In theory you can enforce the GPL in court--suing someone who pirates your code. In practice, you have no defense against somebody plagiarizing your code. Your team members are entirely correct to worry that the fruit of all their hard labor might be swiped by somebody and used in a commercial product.
You and I and the entire SlashDot community might argue about whether such plagiarism might happen--but the simple facts of history are brutally plain: without intellectual property protection that kind of plagiarism practically always occurs.
Example: consider the People's Republic of China. The PRC has paid lip service to intellectual property issues, but fundamentally there isn't any such thing. When was the last time you bought (or heard of) a piece of software developed in the PRC? It isn't because the Chinese are stupid--far from it. The ranks of American software firms (and the membership of SlashDot, I'm sure) are chock full of ethnic Chinese, and Chinese emigrants. But because anybody can peek at your work and swipe the results--and laugh at you while he's headed for the bank--most people decide that there is little reward for innovation. What innovation there is tends to be "protected" by some kind of secrecy scheme, or done because the innovator derives personal pleasure from giving his creations away.
This is a painful lesson to learn--but this is simple history, and simple economics. In some technologies there have been significant barriers to plagiarism (I can plagiarize ABB's technology for continuous-casting sheet steel--but unless I have $100 million for the machinery, not to mention sales contracts with Ford, I can't use their invention) but in software there are no barriers at all. If I can read your source code, I can use it. I may not copy it--I might just grasp the ideas and incorporate them in my next product design. And there is practically no way to prevent that from happening. The only way to protect the work that you have done (and to profit from it) is to seek refuge in the rules of intellectual property.
A new research study reported today that the use of copper wire by racist, skinhead, and white supremacy groups is at an all-time high. "This is a disturbing trend," said a predictably reliable source of meaningless blather. "It is imperative that right-thinking people around the world band together to combat racism, imperialism, Zionism, and other -isms that the UN and the world press disapprove of."
U.S. government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that racist and neo-Nazi organizations make extensive use of copper. "These guys use copper wire to communicate all the time. They connect to the Internet, they watch cable TV, they call each other on the phone," said the official. "But that's just scratching the surface," he continued, "they use copper in electrical wiring, light switches, electrical fixtures--hey, some of them even use copper-bottomed pots and pans to cook meals for their racist friends."
These shocking revelations come hard on the heels of disturbing new revelations that many of the Swiss and German insurance companies that failed to pay on Nazi-era policies also make extensive use of copper wire for both communications and electric power distribution. Swiss government officials in Zurich refused to confirm reports that they were investigating whether insurance company officials used copper-bottomed pans for cooking.
Leading scientists, meeting at a UN-sponsored conference in Tokyo, sought to clarify the issue. "Copper can be an element for good, or for evil," said reknowned ethicist Robert Brooks of Harvard University. "While we deplore the way that these disgraceful elements are using copper, we have to remember the positive ways in which copper has been used for good." Nonetheless, Prof. Brooks did observe that there is a longstanding link between copper and racism--dating back to the early days of the slave trade, when the hulls of slave ships and other vessels of the period were routinely covered with copper to protect the ships from rot. "Think of it," mused Brooks, "how far we've come from the days of the slave trade, and we still can't manage to keep copper out of the hands of these people."
For more information, contact the International Alliance to Ban Copper and Racism, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10022.
The InfoWorld article refers to Intel's quarterly price cuts. You will note that computer manufacturers are also announcing lower prices, reflecting the drop in prices. This is nothing new--it happens in the second week of every quarter.
But since the question has been raised, how concerned is Intel about Transmeta? Probably not that much. Remember that Intel owns the microprocessor business--not just the chips, but also the technology required to make the chips. They have extensive R&D projects with companies like Applied Materials (and a major client of mine) that affect all sorts of things. And remember that Intel is extremely aggressive about protecting its patent rights. Much of Transmeta's press conference palavar about not worrying about Intel and patent issues is so much PR--if IBM is planning on using Intel-developed technology to produce the Transmeta chips you will see mention of a "cross-licensing agreement" in the trade press. (Remember that IBM will actually manufacture the chips for Transmeta.)
There is another factor to consider: producing cutting edge chips in volume requires massive capital investment. If Transmeta can't sign up a lot of business they may not be able to produce enough chips to bring the unit costs down low enough....
At the moment Intel is continuing to cruise right along, printing money. AMD? An annoyance. Transmeta? A set of spects and a press conference. Down the road Transmeta might be reason for Indel to be concerned--but a threat? The moo-ha-ha department? No. We're way too early for that.
I have followed the development of the UCITA for several years with interest, prompted by the continuing coverage in InfoWorld. This article repeats many of the criticisms of the UCITA that have been aired elsewhere:
The new law allows software sellers to include various security measures (such as back doors) in their license agreements.
The new law allows sellers to incorporate all kinds of use restrictions in EULAs, and to make those EULAs binding based on something as simple as opening a disk envelope.
The new law does not require disclosure of known bugs, or provide any remedies (other than those provided by other consumer protection laws) when the end user discovers those bugs while using the software.
The conclusion seems obvious: This is a BAD THING. But before we just snort in derision and click to the next SlashDot topic, let's look a little more closely.
The UCITA addresses two markets:
The first thing to recognize is that the UCITA is written to define rules for two different markets: the consumer (or mass) market, and the custom software market. The UCITA would apply if you went into Circuit City this afternoon and bought a copy of Leisure Suit Larry for Linux. It would also apply if your corporation hired a small boutique firm (like, say, mine) to create a distributed e-commerce logistics project linking raw material vendors, transportation partners, and corporate customers. One is a $29 transaction paid with a Visa card. The other is $200,000 or more of development work. As the UCITA has been discussed, all too often enthusiasts (both pro- and con-) have tended to blur the distinction--citing provisions meant for one circumstance as the kind of Really Bad Thing (TM) that could happen in the other.
The Insidious Trap Door
No better example exists than the Insidious Trap Door(tm) argument. Buy a copy of Leisure Suit Larry for Linux, goes the argument, and someday the developer can send electronic minions scurrying through your modem to disable the software (and copy the contents of your hard drive).
Um, no. The UCITA gives a vendor the legal ability to include a provision permitting that in a contract that both buyer and seller sign. That means that a seller can try to include such a provision, but the buyer doesn't have to accept it. The provision is not for consumer software--if Leisure Suit Larry for Linux included a back door the entire world would hear about it in every review of the game. We'd all fuss and fume, and CmdrTaco would create a bitmap graphic for TrojanWare and tell us all about it.
What that back door provision does is overturn a common way for custom software developers to make sure that they get paid. In the custom software business it is common for small projects to be billed in thirds: one-third at the time the contract is signed, one-third at the time the software is delivered, and one-third 30 days after delivery. However--it is all-too-common for customers to make the first payment, make the second payment, but stiff the developer for the third payment. If the developer is in a different state, the developer's only recourse is to sue in federal court. And you can't bring a civil action in federal court unless the actual damages you are claiming (not potential damages, or damage to your reputation, etc.) is greater than $50,000. If the total job was $45,000, an out-of-state customer can stiff you for the last $15,000 and there is precious little you can do about it. (Lawyers will suggest that there are other remedies--such as suing in the buyer's home state, etc.--but the long and short of it is that the client can stiff you, and you have no options.) The UCITA provides a legal form of defense for the developer for this circumstance: a Trojan.
EGAD! A Trojan! Oh, relax. Years ago I worked for a small company that dominates the market for accounting and marketing software for book publishers. They sell on the thirds principle, and have on occasion had trouble getting that last third. Their software now checks the system date: if the last payment has not been made, at 75 days each operator is warned that "a system issue needs to be addressed. Have your supervisor contact us." At 90 days the operators are warned that "a serious software issue exists. Have your supervisor contact us." At 120 days the operators are prompted "your employer has not paid an outstanding invoice for more than 120 days. The system will not function until the outstanding invoices are paid."
That was extremely effective--until Virginia banned the practice. All of a sudden it is a lot tougher to get paid by a client in Virginia--they know your only option is through the courts, which effectively means you're screwed. The UCITA lets my old employer put that Trojan back in, to make sure they get paid. (Truth in messaging: my company does not do that. We typically provide the source code to the client, and often have one or more of the client's programmers working with us.)
The Good Side of the UCITA
A couple of the elements of the UCITA that have not been highlighted enough are the "warranty of merchantibility" clause, and the "accidental click" clause. These are Good Things. The Warranty of Merchantibility is a hifalutin way of saying "lemon laws." If you buy a car in most states and it turns out to have all sorts of defects you can generally bring it back to the dealer and get your money back. The car you bought fundamentally does not function as an automobile--it is not suitable for the purpose for which it was sold. Back it goes. The UCITA gives you the same protection: buy a copy of Leisure Suit Larry for Linux and take it home. Open it up, install it, and discover that it only works on, say, LinuxOne. (Because of all the supersecret custom LinuxOne development, of course.) Well, if it only works on LinuxOne (or only works on KDE) then it isn't suitable for use on other Linux computers. Under the warranty of merchantibility you can take it back and get a refund.
The "accidental click" clause lets you install an app, click on the "I Agree" button, and complete the install. And then say, "oh--I don't want this." and send it back. You'll have to read the fine print to see the time limit (you could not say, "oh--I don't want this" 90 days after you installed) but at least you can look at the software, and see if it installs, without losing all your rights.
All in all, this is probably a good thing:
All things considered, this is a good thing. Yes--in theory consumer software can now include stupid rules in the EULA. In practice software companies will discover that pissing off your customers is not a good business strategy. This will have a much bigger impact on the custom software marketplace, where small vendors will be able to negotiate reasonable contract provisions. The big losers in this are the lawyers--the UCITA spells out the rules of the game, so you don't need as much legal help to make up the rules as you go along.
PS: For those who would object that Leisure Suit Larry for Linux should be Open Source or GPL'd, let me refer you to http://www.theresnosuchproduct.org. JM
Okay--so Mr. Clinton wants to revitalize American technology by providing a new generation of workers with the skills for the new millennium (I didn't hear it, I didn't read it, but I somehow just know he said it). So he's proposing $91 million bucks to achieve this. To paraphrase a certain sports announcer:
Let's go to the adding machine tape!
Start with $91,000,000
Subtract 40% for the usual government overhead (I'm being generous--it is likely more)--that leaves $54,600,000.
