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ESR's Halloween XI -- Get the FUD
dave writes "In the newest Halloween Document (mirror), Eric Raymond analyzes Microsoft's 'Get The Facts' road show. The anti-Linux arguments they are using now -- and, even more, the arguments they're *not* using -- reveal how desperate Microsoft is getting. He explains why he thinks we need to focus more on government adoptions, and predicts serious ugliness during the next year."
...is in the spinoff projects. For example, this open source Java memory profiler is a spinoff of the DARPA-supported COUGAAR agent framework.
And since both projects are hosted on a server running GForge, I can help improve GForge during working hours. Good times!
The Army reading list
In a quest for truth in advertising, it will now be called "Get the Spin"
Be sure to order your free evaluation kit. Lets slashdot this baby! It costs them a few bucks for every one. Get one for your mom!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
How many Linux machines have been zombied by Netsky, Sasser, MyDoom, or similar worms? Do your Windows TCO estimates include administrator time spent cleaning up after these infestations?
None, because they weren't created for Linux (as it doesn't have the market share that Windows machines do) *and* because *currently* Linux doesn't have the clueless userbase that Windows does (I won't go into the discussion of management telling IT what to do and IT saying "yes sir" and not deploying patches).
If Linux ever attains the userbase that Windows has the clueless users will outnumber those w/half a brain. That is when the worms and whatnot will spread like wildfire.
If the DoD switches in near totality to OpenOffice, hundreds of corporations will switch too for the sake of compatability with their primary source of bread and butter. Microsoft is terrified at the idea of losing not just approximately 1-1.5 million defense desktops (not counting the other, smaller, departments) but the corporations that sell to them. A mass move to Linux, or better yet in 2 years, HaikuOS would be a disaster for Microsoft.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Main Entry: perfervid
Pronunciation: (")p&r-'f&r-v&d, 'p&r-
Function: adjective
Etymology: New Latin perfervidus, from Latin per- thoroughly + fervidus fervid
: marked by overwrought or exaggerated emotion : excessively fervent
Yes, that's exactly what I was going to say.
"Free as in speech."
Linux IS free.
It's just not neccessarily "free as in beer". It may cost you some money, but you're free to do with it (to a degree) what you wish, so long as you contribute any changes back.
Over-simplified, sure. But go download the windows source code, add a few features to explorer (heck, squash some bugs and security flaws while you're in there), and re-release the source back out there with a Makefile.
Let's see how long until your pants are sued right off of your legs.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
The "Get the Facts" series is one of the funniest things I've ever read, especially about linux. M$ is unable to digest the fact that more and more governments are going for F/OSS. With hardware becoming surprisingly cheaper(well, atleast for some governments), they are no longer willing to spend more money for software. Even some state governments are switching to linux. The time/money involved in training the staff to adopt to linux is better than sinking huge amounts into fighting viruses and frequent shutdowns.
It appears that ESR has decided that instead of highlighting the memos behind the FUD that was the hallmark of the previous halloween analysises, he wants to go after the published FUD instead.
Personally I think while his points may be valid he just ruined the value of the Halloween series.
The Halloween series worked because it was criticism of real leaked Microsoft memos.
This so-called "Halloween" memo is just counter-fud.
I just emailed ESR about the gross misreference to GNU/Linux as linux in his article.
The Emperor Has No Clothes.
Come on moderators, you moderated it to +4 without the server or the mirror showing any trouble. Don't make karma-whoring so easy!
Linux isn't free. Hello? If there is actually anyone still left on the planet who thinks the term free software was a good idea, I hope they're paying attention. Because what Microsoft is doing here is exploiting the old familiar gratis/libre ambiguity of the word free in yet another way. They're setting up for a claim that free software advocates are lying or deluded because Linux has a nonzero TCO. Therefore, goes the implication, you can't really trust them about that other freedom thing, can you?
Maybe we need a better / more effective / less easily confused way to talk about the "freedom" aspect. I'd be interested in constructive discussion of this. But there is a logical flaw in ESR's argument here. It's wrong to conclude that using the term "free software" is a bad idea just because MS tries to muddy the waters. MS may or may not succeed in making our current way of communicating the freedom aspect of Free Software less effective, but this is certainly not a reason to stop talking about "Free Foftware". Quite on the contrary, if after all their studying Microsoft is now trying to discredit the "freedom thing", isn't that an indication that emphasis on the freedom aspect is important, and should be increased rather than diminished!
Under construction: swpat politics overview article
Let's see how long until your pants are sued right off of your legs.
You wear pants?
Did I miss the memo? What is "FUD"?
I'm a bit surprised that ESR would point out the Apche vs. IIS differences when Microsoft could come back by pointing out you can always run Apache on Windows if you want to.
I'm sure MS would prefer you use IIS, but this seems an easily deflected statement. I'm positive that MS prefers you using Apache on Windows to you using Apache on Linux.
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
Let's pretend Linux DOES have that kind of userbase. You play the clueless user, I'll play the malicious h4xx0r.
/
:P
I'm going to write up a painfullly malicious script that executes when you view an e-mail.
What, that's not possible? Okay...uh...
You're a pretty dumb user, and I'll name the file Brittney\ Spears\ Nekkid.jpg.sh.
So you double click the file, and it launches. You're a plain old user.
rm -rf
Oops. Didn't work. Why not? No permissions.
rm -rf ~
Now that might, but I want to think that launching a shell script from an e-mail attachment has some sort of protections on linux. Right?
right?
Okay, so my argument is full of holes. Sue me.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
(Yeah, OK, that's probably not quite mathematically correct. Here's a proposition -- if you explain that zeta function story from last week, feel free to then go ahead and flame over "asymptotically".)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I like to acknowledge my resources.
The basic messages about selecting MS/Linux for a system are governed by the following:
- Don't change for the sake of it
- Take into account what your people know (e.g. Linux possibly better if you have lots of Unix people)
- Much of the cost saving of Linux over Unix comes from hardware - i.e. using Intel over mainframe/AIX/zSeries etc.
- OS/Platform is just a tool - choose the right one for the job
- MS/Linux TCO's are nearly always within 10% for most projects by the time all costs are accounted for (this was from an independent solutions provider)
- Don't just focus on TCO - look at ROI (return on investment)
- MS is pretty well zero-development (no code or scripting)
- The People and Processes are more important than the technical solution
- Check licensing model of any platform (will any Linux development become your IP, or will it be open)
- Linux still does not have a really good desktop and the office suites available are still lagging
- security issues such as virus updates and patch management are more of an administration issue than a platform one
- Easier porting J2EE->.Net than the other way round (i.e. MS ties you in worse!!!)
My web domain.
I firmly believe Microsoft have done us a favour.
"Windows vs Linux TCO..."
CIO, "Linux, what's Linux?"
Engineer, "Its that system I have been trying to tell you about that can save us time and money"
CIO, "Ok, tell me about it then"
10 Mins later...
"Ok do it, lets see how it goes."
End of Story. And even though the 'facts' are biased, lets hope most CIO's can consider both sides of the story:)
We're winning?
We're winning because MS isn't banging on about the same arguments year after year?
We're winning because MS is creating in the minds of the public a wide variety of flaws in the idea of open source?
We're winning because MS still has the same market share?
We're winning because we've driven out the smaller OS's without making a dent on MS?
We're winning because we still have ESR as our spokesperson?
I was at the Edinburgh event last week and spoke to many Microsofties and to their corporate customers. The customers were quite cynical about Microsoft's motives but many of them said, in effect, they wouldn't have attended such an event if it hadn't been organised by Microsoft. Microsoft are panicing, time is on our side. Ed
What has ESR brought to the Open Source community?
2 37 &mode=thread&tid=99p l?sid=02/02/28/132424 8&mode=thread&tid=163
:)
Stunningly accurate predictions, like MS's monopoly collapsing in 2001, and Windows becoming obsolete when computer prices dipped below $350.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/12/13/216
http://slashdot.org/article.
He's got a knack for predicting the future. You can rest assured that MS really is getting *DESPERATE* now, especially now that they're obsolete and their monopoly had collapsed years ago.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Whilst these are good examples, it would be very naive to ignore the fact that a lot of companies used the threat of moving to Linux solely to get a cheaper discount from Microsoft.
In other words, they never were intending to use something else, it was always going to be Microsoft, they just they wanted a better price.
To me, being used to leverage a better discount from your competitor, isn't much of a "win" for the adoption of Linux.
In addition, the real wins aren't when Governments move to Linux, but when big Fortune 100/FTSE 100 companies do and mandate that those that work with them must move to open formats. These organisations (sadly, sometimes) have far more power over others than Governments do. When that happens, companies that work with them will be forced to change or find that a competitor will happily step into their shoes.
Then people will find that their OS at work is not Microsoft and will start to use that at home because that is what they are more comfortable with ... and so on ... and so on ...
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Its name?
Is this any surprise... I'm looking to buy a new laptop (with the goal of installing dual boot). I'm amazed to see with certain vendors that I have first to pay an additional 250 pounds to upgrade from XP Home to XP Professional, before there is even have the choice of a 80Mbyte drive or a 3.2Mhz CPU.
For a university department, the cost of six such licenses is the equivalent of one new new machine.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
> ...they weren't created for Linux (as it doesn't have the market share that Windows machines do) *and* because *currently* Linux doesn't have the clueless userbase that Windows does (I won't go into the discussion of management telling IT what to do and IT saying "yes sir" and not deploying patches).
No, you are wrong. The flawed security in Windows is a result of closed source. It has absolutely nothing to do with the knowledge level of the user base. Open Source means more eyes are fixed upon the project, following the bouncing ball, and that can only spell tight security for Open Source. Closed source has to compete with inner-office power struggles, funding diversions, corporate shenanigans, ad nauseum, and the user base remains clueless perhaps to how insecure their systems are, but that's not the point of it all. That's not why systems are being zombied. Spam, anyone?
Security is not compromised by the inept or idiotic, either, and any security system can be bypassed, so it must be about the will to do so, which *is* lacking in the Open Source community, for obvious reasons. Virus writers are actually intelligent people, with a wide variety of skills (read: m4dsk1llz), and they hate Microsoft, or they are bored, so they program destructively. There has to be something said about how corporations treat their programmers, in layoffs or forced overtime without pay, and this stress adds up to malicious rubuttals in the form of crushed company networks. Obviously not all viruses are written to get back at The Man, but many are. I may be an insensitive clod for pointing out how poorly us programmers are treated, but that truly is the reason malicious code is written -- because people simply don't like eachother, or they mistreat people who have a little knowledge and a lot of animosity piling up.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
at the london show, i asked about why one of their (probably depressed and former) security directors never got any budget. he had stated, privately, that whenever he proposed security measures, he was asked "does it increase our profits?".
if the answer was "no, it will decrease our profits" then he was told to think again.
the people at the show were a bit unhappy.
