As I read it, RMS's terms would be enforced by other software partners. Remediation would happen through the courts and not through any regulatory agency. Not sure who's bureaucracy is worse...
But its all moot. I agree with those who note that the DOJ suit has nothing to do with competition via free software and they will not impose open source remedies.
Good to learn of another search tool to put in my box. But I'm initially unimpressed with Google. Feels like a phone carrier ad scam to me. As for its searching, its about as unfocused and scattershot as AltaVista or HotBot.
I use MetaCrawler. I don't see how any search engine can compete with a parasitic approach like MetaCrawler. Maybe you loose the ability to construct nuanced expressions, but for basic searches its great. And MetaCrawler's ability to collate and merge duplicates makes it far better (and only marginally slower) than MegaCrawler.
If you re-read the recent Mozilla birthday threads, and Jamie Zawinski's resignation letter from M$'s perspective, you could see the potential benefits to M$ of publishing NT kernel source. Jamie's lament about Mozilla.org being dominated by Netscape, and the fact that outside participants were unable to contribute much code and mostly gave early design guidance,... many of their laments could be seen as benefits to M$. And developers really would be able to cope better with NT bugs while shining more light on those bugs and potential fixes. M$ gets advice and input in the design and early development stages. They get bugfixes later on. But their developers do all the work. They call all the shots. (And I have no doubt that they would assert full control over re-use of their code. The last thing they could tolerate would be a loss of version control over their dll's.)
OTOH, M$ working methods would have to be drastically altered. It all seems like a very long shot for these reasons alone. Would they continue with daily builds? Would these be posted? Near the end when stabilization is the preeminent concern, would they really want outsiders opinions about the hack vs. fix trade-off decisions? How would they handle the product readiness and release to manufacturing decisions? Openly? That would be rich. The outside tinkerers and perfectionists would certainly be an irritation at the endgame. That's one phenomena the Mozilla crew has yet to face.
Sorry, I think all the M$ bashing is missing the point. MS is getting screwed by recently revised FASB software revenue accounting rules, which leave MS almost no choice but to screw their customers.
My employer is faced with the same ugly dilemma. We are also making awful, contorted product release and pricing decisions based on idiotic accounting BS. My very limited understanding of the new rules goes something like:
Company ABC spends a year and $10M developing the next release, Rn, of their cash cow product BigBucks2000
The schedule gets grim, so they cut feature Y from the product a few months before FCS and redirect the Y team to get the release out.
A month later, they have bugs that need to be fixed in the field, so they spend $.1M fixing them and release an update, Rn.1
Feature Y is now complete and ready to include in the update.
At this point they are caught on the horns of an accounting rule. If they add Y to Rn.1, the accountants will claim the Rn.1 is different from the original Rn. If it is ruled a different product, and they do not charge for it, all $10M of the R&D expenses for Rn must be booked against the one month where Rn was sold. The $.1M R&D expenses associated with Rn.1 would be booked against Rn.1 revenue. If they charge for Rn.1, they can continue spreading the Rn R&D expenses over the full selling cycle of Rn & Rn.1 while booking the update expenses against the selling cycle of Rn.1. If they charge, their books look good. If they don't, they crater the first quarter and their stock tanks. I tried to dig up URLs on this stuff, but so far I've come up empty.
Its all BS. MS customers are about to get screwed by it. But the problem is not specific to MS and may not be entirely MS's fault. Like I said, we have chosen to withhold enhancements from updates, charge separately for new stuff, or only ship new stuff to subscription customers based on this FASB idiocy. Perhaps MS could have made different product packaging and delivery choices that would have given the W98 customers free bug fixes. But my guess is that would have distorted IE5 and the tight coupling of W98 & IE in ways that were just too painful.
Its bad enough that public corporations live and die based on quarterly results and market expectations. Compound this with bean counting straight jackets and the result is that software consumers are getting screwed for no good reason.
According to the info on the RAFI site, "The technology is aimed primarily at seed markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where over 1.4 billion people depend on farm-saved seed and on-farm plant breeding." I wonder if Monsanto is up front abut this intension of if they have some other fig leaf to hide behind. I really can't imagine a plausible benefit for Terminator seeds.
Slashdot Mirror
But its all moot. I agree with those who note that the DOJ suit has nothing to do with competition via free software and they will not impose open source remedies.
Check out the disclaimers on their reseach page. Its pretty clear this toggle is a research / development thing.
I use MetaCrawler. I don't see how any search engine can compete with a parasitic approach like MetaCrawler. Maybe you loose the ability to construct nuanced expressions, but for basic searches its great. And MetaCrawler's ability to collate and merge duplicates makes it far better (and only marginally slower) than MegaCrawler.
OTOH, M$ working methods would have to be drastically altered. It all seems like a very long shot for these reasons alone. Would they continue with daily builds? Would these be posted? Near the end when stabilization is the preeminent concern, would they really want outsiders opinions about the hack vs. fix trade-off decisions? How would they handle the product readiness and release to manufacturing decisions? Openly? That would be rich. The outside tinkerers and perfectionists would certainly be an irritation at the endgame. That's one phenomena the Mozilla crew has yet to face.
My employer is faced with the same ugly dilemma. We are also making awful, contorted product release and pricing decisions based on idiotic accounting BS. My very limited understanding of the new rules goes something like:
- Company ABC spends a year and $10M developing the next release, Rn, of their cash cow product BigBucks2000
- The schedule gets grim, so they cut feature Y from the product a few months before FCS and redirect the Y team to get the release out.
- A month later, they have bugs that need to be fixed in the field, so they spend $.1M fixing them and release an update, Rn.1
- Feature Y is now complete and ready to include in the update.
At this point they are caught on the horns of an accounting rule. If they add Y to Rn.1, the accountants will claim the Rn.1 is different from the original Rn. If it is ruled a different product, and they do not charge for it, all $10M of the R&D expenses for Rn must be booked against the one month where Rn was sold. The $.1M R&D expenses associated with Rn.1 would be booked against Rn.1 revenue. If they charge for Rn.1, they can continue spreading the Rn R&D expenses over the full selling cycle of Rn & Rn.1 while booking the update expenses against the selling cycle of Rn.1. If they charge, their books look good. If they don't, they crater the first quarter and their stock tanks. I tried to dig up URLs on this stuff, but so far I've come up empty.Its all BS. MS customers are about to get screwed by it. But the problem is not specific to MS and may not be entirely MS's fault. Like I said, we have chosen to withhold enhancements from updates, charge separately for new stuff, or only ship new stuff to subscription customers based on this FASB idiocy. Perhaps MS could have made different product packaging and delivery choices that would have given the W98 customers free bug fixes. But my guess is that would have distorted IE5 and the tight coupling of W98 & IE in ways that were just too painful.
Its bad enough that public corporations live and die based on quarterly results and market expectations. Compound this with bean counting straight jackets and the result is that software consumers are getting screwed for no good reason.
??? Seems my link was foobar.
Hopefully this is it: Help Stop the Terminator
According to the info on the RAFI site, "The technology is aimed primarily at seed markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where over 1.4 billion people depend on farm-saved seed and on-farm plant breeding." I wonder if Monsanto is up front abut this intension of if they have some other fig leaf to hide behind. I really can't imagine a plausible benefit for Terminator seeds.