Divide by $14,000 to pay tuition and fees (this is high for most state schools, low for any private school)--the answer is 3,900.
We can play with this math all we want: we might see this program provide a free four-year ride to a thousand students. Or the program might provide a $1400 stipend--once--to 39,000 Computer Science majors. But anyway you slice it, this doesn't amount to much more than a trivial gesture. If the nation has a "shortage" of 250,000 programmers no stipend, whether 1400 bucks or fourteen thousand bucks, is going to solve that problem.
Above and beyond that--this is dumb. You don't want kids taking up programming "just for the money" anymore than you want to be treated by a doctor who is "just in it for the money." The whole point of the med school hazing process is to weed those guys out. A lot of kids think they'll make bucks programming--they're the ones that disappear. The programmers who last--and who are invaluable--do it because they love the challenge, they love to use their brains, and they love the constant learning process. And more often than not, the best programmers were NOT Computer Science majors. (Truth in hiring time: I generally view a Computer Science major as a negative on a resume. I would vastly rather see a liberal arts major, business, or engineering coupled with a CS minor or a distribution in programming.)
Bottom line: this is a facile political gesture, from a president who has turned the facile political gesture into an art form.
The Wall St. Journal, two weeks ago, devoted considerable space to the Andover IPO--strongly suggesting that the only perceptible value in the company was SlashDot, and demonstrating the unorthodox steps that Andover took to get the IPO underwritten. (Notably, the WSJ reports that when Andover initially tried to get underwriting it owed the two of you more money than the entire assets of the firm.) The WSJ has subsequently referred to Andover, by name, as an example of an IPO with a stratospheric share price, but no substance. Nobody, anywhere, has suggested that there is any commercial value to Andover other than SlashDot.
Much as I appreciate the sense of humor you have, and the contributions of the SlashDot community, it seems to me that the really valuable thing about SlashDot is the software--the database system that permits posting, moderation, meta-moderation, etc. It is a work of genius. And, a very valuable thing.
The Wall St. Journal has all but called Andover a bubble--(or, to be less kind, a pump 'n dump). The only way to prove them wrong is to achieve corporate earnings that support the current share price. The only real asset of Andover is SlashDot--and the only real asset of SlashDot is the software. And the software is supposed to be Open Source.
This is one of those "good government" ideas--in the pejorative sense of bright ideas that haven't really been thought through. The premise here is that "speed kills"--so if we can make sure everybody drives at the speed limit, nobody will be killed.
Nice theory. But wrong.
Most speed-related fatalities happen when a driver is operating a vehicle relatively close to the speed limit--but in totally wrong conditions. If there are 8" of snow on the ground, and snow is falling at a rate of 3" per hour, doing 55 miles per hour on Interstate 80 is incredibly dangerous. On the other hand, if it is a clear day, nobody is on the road, and your car is in reasonable mechanical shape, you can safely drive 80 miles per hour. Put 100,000 other cars on the same road, and once again driving at the speed limit constitutes reckless driving.
It rains, occasionally, in Britain. Like, say, every day. The appropriate speed in the rain, the appropriate speed in heavy traffic, the appropriate speed in heavy traffic while its raining, and the speed limit are four dramatically distinct numbers.
Trucking companies have used "governors" for years to limit speeding by their drivers. A number of trucking companies in the U.S. monitor driver speeds, believing that there is a correlation between higher speeds and greater damage claims. (There is some basis for this: if hitting a pothole in Pennsylvania makes the trailer bounce 4" at 55 mph, how high will the trailer bounce if you hit that pothole at 65 mph? A number of trucking companies have speed limits for Pennsylvania in particular, because of the lousy roads in Pa.) Anybody using governors will quickly discover the response of drivers--every single driver now drives at the maximum governed speed. Pretty much regardless of the circumstances. And that maximum governed speed, in the dark, in the rain (or snow), can be a dangerous thing.
The are a number of advocacy groups that decry public expressions of illiteracy. John Dos Passos and others have periodically made public protestations against "innumeracy"--the blithe acceptance of bogus figures or statistics. Perhaps it is time to protest something similar: the belief in a technological silver bullet that will somehow substitute for human judgement.
The tradition of not showing the faces of adults began with Charles M. Schultz, and his Peanuts cartoon strip. The strip has never showed an adult's face, or (in the animated cartoons) used an adult's voice. You only see the child's perspective.
What Intel is describing (in effect, the ability to push processing tasks to remote machines) is something clearly anticipated by Microsoft's COM technology. (In 1997 the marketing name du jour was OLE 2.0, but since "OLE" had come to be a synonym for "speed brake" they changed the name.)
This technique is really quite appealing to large corporations, particularly corporations with operations around the world. I have a client with 16,000 PCs in 34 countries (soon to be 25,000 PCs in 52 countries when a pending acquisition is completed). As I write this they have thousands of PCs sitting on the other side of the world, in the dark, doing nothing. Imagine being able to harness all that CPU time....
There are lots of CPU-intensive tasks that are particularly suited to processing on a plain old desktop PC (as opposed to a top-of-the-line smoking quad Xeon processor box). OCR, image manipulation, and image compression are three activities that spring to mind. If you have unused PCs sitting around, and the network bandwidth to get the data to those PCs, this kind of distributed computing can provide a tremendous benefit to a corporation for essentially zero additional capital.
Microsoft already makes this possible: create a DCOM agent on the remote PC. Ship an install set, and have the agent run the remote install. Ship the data, get the data back (repeat for the next eight hours). You can leave the installed app on that remote machine, or you could even get clever and remove it for security's sake. (This, incidentally, is precisely the technology in Internet Explorer that Microsoft is insisting must be considered a core part of Windows.)
Microsoft isn't going to let Intel prevent anybody from using DCOM--just isn't going to happen. But on the other hand, Microsoft may not fight very hard--Microsoft and Intel (and most of the major technology companies) have cross-licensing agreements that permit using patents of one another. (Sort of a free trade agreement among tech firms, if you will.) If this threatens the functionality of COM (which is the core of Microsoft's Distributed Network Architecture) then we'll see some fur fly. But I don't see that happening.
That Oracle is bringing out all of their software on the Linux platform is interesting news. But that wasn't the topic of this article. This article simply says that one reseller in Japan is moving to Linux, and that Oracle is going to try to persuade more resellers to distribute Oracle/Linux to their customers.
My point is that small resellers in Japan are even less significant in The Grand Scheme of Things(tm) than small resellers are here in the U.S. Given Oracle's pricing practices, I think it is a fair question to ask if this means that Oracle is backing Linux in a big way--or if Oracle is writing off small customers, steering them to resellers (and Linux) for installation and support.
IMHO, this article is a whole lot more PR than news.
Before anybody reads too much into this, read all of the article--especially the last paragraph. How many Oracle development partners are there moving customers to Linux?
One.
So maybe it isn't time for the party hats and noisemakers quite yet. You have to understand the context of this kind of announcement: third-party software vendors in Japan aren't a major force. Companies tend to be highly integrated--they do their own IT work. If they outsource work, they'll outsource it to a major company (typically a major American company--Americans are viewed as being the most technologically advanced by the Japanese). The people hiring the one Oracle Linux partner (and the two others to sign up shortly) are teensy businesses.
When Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, NEC, Matsushita, or Toyota embrace Oracle on Linux then you can get (and should be) impressed.
Good question--it's been a public policy debate in the United States for decades. And right off the bat, in the header to this article, you've mentioned one of the oft-repeated assertions in the discussion: schools don't get enough money.
This seems like a no-brainer--if every school had the kind of money that the rich suburban school districts had, we'd all be better off. A long time ago I learned that this isn't true. Let me tell you the story.
I went to 9th grade in an inner city junior high school in Washington, DC. Ours was one of two junior high schools in the district with white kids--and there weren't that many of us. To say that this was a tough school is an understatement--kids routinely urinated in the stairwells, fights were commonplace, and guns weren't unheard of (and mind you--this was 1973). The highlight of the year came in the spring, when D.C. police came through the school. They'd been all over the campus of the adjacent high school for several days, and came next door--it seems a few of my classmates had held up a couple of stores and a bank during their lunch hours, and disappeared into the high school campus. Nobody considered the notion that these might be *junior* high kids until they caught them. Since junior high was as far as a lot of kids in DC got, they made junior high graduation a huge deal. People came in limousines (hi Rob!) and there was a prom. Our class president was two months pregnant with twins when we graduated.
The following year I went to high school in a suburban school district north of Chicago. The difference was night and day--posh surroundings, incredible equipment, unbelievable opportunities. We had classes in TV production (which, in 1974, was simply astounding--it wasn't till 1975 that we got cameras with zoom lenses). We had two courses in etymology. You could take four years of French, German, Spanish, or Latin; you could take two or three years of Russian, Italian, or modern Hebrew. We had a planetarium.
Some friends from Washington came to visit--and we walked around school. They simply couldn't believe what they saw--they were overwhelmed by the stunning contrast between the shabby conditions they had to put up with, and the incredible abundance of my new school. One friend simply broke down into tears, and was inconsolable. She later credited the experience as being a major factor in her embrace of communism.
What I didn't know then, but learned a couple of years later, was that school funding, per student, was (and is) sharply higher in the District of Columbia than it was (and is) in my high school district. Or, for that matter, anywhere else.
Education isn't like manufacturing--the output of a factory is the result of the raw material, energy, and effort of the workers in that plant. There's a common misperception that if you measure the capital, energy, and effort of the workers in a school building, you can measure the amount of education that results. Increase the amount of capital, goes the argument, and you increase the amount of education.
That isn't true. Let's consider your teacher, for instance. He has the day planner that lists 114 elements. He has students who know of 118 elements. But he teaches that only 109 elements exist. Why? Perhaps because he couldn't be bothered to learn more. Perhaps because he's learned that in today's education system you teach the syllabus--deviating from the syllabus only gets you grief from the curriculum committee. If the syllabus says that the sun rises in the West, you teach that the sun rises in the West. Nobody ever got tenure by telling the curriculum committee they were full of prunes.
The simplest proof of this fallacy is the performance of private schools. Take Hemos--he went to the Holland Christian Schools system. You can look at their web site (there's a link off his web page) and view this year's tuition and fees. It's substantially less than per-pupil expenditure at your local school district. Compare the test score results of urban school districts with the performance of Catholic schools in the same area: similar demographics, but the Catholic schools achieve dramatically better results with a fraction of the money.
