There is a ghost town located on a mountain slope in Montana above a small town called Phillipsburg. This town (Granit City) had a population of three thousand and covered the side of the mountain (that was a big town back then). All but a few buildings and the larger mining structures have vanished, replaced by forest, in a scant 100 years.
Aside from the remains of the lunar lander and a plastic flag on the surface of the moon, probably the only thing future civilizations will find that points back to us will be the plastic stuff like packaging and six-pack binders, and a curious bottleneck of biological diversity in the late 20th century to rival that of the extinction of the dinasaurs, there will be little for future archealogists to find. Given a few tens of thousands of years, even the satelites in orbit will have long since fallen back to earth.
Tales of a space faring civilization in 10,000 years? I doubt it, given that we haven't even bothered to go back to the moon in 25 years. Tales of a civilization that practically worshipped consumption and greed, to the point of (nearly) consuming the entire world and ultimately consuming itself? Quite possibly.
Just another cheery thought for a Wednesday morning.
The very lack of a heiarchy of authority, and the freedom we all enjoy to take existing code and run with it in whatever direction looks promising, is one of the fundamental strengths of the Open Source paradigm. What the author described is one of the worse case scenerios for Open Source software -- two people competing for the same recognition, who loath each other and spend more time slinging mud at one another than they do productively writing code. The result? Two programs (P and P' in this case) which are competing for a user base. Both are improving over time. The following possibilites exist:
JHQ drops development of P, J drops development of P' -- If P or P' have merit, someone else picks up the project and it moves along, sans the bloody rhetoric.
JHQ continues development of P, J continues development of P' -- two compteting products exist for users to choose from, a benefit for the community despite the poisonous relations and rhetoric between JHQ and J
JHQ stops developing P, J continues development of P' -- a viable product continues to exist, and anyone who wishes may continue work on P as a competing product.
JHQ continues developing P, J drops development of P' -- as above, a viable product continues to be developed, and anyone is free to contribute or take over the development of P' if they wish.
In a closed source environment, subject to the heirarchy you consider so vital, there is a good chance similar internal bickering and politiking will result in unacceptable compromises in the code or direction of development, or even the scrapping of the entire project. At the very least one can expect delays to result from this kind of animosity in a corporate or closed source environment (I've seen it in both academic and corporate contexts). In that case, however, users loose even the possibility of obtaining a program they might have found useful. This cannot happen with open source.
In summary, open source removes limits on creativity, allows projects to move in many directions at once, and provides a built-in robustness to projects that allows them to survive some of the ugliest interpersonal conflicts humans are capable of devising. Name one other development model that exhibits such strengths.
The replacement DPT controller exhibited the same flawed behavior: drives not recognized, drives recognized with capacity 0MB, controller firmware hangs at the end of a low level format, and a complete inability to use any of the hardware present. Alas, I must strongly urge anyone considering fibre channel to avoid this product.
Remember the PS/2 debacle? Overpriced, uncompetitive PCs with a new, proprietary bus. Allot of companies went with Big Blue, and allot of heads rolled, as cheaper and faster EISA and ISA bus clones came to market. With the advent of Linux and Open Source, those who cling to the "I can't get fired for choosing Microsoft" run an increasing risk of suffering the same fate. We are paid to be technically savvy, and to investigate and (presumably) select the best technology for a particular job. When an employer discovers they've missed the boat, and become less competitive as a result, the head of the "play it safe, don't innovate" IT manager clinging to an outmoded and unreliable technology becomes one of the first targets on the hit-list.
We've been putting together a RAID system for our office, using Linux on intel. SCSI is no problem -- Mylex and others have excellent controllers, and even the DPT stuff appears to work.
However, DPT Fibre Channel has been an unmitigated disaster. Unless you purchase DPT hard drives, you are basically on your own. The latest Seagate 18 GB Drives (ST318203) do not work at all ("oh, we haven't tried those yet"). Neither do the older Seagates (ST118202), despite tech supports assurances to the contrary ("We know they work, they've been tested"). Don't even get me started on the inconsistencies of what tech support claims ("we never told you that would/wouldn't work", usually as part of a "it's the drives, not the controller" refrain, and in direct contradiction to earlier statements, with the offensive implication that I am somehow lying about what I was told earlier.). Despite Seagate's extreme helpfulness, well above and beyond the call of duty, it looks grim. Unless you are feeling particularly masochistic, or enjoy having your project used to debug their hardware, I strongly suggest avoiding DPT for your project.
In fairness, there is a (slim) possibility that the controller is defective -- a replacement should be in later today or tommorow. I will follow up with a note mentioning the success or lack thereof. If we are not successful getting the replacement DPT controller to work, we will probably return all of our DPT equipment and abondon fibre channel as too bloody a technology (still, even after two years) and look into a Mylex Ultra2-wide RAID solution instead.
1) Intelligent people will support Harvard, ergo anyone criticizing their action must be intelligence challenged(tm).