When you've got a market share that most companies in other sectors would kill for, you've got most of the Fortune 500 convinced they can't live without your product, and you make more money than you know what to do with-- I mean, you're Microsoft, fer cripe's sake-- how the heck do you get desperate?
-JDF
MS can survive with Open Source. For all the bashing the slashdot crowd gives they aren't all that bad.
MS has made some nice stuff. They have some skilled people and good marketing. They just need to create value.
There have been some good things they have done.
MS Flight simulator, long history of an excellent product here.
Defined a standard window system, does anyone else remember back in the DOS days with a new GUI system for every app?
MS also did a good job with VB making it trivial to hack together a quick GUI app.
Until I realized, finally, belatedly, what had been happening to me. Until the Great God Pan reached out of my hindbrain and thundered "YOU!" And his gift is music and his chosen instruments the pipes and flutes. And his, too the power of joy; magic so strong that when it flowed out of me, even before I knew what I was doing, it amazed people into awe and incoherence and poetry.
That day I was reborn; from a skinny lame kid with a flute into a shaman and a vessel of the Goat-Foot God, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Horned Lord. And the music was my first power, but not my last.
ESR is off the deep end.
It's basically the results of a good smear campaign.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
RMS addresses this issue in his speech given at Westminster University, entitled "The Danger of Software Patents". His opening line?
"You've probably heard of me in connection with free software, that's free as in freedom, it doesn't mean zero price..."
If RMS has to clarify this in a speech he's giving about something not directly related to the topic at hand, it's reasonable to assume that at least a few people were confused about the term. However, ESR and the Open Source crowd could easily develop similar problems if Microsoft targeted bringing their philosophy into disrepute by playing on the words "Open" and "source", for example, they might say "Open Source means that the source is open, that you can view it - you can do this just as easily with Microsoft's Shared Source license"...in the end, it's Microsoft who is spreading the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, and they will try and discredit their opposition in any way possible - no matter who that opposition is.
Brandon Glass's personal site.
Linux isn't free. Hello? If there is actually anyone still left on the planet who thinks the term free software was a good idea, I hope they're paying attention.
Can't go one whole article without attacking the ideals of Free Software, can you?
No one thinks the term "Free Software" is a good one, the issue has always been that there's nothing better. I can't use Open Source since the term doesn't mean the same thing.
The only other term I can use is Digital Commons, but Digitial Commons is a larger movement than Free Software.
Anyway, ESR, you can't go one whole article without going on the attack against Free Software, can you? You can't accept that many of the ideals of Open Source haven't panned out, and that with the recent legal attacks, the commitement and idealism of Free Software is what's driving so many to resist so strongly.
You're using such similar tactics to MS that it's startling. At first you ignored Free Software- refused to talk about it in many articles. Then you attacked it. Now you make subtle arguments aginst it in each thing you put out.
If you really wanted a unified movement- you'd stop with the blatant attacks.
What does the linux movement gain from attacking microsoft with such fervor? If microsoft has such a poor product then why is there a need to attack it? Why is so much time spent on the political offensive while the actual issues of Linux are deemed ignorable? It seems that the two "opponets" in this war provide products that are opposites. One works and is not secure, and the other doesn't work and is secure. Its time to stop bickering like children and get to work. Work on making a linux product that needs no introduction, nor political party. A linux product that is unified. Where drivers are available at a central location. A linux product that does not focus on itself, or "them", but rather on the users. Users are the only people that have to be convinced. Bad products go away by themselves, and good stable products advertise and defend themselves. This is not a war. It is customer service.
Jeoin
...what Erik's done besides write some of the documentation for NetHack? The only desperate entity I see is him, to make people think he's relevant.
BTW, Sun Micro has the best commercial Linux desktop package according to an article published by eWeek last week, beating out RedHat's. I thought Slashdot was obligated to link to any article on the web with the word "linux" in it, guess they missed that one.
I like the way Raymond asserts that arguing over the exact meaning of "free" in "free software" is meaningless, but then takes care to use the word "cracked" instead of "hacked" when referring to MS IIS websites. :)
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Fine, but that's the sort of "free" that this particular audience is mainly concerned about - the corporate world does not generally set out to make a political statement via their choice of operating system, not at the expense of the bottom line. For MS to point out that Linux is not free beer is both an accurate and effective talking point, considering who they're talking to. Linux beer may or may not be cheaper than MS beer, but it ain't free, and Microsoft would be a gang of fools to not point that out.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Next time, in promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compacted comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine affectations.
Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant or apparent!!
From Don't Use Big Words...
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
This "Get the Facts" tour sounds like a Jon Lovitz "liar" sketch on Saturday Night Live.
"Linux" is free. It's support that you pay money for.
He takes something MS said and provides HIS made up translation of the so called 'real meaning'.
MS official: We plan to fix Windows
ESR: Translation, We will kill Linus Torvalds and everyone in Open source world.
Wrong.
Apparently sarcasm eludes some people in print.
Support for MS products is not FREE either. Regardless of the platform support will be necessary - why do so many people forget this? It is not as if just anyone can set up a reliable, secure environment with no experience.
Well, strictly looking for new and under $350, I found this at Walmart's site right off the bat. They also have a 2.4gzh one for $398.
I'm sure I could have found even better deals, but I don't really have a lot of time to spend looking (and I'm happy getting a used box from retrobox).
...to show who says what.
Stallman GNU/linux Free Software Bearded Chaotic Good
Linus linux Open Source(?) Unbearded True Neutral
Eric linux Open Source Hitler Mustache Chaotic Evil
Bruce P GNU/linux Free Software Beardless Lawful Good
Alan Cox GNU/lin(mostly) Free Software Mighty beard Chaotic Good
Hello? If there is actually anyone still left on the planet who thinks the term free software was a good idea, I hope they're paying attention. Because what Microsoft is doing here is exploiting the old familiar gratis/libre ambiguity of the word free in yet another way.
Raymond should be less glib and contrive a better argument against the term free software than mere coersion. I see no reason why Micro$oft's perverse attacks should affect my philosophy the freedom of ideas, or dictate which terms are acceptable in discussing it. In these dark days of ever expanding corporatism we need more discussion of freedom, not less.
an ill wind that blows no good
A nitpick (but sometimes important, depending on your audience) ... but you're free to do with it (to a degree) what you wish, so long as, if you redistribute it, you contribute any changes back. (Sure, you imply this in your next paragraph, but people who are Just Joining might not pick up on that.)
You're a pretty dumb user, and I'll name the file Brittney\ Spears\ Nekkid.jpg.sh.
So you double click the file, and it launches. You're a plain old user.
And just how did the file launch? It's not executable yet...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A few things although I agree with you that predicting the future is not his strong point.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Exactly. I just didn't want to sound too rude.
Remember how Linux advocates, real early on, used to love to quote Ghandi? You know, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you've won? Well, it works both ways. Now we have both camps bitterly and intentionally fighting with each other. And what good does it do? If Linux--excuse me, I mean "open source in general" is so blindly superior to Windows in every single way, then that's it. It's over. The existing momentum will carry through and eventually the better solution wins. It's a quiet revolution. It isn't a niche loss, like laser discs or Betamax.
:)
Now what should be worrying people like Mr. Raymond is that Linux-based desktops (which is what we're really talking about, not simply "open source"), is that Linux *isn't* so blindingly superior as to carry the day. Truthfully, I think this is the case. I've used UNIX, I like Linux, but we're essentially having a big battle of the old and huge operating systems here, and none of them is a revolution. None of them is so much better than all the others is wonderful and positive ways. (Mostly they're all negative: don't get virii, don't have to deal with Microsoft.) In fact, the entire concept of the big operating system is a relic. Does anyone argue about the OS in a digital camera? Or a Palm? Or a cell phone? No. And those are more akin to what an "OS" of the future needs to be: thin, small, and unobtrusive. We need the Commodore 64 of the next decade, not the next VAX.
Thanks for listening
It's sarcasm folks. Chill.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
They... HAPPEN. And they happen without consent of the 'clueless' user. There are so many holes in I.E. - even a fully patched I.E. - and these scumbags take advantage of them.
EXAMPLE: The 'CoolWebSearch' bastards have found yet another exploit in the MS JVM. Simply go to an infected web page, wait a few seconds and *BOOM!* you've got a trojan! Neither Adaware nor Spybot could remove it (or knew anything about it). I finally found a CWS Trojan Remover utility that ID'd it and took it out after about an hour's worth of screwing around. Goddamnit, I want to charge these people with my time!!!
Anyway, I.E. can't be fixed by you or I. We simply have to wait until MS does it. I heard this weekend that they are reassembling the original I.E. team to update I.E. The team started out by asking what people would like to see in a new version of I.E.
Personally, I'd like to see them take something like the Gecko engine and wrap an I.E. shell around it - but that probably won't happen. So if they're just getting the team back together now - how long will it be until significant improvements occur? This is a great example of how closed source product can hurt your bottom line.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Anyone else notice that the slashdot abstract was a barely reworded copy of the author's abstract? C'mon, guys, get your acts together. Either put it in quotes and leave it or write your own for real.
> you cannot just discount user stupidity like that and claim superiority because you think you can engineer a solution for it.
So you're suggesting that Microsoft has no liability for their poor security? If what you're saying is true, it would have to apply to Apple as well, as they have similar user bases, and Apple has a much better security record considering viruses than Microsoft ever will. Any system has to account for user stupidity and rise to the challenge. I'm sorry but it's no excuse for bad programming.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Not sure whether it has been posted here before but here's an interesting point of view on ESR : It's about things he claims and things he obviously has not done : "The Emperor Has No Clothes"
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I think all religion is nutzoid. I know people who claim to be in contact with this guy in the sky who created the world and has wishes and plans for everyone. In practice, it seems that those people are often capable of being perfectly rational about other things, so I just ignore their carefully contained madness.
Xenu loves you!
After Microsofts *successful* defence in the anti-trust suit it
appears as if they are on the attack again.