That doesn't mean that money is bad for education, either. And a lot of public school funds provide for handicapped children (including one of my daughters) who typically can't get into a private school. Special Ed placements can easily cost a school district tens of thousands of dollars per year.
What it does mean is that money is generally irrelevant. A good teacher can make physics fascinating teaching in a shack on the beach. A bad teacher (or simply a teacher whose motivation has been crushed by the hassles of bureaucracy) wouldn't be able to make physics sound interesting with a million-dollar budget. The issue is how to identify and encourage good teachers--and how to prevent good teachers from getting crushed by the hassles of bureaucracy. The issue, as well, is how to present those teachers with students who a) don't pose a physical threat that Jon Katz is likely to write about; and b) are eager to learn. If you were asking your teacher about elements 110-118, instead of asking that question here on SlashDot, it might just remind your teacher why he got interested in chemistry in the first place. And it might just prompt him to put a bit more into his classes, beyond the syllabus that the curriculum committee gave him.
People in the business of living off of school taxes (administrators, union officials, etc.) are quick to insist that money and education are directly related. Bosh--having materials, handouts, and doodads is nice--but not nearly as important as many people think. In the final analysis education is related to interested, prepared teachers; with interested, prepared students. Put them in a classroom in a safe, secure environment, and let them go at it.
FWIW, the U.S. Air Force uses Flight Simulator. That the military uses a piece of software doesn't instantly mean that it is harmful or dangerous to kids--it just happens that Flight Simulator these days comes with very accurate representations of approaches and facilities at lots of airports around the world. If you're a junior pilot flying Air Mobility missions Flight Sim can be a help--a three-dimensional prep course for reading the Jeppeson charts you'll use to fly into the field.
My brother's a senior officer in the Air Force. When they fly relief supplies into who-knows-where they're usually not going to a U.S. military base. Oftentimes they're just showing up with little advance prep--using a sim game gives the pilots just a little bit more understanding of where they're going.
So, yeah--Flight Simulator could make your 12-year-old better prepared to fly C-17s for the Air Force. But it still isn't nearly as violent a game as Quake or any of the others.
"Consulting firms can survive without Microsoft. What exactly do you get from them that you can't do without? Microsoft-centric solutions work, but so do non Microsoft-centric solutions.
What I get from Microsoft is a very high degree of certainty that I can assemble a solution from disparate components that will all work together. That dramatically reduces the risk of bidding on projects. When I have to bid on projects that involve multiple vendors the uncertainty is much higher--and no vendor (with the sometime exception of Microsoft) will provide support for solutions beyond their own tools.
For example--between the time I posted my message and the time I read your post I heard from a client. A major client--one of the American broadcasting networks. They have just awarded a hot project--with very high visibility--to us. This is a make-it-or-break-it project with this client--if it works, we will enjoy the good favor of a large and lucrative customer. Screw it up, and we'll never hear from them again. There are some real challenges in this project, including a couple of features that we've never done before--as best as we can tell, nobody has done before. But I can bid the job--taking on a considerable risk--because my prior experience with the technology and the existing Knowledge Base information that exists gives me solid assurance that I can deliver the project. I know that SQL Server works. I know that VB works. I know that DCOM works. I know that NT works. I know that RDS works. So I can have a pretty high degree of confidence that a solution consisting of VB, SQL Server, NT, DCOM, and RDS--deployed in a kind of unusual fashion--will work. Stay tuned on New Year's Eve--if all three networks stay on the air, you'll know we delivered the project.
Now what happens if everybody gets their fondest wish, and Microsoft is broken up? The OS, DCOM, and RDS belongs to one company, SQL Server belongs to another, and VB belongs to a third. I'll get just as much support for an integrated solution from all three companies as I'll get today trying to integrate a Lucent 5-ESS switch with AT&T Networking. Which is to say, not much.
Let's consider the same solution--a mission-critical application necessary to support a broadcast network running over New Year's Eve. If I could not use Microsoft tools, what would it take? Oracle or Informix, Perl and possibly C++--although maybe Borland Delphi, Solaris or Digital Unix, and somebody's implementation (probably Borland/Visigenic's) of CORBA request brokers. For me to bid on a project with any hope of success would require detailed, specific knowledge of the tools and technologies of 4-5 different companies. And, since we're breaking new ground with the solution, would mean taking a huge gamble knowing that none of those vendors would support us.
Don't believe me? Go take a look at Oracle's developer relations program: see if you can find any articles on integrating Oracle with Delphi or tools from Visigenic. Go look at Inprise/Borland's site, and see if you can find anything on integrating Perl with request brokers, or any tools with a database other than Interbase. Go look at any C++ vendor and see if they'll tell you how to reliably write and connect an array of CORBA objects distributed across multiple platforms on different continents. Oh--and while you're at it, keep a piece of paper handy, and write down the amount it costs to join each of those companies' developer relations programs. Compare the total to Microsoft's Solution Provider program, at $1395. You'll see how substantially less expensive--and much more comprehensive--Microsoft's support is.
Break up Microsoft, and the risks of developing cutting-edge solutions become too high. The only people who can afford to take on those projects are companies that have enough people so that somebody, somewhere, has specific experience with every possible combination of tools. Which is great news for Anderson Consulting--and terrible news for thousands of small firms across the country.
A friend just called me, telling me that I'd been singled out for a reply by Richard Hawkins on SlashDot. Cool! Finish my lunch, hit SlashDot, read the comments...
...and feel disappointed.
It's really nice to see my question get answered--and I really enjoyed reading the comments (particularly from Hawkins and Lederer) to all of the questions. But I'm sorry that Prof. Hawkins didn't address the main point of my post:
Antitrust laws were passed to protect small businesses, as well as the consumer. Microsoft is directly responsible for the creation and growth of literally thousands of small ISVs and consulting firms (like mine). The ONLY firm that is portrayed as a "victim" in the Findings is Netscape--which sold for a mere $4.5 billion, despite having never (I think--not sure) earned a profit.
The "remedies" that people are talking about won't actually help any consumer. There is some fanciful notion that some consumer somewhere is harmed by the pricing of Windows--but breaking up Microsoft will cause immediate, permanent damage to lots of small businesses across America. We can compete with Andersen, DeLoitte, Cambridge and the rest because a Microsoft-centric solution will work: the OS, the DBMS, the programming tools, the Office app all work together. Break up Microsoft, and that level of integration disappears--and with it goes my competitive advantage over the big guys. Break up Microsoft, and I become the victim.
So what I really want to ask is--why the hell is the Justice Department looking out for the billionare owners of Netscape, and screwing the likes of me?
One of the signs that a story has been "placed" by a PR firm is when the story gives extensive attention to a single source--who coincidentally has just published a book on the subject. That seems to be the case here--William Triplett is identified as the author of a new book, Red Dragon Rising.
One of the threats that Triplett explicitly raises is that the Chinese might be able to use Internet warfare to raise havoc in petroleum refineries--causing fires, spills, etc. He emphasizes that oil refineries are generally located close together, as though this represents some kind of danger.
That reminded me of something--I've already read this book, only it was a novel. Back in 1986 Tom Clancy and Larry Bond wrote a thriller entitled Red Storm Rising (Clancy, Red Storm Rising, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1986). The story begins with an attack by Muslim terrorists on a massive petroleum refinery in central Russia. One of the terrorists uses computer commands to wreak havoc--causing spills, igniting fires, and causing mass destruction. The fires destroy a major portion of the Soviet Union's petroleum industry, because all the refineries are located so close together.
Whether, and how, the U.S. might respond to a concerted Internet attack is an interesting question. But I wonder if this guy represents a credible source....
That Al Gore appeared at Microsoft, ostensibly to make a "courtesy call," and spoke at length to a group of particularly wealthy Microsoft executives?
Or that Al Gore was the sixth presidential candidate to make that same "courtesy call" so far this year.
That Al Gore fumbled through a couple of questions about the Jackson findings of fact
Or that none of the five other candidates to visit Microsoft have had anything to say about one of the biggest legal and economic issues that the next president will have to consider.
That Al Gore got to write a self-serving "I love me, and you should too" piece in Microsoft's E-zine, Slate.
Or that nobody in the media has suggested that this is an example of Microsoft blatantly trying to curry favor with a candidate.
That the putative reason for letting Gore write the piece was the fact that his daughter Karenna interned at Slate.
Or that nobody--during the time that Karenna Gore was on the masthead of Slate as an Editorial Assistant, wondered if it wasn't extremely coincidental that Microsoft had provided the vice president's daughter with a job.
That none of the other candidates has demanded equal time (we know at least that Steve Forbes can write)
Or that I'd probably be disgusted at how self-serving those articles would be, too.
But I will say this...
If Al Gore can a finger (he used the singular) on the ALT-CTRL-DELETE button (he used the singular again), he's probably capable enough to have invented the Internet.
Um, please. This is horse manure. Roblimo has never heard of a bug?
Lotus writes crap. Back when they were independent they took the attitude that they dominated the desktop, so any piece of software had to be compatible with them. They've taken the same attitude subsequently with other products. Now that they're part of IBM they're just as bad.
Lotus was exploiting an open port. Microsoft secured the opening. Notes broke. Memo to Lotus: don't write software that depends upon security flaws. Write software that uses the published API. You can--right now I have commercial products in the field transferring data across port 80. You just have to play by the rules.
It's also clear that Roblimo has never been involved in software testing. It's easy to say, "gosh--Microsoft should have caught this." Memo to Roblimo: no operating system gets tested with every appplication that uses it. You'd never be able to ship a component. And if an OS revision discloses a flaw in Lotus's software, whose problem is it?
You say this campaign 'will hinge on money'. I live in a country where it is illegal for a candidate to receive money from a corporation, since it makes the debate unfair.(France) Are you saying the government of the united states is not democratically elected? If so what do you plan to do about it? Should the other countries help you gain your freedom like you are helping Irak?
I'm sure you're not suggesting that major corporations in France don't influence elections. The largest corporations in France are either owned entirely by the French government or else the government has a large equity stake. To suggest that corporate interests do not play a role in French (or other European) politics brings to mind the French word naievete.
