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Steve Ballmer's Thoughts On Free Software
An anonymous reader writes, "Steve Ballmer during a 3-day visit to India was asked about whether Free software is the future of India. And he effectively circumvented the question and answered that in the future, software businesses can look at a number of revenue streams such as subscription fees, lower cost hardware, advertising and of course traditional transaction. What is amusing is that in answering the question, he refuses to use the word 'free' or anything close to it."
No too defend him (too much), but from a businesses point of view, there must be a revenue stream somewhere, be it for development, or just support. At some point, people want to get paid. Free works commercially, as long as someone, generally large companies, is willing to pay for guaranteed support.
...software businesses can look at a number of revenue streams such as...lower cost hardware...
I'm assuming by this he means that as hardware costs drop, the overall product cost can remain the same or even increase, thereby increasing the percentage of revenue that's attributable to the software.
This guy's the limit!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
How was this all formulated and typed within one minute of the news posting?
I think Ballmers, and M$'s ideas on free software can be sumed up by the following statement:
" Free software is fine, as long as it isn't really free, and we control it "
Anything more is simply a waste of words.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
If we're talking about Free Software as in the FSF's definition, the free refers to freedom, not price. I used to make quite a nice living writing and selling Free Software.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
And how are they working around the extreme poverty? And social services?
Yes, I thought so.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Balmer is one of the top level executives at a company whose profits are made by selling proprietary software (Making it neither free-as-in-beer, except for all the pirating, nor Free-as-in-speech). If any major market decides to extensively embrace Free Software, his company stands to lose large amounts of future profits.
Asking him what *he* thinks of free software is not a fair question, neither to him (how can he possibly be honest) nor to anyone else that doesnt already understand that (they are likely to not understand that his answer is evasive at best)
Try asking a buggy whip exectuve what they think of the automobile, and internal combustion engines in general.
Social services in India are a joke -- the black market provides much more for the poor at a cheaper price. I got a terrible high fever in Europe (over 104) and was treated perfectly by an Indian doctor in a black market-type clinic. I paid cash (Rupees) and I couldn't believe how little they asked for the help. Would I get surgery in that clinic? I doubt it. But the fever was treated professionally, in a clean atmosphere, with no wait time. I saw enough poor people in that same clinic and in talking to them realized that there were numerous doctors who ran inexpensive clinics for everyone. The biggest dilemma was the social services officials who jailed (and possibly killed, alledgely) the black market clinics that competed with the terrible free ones.
As for extreme poverty, I saw a lot of poor people doing what they needed to do to get out of that situation -- caused by the high taxes and tyranny that existed within the socialist schemes. Some poor people recycled what they found in the trash (one lady we met with in a poor area actually bought her house by recycling water bottles over 10 years). Some poor people sold coconuts to tourists (very lucrative at 25 cents per coconut). Some poor people did horrific things -- but I've seen indebted Americans do horrific things, too. Overall, I saw people with their eyes glistening for opportunity rather than what I see in my own country -- poor people who submit to the State to take care of everything.
This is a classic tactic. Answer the question you want to answer rather than the one which really was asked of you. Basically Balmer didn't want to discuss free software so he discussed revenue streams (which is all software is about in his mind anyways). Anytime someone does this you can be sure that they're not interested in your interests, just their own.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Seriously. Even with a slashdot subscription where you get a heads up on articles that are about to be posted, this is a long and thought out first post. I'm not a tin foil hat brigade card holder but this smells funny.
I don't know of much free software that is really competitive because truly free software doesn't have the support that it needs to compete with software that does have support.
For most people it's email, office applications, web browser, solitaire. I keep seeing this support argument tossed around and every time I ask myself - honestly, how much support does someone actually need?
I used to do end-user support for a living (think Geek Squad-like work). And 99% of the time, it was getting rid of spyware/viruses. Most people really don't need more than that, in my experience.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The problem with web services is that they are just that - services. You are not in control of your data. Granted, you can use gmail as a pop account and utilize encryption securely that way, but that's not what you mean and it's not what I mean, either. For many people this is all right, but for those of us who care about privacy, it is mandatory. Now, with that said, I use gmail for any communications that I don't care about keeping secure, because it is quite good. However, I also use thunderbird for other mail, and I have a work account and a personal account which I use with it.
