I can give right now would be Coca Cola. Do they spend money improving products?
Not that much compared to advertising.
Should they improve their product?
Well, their product do cause some diet and healht problems. All the suggar is a problem. This of cause is also a moral question. Is it really coca colas problem how people use their product.
The bottom line is, FUD might give the biggers bang for the $ for Microsoft. So why should the do 'the right' thing?
I only read slash. for the articles...
"They all seem to be funded by Microsoft."
/. representing speculation as fact to feed the group think?
I RTFA. I saw lots of speculation that Microsoft funded all of them. I saw lots of examples of previous funding. I saw almost no proof though or in most instances even a strong case (they hired a consultant who had worked for Microsoft? Big deal). Another case of
Read reviews of shopping cart software
It's not that we give them unnecessary respect, it's that the mainstream press and PHB's do, which certainly can't be said of Slashdot.
This isn't going to come as any surprise but he's *not* the brightest bulb on the tree. However he's far from alone in that, more's the pity.
Brown sees MS as a *miracle*, like many he looks at the phenomenal financial success, adds the fact that it's nominally 'technology' sector and draws his conclusions.
Now the place I'm working for (which has posted market performance in the same range as MS) just did a celebration of thier 25th anniversary. The founders of the company are both very well off and pretty damned bright guys. One jokingly referred to his early talks with Wall street where he said "we're in the business of being a profitable philanthropy". The other mentioned that "we're in the business of doing the right thing" (does this sound like Google's founders?).
Shortly after, the chief financial officer got up and (predictably -- he's a fan) compared us to Microsoft. The reason is he's a money guy and all he can see is the money / financial success.
In fact if we acted in our markets the way MS does, our clients would show us the door. As it is they respect our engineering, and even our sales force, which is trained very hard to serve the *clients* needs.
Iff OSS follows that model, all the ADTI's in the world won't matter. The fact is that some oss projects (see the recent article linked on /. about why users are 'wrong' in not likeing the new Nautilus 'spatial' design) *don't* think this way, and more's the pity.
Fortunately, those are the exceptions.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Since when does quality matter, especially in IT?
/. crowd, allow ourselves to be infuriated about the plain and open FUD by AdTI and others. What you /should/ be doing instead of performing the /.-equivalent of AOL-like 'me-too-ing', is creating awareness among your managers, and helping them to find linux success stories.
A few weeks back I read an article on the register that stated that 2/3 of IT personel do not have the competence that is required by their function.
Everybode who has ever written a resume knows that lying about what skills and experience you have are commonplace. Because the interview is done by a manager with no in-depth knowledge of the field you're working in. How different is that from a softwarecompany telling you that their product is the best out there? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, but once you've bought a piece of software, and have spent 3 months (or more) on installing, configuring, testing, are you then willing to take your loss if you're not a 100% satisfied? I've seen project being dragged on for a year or more (!!!) because a vendor still had to resolve a bug.
It isn't about quality, it's about marketing. If you buy MS once, it's only logical you keep buying it. Enforce a decision on the executive level. Take a manager out for a meal, or a game of golf, send him a nice bottle of wine at christmas, and pummel him to death with expensive looking reports about how GNU/Linux/OSS is a baaaad idea. He'll bend over eventually. That way, they don't have to take the pepsi-challenge. The executive won't know the difference anyway.
We, the
The one that says that an average Malaysian worker has to work 1,100 (yes, eleven hundred) hours to buy a licensed copy of Windows XP.
The same worker would also have to work roughly 11,000 hours to buy a standard PC not to mention various peripheral devices.
In the name of Eris, some of those "think tanks" really are full of shit. For example, here's a nice article from the "Small Business Survival Committee" against the recent anti-SUV feelings among several key US people. Their motivation is to be doubted in the first place; why would a think tank that aligns itself with SMALL businesses care about SUV? Non "mom-n-pop" shop/small business will ever produce a SUV. Besides, look at some of their reasoning:
Brilliant. Fucking brilliant. That's an ammount of misinformation that would make many a discordianist proud. I love that logic, how many people died in M1A2 Abrams tanks lately? Probably less then that. So clearly, everyone in the US should drive a M1A2 Abrams MBT. Also, more people die each year by drowning in water then by drowning in hydrochloric acid. Therefore, hydrochloric acid is safer to swim in then water. I'm not even going tom start on their anti-"EC penalty vs MS" article. Since when does MS count as a small business, anyways, to attract their concern?
