This does not at all explain why they all have clauses along the lines of "no implied merchantability or fitness..." and "not to be considered a 'good' under Uniform Commercial Code..."
Nor does it explain the bizarre restrictions on use and copying, which seldom do the competition any good.
These clauses seem entirely about creating a special world for software: it can't be liable for performance like a good, it can't be resold like copyrighted material, it can't be reverse engineered like trade secrets, it's details need not be made public like patents, it need not be protected like trademarks. In short, any inconveniences due to the rights of anyone but the publisher are utterly discarded.
By the way, does anyone know who started some of these now-common EULA clauses? My money is on Gates, as he is the high priest of abusing intellectual property to monetary advantage.
Whether he meant it or not, Mental got the issue just right.
Colonization of space may be inevitable to ensure the species' survival, but "leave things better than you found them" must also be learned -- and sooner!
Shouldn't free software be cheaper to develop?
on
TurboLinux Layoffs
·
· Score: 3
Speaking out of almost complete ignorance, I'd think that open source software development should be cheaper than proprietary, since you have community contributions, effective debugging by the userbase, and can build upon other open source software.
Is this really true, or does cost of labor and initial research drown it all out?
If it is true, are Linux companies currently exploiting it well enough? (For instance, is TurboLinux's clustering software costing them too much by not being open enough early enough?)
Much has been made of the effect Jesse Ventura's web site had on his shocking election as Governor of Minnesota. Do you think his site achieves any of what you call for from mainstream politicians? And do you attribute his success to the popularity of the site?
Bonus Question: Do you think that the "just-the-facts" internet culture you describe will spill over into offline politics?
For the record, I did not vote for Jesse, and am now deeply shamed to be from Minnesota. However, I could out certain Slashdotters who did vote for him...
As a counterpoint to all the CorpNet posts, here is a vision of what the Internet could be if we are vigilant about maintaining freedom, access, and openness:
In general, an internet that continues to be (or goes back to being) open and free becomes a place where everyone has an equal voice to communicate to as wide an audience as they want, everyone has access to the entire variety of information available, and the tools of the internet excel at ensuring that your message can be heard clearly, while you can also find out all that you want to know.
Commerce
The free internet of the future creates a frictionless, level marketplace where disintermediation has been taken to the extreme. Whatever business you're in, you have the means to compete on a sale-by-sale basis with anyone else in the same field. What will set your business apart is quality, service, convenience, and specialization.
As a consumer, you can use this situation to great advantage, always commanding the lowest price and greatest value available.
Some side effects: commodity products will be produced as close to where they're consumed as possible, with the most-available materials, by cottage-industry producers that can respond cheaply to the needs of local customers. Meanwhile, exotic products and materials will be made available to wider communities, increasing the value of local resources and skills. The economies of leverage and cartel will nearly disappear, allowing "banana republics" to develop independent, self-sustaining economies, while reducing inequities of wealth and power in all countries.
Culture
Broadcasters, advertisers, and media conglomerates will also succumb to disintermediation, making culture both more global and more heterogeneous. While the prurient will always survive, the hyped, ad-financed, over-promoted, cross-marketed garbage that we and our children currently have shoved down our throats will be rightfully outcompeted by those whose voices currently can't be heard because they don't market well or might make the media conglomerates uncomfortable.
Education, Science, and Technology
If discoveries can be kept from becoming property, and the advantages of open information and peer review are recognized, the internet can continue to benefit science and education as the evolving encyclopedia of our shared knowledge.
This all sounds pretty lofty and idealistic, but that's what freedom can do for you. And if it doesn't turn out the way I've described, we'll have to ask how our future got taken from us, and by whom.
I for one looked at this article (love a geeky mystery and all) and probably scrolled right by the Cobalt/Gateway deal article.
This is also something the mainstream press does all the time -- revisits or repackages old info in a way that makes it more relevant or interesting.