I recently had the chance to 'lunch' with a team of boiler room types on the topic of ' Interoperability, Integration, Extensibility'
subtitled 'Unix interoperability'
After enjoying a excellent meal at one of the better steak houses in town I began to notice that this 'meating' wasn't so much about working with Unix systems as it was about providing unix services from Windows servers; After being seeded with 'free' software (funny that, free tools just not free source) title:Windows Services for Unix 3.5 and looking closely I saw that they are now providing NFS, Syslog, NIS, DNS, Mail and a tool to 'port' your Unix 'legacy' (their words) apps to a modern OS.
What frightened me most was that my inclusion to this meeting was last minute and that my 'peers' didn't have a technical bone in em, they were all either Microsoft partners or middle to upper manglement types.
The last 'free' software I saw from Microsoft was IE, I wonder if this latest offering will have as profound an effect.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Not until it adopts a BSD license. Then it would truly be free. The GPL isn't free, no matter how much Slashdot has drilled it into your head.
Aside from that, you can't ignore support costs, training, and maintenance and claim something is completely free. That's spinning it.
Who is going to these roadshows? And why aren't there similar roadshows mounted by some of the bigger Linux players (IBM comes to mind)? I think they should get a copy of the road show itinerary and simply book the same space for the next day or week.
Imagine the marquee:
Tuesday - Microsoft Corp explains why Linux is bad.
Wednesday - IBM/Red Hat/Suse/et al explains why Linux rocks.
An autobiographical account of my `religious' beliefs and how they got that way. If you start this, please read it through. Stopping partway would probably leave you with some very silly misconceptions.
That's the first line from the link the parent provided. So I read the entire thing, and as usual, when you quote a small portion of text from a large article, it's easy to take it out of context.
Alright, ESR has some interesting beliefs. However, my impression after reading the WHOLE article is not that he's "off the deep end." He describes situations that I do not understand, but that does not mean they cannot exist. I am not particularly religious, but I do not deny that a God (or Gods) could exist. I simply find myself without particular experience that would lead me to believe otherwise, while ESR has had these experiences. As far as I'm concerned, good for him.
Eric is a smart guy, and while some may call him eccentric, strange, or off the deep end, I'm sure he's doing more for the open source movement than any of the people mentioned formerly who are criticizing him.
Microsoft's only long term hope is to provide a superior user interface that is so intuitive, stable, easy and logical that special training is rarely needed for the casual end user. That is what reduces total system cost. The companies that deliver the lowest system cost for the intended work will win out over time. You can't force people to stay with inexpensive mechanical car brakes when EXPENSIVE hydraulic brakes work better! Conversely, I won't buy a $600 Treo 'cellphone', just because its got every feature known to man...(to confuse all but the geekiest user). That is why I use my PowerBook instead of my Dell M60 whenever possible. Bo
I've often thought that "software libre" is rather a mouthful, and not easy for Anglophones (not to mention clueless PHBs) to say or even understand.
But what about "freed software"? It doesn't have the connotations of "free as in beer", and the connotations of "free as in speech" are strong. Sort of like "liberated software".
Plus it's easy to slowly switch over--if half the people say "free software" and half say "software libre," it could be confusing. But if half say "free software" and half say "freed software" I think it'd still work.
Any reasons why this is a Totally Stupid Idea? Don't fail me now, Slashdot! Point out my idiocy. I can take it.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
ESR is only saying that the choice of term "Free Software" was too misleading to use. To cast this as an attack on the ideals of software freedom is ridiculous.
Xenu loves you!
Re: the idiots who didn't recognize your article for what it was; a slam at ESR: I can't believe the number of people who read Slashdot who don't recognize sarcasm!
You're right, his ability to prognosticate is badly flawed when predicting end results. OTOH, I think he's been pretty accurate in how MS would fight the war, don't you? Go back and re-read the Halloween docs and you'll see what I mean.
I forgot the close sarcasm tag. ;) ;) ;)
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
No, that's what we Americans call "French Software"
Oh. So he didn't even do that. I stand corrected. Whatever; I use free
software anyway.
Hmm. I always thought it meant "Fuck Up and Denial"..
<g>
feh. stuff.
Please do.
Just because a group of people are using something, does not make it good or right. There are a large number of examples of vast majority of a country supporting wrong things.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
People !
You must order the MS vs Linux evaluation kit from here! It must cost them 10$ atleast... if enough slashdotters order it enough number of times, M$ will be bankrupt! Gentlemen, Victory is close !!.
Or maybe not...but you'll get a cool folder to keep your important papers.
Meeting Maker is a commercial product that works quite well. I've often toyed with the idea of building an OS equivalent. That said, there've been quite a few web-based OS systems like this, but none of them seem to have become popular. For some reason, this particular question has not been a big itch for the OS community.
Collab.net, founded by OS gurus (from Apache IIRC), provides collaboration tools in use by "over 400,000 users", and I think has a free version.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
"the only vanilla box you can get for below $350 is a used piece of shit that has Windows ME installed. Get out of your basement, your parents need the space."
Get out of YOUR basement and go to any clone store and you will find nice $350 machines that run Linux very well - and Longhorn not at all based on the estimated requirements for it when it comes out.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I am sure that there will be worms and viri for Linux. There are always going to be some exploits. The issue is also one of design.
The Microsoft system is by design an "Anti Security System" because the logic that Microsoft uses is that they "Own" your machine. As such they make it under foreign control intrinsically. Linux on the other hand is designed with the concept that the machine is the user's machine and thus it is generally under control of the user unless he exports control.
This is a profoundly better security scheme for Linux. All of the arguments about bad users opening things up will be true but even with their efforts, the process will tend to be much safer than with Microsoft in charge. This is structurally so.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Sometimes I wonder how the anti-ESR zealots rationalize their actions. Are they jealous because he's so well known ("my program was much more difficult to write than fetchmail, why does nobody quote me"), angry because he has some controversial opinions on firearms, or what?
Apparently people like to cling to all the things they consider personality flaws like starving worms, using them at all opportunities to attack the persons other opinions and activities.
It kinda pisses me off to see valid Microsoft criticism from an Open Source evangelist being attacked just because some asshat takes ESR's hackers dictionary too seriously. Do you really think someone is just trapped in the shadow of ESR, mourning that if ESR was taken down just a notch, he could steal the limelight and rescue the true spirit of open source?
You guys should just pause for a while, and think whether petty arguing among ourselves is more important than the war of spin & fud between us and microsoft. Unless you are working for AdTI, of course - in that case I understand your motivations perfectly.
Grow up. Your mom still lives you more than she loves ESR, no need to feel all sad and droopy.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The difference here is that as he says, Microsoft employs 22,000 programmers. If we assume these are full-time employees, then they're working 40 hours a week on whatever Microsoft wants. Do the 220,000 theorized open-source programmers have 40 hours a week to spend on co-ordinated open source projects?
If this wildly conjectured figure is true, it may be that the case that the number of "man-hours" availble in the two camps is comparable, if the open source coders can find an average of 4 hours a week to work on nonpaying projects. Counting heads doesn't make for a very useful comparison in this case, though, unless someone's going to hire the 220,000 to do open source work (and let me know if that's happening, because I'll show up for an application).
I don't think "we" should get too overconfident about the "capability gap." "We" certainly have fabulously talented coders, but Microsoft certainly does too, and never underestimate the power of a focused monolith. Could we get our army to proceed with even one-tenth of Microsoft's coordinated corporate project discipline? How much potentially productive time do open-source coders lose just bickering with each other in lengthy flamewars about what "free" means?
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I think ESR is being really disingenuous here and not really addressing the meat of MS's points at all. I wouldn't call it FUD, but he's certainly missing the argument and just responding snidely to them.
1. Claim that linux isn't free.
ESR seems to think all MS is talking about here is that it isn't free because it "has a nonzero TCO." Sure, that's part of it, but I think the argument goes deeper. The point is that the majority of corporate customers are not going to just download a freely available distribution of Linux, because most enterprise customers NEED support. Therefore, they are going to buy a supported distribution from a major Linux vendor, and that most certainly costs money. In that case it's most certainly not free (as in beer), and while it is still free (as in speech), those companies are not going to really exercise that freedom because they can't just modify their distribution and still expect support from the vendor.
2. Pretend that Shared source is the same as Open Source.
ESR's basically just belittles this statement, but again, there's some truth behind it. If you consider a company as above, namely, that they have bought a Linux vendor's distribution with support and they are not going to modify that distribution and lose their support. At that point, what IS the difference between 'Shared Source' and 'Open Source'? Either way, they're only looking at the source code and not modifying it. The only real difference I can see is that with Open Source (or really, Free Software) they could try to create a patch and get it into a future release in the hope that their vendor will pick it up and support it. This is really only marginally better than relying on your commercial software vendor for new features, because you're still dependent on some external entity (in this case, your vendor) and their decision making process to get that feature.
He explains why he thinks we need to focus more on government adoptions, and predicts serious ugliness during the next year."
Lone Ranger: "We are surrounded by hundreds of fiece indians. What should we do my faithful companion?"
Tanto: "What do you mean 'we' pale face?"
Writing code that doesn't suck always has to be our base-level and most important response
To put the Open Source movement in some kind of "battle" with Microsoft only serves to belittle what the F/OSS community does.
Let's put things a little into perspective:
1. A huge amount of OSS software runs on Windows also - Mozilla, GIMP, OpenOffice, etc. etc.
This means that whether you run Windows, Linux, BSD, whatever, you have a choice. You do not need to be tied into one of a few commercial software vendors for your applications. It also means that you have the opportunity to try out new applications at little risk and no cost - as a result, you get a comparitive benchmark and can make a decision for yourself whether a particular application you need is better served by a commercial or OSS application. End of story.
2. It's closed standards, not Microsoft, that's the problem.
Using a computer brings with it a responsibility - namely that you take charge of the data that you store on it. You decide how shareable that data is to be, you decide how portable it needs to be and you decide how deeply you lock it away from the eyes of others.
DRM and closed formats simply mean that you hand over that responsibility to a commercial organisation, nothing more. That means that they charge you for taking control of your data and, because they are interested in making a profit, will naturally try to charge you more as time goes on. When use of that DRM format becomes widespread, it becomes the norm and all of a sudden, everyone has had their responsibilities handed over to that organisation. This is the potential loss of personal freedom we must focus on not becoming reality.
