The answer is that open-sourcing may be good for discovery of bugs, but who discovers these bugs? The report-writers advocate that Microsoft products, being a critical private-sector asset, be made available to government security agencies.
Suppose that Microsoft products were made open-source. Then there would be a race to find the inherent bugs. This race is not just between individual well-meaning hackers, but also involves belligerent nations.
One of these is China. Chinese Information Warfare (IW) theorists have advocated the "take-home People's War", meaning that it will dedicate its indigenous IT talent to the task of bug-finding. Every bug then becomes part of its IW arsenal, which may be unleased immediately to disrupt US productivity, or kept in a knowledge repository for future use. This may be in regional conflicts (like Korea), in tactical disruption operations.
Therefore, what we should avoid is to allow this race-condition on the hacker level to occur, easing their IW task. No matter how good the OSS principles are in theory, you don't want a hiccup (an implementation imperfection) to leave you exposed unnecessarily.
Therefore, the information is restricted to Microsoft and US security enforcement agencies. There is a good point elsewhere about how we can trust Microsoft employees inherently. Well, you can't. That's how Russia got the atomic bomb, through spying. Now that's a real security headache.
There's no point charging based on the ratio of traffic. It does not reflect accurately who is benefitting from the information being transferred.
Even the simple act of reading a webpage benefits both the websurfer and the website. Other examples are even more complicated and difficult to disentangle (e.g., a US software company making patches available for download).
Well, a few thousand units really isn't a lot for a commercial product like this. I can imagine quite a few kinds of people willing to pay:
1. A Japanese businessman lives in a small apartment in Tokyo. His kid wants a pet. He goes for one that doesn't make any messes and won't wake up the neighbors. Also you can substitute "aged parent" for "kid".
2. Somebody who just loves electronic gadgetry but is mega-rich and mega-busy, and doesn't have the time to build his own robot. I mean, once you're worth multi-millions (and so many geeks are nowadays), you simply don't have to bother with accounting for the thousands here and there.
I don't understand why everyone else is so uppity about his email being root. Have they considered that
Mail to root is almost always forwarded
The host may forward all mail to one guy regardless of the supplied username. Perhaps it has more than one hostname and handles incoming messages according to the hostname attached to the message.
The important thing to note is that even in your example, there is a change of paradigm: I want to run Netscape and do almost everything via point-and-click. However, to get into Netscape, I have to go to the command prompt and type in its name.
I find it inconvenient to have to switch between the paradigms if I am editing text files or simply switching between windows, and I think that newbies must find it confusing, to say the least.
A user interface must have several attributes, including simplicity and consistency. If you try to teach a newbie how to use a GUI, you wouldn't teach him to run Netscape from the command line. After all, he's already confused as to what the difference between the Internet, e-mail, and the Web is, and why he has to click a button to check his e-mail. Keyboard shortcuts are almost as bad to introduce at this stage.
People have been talking about making Linux easy ever since it came out. Red Hat's distribution made it within reach of technologically savvy people, but still, it ain't "for Dummies" yet.
Caldera's move is a big gamble not only because of the capital outlay, but for brand recognition. Red Hat has always been about usability; witness the installation vis-a-vis Slackware, and how hard they are working on GNOME.
Red Hat is not going to jeopardize its name (a name now worth millions) with a release that it brands "for everyone" unless the distribution has full functionality (or at least, full newbie functionality) from the GUI and is well-supported. When that happens, you're going to see it pre-installed with Dell family computers, just like how it's coming with Dell servers now. It's going to be a big event, so big that they'll have a press kit even ZDNet writers can understand.
Right now, brick-and-mortar shopkeepers are disadvantaged compared to their online counterparts, and taxation is uneven: the technologically-savvy can avoid taxes buy trading on the Net.
Taxing Internet commerce will be fairer overall, be extremely efficient (since it is, by necessity, automated!), and allow lowering of other taxes. I mean, the government has to collect as much money as it needs anyway, and it is not as if the Internet needs tax breaks in order to grow.