2) Censoring isn't very "Harvard", so rather than "censor" by requesting the removial of controversial materials, it is somehow more ethical and less "censorous" to go off half-cocked and delete EVERYTHING the site offered with no due process, no notification, and no opportunity for the web page maintainer to copy his material to an offsite location (their belated agreement to give him the backups after being subjected to a storm of public criticism hardly counts).
3) What harvard did was right. It was OK for them to spew FUD (untruths) because they needed "time."
4) Finally, of course, we see the success of their strategy, in the resoundling lack of accusations and outrage their lack of silence has engendered.
If I understand your arguments correctly, burning entire libraries and spreading FUD about the personal lives and actions of the libraries is OK, even noble, as to do anything less (like lock up an objectionable book) would be "censorship." Anyone objecting to the burning of said libraries would clearly be stupid, as any intelligent person in the security community would support burning the entire library over the censorship the removal of one controversial book would imply. Interesting definitions.
Of course anti-trust laws are regulations. Thoughtful regulation is not inherently bad, *overregulation* is (as is poorly conceived and/or implemented regulation). The fact that bad regulation exists, or is possible, does not inherently imply that all regulation must therefor be bad.
Anti-trust laws were passed to fix an economic system which was becoming increasingly dysfunctional as monopolies and trusts continued to form and abound, destroying the very competition and built in price and quality controls which a free market is expected to promote, and upon which the success of capatalism is dependent. The laws were not designed to eliminate all monopolies (although one can make very strong arguments that laws which would disallow monopolies could, if implemented correctly, be a very good thing), but to curb what monopolies do and to limit the methodology whereby monopolies could be achieved. The result has been less monopolies, more competition, and a more robust economy. It isn't perfect by any means, as the current state of Microsoft demonstrates, but it is far better than nothing at all.
Government is a powerful and dangerous thing, I agree. Alas, as things currently stand, an unrestrained marketplace is not only ultimately dysfunctional from an economic perspective, but also fraught with dangers of its own, including but not limited to anti-labor and ecological excesses, and some very nasty implications with respect to individual rights and liberties. (Just thing what an unregulated employer could coerce you into doing, simply by threating your livelihood. A person will do many things they otherwise would never consider to prevent their family and children from starving, and not everyone is as employable as we are.)
A very interesting discussion would be what kind of non-governmental framework could be devised to replace governmental regulation, which would have the following characteristics:
1) "democratic" feedback mechanisms which would allow concerned individuals as well as concerned interest groups/corporations to participate and effect the outcome (The free market succeeds here initially, but fails miserably in the long term, as once a monopoly is in place the consumers ability to effect change is reduced to zero, especially for critical items such as food, water, housing, etc.)
2) neutral stance, not favoring one corporation over another (again, an unregulated free market fails as it favors large players over small players, and ultimately favors monopolies over everyone else)
3) redress - a mechanism whereby a party which has been wronged can seek redress. Examples would include companies from which property (intellectual or otherwise) has been stolen, which have been the victim of unfair trade practices, or targets of unethical coercian a la' the Mafia, could obtain financial recompense from the offendors, or individuals harmed by gross negligence (health problems due to toxic waste dumping, etc.) could be redressed. Obviously, an unregulated free market has no mechanism in place to address these issues.
4) Protection of individual rights against corporate coercian. This includes labor issues, but also free speach issues ("you say anything but what we want and you'll starve!"), and so forth.
5) Is not a government -- or at least, not a monopoly of power, which arguably any government currently in existence is.
6) Facilitates free trade, by discouraging practices which limit competition and providing a framework which allows businesses and individuals to enter into contracts with one another with confidence and enforcability.
7) Protects individuals and business entities from fraud, overt coercian such as protection rackets, and so forth.
8) Provides equal access to education opportunities (arguably government fails miserably here, at least in the USA where higher education is an expensive privelege rather than a right).
I'm certain there are other desirable characteristics I have overlooked.
Disgovernance is an appealing notion (it certainly appeals to me), but trading away a democratically elected government for a rampent corporate oligarchy isn't really a very pleasant solution. On the other hand, if individuals could "subscribe" to the government of their choice (or some other framework which provides for justice and protection of individual rights) would be an interesting alternative. However, designing something with these characteristics is by no means a trivial excersize, and simply leaving the details to a free market without serious consideration of the consequences, and a method for dealing with dysfunctions as they arise is a recipe for disaster.
I am not against disgovernance, or against government regulation per se. Neither is a panacea, and both have serious implications along with significant dangers which need to be very carefully thought through.
The biggest fallacy of capatalism is that unrestrained free markets lead to optimal effeciency and competition. Unrestrained markets ultimately result in monopolies which historically have been grossly ineffecient and overpriced and which generally use their dominant position in their market niches to prevent new competitors or innovations from entering the market. (Sound familiar?)
This dichotomy in the capatalist model is akin to the "egalitarian" fallacy in communism, which ignores the inherent power that those administering the "giving according to ones abilities and taking according to ones needs" process have over those doing the giving and wishing to do the taking. In the west, the rather fundamental flaw in the economic system which tended to result in less competition, more and bigger monopolies and thereby undermine the entire economic process has been addressed through anti-trust legislation. The east was less fortunate -- an authoritarian, centralized government doesn't have many avenues of feedback available to tweak a broken system and make it work.