And finally, Ask Slashdot is really Ask Slashdot's Readers, so Slashdot is just being true to its approach by letting US tell the poster it's a relabelled Cobalt Qube.
Next time I get mod points, I'll think seriously about giving a -1 Troll to gratuitous Slash-bashing like this.
(Damn, now I've got to wonder if I just fed a Troll!)
Since the big problem with looking for life on Europa is burrowing through 100km of ice, burrowing snakebots would be pretty cool, and they wouldn't require massive machinery.
Problem: how to dig quickly enough to get through that much ice without running out of power.
If the story is right, I'll go out on a limb and say that Gates will choose to abandon the OS company (calling it Windows), and go with the apps company, which would retain the Microsoft name.
Why? All of MS's current profitability is currently in apps, Linux is making it so that OS's can't get too high-priced, and MS apps would still hold a virtual monopoly on both Windows AND Mac desktops. Think of all the software categories that will still have little or no competition on these platforms: office apps (several categories right there), development tools, internet tools, and more.
Given the familiarity barrier to entry for other tools, and the ability to leap into new platforms with money and customers in hand, Gates should be able to profitably milk that cow for some time.
Too bad, really, that they didn't go for breaking them into more parts.
I'll just "me too" the other posters on how a breakup would work and be a good thing.
But wouldn't it be fun if MS Office were itself broken up? By building this monolith, and entangling it so tightly with the OS, MS has ensured that individual best-of-breed packages can't thrive. There used to be a time when you bought your word processing, spreadsheet, database, publishing, email, and presentation software separately, and could pick and choose the best in each category. And if it weren't for this trial, we'd see Visio piled into Office shortly, too.
Remember, folks, the MS monopoly has been created by, done its damage (to both consumers and competitors) with, and made its profits from, OS-specific APPLICATIONS, not the OS itself. And those applications have become more entrenched by merging together.
Now, take the same argument and apply it to IE, and MSN, and Visual Studio, and Windows extras, etc. and you can see that the more finely MS is chopped:-), the more we can get back to having some competition in desktop software again.
The one photon may be a data element of either the message data or the error-correction data. So, if enough photons of message and error-correction data get through, I can reconstruct the message data.
Not to flame, but isn't that kind of like asking how do one *bit* per data element and integrated error correction square up?
Actually, he is right that even novices should be able to construct complex activities that the computer can perform again and again. If the UI has such a feature, you can have elegance and modularity in your tools. Without it, you get feature bloat.
The problem is that novice-usable UI scripting that is also useful to power users may not really exist yet. If it did, I'd think that the world would be beating a path to its door.
Although the Pinkerton justification is suspicious, as it's an "everyone's doing it" defense, I had a similar reaction to Katz: I was appalled (though not necessarily surprised) at the way anonymous reporting has been so casually accepted.
We must remember that the horror of the act being reported doesn't excuse setting aside people's rights. I would wonder how many false child abuse or sex harrassment claims submitted to these reporting services have ruined lives unfairly. Witness the string of child-care center sex abuse accusations supported by what turned out to be coached testimony.
It's probably a good thing that WAVE came along to make us aware of the potential for abuse in this growing "security" field.
I'm on the outside (closed, custom work in Windoze-land) looking in, but it seems to me that what you ask is already happening, just not quite quickly enough for your tastes.
For example, how many *more* open source coders can RedHat employ this year than last? And as the customer base grows, how many more in-house coders will be working on open source stuff, providing mods back to the community? After all, IBM's now-robust commitment to Linux and open source began with serving their own needs on Apache and AIX compatibility, etc.
Just remember, 90% of us, including me, and apparently you, make our living off of building software that never goes retail. But is that because every business that comes along invents its own way of doing things, and thus has unique software needs? No, it's because either the software tool you and I are building:
A) never got built, B) got built for a one-off implementation, C) got poorly built for sale, or D) got well built for too high a sale price.