Incidentally, if you find thunderbird frustrating, I'm interested in what you think of Outlook. Outlook is very unreliable itself. I was using it for a while so I could try out a Franklin-Covey planning application (which turned out to be pretty lame anyway) and I just sort of kept using it for a while because I was already using it - until one day, without any help from me beyond possibly allowing some security updates at some point, it stopped retrieving my mail and I went back to Thunderbird.
Firefox, by the way, may be a memory leaker, but IE7 is the least responsive IE yet (in terms of the UI) and its memory use has come down to practically nothing relative to how it has been. In fact IE often uses more memory than Firefox on my system now. But just as importantly, Firefox is standards-based, it receives security updates dramatically more rapidly than IE, it has a much richer architecture that allows much more powerful plugins to be donated by the community... No, there are many compelling reasons to use it over IE that have nothing to do with ideology.
Socialism is a red herring. (Couple decades ago, it was communism... ah, how the rhetoric changes, and how it stays the same.) Free software doesn't mean you can't make money. It means that you sell services. This only makes sense - over time there is less and less difference between software packages, not more and more; they all tend to pick the low-hanging fruit first with only limited exceptions which are driven by monetarily directed development, which is to say that some company commits to buying a zillion seats if it does x. Thus they all tend to converge on the same point, or at least wander more or less towards it. At that point the only differentiating feature is service. The Open Source community is in a better position to provide service simply because of its size.
In actuality, this model moves us closer to the ideal of the free market, because those who are best able to provide the service are the ones who are in the best position to profit from it. The person who is best suited to develop the new feature is the one who (ostensibly) gets the job. The people who need it the most pay for it.
I'd like to believe that, but my experience tells me different. In fact most commercial software gets worse and worse as time goes by, not better and better, until it is a big pile of crap that collapses under its own weight and is replaced by the new hotness. On the other hand, Free softwar
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'll learn .NET. I'm more marketable to employers .net skills will not be marketable.
n g_for_unregulated_monopolies (or not)
.Net .net developers chasing fewer .net jobs driving the wages for .net developers down.
Today you will. But tomorrow, economic principals strongly suggest it will be used by fewer and fewer consumers. In a few years, your
Take a look at this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Price_setti
A monopoly strongly tends to produce at a lower quantity (Qm) versus a competitive market. (Qc)
For you, and all other developers that translates into:
1. fewer organizations using
2. More
For you and all consumers, that translages into:
1. More expensive hardware. Microsoft is a price maker. They alone set the price for their OS and get to drive the cost of the computer package up accordingly. They will probably provide at Quantity Qm instead of Qc to OEM's like Dell who have no choice but to pass on that cost to you.
2. Fewer employers using Microsoft products. They will only provide their OS at successively higher prices and lower quantity. There is no reason to believe the price they demand will ever go down because the thirst for profit is unquenchable.
3. Lack of innovation on Microsoft's part. Since Microsoft has no competition, there is no reason to innovate. Like most big businesses they borrow or steal from the innovaters. This will drive many customers away as well.
I still feel like I paid for XP & not the Express tools.
1. As my previous comments point out, you already paid too much.
2. You are limiting your future revenue by adopting microsoft tools. There is no path where Microsoft becomes enlightened and lowers their prices to provide the quantity the market demands. History has proven this repeatedly.
3. You would do well to add GPL'd languages that -today- do not command a premium, but will indeed tomorrow because of Microsoft's monopoly position creating demand between points Qm and Qc.
To silence the quickie-mart economists and Microsofties who claim I just "proved" that the developer world is competitive, please note that economic theory also strongly suggests "consumer surplus" is -still- destroyed despite alternatives.
Today's lesson: There is no good that can come from Microsoft any more.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
However, India has a very serious problem that you appear to view as a virtue.
What you are referring to when you say "black" money is tax evasion, and it is a means of corruption. I don't see how it can be compared to open source software. Can you (or someone else) explain this analogy? I don't see it.