One of the foundational principles of American government is the right to free speech, and the right of a free press. If you want to spend ten million dollars to print up posters and distribute them, that's your right. It has been assumed all along that this inevitably means that a rich person can have more influence. To curb this, various limits have been placed on the amount of money that you can give to any one specific candidate. But there are no limits--either for a person or for a corporation--on how much money they can give to a political party. This is commonly called "soft money." Political parties, especially the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996, pushed the legal limits of "soft money" very, very hard. It was on this issue, when cornered by the press, that Al Gore made his infamous "no controlling legal authority" statement (rejecting the idea that the president and vice president are subject to federal campaign contribution laws).
What Al Gore was doing at Microsoft was shaking them down for soft money contributions. As other high-tech companies realize that Judge Jackson has just given the Justice Department carte blanche to regulate all of them (remember: by Judge Jackson's definitions Apple is a de facto monopoly, too--and Apple has been much more proprietary, and predatory, toward small competitors than Microsoft). He's trying to amass a huge war chest through soft money contributions.
The solution is easy: permit contributions (they are an expression of free speech). But, as George W. Bush's campaign is doing, post all contributions on the Web within 10 days. That way anybody can download the data and sort it, and determine just where a candidate's funds are coming from. Current rules require disclosure--but weeks and weeks after the contribution was made. A lot of contributions aren't made until right before the election, so the donor isn't known until final reports are filed well after the election is over. We do better by permitting any contribution--but requiring all contributions to be disclosed immediately.
Oh, and by the way...the government of the United States is not democratically elected. And it never has been. Any literate high school student in the U.S. knows that each state votes for electors--delegates to the Electoral College. The electors are typically pledged to a particular candidate--but it is the electors who select the president and the vice president.
Bear something in mind--Al Gore is not the only presidential candidate to visit Microsoft so far this year. In fact, he is the sixth. Candidates this year are recognizing that this campaign--perhaps more than any other ever--will hinge on money. And it isn't just Microsoft (the corporation) that has money (although the Wall St. Journal points out that the corporation itself has $19 billion in cash on hand). Those 200 top managers of Microsoft are all worth at least 7 figures apiece--many of them worth 8 or 9 figures.
Al Gore has always had a reputation as a "money guy." He ran for Congress and subsequently for the Senate with an extensive list of supporters of his father (the former senator from Tennessee). Gore has always been particularly adept at raising funds, and political commentators frequently suggested that the reason Gore was chosen for the Vice Presidential nomination in 1992 was his vaunted ability to raise funds.
I think the real question about Gore's comment is how he emphasized it. Reportedly the questions got pointed, and there was clearly a hostile audience present. Did Gore say, "oh--I'm sure the White House will be involved in any settlement discussions" in a light, breezy fashion. Or did he get frustrated by a hostile crowd, and snap "...and I'm sure the White House," stop and glare, "will be involved in any settlement discussions."
Either way, Al was there to shake down the bigwigs at Microsoft. Pay up--or the government will decide what you can and cannot do.
"I don't think it's very appropriate for you to be calling Judge Jackson a flake. Let the Second Circuit do that, as they're the ones qualified to do so. Besides, coming from them, it holds more weight."
I'm not calling Judge Jackson a "flake." I'm repeating an assertion I have seen several places, including this article on ZDNN, repeated on MSNBC:
The D.C. Court of Appeals is rumored to have a low opinion of Judge Jackson and has shown sympathy for Microsoft's position in earlier rulings. Many trial watchers say they expect the Court of Appeals to be looking for ways to give Microsoft an out.
Now, in general I do have a pretty low opinion of lawyers, but that's beside the point. The Second Circuit themselves, according to news reports, thinks Jackson isn't that bright. That raises the possibility that human factors, other than the abstract law, could become an issue in this case. (Bob Woodward alleged in his book on the Supreme Court that such personality issues happen all the time.) Since this is such a crucial case, I think it would be interesting to hear what the antitrust experts have to say on the question.
The original Anti Trust Acts were developed to protect small farmers and businesses from predatory actions by trusts--Standard Oil regulating who got railroad tank cars, for instance, so small oil producers couldn't compete.
Can Microsoft argue that Judge Jackson is misapplying the law? Jerry Pournelle cogently points out that Microsoft's presence in any market category has consistently driven prices lower. He particularly points out that Microsoft has been remarkably aggressive in providing tools and support to developers--handing out developer tools for free to anybody who even looked like a programmer.
Microsoft has spent zillions of dollars providing tools and support to tens of thousands of small businesses through their ISV and Microsoft Certified Solution Provider program. Other vendors that have emulated those programs don't provide nearly as much, and charge much, much more for their programs.
Judge Jackson's finding that Microsoft's actions have hurt competition seems to be predicated on the idea that (variously) Apple, IBM, Netscape, and Sun are the competition. But doesn't a small consulting firm (say...mine) that employs a few people and uses Microsoft's tools to compete (successfully, I might add) with IBM, Oracle, and others, better represent the small business that the Anti Trust laws were written to protect?
"...from the paucity of cases that I have read in classes, it seems that the Supreme Court justices can do just about anything short of striking down an existing law."
Actually, striking down existing laws is precisely what the Supreme Court is there to do. As part of the constitutional system of checks and balances the courts act as a check on the actions of the Executive and Legislative branches. Appeals to the Supreme Court typically either argue that an existing law is unconstitutional, or that a law is being applied unconstitutionally. If/when the Supremes find a law to be unconstitutional (the Alien & Sedition Acts in the 19th century, for instance, or state laws prohibiting the practice of abortion in the early 1970s) those existing laws are struck down.
In the case of Microsoft any appeal will be based on the concept that existing law is being applied unfairly. Microsoft isn't going to argue aginst the validity of the Sherman Antitrust Act (and related statutes). Instead, they'll argue that Judge Jackson is incorrectly applying the law, and thus his opinion needs to be overturned.
In reading Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact, it appears that he is repeating a lot of his arguments from the earlier consent decree case regarding the tying of Internet Explorer. That opinion was rejected by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision marked by particularly blunt language about the advisability of judges ruling on new product features.
There has been discussion (on MSNBC, the AP, and the NY Times) observing that if Microsoft appeals, the Dept. of Justice can move to have the appeal heard directly by the Supreme Court--avoiding review (and the consequent delay) by the Second Circuit. There has also been a suggestion floated around that the Second Circuit in general views Judge Jackson as "a lightweight" and "stupid"--hinting that if the Second Circuit gets this case they may well spank Judge Jackson again.
Can you elucidate on this? Would the Dept. of Justice try to avoid review by the Second Circuit? Would the Supremes accept the case? Would they send it back to Jackson, or could they send it to the Second Circuit?
And on top of that, based on your experience, could you provide some handicapping of the likely sympathies of the players?
(Thanks for agreeing to the interview. Given that the last interviewee still has smouldering tailfeathers, I think you're all pretty brave to do this. [smile])
I waded through the morality speech, and listened to the really specious discussion of capitalism. But when I got to the part where the good doctor starts explaining software development (including mentioning that one of these open sources groups is basing their design on "CORBA-based OMG's (operational management groups)" it became clear to me that this guy is clueless. Writes well. Means well. But he's living proof of the idea that you need a license to write computer code.
His fundamental argument is this:
existing systems out there are crap.
Why not build something better ourselves?
Had the good doctor stopped right there he would be on to something. He could, conceivably, produce a product that both benefits the medical community and makes himself rich. Instead he chooses to clutter his idea with the notion that Open Source--per se--would make his idea better. He then goes further--launching into a review of existing Open Source projects that are attempting to do what he describes. And he completely ignores a major weakness of Open Source.
I have been involved in large-scale, complex database programming for more than 12 years, in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. I have both developed large-scale systems for corporations, and developed component tools for database tool vendors (Logic Works, makers of Erwin/ERX; and Bader Technologies, makers of ObjectBase). I have also worked for a small software company that does for book publishers precisely what the good doctor wishes that somebody would do for his medical practice: the company developed the drop-dead, hands-down, be-all and end-all book publishing computer system.
If you call up any customer, they will rave about the software. They will tell you that buying the system will cost you a mint--but it will revolutionize your business, improve your bottom line, make your life more enjoyable, and cause your dog to love you more. Even if you don't have a dog. (I'm not exaggerating--that exact sentence is one customer's standard response to queries about the system.) If you have bought "Open Source" books from any well-known publishers of "Open Source" books your order was almost certainly handled by this system.
Wanna know the dirty little secret? Under the hood, the system is--in one sense--crap. It doesn't even have a relational database--it's built on a collection of flat ASCII files, using a semi-proprietary language named Databus that originated on the Datapoint mini and hasn't been used by practically anybody else in more than a decade. If this system was "open sourced" nobody would want to have anything to do with it. It would be regarded as a joke.
But the company's customers love them. They worship them. They love them so much that customers routinely send presents. I used to run the East Coast office, and my office today is decorated with posters from clients--and I haven't worked for those guys in ten years.
Why? How? Because more than anything else, this company understands that it is not the perfect algorithm that makes the software work. It is not the most up-to-date database engine that the end users want. It is not the baddest, highest, hardest, fastest, coolest, or most groovy new feature that matters. What this company provides to their customers is the answer to any and every problem they have.Even if it has nothing to do with the software.
Get a letter from Borders indicating that all invoices have to be submitted electronically? The software vendor will take up the issue with Borders. Get a chargeback invoice from Waldenbooks? They'll patiently explain the bookkeeping of chargebacks to your staff, again and again and again--as many times as it takes to make sure your staff does it right. Nobody, at any time, ever, speaks of an "end luser."
How far does this go? Back in the 1980s Louisiana State University Press bought the software system. At the time the software only ran on Datapoint minicomputers. Most customers bought the Datapoint mini from us--but LSU got cheap and bought it from a local dealer. For some unbelievable reason they decided that the obvious place to put a minicomputer (this is Louisiana, right?), which is supposed to be kept in a temperature-controlled room, is in the warehouse, right by the loading dock door. And in the summer, when it got hot (this is Louisiana, right?) they'd open the loading dock door to keep the mini cool. So what happens in the summer, when it's hot and humid? (This is Louisiana, right?) Thunderstorms. They take a lightning strike--a direct hit--right smack on the mini.
And what did they do? They called our tech support people. Did we laugh at them? Did we point out that they'd bought the hardware from somebody else, so it wasn't our problem? Did we suggest that they were morons, and LART them? No. The tech guy they talked to calmly responded, "have you called the fire department yet? No? Do you want me to call the fire department? If you have a fire, get out of the building first--we'll call the fire department from here...."
LSU has told that story to every university press in the country. Its one of the reasons why 2/3 of the university presses use this company's software. Because it isn't the code--it is the end-user relationship that matters.
