Is Fear Reducing the Publicity for Open Source?

sebFlyte writes "Are companies deliberately keeping quiet about moves to open source because they are afraid of the reactions of proprietary vendors they still have relationships with? ZDNet raises and tries to answer this question in a two-part special report, 'Open source behind closed doors'. It comes to the conclusion that, in all probability, companies are keeping quiet to avoid reprisals of one sort or another. One part of the fear of publicizing migrations is nicely summed up in the second part by Tristan Nitot of Mozilla Europe: 'Guys are really shy -- it's the Munich Linux thing. They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry.'"

Comments

FUD works (unfortunately)

[ericcantona]

is FUD working ?.
yep...its leading to articles like this on /.

Re:FUD works (unfortunately)

[Gricey]

The point is, it shouldn't. The only people that should fear from this are OS vendors -- because that's the only fundamental difference. So what I use Linux on my webserver -- if you want me to run IIS, because you think it's right for my situation, and I'm familiar with IIS, then port it to the operating system I'm using, please!

The problem is the os-tiein you get with a lot of software. That's bullcrap. If you're marketing software, and you want everyone to use it, you should have builds for the OS your customer is using. After all, theyre YOUR customer and YOU should be jumping through hoops for THEM.

-- incubus

Of course FUD works

[00_NOP]

Nobody at IBM ever got sacked for using it.
I don't work in IT and so when I talk to IT vendors they think I know nothing. That's why they can feed me lines like "MySQL is a toy system" (as opposed to the MS Access crap they were selling). If I was just another manager then I'd probably believe them.

Re:Of course FUD works

[slavemowgli]

Well... MySQL *is* a toy system. Yes, Access is even worse, and it's not like MySQL doesn't have its uses; but any database that will silently alter data you're inserting into a table if it doesn't fit the specified constraints instead of returning an error is unusable for serious work.

If you want a good database, why not look into PostgreSQL?

Re:Of course FUD works

[Pig Hogger]

Nobody at IBM ever got sacked for using it.

And nobody ever got fired for buying IBM either...

Re:Of course FUD works

[shmlco]

Unhuh. And why is it you're not validating user input? Bad data should never have a chance to get to the database in the first place.

Re:Of course FUD works

[Anonymous Coward]

And why is it you're not validating user input? Bad data should never have a chance to get to the database in the first place.

I disagree with the implication that the application layer is the only layer responsable for data intgrety.

Maintaining a constant database is as important as maintaining a secure network.

You wouldn't simply install a firewall on your network, ignoring all other security measures and saying "but it's the firewalls job to do that..."

The same applies to data integrity. Both the app layer and the data layer should do their own validation.

Re:Of course FUD works

[bit trollent]

So does MySQL do named query parameters? I wrote a webapp in asp.net 1.1 using mysql to see if I could really replace MS SQL with MySQL. The first thing I noticed is that
SELECT * FROM forum WHERE ForumID = @ForumID;
no longer works and must be changed to:
SELECT * FROM forum WHERE ForumID = ?;
Now this my be fine for really simple queries, but alot of more complex queries are a real pain in the ass to write without named parameters.

Sorry, but any DB that can't handle named parameters feels more like a toy than even Access.

Btw, check out the QueryAnalyzer built into Visual Studio 2005. It actually does syntax checking for whatever DB you are using (even MySQL) and when used with datsets can eliminate *alot* of DB related code.

When I rewrote my webapp using asp.net 2.0 / MS SQL express and I felt like I had just traded in a Huffy for a real mountain bike.

Re:Of course FUD works

[CyricZ]

It has nothing to do with validating the input from the user. The problem is with the database altering data that may be completely valid, thus potentially invalidating it!

Re:Of course FUD works

[spacefight]

Parent is so true. Debugging a friends PHP/MySQL code in order to check why his PASSWORD() function for a simple user login does not work anymore on the productive host just, to find out that MySQL cuts of data instead of returning a big fat warning, is rather annoying. Oh and the fact that MySQL moved the PASSWORD() function to OLD_PASSWORD() and introduced another hash function in PASSWORD() with one of the latest releases in the 4.n version family is another thing to walk away.

Re:Of course FUD works

[Chrispy1000000 the 2]

Take, for example, a scheduling concern. There is a student, Bob, who needs to take classes A and B. Classes A and B are only offered every few years, so he has to take them when they are offered. Now, the kicker is class A and class B are offered at the same time, 'because they are in different departments. But hey, the student wants to take them both, and has show ability to do so. The student gets permission from both professers to take the classes, one day at class A, one day at class B. Now what? The system is set up to only take one class per time slot. But this student has two. And, you know, the programmer will realize ahead of time that there may be conflicts in scheduals, right? Right?

Re:Of course FUD works

[Anonymous Coward]

Unhuh. And why is it you're not validating user input? Bad data should never have a chance to get to the database in the first place.

The point isn't whether or not the data is valid.

The point is that the database should accept it or reject it with an error. It should not CHANGE it.

Re:Of course FUD works

[Unknown Relic]

Of course it's never the fault of the programmer. From the description of PASSWORD() from the MySQL docs:

"Calculates and returns a password string from the plaintext password str, or NULL if the argument was NULL. This is the function that is used for encrypting MySQL passwords for storage in the Password column of the user grant table.

Note: The PASSWORD() function is used by the authentication system in MySQL Server; you should not use it in your own applications. For that purpose, use MD5() or SHA1() instead. Also see RFC 2195 for more information about handling passwords and authentication securely in your applications."

This has been in the docs for years, long before 4.1 (the version in which the internal hash algorithm was updated) was released. The possibility for application breakage from this change was also fully documented in the upgrade release notes. In fact, it's mentioned in the first real step. As if that wasn't enough, you actually have to want to use the new password algorithm. If after you upgrade the grants table isn't manually altered to support the new hash length, the PASSWORD() function works exactly as it did in versions 4.0 and earlier.

Re:Of course FUD works

[Anonymous Coward]

Unhuh. And why is it you're not validating user input? Bad data should never have a chance to get to the database in the first place.

Jesus H... Here it is 2005, and people still say stuff like this.

First of all, the fundamental purpose of the DBMS is data integrity. If you're doing data integrity in your app, you are doing the DBMS' job. Of course, you are welcomed to *repeat* some of the constraints in your app, since "modern" databases have shitty exception handling, but that's a separate issue.

Second, whatever constraints you have in your DB define your data model. If your DB allows blank user names, then that's part of your data model. You better be able to handle it in your app, and not assume that your validation code ever ran. Because your app is not a DBMS.. it's not the most general layer for accessing the data.

Third: data management has a solid theory behind it. I don't think your app does. Putting validation in your app just means you're even less likely to see future DBMS products that use that information for optimizing queries, for instance.

Fourth: are you ready to go and update all your apps every time the constraints change? How about apps that you don't have any control over (like, say, the "mysql" command line program??). (Aside: it makes me chuckle when greenhorn programmers claim that spreading arbitrary constraints over all their apps is more "agile" than putting it in the DBMS).

Fifth: If you DBMS doesn't support this arguably *correct* methodology, STOP USING IT. Don't make excuses for it. If your DBMS doesn't let you declare *arbitrary* constraints, it's not a true DBMS. It's like a calculator with a missing division key. Good for some tasks, but what's the point when you can make it general with no loss of performance or functionality?

Application-centric data management should've died in the 60's, when it was popular. Let's let it die now, at least.. please.

Re:Of course FUD works

[Lehk228]

that is what setting an override bit is for. if you want the system to be able to store and output "impossible" values for a type of stored data allow for override. don't just stuff it into the system or set the system to allow all "impossible" data

Re:Of course FUD works

[shmlco]

Perhaps you're the one that should get with the times. First, the later versions of mySQL (4.1, 4.0) do throw errors if a truncation would occur. Or you can allow it, with a warning that will be logged. In either case, the "silently corrupting data" issue is a non-starter.

Second, I firmly believe in application servers, and keeping issues from hitting the database until they need to do so. Yes, the database should be the guardian of last resort, but then again I have ONE database. I have LOTS of application servers, and it's easier to fan out and add another cheap app server than significantly upgrade the database hardware.

Third, the higher up the food chain you catch an error, the more likely it is you can return a meaningful error to the user. "Please enter a email address" is just a little easier to understand than "insert failed due to bad constraint".

Fourth, databases have remained largely static in terms of feature sets over the past few years, while application server capabilities have grown by leaps and bounds. I'd rather debug an application or service than a stored procedure, and I'd prefer [when possible] to have the service act as the sole gateway to the database.

Fifth, I catch errors on the server, even though I have javascript error checking enabled. Why? Because it may not have run. Similarly, I check for a good set of error problems (empty fields, etc.) on the app server, even though the db WILL do them again should the information pass muster. Why? So I don't waste the time of my most constrained asset when I already know the data is bad or incomplete.

Chuckle all you want, but I thought all of those mainframe sp database-is-master-of-the-world types died in the '70s. Now it's just another layer in the cake.

Re:Of course FUD works

[julesh]

any database that will silently alter data you're inserting into a table if it doesn't fit the specified constraints instead of returning an error is unusable for serious work.

This has been fixed for nearly a year:

Added STRICT_TRANS_TABLES, STRICT_ALL_TABLES, NO_ZERO_IN_DATE, NO_ZERO_DATE, ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO, and TRADITIONAL SQL modes. The TRADITIONAL mode is shorthand for all the preceding modes. When using mode TRADITIONAL, MySQL generates an error if you try to insert a wrong value in a column. It does not adjust the value to the closest possible legal value.

(MySQL changelog from December 04)

If you want to complain about MySQL's inadequacies, please find a current inadequacy, not an out-of-date one.

Yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

"...they start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry.'

Because offering an 80% discount is the cruelest thing a vendor can do to a customer, and we all live in fear of it happening to us.

Re:Yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reason with him in terms he can understand: throw a chair.

Why go public?

[nuggz]

Lets see you have a new idea.
There is some risk in using it, it might not work, might upset your current suppliers or customers.

You decide to try it. If you don't tell anyone you have no risk of upsetting your customers or suppliers.

If it works you get the benefis before your customers know what's happening. If it doesn't work maybe your customers will make the same mistake.

I can't think of a compelling reason to publicise deployment of opensource technology, except to the shareholders if they want details of strategy.

Re:Why go public?

[jzeejunk]

You decide to try it. If you don't tell anyone you have no risk of upsetting your customers or suppliers.

most corporations have onsite representatives from various vendors for support and so this doesn't work in most cases. infact it's one of the reasons why vendors have support onsite - to know the internals of their clients.

More likely...

[intmainvoid]

More likely what's happening is the IT department sees a need for X, draws up a budget for X with the company's current platform, and gets the budget rejected. So they just do it anyway with the open source solution, present it as a working solution and off you go.

And of course, when it comes to doing a big deal, companies can always try and get a discount by offering to be a case study for the vendor. So their adoption of the vendor's technology gets some press. When a company adopts an open source solution, there's never going to be the same PR push behind it. You are always going to hear more about things that someone can sell than you are about things you can just download for free.

Re:More likely...

[Soko]

More likely what's happening is the IT department sees a need for X, draws up a budget for X with the company's current platform, and gets the budget rejected. So they just do it anyway with the open source solution, present it as a working solution and off you go.

Hey! This is /.! Where's the anti-Microsoft rhetoric? The bashing of proprietary software for being low quality? Sheesh, you give logical and reasonable arguments. What are you doing? On a Friday afternoon no less? Now my head hurts...

I think most of my OSS installations can be summed up in the above statement, and this one too: "The road to a failed project goes directly through accounting..."

Soko

Re:More likely...

[westlake]

More likely the IT department sees a need for X, draws up a budget for X with the company's current platform, and gets the budget rejected. So they just do it anyway with the open source solution, present it as a working solution and off you go

I distrust "stealth" installs. The Cowboy in IT is God's gift to Microsoft.

Re:More likely...

[jbolden]

Lets not forget that Microsoft got into corporate america via. stealth installs. Dos/Windows applications could be installed by end users and thus business departments could add their own IT functions themselves without needing to go through IT. As a result they switched from their mainframe/mini setups to windows for business applications....

Its ironic that Linux is getting into IS shops the same way (though its IS avoiding having to go through budget this time around). Anyway I'm all in favor of stealth installs. Hell anything that defuses power in a corporation away from management is pretty good in my book.

Re:More likely...

[Jasin Natael]

Don't forget that a lot of unauthorized software copying happens in businesses. I wonder if it's just that so many questionable sites are now riddled with spyware, that nobody wants to take the risk to crack a copy of some commercial software. They're willing to spend a little extra time learning or deploying an OSS package. Even if you crack it today, trying to crack the upgraded version next month could put your whole network (and therefore operation) at risk.

Jasin Natael

Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD is the _main source_ of publicity for open source.

Would you have even known Linux existed if you hadn't heard all this screaming from MS saying "WINDOWS IS BETTER THAN ALL THOSE FREE OPEN SOURCE OSES THAT RUN 80% OF THE INTERNET, NYAH NYAH!"?

Re:Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you have even known Linux existed if you hadn't heard all this screaming from MS saying "WINDOWS IS BETTER THAN ALL THOSE FREE OPEN SOURCE OSES THAT RUN 80% OF THE INTERNET, NYAH NYAH!"?

Yes?

Re:Nope.