Hate me!
In a way we are Marvin, with nothing to defend ourselves with except talk. Worked out pretty well for him though... :)
However, I have yet to speak to anyone who *likes* Microsoft the company, apart from a few people I've crossed paths with who "used to work there".
Therefore, based on the fact that very few people *seem* to like of trust Microsoft, why do Microsoft believe that funding pro-MS think tanks is going to sway public opinion away from Open Source?
To me, Microsoft just seems to be acting like a "spoilt child" these days. No longer is it getting everything it wants when it wants it and so has now gone into a "tantrum" mode and just lashing out to the world.
I'm no business guru but it strikes me that if you head up a company that no-one particularly likes, then you spend some resource improving your reputation in the eyes of the public - try to convince everyone that you care about your image in their eyes, that you want to be seen as a corporation that listens and that you change some of your business processes based upon what people tell you is wrong with the way you do things.
I don't actually care about what these think-tanks say about Open Source because I don't trust Microsoft to tell the truth, let alone the quangos they fund. Why should the rest of the world care about what these think tanks say?
Sometimes, I really get the impression that Gates and his cronies have absolutely no perception of customer perceptions and relaitonships...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Has it occured to anyone that these people may genuinely believe that Open Source software is a bad thing?
If you think the report is rubbish, attack the report. Claiming Microsoft is to blame makes the whole community look like paranoid idiots.
Companies going with Open Source really don't give a damn about the license. They really (as always) care about functionality, security, and FLEXIBILITY. The whole GPL-is-a-borg-virus thing never really enters into the equation.
Asian and EU governments are sick of bending over and taking it in the *** from Microsoft, period. Proprietary software vs. open source (again) has nothing to do with it. Linux just so happens to be the best hope at sticking it to them right now.
Lawyers and small businessmen, in the end, are not the decision-makers. The ones who know what they are doing focus on business issues, and leave the IT stuff to their IT guy (CTO for big biz, the sysadmin for small biz). The IT guys are jumping over to OSS, no matter how many FUD white papers from "think tanks" get passed around.
MS is chasing the wrong fox here. The problem (for them) is that it's the only one they know how to chase.
davejenkins.com |
The question is did MS fund them to be anti-OSS? Or does MS go looking for anti-OSS organizations to fund?
~ish.
Due to the very nature of open source, eventually, the best (general) programs will be open source programs. Period.
Its just a matter of time.
Everyone whose looked into "the business" of open source knows this. Revision after revision after revision. You can think of it like evolution. With the code out there, the only constraints are time and people. With enough time, there will be enough people to revise and continue working on the code.
They _will_ lose marketshare when open source gets popular. Firefox being the example of the first "big one." And boy, is it a doozy. Everyone I know who has tried firefox has stuck with it over IE. Including my mom, who now suggests it to other mom-types that are having computer problems. And thats a lot of moms.
Open source could be considered anti-competative, because the domineering open source program will be so good (in theory) that no competitor will be able to enter the market to compete. It could also be considered "communist" (propaganda-sense) because the work of the few massively benifits the many. Did I mention its free? So they cant compete with price? Not very capitalistic, is it?
Open source is pretty altruistic, at least compared to modern business practices. (then again, not urinating on people could be considered altruistic compared to modern business practices.)
but i digress.
Will this hurt their marketshare? You bet. Will this hurt the marketshare of the entire nation? Maybe, eventually.
no
Don't count on it. I suspect the average /. reader (neglecting the Open Source R0x0rs idiots) is far more widely read about these issues than most of the people who write drivel on behalf of MS, and quite capable of doing their own research.
Presumably Microsoft must convince someone to buy their stuff with tactics like this, or they wouldn't spend so much money on it. I can't say I've ever met that person, though.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
For example, the Open Source, Open Questions piece says - and I paraphrase...
I'm an economist and I worry about the sustainability of a model which depends on people doing things for free. Call me onld and stodgy, but that's my concern. That said, it's for the market place to decide: if people prefer to use open source, it will win.