The good doctor can create a huge Open Source project. They can give it a cute name like QuickQuack and hold online chats and chant selections from The Cathedral and the Bazaar. They can build the system with OS software from Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Unisys, or some guy from Finland who was named after a cartoon character. Ain't gonna make a lick of difference--because whenever they have something to install, and wherever they install it, it won't meet the needs of the end users. Because NOBODY--ESR, Linus, Stallman, Dust Puppy, the good doctor, NOBODY is prepared to discuss "Open Source" End User Support. They're all reading BOFH postings and telling one another "end luser" stories.
And it is precisely in the area of End User Support that those less-than-adequate commercial software companies are meeting their customers needs and making money. They're explaining how to reconcile reimbursements from health-insurance carriers; they're explaining how to use new EDI links to Blue Cross/Blue Shield; they're explaining the advantages of two-sided page scanning equipment; they're explaining why the optical archiving system runs better if its mounted vertically; they're explaining--for the fifteenth time--why nightly backups are a Good Thing. They help the end users run their businesses--they help the end users care for their patients. Their end user support people become indispensable parts of their clients medical practices. And if they have any desire to last in this business, they don't ever dare think the words "end luser."
The good doctor is talking about a vertical-market solution. And the business in vertical-market solutions isn't development--it's support. "Open Source" development won't do anything for quality--because without end user support nobody will use it. And I haven't heard anybody offer to step up and provide long-term, expert end-user support "open source"--which is to say, for free.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory you can enforce the GPL in court--suing someone who pirates your code. In practice, you have no defense against somebody plagiarizing your code. Your team members are entirely correct to worry that the fruit of all their hard labor might be swiped by somebody and used in a commercial product.
You and I and the entire SlashDot community might argue about whether such plagiarism might happen--but the simple facts of history are brutally plain: without intellectual property protection that kind of plagiarism practically always occurs.
Example: consider the People's Republic of China. The PRC has paid lip service to intellectual property issues, but fundamentally there isn't any such thing. When was the last time you bought (or heard of) a piece of software developed in the PRC? It isn't because the Chinese are stupid--far from it. The ranks of American software firms (and the membership of SlashDot, I'm sure) are chock full of ethnic Chinese, and Chinese emigrants. But because anybody can peek at your work and swipe the results--and laugh at you while he's headed for the bank--most people decide that there is little reward for innovation. What innovation there is tends to be "protected" by some kind of secrecy scheme, or done because the innovator derives personal pleasure from giving his creations away.
This is a painful lesson to learn--but this is simple history, and simple economics. In some technologies there have been significant barriers to plagiarism (I can plagiarize ABB's technology for continuous-casting sheet steel--but unless I have $100 million for the machinery, not to mention sales contracts with Ford, I can't use their invention) but in software there are no barriers at all. If I can read your source code, I can use it. I may not copy it--I might just grasp the ideas and incorporate them in my next product design. And there is practically no way to prevent that from happening. The only way to protect the work that you have done (and to profit from it) is to seek refuge in the rules of intellectual property.
A new research study reported today that the use of copper wire by racist, skinhead, and white supremacy groups is at an all-time high. "This is a disturbing trend," said a predictably reliable source of meaningless blather. "It is imperative that right-thinking people around the world band together to combat racism, imperialism, Zionism, and other -isms that the UN and the world press disapprove of."
U.S. government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that racist and neo-Nazi organizations make extensive use of copper. "These guys use copper wire to communicate all the time. They connect to the Internet, they watch cable TV, they call each other on the phone," said the official. "But that's just scratching the surface," he continued, "they use copper in electrical wiring, light switches, electrical fixtures--hey, some of them even use copper-bottomed pots and pans to cook meals for their racist friends."
These shocking revelations come hard on the heels of disturbing new revelations that many of the Swiss and German insurance companies that failed to pay on Nazi-era policies also make extensive use of copper wire for both communications and electric power distribution. Swiss government officials in Zurich refused to confirm reports that they were investigating whether insurance company officials used copper-bottomed pans for cooking.
Leading scientists, meeting at a UN-sponsored conference in Tokyo, sought to clarify the issue. "Copper can be an element for good, or for evil," said reknowned ethicist Robert Brooks of Harvard University. "While we deplore the way that these disgraceful elements are using copper, we have to remember the positive ways in which copper has been used for good." Nonetheless, Prof. Brooks did observe that there is a longstanding link between copper and racism--dating back to the early days of the slave trade, when the hulls of slave ships and other vessels of the period were routinely covered with copper to protect the ships from rot. "Think of it," mused Brooks, "how far we've come from the days of the slave trade, and we still can't manage to keep copper out of the hands of these people."
For more information, contact the International Alliance to Ban Copper and Racism, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10022.
The InfoWorld article refers to Intel's quarterly price cuts. You will note that computer manufacturers are also announcing lower prices, reflecting the drop in prices. This is nothing new--it happens in the second week of every quarter.
But since the question has been raised, how concerned is Intel about Transmeta? Probably not that much. Remember that Intel owns the microprocessor business--not just the chips, but also the technology required to make the chips. They have extensive R&D projects with companies like Applied Materials (and a major client of mine) that affect all sorts of things. And remember that Intel is extremely aggressive about protecting its patent rights. Much of Transmeta's press conference palavar about not worrying about Intel and patent issues is so much PR--if IBM is planning on using Intel-developed technology to produce the Transmeta chips you will see mention of a "cross-licensing agreement" in the trade press. (Remember that IBM will actually manufacture the chips for Transmeta.)
There is another factor to consider: producing cutting edge chips in volume requires massive capital investment. If Transmeta can't sign up a lot of business they may not be able to produce enough chips to bring the unit costs down low enough....
At the moment Intel is continuing to cruise right along, printing money. AMD? An annoyance. Transmeta? A set of spects and a press conference. Down the road Transmeta might be reason for Indel to be concerned--but a threat? The moo-ha-ha department? No. We're way too early for that.
I have followed the development of the UCITA for several years with interest, prompted by the continuing coverage in InfoWorld . This article repeats many of the criticisms of the UCITA that have been aired elsewhere:
The conclusion seems obvious: This is a BAD THING. But before we just snort in derision and click to the next SlashDot topic, let's look a little more closely.
The UCITA addresses two markets:
The first thing to recognize is that the UCITA is written to define rules for two different markets: the consumer (or mass) market, and the custom software market. The UCITA would apply if you went into Circuit City this afternoon and bought a copy of Leisure Suit Larry for Linux. It would also apply if your corporation hired a small boutique firm (like, say, mine) to create a distributed e-commerce logistics project linking raw material vendors, transportation partners, and corporate customers. One is a $29 transaction paid with a Visa card. The other is $200,000 or more of development work. As the UCITA has been discussed, all too often enthusiasts (both pro- and con-) have tended to blur the distinction--citing provisions meant for one circumstance as the kind of Really Bad Thing (TM) that could happen in the other.
The Insidious Trap Door
No better example exists than the Insidious Trap Door(tm) argument. Buy a copy of Leisure Suit Larry for Linux, goes the argument, and someday the developer can send electronic minions scurrying through your modem to disable the software (and copy the contents of your hard drive).
Um, no. The UCITA gives a vendor the legal ability to include a provision permitting that in a contract that both buyer and seller sign. That means that a seller can try to include such a provision, but the buyer doesn't have to accept it. The provision is not for consumer software--if Leisure Suit Larry for Linux included a back door the entire world would hear about it in every review of the game. We'd all fuss and fume, and CmdrTaco would create a bitmap graphic for TrojanWare and tell us all about it.
What that back door provision does is overturn a common way for custom software developers to make sure that they get paid. In the custom software business it is common for small projects to be billed in thirds: one-third at the time the contract is signed, one-third at the time the software is delivered, and one-third 30 days after delivery. However--it is all-too-common for customers to make the first payment, make the second payment, but stiff the developer for the third payment. If the developer is in a different state, the developer's only recourse is to sue in federal court. And you can't bring a civil action in federal court unless the actual damages you are claiming (not potential damages, or damage to your reputation, etc.) is greater than $50,000. If the total job was $45,000, an out-of-state customer can stiff you for the last $15,000 and there is precious little you can do about it. (Lawyers will suggest that there are other remedies--such as suing in the buyer's home state, etc.--but the long and short of it is that the client can stiff you, and you have no options.) The UCITA provides a legal form of defense for the developer for this circumstance: a Trojan.
EGAD! A Trojan!
Oh, relax. Years ago I worked for a small company that dominates the market for accounting and marketing software for book publishers. They sell on the thirds principle, and have on occasion had trouble getting that last third. Their software now checks the system date: if the last payment has not been made, at 75 days each operator is warned that "a system issue needs to be addressed. Have your supervisor contact us." At 90 days the operators are warned that "a serious software issue exists. Have your supervisor contact us." At 120 days the operators are prompted "your employer has not paid an outstanding invoice for more than 120 days. The system will not function until the outstanding invoices are paid."
That was extremely effective--until Virginia banned the practice. All of a sudden it is a lot tougher to get paid by a client in Virginia--they know your only option is through the courts, which effectively means you're screwed. The UCITA lets my old employer put that Trojan back in, to make sure they get paid. (Truth in messaging: my company does not do that. We typically provide the source code to the client, and often have one or more of the client's programmers working with us.)
The Good Side of the UCITA
A couple of the elements of the UCITA that have not been highlighted enough are the "warranty of merchantibility" clause, and the "accidental click" clause. These are Good Things. The Warranty of Merchantibility is a hifalutin way of saying "lemon laws." If you buy a car in most states and it turns out to have all sorts of defects you can generally bring it back to the dealer and get your money back. The car you bought fundamentally does not function as an automobile--it is not suitable for the purpose for which it was sold. Back it goes. The UCITA gives you the same protection: buy a copy of Leisure Suit Larry for Linux and take it home. Open it up, install it, and discover that it only works on, say, LinuxOne. (Because of all the supersecret custom LinuxOne development, of course.) Well, if it only works on LinuxOne (or only works on KDE) then it isn't suitable for use on other Linux computers. Under the warranty of merchantibility you can take it back and get a refund.
The "accidental click" clause lets you install an app, click on the "I Agree" button, and complete the install. And then say, "oh--I don't want this." and send it back. You'll have to read the fine print to see the time limit (you could not say, "oh--I don't want this" 90 days after you installed) but at least you can look at the software, and see if it installs, without losing all your rights.
