Funny you should mention this. The question of whether PayPal is liable in the event of a fraudulent auction is very much in the news (here is the article on MSNBC.
Short version: some wise guy auctions off hard drives on Yahoo! to a steady stream of customers. Encourages auction "winners" to pay by PayPal. Those who paid by check got their mail back from the U.S. Postal Service saying no such address exists--those who paid by PayPal got zip.
PayPal is emphasizing that they are a means of facilitating exchange between two parties--they are not a credit card, and they are not a bank. Their terms of service explicitly deny any responsibility to either party in a transaction if the other fails to do something (like ship the goods).
In other words, PayPal is covered legally. How PayPal will fare in the court of public opinion may be another question. And yet another question is whether PayPal will be able to escape the attention of the U.S. government. What PayPal is doing, after all, looks very very much like a bank processing EFT (electronic funds transfer). The courts are going to laugh at Indianapolis regulating video games--but they won't have any problem at all with the idea of the federal government banking authorities regulating an e-business that looks, walks, and sounds like a bank.
I'll reply in another note on a slightly different thread.
I don't think you understand who the patient is we're talking about. Let me elaborate.
Children who get sick go to the pediatrics wing of your local hospital. Children who get banged up in car accidents go to the pediatric intensive-care ward of your local hospital.
Children who are long-term inpatients at children's hospitals are not "normal" kids with boo-boos. They have cancer. They are waiting for transplants. They are hoping to improve enough to be considered as candidates for open-heart surgery. In short, their parents are on their knees every morning and every night, praying desperately to God that these kids live long enough to be able to worry about eating too much fat in their diet.
My youngest daughter has Down syndrome. 54% of Downs kids need open-heart surgery before they're two. Annie was spared that by a merciful God--but more than a third of her preschool classmates are now dead. A beautiful, clever, sparkling little boy who terrorized the world with his motorized wheelchair at age 5 died of lung problems when he was 8--he literally outgrew his lungs. He loved McNuggets--and the medical staff at Children's Hospital thought that McNuggets were just what kids like him needed. I agree.
JonK has written an excellent reply. Rather than repeating his words, I refer you to his splendid post. He's faced the same problem of integration in the CORBA/EJB market space that I've seen with minicomputers, LANs, and PCs over the past 15 years.
To give one example: SQL--the database query language. There are several ANSI standards: SQL-92 is the most recent. But there are tens of thousands of experienced Oracle DBAs out there with years and years of experience with PL/SQL. Who really, really like the non-SQL-92 features in PL/SQL and would doubtless inflict serious bodily injury on any Oracle product manager stupid enough to drop their non-standard features.
The most effective standard in the database business, by far, has been ODBC. (Brought to you by Microsoft.) Different vendors have written ODBC drivers to achieve different types of functionality--Intersolv's drivers provide exactly the same functionality for each of 34 different databases. Write to Intersolv's drivers for one database, and your code will work practically unchanged on any other database. BUT--those Intersolv drivers are very definitely "least common denominator" drivers. Visigenic, on the other hand, writes drivers to give you every last morsel of performance that a given DBMS supports. Write to a Visigenic driver for Informix and you have no guarantee at all that the same code will run against an Oracle back end. So long as you're certain that the back end won't change, the Visigenic driver will yield substantially better performance.
In theory, the idea that a DBMS is an interchangeable component is lovely. In practice, a company will focus on a single database platform and stick with it. They hire DBAs with skills on that platform, they develop solutions targeted at that platform, and they have a huge investment in data stored on that platform. Any client with a brain will include due diligence investigation of a DBMS vendor's financials as part of any purchase decision--it's that kind of a buy-in. In a sense it is comparable to a trucking company buying into an engine vendor--the truck may have a Navistar, Freightliner, or Western Star brand name, but there's a Detroit Diesel engine under the hood. If that trucker has 300 mechanics that are factory-trained on Detroit Diesel engines, it's going to take something huge to convince him to switch to Caterpillar.
Disclaimer: As I said before, I know pretty much nothing about professional DB tools; if MS has in fact made things significantly cheaper/easier for the average DB programmer, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
Not just "significantly" cheaper and easier--dramatically cheaper and easier. The $3000 per seat licenses I mentioned earlier were the kind of scam database vendors got away with because those were the only tools you could use to connect to a given database. Microsoft blew that entire market strategy away with ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity). The last time I checked there were 34 different databases with ODBC drivers available from at least one vendor. OLE DB (such as Microsoft's Active Data Objects) provides significantly higher performance to Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, and other vendors that create an OLE DB interface.
Microsoft didn't do this out of altruism. They did it to permit developers using Microsoft tools to connect to any database out there--but in the process they made it possible for developers using anybody else's tools (PowerBuilder, Delphi, etc.) to connect to those databases as well. The net result was that the proprietary database developer marketplace (Progress, some others) has dried up.
They're presently driving the price of what I'd term "mid-range" database solutions down with the Microsoft Database Engine. It's SQL Server 7.0 without the GUI. Develop the app with SQL Server, ship the app with the MSDE. You have an embedded database with positively kick-booty performance (SQL Server 7 is an absolutely groovy DBMS) with no nickel-and-dime client license fees.
Compare/contrast with database development for the AS/400 platform. Big bucks for the AS/400, big bucks for the OS, and even big bucks for each minor upgrade to the OS. Big bucks for DB2. And big bucks per seat for every user. Who is, of course, sitting in front of a PC running a $400 per seat 3270 terminal emulator package. A Windows client/server solution stomps that whole conglomeration silly both on price and performance. Being able to distribute it across the Internet using anybody's browser makes it even easier. The Total Cost of Ownership is dramatically lower with the Microsoft solution.
You should understand that this kind of behavior is the "bullying" that Microsoft's allies (particularly Oracle) are crying about. Oracle has good reason to cry--they charge an astronomical price for a very good database. Microsoft, with SQL Server 7.0, has a comparable database for most applications at a fraction of the price. Larry Ellison was running around a year ago offering $1 million to anybody who could show that SQL Server was as fast as Oracle--he withdrew the offer right before SQL Server 7 shipped. Oracle's political work to start the Dept. of Justice investigation (including $750,000 in free software and services to the Senate Judiciary Committee), their coordination of the DofJ anti-trust suit, and their snooping around the trash of Jonathan Zuck are all of a piece: they have some whopping great margins to protect, and Threat Number One is Microsoft.
The next question is, is there an Open Source solution that is even cheaper? Yes and no--the tools cost less, but some of the tools simply are not available. (For instance, I'm not aware of any Open Source DBMS that are supported on Linux or BSD by ER/win or InfoModeler. I'm also not aware of any Linux- or BSD-compatible database modeling software similar to ER/win or InfoModeler.) The time you spend doing stuff that Microsoft already does for you out of the box negates a lot of the Open Source cost advantage.
First off--a word of thanks. A friend and sometime employee who lurks on SlashDot sent me an email this morning that read, "so--kicking over anthills on/. again?" I fully expected to see some ugly flames when I checked in. I am delighted by the posts of those of you who have taken the time to respond. SlashDot has a reputation for trolls, and I'm delighted by the tone and tenor of these comments. It's a very engaging conversation.
...I was thinking more of cases where they [Microsoft] stop selling a product that you really depend on for your sales, or take that product in a significantly different direction. In a market that contains Microsoft, you might be lucky to find another company whose product you can use instead - in many such markets, Microsoft will have destroyed those other companies and you won't have any other options besides restructuring your business around the remaining options that MS provides you.
That's a very good point. In fact, that situation is presently happening with Microsoft Site Server. Site Server Commerce Edition 3.0 is a relatively cheap tool, and it does Registration and Membership quite nicely. Site Server Commerce Edition 2000 is a big-ticket tool that does all sorts of stuff--but all I need is plain vanilla registration and membership. I don't want all the other stuff, and I don't want to make my client (an Internet startup) have to pay for it. Microsoft is doing precisely what you suggest: moving away from what I want to do. (Or, "I don't want to go there, at least not today.") What to do?
For the short term, we're writing our own version. It isn't integrated with the OS in the slick way that Microsoft's is--in fact, it depends upon inclusion files in each Active Server Page we write. But we believe in stuff like the CMM and repetitive processes, so that's easy to handle.
From my perspective, Microsoft may have started the sea change in developer relations, but it is no longer leading the charge.
My friend, Charlie, whom I mentioned above, is entirely of that opinion. And Microsoft's latest server pricing announcement lends a lot of weight to that view. I'm very interested on what the next round of Visual Studio will look like--if the purported breakthrough in Internet development tools really amounts to something I'll get a lot more excited about Microsoft. If the "breakthrough" amounts to another kludge like Visual InterDev I may look at Borland's Kylix with a lot more enthusiasm....
Forgive me--I was only thinking of tools used by commercial developers. Yes, gcc is popular among university students--but real-world developers tend to get hired to real with more complex issues. When you're building distributed apps that scale to thousands of users and beyond you need more than just a compiler. How would you write a component (such as a COM or CORBA component) with gcc? And how would you manage a pool of those components? And how would you distribute those components across a variety of servers, or even across multiple domains?
Or, on a simpler scale, how would you extract images from a fax server and store them on an optical disk?
The GNU project has created some free tools. And some useful tools. I'm sure its great for learning how to program. But they're just not for commercial use.
But I work at a small company; and if generous capital isn't available, then MS software sucks you dry quickly. If you have, say, 5 VC++ programmers and 5 VB programmers (for example) the costs add up extremely quickly: 10 licenses for Visual SourceSafe, 5 licenses for VC++, 5 licenses for VB, a copy of Windows NT server (plus client licenses for all users, plus hardware to run it on) to run the SS database on, somebody to administer the server, 10 copies of Windows 2000 (unless you want to go nuts by developing on crashy Win98.)
Actually, my company is about the same size as yours--even a bit smaller. The solution is extremely easy: join the Solution Providers program. You pay an annual subscription fee of around $2400, and you get all the tools you just mentioned: all the development tools, all the server tools, the client licenses, the whole deal. If your local office nominates you for the Partner program you get licenses for even more developers. Definitely worth doing, in your case.
Oh, and you think Visual SourceSafe is a stagnant tool? Way back when Microsoft shipped their first version-control app, named Delta. It sucked. It was so good (not) that MS went out and bought LoneTree just to get SourceSafe.
