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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."
Wasting money on Open Source? Evidently they haven't looked at the Wired article. 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.
Then again, think who these people are funded by.
as opposed to what? Smartly shifting the taxpayer's money to the bank account of the world's richest man?
That if Microsoft has that much money to spend on think tanks and spin doctors, if they spent that much money on improving their products instead of spreading FUD where would they be today!
Microsoft are by many considered the driving force behind the BSA, who seems to have co-authored the software patents directive of the European Commission.
...levels that one of MS's approaches to fighting open source would be to bring up the spectre of lawsuits. Considering the last few years, one would think that Redmond would have a healthy aversion to courtrooms and wouldn't wish that on anyone.
But then, I guess I'm not being a realist. What disappoints me, regardless of history, is that MS is not willing to compete against open source in the marketplace without trying to stack the deck. Have they no confidence in their product? If not, why not? And if not, then why aren't they working to make it better? And if they are, then where are the results?
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
I am wondering here, is there no point where all this FUD turns illegal?
Can a company sponsor a dozen institutions to spread lies without running any risk of prosecution?
Is a misleading name... they're just lobby groups that are trying to give themselves some credibility.
I can't think of anything witty right now
The more of this they do the more they look like morons. 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. I wonder how long it is before some bunch of corporate arse-kissing politicians and/or lobbyists decalare OSS to be the most evil thing since computer viruses and more likely to bring about the collapse of Western civilization and the American way of life than Al Quaeda?
Oops my bad! they already have...
I wonder is somebody is developing special medication for this crowd? It is a growing market...
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Don't worry about them as it only gives them credibility.
Of course. Giving the wealthy even more wealth is the epitome of fiscal common sense these days, and in fact it has always been the undercurrent assumption of economic health. Look at GWB's recent tax cuts; they were gift-wrapped in the usual trickle-down rhetoric.
Monopolies and ultra-wealthy are returning to favor; the legions of stockholders are stamping their feet for those things, due to the stock bribes they've taken in the last 12 years. I don't expect much from elitist think tanks therefore. The only bright ray in this is that Linux isn't free, it's free-as-in-no-license-cost, and that's very compelling in this new age of artificial scarcity.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
To me, no. However it angers me that FUD can be spread like this to a large degree, and people just soak it up.
Just reading through some of the 'comments' on OSS. Raymond Keating calls OSS 'the borg'! What the hell? Microsoft is more the borg than OSS. Since when did freedom become a restriction?
Sonia Arrison suggests that OSS is just full of a lot of pimply teenagers is so far from the truth, I just don't get it. Searching for the 'online' comment she mentions in google comes up with nothing, (that may mean nothing though).
Wayne T. Brough mentions that there are more incompatibilities with OSS than commercial software. When are these people going to get it, that most of the people who write OSS are the same people who write for commercial companies!
There are so many more statments like this. Grrrrrr. I don't think we should just ignore it like this. This is the problem. People actually listen to FUD. The more FUD people get, the more brainwashed they get. You'll be amazed at what people can believe once they are brainwashed.
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34
Get some facts before ranting to the extent you did.
... thanks for asking, Ace.
The pro-wealthy weighting of America's tax system isn't fashion, it's fact. The tax system in America is so Byzantine that the wealthy and corporate take monstrous advantage of it time and time again. This is opposed to the wage-earner who is assaulted by a mandatory system he can't afford to escape through the hiring of a tax accountant. For instance, can YOU (British even so) park your assets offshore while parking your expenses onshore, escaping taxation while also piling deductions under your tax system? Can YOU pay a relative 1% fee to a tax accountant to draft an opinion letter outlining how all that asset movement is legal? Can YOU move compensation from tax-deferred instrument to tax-free account, eventually escaping all taxation on it? Can YOU escape taxation by being so diversely embodied that you simply end up paying yourself?
Enron (an egregious example, certainly) managed to use the tax system so well -- creating almost 900 partnerships for tax-dodging purposes -- that for the last 5 years of its existence, it had no yearly tax liability for 4 of them.
Just because a middle-class person can rack up enormous debts and play a little with his income tax return, doesn't mean that the wealthy and corporate aren't escaping away with billions.
As a Brit, you may find the book dreadfully dull due to its American focus, but go out right now and obtain:
"Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else" by David Cay Johnston
As far as I'm concerned, exposees like Johnston's only illustrate that the American tax system is arranged for the collapse of the American Empire. The complexity, and lack of enforcement in fixing it, are fatal wounds. When tax frauds can happen much, much faster than they can be stopped, then tax frauds will become the usual. When tax dodges can happen for the wealthy equivalent of pocket change, and the very mentality of fraud settles in, then eventually the wealthy will pay no taxes.
P.S. I own no stock and voluntarily participate in no benefits program (a la 401(k)) of any kind
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Read David Stockman's Book: "The Triumph of Politics." He was Reagan's budget director. The deficits were *deliberate*. They saw it as the only way to force reductions in the size of government. He has plenty of ink against the Dems as well, but the notion of the Reagan Administration as sound fiscal stewards isn't supported by former members of the Administration.
"Or maybe Microsoft is the premier platform to RUN APPLICATIONS"
Possibly in a broad sense. However, Linux is becoming the premier platform to BUILD AND DEPLOY APPLICATIONS. It is built for that. When you can deploy applications quickly and cheaply, and can build customized applications quickly and cheaply, you can move ahead of your competitors who are running on yesterday's overpriced applications quickly and cheaply, and afford to make your IT department a revenue generator rather than just a cost sink.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Look at it this way: This is just further proof that in a free and open capitalistic society, even "the truth" has economic value, and control over it can be purchased. Of course, that price can be prohibitively large, but once your economy starts going Pareto (and it inevitably will), you get things like this. The solution is either bloody revolution every 20 years, or fascism. At least in our current model, the upper and middle classes get to experience the metaphoric convenience of the trains arriving on time.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]