Open source has already encroached on commonly-needed software in C and D, and is quickly consuming more of that space. Standardization will bring more of the stuff in B into the realm of common enough to benefit from open source, and A means nobody was going to pay for it, open source or not.
Because software is so desperately needed, the valuable stuff will get built. Because the talent pool is finite, some cool, but not valuable stuff will languish. Neither open nor closed source changes this, but open source at least offers some hope that we won't all spend careers building the same thing over and over -- witness the Y2K bug. How many times was that baby fixed? gcc or somesuch sits on almost as many computers as had Y2K-buggy software, but it only takes one coder to patch a bug in it.
Today, if someone deep links to me, I can cut them off based on referrer, or I can make sure that my content delivers whatever message that customers missed by not visiting my precious home page.
But in the bright, shiny future of XML, the bastard deep linkers will be able to repackage my data to their heart's content.
Of course, like ticketmaster, the future whiners will be forgetting that it's this unfortunately uncontrollable technology that created this easy-to-play-in marketplace to begin with!
Like ticket.com's lawyer said: them's the rules, you gonna play or not?
I find the current situation of the internet (no one in charge) to be absolutely tremendous, and I'm counting on the combined incompetence of the world's bureaucrats to keep it that way.
Really, what are the current harms?
No taxation -- ooh, ouch, please stop!
Too much porn/gambling/fraud -- like international standards are really going to cure this, and like it's worth having our free speech go away along with them?
Too little consumer/privacy protection -- laws and regulations will do much less good here than tools, security, open standards (to ensure tools don't hide nasty surprises), and disclosure (remember the free speech bit?)
The article ends with a comment about an international conference to deal with this: "let's hope it starts something."
Actually, brute-force decryption that scales linearly, rather than exponentially, is exactly what quantum computers promise to do that conventional computers can't.
Many other posters have provided better links and explanations than I could.
But now we've found it useful to allow our tools to make themselves, or in the case of genetics, we've found it useful to invent new living things to be tools. In the gray goo scenario, intent on the part of the tool or the toolmaker doesn't come into it.
Surely your computer has done things you didn't intend. A bug in a sufficiently dangerous technology is all that's required.
As Joy points out, just because it's been talked about for ages doesn't mean we have a solution. Two reasons that the discussion may become more than academic:
1) As tech capability advances, tech danger advances. This is obvious: if I build something to help me compete with other people and species better, then other people could use it to compete better with me.
2) As human culture becomes more interconnected, a culture-wide tech failure becomes a species-wide disaster. Plenty of civilizations have died off in the past, most of them from not understanding how to keep agriculture from eventually destroying their land. But since these civilizations were local phenomena, the species as a whole chugged on. A nuclear holocaust or oops-plague from a genetic experiment would be global.
I think the apathy of geeks towards traditional politics (and the obligatory snubbing in return) is a matter of relevancy. Cyberspace lawlessness, or perhaps more accurately, self-regulation, can quickly make one unconcerned by the actions of lawmakers.
What has affected your life more: the internet, or a balanced budget? Which has spurred unwavering economic growth: information-age productivity, or Alan Greenspan? Which promises to bring peace, prosperity, and democracy to more of the world: the open exchange of information without borders or censors, or the WTO?
American (and probably EU) politics are just so damn boring these days, and it's very much like some employee focus group: "Thank you all very much for sharing your opinions. Management will now go do whatever the hell we feel like, and you will all try to ignore us to whatever extent possible while getting your jobs done."
As for wielding new-found power, how can the techies change things any more than in the last decade?
"You say you want a revolution? I started three of them before breakfast this morning."
Slashdot Mirror
Try the "preferences" link among the pile of links on the top left, and scroll to where it lets you customize sections.
This does not at all explain why they all have clauses along the lines of "no implied merchantability or fitness..." and "not to be considered a 'good' under Uniform Commercial Code..."
Nor does it explain the bizarre restrictions on use and copying, which seldom do the competition any good.