Don't you worry about being discarded by MS once you can no longer expand their market share any further, or if you come to be perceived as a threat to them? It sounds to me like a very Faustian bargain - you've done well for yourself by allying with the market leader, but at the same time your business is irrevocably tied to their business goals and their bottom line. As you mentioned, if MS changes (or is forced to change) their business strategies they aren't going to give you and your business any consideration.
Don't kid yourself--any bargain you make with a tool or hardware vendor puts you in the same position. Suppose (for sake of argument) that somebody conclusively proves that using BSD instead of Linux makes you 38% more attractive to really good looking women. Do you think that Larry Augustin and VA BSD will think of your needs and concerns while they change their name?
Very, very few software systems involve a single tool. Sure--you can write an application with Visual Basic (or GCC). But so can any schmo. What companies pay outside consultants (like my company) for is integrating technologies that their in-house people can't make work. In other words, linking Products A, B, C, and D. If you spend much time in this business you will discover a simple truth: linking any two products from different vendors can be a pain. Linking any three products from three different vendors is always a colossal pain. Linking four products from four different vendors is simply suicidal.
Unless at least three of those products come from the same vendor. And if all of those products come from the same vendor, you have a fairly good bet that they'll work together. And if they don't work together, the vendor at least can't put on much of a finger-pointing exercise. And if you have a longstanding relationship with that vendor (particularly if they introduced you to the client), they'll make sure you're successful.
In other words, if you're going to integrate systems, you tend to get close to a few large vendors. There are Microsoft shops, like mine; or Oracle shops; or Sun shops; or IBM shops; or CA shops. The big advantage (as I see it) to Microsoft is that they do a much better job of courting the developer than anybody else, and they offer more tools (SQL Server, Site Server, etc.) that I can put together in a single solution for a client. Even if every one of those tools is a second-best product, I can create a kick-booty solution for the client on-budget and on-schedule because I know in advance that all the pieces will work together, and I know where to go looking if they won't.
Buying into a vendor's developers program does tie you to that vendor. If you're developing solutions for AS/400 users, it pays for you to ante up the bucks to join IBM's program (which includes [cough, cough] shelling out the bucks to buy an AS/400). But once you do, you're an AS/400 shop. You're not going to go writing solutions for the Unisys ClearPath server or the Unisys A mainframe.
All that said, there's another reason for loyalty to Microsoft. There are a lot of teenagers today on SlashDot that don't remember life when a single-seat programmer's license cost $3000 bucks (or 1.5 times the cost of a compact car). They don't remember the arcane joys of writing Epson LQ-500-compatible printer commands into print routines, or having to buy a third-party help product to display context-sensitive help. They don't remember having to pay $100 per seat for a TCP/IP stack, or $200 per seat for database driver licenses. Microsoft made all that stuff go away. And yes--the guy who was ripping off everybody for overpriced ODBC drivers? He got whupped. The guy charging big bucks for the TCP/IP stacks? Still around, but in a different business. The guys who made careers out of writing printer driver code for word processors (remember print driver disks, anybody?)--presumably doing something else. Microsoft made all that happen--which made using computers, and developing solutions for computers, a whole lot simpler for everybody.
I admire 'em for that--which is why I count myself a Microsoft Loyalist.
Is there such a culture surrounding windows? I'm asking honestly, because I don't know... Is there a huge following that would join the FIN, support microsoft, and rally around them during these "trying times"
In a word, yes. There is a very large community of programmers and database analysts who have grown substantial businesses by using Microsoft tools and technologies. Microsoft has grown by expressly targeting these people (including me) as "influential end users." We're the people Microsoft originally created the Microsoft Developer Network for, and the people that Microsoft is constantly plying with information and inexpensive tools.
When people rant about "Microsoft hegemony" and "bullying" they're being clueless. Or showing their age. The way that Microsoft has developed a monopoly isn't by driving around with fedoras and machine guns, threatening some CIO's family unless he installs Windows NT. Microsoft has been much, much more sneaky than that. Microsoft has, since the late 1980s, expressly targeted the "influential end user" (their term) and particularly software developers. They have expressly sought to gain "mindshare" (I believe an original Microsoft term, but perhaps "embraced and extended" from somebody else) among developers for a very specific purpose: custom apps written by developers require customers to buy the operating system.
Microsoft has been candid about this all along: they'll provide all kinds of tools and help, because at the end of the day they want the client to buy the OS. And the more of the OS they buy, the greater the opportunity for site license deals on Office, etc.
For the developer, it's a great deal. Microsoft development tools are always substantially less expensive than anybody else's, and Microsoft bends over backward to get you to sign up for programs (like the ISV program) that give you the tools even cheaper. Price developer versions of Oracle tools and databases for a team of five developers, for instance--Oracle won't quote you a price. They'll schedule a meeting, bring in a bunch of suits, try to estimate how much you're worth, ask a zillion questions about who your clients are and how much they're worth, and then quote you an astronomical sum. Microsoft will sign you up as a Solution Provider for $2495, which gives you licenses to everything. And they'll refer customers to you as well (unlike Oracle, who has no compunction about calling on your customers).
Partnering with Microsoft is a very, very good deal. But (and here's the wrinkle:) everybody involved knows how the deal works. In the end, Microsoft wants the OS sale. In effect, they're subsidizing all the tools, all the conferences, all the contact, all the support based on sales of the OS. Split the OS off into a different company than products (especially developer tools) and all of a sudden we're looking at a whole new pricing model. And for the small companies out there, like mine, an uncertain future.
So, yes--I've registered as a member of FIN. I've written to my congressman, and to both my senators. I have a strongly vested interest in the success of Microsoft, and I'm not shy about saying so.
Ronald McDonald House is not a children's hospital, and the RMHs don't provide services, per se, to seriously ill children. What they do is provide a place for the families of those children to stay nearby, so the family unit can stay intact.
The original RMH is in Philadelphia, near to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. CHOP serves patients from a wide area--I live about 100 miles from CHOP and know several families that are at CHOP routinely. If you have a child with pervasive disabilities, or that requires continuing treatments, commuting back and forth to Philadelphia can become an enormous task. Wealthier parents might stay in a local hotel, but it was all too common for parents to stop coming--leaving the child alone for days or weeks at a time.
Doctors have known for years that children do better in the hospital when Mom or Dad and/or siblings are around. CHOP doctors (including the chief surgeon, C. Everett Koop) also realized that kids weren't eating their prescribed meals--what they really wanted was junk food. They struck an interesting bargain with the McDonald's franchisers in the Philadelphia area.
McDonald's contributed big bucks for the renovation of Children's Hospital, including the construction of a new lobby. McDonald's built a restaurant *in* the lobby, so ambulatory patients could come down to the restaurant with their parents. In addition, children can have McDonald's meals in their rooms, in place of regular hospital food.
On top of that, the local franchisers bought a nearby rowhouse and rehabbed it as a place for parents and families to stay while a child was at CHOP...which they named Ronald McDonald House.
I agree with you wholeheartedly--Ronald McDonald House is a wonderful institution. I just wanted to mention that RMH is always associated with (and typically adjacent to) a children's hospital--RMH is for the patient's parents.
I hardly think that thier stock price alone shows what kind of position a company is in.
Yeah--it usually does. Stock prices frequently don't accurately assess the value of a company when the price is soaring. But when the price is crashing, it's generally because the market has the company figured out.
Corel just announced their results for the most recent quarter. It isn't pretty: here's a link to a couple of articles on The Motley Fool, quoting Canadian papers.
I'm sorry to see them in this shape, and I hope they survive. But things do not look good for Dr. Mike and friends.
Corel's stock went precipitously up some time ago, based on rumours that they were being bought out by RedHat, then it came down slowly as time went on.
Right. One of the joys of the American financial system is the transparency--when somebody makes a statement like that, all you have to do is look at the numbers. Or in this case, at a graph of Corel's stock performance over the past year, like this one. Which pretty effectively shows Corel's stock price running up to 44-1/2 in late December, and more or less tanking over the past six months. The Titanic sank faster, but not by much.
And while we're looking at numbers and pretty pictures, let's look at Corel's balance sheet. Which shows that Corel's current assets (cash and receivables) are a mere C$10 million more than its current liabilities. For a company doing C$60 million a quarter, that is a very, very hand-to-mouth operation. Which is not a pretty picture.
Or we could look at Corel's cash flow statements which document that Corel has less than 30 days worth of cash on hand.
The biggest concern I have, though, is that Corel hasn't yet released their second quarter results, despite their second quarter having closed a month ago. I don't know if this is unusual for Corel or not--but typically publicly-traded corporations I'm familiar with release their numbers by the 15th. (In fact I once was shipped to Japan on less than 18 hours notice by a client, in order to make sure that they reported results by the 15th.)
As I wrote earlier, don't get me wrong--I'm not a Corel-hater. I was an avid Corel user in 1988 (and I still have the Corel Draw 1.0 manual on my shelf to prove it). OTOH, a lot of corporations are trying to claim credit for "Open Source" in order to score points with the Linux crowd when all they're really doing is laying off developers. (Read: Netscape, Borland/Inprise, etc.) I think that's what Corel is doing here.
It's a good thing Corel doesn't listen to folks like you, or they would have disappeared back in 1988....You don't work for Adobe by any chance?
No--in fact I posted my note (and this one) with my full name, and with the URL of my business displayed in the message header. And, (ahem), I'm not posting as an Anonymous Coward.
Okay--so this conference was a total bust. Somebody in Kansas City did a wretched job organizing a conference, and the conference was wretched.
Do not let this get you down. In fact, the conference may not have been all that bad. Imagine being the 14th person in that opening presentation with Bruce Perens--a whole lot better communication than being one of 2000 at a mega-conference on the west coast, no? When LinuxWorldExpo draws 30,000 attendees you're not going to be firing automatic weapons at a Geeks with Guns gathering, lest it bring out the National Guard.
This may well be a sign of a maturing Linux community.
I've been a Visual Basic programmer since the day the product shipped (I've been programming in Basic since the days when it was an acronym). When VB first shipped it generated a positively electric buzz--it was phenomenally cool. But after the initial hype, after the initial thrill, and after a few developers noticed that there were some serious limits to what you could do with VB1, there seemed to be a plateau....