That's hardly some kind of anti-OSS rant. Rather it's a concern that would be shared by my outside "the community".
Maybe, instead of bashing these people for being Micrsoft's attack dogs (The Small Business Survival Council actually made some interesting submissions re the MSFT settlement), we should listen to what they have to say and give them reasoned responses.
--- My dad's political betting
you do bring up a very valid point.
Why is microsoft or more specifically Steve Ballmer, so hell bent on destroying Microsoft's reputation?
Microsoft had the chance to become everyone's darling and before windows 95 and during windows 95 they were well on their way. but something changed. Making the customers happy and loyal was no longer a goal. Yeah windows 3.11 and windows 95 was a pain in the arse and people complained.
for some reason microsoft has become a gigantic "piss on everyone" corperation. licenses are a nutcase that most corperations are not happy with, they are trying to beat to death old products and trying to force customers into the upgrade cycle to ensure profits instead of innovating.
If word XP-II was faster, smaller and more secure (I.E. fix the scripting language so it has some security) people would buy it... no I dont want the new pixar rendered clippy or new auto formatting features that only piss me and everyone else off...
when did the change occour?
While I still urge you to actually read the actual article, the most appropriate paragraph is (emphasis added)
Some of the points made inside the article are utter tripe. I would argue against the points made therein, but CAGW's stance I would agree with.
Remember, the world we live in is sometimes not so great, and doing the world a favor is not always repaid in kind. The GPL won't change that.
Think Tanks generally serve political organizations in the role that "industry analysts" fill in the technology industry. Their opinions are hardly ever independent, they are dependent on support from the very institutions they analyze and they are woefully inaccurate. Think tanks create and idealogue that is often used by political parties, special interest groups and PACs to sell their ideas to the public to get support for a candidate, a vote in congress or buy in on an unpopular judicial decision. It's no different than Gartner, IDC or Meta saying that a linux based software package isn't ready for prime time or isn't in the "magic quadrant."
We should be happy that Linux and open source in general is now being taken on in a political arena... because the oposition is asking people to pay more money. Like it or not, tax cuts, handouts, cost reductions and the like get votes -- and those fighting open source will find themselves on the wrong side of coin in the world of fiscal politics...
-- $G
The status of a 'Think Tank' report is no different to comments on Slashdot although they might be better researched and spell-checked
Let's be clear about what a "Think Tank" is - an organization like Rand, that employs legions of incredibly smart people and produces tomes of actual original thought.
These so-called "think tanks" are nothing more than second-tier market researchers with ideas above their station. Like Gartner and Forrester.
The sad thing is not so much that there actually are people out there who believe this dribble. It is that some of them get elected to high political positions.
Ahem.
Remember: politicians don't really believe in anything. They just follow the money. And, let's face it: Microsoft has a lot of money to burn. Last time I checked, it was something like 50 billion US dollars in the bank. Expect more and more attacks in the future: 20 million dollars is absolutely nothing to Microsoft. The Monopoly (tm) is not going to go out without a fight.
Solution? More democracy. Specifically, more votes and more consumer-oriented information. People all over the world have decided they were fed up with politics and have let big corporations take control of the government. It's time to fight back with your votes.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
My taxes went down considerably, and I am not super rich.
The real problem that no one addresses is that even with high rates for rich taxpayers, the super-rich are often also liberal (and conservative as well) elites and the tax code has been set up by both parties to have huge loopholes for the super rich, regardless of the rates.
I'd guess there's been some serious cash kickbacks over the years to some big companies (individuals in companies) to get them to stick with microsoft. I can't think of another reason why they would keep using their stuff. I've read all the legit reasons,OK, I can see a few of them, but I bet the REAL main reason is from massive and ongoing kickbacks, and because it's so profitable for *some* people to have very well paying "busy work" fix it daily and forever jobs.
Anyway, it will change. I know it will. Bound to happen. Several years ago now I noticed the young geeks all using linux. Not someone's nephew who can play video games so he's the family computer "specialist", nope, I mean the geeks. The young people in any industry determine the trends of the industry, sooner or later, because thats where the innovation comes from, and also that's where the next generation of decision making bosses comes from.