All in all, this is probably a good thing:
All things considered, this is a good thing. Yes--in theory consumer software can now include stupid rules in the EULA. In practice software companies will discover that pissing off your customers is not a good business strategy. This will have a much bigger impact on the custom software marketplace, where small vendors will be able to negotiate reasonable contract provisions.
The big losers in this are the lawyers--the UCITA spells out the rules of the game, so you don't need as much legal help to make up the rules as you go along.
PS: For those who would object that Leisure Suit Larry for Linux should be Open Source or GPL'd, let me refer you to http://www.theresnosuchproduct.org. JM
Okay--so Mr. Clinton wants to revitalize American technology by providing a new generation of workers with the skills for the new millennium (I didn't hear it, I didn't read it, but I somehow just know he said it). So he's proposing $91 million bucks to achieve this. To paraphrase a certain sports announcer:
Let's go to the adding machine tape!
We can play with this math all we want: we might see this program provide a free four-year ride to a thousand students. Or the program might provide a $1400 stipend--once--to 39,000 Computer Science majors. But anyway you slice it, this doesn't amount to much more than a trivial gesture. If the nation has a "shortage" of 250,000 programmers no stipend, whether 1400 bucks or fourteen thousand bucks, is going to solve that problem.
Above and beyond that--this is dumb. You don't want kids taking up programming "just for the money" anymore than you want to be treated by a doctor who is "just in it for the money." The whole point of the med school hazing process is to weed those guys out. A lot of kids think they'll make bucks programming--they're the ones that disappear. The programmers who last--and who are invaluable--do it because they love the challenge, they love to use their brains, and they love the constant learning process. And more often than not, the best programmers were NOT Computer Science majors. (Truth in hiring time: I generally view a Computer Science major as a negative on a resume. I would vastly rather see a liberal arts major, business, or engineering coupled with a CS minor or a distribution in programming.)
Bottom line: this is a facile political gesture, from a president who has turned the facile political gesture into an art form.
The Wall St. Journal, two weeks ago, devoted considerable space to the Andover IPO--strongly suggesting that the only perceptible value in the company was SlashDot, and demonstrating the unorthodox steps that Andover took to get the IPO underwritten. (Notably, the WSJ reports that when Andover initially tried to get underwriting it owed the two of you more money than the entire assets of the firm.) The WSJ has subsequently referred to Andover, by name, as an example of an IPO with a stratospheric share price, but no substance. Nobody, anywhere, has suggested that there is any commercial value to Andover other than SlashDot.
Much as I appreciate the sense of humor you have, and the contributions of the SlashDot community, it seems to me that the really valuable thing about SlashDot is the software--the database system that permits posting, moderation, meta-moderation, etc. It is a work of genius. And, a very valuable thing.
The Wall St. Journal has all but called Andover a bubble--(or, to be less kind, a pump 'n dump). The only way to prove them wrong is to achieve corporate earnings that support the current share price. The only real asset of Andover is SlashDot--and the only real asset of SlashDot is the software. And the software is supposed to be Open Source.
So how are you guys going to make earnings?
This is one of those "good government" ideas--in the pejorative sense of bright ideas that haven't really been thought through. The premise here is that "speed kills"--so if we can make sure everybody drives at the speed limit, nobody will be killed.
Nice theory. But wrong.
Most speed-related fatalities happen when a driver is operating a vehicle relatively close to the speed limit--but in totally wrong conditions. If there are 8" of snow on the ground, and snow is falling at a rate of 3" per hour, doing 55 miles per hour on Interstate 80 is incredibly dangerous. On the other hand, if it is a clear day, nobody is on the road, and your car is in reasonable mechanical shape, you can safely drive 80 miles per hour. Put 100,000 other cars on the same road, and once again driving at the speed limit constitutes reckless driving.
It rains, occasionally, in Britain. Like, say, every day. The appropriate speed in the rain, the appropriate speed in heavy traffic, the appropriate speed in heavy traffic while its raining, and the speed limit are four dramatically distinct numbers.
Trucking companies have used "governors" for years to limit speeding by their drivers. A number of trucking companies in the U.S. monitor driver speeds, believing that there is a correlation between higher speeds and greater damage claims. (There is some basis for this: if hitting a pothole in Pennsylvania makes the trailer bounce 4" at 55 mph, how high will the trailer bounce if you hit that pothole at 65 mph? A number of trucking companies have speed limits for Pennsylvania in particular, because of the lousy roads in Pa.) Anybody using governors will quickly discover the response of drivers--every single driver now drives at the maximum governed speed. Pretty much regardless of the circumstances. And that maximum governed speed, in the dark, in the rain (or snow), can be a dangerous thing.
The are a number of advocacy groups that decry public expressions of illiteracy. John Dos Passos and others have periodically made public protestations against "innumeracy"--the blithe acceptance of bogus figures or statistics. Perhaps it is time to protest something similar: the belief in a technological silver bullet that will somehow substitute for human judgement.
The tradition of not showing the faces of adults began with Charles M. Schultz, and his Peanuts cartoon strip. The strip has never showed an adult's face, or (in the animated cartoons) used an adult's voice. You only see the child's perspective.
What Intel is describing (in effect, the ability to push processing tasks to remote machines) is something clearly anticipated by Microsoft's COM technology. (In 1997 the marketing name du jour was OLE 2.0, but since "OLE" had come to be a synonym for "speed brake" they changed the name.)
This technique is really quite appealing to large corporations, particularly corporations with operations around the world. I have a client with 16,000 PCs in 34 countries (soon to be 25,000 PCs in 52 countries when a pending acquisition is completed). As I write this they have thousands of PCs sitting on the other side of the world, in the dark, doing nothing. Imagine being able to harness all that CPU time....
There are lots of CPU-intensive tasks that are particularly suited to processing on a plain old desktop PC (as opposed to a top-of-the-line smoking quad Xeon processor box). OCR, image manipulation, and image compression are three activities that spring to mind. If you have unused PCs sitting around, and the network bandwidth to get the data to those PCs, this kind of distributed computing can provide a tremendous benefit to a corporation for essentially zero additional capital.
Microsoft already makes this possible: create a DCOM agent on the remote PC. Ship an install set, and have the agent run the remote install. Ship the data, get the data back (repeat for the next eight hours). You can leave the installed app on that remote machine, or you could even get clever and remove it for security's sake. (This, incidentally, is precisely the technology in Internet Explorer that Microsoft is insisting must be considered a core part of Windows.)
Microsoft isn't going to let Intel prevent anybody from using DCOM--just isn't going to happen. But on the other hand, Microsoft may not fight very hard--Microsoft and Intel (and most of the major technology companies) have cross-licensing agreements that permit using patents of one another. (Sort of a free trade agreement among tech firms, if you will.) If this threatens the functionality of COM (which is the core of Microsoft's Distributed Network Architecture) then we'll see some fur fly. But I don't see that happening.
That Oracle is bringing out all of their software on the Linux platform is interesting news. But that wasn't the topic of this article. This article simply says that one reseller in Japan is moving to Linux, and that Oracle is going to try to persuade more resellers to distribute Oracle/Linux to their customers.
My point is that small resellers in Japan are even less significant in The Grand Scheme of Things(tm) than small resellers are here in the U.S. Given Oracle's pricing practices, I think it is a fair question to ask if this means that Oracle is backing Linux in a big way--or if Oracle is writing off small customers, steering them to resellers (and Linux) for installation and support.
IMHO, this article is a whole lot more PR than news.
Before anybody reads too much into this, read all of the article--especially the last paragraph. How many Oracle development partners are there moving customers to Linux?
One.
So maybe it isn't time for the party hats and noisemakers quite yet. You have to understand the context of this kind of announcement: third-party software vendors in Japan aren't a major force. Companies tend to be highly integrated--they do their own IT work. If they outsource work, they'll outsource it to a major company (typically a major American company--Americans are viewed as being the most technologically advanced by the Japanese). The people hiring the one Oracle Linux partner (and the two others to sign up shortly) are teensy businesses.
When Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, NEC, Matsushita, or Toyota embrace Oracle on Linux then you can get (and should be) impressed.
"How do we keep our teachers up to date?"
Good question--it's been a public policy debate in the United States for decades. And right off the bat, in the header to this article, you've mentioned one of the oft-repeated assertions in the discussion: schools don't get enough money.
This seems like a no-brainer--if every school had the kind of money that the rich suburban school districts had, we'd all be better off. A long time ago I learned that this isn't true. Let me tell you the story.
Education isn't like manufacturing--the output of a factory is the result of the raw material, energy, and effort of the workers in that plant. There's a common misperception that if you measure the capital, energy, and effort of the workers in a school building, you can measure the amount of education that results. Increase the amount of capital, goes the argument, and you increase the amount of education.
That isn't true. Let's consider your teacher, for instance. He has the day planner that lists 114 elements. He has students who know of 118 elements. But he teaches that only 109 elements exist. Why? Perhaps because he couldn't be bothered to learn more. Perhaps because he's learned that in today's education system you teach the syllabus--deviating from the syllabus only gets you grief from the curriculum committee. If the syllabus says that the sun rises in the West, you teach that the sun rises in the West. Nobody ever got tenure by telling the curriculum committee they were full of prunes.
The simplest proof of this fallacy is the performance of private schools. Take Hemos--he went to the Holland Christian Schools system. You can look at their web site (there's a link off his web page) and view this year's tuition and fees. It's substantially less than per-pupil expenditure at your local school district. Compare the test score results of urban school districts with the performance of Catholic schools in the same area: similar demographics, but the Catholic schools achieve dramatically better results with a fraction of the money.
That doesn't mean that money is bad for education, either. And a lot of public school funds provide for handicapped children (including one of my daughters) who typically can't get into a private school. Special Ed placements can easily cost a school district tens of thousands of dollars per year.
What it does mean is that money is generally irrelevant. A good teacher can make physics fascinating teaching in a shack on the beach. A bad teacher (or simply a teacher whose motivation has been crushed by the hassles of bureaucracy) wouldn't be able to make physics sound interesting with a million-dollar budget. The issue is how to identify and encourage good teachers--and how to prevent good teachers from getting crushed by the hassles of bureaucracy. The issue, as well, is how to present those teachers with students who a) don't pose a physical threat that Jon Katz is likely to write about; and b) are eager to learn. If you were asking your teacher about elements 110-118, instead of asking that question here on SlashDot, it might just remind your teacher why he got interested in chemistry in the first place. And it might just prompt him to put a bit more into his classes, beyond the syllabus that the curriculum committee gave him.