[kesuki]

I would. Because a 'security' patch from my then dialup ISP broke my windows networking based filesharing between my desktop and laptop PC (connected via 10 base T) I spent months in frustration trying to get files to copy between my computers, but then i read about this thing called 'linux' and bought this book on it with slackware.. well slackware and me didn't get along, so searched on the internet, and viola, i heard of this thing called 'FreeBSD' well, the installer was so slick and nifty (to me, at that time) compared to linux, and it had all these handbooks i could use to set up and configure ppp to auto dial, use compression, etc etc.. i got consistantly better dialup results than i ever had with windows, usenet binaries were downloading almost 3 times faster (because of the compression that i had set up in the configuration) and it was all golden, I never dialed out from a windows or bothered to try from linux again, ever. that freebsd box (a lowly 486, with external 56k modem) gave me almost 7 years of use as a dialout box... and when i went to cable modem, I used freebsd (albeit on a k6-2 based system) as my firewall, and even though windows had a zillion problems and issues through those years, my windows experience was delightful and problem free the whole time. All because i had heard of this thing called 'open source' because windows had so many problems for me.

all because of a security patch from my isp, that turned off a feature of windows that i was using on a daily basis even though it had gaping vulnerabilities.

yup, i didn't learn about open source because of FUD, it was because windows was broken. all this spyware crap that are causing people to abandom computer in the trash should be causing a dramatic rise in open source adoption too, because the 'easiest' way to secure a windows pc is to take it off the internet, and use an open source pc as your 'internet pc' or even to go so far as to use a CD rom bootable linux distro 'internet' and to use 'windows' for everything else.

Re:Nope.

[TubeSteak]

I hate the software that comes with dialup isps, cable modems, DSL service, etc.

They're usually fairly poor quality.

I can understand installing software for dial-up (i had to do it) but unless the update was the kind where you had to install it or your service stopped working, I don't see why you'd do it.

I'd like to give a personal shout-out to Comcast for their crapola software package. When my dad installed it on his laptop (we have a wifi/router) all I could say is "Why?"

Needless to say, he doesn't have it installed anymore.

Re:Nope.

[Ravatar]

You make a good point:

ALL THOSE FREE OPEN SOURCE OSES THAT RUN 80% OF THE INTERNET


Give me a call when Linux is worth a damn on the desktop. Many people I know who use Windows don't need to run 80% of the internet with their PC. They just want their stuff to work, the first time.

Re:Nope.

[dtfinch]

I still look forward to the day when Apple has a good desktop OS.

I run Linux at home and Windows at work (except our servers, which mostly run Linux). There's nothing especially wrong with Linux on the desktop. People expect it to feel like Windows, do everything the Windows way, perfectly run apps written for Windows, contain copyrighted Windows media codecs, break DMCA protected DRM schemes, and violate several well-enforced software patents, all out of the box, for free, or else to them it's crap. A Linux distro that tries to answer those complaints will either be expensive or illegal.

Re:Nope.

[Ravatar]

So perhaps the concept that a quality OS doesn't have to be free isn't quite so insane?

Not quite

[WindBourne]

You live in fear of the 100% markup that you will pay if you go against MS (for all Windows based software, not just MS's). MS has a long history of penalizing those that do not do exactly what MS wants. Yes, MS will offer 80 % off of this years prices to keep you. But they expect high prices next year, and they expect that you will not even toy with OSS anymore. Simply read what Dell had to say at the MS monopoly trial.

Re:Not quite

[NineNine]

Here's a little secret kiddo: lots and lots of suppliers are like that. All of the suppliers that we use give us large volume discounts. If they start losing some of our business, they'll try to keep us, but they'll also jack up their prices. Loyalty is rewarded in every aspect of business. Just because this is new to you doesn't mean it's new or at all unusual.

Re:Not quite

[cpn2000]

Sure, but how many of them are monopolies, convicted of abusing their monopoly position?

Re:Not quite

[Billly Gates]

Microsoft invented the EULA that we all see. Until recently they were not even a binding agreement because a laywer and a notary needs to be present.

However MS set teh standard and changed the industry to ignore laws with some strange eula that the user does not even see to make them imune to any laws. Did you know sony has eulas for their cd's?

Anyway after what happened with ms taking over I can imagine many IT suppliers thought it would be a good idea to plant landmines to block any competition and keep their customers locked in. Its a great way to make even more money to please the shareholders.

Re:Not quite

[NineNine]

The whole "convicted of abusing their monopoly position" is entirely meaningless. I wish that you lemmings would quit repeating that, as if the US judicial system was overseen by God, Himself. They were arbitarily chosen because they have deep pockets, and very strong rivals who were getting whipped silly. I can guarantee that that case didn't happen to protect you or any other end user from the big, evil "monopoly".

Try running a restaurant where you have fountain drinks with both Coke and Pepsi. products. See how much of a price break you get, if either vendor will even agree to sell to you. It happens every day, in every business that I've ever worked in, studied, or owned. You just aren't aware of it.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of a few places that were forced to choice between either Coke or Pepsi cuz neither would sell to them if they wanted to have both.

Re:Not quite

[Billly Gates]

Coca cola and pepsi are ogliopolies and the soda's are not even that good. They use distribution to lock out rivals to artificially keep their prices high. Most of it is product differentation which means they do mass marketing to convince people their products are somehow supperior and people believe it.

Now that groccers and large retailers like walmart have power, they can produce their own low cost soda's that are equally as good and half the price.

Re:Not quite

[Kjella]

Microsoft invented the EULA that we all see. Until recently they were not even a binding agreement because a laywer and a notary needs to be present.

However MS set teh standard and changed the industry to ignore laws with some strange eula that the user does not even see to make them imune to any laws. Did you know sony has eulas for their cd's?

Why the heck are you comparing apples and smoked salmon? We're talking about large volume licensing, the kind that happens via a plain old-fashioned no-legal-doubt-about-validity contract. Their single end-user licensing has absolutely nothing to do with large volume pricing. As far as that "accepted practise" goes, it depends on where. Any country accept volume discounts, but some countries do not allow a dominating company to base those on purchases of competing goods. In other words, you can give me a good price for 100k copies of software, but not depending on whether I use 100k licenses or 100k+20k licenses from someone else. Instead, they offer site licenses which circumvent the problem by making the marginal cost zero, which effectively means you might as well put the other 20k users on MS too...

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Consistency and honesty are rewarded in every aspect of business, not loyalty. Loyalty to another instead of a principle is a quick road to bankruptcy. Capitalism is capitalism. If you buy MS products out of loyalty, good for you, but it is an emotional decision not one based on business.

Then again I also know folks who use the word loyalty to mean under the table deals and in that sense it is neither new or at all unusual. The only thing new is that the price of bribes seems to be heading towards zero. My ex worked at MS for about ten years and one of my favorite quotes of hers, "Never in history have so many cocks been sucked with such wide eyed enthusiasm for a just a T-shirt."

If they start losing some of our business, they'll try to keep us, but they'll also jack up their prices.

I would look for suppliers that try to keep you by not jacking up prices, but maybe that is just me.

Re:Not quite

[CyricZ]

The term is "oligopolies", not "ogliopolies".

Re:Not quite

[DVega]

The difference is that if a "normal" supplier treats you in a way you think unfair, you can always switch to another one. Does not happen with Microsoft, because it's a monopoly. You have no choice. You can not switch all your desktops to Linux and OpenOffice.

Re:Not quite

[SoSueMe]

Free porn. NineNine.com[ninenine.com]

So, how do you lock in the "Porn" market?

Is that working out for you?

Re:Not quite

[bit trollent]

I can't help but lol when someone walks up to a closed minded group of people and tells them that everything they believe is wrong. The only thing better is when he follows this up by undeniably proving them to be completely wrong in every sense of the word. I just with I could see the look on their faces.

You rule and your pornographic website is awesome (if you use a secure browser and turn off plugins, java, and javascript).

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

I just love it when some malcontent fanboi thrashes at windmills and another troll gushes. Porn references, indeed.

Re:Not quite

[schon]

The whole "convicted of abusing their monopoly position" is entirely meaningless. I wish that you lemmings would quit repeating that

Translation: "I can't actually refute this based on facts, so I'll just insult you all for bringing it up, and then try to make it look like they're victims."

Re:Not quite

[NineNine]

your pornographic website is awesome (if you use a secure browser and turn off plugins, java, and javascript).

Thanks... website is all automated, and I still have trouble detecting some of the newer tricks that gallery creators use, but I'm working on it. Just implemented something about a week ago that should improve the quality a good bit. Unfortunately, it's a constant fight to keep the assholes at bay.

And I honestly don't expect anybody here to think. I just can't let baldfaced ignorance go unchallenged. I feel some kind of twisted moral obligation to try to correct them.

And, this is honestly not some kind of reach-around compliment, but I actually like torrentspy (just saw it for the first time). I think I'm gonna have to fire up ABC again tonight...

Re:Not quite

[NineNine]

Oh, please. The whole "convicted monopoly" thing is the same as the politico-drones who buy into and further propogate the idea that the Iraq war was a good, useful, justified war because Bush said they had "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and the President can't be wrong or questioned. Puh-lease.

I shouldn't have to justify my statement because anybody who has any interest in how large corporations work would see right off that the whole MS thing was the equivalent of a cop sitting on the side of the road and picking out speeding cars that happen to be BMW's and Mercedes. After all, he's just protecting the public good from the evil speeders, right? C'mon, use your fucking brain.

Re:Not quite

[killjoe]

Most vendors try to suck up to you because they know you can dump them and move to their competition. MS has no such worry so they fuck you instead.

Re:Not quite

[killjoe]

Two wrong don't make a right. I know it's fashionable to ignore ethics in American business but that does not mean the consumers are not allowed to complain about sleazy businesses or point out their slimy behavior.

MS is amongst the top of the sleaziest corporations. YOu can bitch and moan all you want about how people should not be allowed to say that but it's futile. You are not going to be able to silence people who have a bone to pick with a corporation who is working so hard to destory open source and calling people who use and write open source software communists and anti-american.

What is good for the goose and all that. Why is it OK for Bill Gates to call me a communist just because I like linux but not OK for me to call him a criminal because he (his company) was tried and convicted despite an appeal?

Re:Not quite

[_Sprocket_]

Try running a restaurant where you have fountain drinks with both Coke and Pepsi. products. See how much of a price break you get, if either vendor will even agree to sell to you. It happens every day, in every business that I've ever worked in, studied, or owned. You just aren't aware of it.

Now... according to you... Coke and Pepsi should be up on the legal block by now. Big pockets, right? Yet they aren't. Maybe it's got something to do with the IT market? Cisco tends to dominate their sector of the market. No lawsuit there. Oracle... nope. Odd that Microsoft was singled out when there are so many other potential marks.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush dropped the suit. Bush attacked Iraq. You may want to rethink the example.

Re:Not quite

[bit trollent]

Bill Gates never called you a communist. I'm pretty sure he never said that "people who use Linux are communist". If Bill Gates is going to call you anything, he should really call you a dipshit.

MS is amongst the top of the sleaziest corporations.

The sleaziest corporations in the US pollute without remorse resulting in thousands of illnesses and deaths. They buy off politicians so that they may continue to pollute and kill unabated. Get some perspective before you start making wild accusation.

about "ethics": a quick summary of the MS monopoly trial

Netscape and Real Networks each made a product which was inferior to Microsoft's. IE was superior to Netscape Navigator since version 4 or so, and WMP has been superior to Real Player ever since Real Networks became a scumware company. Hell it was harder to find the free version of real player on real's own website than it is to find it on a computer where it was installed.

Rather than compete on features these companies chose to try to force MS to stop bundleing its superior products with its popular OS. Is it just me, or shouldn't a $140 OS come with a web browser and media player?

Both companies were instrumental in anti-trust lawsuits against MS. Considering that Real "Check out how we spam you from your system tray" Player is often the first thing I uninstall after a system restore and Netscape never managed to be nearly as fast as IE or Opera the motives for such a letigious strategy should be clear.

MS is sleazy, but the people who sued them on the premise that MS's superior products were beating them due to unfair competition are far sleazyer.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that if a "normal" supplier treats you in a way you think unfair, you can always switch to another one. Does not happen with Microsoft, because it's a monopoly. You have no choice. You can not switch all your desktops to Linux and OpenOffice.

Why not? Haven't the Open Source fanboi's been telling us that we could do just that?

Re:Not quite

[10101001 10101001]

All of the suppliers that we use give us large volume discounts. If they start losing some of our business, they'll try to keep us, but they'll also jack up their prices. Loyalty is rewarded in every aspect of business.

Loyalty may be rewarded in business, but loyalty is something measured over time. Purchase rates are a measurement of space. If a company is effectively punished not for decreasing their purchase rate but instead for purchasing also from a competitor, it's generally regarded as anti-competitive practices, not any sign of a business trying to instill loyalty. Seeing how there doesn't seem to be a move away from Windows on the desktop in most places (which means that with ever growing companies, there's even more Windows purchases each upgrade cycle), but instead Linux and other free software are making end-roads into the server market where Windows never existed, it's even further ludicrous to claim that reducing rewards is somehow a measurement of loyalty (short of loyalty to supporting Microsoft as a monopoly).