If we take away those tweaks which have enabled our economic system to function so well these last several decades, we will have the dubious pleasure of watching capatalism begin to crack beneath its own internal contradictions in much the same way communism did. While perhaps interesting from an intellectual point of view, for those of us participating in the economy in question it would really, really suck.
No, I'm certain the government uses very strong crypto, and I'm equally certain you are correct in saying that they want to read our mail, but not have us reading theirs.
However, the government does not exist in a vacuum. They have to tap the available talent pool. If that pool goes to zero (or becomes very, very small) because the expertise "moves" overseas, then they'll either have to bootstrap their own talent or recruit from abroad. The former means greater effort for equivelent capabilities, the latter has security repercussions of its own. Either way, killing the domestic pool of expertise the way they are doing is harmful, not just to private industry and the open source community, but ultimately to the very government agencies trying to restrict the technology.
The encryption export policy of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, et. al. is one of the most disturbingly short-sighted and dangerous policies politicians have come up with in a very long time. I'll leave the free speach implications to others -- they have been discussed in great detail already.
The economic disadvantages of such a policy are also widely known and acknowledged, even by proponents of the policy. Foreign vendors (in particular European vendors whos governments have much more liberal cryptographic polices) can offer their customers unencumbered, strong, reliable encryption today. No American company can compete internationally. With more and more firms becoming international in scope, the marketplace for strong American encryption grows smaller, which means American presence in the industry growing smaller and weaker as time goes by. What does this mean? If you're a cryptographer, go to work for the government, or, ultimately, go work abraod. Since we can be sure that the percentage of people chosing to work for Uncle Sam will be less than 100%, this means a net brain drain on the United States.
But, there is an even more distressing trend which some would argue has already begun to develop. The impetus to develop new cryptographic algorithms, whether it be money via a commercial product, widespread recognition via an open source product, or even simple political idealism, has been largely destroyed in the United States by these restrictions. While the NSA may get some short term benefit from this, medium term the consequences are clear: more and more expertise will migrate abroad, not just in terms of the "brain drain" described above, but simply because less and less Americans have interest in working on something with such draconian governmental fetters attached to it, and such high personal risk in terms of legal and financial consequences. More and more breakthroughs will be made abroad rather than here, and the number of cryptographic experts abroad will continue to increase while in the United States the number will probably go down.
The only question is how long this scenerio will take to play out. Weeks? Unlikely. Years? Quite possibly. Within two or three decades? Almost certainly.
This will be bad for the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, and can only grow worse over time as America falls further and further behind other nations in this critical technology. In the end, it will be the entire United States that will be playing catch up to the rest of the world. Not just private industry or private programmers, but the entire U.S. Government as well, including the NSA, CIA, and FBI, not to mention the various military branches which also have more than a passing interest in tapping dometic cryptographic expertise. These export restrictions promise to have a very profound long term impact on our national security, but not in the sense the various Executive offices would have us believe.
check dejanews for "netiquette" -- that should get you started. Much of the stuff harkens back to a more civilized, or at least civil, net, but much is still applicable.
There are exceptions to the "thou shalt not post private email publicly" rule, such as when you're being stalked or threatened, but even then it isn't so much an exception as it is a "I know this is wrong, mae culpa, but I feel I have no choice because this person is threatening my life, and if I suddenly disappear I want you all to know who the culprit probably is!"
> But what WILL happen when all of our > transactions and communications can be > encrypted? Interesting question...
Then we will be able to enjoy the kind of privacy our great-grandparents took for granted. The kind of privacy the founding fathers of the United States took as a given, so much so that they (unfortunately) didn't bother to explicitly write it into the constitution, even though other amendments (such as the fourth) clearly imply that such privacy was simply a fact of life, like getting up in the morning and feeding your horse.
Chips like this may or may not usher in a new age where levels of personal privacy return to the level they were at a few decades ago, but at least they'll require that the spooks do a little work (hopefully hard work) whenever they feel compelled to violate ours.
Chances are, the ones you were looking at took an analogue signal from the host adapter and reconverted it to digital for the display. Check out the SGI monitors (digital signal, no D->A->D conversion). Fonts which are unusable in 1600x1200 on a regular CRT (such as xterm's "tiny" font) because of fuzziness are crisp, clear, and readable on the SGIs at 1600x1024.
However, a couple of cheap analogue flatpanels we have do have some fuzziness, both due to the lower resolution of the device (1024x768, 15") and because of electromagnetic artifacts in a noisy environment (they were deployed on the floor of one of the options exchanges). Even so, they are much easier on the eyes than the CRTs -- so much so that the other clerks and traders are screaming for them.
Posting private emails in a public forum without the author's expressed permission is one of the more heinous violations of accepted netiquette anoyone can engage in. Whether it be USENET or a personal (or in this case corporate) webpage, it is clear that Mindcraft not only lacks the integrity to do a reasonable and well balanced benchmark comparison, they also lack the integrity to refrain from violating people's privacy by holding up private correspondence to public ridicule.