Right about that time Microsoft organized a conference in New York City with Boston University. Big deal, big ticket conference, with a huge fee to attend. And approximately nobody signed up. Microsoft called me up personally to invite me to attend, and the person asked me if I had any friends who'd like to come along too. For free. (And bear in mind--this was organized by professional conference organizers, in midtown Manhattan. This wasn't some poor guy in over his head in Kansas.)
Even with the last-minute scrambling, there were something like 40 people there--maybe less. Microsoft people openly worried about looking that stupid in front of the entire New York IT world. It was a cast-iron disaster.
Except that it wasn't. During the early buzz of Visual Basic there was a small group of self-employed programmers using the tool, and a larger group of corporate programmers who were playing with it at home. By the time this conference rolled around, a lot of those guys had jobs as VB programmers, and couldn't get the time to go to the conference. Or didn't feel the conference would tell them anything they couldn't hear online. VB has gone on to huge things in New York City and elsewhere, of course, and a poorly attended conference in 1992 hasn't made the slightest bit of difference.
That may well be the same thing with this Linux conference. Sure--poor promotion will hurt. But poor attendance by the locals may well mean that people are using Linux at work, and that in turn means that Linux is infiltrating the corporate world.
You may see more conference reports that show poor attendance. It doesn't mean that Linux is in trouble--it probably just means that a lot of Linux users have been to a conference or two, heard the speeches extolling Open Source, and are biding their time (and keeping their money) until there is something new! and exciting! about Linux to come hear about.
That may be coming: Borland/Inprise is now projecting that Kylix, their cross-platform version of Delphi, will ship later this year. When developers can take advantage of a visual development IDE and deploy on Linux, there may be a phenomenal explosion of interest. And when corporate IT managers discover that the boys in the back room have been running the company proxy server on Linux for months, you may well see an explosion of interest in Linux all across corporate America.
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Linux evangelist. But I would not, at all, consider this conference (or Roblimo's similarly pessimistic views on PC Expo) reason to get discouraged about the potential of Linux.
The penguin may just be sitting on the tip of the iceberg....
With all respect to those who think this is a positive thing, we must seriously consider whether this isn't so much FreeWare as it is AbandonWare.
A few facts gleaned from The Motley Fool:
Stock presently trades at 3-7/8
Stock just slightly higher than 52-week low
Stock precipitously down from 52-week high of 44-1/2
Corel listed 1,320 employees on June 1, but announced plans on June 6 to lay off 320
For the quarter ended 2/29/2000 the company's loss expanded to C$21.3 million--on revenue of C$44 million--before extraordinary items
(Note: Corel's latest quarter ended 5/31/2000, but Corel has not yet posted results.)
Corel's public filings with financial authorities publicly stated that without a significant infusion of cash Corel may not be able to continue operations through the end of the year.
Corel is now back trying to raise money in the Canadian equity markets (they are in the "quiet period" before a public offering)
In light of the above, Borland/Inprise bailed out of their planned merger with Corel.
In short, I think that Corel is a company that is in serious financial trouble. I think it is far more likely that Corel is doing this not for PR--but because they're going to eliminate PhotoPaint development, support, etc. as part of their announced C$40 million cost-cutting campaign.
Don't get me wrong--I have a lot of regard for Corel. Ten years ago I was writing PostScript code generators for calibrating imagesetting equipment--and developing books and periodicals with Corel Draw and Ventura Publisher (now owned by Corel). I subsequently was a sysop on the VENTURA forum on CompuServe, and did a lot of technical illustration with Corel Draw. I've retouched hundreds of photographs with PhotoPaint.
But I think this is a sign of Corel going into the tank--not a sign of positive developments for Linux at all.
Basically, leave it to states/locals to do deal with each zip code.
To quote Ronald Reagan, "there you go again!"
Zip codes are not the province of state or local authorities. They are the province--the sole and exclusive province--of the U.S. Postal Service. And if you think that handling sales taxes on out-of-state purchases is a thorny political issue, just contemplate what would happen if Congress required the Postal Service to redraw all the zip code boundaries to coincide with political subdivisions (county, municipality, etc). (Remember all the screaming when area codes got split? Just a dim rumble comparatively.)
Lots of people have contemplated the problem of identifying and paying local sales taxes. The problem has existed in Texas, California, and New York since (at least) 1987, when I first confronted it. In order to assess sales taxes at the local level every database would have to include a county identifier, a municipality identifier, and at least two special district identifiers (some states assess additional sales taxes within areas served by mass transit; others assess sales taxes by school district; etc.). And yes--you would have to maintain both municipality and county, since there are municipalities (New York City and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for two) that span counties. Better yet--every database system would have to be able to identify that a consumer was filling in appropriate values. (So, with a zip code of 18091, I don't fill in Centre County in order to avoid a local county sales tax.) Vastly complicated and hugely burdensome are two phrases that spring to mind....
The best solution is Delaware's: don't assess sales taxes. Then your tax-paying businesses have nothing to fear from e-commerce, and you can become a "haven" for e-commerce businesses. Sales taxes are also hideously expensive to collect, audit, and enforce. They are a huge pain to retailers, and the only people who like sales taxes are small biz accountants, since tax audits represent such a nice chunk of business.
Assess taxes on income. Taxes on property get bucks from well-heeled society matrons, but bankrupt senior citizens. Taxes on consumption hike the price of Ferraris, but hit the poor hardest of all.
Today it would be close to trivial to implement such a system--the lookup table by zip code for the tax to be collected would be easy. Extensions to existing software would be minor.
Bzzzzzt! Wrong! In fact, calculating the appropriate sales tax to collect is still practically impossible. A lawyer might deem this a trivial task (a "lookup table by zip code...") but in fact any quick survey of states where local sales taxes are permissible will instantly reveal the fact that zip codes and municipal boundaries frequently do not coincide.
Consider California: the state has a sales tax, each county can assess a sales tax, plus each city can assess a sales tax. In addition there are several special sales tax districts such as the Bay Area Rapid Transit District that can assess a sales tax. Zip codes in California do not necessarily map to county or even city boundaries. (You can view California sales tax rates, by county, here.)
This is an excellent example of a looming problem in government: Hawk, the writer of this post, is a legal scholar who "gets it." He was an authority cited by SlashDot when Judge Jackson's findings of fact in the Microsoft case were issued. He's the kind of lawyer that other lawyers will ask for guidance on public policy issues like assessing sales taxes. And, in fact, (on this specific issue) he's flat wrong. Calculating local sales taxes is anything but trivial, and you can't use zip codes to do it. Am I dumping on Hawk? Not really--I'm using this as an example of the serious problem we as a people face as our elected representatives try to come to grips with the Internet and the digital age. It's easy for a congressman or a judge to hear a Penn State professor say, "it's trivial" and blithely charge ahead--or write a decision--with that in mind. And having heard once that something like this is trivial, they aren't going to be dissuaded by anything less than an overwhelming amount of data. He's a professor, after all.
Moral: Do not ask a database programmer to write an appellate brief for you. And do not ask a lawyer to explain computer technology.
It must be a slow news day at the New York Times....
This editorial is asking and answering a simple, but stupid, question: is the "digital revolution" as significant as electricity? Or the internal combustion engine? Or modern medicine?
Well, gosh, no. Except....
There is absolutely nothing technologically significant about the internal combustion engine. It is the product of relatively low-precision machine work with an astonishingly small degree of innovation from year to year. There is a LOT that is technologically significant about how the internal is USED, however. Electricity--it was a curiosity in the 18th century that was celebrated by "philosophical gentlemen" who usually died trying to play with it. It was technologically meaningless, UNTIL it was put to use.
In the 15th century a group of Germans achieved an astonishing technological breakthrough: they were able to machine wooden (and later metal) parts to tolerances of less than 1/1000 of an inch. A big deal? Yes! Nobody--anywhere in the world--could achieve that precision. But was it a technological breakthrough?
The Reformation didn't happen because a bunch of Germans developed precision measurement and machining. It happened because those Germans were led by Johannes Gutenberg, and what they were machining was moveable type. What they created is still the most significant technological advancement in the history of the world.
So how does the Digital Revolution stack up? We're WAY too quick to be judging. The revolution is only just starting, and it will be decades before we fully understand just how far-reaching it will become. Just as a f'rinstance, consider this: the Chinese student uprising in 1989 was largely driven by the fax machine. Consider the impact of email, especially with strong encryption, on repressive governments everywhere. It is entirely possible that we will witness dramatic political changes around the world in the next decades due to the "digital revolution." That may be good (like the Soviets, the empire collapses peacefully) or bad ( like the Yugoslavs, the old order dies in flames). But either way, the impact of something as low-tech as email, coupled with something as "digital" as strong encryption, will be substantial.
Does this story make you angry? Does it make you think an injustice has been done? Do you want to actually do something about it?
Remember two key facts of public life:
Politicians do not like political controversy.
Political controversy sells newspapers.
Thus, a little political controversy will thrill the local newspaper, and make life miserable for the bozos who think they're the Big Shots in the "close-knit" community of Milford, Utah.
And how do you engender a little political controversy? Posting a comment here on SlashDot can help (the more comments, the more people read the article--the more people read the article, the more will hopefully express their concern to people in Utah). But expressing your thoughts directly to the Utah press will do even more. All you have to do is write to the electronic version of Letters to the Editor of the Salt Lake Tribune at mailto:letters@stltrib.com. Be sure to include your name, your address, and a daytime phone number. Be polite, don't be crude, and be sure to use words like "fairness", "concern", and "fair play". Here's what I just sent them:
To the editor:
In the age of the Internet a high school kid with pink hair and an outrageous web site can become an overnight cause celebre. And a high school principal in southern Utah can achieve worldwide reknown as a villain--and perhaps as a fool.
I am writing, of course, about Ian Lake and his treatment at the hands of the Milford, Utah high school and police, which was covered in Joe Baird's article in the Tribune on May 28th. Faced with an in-your-face kid who sometimes dyed his hair odd colors, sometimes talked back to school officials, and then--horrors!--posted a web site saying rude things about teachers and fellow students; the high school principal and the local sheriff responded in a manner straight from the handbook of How to Get Really Bad Publicity. The police raided his house, and confiscated his computer. They jailed the kid (claiming it was for his own protection) and then exiled him to his grandparents in southern California.