It's at this point I'd like to draw a strong analogy of Microsoft to Coca-Cola. Why? Because both are a clear example of using IP to drastically mark-up the innate sale price of a consumer good, then using this drastic mark-up and the exclusiveness to have a flexible difference between the sale price to consumers and the sale price to distributors. It's this flexible difference that gives Microsoft and Coca-Cola the undue control over distributors, allowing a form of anti-competitiveness impossible in industries without the same sort of IP protection. After all, while one company that makes bolts can surely try to punish you for buying bolts from a separate company, the non-exclusiveness of bolts allows you to completely dump them for another company who won't try to screw you over in the same way (of course, an ideolistic view ignoring logistics like shipping). In the end, the almighty dollar will mean that bolt companies more obsessed with loyalty and screwing over the disloyal will run out of customers because their bolt prices will be too high.

So long as their IP protection for Microsoft and Coca-Cola, though, this cycle of price reduction can't begin. So, we can either motivate everyone to switch to screws instead of bolts, and hope that screws have enough competition without creating another Microsoft, or we can motivate everyone to switch towards a system that cuts the IP exclusiveness out of the equation. The second it was realized that computer code could function, not just be humanly interpreted, the ability to copyright it should have been expressibly outlawed. This is what makes recipes and computer code different than music and books. It's also the reason why software patents, assuming you think patents are okay, are the sort of IP that makes sense for recipes and computer code.

Oh, and as a small aside, yes I realize that Munich was a clear example of MS actually losing sales. And they were, at least in the short term, promised discounts to lure them to stay. So, if anything, Microsoft seemed to actually be rewarding talk of disloyalty. But yea, in the end, Microsoft was hoping they'd kill Linux, et al; I'm sure at that point, they'd go back and punish all those who were disloyal or spoke of being disloyal. Really, if you're girlfriend was threatening to have sex with another guy, would you be more inclined to dump her or would you throw lots of money to get her to stay? The only reasons I'd throw money at her is if a) I was really pathetic and desperate or b) I was for sure I'd end up marrying her and hence be able to do worse and use her examples of wanting to cheat as an excuse. There's nothing healthy about such a relationship.

Re:Not quite

[suitepotato]

The people most given to hating Microsoft for being smart where their competition was stupid are themselves geeks and nerds, the people who are themselves most often hated in school for NOT being stupid instead of UNlike a lot of others.

Re:Not quite

[ConceptJunkie]

So you're saying that just because MS is an easy and inviting target that means they _weren't_ a monopoly and abusing that status?

Since you've offered nothing to back up the fact that MS was unfairly persecuted your argument reduces to a mere non sequitur, which by the rules of logic can be dismissed with a wave of my hand.

Bah!

Microsoft was convicted of being a monopoly because they are a monopoly. Of course, the whole browser-bundling thing was irrelevant and a red herring, but MS was competing unfairly since the late 80's if not earlier. The final result of this conviction was nothing anyway, so I wouldn't lose any sleep even if MS was being set up.

All they got, in effect, was a firm warning, "We're warning you: Don't do that again or we'll warn you again."... straight out of the U.N.'s playbook. The DoJ will get bored shortly, if it already hasn't, and MS will go back to business as usual.

Re:Not quite

[DavidTC]

Coca-Cola has no legal IP protection at all, so your example is extremely stupid. None whatsoever. About the only IP that that company owns is the trademark on their name and some artwork for the bottles.

Coca-Cola does have one, slightly odd, 'monopoly', and that's on de-cocainize coca extract, which they buy from the only plant in the US licensed to produce it. In theory, anyone can buy from them, but in practice, they do all their business with Coca-Cola, and thus would be rather unwilling to sell to Coca-Cola clones.

And that is just for one of their many products, and Pepsi has no monopoly like that at all.

Ah, but what about trade secrets? Well, trade secrets are not government created 'property'. They exist regardless of anything the government does. Trade secret laws give them a set value under the law. But even without the trade secret law, NDAs and generic tort law would still make them exist in exactly the same way...the court battles would just be more annoying.

Re:Not quite

[10101001 10101001]

Coca-Cola has no legal IP protection at all,

Actually, a trade secret (which you at least make mention of lower down) is covered under IP. You fail to recognize that the FDA requires all food to include an ingredients list of their composition. Coca-Cola was allowed to exclude actually defining what a key ingredient was precisely because it was a trade secret. So, while you're right that without something like the FDA forcing disclosure or specific government law recognizing trade secrets, there wouldn't be any government protection, clearly both of those exist.

Oh, and as for your claim that without trade secret law there'd be NDAs and general tort law to produce the same effective thing, the same argument could be made about copyright. Of course, you'd then realize that such would effectively mean that disclosure would hold all parties who receive the "trade secret"/"copyrighted work" culpable. Without such a requirement, the person who signed the NDA would be punished and the "trade secret"/"copyrighted work" would effectively be covered under no contract after passing sufficient hands, meaning anyone could use it. So, one would have to revert back to having some nature of IP laws to recognize that embodied ideas are a sort of property that can be stolen and that only the original maker has any rights to benefit from it. It's not like, after all, you making a copy of something when you're not under any contract somehow magically makes you culpable for things the contract holder agreed to.

Re:Not quite

[mysticgoat]

Hey, lay off that "MS is no badder than anybody else" line of bull.

MS has spent more than 20 years building its reputation for screwing competitors, customers, and even partners for any little bit of market advantage. Talk to some of the guys who've been around for a while about undocumented DOS routines, announcements of vaporware versions RSN, doublefaced Windows API (fast routines for internal development, and slower ones for everyone else), "embrace and extend", et cetera ad nauseum. MS has put the time into building its reputation. It is hands down the baddest big corporation in the western world. It has earned that unique place, and I'm sure it has taken a lot more cleverness and grunt effort to get there than any other institution would ever devote to such an endeavor. Microsoft is to business in our time as Ghengis Khan's Mongol hordes were to Asia in his time.

And besides, what other corporation of comparable size has a foul mouthed, chair throwing monkey dancer as second in command? Do you really think such a person could be found in the inner sanctum of IBM, Sun, GMC, Ford? Do you think there might be a reason why that is the case?

So you just peddle that soft soap your pushing somewhere else. Microsoft is hands down the baddest company around. They have worked hard to get there. They fully deserve all the "honors" that go with that status.

Re:Not quite

[killjoe]

" Bill Gates never called you a communist. I'm pretty sure he never said that "people who use Linux are communist"."

Yes he did. Why don't you google for it.

"The sleaziest corporations in the US pollute without remorse resulting in thousands of illnesses and deaths."

Nah, not anymore. Mainly because manufacturing companies don't operate in the US anymore. The sleaziest corporations in the US these days use illegal immigrant labor to save money, deny people medical insurance, hire people as temps to circumvent labor laws, classify people as management to avoid paying them overtime, and worst of all work like hell to stop people from transmitting information amongst themselves.

The ability to transmit information from one member to another and from one generation to another is what separates us from animals. MS is attacking the very thing that makes us human. They are building a world where information is no longer permanent and may not be transmitted without their permission. This is much worse then polluting or even killing people. This is killing humanity, denying you the right to read and write is a crime far worse then murder.

"MS is sleazy, but the people who sued them on the premise that MS's superior products were beating them due to unfair competition are far sleazyer."

That's the standard MS shill line. You can keep saying it but I don't think you are going to convince anybody. If the netscape and real products were truly inferior MS would not have resorted to threating companies who installed them by default. The fact that they strong armed companies is proof that they knew people would not use their product voluntarily. Same with making you install IE when you installed to service pack to NT. If it was great they would not have shoved it down people's throats.

MS by it's tactics admitted the IE was vastly inferior to netscape. They were so convinced that no human would voulntarily use it that they shoved it down everybodies throat and threatened companies that installed netscape by default.

Re:Not quite

[bit trollent]

Bill Gates : "No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned--including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system--there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future."

He was calling people who call for reform of our IP laws to make them more like the GPL communists. Thats FSF, not Open Source. I hope you know difference. Notice how he doesn't call people who use, modify, distribute open source software communists. Tee people who he is describing as communists want to dictate the license I release my own software that I can release my own software with. They (not you) are communists in my eyes as well. I agree with IP reform, but lets just say I don't want Richard Stallman creating the new laws.

So Bill Gates never called YOU a communist, dipshit.

"MS is sleazy, but the people who sued them on the premise that MS's superior products were beating them due to unfair competition are far sleazyer."
That's the standard MS shill line. You can keep saying it but I don't think you are going to convince anybody. If the netscape and real products were truly inferior MS would not have resorted to threating companies who installed them by default. The fact that they strong armed companies is proof that they knew people would not use their product voluntarily. Same with making you install IE when you installed to service pack to NT. If it was great they would not have shoved it down people's throats.

Wow, some slashtard has called me and MS shill. Where do I go from here? I think I will insult you. You know what your problem is? You are a fucking moronic groupthink compliant slashtard. Almost everything you say is worthless. You are stupid, and you do not think for yourself.

There are plenty of software companies out there competing agains microsoft who are able to succeed thanks to their superior software. Windows XP already burns CDs. Why do I need Nero? Because it is better than Microsoft's cd burning software. Why do I need the Opera web browser? Because it is better than MS's software. These two companies did not sue Microsoft, and they got plent of users thanks to their superior software. Netscape did suck more than IE since version 4. Same or worst goes for Real Player. Its just the way it is.

MS has done some sleazy stuff (especially threatening companies who want to installl 3rd party software on pcs they produce, often in exchange for money). That said, I can't even remember the last name brand computer that didn't come so loaded from the factory with so much crapware that it is already more or less ruined. Is this also an MS shill line? Please tell me. your opinion is important to me.

The ability to transmit information from one member to another and from one generation to another is what separates us from animals. MS is attacking the very thing that makes us human. They are building a world where information is no longer permanent and may not be transmitted without their permission. This is much worse then polluting or even killing people. This is killing humanity, denying you the right to read and write is a crime far worse then murder.

Uhhuh. I guess that you are referring to DRM. You know the AUTHOR of content decides the level of comp

Re:Not quite

[killjoe]

That's a very professional spin you have put on Bill's words there you should ask for a raise. SO bill gates thinks RMS and the FSF are communist organizations huh? But he has no problem at all with any other members of the copen source community. He is such a great guy!

"Is this also an MS shill line? Please tell me. your opinion is important to me."

Why yes it is a shill line. MS shills (and corporate shills) like you always trot out these lame arguments. You know "sure they are sleazy but not as sleazy as somebody else" or "sure they are sleazy but they could be worse" or "sure they are sleazy but so is everybody else"

WHat I find facinating is that you never addressed my point about why they felt the need to shove IE down everybodies throats and threaten companies who included netscape if IE was so superior.

"If you are referring to the proprietary formats than I just have to say that it is almost always trivially easy to export a document to html or some other open format and send it to anywone."

I am talking about all that and more. Like lobbying govt for draconian laws, like "innovating" less permanent information publishing forms etc.

"If you are just some malcontent who likes to whine and pontificate (as I suspect) then I must tell you that I am getting bored with you."

I would rather be a malcontent then a shill any day. Hey look over there somebody is saying something bad about maytag go my little shill, a corporation needs defending from one of their consumers! Look somebody thinks rockford shoes are uncomfortable, away my little shill run and protect the nice corporation!.

There is something mentally wrong with people like you.

Re:Not quite

[bit trollent]

Yeah, Its called reading comprehension. Don't be sad. Far too many people in the USA aren't able to read at this level either. It's how I knew there were no WMDs in Iraq, how I got a 750 Verbal SAT score despite lousy grades in high school, and how I know you are full of shit. In the land of the blind...

meh, I don't find a need to explain MS introducting its own web browser in a service pack just as the internet was getting big. Its their product, their right. Did you whine this bad when MS introduced WIFI software with a service pack? And how the hell am I supposed to even download other software without a fucking web browser anyway??

whatever. Call me a shill.

I have already told you the one thing which all companies successfully competing against Microsoft have in common - superior products. Thats really all I had to say.

Re:Not quite

[killjoe]

for the last time shill boy. If IE was so superior why did MS shove it down the peoples throats and threaten dell and others when they installed netscape by default.

By those acts MS has admitted that IE was an inferior product that could not compete fairly in the Marketplace. The only people who think otherwise have pledges their allegience to microsoft incroporated.

I am curious as to why you chose to become a sycophant for MS though, why not choose a better corporation. I mean maytag is a nice corporation why not shill for them? How about RCA? I hear there are some people who dislike RCA products why don't you hang out at those boards and defend RCA against "malcontents"?

Why did you choose MS to pledge your undying loyalty to?

As I said there is something wrong with a human who takes such a personal affront when somebody critizies a corporation. There is something profoundly wrong with you.

Re:Not quite

[bit trollent]

Damn, your really are dense.

I am not loyal to any company. I am loyal to myself. I am loyal to the rules of logic.

To me, a poorly argued position that I agree with is worst than a well argued position that I disagree with.

your arguments are total BULLSHIT.

Re:Not quite

[killjoe]

Mr sycophant has no real answer. He tells me my arguments are bullshit but offers no counter arguments. You are a pretty crappy shill there ms fan boi. If you want Bill Gates to notice your efforts you are going to have to do better.

Re:Not quite

[bit trollent]

I think I hear Bill Gates calling you a Communist.

You better go bitch on slashdot.