People in the business of living off of school taxes (administrators, union officials, etc.) are quick to insist that money and education are directly related. Bosh--having materials, handouts, and doodads is nice--but not nearly as important as many people think. In the final analysis education is related to interested, prepared teachers; with interested, prepared students. Put them in a classroom in a safe, secure environment, and let them go at it.
FWIW, the U.S. Air Force uses Flight Simulator. That the military uses a piece of software doesn't instantly mean that it is harmful or dangerous to kids--it just happens that Flight Simulator these days comes with very accurate representations of approaches and facilities at lots of airports around the world. If you're a junior pilot flying Air Mobility missions Flight Sim can be a help--a three-dimensional prep course for reading the Jeppeson charts you'll use to fly into the field.
My brother's a senior officer in the Air Force. When they fly relief supplies into who-knows-where they're usually not going to a U.S. military base. Oftentimes they're just showing up with little advance prep--using a sim game gives the pilots just a little bit more understanding of where they're going.
So, yeah--Flight Simulator could make your 12-year-old better prepared to fly C-17s for the Air Force. But it still isn't nearly as violent a game as Quake or any of the others.
"Consulting firms can survive without Microsoft. What exactly do you get from them that you can't do without? Microsoft-centric solutions work, but so do non Microsoft-centric solutions.
What I get from Microsoft is a very high degree of certainty that I can assemble a solution from disparate components that will all work together. That dramatically reduces the risk of bidding on projects. When I have to bid on projects that involve multiple vendors the uncertainty is much higher--and no vendor (with the sometime exception of Microsoft) will provide support for solutions beyond their own tools.
For example--between the time I posted my message and the time I read your post I heard from a client. A major client--one of the American broadcasting networks. They have just awarded a hot project--with very high visibility--to us. This is a make-it-or-break-it project with this client--if it works, we will enjoy the good favor of a large and lucrative customer. Screw it up, and we'll never hear from them again. There are some real challenges in this project, including a couple of features that we've never done before--as best as we can tell, nobody has done before. But I can bid the job--taking on a considerable risk--because my prior experience with the technology and the existing Knowledge Base information that exists gives me solid assurance that I can deliver the project. I know that SQL Server works. I know that VB works. I know that DCOM works. I know that NT works. I know that RDS works. So I can have a pretty high degree of confidence that a solution consisting of VB, SQL Server, NT, DCOM, and RDS--deployed in a kind of unusual fashion--will work. Stay tuned on New Year's Eve--if all three networks stay on the air, you'll know we delivered the project.
Now what happens if everybody gets their fondest wish, and Microsoft is broken up? The OS, DCOM, and RDS belongs to one company, SQL Server belongs to another, and VB belongs to a third. I'll get just as much support for an integrated solution from all three companies as I'll get today trying to integrate a Lucent 5-ESS switch with AT&T Networking. Which is to say, not much.
Let's consider the same solution--a mission-critical application necessary to support a broadcast network running over New Year's Eve. If I could not use Microsoft tools, what would it take? Oracle or Informix, Perl and possibly C++--although maybe Borland Delphi, Solaris or Digital Unix, and somebody's implementation (probably Borland/Visigenic's) of CORBA request brokers. For me to bid on a project with any hope of success would require detailed, specific knowledge of the tools and technologies of 4-5 different companies. And, since we're breaking new ground with the solution, would mean taking a huge gamble knowing that none of those vendors would support us.
Don't believe me? Go take a look at Oracle's developer relations program: see if you can find any articles on integrating Oracle with Delphi or tools from Visigenic. Go look at Inprise/Borland's site, and see if you can find anything on integrating Perl with request brokers, or any tools with a database other than Interbase. Go look at any C++ vendor and see if they'll tell you how to reliably write and connect an array of CORBA objects distributed across multiple platforms on different continents. Oh--and while you're at it, keep a piece of paper handy, and write down the amount it costs to join each of those companies' developer relations programs. Compare the total to Microsoft's Solution Provider program, at $1395. You'll see how substantially less expensive--and much more comprehensive--Microsoft's support is.
Break up Microsoft, and the risks of developing cutting-edge solutions become too high. The only people who can afford to take on those projects are companies that have enough people so that somebody, somewhere, has specific experience with every possible combination of tools. Which is great news for Anderson Consulting--and terrible news for thousands of small firms across the country.
A friend just called me, telling me that I'd been singled out for a reply by Richard Hawkins on SlashDot. Cool! Finish my lunch, hit SlashDot, read the comments...
It's really nice to see my question get answered--and I really enjoyed reading the comments (particularly from Hawkins and Lederer) to all of the questions. But I'm sorry that Prof. Hawkins didn't address the main point of my post:
Antitrust laws were passed to protect small businesses, as well as the consumer. Microsoft is directly responsible for the creation and growth of literally thousands of small ISVs and consulting firms (like mine). The ONLY firm that is portrayed as a "victim" in the Findings is Netscape--which sold for a mere $4.5 billion, despite having never (I think--not sure) earned a profit.
The "remedies" that people are talking about won't actually help any consumer. There is some fanciful notion that some consumer somewhere is harmed by the pricing of Windows--but breaking up Microsoft will cause immediate, permanent damage to lots of small businesses across America. We can compete with Andersen, DeLoitte, Cambridge and the rest because a Microsoft-centric solution will work: the OS, the DBMS, the programming tools, the Office app all work together. Break up Microsoft, and that level of integration disappears--and with it goes my competitive advantage over the big guys. Break up Microsoft, and I become the victim.
So what I really want to ask is--why the hell is the Justice Department looking out for the billionare owners of Netscape, and screwing the likes of me?
One of the signs that a story has been "placed" by a PR firm is when the story gives extensive attention to a single source--who coincidentally has just published a book on the subject. That seems to be the case here--William Triplett is identified as the author of a new book, Red Dragon Rising .
One of the threats that Triplett explicitly raises is that the Chinese might be able to use Internet warfare to raise havoc in petroleum refineries--causing fires, spills, etc. He emphasizes that oil refineries are generally located close together, as though this represents some kind of danger.
That reminded me of something--I've already read this book, only it was a novel. Back in 1986 Tom Clancy and Larry Bond wrote a thriller entitled Red Storm Rising (Clancy, Red Storm Rising, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1986). The story begins with an attack by Muslim terrorists on a massive petroleum refinery in central Russia. One of the terrorists uses computer commands to wreak havoc--causing spills, igniting fires, and causing mass destruction. The fires destroy a major portion of the Soviet Union's petroleum industry, because all the refineries are located so close together.
Whether, and how, the U.S. might respond to a concerted Internet attack is an interesting question. But I wonder if this guy represents a credible source....
What disturbs me most?
That Al Gore appeared at Microsoft, ostensibly to make a "courtesy call," and spoke at length to a group of particularly wealthy Microsoft executives?
That Al Gore fumbled through a couple of questions about the Jackson findings of fact
That Al Gore got to write a self-serving "I love me, and you should too" piece in Microsoft's E-zine, Slate.
That the putative reason for letting Gore write the piece was the fact that his daughter Karenna interned at Slate.
That none of the other candidates has demanded equal time (we know at least that Steve Forbes can write)
But I will say this...
If Al Gore can a finger (he used the singular) on the ALT-CTRL-DELETE button (he used the singular again), he's probably capable enough to have invented the Internet.
Um, please. This is horse manure. Roblimo has never heard of a bug?
Lotus writes crap. Back when they were independent they took the attitude that they dominated the desktop, so any piece of software had to be compatible with them. They've taken the same attitude subsequently with other products. Now that they're part of IBM they're just as bad.
Lotus was exploiting an open port. Microsoft secured the opening. Notes broke. Memo to Lotus: don't write software that depends upon security flaws. Write software that uses the published API. You can--right now I have commercial products in the field transferring data across port 80. You just have to play by the rules.
It's also clear that Roblimo has never been involved in software testing. It's easy to say, "gosh--Microsoft should have caught this." Memo to Roblimo: no operating system gets tested with every appplication that uses it. You'd never be able to ship a component. And if an OS revision discloses a flaw in Lotus's software, whose problem is it?
This problem belongs to Lotus.
You say this campaign 'will hinge on money'. I live in a country where it is illegal for a candidate to receive money from a corporation, since it makes the debate unfair.(France) Are you saying the government of the united states is not democratically elected? If so what do you plan to do about it? Should the other countries help you gain your freedom like you are helping Irak?
I'm sure you're not suggesting that major corporations in France don't influence elections. The largest corporations in France are either owned entirely by the French government or else the government has a large equity stake. To suggest that corporate interests do not play a role in French (or other European) politics brings to mind the French word naievete.
One of the foundational principles of American government is the right to free speech, and the right of a free press. If you want to spend ten million dollars to print up posters and distribute them, that's your right. It has been assumed all along that this inevitably means that a rich person can have more influence. To curb this, various limits have been placed on the amount of money that you can give to any one specific candidate. But there are no limits--either for a person or for a corporation--on how much money they can give to a political party. This is commonly called "soft money." Political parties, especially the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996, pushed the legal limits of "soft money" very, very hard. It was on this issue, when cornered by the press, that Al Gore made his infamous "no controlling legal authority" statement (rejecting the idea that the president and vice president are subject to federal campaign contribution laws).
What Al Gore was doing at Microsoft was shaking them down for soft money contributions. As other high-tech companies realize that Judge Jackson has just given the Justice Department carte blanche to regulate all of them (remember: by Judge Jackson's definitions Apple is a de facto monopoly, too--and Apple has been much more proprietary, and predatory, toward small competitors than Microsoft). He's trying to amass a huge war chest through soft money contributions.
The solution is easy: permit contributions (they are an expression of free speech). But, as George W. Bush's campaign is doing, post all contributions on the Web within 10 days. That way anybody can download the data and sort it, and determine just where a candidate's funds are coming from. Current rules require disclosure--but weeks and weeks after the contribution was made. A lot of contributions aren't made until right before the election, so the donor isn't known until final reports are filed well after the election is over. We do better by permitting any contribution--but requiring all contributions to be disclosed immediately.