If the Milford authorities wanted to give this kid a platform for his rage, they could not have done a better job. The story of their ham-handed persecution of this kid has appeared on SlashDot, the highly-regarded Internet news site that is read daily by hundreds of thousands of computer professionals around the world. (For more information, see http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/06/01/152623 5.) Hundreds and hundreds of SlashDot readers have posted comments of outrage and concern within just hours of the story being made available. While nobody is embracing Ian Lake's foul-mouthed trashing of students and teachers at Milford High School, high-tech professionals on five continents are guffawing at school officials who think that trash talk on a web site is a precursor to another shootout like Columbine High.
I'm a 4-H leader as well as a computer professional. I work with kids that are Ian Lake's age, and I have children that age as well. As a general rule, it's pretty reasonable to expect 15-year-old kids to periodically demonstrate that they're 15-year-old kids: proto-adult bodies with the minds of eight-year-olds. On the other hand, one should expect the adults in the situation to behave better than eight-year-olds. When they don't, as the Milford High principal and the local sheriff have not, they can end up looking really foolish. And in this case, attracting worldwide attention to boot.
The Milford authorities should wise up, grow up, and let the kid come back to school.
John Murdoch, President Wind Gap Technology Group (http://www.windgap.com) 959 Park Estates Road Wind Gap, PA 18091 (610) 759-0660 jmurdoch@windgap.com
This isn't as crazy as you might think. And if you're into conspiracy theories and Little Black Helicopters[tm] you might even think it possible that Microsoft leaked the story to the BBC reporter.
The British Columbia government would, in fact, dearly love to get Microsoft to move north. Even if they couldn't get all of Microsoft, they'd love to get some of Microsoft. Anybody working in economic development circles would dearly love to get Microsoft to open a new facility in his or her territory. So it's safe to say that BC economic development people are on board with whatever is going on here.
Microsoft isn't just trying to get the DOJ off its back. Microsoft is seriously, deeply, bitterly offended. Microsoft is pissed. I'm not in Seattle, I'm on the East Coast. But all the Microsoft people I know are--to a man--convinced that this whole case is a sham. It was orchestrated by their competitors (particularly Oracle, who is next to get clobbered by an almost-as-good-at-one-third-the-price product) and run by the Democrats. If, in their view, Microsoft had been paying off politicians all these years (as Silicon Valley has been faithfully doing) this case would have never happened. (Mind you, this is their view, although I agree with it.)
[Don't flame--stay with me.]
Microsoft doesn't need to pick up and leave--they just need to make it clear that A) they can, and B) that there is a credible offer within a reasonable commuting distance where they can move to.
British Columbia fits the bill nicely. Lots and lots of Microsoft employees vacation in the San Juan Islands (which stretch from Anacortes, Washingon to Victoria, BC). Lots and lots of Microsoft employees live north of Redmond, so the commute to the Canadian border isn't that far. All Microsoft has to do is buy a chunk of land right on the border, and enter "serious negotiations" with the BC government for some form of income tax abatement for American commuters and the lightbulb will come on for lots of politicians across the U.S.
The political ironies are just too entertaining: remember the threats about the NAFTA treaty? Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" that was all those jobs moving to Mexico? The prospect of the world's richest company moving across the border to avoid U.S. regulation, taking 20,000 American jobs with it, would be hugely embarassing to the Clinton Administration. And, since Al Gore is already on record as being in favor of a breakup and in favor of NAFTA, it would hurt Gore politically. It would also, overnight, resurrect the Reform Party, which was last seen meeting in a phone booth in Minneapolis. They're about to nominate Mr. Protectionism his own self, Pat Buchanan. Pat's absolutely stark staring gonzo, but he's a terrific speaker--and he could take this and go bananas.
There would be two certain results: the Sunday morning political talk shows would cover nothing else for weeks; and Pat Buchanan would split the Democratic vote over protectionism. Bush wins the White House. The same George W. Bush who has publicly said that breaking up Microsoft would be a big mistake.
And in the end, Microsoft doesn't have to move. Sure, maybe they open a facility in British Columbia. ("Embrace and extend" UserFriendly, perhaps? Visual Dust Puppy 2000, anyone?) But they just quietly say that they're always talking to economic development officials in any number of locations, and they're intrigued by some of the opportunities in BC, blah blah blah. And quietly deliver the election to Dubyah--who then scraps the DOJ suit.
All they have to do is make the threat credible....
Note: this is not, classicly speaking, a conspiracy theory. An orthodox conspiracy theory must include the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in the conspiracy, since of course any conspiracy (possibly excepting Brutus and Marc Antony doing in Julius Caesar) includes the BATF.
In order to present this as an orthodox conspiracy theory we might theorize that replacing the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice with a Republican leadership would severely curtail anti-trust actions against any number of businesses, not just Microsoft. Among those threatened with anti-trust action recently, by Clinton administration officials, are gun manufacturers who have publicly criticized the agreement between Smith & Wesson and the Clinton administration regarding gun shows, etc. Smith & Wesson and the rest of the gun industry, of course, is regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms--who are certain to have their powers curtailed big time if the governor of (Waco) Texas is elected president.
The BATF is involved--Q.E.D, the conspiracy is proven.
"Based on the license's remarkably nebulous wording, there isn't any exception made for comments made by non-licensees; so long as the content appears on a licensee-hosted site, you can be held liable." [Emphasis in the original]
You're right--and in the licensing biz, that's the way it works. If you're a McDonald's franchisee running a web site for other McDonald's operators (true fact: most franchisers have licensee organizations that don't always see eye-to-eye with corporate headquarters) Big Mac is going to expect you to delete that post that says the Quarter Pounder is made with horse meat. In, say, zero seconds. If you even think about the First Amendment issues there'll be a truck in front of your store removing all the signs before noon. That's the deal: you do things their way, you give up a lot of autonomy, but McDonald's makes you rich.
That said, you make a good distinction: Apogee can beat up on its licensees, but what about Microsoft and SlashDot? Microsoft (which invoked the DMCA, not UCITA) was claiming its secrets were violated. Changes in rules like copyright generally don't happen until there is significant review by the courts--Microsoft was trying to invoke the DMCA, but in more or less exactly the same way that the Pentagon would have tried to prevent the Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers. The context of the SlashDot posts were (generally speaking) public comment about controversial documents. The courts are going to have to hear some really compelling arguments to let something like that fly.
The Microsoft vs. SlashDot thing was about the DMCA. The Apogee thing is about licensing. Neither has anything to do with the UCITA.
This isn't a case of the evils of UCITA. This is a case of jumping to conclusions. If you read the document the restrictions about negative comments, etc., pertain to licensees of Apogee's trademarks.
Apogee requires anybody who wants to use their trademarks to ask for permission. When they get permission they become a licensee--as a licensee they cannot do all the stuff everybody is getting all flustered about.
Well, guess what? This is absolutely standard in the world of licensing. If you're a McDonald's franchisee you cannot host alt.bigmacs.suck.bigtime--that's part of the deal. Them's the rules. If you're going to license Apogee's trademarks, you have to abide by the license agreement.
What this does NOT do is restrict anybody rights to free speech. Duke Nukem is a stupid game. It's immoral. It encourages preteens to acts of violence. It causes people to become fat. I have it on good information that the electrons in the game have been Genetically Modified.
So there.
Should I quake in my boots, waiting for the Apogee lawyers to appear? Nope--because I'm not an Apogee licensee. "Well, wait a minute," you might say. "If 'Duke Nukem' is a trademark of Apogee, and I post a message saying 'Duke Nukem sucks', haven't I used Apogee's trademark? And haven't I therefore become (at least by Apogee's delusional agreement) an Apogee licensee?"
Bzzzzt! Wrong. Apogee explicitly requires you to apply to use their trademarks. They will then issue you a license. Until that happens, you're not a licensee. Posting anti-Duke messages is entirely legal, and the UCITA has nothing to do with it.
BUT if you copy a Duke Nukem GIF off of their web site and post it on your dukenukemblowschunks.com website, they're going to accuse you of trademark infringement. And they might even try to assert that using their site means that you agree to their terms and conditions (um, no.)
AND If you do ask for a license to the Duke Nukem logo to put on the cover of your forthcoming Duke Nukem Tips & Tricks (a bit late to market, aren't we?) then you're on the hook. You can't say bad things about the product. As I wrote above, that's how product licensing agreements work.
Note: I wrote that you should call your legislator--not the PUC. The PUC has a vested interested in protecting the regulated monopolies--the more regulations, the more work for the regulators. The PUC won't do diddly except send you photocopied pages of tariffs. (Although they can tell you what tariff hikes are presently proposed and when you can testify regarding them.)
"With all this hassle, next time I sign up for DSL (maybe I'll switch to cable), I'll probably sign up directly with the phone company, if they offer the service. This seems like an unfair advantage to the other companies."
As it happens, Bell Atlantic is in hot water on this very subject. The State of New York just fined BA $10 million for anticompetitive practices with regard to competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Public Utility Commission has gone so far as to require BA to divest their retail phone operations (so the "wholesale distribution" side treats all carriers equally). The state's Consumer Advocate is presently on a campaign about businesses that have been harmed when they switched to a CLEC, and Bell dropped all mention of them from directory assistance.
In other words, the regulators are watching. If BA is jerking around CLEC DSL customers while providing a different level of service to its own customers, that's anticompetitive.
Call your state legislator--ask him or her to ask the Public Utility Commission for information on resolving complaints about poor DSL service. You may have to explain DSL to the kid who answers the phone (he's a political science major/groupie) but legislators love constituent service opportunities like this. They will ask for pertinent information (so the letter can say, "My good friend Elmer Stutzenfreud (Circuit ID #17X933099J32, Covad ID# 234234234, BA Repair order #NY0339993A3) has mentioned to me the severe impact of a DSL outage on his business....")
Regulated monopolies have zero incentive to listen to consumers. But they live and die by the whim of the legislature--and the legislators know it. Call your state rep or state senator, and ask for help.
