Slashdot Mirror
South African Minister Locks Horns With Microsoft
naheiw writes "The South African minister of public service and administration on Monday addressed the opening of the Idlelo 3 free software conference in Dakar, Senegal, saying that software patents posed a considerable threat to the growth of the African software sector (video). Microsoft responded aggressively, saying that 'there is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity.'"
I guess they only recognize their own stuff and not the UN's FOSS (free/open source software) and IOSN (International Open Source Network) programs
http://www.iosn.net/foss/foss-general-primer
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/open/opencharity.mspx
Oh, the irony! Or is it hypocrisy?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Especially not Bram Moolenaar.
It does also sometimes serve its original intent, to protect the little guy from having his ideas stolen with zero recourse.
I agree today its not often, but id not say patents are ONLY to support the big legal departments for harassment purposes.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
While you're certainly correct that most free software isn't written for charitable reasons, there certainly is plenty of free software that is. Look at the OLPC; that's not for profit, or for ego, it's a charity, unless you want to clame that every single charity out there, from ones that fight hunger to AIDS to teaching in developing nations, is just around to "have their ego stroked." Or, to give you a particularly striking example, here is an excerpt from the SQLite source code:
Crazy Taco:
The thing the Africans need to realize is that most programmers prefer to get money in exchange for their coding, and if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding, you have cut off about 98% of your source of new code.
That's absolutely false. 99% of programmers don't make their money from software patents; in fact, most of them would have an easier time doing their jobs and making money if software patents didn't exist. Software copyrights certainly help protect their software and allow them to make money, but the vast majority of software patents are held by patent trolls who haven't written a line of useful software in their lives, or big companies that just patent everything they think they can to use defensively against other companies in case of patent lawsuits.
The problem with software patents is that pretty much every piece of software written is a novel invention, because if it wasn't, then you should have reused code that already existed since it already does what you need. If people patented every new idea they had while coding, they'd be in an out of the patent office 10 times a day, and wouldn't be able to get their work done (credit to Phil Greenspun for that argument). The only people who get patents are, as I mentioned, greedy patent trolls who just want to make an easy buck (it's pretty damn simple to come up with a new, patented idea in code, and then just sue anyone else who happens to think of that and implement it later), and companies that usually get big patent portfolios so when other big companies try to hit them up for money, they can just do a patent cross-licensing agreement and not have to actually fight it out in court.
As a professional, paid programmer, I must say that patent issues are second only to cryptographic regulation issues in terms of laws that have interfered with me actually getting my job done.
"Nobody develops software for charity.'"
I hear echoes of a letter written by a certain William Gates over 30 years ago:
http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html
"What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? "
What do I get out of it? It works for me, that's all. Doesn't hurt me or compromise me in any way to give it away, so I do.
I think consistent, reliable, updated software is rare. Your database you speak of sounds like a one-off thing. What if someone finds a security hole? Or wants an additional feature? You'll either ignore the request, tell them to fix it, or be annoyed but fix it yourself. For free. What if there are 100 features/bugs that need to be worked on? Unless you have a lot of loose time, it'll end up another buggy piece of "open source" software with 2.5 cows on Tucows.
The idea of developers sharing and improving upon free software is a good one. The idea that the free software has any responsibility backing up its existence is false. "It's free...do what you want with it" is fine for developers, not for the end users. And that's what Microsoft is saying.
There are exceptions (BackupPC, Apache, Firefox, Plone) but in the end, only the software is free (as in speech) while the dev time is not (as in consulting and thanks for the beer).
Yes, there are many developers who write code for no money, but at the same time, I don't know anyone who does it entirely for selfless, charitable reasons.
Vim is explicitly produced as a way to promote a charity for Uganda.
Not a typewriter
List two software innovations (i.e. something not copied) done by the linux/hobbyist community please.
Well there's Blender, mplayer, VLC, Asterisk (which I use at work.) There's more than that I'm sure, but you only wanted two examples.
Ubuntu is, or was initially, an African distro. It is, AFAIK, the only distro with extensive African language translations. The South African government is committed to open source in all state departments including education and is actively migrating its proprietary software to open source http://www.ioltechnology.co.za/article_page.php?iSectionId=2888&iArticleId=3695987. It will only allow proprietary where there is no open source equivalent, which explains why MS is upset. South Africa may not be a large market by MS's standards, but the government's stance is already having a knock-on effect with some large industry players opting for open source as well. http://www.tectonic.co.za/wordpress/?p=1562&src=digg
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
I can only assume you're trolling, and I *know* I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I have a personal beef against Office 2007 thanks to one "just ride the gravy train and do / know jack" schmuck of an IT guy...
Maybe, on high-end hardware. My wife's school has a bunch of old Dells, and Office 2003 was sluggish, but acceptable on them. The school's IT guy decided in the middle of the school year to install Office 2007 school-wide, without telling anyone. Nice. So the software is slower than a dying dog, and now the UI's so different that all the teachers who had only finally figured out where everything was under the old Office paradigm are crippled in their productivity by this weird "ribbon" garbage. Which, incidentally, is quite the hog in terms of screen real estate when you've only got 1024x768 or less to play with.
Based on what? If it's slower to load, and includes things you don't need, that would seem to be bloat...?
No more so than Office 2000, which, while no winner of any beauty awards, at least we were used to. And see my comment above about the unusability of the ribbon interface on smaller monitors.
This New! Improved! And Innovative! interface resulted in numerous half-bald teachers at my wife's school. Due to tearing their hair out trying to get things done, I mean.
I hesitate to even get into this one much, but the troubles with MSO 2007 file incompatibility with older installations, or the problems with "compatibility" mode using older file formats within MSO 2007, has been documented to some length elsewhere on the web.
So there. Food for the troll, maybe, but at least I've gotten some things off my chest. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."