Re:Not quite

[killjoe]

Bill Gates thinks all open source users and programmers are communists and terrorists. We know what happens to terrorists don't we?

Did you hear about what he is doing to the CIO of Mass? Apparently he is funding slimy personal attacks on the man.

Re:Not quite

[DavidTC]

You fail to recognize that the FDA requires all food to include an ingredients list of their composition. Coca-Cola was allowed to exclude actually defining what a key ingredient was precisely because it was a trade secret.

This is complete gibberish. The FDA does not require certain types and levels of ingrediants to be listed, 'natural flavors' being one of them. It has nothing at all to do with trade secrets.

If you think that Coca-Cola has some sort of 'legally-registered' trade secret, under which they area llowed to keep information away from the public, you're completely wrong. There is no such thing. You'll notice you can file trademarks, patents, and copyrights with the government. There is nowhere to file trade secrets. (Or anywhere to file the existant of trade secrets, either, considering it wouldn't make much sense to file the actual secrets...)

And trade secrets and copyrights are nothing alike, because copyrights functions without contracts, and trade secrets do not. It is perfectly legal for me, on a tour of Coca-Cola, to whip out some binoculars and take some notes. Although they will obviously make me leave, before that, if I can figure anything out, it's mine for the taking.

It is not legal for me to copy a copyrighted work, even sans any contracts or EULAs or anything. Or use patented process, or someone else's trademarks. This is a fundamental difference.

I rather suspect you don't understand how trade secrets work, because I didn't say that NDAs and general tort law could replace trade secrets. Trade secrets already require NDAs. All the lack of specific trade secret law would mean is that people would be sued for contract violations that caused great harm to the company under general tort law, instead of status specifically set up to handle trade secrets.

Your logic is rather like assuming that, barring a law against rape, rape would be legal. Well, no...it's assault. There's just a more specific law it's illegal under that handles the situtation better.

It's the same thing with trade secrets. Breaking an NDA by telling people something you're specifically been required, by contract, not to, is perfectly good grounds to sue you for, without any trade secrets laws at all.

In fact, many states have no specific laws about trade secrets, any yet revealing them there is just as likely to get you sued. They usually have some common law concept of trade secrets, but, like I said, it's all basically tort law.

Trade secret laws just get some of the arguing out of the way. They, for example, set specific requirements for how well the 'secret' must have been guarded, so companies can't sue people for revealing info that people not under an NDA knew.

And trade secret law lets companies leap from 'breaking and entering' to 'violation of trade secret law for stealing info while you were there', whereas tort law has a long and complicated route if you want to sue someone for harming you as a result of their breaking the law.

Re:Not quite

[10101001 10101001]

There are actually trade secret protections offered by the FDA*. Trade secrets are an IP protection. Trade secrets simply are the only IP protection that are granted not through government action but instead government inaction (trade secrets are recognized as some sort of right that cannot be infringed through law--hence my bringing up the FDA).

My comparison of copyright and trade secret was silly. So long as there's forced disclosure laws, those under said disclosure laws need some sort of legal exemption to prevent being forced to reveal their trade secrets. Coca-Cola's monopoly status (at least in other countries) and inflated price (relative to production cost) must not be due to trade secrets. It seemed a good example mostly because of the above listed properties, but clearly Coca-Cola must use another mechanism to retain its position.

*From the link: 'The law allows a manufacturer to ask FDA to grant "trade secret" status for a particular ingredient. FDA grants this status under vary limited circumstances and after careful review of the manufacturer's data. The manufacturer must prove that the ingredient imparts some unique property to a product and that the ingredient is not well-known in the industry. If trade secret status is granted, the ingredient does not have to be listed on the label, but the list must end with the phrase "and other ingredients."'

Re:Not quite

[DavidTC]

That link is about cosmetics, not food. Cosmetics labeling is nowhere near as important as food labeling.

However, it does exist, in a very limited form, under food. Like I said, you can call things that are just flavors, and natural, 'natural flavors', without specifying what those flavors are, or exactly how much of these there are.

The FDA may refer to these as 'trade secrets', but 'not well-known in the industry' is NOT, under any circumstances, a valid defination of a trade secret under any state law.

And that Wikipedia aticle is gibberish, as, for one thing, it fails to recognize that you can't patent a recipe. Just because it calls trade secrets IP does not make that true. It does, however, also says 'Trade secrets are not protected by law in the same manner as trademarks or patents.'

Now, in addition to normal tort laws about violating contracts and harming people, there is also include a more general concept that the government should not disclose company secrets unless they have a good reason. And sometimes these rules are actually written down.

However, they all have different ideas about what 'secrets' are, and this concept is completely disconnected from the legal concept of 'trade secrets' in civil law. Don't think that because the FDA called them 'trade secrets' they are they same thing. According to the FDA's rules, it can be a 'trade secret' if a shampoo contains aloe in it, and might be able to leave off the label. However, the existence of aloe in shampoo would not a trade secret under any state law's concept of trade secrets if, for example, you didn't sign the workers to NDAs, and even get the company supplying aloe to the factory under an NDA, too.

Whereas in California state court, for example, you can keep information from being disclosed if it mets exactly the legal defination of trade secrets in California. (And for other reasons, but the aloe example would not fall under any of them.)

In other words, trade secrets are two things. They provide a nice framework under the law for unlawful disclosure of company information, if the company follow certain standards to keep it secret, and, in various ways, they keep a company from having to tell the government, under varying circumstances, certain things, or keep the government from then telling anyone those things, unless it really really feels like it.

However, they are not IP. They are more like privacy laws for company. Property has rather one large and important property that trade secrets do not:

If you accidentally 'misplace' property, you can get it back. Be it physical or intellectual property. If you leave your wallet or your car title or copyright registration laying around, and others find it, it is still yours, because it is property. This is, in fact, the entire basis for 'ownership', going back to when that concept was seperated from 'possession'. We're talking 'back when we were monkeys', this concept is so old. It is yours even when you don't hold it.(1)

Whereas trade secret and indivdual privacy laws merely say 'If people unlawfully reveal this information, they can be punished, and we, the government, will not reveal it unless we have to'. If you leave your secrets, be they trade secrets or your social security number, laying around, and others find it, that information is their's to do with as they see fit, barring fraud.

1) Not that I like the idea of owning copyrights or patents or even land. I don't like the idea of 'owning' something that is merely a restriction on others. But the framework of 'ownership' is consistent between a can of coke and the copyright to Superman.

For Microsoft it is pretty much no loose.

[LWATCDR]

If you have problems with a new version of Windows it really isn't your fault I mean what choice do you have but to stick with Windows since it is that standard. Microsoft will fix it. It is a great system you get to lump all the blame on Microsoft because everyone knows how bad they are.
If you try and migrate to Linux, BSD, or Open Office and you have issues then your to blame for leaving Microsoft.
Migrating from one system to another is never trouble free. There will be probably be some fun driver issues with Vista and goodness knows what else. Going to Linux is also not going to be simple for a company. Learning Linux is not trivial and it is not perfect. I happen to think that Linux is great. We have almost no problems with our Linux boxes. We also have very few problems with the only Windows Server we have left. We would like to migrate entirely to Linux for our servers and probably will at some point but I am sure it will not be "simple".

Re:For Microsoft it is pretty much no loose.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll go over your arguments bit by bit...

If you have problems with a new version of Windows it really isn't your fault I mean what choice do you have but to stick with Windows since it is that standard. Microsoft will fix it. It is a great system you get to lump all the blame on Microsoft because everyone knows how bad they are.
If you try and migrate to Linux, BSD, or Open Office and you have issues then your to blame for leaving Microsoft.
Migrating from one system to another is never trouble free. There will be probably be some fun driver issues with Vista and goodness knows what else. Going to Linux is also not going to be simple for a company. Learning Linux is not trivial and it is not perfect. I happen to think that Linux is great. We have almost no problems with our Linux boxes. We also have very few problems with the only Windows Server we have left. We would like to migrate entirely to Linux for our servers and probably will at some point but I am sure it will not be "simple".

Yeah, if you have problems with a Microsoft OS, it's the fault of MS. You do have plenty of choices- Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, hell, even DOS. How certain are you MS will fix it? New exploits are dug up in Windows every day, SP2 or not. How is Windows a "Great System"? mm, BSOD's, malware, restrictive licences, paying money for it... any OS that has these would be hard-pressed to be called "Great". How is anyone to blame for leaving MS? If someone has problems with A POSIX-Compliant OS, then it is not the fault of the consumer... it's the fault of the developer. If migrating from one system to another always has difficulties, where were these difficulties when I moved from Windows to Linux? Going from anything to anything else is usually a big thing for a company, an entity which most of the time has a lot of inertia to it. Learning to use Linux is different than learning Windows because the two are inherently different. Linux is a little more technical, but if you can learn to live with it, then you've learned to use an OS for which you will never be charged for, be forced to reinstall due to malware, and will never give you cause to reboot from error (Unless you go in and muck with things and you don't know what you're doing). *Shuffles away, grumbling about people who don't know what they're talking about*

Re:For Microsoft it is pretty much no loose.

[LWATCDR]

I guess I didn't make my self clear. Windows isn't a great system. Shifting the blame to Microsoft is a great system.
First I am talking about in a server setting not for home use.
By using Windows any problems are "unavoidable" and or "Microsoft's" fault. You have to take no real blame. I know that OS/X, Linux, BSD, and even Solaris are all options but you can dismiss them if you want to.
Linux is great and I use it all the time. It is less of a problem for me than Windows but it isn't perfect or free from issues.
Drivers, installing software, package managers, and a bunch of other minor issues still haunt Linux.
Just as malware and exploits haunt Microsoft.

Monkey dance coming to an OSS migration near you.

[spejsklark]

They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry.

Better that than a monkey dance!

We don't tell the managers

[johnjaydk]

To a very large extend we, as IT proffesionals, don't tell the managers that we use OSS.

They don't understand it and are afraid of things they don't understand.So there is little incentive to inform them. We only really need the managers when we need their approval to buy something. So they only ever hear about things that costs money and gets a distorted view of things.

Re:We don't tell the managers

[Anonymous Coward]

To a very large extend we, as IT proffesionals, don't tell the managers that we use OSS.

John, could you step into my office for a moment?

Your Boss

Re:We don't tell the managers

[Anonymous Coward]

That's my real world experience also. If you say you think it would be wise to install anti-virus software on the mail gateway, the PHB's will agree. They will also make a pig's breakfast out of the proposition, and could very well end up spending tens of thousands of dollars on something just to feel like they can hold someone else accountable. If there's anything an undereducated manager wants to avoid, it's responsibility for an IT application. OTOH, you can just install clamav and be done with it. No muss, no fuss, and it works as well or better than anything out there.

The sucky part about all of this is that while F/OSS often makes it possible for you to get your job done efficiently and effectively, if you have to do everything in a skunkworks fashion to avoid dealing with managers who's reach exceeds their grasp, well, you probably won't get a lot of brownie points. Managers don't like being left out of the loop. If you tell them you accomplished x, y, and z, but they didn't even know you were working on those things, they might justifiably be a little peeved, whether you did a good job or not.

There is an exposure problem. If you spend too much time on slashdot, you may come away with the mistaken impression that F/OSS is "in the air"; that everyone and their brother knows what's afoot - an unstoppable juggernaut. Try reading the PR rags targeting IT managers though, and you'll come away with a very different impression. You'll read about collaboration software and appliances you never knew existed. The shiny object "buy a box to solve your problem" theatre is very much alive and well, buzzword bingo cliches and all. Sad, really.

I think proprietary vendors are particularly enamored of print media, because they retain complete control of the presentation. (Try to find a proprietary vendor that hosts an open discussion forum like /. on their site somtime.) And they shovel these shit rags into IT manager mailboxes in such quantities you could burn them to heat your home. What's an overworked IT manager to do? Read the crap, of course. It's not really their fault. They have barking headlines strewn across their desk so thick they can't even see the pictures of their kids. And should they happen to take a vendor call (they honestly try to avoid them, but they have to pick up the phone sometimes), and if that vendor should happen to be pitching the same pablum as the "CIO Mega Genius Issue" in the corner of their eye, well, the confluence cannot be denied - "Set up a meeting!"

(And god forbid you slash the IT budget too much. It's much easier to retain a budget than to try to get it back.)

So what is the F/OSS antidote to all this PR? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it will cost a lot of money. The information is out there, but it's not getting to all the right eyeballs. Competing on quality, no problem. Competing on ideology, no problem. Competing against billions of dollars worth of spin? Depressing. I was kind of counting on the IBM's, etc. of the world to help out with that one. Then I saw an IBM exec at what was billed as an open source convention. His basic pitch was that IBM liked open source because it helped familiarize people with tools (IBM's free java database, in particular) that they would feel compelled to upgrade to expensive IBM proprietary stuff.

Re:We don't tell the managers

[Dan_Bercell]

Not always scared just because of not knowing. Lots of em have done their homework and dont want to do the 'good-enough' solution.

Lets face it, most Open Source solutions are 'good-enough'.

Its hard to compete with a IBM, MS, ASP, Oracle..etc product, they are solid, supported and name brand solutions.

This is obvious...

[__aaclcg7560]

Of course, yon't want to piss off the janitors. That "something died in the wall" smell will never leave your cube if you do.

also,

[know1]

I bet in part it is due to some admins sneakily switching over the companies network/web/whatever server over and not telling the boss because they don't need to know and it saves hassle

Really ?

