Slashdot Mirror
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
Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
Being attacked by a think tank? Sounds like we need to get Marvin to go and talk to it into submission.
("What a depressingly stupid tank.")
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
really needs a sanity check and anything they say really should be taken with a grain of salt. They praised Reagan for helping to keep the budget deficit in check.....Now THATS what I call revisionist history!
as opposed to what? Smartly shifting the taxpayer's money to the bank account of the world's richest man?
Someone was bound to think of slashdotting as an appropriate vengeance against the think tanks.
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.
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.
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.
...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".
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
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 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
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.
Don't worry about them as it only gives them credibility.
And I haven't received almost any funding from Microsoft.
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
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.
Linux most important problem is that people don't know about it and that people don't know that it can solve their problem at all.
Microsoft is now solving both problems for us.
Yes, I know that PHBs are in general pretty dumb, but instead of not even considering OpenSource, hundreds of TCO-studies about Linux and Windows will make sure they will:
I personally thank Microsoft for that free advertizing and see it as an act of desperation.
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
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
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!
From the article:
"As unlikely as this might seem to the skeptic, the National Security Agency (NSA), that coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. information systems and produce foreign intelligence information, made the folly of developing GPL-licensed code to improve the Linux operating system. After reading the terms of the Linux GPL, the NSA realized they needed to post this enhancement to the Internet in source code form for the world to see. 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."
This is just wrong. NSA had no requirement to distribute the source since they were using it all in house. But since the people who work at these places are on the mission of creating disinformation, they obviously would ignore this:
From http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/info/faq.cfm:
"Does NSA favor open source software?
NSA initiatives in enhancing software security cover both proprietary and open source software, and we have successfully used both proprietary and open source models in our research activities. NSA's work to enhance the security of software is motivated by one simple consideration: Use our resources as efficiently as possible to give NSA's customers the best possible security options in the most widely employed products. The objective of the NSA research program is to develop technologic advances that can be shared with the software development community through a variety of transfer mechanisms. NSA does not favor or promote any specific software product or business model. Rather, NSA is promoting enhanced security."
It seems to me that NSA's intentions and reasons can be inferred from that above statement quite easily. But if these think tanks are being used solely for propaganda then I'm not all that surprised.
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.
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.]
There was an interesting exchange between the Competitive Enterprise Institute which claims Linux is unsuitable for government, business use and Julian Sanchez from the Cato Institute, who thinks government should consider OSS if it fits their needs.
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.
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]