Do I approve of the flames these messages contain? No. Such immature flamage only hurts the image of Linux to those less clueful. Nevertheless, Mindcraft's abuse of the net in publishing the emails in question are far and away worse than anything anyone wrote them could have been. Perhaps someone should point Mindcraft towards a FAQ or two on proper behavior and netiquette.
So what happens when the Microsoft MindWindows interface in the base of your skull freezes with a General Protection Fault? Epeleptic seizures, convulsions, autisticism, coma? And after the reboot, are you still you, or merely an imperfect copy? Do you have to pay Bill Gate's heirs to stay you, lest they turn you off for license infringement? Who owns the rights to your creativity? You, or Microsoft? For that matter, who owns you? You, Microsoft, or Your Benign Government, via the Good Citizen(tm) module required in every federally licensed neural interface? If we think using Linux or *BSD gives us a competitive edge today, just imagine tommorow!
A friend of mine (perhaps you, AC?) made this exact point to a school board somewhere in the midwest (location obscured to protect my friend) which was grossly underpaying their sysadmin for this very reason, even though the guy was sharp as a tack on the tech side. Apparently their perception was precisely what you're describing -- he even used the same verbiage as you to try and explain to the board what it was they were doing wrong, and how fucked the entire school district would be if this guy ever discovered his true market value and found a job that would pay him accordingly.
Heinlein as an author was full of interesting dichotomies. On the one hand, he was contemptious of the "unwashed masses." On the other hand, he was very strongly of the opinion that individuals make all of the difference (indeed many of his writings are unashamedly promoting of libertarian / anarchist ideals). He was at times unbelievably optomistic about the future, and at other times terribly pessemistic.
Like most of us, his views are probably more complex than anyone can reasonably summarize, and full of contradictions. Although I strongly agree with most of what David Brin wrote in his essay about the Star Wars debacle (and I am a fan of much of his other work), I think there is a very real danger of reading too much into a person from the fiction that they wrote.
Just some idle thoughts. With all the different "Open Source" licenses out there, it seems worthwhile to develop some kind of metric to allow someone, at a glance, to determine if the license is free (speach) enough to be used in their project(s). Two orthoganal measurements come to mind immediately: Freedom of use (what limits if any, are there?) and Protection from forking (perhaps based on historical stats of othe projects under the same license, or an evaluation of the likelihood based on the license characteristics themselves). A third might be "hijackability" of the code, though I think the other two measures cover that pretty well.
E.g. on a scale of 0 to 9, the GPL might fall have an "f" value of 7 and a "p" value of 8, while the BSD license would perhaps have an "f" value of 8, but a "p" value that is much lower. Public domain software would have an "f" value of 9, and a "p" value of 0. (Proprietary licenses would presumably have an "f" value of 0, but a "p" value of 9.) No idea how one would actually go about quantifying such things, or how to do so in an "open" manner (as opposed to, say, just appointing a committee we're all supposed to trust to do this). Whatever the solution, it seems some kind of measurable metric that has a little more precision than "so-and-so has said it meets the Open Source definition" is IMHO really needed, though.
A third metric comes to mind -- how compatible is the license with other open licenses. I.e. how much would using a particular piece of code "pollute" the rest of the code? How would one best define and measure this "c" factor?
Well, some of that money would be well spent developing an OPEN DVD standard -- something which could be to DVD what mp3 is to the RIAA. Hardware vendors of DVD decoding products are prevented from giving us specs to write drivers for their product by the DVD consortium. DVD, alas, is NOT an open standard, but unfurtunately this hasn't really slowed down its adoption in the home electronics industry. Maybe in the computer industry we could come up with a better alternative that is open...
The letter has criticized the agreement because it spends German taxpayer money on products of dubious quality, when there are superior, freely available products which do the same thing. It is true that Microsoft are the most notorious for selling shoddy software products, but they are hardly the only ones. It is the idea that tax dollars (or, rather, Marks) are being spent on inferior, commercial products when better, free (as in speach, and in many cases also as in beer) products are availabe that would cost the taxpayers little or nothing.
There is also a legitimate philosophy against subsidizing industry in general -- there are numerious ethical as well as economic arguments against this kind of thing (it does, I think anyone would agree, severely distort the free market no matter how it is done, and many people rightly think this is a bad thing irrespective of the ethical arguments pro or con). Subsidizing a monopolistic entity, which has caused such havoc in the IT industry in the last decade is to many a particularly perverse and noxious example of this practice.
3dfx has a link on their homepage to Linux drivers, which forwards one to Daryll's 3dfx page (Daryll is a volunteer who has made heroic efforts to get 3dfx hardware running under Linux, sometimes with 3dfx's support, sometimes not). 3dfx is clearly representing themselves on their homepage as supporting, at least marginally, Linux, and seem happy to ride on Daryll's coattails and take credit for supporting the Linux community. Buy any reasonable definition this makes them, at least periferally, a member of the community. A member which until fairly recently enjoyed a pretty good reputation and a lot of goodwill. They have squandered this, and are now behaving poorly, and it behooves us to make this point clear to them in the one way they are sure to understand: with our purchasing dollars.