Microsoft backs DRM heavily and it is that issue we should fight against because that's the only danger to Open Source - OSS and Microsoft can co-exist provided standards and formats remain open to all. If Microsoft cannot accept that, then that's their problem...
3. Users need to be educated to make a choice.
Spreading the word of Open Source & Linux is the only way forward because people then start to make choices for themselves as to what software best fulfills the job that they need to do, rather than simply just blindly consuming every piece of software Microsoft churns out. If the F/OSS community has no remit to "destroy Microsoft" then it can simply focus on creating good software and listening to the users of that software as to how to improve or change that it for the better.
For example, while I can work wonders with UNIX command line tools that can format text just about any way I want it, my teenage niece who does her homework in Word, Excel & Powerpoint is not suddenly going to get a knock on the door from her uncle armed with his Linux CD, just because he thinks "grep" and "sed" are better... Everyone has their own perceptions of what is usable.
The OSS community is doing what it should be doing right now - keep churning out the good software, not rising to Microsoft's little tantrums & letting the users know they have a choice.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I just love how the definition of 'free' mutates depending on who's talking about what. For example, free is good when talking about Linux no matter what the TCO is because it comes with source code. But free is bad when talking about Microsoft because of words like "DRM" and "monopoly" etc.
I know this post isn't going to earn me any popularity here. That's fine. All I ask is that you take away this one little statement from me: if the word free dynamically changes and confuses people, stop using it. Don't use free when one person's thinking licensing cost and another's thinking about source code. Everybody values each of those factors seperately.
"Derp de derp."
There's lots of compelling arguments in your case here, but I think you could use some edits.
1.) " Like the dog that didn't bark in the night-time, these omissions are significant, because Microsoft marketing is thorough and ruthlessly opportunistic." The first part of this statement is rather confounding. I assume that you mean that that fact that they have dropped these arguments should be indicative of the thoroughness of the marketers.
2.) "Do I even need to point out that most of the factual claims are blatant lies brought to you by the same people who got caught faking video evidence in their Federal antitrust trial?". Unless you can show that the actual forger is at work here, refrain from painting all MS employees with the brush of a criminal. This only serves to undermine your objectivity.
3.) "Hammer them without mercy -- but do it in a quiet, reasonable voice and keep control of the terms of argument. " Do it "ruthlessly" perhaps? This also serves to undermine you credibility as it shows you too are playing the word game. Ruthless is a "charged word" even though it used to mean "without emotion" it implies some bitter, hateful vengence now. You used it to describe MS Marketing before but you don't use it now, but just be consistent. The rest of the statement is good though, stick to the facts and definitions, and keep the argument in your favor.
4.) "...higher Windows TCO is forever" Please quantify "higher" with a number.
5.) "Shared source is a poison pill." Shared Source may be a misnomer but calling it a "posion" pill is just imflamitory.
6.) "Can you explain why Windows IIS websites are cracked or defaced more often than Apache ones, despite the fact that IIS runs less than a third the number of sites Apache does?" Please quantify "more often". Also, attempt to separate this into 2 questions, as the answer will undoubtably be "Hackers hate Windows, hackers attack Windows" which will only be to their advantage because it implies that they are top dog. The top dog is perpetually being challenged. Saying that they are attacked often is handing them the opportunity to say that they are top dog.
Otherwise, this is good article and it's got some great questions for MS PR about the Shared Source == Open Source nonsense.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
Wow, your opinion is bolstered by the fact you used the term "M$." No company is ever out to make money other than Microsoft! Sorry, "Micro$loth."
.NET, they've shown the kind of forward-thinking that OSS lacks--who is still busy reimplenting more UNIX stuff from the last two decades melded with a Windows 98 interface-a-like. Apple got it right when it comes to UNIX GUIs.
The time/money involved in training the staff to adopt to linux is better than sinking huge amounts into fighting viruses and frequent shutdowns.
It's called firewall or antivirus software. What "frequent shutdowns?"
Microsoft may not like some servers switching to Linux, but they're not exactly worried about it. Windows XP is doing extremely well, and their marketshare is intact (despite such "formidable" competitors like XFree86). With
sarcasm
n.
1. A cutting, often ironic remark intended to wound.
2. A form of wit that is marked by the use of sarcastic language and is intended to make its victim the butt of contempt or ridicule.
3. The use of sarcasm. See Synonyms at wit1.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Let's continue using this 1998-era "funny" bash of Microsoft. It means you're clever and intelligent!
"Damn M$. I hate Micro$loth products." Witness the mental fury of these high school/college dorm room Linux zealots. Meanwhile, outside the little niche of the Slashdot forum, the rest of the world doesn't know or care about something called "M$," "RIAA," or even "Linux."
I don't think so.
1) 99% of corporate linux users could care less if they can ever see the code, and fewer still care if they could release changes. In other words, hardly anyone outside the community cares about the freedom. And how many of these people aren't *already* using linux, BSD, or something similar?
2) If MS can make linux advocates defend what they say and spend time clarifying what should have been clear originally, that's time they spend NOT answering questions about Sasser. That's a victory for them. So yes, if MS successfully muddies the waters, it's a reason to use another term, though not for abandoning the topic.
3) ESR didn't suggest we not talk about the freedom aspect, just that we use a clearer term. He's right.
4) MS isn't trying to discredit the "freedom thing." Hell, their "Shared Source" crap admits that some people will find "freedom" useful. Rather, they're using the ambiguity to suggest that Linux advocates are deceptive, by intentionally presuming that when we say free(libre) we're actually saying free(gratis).
5) Freedom arguments should be largely abandoned toward typical corporate and government targets, and reserved for those who would actually want to change the code anyway - and I suspect these people would know the difference between "libre" and "gratis" forms of free already.
Ultimately, would we rather spend time on the defensive, re-educating people who were confused by a poorly-chosen term, or would we rather spend that time nailing MS on TCO from stuff like worms and the myriad security holes in IE and WMP that yield root access? Not to mention critical holes that go unpatched for months.
It's great watching the pedantic dipshits that post here stumble over obvious sarcasm. Makes you wonder how they made it through school.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
so what have you brought to CLosed source programming such as MS windows?
Did u bother to read ESR's project page listing his projects? NO?
Read before leaping..it might save a you a big first step into the boid
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Neither "Open Source" or "Free Software" contain a complete explanation of what they mean.
"Open Source" can be confused with viewable source. MS can compete against that.
"Free Software" can mean libre or gratis, MS can't compete with either of those meanings.
MS have marketing and business analysts thinking about things like this. They've chosen to say "open source" (and "Linux" for the OS). This should be enough to tell us that these terms are not what we should be using.
Winning depends on us being free to develop and distribute software for all useful purposes. The threats to us are in the form of taking away these freedoms (through DMCA, patents, and Paladium). It's never been about "open", it's about "free".
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
We have a consultant on hand for our Linux stuff that we hand picked. Should we need to tap some extra knowledge, he has been great and can bring in others (on his ticket) if that firm is stumped. It works well.
my experience across 8 years has been that commercial support from a specific vendor can be hit or miss. Sometimes great (really great... Cisco comes to mind). Sometimes really really bad.
At my old job, they still had to hire independent consultants for some Microsoft tasks.
Fine, but that's the sort of "free" that this particular audience is mainly concerned about - the corporate world does not generally set out to make a political statement via their choice of operating system, not at the expense of the bottom line.
Corporations cannot run their companies for free. Every bit of maintenance and operational activity costs money. The free as in speech aspect of OSS benefits them by offering choice: it's difficult to lock a company into an upgrade cycle (with its caascading effects) when that company can choose to continue using an old version indefinitely. You can't EOL an OSS product, and you can't hold them hostage with bugfixes.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Hi. I just wanted you to know that some people were able to understand that your comment was sarcastic humour, not to be taken literally. Or at least I was. This site can get up to half a million viewers a day, and you're bound to run into some at the low end of the bell curve when it comes to getting a joke ;)
I believe "normal" users would use up2date, or whatever tool their distro provides. And IIRC from my limited RedHat experience, it's just as easy and automated as Windows Update. I'll admit you'd still have the people who wouldn't upgrade, but if they felt confident that the upgrade wouldn't bork their system (as Windows can do), they'd be better than the Windows crowd.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The fact is that even though Microsoft semantic lies might delay their death by a few months, the Linux sunami is still going to take over because of pure raw market forces - nothing is going to stop that.
If anything, this is a unherd of opportunity to remind the business leaders of the world that free markets are about freedom and not just markets. IMHO, the meaning of Linux is not to get revenge at Microsoft, not to get immediate market dominance, but to secure freedoms and liberties in the information space.
I think history has shown that markets don't drive freedoms, freedoms drive markets. If you want better markets, aim for better freedoms, not the other way arround.
I'll hook you up with an 80Mbyte drive *and* a 3.2MHz CPU for 250 quid.
I should be able to find an 80Mbyte drive in a 386 somewhere, but I'll have to underclock an XT for the 3.2MHz CPU.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
The kernel exploit you're talking about is a local exploit, not a remote one. No matter how you cut it, making a file executable simply through its file extension is bad security design. Google Zeitgeist is not an accurate measure of market share because it under-represents broadband users (whose IP addresses change much less often than narrowband users). The vast majority of Linux users (about 85%) use broadband, compared to about 35% for Windows users. The "popularity" argument has yet to be convincingly demonstrated. IIS is less popular than Apache for web-serving, yet there have been more exploits and vulnerabilities for IIS. This contradicts your theory. Fox News is a right-wing propaganda station. Before calling others clueless, perhaps you should get some clues of your own...
Reminder: find a new sig
No support for MS products is just impossible to get....
I know thats not true. But how many of you out there didn't go to google first when you have a problem with Windows? And where do you go for a problem with Linux? The same place eh?
Picking up the phone first to get support is thing of the past, but its always right up front in TCO calculations.
And remember using TCO math, the office coffee machine is way to expensive for your business to have!
I don't know of any major company that can go without some level of support, and that's not going to be free folks...
And that's an absolutely irrelevant argument. You're going to have support costs no matter what OS you're using; the OS itself has nothing to do with those costs. The only way to rid yourself of those costs is to stop using computers altogether, and I would guess the long-term cost of *that* move would far exceed any budgeted support.
Assuming that the support costs for OS A or OS B or OS C are roughly equivalent (which means we need to discount MS FUD about the issue), and you aren't going to get rid of your computers any time soon, the only issue at hand is what ADDITIONAL costs each of those OS's adds to the budget.