P.S.: There is a quid to the pro quo: when your legislator comes up for reelection he will ask for your vote. If he has done an effective job representing your interests, you probably should vote for him.
"...but who's really concerned about what Agriculture is trying to keep secret?"
Um, did you ever wonder where the U.S. government forecasts about crop yields in the Soviet Union came from? Or where the current forecasts about crop yields in North Korea come from?
Ever wonder about the geopolitical impact of another year of famine in a country that combines a stone-cold whacko dictator, a not-very-well-hidden nuclear weapons program, a very successful ballistic missile program, and a population with a *long*-standing hatred of Japan?
Yeah--the people in Washington worry about that, too. Which is why there are people at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture who view information from sattelites that is considered to be classified data.
John Murdoch P.S.: No kidding: I'm actually a 4-H leader, which is a Dept. of Agriculture-funded program.
Am I sure? As I mentioned earlier, the crux of the question here is whether anybody is sure of whether or not this is a copyright violation. It is the uncertainty of the thing that creates room for lawyers to get involved.
Let's say that I'm very confident that machine output is generally not regarded as a creative work that is subject to protection with intellectual property laws. The process involved to create the machine output may certainly be creative--but the output is not. Anybody applying the same inputs to the "machine" will get the same output--so there is nothing creative in the output. The creativity that is subject to legal protection is in the "inputs" to the "machine"--the work done in DreamWeaver.
There was a young writer on Slash, Who decided he needed some cash, He served up hot grits, arranged on a Ritz, And learned that you can't make money writing limericks if you can't make them rhyme.
Okay--so there is a creative work. (Remember, the law doesn't pass judgement on whether the "creative work" is actually any good.) When you view that in your web browser you're seeing the result of two different processes--the process of creating the HTML code that is shipped to your browser, and the code generated by your browser for your display. If you select that pseudo-limerick and print it you will create another program, quite possibly a PostScript program. Is the HTML code a creative work? Nope--anybody typing that bit of cheap doggerel into the SlashDot comments page will produce the same result. Anybody printing the limerick (to the same printer) will produce the same result. The only creative (hey--I finally used "hot grits" in a SlashDot post, although I have absolutely no clue why the lameboys think its funny) work was the limerick.
All that said, in this case the question is whether the original guys did any creative work in the HTML code, or if they just presented code output from DreamWeaver. If they just turned in the output from DreamWeaver, and the finished project looks substantially the same, it would be tough to claim injury. On the other hand, if the creative work has been altered, and the client is refusing to pay the first crew, then they have something to stand on. The "work for hire" rules in the Copyright Act require that the author of the work has to get paid. A work-for-hire contract necessarily requires the "hire"--if the author of the work isn't paid, the author still owns the work. And can protect it under copyright.
So, is our friend in trouble? Nope. He didn't make the contract with the first crew. They can ask (or compel) him to cease and desist, but their litigation is with the advertising firm that's in the middle of this.
But my opinion isn't what matters. Our friend should absolutely, positively, get sound legal advice from a practicing attorney.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi Dan!
Funny you should mention this. The question of whether PayPal is liable in the event of a fraudulent auction is very much in the news (here is the article on MSNBC.
Short version: some wise guy auctions off hard drives on Yahoo! to a steady stream of customers. Encourages auction "winners" to pay by PayPal. Those who paid by check got their mail back from the U.S. Postal Service saying no such address exists--those who paid by PayPal got zip.
PayPal is emphasizing that they are a means of facilitating exchange between two parties--they are not a credit card, and they are not a bank. Their terms of service explicitly deny any responsibility to either party in a transaction if the other fails to do something (like ship the goods).
In other words, PayPal is covered legally. How PayPal will fare in the court of public opinion may be another question. And yet another question is whether PayPal will be able to escape the attention of the U.S. government. What PayPal is doing, after all, looks very very much like a bank processing EFT (electronic funds transfer). The courts are going to laugh at Indianapolis regulating video games--but they won't have any problem at all with the idea of the federal government banking authorities regulating an e-business that looks, walks, and sounds like a bank.
I'll reply in another note on a slightly different thread.
Hi!
I don't think you understand who the patient is we're talking about. Let me elaborate.
Children who get sick go to the pediatrics wing of your local hospital. Children who get banged up in car accidents go to the pediatric intensive-care ward of your local hospital.
Children who are long-term inpatients at children's hospitals are not "normal" kids with boo-boos. They have cancer. They are waiting for transplants. They are hoping to improve enough to be considered as candidates for open-heart surgery. In short, their parents are on their knees every morning and every night, praying desperately to God that these kids live long enough to be able to worry about eating too much fat in their diet.
My youngest daughter has Down syndrome. 54% of Downs kids need open-heart surgery before they're two. Annie was spared that by a merciful God--but more than a third of her preschool classmates are now dead. A beautiful, clever, sparkling little boy who terrorized the world with his motorized wheelchair at age 5 died of lung problems when he was 8--he literally outgrew his lungs. He loved McNuggets--and the medical staff at Children's Hospital thought that McNuggets were just what kids like him needed. I agree.
Hi Phil!
JonK has written an excellent reply. Rather than repeating his words, I refer you to his splendid post. He's faced the same problem of integration in the CORBA/EJB market space that I've seen with minicomputers, LANs, and PCs over the past 15 years.
To give one example: SQL--the database query language. There are several ANSI standards: SQL-92 is the most recent. But there are tens of thousands of experienced Oracle DBAs out there with years and years of experience with PL/SQL. Who really, really like the non-SQL-92 features in PL/SQL and would doubtless inflict serious bodily injury on any Oracle product manager stupid enough to drop their non-standard features.
The most effective standard in the database business, by far, has been ODBC. (Brought to you by Microsoft.) Different vendors have written ODBC drivers to achieve different types of functionality--Intersolv's drivers provide exactly the same functionality for each of 34 different databases. Write to Intersolv's drivers for one database, and your code will work practically unchanged on any other database. BUT--those Intersolv drivers are very definitely "least common denominator" drivers. Visigenic, on the other hand, writes drivers to give you every last morsel of performance that a given DBMS supports. Write to a Visigenic driver for Informix and you have no guarantee at all that the same code will run against an Oracle back end. So long as you're certain that the back end won't change, the Visigenic driver will yield substantially better performance.
In theory, the idea that a DBMS is an interchangeable component is lovely. In practice, a company will focus on a single database platform and stick with it. They hire DBAs with skills on that platform, they develop solutions targeted at that platform, and they have a huge investment in data stored on that platform. Any client with a brain will include due diligence investigation of a DBMS vendor's financials as part of any purchase decision--it's that kind of a buy-in. In a sense it is comparable to a trucking company buying into an engine vendor--the truck may have a Navistar, Freightliner, or Western Star brand name, but there's a Detroit Diesel engine under the hood. If that trucker has 300 mechanics that are factory-trained on Detroit Diesel engines, it's going to take something huge to convince him to switch to Caterpillar.
Hi!
Not just "significantly" cheaper and easier--dramatically cheaper and easier. The $3000 per seat licenses I mentioned earlier were the kind of scam database vendors got away with because those were the only tools you could use to connect to a given database. Microsoft blew that entire market strategy away with ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity). The last time I checked there were 34 different databases with ODBC drivers available from at least one vendor. OLE DB (such as Microsoft's Active Data Objects) provides significantly higher performance to Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, and other vendors that create an OLE DB interface.
Microsoft didn't do this out of altruism. They did it to permit developers using Microsoft tools to connect to any database out there--but in the process they made it possible for developers using anybody else's tools (PowerBuilder, Delphi, etc.) to connect to those databases as well. The net result was that the proprietary database developer marketplace (Progress, some others) has dried up.
They're presently driving the price of what I'd term "mid-range" database solutions down with the Microsoft Database Engine. It's SQL Server 7.0 without the GUI. Develop the app with SQL Server, ship the app with the MSDE. You have an embedded database with positively kick-booty performance (SQL Server 7 is an absolutely groovy DBMS) with no nickel-and-dime client license fees.
Compare/contrast with database development for the AS/400 platform. Big bucks for the AS/400, big bucks for the OS, and even big bucks for each minor upgrade to the OS. Big bucks for DB2. And big bucks per seat for every user. Who is, of course, sitting in front of a PC running a $400 per seat 3270 terminal emulator package. A Windows client/server solution stomps that whole conglomeration silly both on price and performance. Being able to distribute it across the Internet using anybody's browser makes it even easier. The Total Cost of Ownership is dramatically lower with the Microsoft solution.
You should understand that this kind of behavior is the "bullying" that Microsoft's allies (particularly Oracle) are crying about. Oracle has good reason to cry--they charge an astronomical price for a very good database. Microsoft, with SQL Server 7.0, has a comparable database for most applications at a fraction of the price. Larry Ellison was running around a year ago offering $1 million to anybody who could show that SQL Server was as fast as Oracle--he withdrew the offer right before SQL Server 7 shipped. Oracle's political work to start the Dept. of Justice investigation (including $750,000 in free software and services to the Senate Judiciary Committee), their coordination of the DofJ anti-trust suit, and their snooping around the trash of Jonathan Zuck are all of a piece: they have some whopping great margins to protect, and Threat Number One is Microsoft.
The next question is, is there an Open Source solution that is even cheaper? Yes and no--the tools cost less, but some of the tools simply are not available. (For instance, I'm not aware of any Open Source DBMS that are supported on Linux or BSD by ER/win or InfoModeler. I'm also not aware of any Linux- or BSD-compatible database modeling software similar to ER/win or InfoModeler.) The time you spend doing stuff that Microsoft already does for you out of the box negates a lot of the Open Source cost advantage.
Hi!
First off--a word of thanks. A friend and sometime employee who lurks on SlashDot sent me an email this morning that read, "so--kicking over anthills on /. again?" I fully expected to see some ugly flames when I checked in. I am delighted by the posts of those of you who have taken the time to respond. SlashDot has a reputation for trolls, and I'm delighted by the tone and tenor of these comments. It's a very engaging conversation.
