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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.
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!
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.
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 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.
I see OSS as the level of software that the community can acheive by itself. If you want to sell something to people, you have to provide something that they can't or aren't prepared to do themselves.
For example, do professional decorators complain that some people are prepared to wallpaper their own houses? By doing it themselves they're stealing money from the decorating industry! No, decorators make money by being quicker and better at the job than an average person could be.
It's the same with software. If a company can't produce a product significantly better than that which the community can make by itself, then it doesn't deserve to make any money.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.