These clauses seem entirely about creating a special world for software: it can't be liable for performance like a good, it can't be resold like copyrighted material, it can't be reverse engineered like trade secrets, it's details need not be made public like patents, it need not be protected like trademarks. In short, any inconveniences due to the rights of anyone but the publisher are utterly discarded.
By the way, does anyone know who started some of these now-common EULA clauses? My money is on Gates, as he is the high priest of abusing intellectual property to monetary advantage.
I believe a site that does some of what you want is opensecrets.org
Whether he meant it or not, Mental got the issue just right.
Colonization of space may be inevitable to ensure the species' survival, but "leave things better than you found them" must also be learned -- and sooner!
Speaking out of almost complete ignorance, I'd think that open source software development should be cheaper than proprietary, since you have community contributions, effective debugging by the userbase, and can build upon other open source software.
Is this really true, or does cost of labor and initial research drown it all out?
If it is true, are Linux companies currently exploiting it well enough? (For instance, is TurboLinux's clustering software costing them too much by not being open enough early enough?)
All speculations welcome...
Much has been made of the effect Jesse Ventura's web site had on his shocking election as Governor of Minnesota. Do you think his site achieves any of what you call for from mainstream politicians? And do you attribute his success to the popularity of the site?
Bonus Question: Do you think that the "just-the-facts" internet culture you describe will spill over into offline politics?
For the record, I did not vote for Jesse, and am now deeply shamed to be from Minnesota. However, I could out certain Slashdotters who did vote for him...
As a counterpoint to all the CorpNet posts, here is a vision of what the Internet could be if we are vigilant about maintaining freedom, access, and openness:
In general, an internet that continues to be (or goes back to being) open and free becomes a place where everyone has an equal voice to communicate to as wide an audience as they want, everyone has access to the entire variety of information available, and the tools of the internet excel at ensuring that your message can be heard clearly, while you can also find out all that you want to know.
Commerce
The free internet of the future creates a frictionless, level marketplace where disintermediation has been taken to the extreme. Whatever business you're in, you have the means to compete on a sale-by-sale basis with anyone else in the same field. What will set your business apart is quality, service, convenience, and specialization.
As a consumer, you can use this situation to great advantage, always commanding the lowest price and greatest value available.
Some side effects: commodity products will be produced as close to where they're consumed as possible, with the most-available materials, by cottage-industry producers that can respond cheaply to the needs of local customers. Meanwhile, exotic products and materials will be made available to wider communities, increasing the value of local resources and skills. The economies of leverage and cartel will nearly disappear, allowing "banana republics" to develop independent, self-sustaining economies, while reducing inequities of wealth and power in all countries.
Culture
Broadcasters, advertisers, and media conglomerates will also succumb to disintermediation, making culture both more global and more heterogeneous. While the prurient will always survive, the hyped, ad-financed, over-promoted, cross-marketed garbage that we and our children currently have shoved down our throats will be rightfully outcompeted by those whose voices currently can't be heard because they don't market well or might make the media conglomerates uncomfortable.
Education, Science, and Technology
If discoveries can be kept from becoming property, and the advantages of open information and peer review are recognized, the internet can continue to benefit science and education as the evolving encyclopedia of our shared knowledge.
This all sounds pretty lofty and idealistic, but that's what freedom can do for you. And if it doesn't turn out the way I've described, we'll have to ask how our future got taken from us, and by whom.
I for one looked at this article (love a geeky mystery and all) and probably scrolled right by the Cobalt/Gateway deal article.
This is also something the mainstream press does all the time -- revisits or repackages old info in a way that makes it more relevant or interesting.
And finally, Ask Slashdot is really Ask Slashdot's Readers, so Slashdot is just being true to its approach by letting US tell the poster it's a relabelled Cobalt Qube.
Next time I get mod points, I'll think seriously about giving a -1 Troll to gratuitous Slash-bashing like this.