There's nothing impressive about it. They are, or at least represent themselves as, a member of our community, in the hopes we'll buy their stuff. If this is misrepresentation, shame on them. If not, shame on them for being such poor citizens of the community. Either way, I am not buying any more of their stuff, and I encourage others who feel likewise to do the same.
This has some disturbing connotations, if taken to its logical conclusion. How long before writing foul language to a newsgroup in America results in extradition to Australia, or posting dirty stories results in incarceration in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or elsewhere?
Allowing one jurisdiction to start reeling in users whose alleged "crime" was committed sitting at a computer in a distant geographical location is a very, very slippery slope to an ugly future, where the most repressive and restrictive jurisdiction prevails everywhere.
Unfortunately this isn't the first time this has happened -- back in the BBS days there was a California man who stood trial in (I think it was) Kentucky or Tennessee for violating local obscenity laws, even though the postmaster who had accessed the "obscene" material had deliberately dialed into the BBS (located in California). I do not recall how the case ended up, but it wouldn't surprise me if it had been cited to justify this instance of jurisdictional abuse.
This kind of ruling gives governments a very heavy hand in choosing not only who they want to punish, but under what set of mutually inconsistent rules.
If this angers you as much as it does me, voice your feelings in the only language these people understand -- money. Support their competitors and do not purchase their products. Whatever the legal merits of the case, 3dfx is IMHO clearly behaving as a poor citizen of the open source community. I have a 3dfx card. A number of my friends are interested in doing 3d under Linux, and I volunteered to be the guinie pig. I am now going to purchase a TNT2 card and get it working under Linux, then recommend to my friends that they do the same. I am even going to go as far as to explicitely tell them that if they buy a 3dfx product they will be on their own -- I will not help them install or configure it. And yes, I am going to be very up front with them as to exactly why I am doing this.
Our wallets are unfortunately the only way we have to voice our objections effectively. It probably won't work, but it *might* help reign in the overly litigious corporate culture which threatens to engulf us. I urge others to take a similar stance, and to make sure 3dfx knows exactly how you feel (in a polite, well considered manner).
As an aside, does anyone have any recommendations for TNT or TNT2 based cards they have working under Linux, and if so, what issues (if any) did you have?
While I agree that, in an ideal world, grammatical, spelling, and other, similar errors, would be caught prior to publication, I think it is worth pointing out that the author is from Europe. There is a fairly high probability that English is not his native toung. A spell checker or proof reader might have been useful, but if Linus Torvalds and Linux have been added to his dictionary (as they have mine), I doubt it would have caught "Linux Torvalds" or similar errors.
The man posted his opinions in a very well thought out manner, in an electronic forum. Unless someone wants to pay slashdot to hire an English major to proofread all of its articles, I don't think we can be too picky about these things. This is particularly true when the author is not a native speaker of the English language. And frankly, employing an English major may involve a philisophical compromise which the folks at/. may find a little too repugnant. (As an aside, and in the interest of disclosing my own biases, I never cared much for "Language Nazis" -- as we used to call them -- when I was growing up, and those feelings persist even today.)
Rather than nit-picking the inevitable grammatical errors, perhaps a more constructive way to address these sorts of issues is to emphesize both the grass-roots and international base of support and collective intellect upon which the Free Software movement is based. In that context, judging the veracity of the Linux movement on the basis of some grammatical or spelling errors by opponents of Free Software will be exposed as uninformed and baseless at best, and ethnocentric at worst.
The paradigm shift from closed source / proprietary solutions and standards to open standards, open source, and peer review as a model for software development is simply too fundamental for Microsoft, or anyone else, to do more than throw a momentary splash of cold water on the movement. The free software movement applies the scientific and intellectual paradigm of free information exchange and peer review that has been the foundation of western culture's technological advancement for the last several centuries to a medium ideally suited to foster and enhance it: the internet.
Microsoft, and others like them who cling to the old proprietary, closed, buggy, unreliable way of doing things are much like the old alchemests, with their jelously guarded secret formulas and haphazard methods of research. Bring in the scientific method, with its free flow of information, openly shared knowledge, and (often merciless) peer review. The result? While the alchemests of the day undoubtably dismissed, and then derided the early chemists in much the same way Microsoft does Linux, and the Free Software community as a whole, it was the chemists who thrived, unlocking a torrent of secrets hitherto incomprehensible to humankind. Today chemistry thrives as a science and an industry. Alchemy on the other hand is dead.
Consider the worst case scenerio: Microsoft succeeds in convincing the whole of corporate America, or even the entire corporate world, that Linux and Open Source is a farce. What happens? We keep on doing exactly what we're doing. Sooner or later someone starts a company competing with MicrosoftUser Corp., but likes Linux or FreeBSD better and uses it. We all know the advantages of Linux et. al. over the offerings of Microsoft. All other things being equal, the startup company crushes MicrosoftUser Corp.