Aside from retraining - which will occur with MS anyway, the next time you 'upgrade' your version of Windows - the actual cost of Linux is $0. It is, in fact, free.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I probably agree with most of what he says there, except for that
1) good code isn't propoganda
2) destroying Microsoft shouldn't be a goal
3) beggars can't be choosers - (I won't beg people to use Linux)
not to mention...
Using patents as anything other than a form of insurance or a form of fake currency is entirely unproductive and will only serve to reduce their value as a fake currency and as a modern-day form of insurance. Unless, of course, people would choose to use them for what they are meant to be used for...
The DMCA is going to be rewritten
Someone is going to take what this Halloween document says and twist it and try to prove that Linux is out to destroy proprietary software and your paycheck, which will generate more arguments back and forth.
Just because Red Hat might be right doesn't mean that they are the best choice in software for your organization.
Imagine a cool, calm, peaceful, beautiful, and very blue body of water - a fresh cool breeze blowing through your hair; the smell of flowers and other good-smelling things; the sounds of birds and leaves blowing in the breeze.
Microsoft is a company. What is a company but a collection of individuals. The problem is not Microsoft, the problem is individuals who work, used to work, know people who work, etc... at Microsoft. The same thing can be said for government. It's not Microsoft + the government out to destroy Linux, it's individuals + individuals being selfish, greedy and stupid.
The first thing that can be done is to show respect for Microsoft. Sure, Linux costs more, but IT'S BETTER. (which is true). Linux is more expensive because it's better. (it's actually less expensive). Now all the rich folks will want Linux because it's the "Cadillac" of operating systems. Microsoft gets Chevrolet status by their own request.
I recently though of an analogy after reading Stephen Hawking's book - it's about entropy, or the direction of time. Glasses fall off of tables and shatter, they don't pick themselves up from pieces on the floor and magically un-break themselves and fall "up" back on the table in one piece.
But God, or in this case, let's compare God to the public - to the individual who is observing what is going on, and making a decision, a judgement, as to which software solution is the best to buy.
Can God, or the observer, in this case, press "rewind", and have the glass re-assemble itself? If this is true, does it really matter who threw the first punch? For all anyone cares, they are just "fighting". It doesn't matter who started it.
Imagine a cool, calm, peaceful, beautiful, and very blue body of water - a fresh cool breeze blowing through your hair; the smell of flowers and other good-smelling things; the sounds of birds and leaves blowing in the breeze.
Glad to help. I'm unbiased and I can say quite honestly and categorically that both Microsoft and ESR make some good points, and some bad ones.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Let's take it one step easier to understand...
install that single copy of windows on 10 desktops or servers.
now do it with linux (except redhat Advanced server)
the first will get you tens of thousands in fines and called a evil software pirate.
the second has no cost.
windows licensing is a NIGHTMARE. and many It people do not understand it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
True enough, but that's a little bit more complicated an argument than "it's free!" ;)
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Way to miss the sarcasm.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I wonder if Linux/FOSS evangelism is much easier in non-English-speaking countries? I mean, most of the FUD and confusion in the US, UK, et al, seems to stem from the difference between free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer.
Maybe that's why Brazil and France (for example) are migrating to Linux/FOSS. After all, the French and Portuguese languages have different words for the two meanings of "free". It's probably easier to make the case for "free" software.
"The word never changes. The meaning never changes."
As long as confusion still exists, then my point is valid. If you'd like to have a more detailed discussion, log in. Prove to me that you really feel the way you do as opposed to just attacking.
"Derp de derp."
Linux applications can have GUI wizards too. Most don't bother as they assume you have some proficiency in installing from a CLI interface, package, or whatever.
Some I can think of off the top of my head:
IceWMCP (IceWM Control Panel)
OpenOffice (nice GUI installer)
And if you wanted a GUI front-end for package managers, apt-get has a Synaptic,
and I'm sure there are many others for RPM etc.
Inspector Gregory:
"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
From "The Adventure of Silver Blaze" by Arthur Conan Doyle
Help fight continental drift.
This clarifies things a lot. Thank you.
Xenu loves you!
We can afford to pin some of our hopes on growth in Europe and developing countries and elsewhere, but Microsoft can't -- the time horizon on it is too long for a company whose big challenge is to keep beating revenue expectations every quarter in a market where they have 92% share (if they don't beat those expectations every quarter, their stock tanks, the option pyramid collapses, and it's game over).
Actually
- Microsoft has given up awarding stock options since it is or soon will be against GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) and hence almost as if it were illegal.
- Microsoft's stock has already tanked going from a peak of around $60 (split adjusted) in 2000 fairly steadily downwards to approx $28 and change today.
- Developers are already leaving Redmond in appreciable numbers
Despite all this, Microsoft still appears to be doing ok - not about to go bust or anything.
Do you notice that the slow ones (e.g. Dot.Com.CEO, Saeed al-Sahaf, bonch) seem to be on the M$ side? :)
Please cite an example of ESR attacking the ideals of free software.
AFAIK he has never said that these ideals are not true or good or proper - the strongest thing he's ever said against them is that they're not always the most effective marketing tool.
Xenu loves you!
What happens when MS' security get's better and they manage to halt the proliferation of viruses and worms and trojans and the like? What will be the need for anyone (such as a big account like the USAF) to switch away from MS' prodcut line? There's a lot of discussion here about hammering on MS about security and whatnot, but nobody's asked the big question: what happens if they finally get things right?
- Number of worms/security issues in Windows
Reminds me of the age old saying that rich people dont die of (NameYourDisease). It is not because they are a better breed, just that they have the means and money to get the cure. Poor people just can't. Most of the virus' and worms exist in windows environment because 1)it is more popular, so offers the biggest bang for the buck to the writers, and 2)windows machines are more likely to be used by novices and hence not well protected. Once Linux reaches the tipping point and we have more people buying walmart sold linux boxes, we will have simillar problems. perhaps a tad more, since not all average Joe's will fix their kernels/applications whereas MS is getting there by automatically performing windowsupdate
- Open source vs Shared Source
Open source is not really open in terms of who can contribute and what. There still exist certain people or groups (like linus for the kernel) who double check to make sure there are no malware introduced. I for one would definitely stay away from somebody offering a latest version of (NameYourAppHere) build offering special features. Of course, you can look at the linux/GNU sources, but I would rather have 'experts' certify applications as good before I use them. With MS, they are this expert and usually people trust them (they may make mistakes, but not deliberate malware attempts)
- Cost
The only advantage of GNU is the initial price (usually zero). Support, IT, maintenence etc still costs real money. Perhaps a tad more for linux since programmers/administrators are a bit more expensive (you can dispute, but look at any job board for the offered salaries for admins in these platforms). As a business model, GNU/free would find it very difficult to survive. I contribute to some open source projects in my free time since I get to pay my bills with the money earned with my paid job working on closed source. Once I dont have a job, chao open source development, I'd rather spend my efforts finding a job that pays me money. Working on open source projects is just a hobby for me and perhaps many others. I'm willing to let it 'cost' me something (time/money) but this cost needs to be underwritten with an income (derived from real paying activities)
I think MS is a necessary evil just as we needed an adversary during the cold war. Without one, we may become complacent and innovation may not continue at this speed.
Mod me down or believe what you want to believe. I believe I am the necessary evil in this discussion
Looks like someone still doesn't understand sarcasm.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
While I'll agree with this on major applications (Oracle, DB2,...Solaris on our servers)...this just isn't true for desktop (windows). No one I know of has ever called MS for support....it just isn't there really. When's the last time YOU got good phone support from MS...much less on site in less than 24 hours for support?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The Jargon File comes to mind. I owe quite a bit of my knowledge of computer history to its print form, the New Hacker's Dictionary.
He also brought us the infamous Aunt Tillie Builds a Kernel lkml thread.
-jim
I don't see how broadband makes a difference, but Google does not explain how they generate the stats.
I would think Linux would be over-represented on Google because (1) Smarter users use Google, dumb users use MSN because it's the default home page, and (2) Google started out marketing to Linux users during their "beta" period.
As for IIS -- Netcraft is not even half of the story. IIS is very commonly installed on intranet server, file servers, workstations, etc. It runs by default on every new Windows 2000 Server. IIS could well be more "popular" than Apache. Even if it isn't used, it's still can be worm infected.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
And you don't even have to do that.
Againe, sorry, but you get what you pay for. A decent box is around $700 if you buy the parts. I need a box that is on ALL the time, can take a load, and does not mind only getting cleaned once every 3 or 4 months. Must be rack-mount.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
It seems logical that Google would associate OSes with individual IP addresses. This technique under-represents broadband users.
Let's assume that two users, one using broadband (i.e. Cable or DSL) and the other narrowband (i.e. modem), each access Google once every day for a month. The average broadband user is unlikely to change IP addresses more than once or twice over that time period (personally, my IP address usually lasts for about six months). The narrowband user, on the other hand, will likely change IP addresses every time he reconnects to the network - so it could have as many as 30 different IP addresses for a single month!
Since very few Linux users are narrowband users, it's easy to see how their number would be misrepresented by Google's index.
As far as IIS is concerned, I'm not talking about its other capabilities, but rather only of its web-serving component. As a web server, IIS has about half of Apache's market share, yet - still as a web server - it has more vulnerabilities.
And if it's not used, then it shouldn't be the target of worms - unless the service is on by default, which would be a very bad thing from a security point of view (and would support the argument that market share numbers have nothing to do with security lapses in design).
Reminder: find a new sig
all the many, many programmers not employed by MS, but working on all the myriad Windows tools and applications, open or closed, part of Windos or external.
Does that open source 220,000 include the GIMP coders? Does the 22,000 MS coders include the Photoshop and PaintShopPro people?
Is Richard Stallman Ken Starling, the Voyager hippie of Santa Cruz/Boulder Creek or is he a stranded Captain Braxton of the Federation Timeship Aeon?
When does ms fall? Or, rather, when is their HQ blasted from afar?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
the only vanilla box you can get for below $350 is a used piece of shit that has Windows ME installed.
The last Dell we ordered was $349; no monitor but everything else; 2.8G Celeron, 256M RAM, 40G HD, a very respectable machine. It came with XP Home.
BUT we had pony up more money to get XP Pro since XP Home will not even log onto a Windows domain. We also needed Office 2003 Pro since we are standardized on Word, Excel and Access. Total: $748!