(Damn, now I've got to wonder if I just fed a Troll!)
Now I can get back to work...Ah, Yes:
A Tale of Two Cities
Copyright 2000, Me. All Rights Reserved.
That should help with the bills.
Since the big problem with looking for life on Europa is burrowing through 100km of ice, burrowing snakebots would be pretty cool, and they wouldn't require massive machinery.
Problem: how to dig quickly enough to get through that much ice without running out of power.
If the story is right, I'll go out on a limb and say that Gates will choose to abandon the OS company (calling it Windows), and go with the apps company, which would retain the Microsoft name.
Why? All of MS's current profitability is currently in apps, Linux is making it so that OS's can't get too high-priced, and MS apps would still hold a virtual monopoly on both Windows AND Mac desktops. Think of all the software categories that will still have little or no competition on these platforms: office apps (several categories right there), development tools, internet tools, and more.
Given the familiarity barrier to entry for other tools, and the ability to leap into new platforms with money and customers in hand, Gates should be able to profitably milk that cow for some time.
Too bad, really, that they didn't go for breaking them into more parts.
I'll just "me too" the other posters on how a breakup would work and be a good thing.
:-), the more we can get back to having some competition in desktop software again.
But wouldn't it be fun if MS Office were itself broken up? By building this monolith, and entangling it so tightly with the OS, MS has ensured that individual best-of-breed packages can't thrive. There used to be a time when you bought your word processing, spreadsheet, database, publishing, email, and presentation software separately, and could pick and choose the best in each category. And if it weren't for this trial, we'd see Visio piled into Office shortly, too.
Remember, folks, the MS monopoly has been created by, done its damage (to both consumers and competitors) with, and made its profits from, OS-specific APPLICATIONS, not the OS itself. And those applications have become more entrenched by merging together.
Now, take the same argument and apply it to IE, and MSN, and Visual Studio, and Windows extras, etc. and you can see that the more finely MS is chopped
The one photon may be a data element of either the message data or the error-correction data. So, if enough photons of message and error-correction data get through, I can reconstruct the message data.
Not to flame, but isn't that kind of like asking how do one *bit* per data element and integrated error correction square up?
Actually, he is right that even novices should be able to construct complex activities that the computer can perform again and again. If the UI has such a feature, you can have elegance and modularity in your tools. Without it, you get feature bloat.
The problem is that novice-usable UI scripting that is also useful to power users may not really exist yet. If it did, I'd think that the world would be beating a path to its door.
Although the Pinkerton justification is suspicious, as it's an "everyone's doing it" defense, I had a similar reaction to Katz: I was appalled (though not necessarily surprised) at the way anonymous reporting has been so casually accepted.
We must remember that the horror of the act being reported doesn't excuse setting aside people's rights. I would wonder how many false child abuse or sex harrassment claims submitted to these reporting services have ruined lives unfairly. Witness the string of child-care center sex abuse accusations supported by what turned out to be coached testimony.
It's probably a good thing that WAVE came along to make us aware of the potential for abuse in this growing "security" field.
I'm on the outside (closed, custom work in Windoze-land) looking in, but it seems to me that what you ask is already happening, just not quite quickly enough for your tastes.
For example, how many *more* open source coders can RedHat employ this year than last? And as the customer base grows, how many more in-house coders will be working on open source stuff, providing mods back to the community? After all, IBM's now-robust commitment to Linux and open source began with serving their own needs on Apache and AIX compatibility, etc.
Just remember, 90% of us, including me, and apparently you, make our living off of building software that never goes retail. But is that because every business that comes along invents its own way of doing things, and thus has unique software needs? No, it's because either the software tool you and I are building:
A) never got built,
B) got built for a one-off implementation,
C) got poorly built for sale, or
D) got well built for too high a sale price.
Open source has already encroached on commonly-needed software in C and D, and is quickly consuming more of that space. Standardization will bring more of the stuff in B into the realm of common enough to benefit from open source, and A means nobody was going to pay for it, open source or not.