Even if Microsoft ties up Linux companies in software patent lawsuits (frivolouse or otherwise) and succeeds in killing Linux in the US, there is still the rest of the planet. The likely result: the United States becomes a backwater in the software world while the rest of the planet rushes forward, applying a vastly superior paradigm which is not only proving itself in the software world in the form of Open Source, but has already proven itself time and time again in every other field of scientific and engineering endeaver. Against the free exchange of ideas and peer review the alchemists and proprietary software vendors, with their secret, mysterious formulas, simply cannot win.
Even with the might of the US Government behind them (which they clearly do not, and probably never will, have), the only way for Microsoft and its ilk to kill the free software movement would be to kill or imprison every last developer, user, and supporter of it, worldwide. Kill Linus Torvalds? Alan Cox steps forward to take his place. Kill Alan? Someone else steps forward. The Catholic church, with its grip on power, was unable to stop the renaissance and the birth of modern science, even by torturing and killing as many early scientists as they could get their hands on. Does anybody think Microsoft will fare any better against us?
This doesn't mean Microsoft can't cause us a great deal of grief with their immense wealth, only that, no matter the grief they do cause us, in the long run they've already lost the war.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a ghost town located on a mountain slope in Montana above a small town called Phillipsburg. This town (Granit City) had a population of three thousand and covered the side of the mountain (that was a big town back then). All but a few buildings and the larger mining structures have vanished, replaced by forest, in a scant 100 years.
Aside from the remains of the lunar lander and a plastic flag on the surface of the moon, probably the only thing future civilizations will find that points back to us will be the plastic stuff like packaging and six-pack binders, and a curious bottleneck of biological diversity in the late 20th century to rival that of the extinction of the dinasaurs, there will be little for future archealogists to find. Given a few tens of thousands of years, even the satelites in orbit will have long since fallen back to earth.
Tales of a space faring civilization in 10,000 years? I doubt it, given that we haven't even bothered to go back to the moon in 25 years. Tales of a civilization that practically worshipped consumption and greed, to the point of (nearly) consuming the entire world and ultimately consuming itself? Quite possibly.
Just another cheery thought for a Wednesday morning.
You miss the point.
The very lack of a heiarchy of authority, and the freedom we all enjoy to take existing code and run with it in whatever direction looks promising, is one of the fundamental strengths of the Open Source paradigm. What the author described is one of the worse case scenerios for Open Source software -- two people competing for the same recognition, who loath each other and spend more time slinging mud at one another than they do productively writing code. The result? Two programs (P and P' in this case) which are competing for a user base. Both are improving over time. The following possibilites exist:
JHQ drops development of P, J drops development of P' -- If P or P' have merit, someone else picks up the project and it moves along, sans the bloody rhetoric.
JHQ continues development of P, J continues development of P' -- two compteting products exist for users to choose from, a benefit for the community despite the poisonous relations and rhetoric between JHQ and J
JHQ stops developing P, J continues development of P' -- a viable product continues to exist, and anyone who wishes may continue work on P as a competing product.
JHQ continues developing P, J drops development of P' -- as above, a viable product continues to be developed, and anyone is free to contribute or take over the development of P' if they wish.
In a closed source environment, subject to the heirarchy you consider so vital, there is a good chance similar internal bickering and politiking will result in unacceptable compromises in the code or direction of development, or even the scrapping of the entire project. At the very least one can expect delays to result from this kind of animosity in a corporate or closed source environment (I've seen it in both academic and corporate contexts). In that case, however, users loose even the possibility of obtaining a program they might have found useful. This cannot happen with open source.
In summary, open source removes limits on creativity, allows projects to move in many directions at once, and provides a built-in robustness to projects that allows them to survive some of the ugliest interpersonal conflicts humans are capable of devising. Name one other development model that exhibits such strengths.
The replacement DPT controller exhibited the same flawed behavior: drives not recognized, drives recognized with capacity 0MB, controller firmware hangs at the end of a low level format, and a complete inability to use any of the hardware present. Alas, I must strongly urge anyone considering fibre channel to avoid this product.
Remember the PS/2 debacle? Overpriced, uncompetitive PCs with a new, proprietary bus. Allot of companies went with Big Blue, and allot of heads rolled, as cheaper and faster EISA and ISA bus clones came to market. With the advent of Linux and Open Source, those who cling to the "I can't get fired for choosing Microsoft" run an increasing risk of suffering the same fate. We are paid to be technically savvy, and to investigate and (presumably) select the best technology for a particular job. When an employer discovers they've missed the boat, and become less competitive as a result, the head of the "play it safe, don't innovate" IT manager clinging to an outmoded and unreliable technology becomes one of the first targets on the hit-list.
We've been putting together a RAID system for our office, using Linux on intel. SCSI is no problem -- Mylex and others have excellent controllers, and even the DPT stuff appears to work.