Also, the State can be a burden, but the degree that it is a burden is ultimately under the control of the populace. The State is a necessity; order will always be imposed, contrary to what anarchists fantasize, since order is necessary.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
A. I type very, very fast (learned to type in 1978 at the age of 4) on a Commodore PET.
B. I write for a living -- thousands of words a day, generally.
C. I take notice of Slashdot articles that are pertinent to my future, such as this one.
D. I can write long-winded and fairly accurate articles in minutes, a little longer if I need to add sources.
Not so difficult, really. I have a long history of +5 first posts only because of how I browse slashdot (RSS link to my subscriber account). Love this site because of the interesting replies, so why not get in early to get the best replies, right? Karma means nothing -- I've honestly thought of just posting anonymously (which I have done often enough when I am accused of karma whoring).
Then India will love Linux, because Linux is more pro- free market than Microsoft is. You need to stop thinking of copyrights like a property right, and start thinking of them like a communist regulation that controlls how people use information in the information age.
Let me give an example, at one large data center I worked for they had these NT servers that ran a database application for 1000's of locations. Sure enough the things would crash every day, and sure enough it would cost them over a million dollars per hour of down time. They bought the best x86's that money could buy, they custom re-wrote the tcp/ip stack, but still the computers would crash every single day and still it would cost them over a million dollars per hour. Finally, they flew in experts from all over the planet. The experts came back and said that there was a bug in the OS that was causing it. So my company then went to Microsoft and demanded that they fix it. Microsoft in "business speak" basically said "screw off and FU".
So please tell me that if they had the source, and ownership of that source couldn't be controled. Would they have refused to pay for a fully backed support contract? Would they have said "no were not going pay developers to fix it, because someone else could copy our fixes?" Hell no, that code would have gotten fixed, and every body would have benefited.
In things like software, free riders are not a burden because their copy deosn't deprive me of my copy. But rather, spreads exposure and therefore the chances soneone elses fix will be my fix. So the forces driving Linux forward and pushing Microsoft back are pure unadulterated free market forces and that is that.
Interesting first post; I have been to India twice and have seen many of the remarkable changes brought by Narasimha Rao's and Dr. Manmohan Singh's economic liberalization. It is another example of what improvements can be made when a nation decides to discard the failed ideology of Communism.
India was never communist -- they had a quasi Socialist economy post independence, for a short while. During this time, the state owned most most things, but the private sector was also allowed ownership of a lot of things.
Perhaps you meant Socialism, not Communism?
The little asterisk next to his nickname means he's an anarcho-capitalist. They are able to think and type much more rapidly than garden-variety Pinko-Commie/Libertarian Slashdotters.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
As you can see, Free Software seems committed to avoiding the question - always changing the subject or feigning ignorance of the grammar being used. To be fair, I don't think we can consider this a reasonable position, any more so than Ballmer's at least.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
They have done terrible things in the past. I've still not quite forgiven them for continuing to ship DOS when the 80386 (the original, not the standard), with its 32-bit, flat-memory, model became available. Just a *touch* of vision, and they could have had a 32-bit Xenix (which they owned) running on those machines, and I could have retired some refrigerator-sized VAXes much sooner. This was in 1987, so years and years before NT became an option. They could have done what NeXT/Apple did, and put a nice graphical shell on top of a Unix underpinning, but instead they put an unstable graphical shell on top of 8-bit, single-tasking DOS, and it took them until around 1991 to do that.
A former boss of mine, who had dealt with the Microsoft of the 80s once said, "the issue is that Bill has a Vision. One vision, and that vision is frozen in the 1970s".
On the other hand, I find that I am less and less interested in the political fights, and more and more interested in getting work done. So, I use a mix of proprietary, but highly-functional, desktop apps under a mostly proprietary, but highly functional, operating system, and rely on Free software (of one sort or the other), for specialized tools, compilers, and things that the Free community has taken a real interest in. (except for the 9-billion IRC clients. One for each name of God.) So, if uSoft cares to offer cross-platform development tools, less annoyingly licensed operating systems, etc, I'll talk to them. Otherwise not, but it's a decision these days made mainly on suitability to the tasks at hand. This being said, all they make that I use is Word, and that's because it interfaces to my reference manager. However, that decision is a technical, not emotional or political decision. Some time spent by the FSF making their software more functional would convert far more people to their side than all of the songs in favor of Software Libre ever will.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
The function of the state is to protect its citizens. Protecting their property is just a nice aftertought.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.