That's a very good point. In fact, that situation is presently happening with Microsoft Site Server. Site Server Commerce Edition 3.0 is a relatively cheap tool, and it does Registration and Membership quite nicely. Site Server Commerce Edition 2000 is a big-ticket tool that does all sorts of stuff--but all I need is plain vanilla registration and membership. I don't want all the other stuff, and I don't want to make my client (an Internet startup) have to pay for it. Microsoft is doing precisely what you suggest: moving away from what I want to do. (Or, "I don't want to go there, at least not today.") What to do?
For the short term, we're writing our own version. It isn't integrated with the OS in the slick way that Microsoft's is--in fact, it depends upon inclusion files in each Active Server Page we write. But we believe in stuff like the CMM and repetitive processes, so that's easy to handle.
My friend, Charlie, whom I mentioned above, is entirely of that opinion. And Microsoft's latest server pricing announcement lends a lot of weight to that view. I'm very interested on what the next round of Visual Studio will look like--if the purported breakthrough in Internet development tools really amounts to something I'll get a lot more excited about Microsoft. If the "breakthrough" amounts to another kludge like Visual InterDev I may look at Borland's Kylix with a lot more enthusiasm....
Forgive me--I was only thinking of tools used by commercial developers. Yes, gcc is popular among university students--but real-world developers tend to get hired to real with more complex issues. When you're building distributed apps that scale to thousands of users and beyond you need more than just a compiler. How would you write a component (such as a COM or CORBA component) with gcc? And how would you manage a pool of those components? And how would you distribute those components across a variety of servers, or even across multiple domains?
Or, on a simpler scale, how would you extract images from a fax server and store them on an optical disk?
The GNU project has created some free tools. And some useful tools. I'm sure its great for learning how to program. But they're just not for commercial use.
Hi!
Actually, my company is about the same size as yours--even a bit smaller. The solution is extremely easy: join the Solution Providers program. You pay an annual subscription fee of around $2400, and you get all the tools you just mentioned: all the development tools, all the server tools, the client licenses, the whole deal. If your local office nominates you for the Partner program you get licenses for even more developers. Definitely worth doing, in your case.
Oh, and you think Visual SourceSafe is a stagnant tool? Way back when Microsoft shipped their first version-control app, named Delta. It sucked. It was so good (not) that MS went out and bought LoneTree just to get SourceSafe.
Hi!
Don't kid yourself--any bargain you make with a tool or hardware vendor puts you in the same position. Suppose (for sake of argument) that somebody conclusively proves that using BSD instead of Linux makes you 38% more attractive to really good looking women. Do you think that Larry Augustin and VA BSD will think of your needs and concerns while they change their name?
Very, very few software systems involve a single tool. Sure--you can write an application with Visual Basic (or GCC). But so can any schmo. What companies pay outside consultants (like my company) for is integrating technologies that their in-house people can't make work. In other words, linking Products A, B, C, and D. If you spend much time in this business you will discover a simple truth: linking any two products from different vendors can be a pain. Linking any three products from three different vendors is always a colossal pain. Linking four products from four different vendors is simply suicidal.
Unless at least three of those products come from the same vendor. And if all of those products come from the same vendor, you have a fairly good bet that they'll work together. And if they don't work together, the vendor at least can't put on much of a finger-pointing exercise. And if you have a longstanding relationship with that vendor (particularly if they introduced you to the client), they'll make sure you're successful.
In other words, if you're going to integrate systems, you tend to get close to a few large vendors. There are Microsoft shops, like mine; or Oracle shops; or Sun shops; or IBM shops; or CA shops. The big advantage (as I see it) to Microsoft is that they do a much better job of courting the developer than anybody else, and they offer more tools (SQL Server, Site Server, etc.) that I can put together in a single solution for a client. Even if every one of those tools is a second-best product, I can create a kick-booty solution for the client on-budget and on-schedule because I know in advance that all the pieces will work together, and I know where to go looking if they won't.
Buying into a vendor's developers program does tie you to that vendor. If you're developing solutions for AS/400 users, it pays for you to ante up the bucks to join IBM's program (which includes [cough, cough] shelling out the bucks to buy an AS/400). But once you do, you're an AS/400 shop. You're not going to go writing solutions for the Unisys ClearPath server or the Unisys A mainframe.
All that said, there's another reason for loyalty to Microsoft. There are a lot of teenagers today on SlashDot that don't remember life when a single-seat programmer's license cost $3000 bucks (or 1.5 times the cost of a compact car). They don't remember the arcane joys of writing Epson LQ-500-compatible printer commands into print routines, or having to buy a third-party help product to display context-sensitive help. They don't remember having to pay $100 per seat for a TCP/IP stack, or $200 per seat for database driver licenses. Microsoft made all that stuff go away. And yes--the guy who was ripping off everybody for overpriced ODBC drivers? He got whupped. The guy charging big bucks for the TCP/IP stacks? Still around, but in a different business. The guys who made careers out of writing printer driver code for word processors (remember print driver disks, anybody?)--presumably doing something else. Microsoft made all that happen--which made using computers, and developing solutions for computers, a whole lot simpler for everybody.
I admire 'em for that--which is why I count myself a Microsoft Loyalist.
Hi!
In a word, yes. There is a very large community of programmers and database analysts who have grown substantial businesses by using Microsoft tools and technologies. Microsoft has grown by expressly targeting these people (including me) as "influential end users." We're the people Microsoft originally created the Microsoft Developer Network for, and the people that Microsoft is constantly plying with information and inexpensive tools.
When people rant about "Microsoft hegemony" and "bullying" they're being clueless. Or showing their age. The way that Microsoft has developed a monopoly isn't by driving around with fedoras and machine guns, threatening some CIO's family unless he installs Windows NT. Microsoft has been much, much more sneaky than that. Microsoft has, since the late 1980s, expressly targeted the "influential end user" (their term) and particularly software developers. They have expressly sought to gain "mindshare" (I believe an original Microsoft term, but perhaps "embraced and extended" from somebody else) among developers for a very specific purpose: custom apps written by developers require customers to buy the operating system.
Microsoft has been candid about this all along: they'll provide all kinds of tools and help, because at the end of the day they want the client to buy the OS. And the more of the OS they buy, the greater the opportunity for site license deals on Office, etc.
For the developer, it's a great deal. Microsoft development tools are always substantially less expensive than anybody else's, and Microsoft bends over backward to get you to sign up for programs (like the ISV program) that give you the tools even cheaper. Price developer versions of Oracle tools and databases for a team of five developers, for instance--Oracle won't quote you a price. They'll schedule a meeting, bring in a bunch of suits, try to estimate how much you're worth, ask a zillion questions about who your clients are and how much they're worth, and then quote you an astronomical sum. Microsoft will sign you up as a Solution Provider for $2495, which gives you licenses to everything. And they'll refer customers to you as well (unlike Oracle, who has no compunction about calling on your customers).
Partnering with Microsoft is a very, very good deal. But (and here's the wrinkle:) everybody involved knows how the deal works. In the end, Microsoft wants the OS sale. In effect, they're subsidizing all the tools, all the conferences, all the contact, all the support based on sales of the OS. Split the OS off into a different company than products (especially developer tools) and all of a sudden we're looking at a whole new pricing model. And for the small companies out there, like mine, an uncertain future.
So, yes--I've registered as a member of FIN. I've written to my congressman, and to both my senators. I have a strongly vested interest in the success of Microsoft, and I'm not shy about saying so.
Hi Marc!
Ronald McDonald House is not a children's hospital, and the RMHs don't provide services, per se, to seriously ill children. What they do is provide a place for the families of those children to stay nearby, so the family unit can stay intact.
The original RMH is in Philadelphia, near to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. CHOP serves patients from a wide area--I live about 100 miles from CHOP and know several families that are at CHOP routinely. If you have a child with pervasive disabilities, or that requires continuing treatments, commuting back and forth to Philadelphia can become an enormous task. Wealthier parents might stay in a local hotel, but it was all too common for parents to stop coming--leaving the child alone for days or weeks at a time.
Doctors have known for years that children do better in the hospital when Mom or Dad and/or siblings are around. CHOP doctors (including the chief surgeon, C. Everett Koop) also realized that kids weren't eating their prescribed meals--what they really wanted was junk food. They struck an interesting bargain with the McDonald's franchisers in the Philadelphia area.
McDonald's contributed big bucks for the renovation of Children's Hospital, including the construction of a new lobby. McDonald's built a restaurant *in* the lobby, so ambulatory patients could come down to the restaurant with their parents. In addition, children can have McDonald's meals in their rooms, in place of regular hospital food.
On top of that, the local franchisers bought a nearby rowhouse and rehabbed it as a place for parents and families to stay while a child was at CHOP...which they named Ronald McDonald House.
I agree with you wholeheartedly--Ronald McDonald House is a wonderful institution. I just wanted to mention that RMH is always associated with (and typically adjacent to) a children's hospital--RMH is for the patient's parents.
Yeah--it usually does. Stock prices frequently don't accurately assess the value of a company when the price is soaring. But when the price is crashing, it's generally because the market has the company figured out.
Corel just announced their results for the most recent quarter. It isn't pretty: here's a link to a couple of articles on The Motley Fool, quoting Canadian papers.
I'm sorry to see them in this shape, and I hope they survive. But things do not look good for Dr. Mike and friends.
Right. One of the joys of the American financial system is the transparency--when somebody makes a statement like that, all you have to do is look at the numbers. Or in this case, at a graph of Corel's stock performance over the past year, like this one. Which pretty effectively shows Corel's stock price running up to 44-1/2 in late December, and more or less tanking over the past six months. The Titanic sank faster, but not by much.
And while we're looking at numbers and pretty pictures, let's look at Corel's balance sheet. Which shows that Corel's current assets (cash and receivables) are a mere C$10 million more than its current liabilities. For a company doing C$60 million a quarter, that is a very, very hand-to-mouth operation. Which is not a pretty picture.
Or we could look at Corel's cash flow statements which document that Corel has less than 30 days worth of cash on hand.
The biggest concern I have, though, is that Corel hasn't yet released their second quarter results, despite their second quarter having closed a month ago. I don't know if this is unusual for Corel or not--but typically publicly-traded corporations I'm familiar with release their numbers by the 15th. (In fact I once was shipped to Japan on less than 18 hours notice by a client, in order to make sure that they reported results by the 15th.)