Oh, and by the way...the government of the United States is not democratically elected. And it never has been. Any literate high school student in the U.S. knows that each state votes for electors--delegates to the Electoral College. The electors are typically pledged to a particular candidate--but it is the electors who select the president and the vice president.
Bear something in mind--Al Gore is not the only presidential candidate to visit Microsoft so far this year. In fact, he is the sixth. Candidates this year are recognizing that this campaign--perhaps more than any other ever--will hinge on money. And it isn't just Microsoft (the corporation) that has money (although the Wall St. Journal points out that the corporation itself has $19 billion in cash on hand). Those 200 top managers of Microsoft are all worth at least 7 figures apiece--many of them worth 8 or 9 figures.
Al Gore has always had a reputation as a "money guy." He ran for Congress and subsequently for the Senate with an extensive list of supporters of his father (the former senator from Tennessee). Gore has always been particularly adept at raising funds, and political commentators frequently suggested that the reason Gore was chosen for the Vice Presidential nomination in 1992 was his vaunted ability to raise funds.
I think the real question about Gore's comment is how he emphasized it. Reportedly the questions got pointed, and there was clearly a hostile audience present. Did Gore say, "oh--I'm sure the White House will be involved in any settlement discussions" in a light, breezy fashion. Or did he get frustrated by a hostile crowd, and snap "...and I'm sure the White House," stop and glare, "will be involved in any settlement discussions."
Either way, Al was there to shake down the bigwigs at Microsoft. Pay up--or the government will decide what you can and cannot do.
"I don't think it's very appropriate for you to be calling Judge Jackson a flake. Let the Second Circuit do that, as they're the ones qualified to do so. Besides, coming from them, it holds more weight."
I'm not calling Judge Jackson a "flake." I'm repeating an assertion I have seen several places, including this article on ZDNN, repeated on MSNBC:
Now, in general I do have a pretty low opinion of lawyers, but that's beside the point. The Second Circuit themselves, according to news reports, thinks Jackson isn't that bright. That raises the possibility that human factors, other than the abstract law, could become an issue in this case. (Bob Woodward alleged in his book on the Supreme Court that such personality issues happen all the time.) Since this is such a crucial case, I think it would be interesting to hear what the antitrust experts have to say on the question.
The original Anti Trust Acts were developed to protect small farmers and businesses from predatory actions by trusts--Standard Oil regulating who got railroad tank cars, for instance, so small oil producers couldn't compete.
Can Microsoft argue that Judge Jackson is misapplying the law? Jerry Pournelle cogently points out that Microsoft's presence in any market category has consistently driven prices lower. He particularly points out that Microsoft has been remarkably aggressive in providing tools and support to developers--handing out developer tools for free to anybody who even looked like a programmer.
Microsoft has spent zillions of dollars providing tools and support to tens of thousands of small businesses through their ISV and Microsoft Certified Solution Provider program. Other vendors that have emulated those programs don't provide nearly as much, and charge much, much more for their programs.
Judge Jackson's finding that Microsoft's actions have hurt competition seems to be predicated on the idea that (variously) Apple, IBM, Netscape, and Sun are the competition. But doesn't a small consulting firm (say...mine) that employs a few people and uses Microsoft's tools to compete (successfully, I might add) with IBM, Oracle, and others, better represent the small business that the Anti Trust laws were written to protect?
"...from the paucity of cases that I have read in classes, it seems that the Supreme Court justices can do just about anything short of striking down an existing law."
Actually, striking down existing laws is precisely what the Supreme Court is there to do. As part of the constitutional system of checks and balances the courts act as a check on the actions of the Executive and Legislative branches. Appeals to the Supreme Court typically either argue that an existing law is unconstitutional, or that a law is being applied unconstitutionally. If/when the Supremes find a law to be unconstitutional (the Alien & Sedition Acts in the 19th century, for instance, or state laws prohibiting the practice of abortion in the early 1970s) those existing laws are struck down.
In the case of Microsoft any appeal will be based on the concept that existing law is being applied unfairly. Microsoft isn't going to argue aginst the validity of the Sherman Antitrust Act (and related statutes). Instead, they'll argue that Judge Jackson is incorrectly applying the law, and thus his opinion needs to be overturned.
In reading Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact, it appears that he is repeating a lot of his arguments from the earlier consent decree case regarding the tying of Internet Explorer. That opinion was rejected by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision marked by particularly blunt language about the advisability of judges ruling on new product features.
There has been discussion (on MSNBC, the AP, and the NY Times) observing that if Microsoft appeals, the Dept. of Justice can move to have the appeal heard directly by the Supreme Court--avoiding review (and the consequent delay) by the Second Circuit. There has also been a suggestion floated around that the Second Circuit in general views Judge Jackson as "a lightweight" and "stupid"--hinting that if the Second Circuit gets this case they may well spank Judge Jackson again.
Can you elucidate on this? Would the Dept. of Justice try to avoid review by the Second Circuit? Would the Supremes accept the case? Would they send it back to Jackson, or could they send it to the Second Circuit?
And on top of that, based on your experience, could you provide some handicapping of the likely sympathies of the players?
(Thanks for agreeing to the interview. Given that the last interviewee still has smouldering tailfeathers, I think you're all pretty brave to do this. [smile])
I waded through the morality speech, and listened to the really specious discussion of capitalism. But when I got to the part where the good doctor starts explaining software development (including mentioning that one of these open sources groups is basing their design on "CORBA-based OMG's (operational management groups)" it became clear to me that this guy is clueless. Writes well. Means well. But he's living proof of the idea that you need a license to write computer code.
His fundamental argument is this:
Had the good doctor stopped right there he would be on to something. He could, conceivably, produce a product that both benefits the medical community and makes himself rich. Instead he chooses to clutter his idea with the notion that Open Source--per se--would make his idea better. He then goes further--launching into a review of existing Open Source projects that are attempting to do what he describes. And he completely ignores a major weakness of Open Source.
I have been involved in large-scale, complex database programming for more than 12 years, in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. I have both developed large-scale systems for corporations, and developed component tools for database tool vendors (Logic Works, makers of Erwin/ERX; and Bader Technologies, makers of ObjectBase). I have also worked for a small software company that does for book publishers precisely what the good doctor wishes that somebody would do for his medical practice: the company developed the drop-dead, hands-down, be-all and end-all book publishing computer system.
If you call up any customer, they will rave about the software. They will tell you that buying the system will cost you a mint--but it will revolutionize your business, improve your bottom line, make your life more enjoyable, and cause your dog to love you more. Even if you don't have a dog. (I'm not exaggerating--that exact sentence is one customer's standard response to queries about the system.) If you have bought "Open Source" books from any well-known publishers of "Open Source" books your order was almost certainly handled by this system.
Wanna know the dirty little secret? Under the hood, the system is--in one sense--crap. It doesn't even have a relational database--it's built on a collection of flat ASCII files, using a semi-proprietary language named Databus that originated on the Datapoint mini and hasn't been used by practically anybody else in more than a decade. If this system was "open sourced" nobody would want to have anything to do with it. It would be regarded as a joke.
But the company's customers love them. They worship them. They love them so much that customers routinely send presents. I used to run the East Coast office, and my office today is decorated with posters from clients--and I haven't worked for those guys in ten years.
Why? How? Because more than anything else, this company understands that it is not the perfect algorithm that makes the software work. It is not the most up-to-date database engine that the end users want. It is not the baddest, highest, hardest, fastest, coolest, or most groovy new feature that matters. What this company provides to their customers is the answer to any and every problem they have. Even if it has nothing to do with the software.
Get a letter from Borders indicating that all invoices have to be submitted electronically? The software vendor will take up the issue with Borders. Get a chargeback invoice from Waldenbooks? They'll patiently explain the bookkeeping of chargebacks to your staff, again and again and again--as many times as it takes to make sure your staff does it right. Nobody, at any time, ever, speaks of an "end luser."
How far does this go? Back in the 1980s Louisiana State University Press bought the software system. At the time the software only ran on Datapoint minicomputers. Most customers bought the Datapoint mini from us--but LSU got cheap and bought it from a local dealer. For some unbelievable reason they decided that the obvious place to put a minicomputer (this is Louisiana, right?), which is supposed to be kept in a temperature-controlled room, is in the warehouse, right by the loading dock door. And in the summer, when it got hot (this is Louisiana, right?) they'd open the loading dock door to keep the mini cool. So what happens in the summer, when it's hot and humid? (This is Louisiana, right?) Thunderstorms. They take a lightning strike--a direct hit--right smack on the mini.
And what did they do? They called our tech support people. Did we laugh at them? Did we point out that they'd bought the hardware from somebody else, so it wasn't our problem? Did we suggest that they were morons, and LART them? No. The tech guy they talked to calmly responded, "have you called the fire department yet? No? Do you want me to call the fire department? If you have a fire, get out of the building first--we'll call the fire department from here...."
LSU has told that story to every university press in the country. Its one of the reasons why 2/3 of the university presses use this company's software. Because it isn't the code--it is the end-user relationship that matters.
The good doctor can create a huge Open Source project. They can give it a cute name like QuickQuack and hold online chats and chant selections from The Cathedral and the Bazaar. They can build the system with OS software from Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Unisys, or some guy from Finland who was named after a cartoon character. Ain't gonna make a lick of difference--because whenever they have something to install, and wherever they install it, it won't meet the needs of the end users. Because NOBODY--ESR, Linus, Stallman, Dust Puppy, the good doctor, NOBODY is prepared to discuss "Open Source" End User Support. They're all reading BOFH postings and telling one another "end luser" stories.
And it is precisely in the area of End User Support that those less-than-adequate commercial software companies are meeting their customers needs and making money. They're explaining how to reconcile reimbursements from health-insurance carriers; they're explaining how to use new EDI links to Blue Cross/Blue Shield; they're explaining the advantages of two-sided page scanning equipment; they're explaining why the optical archiving system runs better if its mounted vertically; they're explaining--for the fifteenth time--why nightly backups are a Good Thing. They help the end users run their businesses--they help the end users care for their patients. Their end user support people become indispensable parts of their clients medical practices. And if they have any desire to last in this business, they don't ever dare think the words "end luser."
The good doctor is talking about a vertical-market solution. And the business in vertical-market solutions isn't development--it's support. "Open Source" development won't do anything for quality--because without end user support nobody will use it. And I haven't heard anybody offer to step up and provide long-term, expert end-user support "open source"--which is to say, for free.