[karvind]

I just searched for earlier slashdot stories:

Oracle Continues Warming Up to Open Source

Intel Begins Support for Debian

IBM Turns to Open Source Development

IBM And Sony Form Linux Alliance

Linux Tablet to be Released in Two Days

There are only few of the many stories. Does it sound if companies are keeping mum about open source adoption ?

Re:Really ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Britney Spears makes the tabloids with a black eye, it doesn't necessarily mean that she wants the publicity.

Re:Really ?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Each of those companies are primarily technology providers in some form.

I think the article pertains mostly to companies whose primary market isn't technology, where they use tech, but don't sell that tech as a product to itself.

**YES**

[tomstdenis]

Look at the manual for the game "Champions of Norrath". See the BSAFE logo in it?

Now run strings on the binary [on the DVD] and compare it to LibTomCrypt v0.62 [if you can find a copy, heck I don't even have a copy, I do have a copy of v0.14 which has the strings].

Point is, they used LibTomCrypt to write their SSL library but they put a RSA BSAFE logo in the manual. :-)

Tom

Re:**YES**

[marcello_dl]

Maybe RSA uses LibTomCrypt. ;)

Re:**YES**

[tomstdenis]

I highly doubt that. RSA does have a value over LTC. They have tons of engineers to help review and audit the code. Look at my last few release. Yes, I've added new features or improved code but some of them are bug fixes for things that shouldn't have been bugs in the first place.

Sony [specifically SCEA] chose LTC because it was cheaper to use the code and audit the parts they were using than to license BSAFE. [my code was free at that time, it wasn't public domain like it is now].

But the point is, they wanted the logo in the manual to make sure that the customer would recognize the name.

Tom

Re:**YES**

[TubeSteak]

Can you translate the above posts into English for the non-informed?

BSAFE, LibCrypt, SCEA, etc... means almost nothing to me.

Re:**YES**

[tomstdenis]

And the award for people who need to learn to use google goes to (drum roll) TubeSteak.

BSAFE is a product by the RSA Software corporation that provides cryptographic functionality to developers. LibTomCrypt is my crypto library which I give out for free [under public domain] at http://libtomcrypt.org./ SCEA is the Sony Computer Entertain of America Corporation.

Tom

Re:**YES**

[Anonymous Coward]

You failed to communicate. Why should anyone have to go to Google to correct your failure. BTW your website also fails to communicate what your code does. If you can't explain what you do then I doubt it is the responsibility of the casual reader to figure it out.

Re:**YES**

[tomstdenis]

"BTW your website also fails to communicate what your code does."

Then chances are you're not in need of what it provides. I distribute software libraries not end user programs. If you're not a developer looking for cryptographic routines chances are good that you don't know about my libraries.

A smart reader would infer from the fact that SCEA chose LTC over BSAFE [a much more publicly known crypto library] that LTC provides for the same sort of needs that BSAFE does.

As for SCEA ... they're not exactly a mystery either. Ever heard of the Playstation?

Tom

They want the phone to stop ringing

[nukenerd]

They know that if they announce it publically they are going to be subjected to endless publicity, phone interviews, and other calls from M$, consultants, equivalent organisations for advice (if public sector), politicians - like Munich, Newham and Massachusetts were/are. Every instance now becomes a political and marketing football. They prefer a peaceful life.

It's the competitive advantage, stupid!

[russsell]

Open source software gives user companies a competitive advantage over companies that are tied into massive licence fees.

Of course they aren't going to tell anyone!

But it's not always FUD or hidden M$ conspiracies.

[marcello_dl]

It may also be ignorance. Let's say a company whose workforce is accostumed to windows does tech support for some hardware products. One of their clients phone, they have a problem. During the phonecall the client mentions he has linux installed on a partition. Bingo, the tech support guy genuinely think that the problem is an interference or a misconfiguration because of the presence of "that other os".

Once I offered to backup an old win98 machine with a linux livecd and an usb stick because the system was clogged, and I didn't trust myself to install more drivers on it. People instead were thinking the opposite, with running linux as the risky choice. D'oh!

Sometimes it works the other way. I phoned my ISP cause "my internet was broken" :)
Tech support starts talking about configuration, on windows. I cut short: "I am using linux and tested both my installations and one of OSX. My ethernet hub blinking lights says that my network card works, too".
"So it's the modem or the line" (both their business, and of course it was a line problem).

Competition

[shmlco]

Perhaps they don't want their competitors to know that they too can have the exact same solutions for free....

Yeah, FUD works

[hug_the_penguin]

But it's not the main issue.

`It's free, it can't be as good as the product that costs ${large_amount_of_cash}`

Ubuntu has gone some way to changing that because people have ordered CDs and tried it (just because they're free (beer)) and realised that really, freebies aren't all that bad. But what about the vast majority of people who haven't even heard of linux, or openoffice, or any of the other free(speech) applications?

And then there is the problem of education. Throughout the whole of my education, the institutions were wedded to windows, you weren't able to use a linux live CD, that would be a bannable offence, and just forget being able to work on documents at home if you didn't have windows. The MSDNAA is just another snare to get universities using microsoft products and to try and gain loyalty with students. Still there is the perception that cheap = crap. Just how far does it extend? And how many of the kids in school right now are going to grow up thinking microsoft is the only, or best, choice?

I'll let the GNU foundation take it from here : Free Software in education

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[NineNine]

Ubuntu is the pet project of a very rich guy who does Ubuntu for fun. There are not too many other products on the planet that are produced and given away for free "just because". People would be idiots NOT to question why a product is given away for free.

Would you take a free ham sandwich from a guy standing on the street? How about some free car tires from some random guy who says that they're jsut as good as the tires you buy from a store? "Free" generally means "something wrong with it". Only recently has society had an abundance of very wealthy people who have enough surplus time and money that they're willing to give it away for nothing. It's going to take several generations for people to wrap their minds around, assuming that it lasts that long. It's a completely foreign concept to just about everybody who has to work to earn a living.

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[hug_the_penguin]

Yes, this is exactly what we're fighting against. People have a perceived value, if it costs a lot its quality, if its free its crap.

Some of us enjoy programming for fun and hack onto projects and improve them, this is the tack people should be taking. If you market it as professionals with some spare time doing this for fun, and show how this results in more reliable code, that could be the way to turn the tide, until this happens, expensive software will continue to be regarded as better. You'd think people would learn after windows crashes 8 times in a week...

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[ScottyH]

Did I hear someone say "free ham sandwich"?

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[JohnHans]

Only recently has society had an abundance of very wealthy people who have enough surplus time and money that they're willing to give it away for nothing.

No, it is not wealth that brought about free software it is the ability of the user to communicate (I.E. the Internet). Free software is out there because users can share their efforts and together produce something that is more then what they could produce on their own. Software is given away for free because the creator benefits from giving it away.

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[SoSueMe]

"Altruism", perhaps?
I know, it's a foreign concept in today's society.
Maybe, just maybe, someone doesn't have an ulterior motive or a profit angle.
It is a weird concept, but I'd prefer to let the proof be revealed in fact rather than speculation.

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[NineNine]

Somehow I doubt that the time and money that goes into something like Ubuntu, complete with slick marketing, even comes close to offsetting the price that their own corporate users would have to pay for an install of say, Debian.

There MUST be a tremendous amount of wealth because many projects (like Ubuntu), the creator derives negligible benefit. Projects like that are most definitely a net loss to the user. Why would somebody put in even 20 hours developing for GIMP when for a significant less amount of time/money, that person could have their needs filled with a rival, like Photoshop.

There MUST be a relatively large amount of money sloshing around in IT beause you simply don't see people working in other industries willing to give away their services for free. How many plumbers do you know that plumb for free in their off time? How about car mechanics? Carpenters? Marketing people? Truck drivers? Accountants? Hell, I can't think about any industry where a noticeable segment work for free.

No... I take that back. Some lawyers do pro bono work... but then again, those are either idealistic young attorneys, or very wealthy attorneys that can work 50 hours a week at $200/hour. Same thing with OSS... it's either the very young, indealistic crowd (college kids without bills to pay and families to support) or the very wealthy (the creator or Ubuntu is a great example).

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[Olivier Galibert]

Have you ever seen a painter or a writer work 9 to 17 weekdays period?

Quality programming has a non-negligible artistic component. I know it's fashionable to try and ignore it, especially at manager level, but then that kind of people do not really care about the quality part either.

    OG.

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[hug_the_penguin]

It's how unix got going, it's how hacking started out, it's undoubtably how linux and BSD got off the ground and are currently so mature.

In my perl book, it has a wonderful little section about how early adopters of the internet used it to exchange scripts for administration etc., this is how the system works. People feel good about donating their time, they possibly enjoy programming as a hobby anyway. Regardless, there is no pressure like in a work situation, the quality of your work is higher.

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[Hosiah]

Well, would you watch TV for free? Granted, the TV show is interrupted by commercials. That's how it pays for the cost of producing the show. Software is much cheaper to produce than a TV show - frequently just a few people can do it. The banner ads on the download site can pay for it. And just like TV shows, once a piece of software is produced and edited to it's final version, it can be released/rebroadcast again and again and again...at no additional cost! Unlike a ham sandwich, which can only be eaten once.

But along came the proprietary vendors and convinced people to think of software like ham sandwiches - one use, one license. Just like with TV, we used to get 100's of channels for free, then cable came along and all the free channels dried up. Remember the selling point of cable in the first place was "more choices, no commercials"? Well, the free choices went away, you now have *fewer* channels available - and when's the last time you saw a whole program without a commercial? Oh, that's right, the "premium" channels - which cost even more!

Gullible, aren't you? Watch them do it to you again with radio and DRM. How long before you have to pay to breathe the freakin' AIR???

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[level_headed_midwest]

How long before you have to pay to breathe the freakin' AIR??? I take it you do not live in California...

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[TubeSteak]

I've only played with Knoppix and it isn't terribly NTFS friendly.

Are there other distros (like Ubuntu) that just work with NTFS? And won't garble data?

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[EnderWiggin99]

...it's either the very young, indealistic crowd (college kids without bills to pay and families to support) or the very wealthy (the creator or Ubuntu is a great example).

This is both seldom-realised truth and a huge advantage OSS has over proprietary software. The wealthy don't care about the direction that 'their' software is going as long as it's 'theirs' and they are fulfilling their vision of a world-wide humanitarian need. Young people aren't likely to be discouraged by seemingly-insurmountable problems, and are full of great little ideas that nobody cares about but that everyone loves to take advantage of.

We get some great innovation from this equation.

Apple (Steve Jobs) knew in the 1980s that wealth + youth = innovation

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[init100]

You'd think people would learn after windows crashes 8 times in a week...

But then they'll think that this is the baseline, and that free programs must be even worse.

Re:Yeah, FUD works

[hug_the_penguin]

This can be the case, but it can go the other way, whereby they accept it as the norm and won't like linux because it doesn't have odd quirks like this.

Blame the programmer

[Steeltoe]

Sure, blame the programmer. In the meanwhile, the systems that run MySQL will continue to silently fail due to bugs, and distrupt your data, while those who run better database systems will catch the bug and fix it at an earlier stage.

If this is true that is. I saw something in vTigerCRM where if I store a long website URL into an account, it will just become shortened without any warning. So I'm inclined to believe this is true. That is *Very*, *Very*, *Seriously* foobar, IMHO.

Hrm...

[erroneus]

Not sure if this is about FUD or not, but let's look at what's obvious on Slashdot-world:

Company or other entity announces or otherwise speaks of moving to an OSS solution. Several things typically happen at once:

1. Microsoft reads it and rushes over to respond in some way by
      a. offering lower prices
      b. making some sort of threat (BSA audit or something)
2. People criticise the company
      a. by saying they are just doing this for attention and/or get a better price from MS
      b. by saying they are stupid from moving away from the 'standard' Microsoft

So yeah, if you want your OSS migration to be successful, talk about it AFTER the fact if you don't want the hassle as described above.

Maybe companies are keeping quiet about

[I'm Don Giovanni]

their internal tech moves because nobody really gives a damn. It would be the height of arrogance for a company to assume that the world cares whether it moves to open source or any other tech for that matter. Most companies aren't in the business of announcing to the world what their internal tech moves are.

I don't know what internal tech McDonalds uses, and don't care. McDonalds knows that I don't care, and therefore doesn't waste time bothering to make irrelevant declarations to the world regarding their internal tech.

Re:Maybe companies are keeping quiet about

[shibashaba]

I agree but for different reasons. Most companies I would think just want to stay out of the pissing contests. While the world as a whole dosen't care what companies use, every software and hardware vendor is definately interested in what companies use.

Re:Maybe companies are keeping quiet about

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what internal tech McDonalds uses, and don't care. McDonalds knows that I don't care, and therefore doesn't waste time bothering to make irrelevant declarations to the world regarding their internal tech.

I know what internal tech McDonalds uses, and I do care about it - to the extend of not going to the McDonalds next door to my office, instead choosing to walk three minutes more to the Burger King down the street.

The reason? McDonalds' choice of operating system.

Re:Maybe companies are keeping quiet about

[init100]

I don't know what internal tech McDonalds uses, and don't care.

IIRC, I think they use SCO Unix

Re:Monkey dance coming to an OSS migration near yo

[jskline]

I don't know...