So, yes to Internet taxes, if it means that other taxes will go down, because it is a fair tax.
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The answer is that open-sourcing may be good for discovery of bugs, but who discovers these bugs? The report-writers advocate that Microsoft products, being a critical private-sector asset, be made available to government security agencies.
Suppose that Microsoft products were made open-source. Then there would be a race to find the inherent bugs. This race is not just between individual well-meaning hackers, but also involves belligerent nations.
One of these is China. Chinese Information Warfare (IW) theorists have advocated the "take-home People's War", meaning that it will dedicate its indigenous IT talent to the task of bug-finding. Every bug then becomes part of its IW arsenal, which may be unleased immediately to disrupt US productivity, or kept in a knowledge repository for future use. This may be in regional conflicts (like Korea), in tactical disruption operations.
Therefore, what we should avoid is to allow this race-condition on the hacker level to occur, easing their IW task. No matter how good the OSS principles are in theory, you don't want a hiccup (an implementation imperfection) to leave you exposed unnecessarily.
Therefore, the information is restricted to Microsoft and US security enforcement agencies. There is a good point elsewhere about how we can trust Microsoft employees inherently. Well, you can't. That's how Russia got the atomic bomb, through spying. Now that's a real security headache.
There's no point charging based on the ratio of traffic. It does not reflect accurately who is benefitting from the information being transferred.
Even the simple act of reading a webpage benefits both the websurfer and the website. Other examples are even more complicated and difficult to disentangle (e.g., a US software company making patches available for download).
Well, a few thousand units really isn't a lot for a commercial product like this. I can imagine quite a few kinds of people willing to pay:
1. A Japanese businessman lives in a small apartment in Tokyo. His kid wants a pet. He goes for one that doesn't make any messes and won't wake up the neighbors. Also you can substitute "aged parent" for "kid".
2. Somebody who just loves electronic gadgetry but is mega-rich and mega-busy, and doesn't have the time to build his own robot. I mean, once you're worth multi-millions (and so many geeks are nowadays), you simply don't have to bother with accounting for the thousands here and there.
The important thing to note is that even in your example, there is a change of paradigm: I want to run Netscape and do almost everything via point-and-click. However, to get into Netscape, I have to go to the command prompt and type in its name.
I find it inconvenient to have to switch between the paradigms if I am editing text files or simply switching between windows, and I think that newbies must find it confusing, to say the least.
A user interface must have several attributes, including simplicity and consistency. If you try to teach a newbie how to use a GUI, you wouldn't teach him to run Netscape from the command line. After all, he's already confused as to what the difference between the Internet, e-mail, and the Web is, and why he has to click a button to check his e-mail. Keyboard shortcuts are almost as bad to introduce at this stage.
People have been talking about making Linux easy ever since it came out. Red Hat's distribution made it within reach of technologically savvy people, but still, it ain't "for Dummies" yet.
Caldera's move is a big gamble not only because of the capital outlay, but for brand recognition. Red Hat has always been about usability; witness the installation vis-a-vis Slackware, and how hard they are working on GNOME.
Red Hat is not going to jeopardize its name (a name now worth millions) with a release that it brands "for everyone" unless the distribution has full functionality (or at least, full newbie functionality) from the GUI and is well-supported. When that happens, you're going to see it pre-installed with Dell family computers, just like how it's coming with Dell servers now. It's going to be a big event, so big that they'll have a press kit even ZDNet writers can understand.
Right now, brick-and-mortar shopkeepers are disadvantaged compared to their online counterparts, and taxation is uneven: the technologically-savvy can avoid taxes buy trading on the Net.
Taxing Internet commerce will be fairer overall, be extremely efficient (since it is, by necessity, automated!), and allow lowering of other taxes. I mean, the government has to collect as much money as it needs anyway, and it is not as if the Internet needs tax breaks in order to grow.
So, yes to Internet taxes, if it means that other taxes will go down, because it is a fair tax.