As I wrote earlier, don't get me wrong--I'm not a Corel-hater. I was an avid Corel user in 1988 (and I still have the Corel Draw 1.0 manual on my shelf to prove it). OTOH, a lot of corporations are trying to claim credit for "Open Source" in order to score points with the Linux crowd when all they're really doing is laying off developers. (Read: Netscape, Borland/Inprise, etc.) I think that's what Corel is doing here.
No--in fact I posted my note (and this one) with my full name, and with the URL of my business displayed in the message header. And, (ahem), I'm not posting as an Anonymous Coward.
Okay--so this conference was a total bust. Somebody in Kansas City did a wretched job organizing a conference, and the conference was wretched.
Do not let this get you down. In fact, the conference may not have been all that bad. Imagine being the 14th person in that opening presentation with Bruce Perens--a whole lot better communication than being one of 2000 at a mega-conference on the west coast, no? When LinuxWorldExpo draws 30,000 attendees you're not going to be firing automatic weapons at a Geeks with Guns gathering, lest it bring out the National Guard.
This may well be a sign of a maturing Linux community.
I've been a Visual Basic programmer since the day the product shipped (I've been programming in Basic since the days when it was an acronym). When VB first shipped it generated a positively electric buzz--it was phenomenally cool. But after the initial hype, after the initial thrill, and after a few developers noticed that there were some serious limits to what you could do with VB1, there seemed to be a plateau....
Right about that time Microsoft organized a conference in New York City with Boston University. Big deal, big ticket conference, with a huge fee to attend. And approximately nobody signed up. Microsoft called me up personally to invite me to attend, and the person asked me if I had any friends who'd like to come along too. For free. (And bear in mind--this was organized by professional conference organizers, in midtown Manhattan. This wasn't some poor guy in over his head in Kansas.)
Even with the last-minute scrambling, there were something like 40 people there--maybe less. Microsoft people openly worried about looking that stupid in front of the entire New York IT world. It was a cast-iron disaster.
Except that it wasn't. During the early buzz of Visual Basic there was a small group of self-employed programmers using the tool, and a larger group of corporate programmers who were playing with it at home. By the time this conference rolled around, a lot of those guys had jobs as VB programmers, and couldn't get the time to go to the conference. Or didn't feel the conference would tell them anything they couldn't hear online. VB has gone on to huge things in New York City and elsewhere, of course, and a poorly attended conference in 1992 hasn't made the slightest bit of difference.
That may well be the same thing with this Linux conference. Sure--poor promotion will hurt. But poor attendance by the locals may well mean that people are using Linux at work, and that in turn means that Linux is infiltrating the corporate world.
You may see more conference reports that show poor attendance. It doesn't mean that Linux is in trouble--it probably just means that a lot of Linux users have been to a conference or two, heard the speeches extolling Open Source, and are biding their time (and keeping their money) until there is something new! and exciting! about Linux to come hear about.
That may be coming: Borland/Inprise is now projecting that Kylix, their cross-platform version of Delphi, will ship later this year. When developers can take advantage of a visual development IDE and deploy on Linux, there may be a phenomenal explosion of interest. And when corporate IT managers discover that the boys in the back room have been running the company proxy server on Linux for months, you may well see an explosion of interest in Linux all across corporate America.
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Linux evangelist. But I would not, at all, consider this conference (or Roblimo's similarly pessimistic views on PC Expo) reason to get discouraged about the potential of Linux.
The penguin may just be sitting on the tip of the iceberg....
With all respect to those who think this is a positive thing, we must seriously consider whether this isn't so much FreeWare as it is AbandonWare.
A few facts gleaned from The Motley Fool:
In short, I think that Corel is a company that is in serious financial trouble. I think it is far more likely that Corel is doing this not for PR--but because they're going to eliminate PhotoPaint development, support, etc. as part of their announced C$40 million cost-cutting campaign.
Don't get me wrong--I have a lot of regard for Corel. Ten years ago I was writing PostScript code generators for calibrating imagesetting equipment--and developing books and periodicals with Corel Draw and Ventura Publisher (now owned by Corel). I subsequently was a sysop on the VENTURA forum on CompuServe, and did a lot of technical illustration with Corel Draw. I've retouched hundreds of photographs with PhotoPaint.
But I think this is a sign of Corel going into the tank--not a sign of positive developments for Linux at all.
sic transit gloria....
To quote Ronald Reagan, "there you go again!"
Zip codes are not the province of state or local authorities. They are the province--the sole and exclusive province--of the U.S. Postal Service. And if you think that handling sales taxes on out-of-state purchases is a thorny political issue, just contemplate what would happen if Congress required the Postal Service to redraw all the zip code boundaries to coincide with political subdivisions (county, municipality, etc). (Remember all the screaming when area codes got split? Just a dim rumble comparatively.)
Lots of people have contemplated the problem of identifying and paying local sales taxes. The problem has existed in Texas, California, and New York since (at least) 1987, when I first confronted it. In order to assess sales taxes at the local level every database would have to include a county identifier, a municipality identifier, and at least two special district identifiers (some states assess additional sales taxes within areas served by mass transit; others assess sales taxes by school district; etc.). And yes--you would have to maintain both municipality and county, since there are municipalities (New York City and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for two) that span counties. Better yet--every database system would have to be able to identify that a consumer was filling in appropriate values. (So, with a zip code of 18091, I don't fill in Centre County in order to avoid a local county sales tax.) Vastly complicated and hugely burdensome are two phrases that spring to mind....
The best solution is Delaware's: don't assess sales taxes. Then your tax-paying businesses have nothing to fear from e-commerce, and you can become a "haven" for e-commerce businesses. Sales taxes are also hideously expensive to collect, audit, and enforce. They are a huge pain to retailers, and the only people who like sales taxes are small biz accountants, since tax audits represent such a nice chunk of business.
Assess taxes on income. Taxes on property get bucks from well-heeled society matrons, but bankrupt senior citizens. Taxes on consumption hike the price of Ferraris, but hit the poor hardest of all.
Bzzzzzt! Wrong! In fact, calculating the appropriate sales tax to collect is still practically impossible. A lawyer might deem this a trivial task (a "lookup table by zip code...") but in fact any quick survey of states where local sales taxes are permissible will instantly reveal the fact that zip codes and municipal boundaries frequently do not coincide.
Consider California: the state has a sales tax, each county can assess a sales tax, plus each city can assess a sales tax. In addition there are several special sales tax districts such as the Bay Area Rapid Transit District that can assess a sales tax. Zip codes in California do not necessarily map to county or even city boundaries. (You can view California sales tax rates, by county, here.)
This is an excellent example of a looming problem in government: Hawk, the writer of this post, is a legal scholar who "gets it." He was an authority cited by SlashDot when Judge Jackson's findings of fact in the Microsoft case were issued. He's the kind of lawyer that other lawyers will ask for guidance on public policy issues like assessing sales taxes. And, in fact, (on this specific issue) he's flat wrong. Calculating local sales taxes is anything but trivial, and you can't use zip codes to do it. Am I dumping on Hawk? Not really--I'm using this as an example of the serious problem we as a people face as our elected representatives try to come to grips with the Internet and the digital age. It's easy for a congressman or a judge to hear a Penn State professor say, "it's trivial" and blithely charge ahead--or write a decision--with that in mind. And having heard once that something like this is trivial, they aren't going to be dissuaded by anything less than an overwhelming amount of data. He's a professor, after all.
Moral: Do not ask a database programmer to write an appellate brief for you. And do not ask a lawyer to explain computer technology.
Hi!
It must be a slow news day at the New York Times....
This editorial is asking and answering a simple, but stupid, question: is the "digital revolution" as significant as electricity? Or the internal combustion engine? Or modern medicine?
Well, gosh, no. Except....
There is absolutely nothing technologically significant about the internal combustion engine. It is the product of relatively low-precision machine work with an astonishingly small degree of innovation from year to year. There is a LOT that is technologically significant about how the internal is USED, however. Electricity--it was a curiosity in the 18th century that was celebrated by "philosophical gentlemen" who usually died trying to play with it. It was technologically meaningless, UNTIL it was put to use.
In the 15th century a group of Germans achieved an astonishing technological breakthrough: they were able to machine wooden (and later metal) parts to tolerances of less than 1/1000 of an inch. A big deal? Yes! Nobody--anywhere in the world--could achieve that precision. But was it a technological breakthrough?
The Reformation didn't happen because a bunch of Germans developed precision measurement and machining. It happened because those Germans were led by Johannes Gutenberg, and what they were machining was moveable type. What they created is still the most significant technological advancement in the history of the world.
So how does the Digital Revolution stack up? We're WAY too quick to be judging. The revolution is only just starting, and it will be decades before we fully understand just how far-reaching it will become. Just as a f'rinstance, consider this: the Chinese student uprising in 1989 was largely driven by the fax machine. Consider the impact of email, especially with strong encryption, on repressive governments everywhere. It is entirely possible that we will witness dramatic political changes around the world in the next decades due to the "digital revolution." That may be good (like the Soviets, the empire collapses peacefully) or bad ( like the Yugoslavs, the old order dies in flames). But either way, the impact of something as low-tech as email, coupled with something as "digital" as strong encryption, will be substantial.
Does this story make you angry? Does it make you think an injustice has been done? Do you want to actually do something about it?
Remember two key facts of public life:
Thus, a little political controversy will thrill the local newspaper, and make life miserable for the bozos who think they're the Big Shots in the "close-knit" community of Milford, Utah.
And how do you engender a little political controversy? Posting a comment here on SlashDot can help (the more comments, the more people read the article--the more people read the article, the more will hopefully express their concern to people in Utah). But expressing your thoughts directly to the Utah press will do even more. All you have to do is write to the electronic version of Letters to the Editor of the Salt Lake Tribune at mailto:letters@stltrib.com. Be sure to include your name, your address, and a daytime phone number. Be polite, don't be crude, and be sure to use words like "fairness", "concern", and "fair play". Here's what I just sent them:
The British Columbia government would, in fact, dearly love to get Microsoft to move north. Even if they couldn't get all of Microsoft, they'd love to get some of Microsoft. Anybody working in economic development circles would dearly love to get Microsoft to open a new facility in his or her territory. So it's safe to say that BC economic development people are on board with whatever is going on here.