Balmer comes in and begins to twist my arm, it would give me damned good reason to kick his ass from here to the very edge of the curb in the front parking lot... and then I'd tell him to never ever show his sorry-assed hiny up here ever again.

I don't no **** from nobody! :-)

Especially him.

I can tolerate the monkey dance simply because I can turn it off or get up and leave. :-)

True story.

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1996, I was working at a Fortune 500 company, and we were planning to migrate many of our systems from Big Blue to Microsoft. I was in charge of choosing the best C++ tool, and after some meetings with programmers I chose Microsoft Visual C++. We had a conference call with some Microsoft sales people one day, and while there were only 2-3 of us speaking with them, the move to Microsoft was a really big deal in the company, and a lot of people were opposed to it, so there were several big wigs in the room just listening in. Microsoft got on the line, and they immediately started shouting. They asked me questions and then cut me off before I could answer them, they swore at us, and they said that if we didn't choose their product that they were going to go to our managers and show them how daft we were, etc. We were buying the product! After a couple minutes of this, we just sat in stunned silence. It was my meeting, so I said "Alright, I think we're done here." and hung up. I was completely flustered and terrified, and my hands were shaking. We all filed out of the room, and I tried not to look at anyone in the eye. A year later, I was writing Java code.

Re:True story.

[CyricZ]

Ouch. I'm sorry that you had to develop with Java.

Re:True story.

[Anonymous Coward]

That story is complete bullshit.

Re:True story.

[Anonymous Coward]

The story is absolutely true, and actually it was kind of nice programming in Java after running the Microsoft treadmill.

Re:True story.

[jcr]

Wish you'd recorded that call, dude.

-jcr

Re:True story.

[Anonymous Coward]

True Story.

I was going to switch my Fortune 500 company's internal servers from M$ WinBlows 200POOP to GNU/Linux, but then Richard Stallman raped my grandmother in the ass.

A year later, I'm still administering IIS.

We don't tell the managers-Music Video

[Anonymous Coward]

"So they only ever hear about things that costs money and gets a distorted view of things."

Software for nothing, labour for free.

Wrong kind of company

[nurb432]

An IT company can take the risk, they understand what is going on, and often so do their customers.

Now take a non IT company, and its a big risk and they often do stay quiet.

It's because open source is communism:)

[max born]

And communists always do things in secret.

There was a CNET interview with Bill Gates earlier this year in which he suggests:

There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

Re:It's because open source is communism:)

[dbIII]

There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises

There is a certain mindset that identifies anyone that does anything for anyone outside of their immediate family without receiving financial gain for it as a communist.

Re:It's because open source is communism:)

[spectecjr]

There is a certain mindset that identifies anyone that does anything for anyone outside of their immediate family without receiving financial gain for it as a communist.

And then there are people who want to get rid of all forms of intellectual property, and ensure that everything is Free as in liberty and Free as in cash - and force everyone else to do the same.

Re:It's because open source is communism:)

[Jonti]

"there are people who want to get rid of all forms of intellectual property, and ensure that everything is Free as in liberty and Free as in cash - and force everyone else to do the same"

Exactly wrong, bud. It is the believers in "Intellectual Property" who need to use force to stop folks using ideas, or methods, or forms of speech or code. Without that State-backed force or the threat of it, all those things would be as free as the air.

Re:It's because open source is communism:)

[spectecjr]

Exactly wrong, bud. It is the believers in "Intellectual Property" who need to use force to stop folks using ideas, or methods, or forms of speech or code. Without that State-backed force or the threat of it, all those things would be as free as the air.

Thing is, bud, that if you don't believe people should be compensated for the things they craft using their mind, then why should anyone be compensated for anything at all? ... which takes us right back to the communism idea.

Re:It's because open source is communism:)

[Anonymous Coward]

> There is a certain mindset that identifies anyone that does anything for anyone outside of their immediate family without receiving financial gain for it as a communist.

Damn radical Libertarians :/

Re:It's because open source is communism:)

[Jonti]

Your point was about the use of force.

It is the believers in "Intellectual Property" who need to use force to stop folks using ideas, or methods, or forms of speech or code.

No should or shouldn't about it. It's just the way it is.

Re:It's because open source is communism:)

[spectecjr]

Your point was about the use of force.

No, it wasn't. But thanks for playing.

... it's the Munich Linux thing

[wysiwia]

Munich's transition to Linux shows one thing for sure: There are lots of third party products which are Windows-only! Unfortunately Munich doesn't provide any number but Mannheim says they have about 150 and I know our company has about 130. As you see this is a number you simply can't forget, each (or many) of them might be a killer argument. So the first and most important task to help Linux to success, is to reduce the number of Windows-only application!

The solutions are different and may vary from Java applications to terminal server but there are always a few left which have to be done with C++. And at least for these but also for some of the others there is wyoGuide (URL:http://wyoguide.sf.net). It shows how you can code in a cross-platform fashion with all the features and tricks C++ provides.

O. Wyss

Competitive advantage

[Epeeist]

There is another explanation. I worked for an expert systems company when it was "the next big thing". There were very few reports in the press about companies developing expert systems, though people in the field knew a lot was being done.

The major reason was that the possibility of getting a competitive advantage by producing something that nobody else had.

The same may be true here but in a different way - you just removed a large amount of your cost base, but you don't want your competitors to know about it because they might start doing the same thing.

You should not fear Don Balmero ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don Balmero only wants from you a fair share for protection. Of course when you start getting crack from open source for less he can get angry ...

Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/03/163 9208&tid=187&tid=218
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/17/17 55203&tid=155&tid=106

It costs more, so it has got to be better...right?

[sipbroker]

This is the mentality of alot of IT managers and fear stems from two simple words "Commercial Support". The reality is though, that many of the largest software companies are raising their stakes in open source technology and many of their big customers are starting to realise the savings. IBM for example dumped its own webserver a few years back and now invests millions in open-source projects. By simple expanding the base functionality, they are able to quickly develop commercial products, such as their Eclipse-based development tools. In a few years time the world will wonder what we did before OSS.

Re:But it's not always FUD or hidden M$ conspiraci

[shibashaba]

Lucky you, last time I called comcast after they found out I was using linux all the stupid bitch would do was YELL we don't support linux over and over. All I was trying to find out is if there was an outage.

Fear? Not at all...

[3seas]

There is just this unwritten, unspoken objective that we all know...

When the time is right, we are all going to drop MS at the same time....

The quite about it is all about prepration for that time.

But it won't be called the boston tea party, nor "the great software flap"

It's be something like "the great quiet private digital dump-n-flush"

Re:Fear? Not at all...

[16K Ram Pack]

I think it's more like a snowball effect. There's 3 parts - software developers, hardware and users. The more users use Linux, the more people will develop software for it, and the more hardware will be supported. The effect of this is that more users will see it as an acceptable solution and the more users, etc etc.

We are seeing some strong shoots now. The first commercial laptops appearing from major manufacturers bundled with Linux, Nero for Linux and cities looking at switching (and a switch to OpenOffice.org is an "unbinding" of your users).

I think that we'll see slow growth for the next 5 or so years, followed by it really moving very fast.

Don't let someone else see you rid it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be a troll or anything but,

does this mean that Linux is being relegated to the likes of fat chicks and mopeds?

Some of that fear is well-founded

[Junks Jerzey]

Please don't label me as a troll. I understand the benefits of OSS as much as anyone.

Honestly, I think much of the problem comes from over-hyping OSS. It should be obvious that the usefulness of OSS is directly related to the quality of the software, but unfortunately there's a tendency to lump all open software together. Witness how many people respond to "There's no good OSS equivalent of Photoshop" with "Use the GIMP!" when in reality there's no comparison, even with the Photoshop GUI hacks for The GIMP.

Numerous times I've looked at open source clones of software, only to dismiss them because they're written by bored students with little software engineering experience. I'd hate to become attached to something that the author could drop when he gets a job or girlfriend or new game system. You run much less risk when there's a company behind it. Sure, I *could* learn the code and take over it myself, but that's unrealistic. You can't just pick up a 50,000+ line program and understand it. (In many cases looking at the code would be enough to make me avoid that program.)

Bottom line: Some OSS is good, some is crap. J"OSS" isn't any kind of magic term.

Re:Some of that fear is well-founded

[ccp]

Bottom line: Some OSS is good, some is crap.

And this is different from propietary exactly how?

And, BTW, good troll!

Cheers,

Re:Some of that fear is well-founded

[Coryoth]

Bottom line: Some OSS is good, some is crap. J"OSS" isn't any kind of magic term.

Very, very true. Anyone can write a piece of crap and release it as OSS. A quick browse through freshmeat or soureforge will turn up any number of OSS projects that are, quite simply, complete garbage. But then that shouldn't really be the point. OSS isn't a magic term that makes software good, sure, but the real point is that "Proprietary Shrink Wrapped Software" isn't a magic term that makes software good either. Which is to say the claim shouldn't be that OSS software is all good, but merely that OSS can be an entirely viable option - sometimes it is every bit as good, and sometimes better, than proprietary alternatives.

Why is that even worth mentioning? As obvious as it may seem to us, the reality is that the concept of freely available, community developed software being anything but cheap crap is not really that widespread in the mainstream. The concept that maybe, for this project, using an open source solution (and the advantages that that model of development offers) might be the best way to go, is only really starting to dawn on a lot of businesses. OSS advocacy (the sane kind at least) isn't about OSS as a magic solution, but rather about OSS as entirely viable solution in some cases, and a solution that offers its own unique advantages.

Jedidiah.

Re:Some of that fear is well-founded

[westlake]

the concept of freely available, community developed software being anything but cheap crap is not really that widespread in the mainstream

Maybe that is because the OS apps with "mainstream" recognition have been community projects in name only. It is the Sun logo the user sees when he launches OpenOffice.

Re:Some of that fear is well-founded

[zCyl]

I'd hate to become attached to something that the author could drop when he gets a job or girlfriend or new game system.

Actually, one of the most important things about open source projects is that the important ones DON'T disappear when they get dropped. Either a new developer picks it up, or the code is forked into a differently named project or absorbed into a larger project. Open source software can survive a primary developer disappearing much better than proprietary software can survive a company dropping support for a product.

Why is this even a question?

[supabeast!]

Media coverage of computers - particularly magazines that focus on tech - has always been biased to the point of printing outright lies to suck up to big advertisers. Remember the old "Upgrading costs more than new computers" myth Ziff-Davis publications perpetuated for years? Or all those post-bubble cover stories about how CA's new CEO had turned the company around with great new products and huge new customer accounts, when that was clearly not the case, and the company was just cooking the books?

Computing media is some of the worst crap on earth - and anyone who puts much faith in them as good sources of information is a moron.

Let's make the MS fanboys happy:

[Hosiah]

They've been complaining about the Billy-as-Borg icon for years. Let's get rid of it...and replace it with Billy-as-the-Godfather. Really, they aren't Borg anymore, they've been busted down to "common thugs"...still fearsome, but no longer insurmountable. The fact that they have to resort to such tactics proves this.

Re:Let's make the MS fanboys happy:

[TubeSteak]

I swear I read Billy-as-the-Goat instead of Godfather.

I think a little facial hair might give Bill Gates a more mature appearance anyways.

Re:Monkey dance coming to an OSS migration near yo

[Anonymous Coward]

Or chair throwing

Re:Single worst thing

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you talking about?

Re:Single worst thing

[SoSueMe]

You're absolutely right!
I need to change my comment threshold.

Thanks for the tip!

We do this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Writing as an AC for obvious reasons.

We're moving a lot of things to Linux and open source, not because of any political agenda but because we're trying to get the best tool for the job, and when it comes to science, a lot of the best tools are Unix/Linux-based.

Being a private company on a fierce market we keep our mouths shut about this for obvious reasons, as I'm sure all of our competitors do too.

Re:We do this.

[dbIII]

Being a private company on a fierce market we keep our mouths shut about this for obvious reasons

Many of the clients of the company I work for are very conservative oil companies - and they are all happy to hear that we run a lot of geophysical software on linux. The reality is the niche was one MS ignored and the software has been around for decades, so none of the software involved will run on an MS platform but will run on linux (and AIX, Solaris etc).

Also MS is too much of a moving target, ever tried running a VB app written for win3.1 on a modern system, or even on a win98 machine put together for that purpose? In comparison, linux has examples like "xv", a *nix image viewer that many people use today that has it's last release date as 1992 - since then it's only had minor patches to add support for image formats that didn't exist back then.

Competitive advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've found a way to cut your IT budget in half, why on earth would you want to show your competition how to do it? Better to publically lament the high cost of IS/IT and privately pocket the difference.

Monkeyman

[Anonymous Coward]

'They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry'

All I can say is ....

'Here's a song for the bouncers .... Monkeyman'

The funny thing is ...

[Infernal Device]

It isn't anyone's business what software a particular company chooses to use, be it Open Source or Commercial. For public offices, I can see it as having some importance, but people are making way too much noise about the use of commercial software.

The only metric that matters is whether or not a particular piece of software gets the job done with the least amount of problems.

Re:The funny thing is ...

[julesh]

It isn't anyone's business what software a particular company chooses to use, be it Open Source or Commercial.