This, I suspect, is what ESR was talking about. It more than doubles the cost of a system just for the Microsoft software! Does it make a difference to us? Hell, yes! We are looking at a Linux workstation running Open Office for the next new employee. I haven't worked out the database issues yet, but I can put in one helluva lotta work for $400 per workstation.
Get out of your basement, your parents need the space.
When are you moving out?
Even Schwann bred but I am not so sure about ESR's chances...
http://threetechguys.info Come, discuss Technology. Got a technology question? Come ask!
Linux has a long way to go before it can pass the Non-tech-spouse test.
Ask yourself honestly, does Windows pass this test?
I agree with your whole post, except for this old chestnut. No operating system that's having a "tech-savvy person present" type problem passes this test. Zippo. None. Not Windows, not Linux, not OS X, not even a Commodore 64.
Ever have a Windows box fail to talk to a USB printer? Or one that keeps reseting it's video settings? Hand that one to your spouse. And be prepared to sleep on the couch.
Linux may be harder to set up, I'll grant that... but it's not harder to work with.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
This campaign is going to explain how the cost of quitting smoking (nicoderm, self help books, etc.) is higher than smoking. This is only valid in a period of three weeks, but it's valid nonetheless.
What microsoft fails to mention is that in three years when you upgrade the software on everyone's machine, the cost of upgrading is drastically less than if you kept them running windows.
The cost to switch people over is there in terms of wasted hours figuring out how to use linux and presumably KDE, however this is done once as they did from going to typewriters to windows.
I don't remember typewriter companies having their "get the fud" roadshow preaching how expensive it is to train people to use a word processor.
"I also expect a serious effort, backed by several billion dollars in bribe money (oops, excuse me, campaign contributions), to get open-source software outlawed on some kind of theory that it aids terrorists."
"But in the next year, I think we need to focus more on government adoptions, in order to protect our political and legislative flanks."
We need to beat them to the punch. Open Source is a matter of national security! It only takes one back door in a closed source OS or application to put our nations security at risk. All applications critical to national security should be running on OS' where the people are able to read the source and thus be positive no terrorist has planted a back door.
Write your congressman! Now, before anyone else has a chance to beat you to it. Here are some important things to remeber when you are trying to influence government:
- Email makes little impact. It is very easy to send a congressman email. As a result most congressmen are flooded with emails, and actually read very little of it. Send Snail Mail Instead!
- One petition is the equivalent of only one letter. A lot of people will sign your petition just to get rid of you. Your congressman knows this. Therefore you petittion only counts for the person who mailed it in, not for every signer.
- Form letters don't work. Congressmen do not open their own mail. A staffer opens it instead. If there are 300 copies of the same form letter, the congressman will only see one copy and be told that 300 copies came in. It just does not have the impact of 300 seperate letters with different wording making the same point.
- Vote! I cannot stress this enough. The list of registered voters is public record and whether you voted in the last election is part of that record. If you are not a voter, your congressman does not care what you think. You will not vote for his opponent in the next election anyway.
- Send Money. Yeah I know, It feels kind of dirty and you may not actually like your congressman. Still, Microsoft donates to both political parties and many individual politicians. We have to in some way counter this. Even a five dollar check will make an impression on the politician. It proves you are serious. An alternative to donations to the politician himself is a donation to his party. Just send a photocopy of the check to your congressman with your letter. Even better if he votes wrong, send him a photocopy of your donation to his opponent!
We have been lied to and misled. They have convinced us our vote does not count and we cannot make a difference. As a result we do not act. As long as we buy in to this and do not hold the goverment accountable, the government will not be accountable.Insert Generic Sig Here:
Do you really think there's a CIO out there who hasn't yet heard of Linux? That's like suggesting that there's a CFO somewhere who's never heard of SAP or Peoplesoft.
CIOs may not use Linux, they may not even have any interest in using Linux, but by now certainly every CIO has at least heard of it and can probably describe Linux better than half the people on Slashdot.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Forgive me, but I don't think Microsoft Windows in it's current state could be called 'thin, small, and unobtrusive'.
.NET might look a bit odd in this light. You could more or less swap the OS under your application (I am aware that this is in practice rather difficult). It makes your appliction 'OS agnostic'. But pushing along this road is basicly their only chance of getting a safer Windows, due to less buffer overflows.
Though I get your point. You probably wanted to say that an Operating System should become a commodity feature. It should basicly be there, and that's it. Open Source operating systems could let that happen. Everybody may use the OS, and people who want to tinker with it to make it better, may tinker at will.
The trouble is, Microsoft won't let that happen, Windows is still too much of a cash cow for them. Microsofts current push for
Give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor
Sorry there, but besides Fud, what has ESR brought to the Open Source community ?
The aqueduct. . . and the sanitation! And the roads. . .
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I am wondering when Microsoft will use the ol' tried and true embrace-extend-kill manuveur on Linux? It could take shape as follows:
.Net instead) change the brand name of it, sell new books, seminars, and certificates.
1. Add "Linux components" or some other confusingly similar branded name for some Linux-like functionality into future releases of Windows. Make these components half-functional, clunky, yet do one or two useful things really that most programmers would find attractive.
2. Hype this as wonderful new technology that is fully compatible with Linux. Sell books, training seminars, magazines, and certifications.
3. Release at least three versions of the new technology, change several API conventions just to knock early adoptees off balance (and make them wish they used a relatively more stable platform like
4. The death grip: After sufficient momentum has gathered behind it announce that this "old technology" will not be included in the next version of Windows and will be replaced by Something Better(tm) which is really just the next version of the preferred platform you wanted everyone to use in the first place.
5. The coffin nail: Because the technology was confusing branded as "Linux", CEOs who discover their archtitecture is based on a soon-to-be-obsolete API vow never to use "Linux" again and fire the CIO who bought into Microsoft's hype.
Of course Linux/OSS will march on unhindered but such a ploy would definately leave a bad taste in the mouth of many unmanagement.
From your first link:
Dude, at least you could have bothered to read the fuckingAnd the average PC price is still way over $350, probably around $500 and closer to $800 if you include laptops. Very few manufacturers sell sub $350 computers, according to techbargains.com the cheapest Dells are around $450.
And if you look closly you will see that most of those that sell sub $350 computers ship them with (surprise!) Linux. Check the above Wal-Mart link someone posted and click on the specs to seee that it's "based on the Linux operating system"/"Sun Java desktop system"
So even if ESR was a bit quick to announce "the obsolete Microsoft" he's neither totaly wrong or right.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
It seems that self-grandiosity and self-promotion (key aspects of narcissism) are alive and well.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
You forgot to include the definition of irony and that's why he doesn't understand sarcasm. Most people seem to think that irony means something akin to "odd" as opposed to saying the opposite of what you really mean.
As in: "Yeah, right."
Literalists innately do not understand irony, thus can't understand sarcasm.
KFG
I wouldn't worry about it. Slashdot moderation tends to work okay. Meta moderation also helps.
I watched it go from my origional post down, then back up again.
Even on slashdot the raving anti MS zealots are a minority. Many of the viewers/moderators seem to be reasonable people.
Make your point, speak your mind, meta moderate to help, and don't worry about being modded down.
How about this for $248, or $168 without HD/CD. Brand new.
Linux zealots are so fucking insane...
Whatever. I've learned long ago not to take arguments from Anonymous Cowards seriously - especially when they're accompanied by insults. To me, just the fact that you used the words "Linux zealots" annihilates whatever credibility you may have had as an AC (which isn't a lot).
Current estimates for Linux market share place it at 2.5%, which is consistent with estimates from the Linux Counter.
BTW, Google may be a Linux company, but even they don't pretend that the Zeitgeist is an accurate measure of Market Share. If it was the case, why would people pay thousand of dollars for that kind of market research, hmm?
Reminder: find a new sig
It seems logical that Google would associate OSes with individual IP addresses.
No web developer worth his paycheck uses IP addresses to track users. There's too many people (like all of AOL and nearly every corporate user) behind proxy servers. Google uses permenent cookies to track users, and they've got webserver logs. Unless you have a reference, I'm going to assume you pulled that from your ass.
As far as IIS is concerned, I'm not talking about its other capabilities,
Well, it doesn't really matter what you want to talk about -- when it comes to automated worms it's a pure numbers game. And IIS has tons of installations that don't show up in Netcraft. It seems you want to remain ignorant of that fact, because it undermines your argument.
(And yes, that has largely to do with stupid defaults, but also the fact that IIS is designed more for Intranet use than public servers.)
If you'd like to kill the "popularity" argument, you're going to have to do better than bogus statistics. A good example may be how 'Unix Hackers' picked on inexperenced Linux users back in the 1990s. Linux was relatively not that popular, but it had more than it's share of hack scripts.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
IMHO
A government "for the people, by the people" should use software "for the people, by the people".
Do we really want our government to continue to buy the same software each year, while never understanding its innermost secret workings, and in the mean time paying annual service contracts?
How else would you do it? Cookies aren't reliable, nor is counting every single Google access.
I mean, obviously you must have an idea of how Google does it, right? So why don't you share it with us?
Reminder: find a new sig
Style points for using the word perfervid.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
Someone is going to have to explain this TCO thing to me - pretend I am thick or something.
I've got 6 servers at work all running linux. I spend virtually no time adminning them (I run debian stable). My mail server has never missed a beat - adding users takes about 5 seconds (qmail-popadmin user@adomain.com {password} - this auto creates new domains also etc..) My PDC is Samba (one day I will migrate all our desktops to Linux) - it works flawlessly. My firewall, dns and VPN servers just do their thing (old desktop hardware)
These systems cost me nothing in software costs.
I also have (unfortunately) an Exchange 2003 server (due to RIM tying in to Notes and Exchange only) The O/S and Exchange software for this cost 2000 approx. Adding a user is a PITA and, when I hit another threshold, I have to buy more licences. Exchange has to be the most convoluted peice of software I have ever met. I spend more time doing admin on this machine than all of my others put together and still cannot do the simplest of things.
So, why or how does linux have a higher TCO ?
Am I missing paying an ease-of-use tax or something ? I just don't get it - someone enlighten me please.
Agree and disagree.
When people use you as leverage, that means they acknowledge that you are a threat to your competitor, so much so that they can use it to their advantage, and get cheaper products. They're gonna know you, they've researched you.. they know what you're capable of. perhaps you're not 100% what they want, but it's enough for leverage.