Microsoft isn't just trying to get the DOJ off its back. Microsoft is seriously, deeply, bitterly offended. Microsoft is pissed. I'm not in Seattle, I'm on the East Coast. But all the Microsoft people I know are--to a man--convinced that this whole case is a sham. It was orchestrated by their competitors (particularly Oracle, who is next to get clobbered by an almost-as-good-at-one-third-the-price product) and run by the Democrats. If, in their view, Microsoft had been paying off politicians all these years (as Silicon Valley has been faithfully doing) this case would have never happened. (Mind you, this is their view, although I agree with it.)
[Don't flame--stay with me.]
Microsoft doesn't need to pick up and leave--they just need to make it clear that A) they can, and B) that there is a credible offer within a reasonable commuting distance where they can move to.
British Columbia fits the bill nicely. Lots and lots of Microsoft employees vacation in the San Juan Islands (which stretch from Anacortes, Washingon to Victoria, BC). Lots and lots of Microsoft employees live north of Redmond, so the commute to the Canadian border isn't that far. All Microsoft has to do is buy a chunk of land right on the border, and enter "serious negotiations" with the BC government for some form of income tax abatement for American commuters and the lightbulb will come on for lots of politicians across the U.S.
The political ironies are just too entertaining: remember the threats about the NAFTA treaty? Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" that was all those jobs moving to Mexico? The prospect of the world's richest company moving across the border to avoid U.S. regulation, taking 20,000 American jobs with it, would be hugely embarassing to the Clinton Administration. And, since Al Gore is already on record as being in favor of a breakup and in favor of NAFTA, it would hurt Gore politically. It would also, overnight, resurrect the Reform Party, which was last seen meeting in a phone booth in Minneapolis. They're about to nominate Mr. Protectionism his own self, Pat Buchanan. Pat's absolutely stark staring gonzo, but he's a terrific speaker--and he could take this and go bananas.
There would be two certain results: the Sunday morning political talk shows would cover nothing else for weeks; and Pat Buchanan would split the Democratic vote over protectionism. Bush wins the White House. The same George W. Bush who has publicly said that breaking up Microsoft would be a big mistake.
And in the end, Microsoft doesn't have to move. Sure, maybe they open a facility in British Columbia. ("Embrace and extend" UserFriendly, perhaps? Visual Dust Puppy 2000, anyone?) But they just quietly say that they're always talking to economic development officials in any number of locations, and they're intrigued by some of the opportunities in BC, blah blah blah. And quietly deliver the election to Dubyah--who then scraps the DOJ suit.
All they have to do is make the threat credible....
"Based on the license's remarkably nebulous wording, there isn't any exception made for comments made by non-licensees; so long as the content appears on a licensee-hosted site, you can be held liable." [Emphasis in the original]
You're right--and in the licensing biz, that's the way it works. If you're a McDonald's franchisee running a web site for other McDonald's operators (true fact: most franchisers have licensee organizations that don't always see eye-to-eye with corporate headquarters) Big Mac is going to expect you to delete that post that says the Quarter Pounder is made with horse meat. In, say, zero seconds. If you even think about the First Amendment issues there'll be a truck in front of your store removing all the signs before noon. That's the deal: you do things their way, you give up a lot of autonomy, but McDonald's makes you rich.
That said, you make a good distinction: Apogee can beat up on its licensees, but what about Microsoft and SlashDot? Microsoft (which invoked the DMCA, not UCITA) was claiming its secrets were violated. Changes in rules like copyright generally don't happen until there is significant review by the courts--Microsoft was trying to invoke the DMCA, but in more or less exactly the same way that the Pentagon would have tried to prevent the Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers. The context of the SlashDot posts were (generally speaking) public comment about controversial documents. The courts are going to have to hear some really compelling arguments to let something like that fly.
The Microsoft vs. SlashDot thing was about the DMCA. The Apogee thing is about licensing. Neither has anything to do with the UCITA.
This isn't a case of the evils of UCITA. This is a case of jumping to conclusions. If you read the document the restrictions about negative comments, etc., pertain to licensees of Apogee's trademarks.
Apogee requires anybody who wants to use their trademarks to ask for permission. When they get permission they become a licensee--as a licensee they cannot do all the stuff everybody is getting all flustered about.
Well, guess what? This is absolutely standard in the world of licensing. If you're a McDonald's franchisee you cannot host alt.bigmacs.suck.bigtime--that's part of the deal. Them's the rules. If you're going to license Apogee's trademarks, you have to abide by the license agreement.
What this does NOT do is restrict anybody rights to free speech. Duke Nukem is a stupid game. It's immoral. It encourages preteens to acts of violence. It causes people to become fat. I have it on good information that the electrons in the game have been Genetically Modified.
So there.
Should I quake in my boots, waiting for the Apogee lawyers to appear? Nope--because I'm not an Apogee licensee. "Well, wait a minute," you might say. "If 'Duke Nukem' is a trademark of Apogee, and I post a message saying 'Duke Nukem sucks', haven't I used Apogee's trademark? And haven't I therefore become (at least by Apogee's delusional agreement) an Apogee licensee?"
Bzzzzt! Wrong. Apogee explicitly requires you to apply to use their trademarks. They will then issue you a license. Until that happens, you're not a licensee. Posting anti-Duke messages is entirely legal, and the UCITA has nothing to do with it.
BUT if you copy a Duke Nukem GIF off of their web site and post it on your dukenukemblowschunks.com website, they're going to accuse you of trademark infringement. And they might even try to assert that using their site means that you agree to their terms and conditions (um, no.)
AND If you do ask for a license to the Duke Nukem logo to put on the cover of your forthcoming Duke Nukem Tips & Tricks (a bit late to market, aren't we?) then you're on the hook. You can't say bad things about the product. As I wrote above, that's how product licensing agreements work.
Hi!
Note: I wrote that you should call your legislator--not the PUC. The PUC has a vested interested in protecting the regulated monopolies--the more regulations, the more work for the regulators. The PUC won't do diddly except send you photocopied pages of tariffs. (Although they can tell you what tariff hikes are presently proposed and when you can testify regarding them.)
Hi!
Your post ends with the magic words:
"With all this hassle, next time I sign up for DSL (maybe I'll switch to cable), I'll probably sign up directly with the phone company, if they offer the service. This seems like an unfair advantage to the other companies."
As it happens, Bell Atlantic is in hot water on this very subject. The State of New York just fined BA $10 million for anticompetitive practices with regard to competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Public Utility Commission has gone so far as to require BA to divest their retail phone operations (so the "wholesale distribution" side treats all carriers equally). The state's Consumer Advocate is presently on a campaign about businesses that have been harmed when they switched to a CLEC, and Bell dropped all mention of them from directory assistance.
In other words, the regulators are watching. If BA is jerking around CLEC DSL customers while providing a different level of service to its own customers, that's anticompetitive.
Call your state legislator--ask him or her to ask the Public Utility Commission for information on resolving complaints about poor DSL service. You may have to explain DSL to the kid who answers the phone (he's a political science major/groupie) but legislators love constituent service opportunities like this. They will ask for pertinent information (so the letter can say, "My good friend Elmer Stutzenfreud (Circuit ID #17X933099J32, Covad ID# 234234234, BA Repair order #NY0339993A3) has mentioned to me the severe impact of a DSL outage on his business....")
Regulated monopolies have zero incentive to listen to consumers. But they live and die by the whim of the legislature--and the legislators know it. Call your state rep or state senator, and ask for help.
P.S.: There is a quid to the pro quo: when your legislator comes up for reelection he will ask for your vote. If he has done an effective job representing your interests, you probably should vote for him.
"...but who's really concerned about what Agriculture is trying to keep secret?"
Um, did you ever wonder where the U.S. government forecasts about crop yields in the Soviet Union came from? Or where the current forecasts about crop yields in North Korea come from?
Ever wonder about the geopolitical impact of another year of famine in a country that combines a stone-cold whacko dictator, a not-very-well-hidden nuclear weapons program, a very successful ballistic missile program, and a population with a *long*-standing hatred of Japan?
Yeah--the people in Washington worry about that, too. Which is why there are people at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture who view information from sattelites that is considered to be classified data.
John Murdoch
P.S.: No kidding: I'm actually a 4-H leader, which is a Dept. of Agriculture-funded program.
Hi!
Am I sure? As I mentioned earlier, the crux of the question here is whether anybody is sure of whether or not this is a copyright violation. It is the uncertainty of the thing that creates room for lawyers to get involved.
Let's say that I'm very confident that machine output is generally not regarded as a creative work that is subject to protection with intellectual property laws. The process involved to create the machine output may certainly be creative--but the output is not. Anybody applying the same inputs to the "machine" will get the same output--so there is nothing creative in the output. The creativity that is subject to legal protection is in the "inputs" to the "machine"--the work done in DreamWeaver.
Okay--so there is a creative work. (Remember, the law doesn't pass judgement on whether the "creative work" is actually any good.) When you view that in your web browser you're seeing the result of two different processes--the process of creating the HTML code that is shipped to your browser, and the code generated by your browser for your display. If you select that pseudo-limerick and print it you will create another program, quite possibly a PostScript program. Is the HTML code a creative work? Nope--anybody typing that bit of cheap doggerel into the SlashDot comments page will produce the same result. Anybody printing the limerick (to the same printer) will produce the same result. The only creative (hey--I finally used "hot grits" in a SlashDot post, although I have absolutely no clue why the lameboys think its funny) work was the limerick.
All that said, in this case the question is whether the original guys did any creative work in the HTML code, or if they just presented code output from DreamWeaver. If they just turned in the output from DreamWeaver, and the finished project looks substantially the same, it would be tough to claim injury. On the other hand, if the creative work has been altered, and the client is refusing to pay the first crew, then they have something to stand on. The "work for hire" rules in the Copyright Act require that the author of the work has to get paid. A work-for-hire contract necessarily requires the "hire"--if the author of the work isn't paid, the author still owns the work. And can protect it under copyright.
So, is our friend in trouble? Nope. He didn't make the contract with the first crew. They can ask (or compel) him to cease and desist, but their litigation is with the advertising firm that's in the middle of this.
But my opinion isn't what matters. Our friend should absolutely, positively, get sound legal advice from a practicing attorney.