Microsoft is hosed now, ain't nuthin they can do other than try and get legislation passed to save them. I'm serious on that. they are right at the exact point they need protection, even though they are still raking in billions, it's coming, they know it, that's why you are seeing this sort of stuff. Part of that is to have "concerned consumers" lobby for them. What a crock. IF they do that they will struggle along making billions for a lot more years, but if they *fail to get legislation passed that protects them and their business model of no warranty and mediocre product but maximum profits*, they are hosed. It might take some time, but they will crash and burn right along the opposite side of the curve of their rise to success. That is my prediction.
Unbelievably, any person with a PC and an Internet connection can now logon to the NSA's website and print out the blueprint for NSA s Security Enhanced Linux software.
So we'd rather have the non-NSA approved Windows running on our computers? If the NSA believes it is secure enough to keep their sensitive information from being breached, I would think it would be secure enough for my porn.
Just because the NSA partially developed it, it doesn't mean there's NSA secrets and threats to our national security.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
I'll assume you mean piracy.
Could you tell me where MS is losing money to 'pirates?' If I take one of their CDs, copy it, and give it to a friend who has no means of buying a copy, I've not cost MS anything, but I have extended their lock in. Nobody has lost anything, at least in a financial sense. The only ones to directly make $$$ at all out of this is the CD manufacturing company.
If I take a CD of Free software, burn it, and give it to the same friend, MS sees just as much money as before, and the Free Software movement gets just as much. My friend has received software he didn't pay for, and I suspect the BSA won't care.
The only difference this time is that MS doesn't assert it's dominance over my friend. And that's what they're ultimately after. I'm sure they'd rather have many people using knocked off software that they control rather than Free alternatives.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Well, their product do cause some diet and healht problems. All the suggar is a problem. This of cause is also a moral question. Is it really coca colas problem how people use their product.
Well, considering that they also make a sugar-free version, Diet Coke, which didn't stop people from buying their original, I'm thinking it's not Coca-Cola's fault.
You can accuse Microsoft of using scare tactics to enforce its market share, but it's kind of absurd to accuse Coca-Cola of trying to scare people aware from diet soda.
Revisionism is not including the fact that the Democrats controlled Congress and spending. Reagan had to go along with the increases in Congressional spending to get them to go along with the military buildup.
the realy funny thing here is that what the GPL uses to work is their holy intelectual property laws.
there is one thing selling something and claiming that its yours when its not. its something else to shrinkwrap what other people have created along with a nice manual or 5 that you have made and selling the package. there in is the point, your sales price is there to cover the expences in packageing and so on. not a one time rental sum for allowing me to use your code.
i dont know who twists the intelectual property laws more, the companys that licence out stuff for use or the GPL. but i get a better feeling from thinking about how the GPL works.
allso, there was one think tank listed on the page (i dont bother to read the quotes from them all, it was just to mutch sewage at ones) that commented that after the NSA had created the changes that went into the NSA secure linux project they had to release it to public use. this is totaly wrong, the only time you have to relase code changes is when you give away or sell the object version of the changed code to a third party. for internal use you are free to do whatever you want. so the NSA didnt have to release the code changes as long as it was only used within the organisation.
there is allso the talk about linking, if you link to a library that is under the gpl but its contained in its own binary files then you dont have to release your source. its only if you compile it into the resulting binary directly that you have to release the code as then it becomes part of the same product rather then a product that works on top of a diffrent product.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The one that says that an average Malaysian worker has to work 1,100 (yes, eleven hundred) hours to buy a licensed copy of Windows XP.
Nice sound bite. How many hours does the average Malaysian work to buy a computer, or to pay the rent and utilities on a place to put the computer, or to pay for the Internet connection required to get the software? How many hours for a cell phone? For a Linux-powered PDA? For OS X?
I'm sure XP is out of the range of affordability for much of the world's population. Is that a bad thing? Some things are more expensive. MS has costs associated with selling and supporting software that open source doesn't have. Pricing to meet those costs is a sound business practice, and as a Microsoft shareholder I'm glad they're not giving the stuff away.
And please, get off this 'lock in' bullshit.
Tell me how many people at this LAN party were running Linux instead of a pirate copy of Microsoft Windows.