Next time they need to buy supplies, they're gonna try to do the same thing- they're going to remember that you can save them money. but when they look up, they see everyone else *IS* choosing you this time. When they research you, they'll see you not only cover what the competition was doing for you, but they offer you more. 125% of what you were looking for.
My point is, next time around, you'll have a better chance- better than if they were to never have seen you in the first place. You may have lost the first battle, but you'll win the war.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
And those, my friend, are called fighting the symptoms without curing the disease.
You're right. User-run executable attachments are part of some great disease of system design. It's all Microsoft's fault when people don't patch their systems, and two months later an exploit makes the rounds.
It's all their fault (repeat over and over).
If you had bothered to read my fucking summary of the /. articles, you would see that I correctly and accurately summarized his unrealized predictions.
:)
He's got a knack for predicting the future. You can rest assured that MS really is getting *DESPERATE* now, especially now that they're obsolete and their monopoly had collapsed years ago.
OF COURSE THEY SELL LINUX ON THE SUB $350 MACHINES. That was going to be the trigger that made Windows obsolete....has it happened? Judging by your poor reading comprehension skills and combattive nature, trying to argue with points I didn't make, I'd better answer that for you. No. Windows is not obsolete.
Try reading for comprehension before you get snippy and abusive with people.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
please remember, all lot of that software is stuff that he "maintains", and a lot of it is useless toys.
ESR is not a a 'great' programmer by far.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Okay, let's assume for a moment that Google uses cookies. This introduces its own random element into the statistics, i.e. people who reject cookies, or clean out their cookies regularly (I know at least two Windows users who do this regularly, even though I've told them it's useless). These will greatly increase the margin of error. With that in mind, it's pretty clear that a measurement of 1% would be anything but precise.
Anyway, since none of us knows for sure how Zeitgeist makes its calculations, and what the margin of error is, the least we can do is agree that it should not be taken as an accurate representation of Market Share, as anti-Linux advocates and astroturfers are fond of doing...
Reminder: find a new sig
ESR didn't write the New Hacker's dictionary, he simply took a pre-existing online version, added some crap to it, and let it fester. For example, there's an entry for fisking, which is term used primarily by conservative blogers, (Primarily it means a point by point deconstruction of a liberal argument, pointing out how each point disagrees with conservative ideology, and is therefore wrong) but entry for "apache", or "DDoS"
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Most people use some flavor of Unix when they interact with a web server over the internet. Unix is everywhere. You just can't see the logo.
----
The Last Samurai
...which goes back to my original argument that Google Zeitgeist is not an accurate representation of market share, whatever the method employed. You're probably right that the IP address method is no more accurate than the cookie one, or a per-access one. And yet MS apologists keep citing that figure with smug arrogance...
Reminder: find a new sig
are going to type:
sh Brittney\ Spears\ Nekkid.jpg.sh
The original poster was going on about the same level of danger of executable attachmnets in Linux as Windows. But it's not as easy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I grant that a user could be sent an ELF shared library. But how many mail clients are going to know (or going to want) to use the loader like that?
I repeat, even if a user got a shared ELF binary in the mail, how is it really going to be easily run by a fairly new user?
People seem to think that Windows has so many viruses just because it's popular. But that myth ignores the very real difficulties of doing the same kind of thing with email or executable attachments on other systems.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just finished reading the article and followed the link on trusted computing. The question thats in my mind now is what kind of effect this will have on Microsoft.
Its interesting because almost every one of my friends doesnt see Linux as being free as any sort of advantage. They all say "Its not like I actually paid for Windows!" If anyone needs any sort of Microsoft product someone will ask and the next day someone will show up with a burned copy of it. So who cares if you can download Debian for free? I also realize that my group of friends are somewhat more technical than most normal people. But I've noticed this kind of software pirating from even very non-technical people.
If trustworthy computing succeeds, and Microsoft software will only install on TC-enabled PC's, what kind of effect do you all think this will have on Microsoft? Do you think they'll actually lower their prices if more people are paying for Windows? And do you think it might help more technical home users to start using free software?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sorry, I didn't realize I was talking to someone who would portray "Linux Counter" numbers as more legitimate than Google. Forget it.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Ha ha. I wasn't saying that Linux Counter is an accurate measure. I was saying that 2.5% is the generally accepted market share figure for Linux. Out of 800 million computers, that's about 20 million Linux computers. It just so happens that this is close to Linux counter's 18 million estimate. I was merely pointing out the fact that Linux counter seemed close to the generally accepted figure. No need to be all uppity about it...
Reminder: find a new sig
We have to assume that Microsoft's long-term aim is to crush our culture and drive us to extinction by whatever combination of technical, economic, legal, and political means they can muster.
What better way to defend the culture than to explain it? What better way to crush it than to make your enemy feel too foolish to think things through or explain them to others?
What ERS is worried about is looking, "irrelevant or nutty". Fine, you only need to talk about it when confronted with lies about it and you need to be aware of your audience. They brought it up, dissmissing it is easy because the M$ position is impossible to defend. Ducking it is bad news. Self censorship is perceived as ignorance, weakness or deception.
You can stop a M$ fanboy dead in his tracks when they bother to bring up this rotten little strawman. Not even RMS would argue that your services should be without cost and every IT manager knows that services cost money. What is true is that free software will always cost less and be more flexible than non-free. Microsoft's demands to give them money and sign a contract for restricted use software is a real loser by comparison. When the fanboy starts talking about Microsoft's rights to do all of that, you have revealed the greedy slave for what they are. You can then talk about everyone's right to ignore bad deals from liars.
It takes care and practice to explain free software to corporate drone types, but you can do it concretely and concisely. With free software, the company owns it's software and it's computers 100% but pays less to do so than they would if Microsoft owned them.
Later, if you are chummy with someone, you can get into the details. Talking about how and why free software works is not a waste of time, it's culture building. It does not take long to explain how free software does not have owners and all the benefits that brings everyone involved with software. The more people understand this, the less they will fall for the Open / Shared source lie or free beer.
Culture building is all about explaining things and building up the mindset. You can't do that by ignoring the fundamental drive of free software, to be free of other people's restrictions and demands. Everyone can get it and it's not incompatible with good American ideals that any corporate type can understand.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have to disagree with you on two counts. First, free software only has to be "good enough" if it's cheaper then what it's replacing. Second, Linux desktops kick ass. You don't have to be negative at all to say that Linux desktops work better, longer and easier.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
OK, I'm talking to a guy who will nitpick Google's 1% to death, but then thinks it's perfectly OK throw out a number like "2.5%" with no source whatsoever and then claim it's "generally accepted" (by whom?). See the problem with your argument?? Maybe, just maybe, that's why people think you are an irrational zealot.
Furthermore, the desktop/server difference could easily accomodate both numbers.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I'm reminded of a SciFi Channel ad: "Even numbered Trek movies don't suck". Enough already - the "Halloween Surprise" was good info. This is just getting tired.
Is it only me, or has Raymond played the "I wrote fetchmail" card for a whole lot more than it was ever worth? The last time he tried any hackery, the Linux kernel developers sent him and his Config Markup Language 2 packing. And for good reason: developed in a vacuum, presented as a fait accompli, and defended bitterly against all criticism, it was everything he argued against in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
B.C. is the religious comic strip about cave people. Wizard of Id features a short king and a knight named Rodney.
"Yeah... a higher TCO... that's the ticket.
And it's not that secure either."
OK, I'm talking to a guy who will nitpick Google's 1% to death
Why do you feel the need to exaggerate to make a point? I didn't "nitpick" to death, I just noted that I don't feel that Google's Zeitgeist is an accurate representation of Market Share.
but then thinks it's perfectly OK throw out a number like "2.5%" with no source whatsoever and then claim it's "generally accepted"
Is IDC a good enough source for you? This , by Paul Thurrott no less, gives a 2.3% market share in 2002. Are you going to call IDC a dubious source, and Thurrott an irrational Linux zealot as well? Oh, and those are desktop figures, according to the article.
But wait a minute - it seems I was too conservative in my assessment: for 2003, IDC gives Linux on the desktop 2.8 percent, not 2.5!
You see, contrary to what your knee-jerk reaction has led you to believe, I didn't start by saying: "Google Zeitgeist puts Linux at 1%? That's way too low! I'm sure I can find reasons to justify my biased views!" What really happened is that I already knew that IDC and others put Linux at approximately 2.5% of the desktop market, so when I saw Google's figures I thought "Hmmm...there seems to be a discrepancy between Google's index, which does not profess to represent accurate market share figures, and the numbers of respected research firms. I wonder what could cause that difference..."
See the problem with your argument?? Maybe, just maybe, that's why people think you are an irrational zealot.
In light of this it seems you shouldn't be so quick in calling other people zealots. You'd look less like one yourself.
By the way, right now I'm a Windows user. So please, do suck on it.
Reminder: find a new sig
This phrase (and its companion, "free as in speech") is rapidly becoming too common for its current cumbersome form. Anyone up for working on replacements?
I'm thinking "freer" vs. "freech" from now on.
Everything that was once directly lived has receded into a representation. -debord
Hmmm... I think that phrase is too long to be useful as a replacement for "free software"/"open source", but I think it would be powerful as part of a kind of certification mark that expresses a reasonable effort towards adherence to a specific set of (yet to be precisely defined) "Digital Age Ethics" principles.
Anyone interested in discussing this further is invited to contact me via email at: nb (at) freedom (dot) biz.
Under construction: swpat politics overview article
And if you had put those links in your original post, rather than a bunch of nonsense about broadband IP addresses, you'd be at Score 5 and you wouldn't be so agitated right now.
I don't think you're a zealot, by-the-way, just poor at presenting your argument.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
If I'd put the figures in my first post, we wouldn't have had the occasion to trade arguments. A bit boring, isn't it? I'd rather keep the hard data for the coup de grace.
As far as broadband is concerned, until we know for sure how Google calculates its Zeitgeist figures, it is still a valid theory. You may not agree with it, but it is possible. Anyway, no hard feelings.
Reminder: find a new sig
You can deploy thousands of workstations and give the users great freedom to customize their environment, while keeping stability, security, and fast, controlled rollouts of new software. I've seen it done with Suns, and there's no reason it can't be done with Linux. If your vision of Unix is DEC terminals connected to a VAX, things have changed a bit since then.
But you know what? You can actually have diskless PCs acting as X terminals and still deliver most of the freedom users expect from a modern PC. The physical architecture and the administrative policies are not necessarily linked.