However, DPT Fibre Channel has been an unmitigated disaster. Unless you purchase DPT hard drives, you are basically on your own. The latest Seagate 18 GB Drives (ST318203) do not work at all ("oh, we haven't tried those yet"). Neither do the older Seagates (ST118202), despite tech supports assurances to the contrary ("We know they work, they've been tested"). Don't even get me started on the inconsistencies of what tech support claims ("we never told you that would/wouldn't work", usually as part of a "it's the drives, not the controller" refrain, and in direct contradiction to earlier statements, with the offensive implication that I am somehow lying about what I was told earlier.). Despite Seagate's extreme helpfulness, well above and beyond the call of duty, it looks grim. Unless you are feeling particularly masochistic, or enjoy having your project used to debug their hardware, I strongly suggest avoiding DPT for your project.
In fairness, there is a (slim) possibility that the controller is defective -- a replacement should be in later today or tommorow. I will follow up with a note mentioning the success or lack thereof. If we are not successful getting the replacement DPT controller to work, we will probably return all of our DPT equipment and abondon fibre channel as too bloody a technology (still, even after two years) and look into a Mylex Ultra2-wide RAID solution instead.
So, let me get this strait. You contend:
1) Intelligent people will support Harvard, ergo anyone criticizing their action must be intelligence challenged(tm).
2) Censoring isn't very "Harvard", so rather than "censor" by requesting the removial of controversial materials, it is somehow more ethical and less "censorous" to go off half-cocked and delete EVERYTHING the site offered with no due process, no notification, and no opportunity for the web page maintainer to copy his material to an offsite location (their belated agreement to give him the backups after being subjected to a storm of public criticism hardly counts).
3) What harvard did was right. It was OK for them to spew FUD (untruths) because they needed "time."
4) Finally, of course, we see the success of their strategy, in the resoundling lack of accusations and outrage their lack of silence has engendered.
If I understand your arguments correctly, burning entire libraries and spreading FUD about the personal lives and actions of the libraries is OK, even noble, as to do anything less (like lock up an objectionable book) would be "censorship." Anyone objecting to the burning of said libraries would clearly be stupid, as any intelligent person in the security community would support burning the entire library over the censorship the removal of one controversial book would imply. Interesting definitions.
Of course anti-trust laws are regulations. Thoughtful regulation is not inherently bad, *overregulation* is (as is poorly conceived and/or implemented regulation). The fact that bad regulation exists, or is possible, does not inherently imply that all regulation must therefor be bad.
Anti-trust laws were passed to fix an economic system which was becoming increasingly dysfunctional as monopolies and trusts continued to form and abound, destroying the very competition and built in price and quality controls which a free market is expected to promote, and upon which the success of capatalism is dependent. The laws were not designed to eliminate all monopolies (although one can make very strong arguments that laws which would disallow monopolies could, if implemented correctly, be a very good thing), but to curb what monopolies do and to limit the methodology whereby monopolies could be achieved. The result has been less monopolies, more competition, and a more robust economy. It isn't perfect by any means, as the current state of Microsoft demonstrates, but it is far better than nothing at all.
Government is a powerful and dangerous thing, I agree. Alas, as things currently stand, an unrestrained marketplace is not only ultimately dysfunctional from an economic perspective, but also fraught with dangers of its own, including but not limited to anti-labor and ecological excesses, and some very nasty implications with respect to individual rights and liberties. (Just thing what an unregulated employer could coerce you into doing, simply by threating your livelihood. A person will do many things they otherwise would never consider to prevent their family and children from starving, and not everyone is as employable as we are.)
A very interesting discussion would be what kind of non-governmental framework could be devised to replace governmental regulation, which would have the following characteristics:
1) "democratic" feedback mechanisms which would allow concerned individuals as well as concerned interest groups/corporations to participate and effect the outcome (The free market succeeds here initially, but fails miserably in the long term, as once a monopoly is in place the consumers ability to effect change is reduced to zero, especially for critical items such as food, water, housing, etc.)
2) neutral stance, not favoring one corporation over another (again, an unregulated free market fails as it favors large players over small players, and ultimately favors monopolies over everyone else)
3) redress - a mechanism whereby a party which has been wronged can seek redress. Examples would include companies from which property (intellectual or otherwise) has been stolen, which have been the victim of unfair trade practices, or targets of unethical coercian a la' the Mafia, could obtain financial recompense from the offendors, or individuals harmed by gross negligence (health problems due to toxic waste dumping, etc.) could be redressed. Obviously, an unregulated free market has no mechanism in place to address these issues.
4) Protection of individual rights against corporate coercian. This includes labor issues, but also free speach issues ("you say anything but what we want and you'll starve!"), and so forth.
5) Is not a government -- or at least, not a monopoly of power, which arguably any government currently in existence is.
6) Facilitates free trade, by discouraging practices which limit competition and providing a framework which allows businesses and individuals to enter into contracts with one another with confidence and enforcability.
7) Protects individuals and business entities from fraud, overt coercian such as protection rackets, and so forth.
8) Provides equal access to education opportunities (arguably government fails miserably here, at least in the USA where higher education is an expensive privelege rather than a right).
I'm certain there are other desirable characteristics I have overlooked.