We'll get off the 'lock in' bullshit when games companies use open, cross-platform standards like OpenGL and SDL in preference to sugar-coated lock-in Microsoft only technologies like Direct3D and DirectX.
Microsoft court the game dev community to, you know... they want you to use their proprietary technologies so gamers have no choice but to use Windows to play games, pirated or not.
Does my bum look big in this?
Starting to understand now how those loopholes come into effect? Even worse, think about what happens when a loophole that's being widely exploited is shut down. It works out to the same thing as a tax increase, and you know how Americans feel about those. Which is why so many genuinely accidental loopholes become permanent parts of the tax code. And the loopholes work both ways, like the now-gone "marriage penalty" (where a married couple pay more in taxes than they would filing separately). Those loopholes tend to last forever too, because tax reform - even tax reform that reduces the overall tax burden on a popular demographic - never plays as well as tax cuts. And if there's one thing politicians love, it's spending my money.
They've also brought out a new product that does essentially what we all do at soda fountains: it goes half coke, half diet coke, for a drink that has half the calories and 90% of the flavor.
I think that's pretty darn responsible of them. But remember, the Coca-Cola people also make Gatorade...a drink I don't think you can associate with poor health.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Revisionism is not including the fact that the Democrats controlled Congress and spending. Reagan had to go along with the increases in Congressional spending to get them to go along with the military buildup.
So what is the current administration's excuse?
If you find a group like this that thinks Open Souce is great how much do you want to bet there is some IBM money behind it. I bet if you read it you would not even try to find out who funded it and if you did find out that it was IBM or Red Hat you would tend to think "Wow it is so great they they spent money to get the truth out" Companies paying for to get there point of view out is common. Let me give you all a hint. If you think a news source is unbiased the truth is they are most likley telling you what you want to hear. You think it is the truth so it is unbiased. You can see it all the time on slashdot. Someone disagrees with someone else so they are closed minded.
The best way I have found to seek the truth is to look for news sources that you think are totaly biased. It is the best way to slay your own bias.
I do have to admit that the idea that the NSA was did not know "dangers" of releasesing their secureity upgrades to Linux very funny.
My favorite line from the bible is "What is truth? Is my truth the same as yours?"
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You, and most slashdottians, are missing the point of think tanks. They are there to push a position. That means taking sides. Not being independant. These are not news organizations. They may be paid, but if their argeuments don't hold up, then the idea fails. That is debate. In debate, no one stands around and says, "I don't have an opinion, I just do what works." In debate, you take a side and defend it vigorously. Just like the majority does here for linux.
The real benificiaries, the middle classes who administer all this crap.
And yet, as a percentage of the population the middle class is smaller than at any other time in the last century, and getting smaller by the year. So if us greedy bastards in the middle are the ones making out like bandits, how come record numbers of us are dropping out of the middle class and into the ranks of the poor?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I can't help but compare the Corporate funded think tanks to the Political ones.
...etc.), and how they put out reports on terrorism, foreign policy, international affairs, ...etc.
For example, this article is about how big entrenched businesses (Microsoft is the one here) find shills to lobby its cause with the decision makers in business (IT) and government, in order to protect its interests.
Compare that to the neo-con think tanks (Project for New American Century, Rand Corp,
A dangerous alliance.
The difference I see is that in the political scene, it is the tanks that drive the administration, while in the software/IT scene, it is corporations who drive the think tanks. Also, the danger of the political scene is far more reaching across the world and the future of civilization as we know it.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
This is all covered in the excellent book Trust Us, We're Experts. Basically, think tanks, "citizen groups", and many research centers are just another pr tool a company can use - the appearance of unbiased opinions to bolster what the company wants to do.
I highly recommend this book.
It's just that a paper from the "Tocqueville Business Lobby" doesn't sound as impressive...
I've read the article called "Is open source a threat to the future of intellectual property rights".
Although the article itself it pretty biased (mostly based on extreme circumstances), I wanted to comment on a paragraph where the article talks about the NSA and selinux.
The first part of the paragraph says that by open-sourcing the DoD and FAA would make a big mistake because the code would be there for anyone to examine and look for weaknesses.