Or "I could care less about
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Um, I meant "literalists" there. Just clarifying because I used quotation marks, so I don't want you to think that those meant that I was attributing the typo to you (not the intention, just a genuine typo on my part).
I'd rather be lucky than good.
There is a more fundamental problem in the essay's logic. Brooks explains it in "The Mythical Man Month". You could turn the whole world loose on writing replacements for Microsoft software, but there is a point at which the communication overhead bogs everything down and you would have been better off sticking to fewer people. The collaboration required to create a great, consistent user experience for something like an operating system or office suite is tremendous, and open source needs to do a better job at this if it ever hopes to achieve the aims of its evangelists in taking over the business and government computer world.
Sorry Overly Critical Guy, oops, I mean Bonch, but in your quickfire trolling to get anyone who bashes MS, you missed the sarcasm and came out looking more idiotic than you already do. Pretty impressive.
But your fighting the good fight, right?
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
That's ok. I don't need to take credit for your typos. I can produec an infinit suply of my won on drmand.
KFG
Somebody could choose to pick up an Open Source product ... just like some companies have picked up Closed Source products - except in those cases it's called "buying the rights to continue production." How many companies had ownership of TurboPascal? And what about the folks still supporting QuarkExpress?
Companies producing 'commercial software' may not let anybody & everybody have their source code, but it is disingenuous to argue that getting it is impossible. They just do it differently and in a manner all the bean-counters are familiar with.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Yes, you are. You obviously have not tried egroupware. Exchange cannot touch it. It has a bunch of modules that Exchange dreams of having.
It's fast, free in every sense of the word, full-featured. It has built in ACLs for every module allowing a great deal of granularity in what you or your admin chooses to share. It has modules that allow you to group as in a threaded email conversation address book entries, calendar entries, notes, all of which you can delegate and share or not share.
It has a built-in FTP client, IMAP and POP3 email clients, integrates into LDAP environments, forum, project management, knowledge base, polls, and more and it WORKS. Of course, you the admin decide which modules you want to enable for which users.
For those that have not tried it yet, you owe to yourself to do so now before you claim that there isn't a good groupware solution in Linux.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Most people seem to think that irony means something akin to "odd" as opposed to saying the opposite of what you really mean.
Black Adder: You've no idea what irony is, have you Baldric?
Baldric: Yeah, it's like goldie or bronzie except it's made out of iron.
Try downloading gpl software modify it and then refuse to release the source code and see how quickly you get sued by the FSF as well. Both have restrictions to your freedom. The point is what freedom do you want? Just because the freedom you want not the same freedom i may want does not mean that is any less valid. In terms of an organization which wants source code access so they can review the code for security purposes, or have the ability to tweak it for their own internal use shared source is actually more free than GPL because it is explicitly allowed, where in GPL (depending how you define distributing) it is implicitly allowed.
That has to be the best D&D reference I've seen all week!
This sig space intentionally left blank.
sounded like the last RFP I wrote....
Your point 1: You've never read any Sherlock Holmes so your ignorance is forgiven. It refers to a case where Holmes realized the evidence was not an inconvenient fact but a missing fact. But you're playing word games too: if you like marketers, you call them thorough, if you don't, call them opportunistic. It doesn't change anything.
Your point 2: So what. They called us criminals first. Nyahh.
Your point 3: "Hey why don't I think of a word I don't like and then accuse ESR of not using it in a context that suits me?" Go back to Debating 101, kid.
Your point 4: What, so you can endlessly debate it? Seems to me you're asking for the impossible. Noone is going to agree with anyone's figures. This is also part of Debating 101.
Your point 5, which is so wrong I'm quoting it:
inflammatory for a start. It isn't inflammatory, its the truth. You agree to using MS's Shared Source providing you give MS royalty-free rights to use EVERYTHING you produce with it, and your source. Great deal, huh? NO. It's a poison pill.Finally, your point 6: IIS is a crock. It's so bad that MS has said publicly there are bugs it will NOT fix. These happen to be bugs any script kiddy can drive a truck through. We live now in a world where if x = bug; attack(); if you haven't noticed. IIS is a PR nightmare for MS but they can't be seen to publicly discontinue support. Your argument is so besides the point it's almost trollery.
Otherwise, your heart's in the right place, you've just got sharpen your skillz.
Modders: I know it looked like it was a reasonable argument but it only deserved a 3.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
I suppose he is talking to those who believe Free Software being a good idea. Quoting the sentence in a way you did could seem he didn't think FOSS was good, but instead of reading the sentence as itself without including the rest of the article as an argument and really considering the whole thing you'd then know this certain sentence is just a little bit exaggerated one. In a wider sense it doesn't mean he thinks ill of free software or anything like that. I will emphasize: You've quoted the sentence out of context.
- Voice of Ambience -
You're funny!
From the first sentence of your first source, "Despite a rash of gushing news stories about the successes of Apple Computer's Mac OS X (on the client) and Linux (on the server), Windows not only continues to dominate its rivals in both markets but also is growing in both markets".
From the first sentence of your second, "According to IDC, Microsoft will hold its position in the worldwide operating environments market through 2007, despite continued competition from Linux".
Do you agree with these two statements and the percentages quoted, or just the percentages?
That post is insightful if you asked me..
:)
And I do plenty stretching excercises every day, being a Christian that is.
- Voice of Ambience -
As it seems to capture more of the "libre" than "open" or "free" do, and there's no chance for confusion. Similarly, I wish the "Free Software Foundation" (FSF) would change its name to "the Foundation for Software Freedom" (FSF)...
The fact of the matter is, that Software gets easier and easier to create, over time. The only solution to this 'dilemna' is to do everything you can to make it more and more difficult to write software.
... innovation which in fact turns out to be nothing more than a new 'straw man API', catering to pop-culture 'jones next door' economics.
Programmers/Developers have a hard time with this, but its true. Whereas 10 years ago, a professional was expected to be able to conjur up GUI's and Servers and Apps and Tools and Utils, and was paid for it, now any punk-ass kid with a C compiler can write the same software, for fun, in his spare time.
The more software you write, the easier it gets to write software.
Microsoft are not confronting this issue. It used to be that software was a professionals game. But this has been proven, time and again, to not be true; if you can read, if you can work out the basic mechanics of using a dictionary, and if you have patience and willpower enough to keep yourself in front of the computer long enough to get something actually running, then You Too Can Be A Programmer (tm).
Chasing endless API's and "new" dev kits and "frontier frameworks" and implementing new protocols: This all gets easier the more you do it.
Open Source has proven this, time and time again. The Millionaire Kiddy who writes a $10,000 perl script to run his New Enterprise is standing on the shoulders of many, many giants^H^H^H^H^H^HHackers who have come before him. Software gets easier.
No corporation in the history of computing sciences has done more to combat this fact than Microsoft. The moment their developer pool starts using their API's and SDK's to develop products that compete with Microsofts' internal developer programs, Microsoft 'updates' the API's and SDK's and "Technology Platforms" to give everyone something new to learn, 'revolutionizing' the industry with 'innovation'
API's don't need to evolve. A properly planned abstraction layer solves *all* issues. The constant release/re-release/update/re-update of fundamental, core developer tools is a treadmill being used by Microsoft to keep the industry 'busy', when in fact so much more could be being done if things just settled into a solid, standard state.
Open Source proves this. Once an API is ready and released, and usable, it sticks. Witness libc. Witness POSIX. Witness Qt. Witness countless other fundamental, core API's and Platform SDK's which are available in the F/OSS world, upon which massive amounts of applications programs have been written.
Software gets easier and easier to write, the more you do it. Microsoft know this. All attempts they make to bring 'new, innovative technology' to the field are really nothing more than attempts to keep their developer pools pre-occupied with learning 'new stuff', maintaining some sort of 'professional standard' for what is and isn't a developer.
But I'm telling you, software sciences that were once hard, don't stay that way for long. While there are many things (DSP programming, for example) which are 'hard', they do not stay that way. Once you've written an app once, you can write it again, better, without having to change your platform, or your SDK, or your API.
The Open Source movement seems to intrinsically recognize this fact. This is why so much work was done to get the 'platform' (GNU, kernels, libs, tools) all in stable, working order - because software gets easier to write, the more you do it.
I stopped using Microsoft when I recognized that their MSDN "tools" were really being used to DISTRACT me from actually doing neat, innovative stuff. MFC wasn't there for my convenience, it was there for Microsofts. ActiveX wasn't there to make my life easier, it was there to draw yet more lines in the developer sand, and create 'elites' and 'cliques' in the developer sphere, upon which to divide developers into 'cans' and 'c
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Popular is valid. Unpopular is loony.
Great logical thinking you have got there (Mohhamed, Jesus, Buddha were all loonies then).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Can we stop giving a soapbox to a man who claims to channel Pan?
Hypothetically, if I ever claimed, while waxing poetic, that Clio (muse of history) had reached out of my hindbrain, thundered "YOU!", and helped me write really gripping and compelling historical essays, presumably you'd want everyone to cease paying attention to everything I say. (So much for metaphor.)
OK, but why should we pay attention to you, when obviously you're trying to convince the world you're possessed by Thalia the muse of comedy?
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
I fail to see the relevance of your question. We were talking about the exact market share figure of Linux, not whether Windows was dominating or not. Of course Windows is dominating the market! What's that got to do with the current discussion, which is about the discrepancy between Google Zeitgeist and IDC figures? Nothing.
If you're going to argue with the big boys, make sure you know what you're doing, m'kay?
Reminder: find a new sig
Too similar to freedom fries, might come across a little crazy...
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Oops, looks like somebody forgot to check that "Post Anonymously" thingy.
A pragmatism that has allowed free software to expand and flourish in mainstream computing circles, instead of being limited to a few thousand hackers debating the finer points of "free speech" and "free beer" from their parents' basements.
Which is exactly what Raymond says. "If there is actually anyone still left on the planet who thinks the term free software was a good idea, I hope they're paying attention. Because what Microsoft is doing here is exploiting the old familiar gratis/libre ambiguity of the word free in yet another way. They're setting up for a claim that free software advocates are lying or deluded because Linux has a nonzero TCO."
"H.L. Mencken once said, 'There's an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible ... and wrong.' So if the solution to our problem is
not neat, plausible and wrong; then it could be messy, unlikely and right.
Right?" -Gil Grissom, CSI: episode Chaos Theory, Season 2
Yeah, it's offtopic, but I don't know where else to put it.
And what is exactly wrong in channelling me?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."