Yes it is. If I do business with a company in a way that will require an exchange of data, I need to be able to understand the data formats that will be used. This means one of two situations must occur:

* The data format used is a proprietary format. In this case, we both need to be using identical software.
* The data format used is an open standard. In this case, the software used is irrelevant, at least as long as the standard is followed adequately by both parties.

Now, in the former case, it matters to me very much whether or not the software in question is open source or commercial, largely because I don't want to have to pay for it. If I do have to pay for it, I'm likely to take my business elsewhere.

That might be true in government

[HangingChad]

In government, at almost any level, if you try an open source implementation it's very wise just to keep quiet about it. Then when the reaction comes you can inform them their system has been running on an OSS platform for the last six months without a hitch. If MSFT gets wind of it they'll be calling legislators up and down the chain reminding them how much money proprietary software brings them. And if there's the slightest little problem the NBMers will seize on that to discredit the entire project.

My business customers don't seem to give a crap. If it works, they'll use it. MSFT can whine all they want and it'll get them nowhere. On the other hand if MSFT offers them a compelling deal they're not going to have any more loyalty to OSS.

Ballmer is engaged in an endless game of whack-a-mole. And the moles are popping up faster than even the mighty MSFT can keep pace with. The fact that Ballmer has to waste his time to personally strong-arm organizations is the highest compliment he can pay to those of you involved in OSS projects. Not only can you change the world for the better, you can get under Ballmer's skin and make him burn some avgas in that expensive plane he flies around in. Hehe. Bonus.

Re:That might be true in government

[dbIII]

In government, at almost any level, if you try an open source implementation it's very wise just to keep quiet about it. Then when the reaction comes you can inform them their system has been running on an OSS platform for the last six months without a hitch. If MSFT gets wind of it they'll be calling legislators up and down the chain reminding them how much money proprietary software brings them.

It looks like you don't have a software problem - you have a corruption problem.

Re:That might be true in government

[jlanthripp]

It looks like you don't have a software problem - you have a corruption problem.

Well, he was talking about the government. That corruption is {part|all} of the problem is a given.

Re:That might be true in government

[chawly]

And you don't ? You sure ???

Re:That might be true in government

[dbIII]

And you don't ? You sure ???

Used to have a lot of it.

Where I live a lot of people are very aware of corruption because there was a lot of blatant bribery at the very top level - the police commissioner and several government ministers went to jail over it and the former premier (who labelled most of his opponents as communist, including the local Catholic and C of E Bishops) escaped jail due to a hung jury and it being decided a retrial wasn't worth it, despite him being infamous for taking bribes. Think of US south politics in bad times but set in Australia.

A lot less of it goes on because when people see a stupid decision that will benefit an outside group to the detriment of the organisation they look for the bribes.

Not in big places.

[jotaeleemeese]

Big bussinesses have legal constraints to control change in Production systems.

Especially onerous is the situation in the Financial Industry. I kid you not, but I have seen foreign machines detected and isolated in a matter of minutes in properly administered networks.

That does not mean these bussinesses do not use OSS solutions. Heck, they take full advantage of it, but they do so under a controlled process that minimizes risks.

Re:But it's not always FUD or hidden M$ conspiraci

[Jester998]

Reminds me of when I moved into a new apartment a while back. I had my DSL line moved over from my previous place, but I was getting tons of sync problems. I called to have them turn on interleaving, but of course first line tech support had to go through their standard scripts before they'd pass me onto someone who knew what they were talking about.

Tech Support: "Are you using a router?"
Me: "I have a gateway server..."
Tech Support: "What brand is it?"
Me: "Umm, it's a computer."
Tech Support: "Does it say D-Link or Linksys or something on it?"
Me: "No... it's a computer that I've configured to do NAPT, DNS, DHCP and stuff like that."
Tech Support: "So it's not a little box about 8 inches long?"
Me: "No... it's a full-sized computer."
Tech Support: "OK... *longish pause* What operating system are you using?"
Me: "The machine connected to the DSL bridge is FreeBSD."
Tech Support: "Umm, I mean what version of Windows."
Me: "..."
Tech Support: "Like, Windows 98 or XP?"
Me: "It's not Windows at all, it's FreeBSD... it's a different kind of operating system."

I don't really blame the person I was talking to... most of the first-line support staff are people who are barely computer literate and only manage to do their jobs by reading the support scripts. I found it more amusing (though a waste of time) than anything else.

Even CLEAN Audits are Expensive

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

I've been through one software audit ... we were squeaky clean, but it took about 4 hours of my time. Multiply that by the 25,000+ employees of that company, at their fully loaded pay rate and it was DAMNED EXPENSIVE to come up squeaky-clean.

Twist your arm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when does Steve Ballmer twist your arm until you cry? Come on folks, a more realistic scenario would be him hurling a chair at you, then threatening to `fucking kill' and bury you.

Why should users boast about it?

[Anonymous Coward]

My company, a big financial institution (one of the most recognizable names in the world), has Open Source all around the place.

Red Hat servers (growing by the month and threatening both Windows an UNIX, read Solaris).
Open SSH.
Perl.
Apache.
500+ Linux desktops (for a call center).
and in appliances as well (filers, firewalls, and other more esoteric products based in OSS).

but our work is not to boast (heck, we are forbidden to do so, my ass would be busted if I would disclose who I am talking about), it is to deliver solutions, and from that point of view we are completely agnostic.

We are looking at single sign on solutions for example, and there is no chance in hell for us to use OSS, it is simply too complicated to implement and administer. But if there was something out there it would be checked, no question about it.

Once a solution is in place nobody is going to go and be cocky about it, OSS does not have a marketing team and it is not our role to get the word out.

If Red Hat wants, they can (and should IMHO) boast about getting such a big foothold, but as others have mentioned, companies are not very keen to let know the competition what they are using and the hackers what is being deployed.

So for the time being you will have to do with ACs like me, but to all the OSS supporters I can say this: you are making big inroads in enterprise class software, people are seriously questioning why we should have to put up with MS's forced upgrade cycles and propietary formats. Even our Windows Sys Admins are questioning the wisdom to develop mostly for IE internally.

Fear of software audits

[Hangeron]

Why would companies ever allow someone to audit their systems? Sounds crazy that they'd agree to sign a contract like that.

Re:Monkey dance coming to an OSS migration near yo

[davygrvy]

Just don't force me to drink any of that funny KoolAid is all I ask, thank you.

Syntax error

[dbIII]

So does MySQL do named query parameters? I wrote a webapp in asp.net 1.1 using mysql to see if I could really replace MS SQL with MySQL

Learn how to use the tools you use - it doesn't take much to read some docs to work out the required syntax to get something to work. MS SQL is as close to another standard of SQL as visual basic is to other forms of basic.

Re:Syntax error

[bit trollent]

Well I did get the whole forum part of the webapp working with MySQL. If you mean figuring out a way to use named parameters then I'm affraid I have looked and not found a way to use them. In getting stuff to work I have found plenty of ways of getting around this missing feature.

I want to make clear that the reason I even used MySQL was to be able to use it if I ever needed to, specifically to save on licensing fees. I read plenty of documentation, and got a decent handle on how MySQL works. I wanted to replace MS SQL with it. I made it work before I decided the workarounds just weren't worth it.

If you know of some way to use named parameters then please tell me here and now. I have looked through many pages of documentation and found nothing. I find named parameters so usefull because they save me a ton of time and make my code more readable.

Do other open source databases have named parameters? If so which ones do?

Re:It costs more, so it has got to be better...rig

[dbIII]

In a few years time the world will wonder what we did before OSS

There was something similar before Bill Gates took the new fangled idea of charging people for software instead of just hardware and support and ran with it. Commercial software is the new kid on the block.

Re:But it's not always FUD or hidden M$ conspiraci

[Hosiah]

Oh, I accepted that lying about my OS to my ISP was a necessity a LONG time ago. My DSL *insists* on not supporting Linux (even if I try to explain to them that I got online *just* *fine* with Linux and offer to explain how so they can stop turning away customers - their response is something along the lines of "La La La I'm not LISTENINGGGGGG").

So these days, I just greet their service tech at the door, accept the package, say I'll install it just fine, thanks, and shut the door before he gets too nosey.

And the manager stories are even less surprising. Me, handing in my first edition of the company newsletter I got stuck doing: Manager: "Looks great! How'd you do these graphics?" "I used Gimp's foo-filter and layered the..." "You WHAT!?!?!" "Er...I worked on it all night in Photoshop." "Oh, that's what I thought you said. And an excellent example of Photoshop's superiority it is, too!"

Once GPL, they can't go back

[Anonymous Coward]

Once GPL, they can't go back to keeping their source and eating it too. Once a product has been under GPL it always will be. If they don't tell anyone, they can close the source and sell it as their own. That's why the corporate IT avoids it.

worth a dmn on the desktop

[weierstrass]

Linux on the desktop is at least as good as Windows 95 in all areas, and much better in some.
This considering only core OS utilities, not the whole bunch of software you get with most distros.

Re:worth a dmn on the desktop

[Ravatar]

Think about what you just said. Then read your statement and think about it again.

Flame Bait

[Eric Damron]

"Just because this is new to you doesn't mean it's new or at all unusual."

Rude Dude.

Hi, I'm Elmer FUD

[Hosiah]

And I'll get dat wascawwy penguin! hahahahaha!

Stick with what works

[random-2001]

Personally i think people just dont want to change. If a system works well enough for the present its logical to assume that it will work for the future. I mean why use open source if a proprietary solution works well enough.

Re:Stick with what works

[Anonymous Coward]

why build a new product if the product you sell now is doing fine?

Commercial OSS is a lot about shutting up.

[Qbertino]

Running your business on OSS or making money of OSS is about shutting up about it. How would I look if I'd say I've underpriced my competitors by 50% for that corporate website because it runs of an OSS CMS? It's the remaining 50% we make money on. And finance our active support and development of OSS. The competitors make even a larger amount of money (if they'd sell) but they can bullshit about their efforts and technology all the way because it's closed source.
When you do OSS on the other hand, you market yourself more than the product. That's why OSS isn't talked about that often.

There are partners we have who couldn't care less if the framework we're using is being built as OSS and available under a different name at sf.net - but they do want us not to advertise that to their competitors. Quite logical.

Be it that that extremly powerfull framework at that famous software copmany costs 15000$ dollars. It doesn't matter as long as only a few know that the very same thing is available as OSS. And even those who do will shut up about it. :-)

OSS business isn't about talking about things, it's about knowing things. And talking usually doesn't cut it anyway, because people who need the advantage of OSS technologies explained often are to dumb to understand that explaination. I've learned that more than once. Might aswell just wait until it sinks in and gain business momentum along the way.

maybe what we need is..

[Anonymous Coward]

..a demand aggregator. Someplace where its a buyer's market. Where suppliers can come in and see like 1000 licenses of said software required, they will be willing to offer discounts. justa crazy idea. Why hasnt it happended yet?

-1 True?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I get one reply telling me to read the manual, and some dickless wonder mods me down troll.

Fucking great. Slashdot is SHIT. AND YOU DUMBFUCK MODERATORS ARE THE REASON. CUT YOUR DICKS OFF BEFORE YOU INFECT THE WORLD WITH YOUR SEED.

negotiating 101 here

[Anonymous Coward]

1. I buy $1,000,000 worth of your product at a 50 percent discount
2. I pay 10 percent maintenance fee ($100,000)
3. At the end of the 5 year contract, I only want to renew 1/2 of what I originally bought
4. Vendor charges a 40 percent increase on maintenance ($70,000) because I am still a demanding customer, I open lots of support calls, and my action of only throwing 1/2 of their software out tells them that I am going to stop using them in the future.

That has nothing to do with open source and fear of losing paying customers. It has everything to do with basic business buying just as it would in any industry buying any product in large volume.

It's no consipiracy of commercial versus open source.

Voyager Finale - SPOILER

[dodongo]

Really, they aren't Borg anymore, they've been busted down to "common thugs"...still fearsome, but no longer insurmountable.

Clearly you haven't seen the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager. All we need are transphasic torpedoes (or whatever the hell they were) and a neurally-accessed Janeway hologram, and all our Microsoft problems will be solved. ....Or will they??

Scarcity

[dodongo]

Unlike a ham sandwich, which can only be eaten once.

Economically speaking (I'm a linguist, not an economist, damnit!), this relates to things like scarcity and COGS (cost of goods sold). The direct expenses in selling software come from the expectations of the consumer: flashy box, manuals, media. The bulk of the expenses in producing software come from time: paying people to make things (code, packaging, marketing). In the case of downloadable software, the only realy direct expense in distribution is bandwidth.

In the ham sandwich case, for example, the price is driven by the relative scarcity of the item. There is only one ham sandwich, and you can only sell it to one interested party, before you as the salesperson no longer have the sandwich and have to prepare anothher. Each incidence of an item sold increases the COGS numbers in a pretty linear fashion; for software, what expense there is comes in the form of labor. Gold code can be reproduced and distributed for far under the ham-sandwich-type model.

And furthermore, bullshit to grandparent's "you wouldn't take free stuff". Ever been to a college campus or a radio station remote broadcast? People will do freaking anything to get a free t-shirt or a can of Coke.

Re:Yeah, FUD works... Not

[mysticgoat]

One of your premises is flawed.