Because software is so desperately needed, the valuable stuff will get built. Because the talent pool is finite, some cool, but not valuable stuff will languish. Neither open nor closed source changes this, but open source at least offers some hope that we won't all spend careers building the same thing over and over -- witness the Y2K bug. How many times was that baby fixed? gcc or somesuch sits on almost as many computers as had Y2K-buggy software, but it only takes one coder to patch a bug in it.
Today, if someone deep links to me, I can cut them off based on referrer, or I can make sure that my content delivers whatever message that customers missed by not visiting my precious home page.
But in the bright, shiny future of XML, the bastard deep linkers will be able to repackage my data to their heart's content.
Of course, like ticketmaster, the future whiners will be forgetting that it's this unfortunately uncontrollable technology that created this easy-to-play-in marketplace to begin with!
Like ticket.com's lawyer said: them's the rules, you gonna play or not?
I registered on Slashdot.
Open Source is analogous, but not strictly equivalent to scientific peer review. Among the differing concepts are:
"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
and
One is NOT allowed to propagate alterations to community work without disclosure.
Neither of the above are true in scientific peer review, and both are frequently touted as essential elements of Open Source success.
I find the current situation of the internet (no one in charge) to be absolutely tremendous, and I'm counting on the combined incompetence of the world's bureaucrats to keep it that way.
Really, what are the current harms?
No taxation -- ooh, ouch, please stop!
Too much porn/gambling/fraud -- like international standards are really going to cure this, and like it's worth having our free speech go away along with them?
Too little consumer/privacy protection -- laws and regulations will do much less good here than tools, security, open standards (to ensure tools don't hide nasty surprises), and disclosure (remember the free speech bit?)
The article ends with a comment about an international conference to deal with this: "let's hope it starts something."
Let's not.
Actually, brute-force decryption that scales linearly, rather than exponentially, is exactly what quantum computers promise to do that conventional computers can't.
Many other posters have provided better links and explanations than I could.
But now we've found it useful to allow our tools to make themselves, or in the case of genetics, we've found it useful to invent new living things to be tools. In the gray goo scenario, intent on the part of the tool or the toolmaker doesn't come into it.
Surely your computer has done things you didn't intend. A bug in a sufficiently dangerous technology is all that's required.
As Joy points out, just because it's been talked about for ages doesn't mean we have a solution. Two reasons that the discussion may become more than academic:
1) As tech capability advances, tech danger advances. This is obvious: if I build something to help me compete with other people and species better, then other people could use it to compete better with me.
2) As human culture becomes more interconnected, a culture-wide tech failure becomes a species-wide disaster. Plenty of civilizations have died off in the past, most of them from not understanding how to keep agriculture from eventually destroying their land. But since these civilizations were local phenomena, the species as a whole chugged on. A nuclear holocaust or oops-plague from a genetic experiment would be global.
"Think of it like buying a dog... "
And, if you want your politician to avoid scandal, you'll apparently need to have him neutered!
I think the apathy of geeks towards traditional politics (and the obligatory snubbing in return) is a matter of relevancy. Cyberspace lawlessness, or perhaps more accurately, self-regulation, can quickly make one unconcerned by the actions of lawmakers.
What has affected your life more: the internet, or a balanced budget? Which has spurred unwavering economic growth: information-age productivity, or Alan Greenspan? Which promises to bring peace, prosperity, and democracy to more of the world: the open exchange of information without borders or censors, or the WTO?
American (and probably EU) politics are just so damn boring these days, and it's very much like some employee focus group: "Thank you all very much for sharing your opinions. Management will now go do whatever the hell we feel like, and you will all try to ignore us to whatever extent possible while getting your jobs done."
As for wielding new-found power, how can the techies change things any more than in the last decade?
"You say you want a revolution? I started three of them before breakfast this morning."