It would probably not be a good idea to open source certain kinds of software, but the security of those software systems should not be compromised by the availability of the source code, like the key/lock analogy used when reviewing commercial crypto.
Another thing they are saying in that paragraph is that the NSA was forced to release their selinux code. That is complete false. The idea was that they wanted to show an example of mandatory access controls, because they think that current discretionary access control systems are not secure enough. They deliberately chose linux because its code was widely available, and because of its popularity (after all, a closed source SE-NT would be of no help because nobody would be able to use it as an example on making a MAC enabled system). There are even some BSD variants that are using ideas from selinux related papers (I think trusted BSD wanted to implement the FLASK architecture, the one used in selinux).
Anyone that decided to check would be able to dismiss these two points as soon as they checked the documentation on the website (you can 'log on the NSA's website and print out the blueprints' if you want!). Check the FAQ, questions 9 and 10.
The sad thing is that most of the readers of this crap will just jump to the conclusions instead of checking the source (no pun intended).
GPG 0x1B479C78
They strong armed box vendors, and released apps that on purpose broke other peoples apps. This is true, correct? Part of a pattern of generic skunky behavior leading to establishment of a monopoly they couldn't have completely gotten based on actual true productivity and pricing and being ethical. I mean they did get convicted of a few things, and there's some good evidence of other unethical behavior as well.
I also think they probably used a lot of under the table cash in the right hands, but I can't prove it, I'm just guessing, but I'll keep repeating it anyway, because I think I'm right..and I think there's people out there who know that too, buit don't want to get caught up in any federal lawsuits over it, but eventually they'll get busted just like enron or worldcom. I bet it happens, someone is gonna spill the beans one day, and a lot of folks who know about it probably got the records squirreled away in case they have to use them for plea bargaining. Insurance.
Just a guess though, but I hope they are getting nervous about it, especially ole bill hisself.
I know not everyone at any corporation, including microsoft, is evil or a criminal, and I know they have some talented people who've worked hard over the years. I am also of the opinion that at upper management level they are predators and skunks, and sought to maximise profits rather than spend the money on making more stable and more secure products. I think they maximised profits to the detriment of their own workers and employees, let alone other people affected by the use and "trying to use" their stuff.
Plus they been milking that no warranty deal for a long time. Let's see em compete if they have to offer a normal suitability for purpose warranty, same as any other product has to have. Software in general been getting a skate on that juicy plum for a long time now, either it's a brand new industry that needs cuddling and handholding and their teddy bears when there's loud noises outside,and they admit they are incompetent to offer a warranty on their products they have made hundreds of billions on, or they can step up to the plate like any other company/industry,and accept adult responsibility for their work. I think it's way past time to require warranties for professional for-profit software. If you take money for it, I think you should have to back it up with a warranty of some kind.
As to courting developers-ehh, people will go work where they get the best experience and get to do the job they want to do. Part of that is money, but money isn't everything.
And for people who think it is, I feel sorry for them.
One thing that stands out in my memory of the Reagan years was the Democrafts holding the Washington DC Zoo animals hostage. "Sign our massive omnibus budget or the cute Panda dies a miserable death!"
Reagan's biggest mistake in my mind was caving in to their demands. Never negotiate with terrorists, even if they're congressmen and senators...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Still the same worker probably doesn't need a "standard" PC (which, by your definition, costs 11,000 hours) but would be perfectly fine with an "older" PC for, like, 500 hours?
Or probably with a free PC?
In our "modern" world old hardware becomes worthless so rapidly that donating it to 3rd world countries for free is often cheaper than trying to recycle it.
Someone should put together a "low hardware"-knoppix that can run with little hardware but provides all the office-/net-related goodies.
I guess that's already happened and I just don't know about it...
Fascism? No, we'll just end up with Corporatism. The Republicans *love* corporatism, and they control the legistlative and executive branches, and are poised for taking the judicial branch. What's good for corporate America is good for everyone. Hooray!
Oh fuck.
A double - talk : Microsoft Corp. says it is looking to turn over more of its programs to open-source software developers, playing a greater role (then why open source bashing?)in a process that the Redmond company has criticized strongly at times in the past.
Earlier Microsoft had a policy : If you cannot convince, confuse. Now they are following : if you cannot beat them, join them.