A typical FOSS project is something like a medeval cathedral, built by small donations of labor and skill given by large numbers of contributors over a long time. Some of the individuals might do it for ego satisfaction, but most contribute because the work will increase their saleable skills or because they need a particular tool and extending a FOSS project like POV-Ray, Blender, GCC, or Apache is the best way to get it.

However, unlike a cathedral that starts to weather as soon as the cornerstone is laid, FOSS is immune to entropy. It only gets better and better over time, as more people make small contributions. Also, the code a contributor adds to a FOSS project is going to be debugged and refined by the supporting community in a way that no individual programmer could ever manage on his own.

In short, you cannot legitimately talk about a FOSS project without talking about its support community. It is this community's interaction with the software that adds the value to the FOSS project.

FOSS isn't a zero-sum game. A FOSS project is a community effort that creates new wealth out of nothing, where each contribution is of negligible cost to the contributor. There is nothing comparable in the commercial software world. Twenty hours of coding (or debugging, or writing user docs) for a FOSS project is qualitatively not comparable to the purchase cost of commercial software. The first is an investment in a community wealth generator; the second is an expenditure.

You are confused

[Per Abrahamsen]

There is a huge difference between giving a volume discount, and an "exclusive supplier discount". The first is standard practice. The second is not, and is often illegal (as well as always unethical) if you are in a monopoly position. You demonstrate either ignorance or malice by mixing the two up.

Also, "the other kids are doing it" wasn't a good excuse in kindergarden, and still isnt a good excuse in the world of grown up ethics.

FUD

[Per Abrahamsen]

Actually, FUD works well for free software, but in another way than you imply. FUD used to mean something, Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. In particular, it refered to the practice of IBM to discourage competition, back in their monopoly days. "Sure, you could by it from our competitors for half the price. But will they be around tomorrow? And where will you get maintainance then? With IBM, you *known* we will be there for the long run."

The problem with FUD is that it is the true. The average life expectancy for a proprietary vendor that goes up against the market leader is very low.

But this works to the advantage of free software is the same. "Sure, you can buy a solution from a proprietary vendor. It may even have a lower TCO than our product today, But what will the price be tomorrow? Will they even be around tomorrow? Even if they are still around, will you be their focus? Or will they concentrate on the latest shining thing in the busniness world? If so, you may end up with a dead end product, which you can't change, and can't hire someone else to maintain. Not so with us. With our solution based on free software, you can always choose another vendor, should we fail to deliver satisfying performance. And even if we go down, our engineers will still exists, and they (like everybody else) will have the right to modify and distribute the software. So there will always be someone, and control of this ressource will be in your hands, not in the hands of another company."

What's FUD?

[vampares]

You scare me.

Start-ups will benefit most

[Peter_JS_Blue]

It seems that start-ups will benefit most from FOSS if they make the decision to only use FOSS from day 1 - like Google & Yahoo on the huge end of the scale and small start-ups like us (M2MN) on the microscopic end of the scale.

The more established companies will probably have a mix of FOSS and Proprietary software and can allways be easily coerced / bullied by certain vendors especially if they use proprietary software in their infrastructure.

We use FOSS ( Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, PHP, MySQL, ... ) because it allows us to develop many mini-projects at near zero cost and if one or two start to earn money, we can detach them from our "incubator" and convert them into self-contained businesses when the time is right. ( One of our mini-projects Rare List Rare Book Community is almost at that stage.)

Now multiply that by the thousands of companies who (thanks to FOSS) are now able to fund dozens of projects and you start to see why the big vendors are so shit scared. We (and all the others) are just too small and numerous for them to target en-mass. Like millions of ants nibbling away at your market, you may stomp on a few but there are thousands more in the pipeline.

If that was not scary enough for those vendors, quite a few of those FOSS "ants" could grow large enough to bite your legs off - Google, Yahoo anyone !!

Peter Blue - Technologist, Entrepreneur & Project developer

Not quite-Bipolar Ethics.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Two wrong don't make a right. I know it's fashionable to ignore ethics in American business..."

Just businesses? I love the "us verses them" bipolar viewpoint in the morning. Big clue, it's fashionable for the average citizen to ignore ethics. Second big clue. Companies are composed of citizens. See if you all can put two and two together.

Human Mindset is the Problem

[TarrySingh]

Here's the problem: --People just somehow trust stuff that is on the shelf and costs something. --People are not used to accepting free stuff and see it's relevance in their enviroment as being directly deployable. --Windows is a disease and sysadmins are bunch of retards who just install the Open Source OS and then stop because they have to continue downloading their movies/video's/music/chat , the activity which benifits MS so well The mindset has been set in retarded_state=force mode and it HAS got to change!

try this

[heybo]

I think you left something out. Try this...

SELECT * FROM forum WHERE ForumID='@ForumID';

Don't forget the single ' around @ForumID. Remember VB2005 was written to work with MS products the best. I've been using MySQL for years and the only problem I've had is geting VS to work with it WHEN I used VS. We changed to IBM WebSphere and Java for development and will NEVER go back. The big reason we changed. MS only supporting it own. IBM's tools work just as good with their competiors stuff as their own like a development platform should.

Hope this helps.

IBM just works with everything and you will find what made other products appear to be broken in VS 2005 doesn't happen in WebSphere. It just works!

A bad example

[heybo]

"If a company uses a lot of IBM products and migrates to another application server, then a political thing comes into play. Whether they are switching to BEA or JBoss doesn't matter -- they are reluctant to publicise as they still have to maintain a relationship with IBM," Connolly says.

Yes IBM would like to sell you their product but if you are using something else that IS "Open Standard Compliant" then it works with their products, and they are happy to work with you to make it work with the "Other Guys" stuff. Their development tools work with the other guys platforms.

Try that with MS and watch the screaming, cussing, threats and FUD start to fly. Try using their development tools with the other guys platform and watch it all break or watch yourself jump through hoops of real fire. Call tech support and they blame the problem on the other guys platform. Of course they will be happy to tell you how wonderful it all works IF you use MS!

MS is like Ford using 13 1/2" wheels that only Firestone makes the tires for. So if you are going to drive a Ford you MUST use Firestone tires to go down the road. IBM on the other hand builds their car with 14" rims that anyone's tires will fit on.

Isn't that the way things are suppose to work? This works well in all other fields of work. Why not IT? Do we know how to spell "User Lock IN"?

A use for powerless minions ...

[RockDoctor]

From TFA : Companies may also choose to keep a low profile about projects to avoid a time-consuming sales visit from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft, according to Aaron Seigo, who works as a consultant with projects deploying the desktop environment KDE.

"I've seen it happen first hand," says Seigo. "Microsoft sees it as a lost sale, so you'll get a phone call and they'll try to send in one of their regional sales people. He'll ask 'why are you running Linux? How many machines are you running?' and so on. From a sales intelligence perspective it makes sense, but most companies find that invasive."

Won't take no for an answer
It can be difficult to avoid such a visit, according to Seigo. "They will keep calling. Microsoft usually has very good sales people so they will be persistent -- they won't take the first 'no' for an answer," he says.

At last, I've found a use for that retarded moron son of the Boss, who we keep in the stationary cupboard ensuring that the paperclips are all stored in the correct orientation. We give him the job title "Senior Vice President for Co-ordination of Communications with Microsoft", put a sign to that effect on the door to the stationary cupboard, give him a phone without outgoing calls capabilty, give his telephone number and job title to Microsoft, and then lock the Microsoft visitor in the cupboard with him.
As long as no-one who actually works at work talks to the SVPCCM (this is the cunning bit - that's why I specified the Boss's moron son), we can have the morale boost of being nasty to both MS and the Moron Son (another MS!, it's an emergent property. I didn't plan that. I feel the touch of the Noodly Appendage - this must be the One True Solution.), while getting on with doing our real work without disturbance.

Could we sell tickets? I think so! More fun than pulling the wings off flies, and much more morally defensible.

Re:Not quite a commie

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppose you actually WERE a communist? Suppose Communist party candidates actually started running in elections in a place near you. If you lived anywhere outside of the US, this is a real possibility. Tijuana, Mexico has its own 'Parti Comunisa' and they run candidates all the time. Some of them even win! Do you even know what a Communist is? Does Gate$$$ and company? Does
Ballllmer? Right now the monopolists are riding high and roughshod over apathetic populations. But suppose this changes? Suppose the masses of people of the US even are rattled out of their easy chairs by the fact that they now have no job to pay for the 'easy chair'? Suppose the 'easy chair' now has no television in front of it spewing video opiates and pro-police state propaganda simply because in their infinite wisdom the television industry through its paid for political sock puppets succeed in forcing pay television on the entire population using enforced digital conversion and subsequent massive digital encryption. And the poor jobless consumers throw out en masse their now useless black boxes because they can not afford them and are saddened every time they are reminded of their now unrequited addiction every time they see the big heavy chunk whose blank face once displayed something more than a 'subscribe now' message. Communism usually takes root among the dispossessed, and no revolution will ever take place merely because the tv is off. But if other conditions become noticeable because newly awakened sleepers now see just how low they have fallen, the former sleepers may become politically aware as well! The taking of their televisions has not come in a vacuum. Energy prices have risen over 200 percent in as little as under two years. The value of the dollar has fallen over 30 percent in under a year and an apathetic American public is not aware of this. Present government plans are to let speculators buy up all the utility companies and charge whatever the traffic will bear and in any location they choose. The public is not yet really aware of this either. Present public health policy concerning bird flu, which kills upward of seventy percent of those infected, is to retreat the federal senior staff into Cheyenne Mountain and close the gates; protect a small percentage of government and armed service and police command staff (the part of the ruling class with weapons; and to let the rest of the population fend for itself under martial law in the event of an epidemic. That epidemic has already started in Liaoning Province in China with thousands of dead. Seventy seven of its health workers sent to one facility alone died of the disease within days of arrival. Reporters and other witnesses who attempt to report on it are threatened with jail by the Chinese authorities. The Chinese actually claim to be communist, but no longer practice it as they tore up the social contract that is part of it and they basically leave the people there to fend for themselves.
    If it hits here and that 70 percent fatality rate holds, over two hundred million Americans and a hundred million Mexicans will die. Among the survivors there will be little sympathy for the life expectancy of the monopolists who brought them so much death so that they could make more immoral profit on the blood of the peoples of the world. They will know that the government, like Nero, fiddled while Rome burned. Politicians have spent the time when they could have manufactured enough vaccine and anti-flu drug, not by manufacturing the materials but rather protecting the windfall profits of the so called intellectual property 'holders' and negotiating for small amounts of these materials 'to save money'. What good will these savings and these 'intellectual properties' do anyone if they are DEAD?!
          If they call you a communist, know what they are; the label 'communist' may have more honor than you think! For if
you survive the coming holocaust, it will be up to you and your fellows to see that this NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN! You survivors will have to try all those monopolists as fast as they come creeping out of
the ground and from under rocks in a new judgement at Nuremberg. I suspect your guillotines will be busy!

Re:Yeah, FUD works... Not

[NineNine]

The first is an investment in a community wealth generator; the second is an expenditure.

I disagree that it's a "community wealth generator". Nobody who supports OSS ever addresses the fact that paid programming jobs are being lost to OSS projects. Proprietary software generates hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue for the companies and the employees that make and maintain it. OSS generates a few hundred million, if that much.
 
It's the same as if a wealthy person opened up a plumbing company for fun (which is essentially what OSS is... wealthy people doing it for fun). Assume that this new plumbing company did plumbing work for free. There are most definitely going to be unemployed or at least underemployed plumbers in that same are simply due to the lost business. There's really no way around this... OSS destroys *much* more wealth than it creates. So sure, you may get some neat-o app for free, but don't forget the guy who's trying to make a living and support his family (and our taxes) by programming.

Re:Yeah, FUD works... Not

[hug_the_penguin]

No. you're forgetting that a lot of free/libre software is not free/beer. It's not just free/libre that takes customers away, it's free/beer software too. As for your comment that free/beer is a bad thing, you can't possibly suggest that it's a bad thing that people are donating their time to these projects. Yes, people have to make a living, but that doesn't mean people should be stopped from doing things for free. Steve Ballmer tried to pull the `my family has to eat` routine too, and it isn't working. Free/beer software is done not to wreck other people but to help people who don't want to shell out for expensive software. End of the day, if your product isn't sufficiently better than a free/beer one then it isn't worth paying for. You pay for software because it's better, and if it isn't then you make it better so that people will buy it. If you don't like the way things work, go over to communist china.

Re:Yeah, FUD works... Not

[mysticgoat]

Balderdash.

It's the same as if a wealthy person opened up a plumbing company for fun (which is essentially what OSS is... wealthy people doing it for fun)...

First, find a proper example that uses intangible goods or services and so is reasonably similar to software development. Then we'll have the beginnings of a basis for discussion. I'll give you a hint: FOSS is something like a convention of english teachers sharing their best practices with each other and developing a set of recommended lesson plans.

Second, stop with the nitwit unbacked assertion that FOSS is generated only by a few wealthy people as a hobby. Anyone who is willing to spend a few minutes looking at the development forums at OOo, Blender, POV-Ray, Firefox, etc, will quickly realize that a great number of people contribute to these projects, and most of them express concerns that are of distinctly middle class or poor student origin. FOSS isn't like the America Cup races. And since its development process is completely open, anyone can look at the email trail of any FOSS project and realize that the overwhelming majority of participants are just ordinary blokes.