Disgovernance is an appealing notion (it certainly appeals to me), but trading away a democratically elected government for a rampent corporate oligarchy isn't really a very pleasant solution. On the other hand, if individuals could "subscribe" to the government of their choice (or some other framework which provides for justice and protection of individual rights) would be an interesting alternative. However, designing something with these characteristics is by no means a trivial excersize, and simply leaving the details to a free market without serious consideration of the consequences, and a method for dealing with dysfunctions as they arise is a recipe for disaster.
I am not against disgovernance, or against government regulation per se. Neither is a panacea, and both have serious implications along with significant dangers which need to be very carefully thought through.
The biggest fallacy of capatalism is that unrestrained free markets lead to optimal effeciency and competition. Unrestrained markets ultimately result in monopolies which historically have been grossly ineffecient and overpriced and which generally use their dominant position in their market niches to prevent new competitors or innovations from entering the market. (Sound familiar?)
This dichotomy in the capatalist model is akin to the "egalitarian" fallacy in communism, which ignores the inherent power that those administering the "giving according to ones abilities and taking according to ones needs" process have over those doing the giving and wishing to do the taking. In the west, the rather fundamental flaw in the economic system which tended to result in less competition, more and bigger monopolies and thereby undermine the entire economic process has been addressed through anti-trust legislation. The east was less fortunate -- an authoritarian, centralized government doesn't have many avenues of feedback available to tweak a broken system and make it work.
If we take away those tweaks which have enabled our economic system to function so well these last several decades, we will have the dubious pleasure of watching capatalism begin to crack beneath its own internal contradictions in much the same way communism did. While perhaps interesting from an intellectual point of view, for those of us participating in the economy in question it would really, really suck.
No, I'm certain the government uses very strong crypto, and I'm equally certain you are correct in saying that they want to read our mail, but not have us reading theirs.
However, the government does not exist in a vacuum. They have to tap the available talent pool. If that pool goes to zero (or becomes very, very small) because the expertise "moves" overseas, then they'll either have to bootstrap their own talent or recruit from abroad. The former means greater effort for equivelent capabilities, the latter has security repercussions of its own. Either way, killing the domestic pool of expertise the way they are doing is harmful, not just to private industry and the open source community, but ultimately to the very government agencies trying to restrict the technology.
The encryption export policy of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, et. al. is one of the most disturbingly short-sighted and dangerous policies politicians have come up with in a very long time. I'll leave the free speach implications to others -- they have been discussed in great detail already.
The economic disadvantages of such a policy are also widely known and acknowledged, even by proponents of the policy. Foreign vendors (in particular European vendors whos governments have much more liberal cryptographic polices) can offer their customers unencumbered, strong, reliable encryption today. No American company can compete internationally. With more and more firms becoming international in scope, the marketplace for strong American encryption grows smaller, which means American presence in the industry growing smaller and weaker as time goes by. What does this mean? If you're a cryptographer, go to work for the government, or, ultimately, go work abraod. Since we can be sure that the percentage of people chosing to work for Uncle Sam will be less than 100%, this means a net brain drain on the United States.
But, there is an even more distressing trend which some would argue has already begun to develop. The impetus to develop new cryptographic algorithms, whether it be money via a commercial product, widespread recognition via an open source product, or even simple political idealism, has been largely destroyed in the United States by these restrictions. While the NSA may get some short term benefit from this, medium term the consequences are clear: more and more expertise will migrate abroad, not just in terms of the "brain drain" described above, but simply because less and less Americans have interest in working on something with such draconian governmental fetters attached to it, and such high personal risk in terms of legal and financial consequences. More and more breakthroughs will be made abroad rather than here, and the number of cryptographic experts abroad will continue to increase while in the United States the number will probably go down.
The only question is how long this scenerio will take to play out. Weeks? Unlikely. Years? Quite possibly. Within two or three decades? Almost certainly.
This will be bad for the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, and can only grow worse over time as America falls further and further behind other nations in this critical technology. In the end, it will be the entire United States that will be playing catch up to the rest of the world. Not just private industry or private programmers, but the entire U.S. Government as well, including the NSA, CIA, and FBI, not to mention the various military branches which also have more than a passing interest in tapping dometic cryptographic expertise. These export restrictions promise to have a very profound long term impact on our national security, but not in the sense the various Executive offices would have us believe.
check dejanews for "netiquette" -- that should get you started. Much of the stuff harkens back to a more civilized, or at least civil, net, but much is still applicable.
:-)
There are exceptions to the "thou shalt not post private email publicly" rule, such as when you're being stalked or threatened, but even then it isn't so much an exception as it is a "I know this is wrong, mae culpa, but I feel I have no choice because this person is threatening my life, and if I suddenly disappear I want you all to know who the culprit probably is!"
Hope this helps!
> But what WILL happen when all of our
> transactions and communications can be
> encrypted? Interesting question...
Then we will be able to enjoy the kind of privacy our great-grandparents took for granted. The kind of privacy the founding fathers of the United States took as a given, so much so that they (unfortunately) didn't bother to explicitly write it into the constitution, even though other amendments (such as the fourth) clearly imply that such privacy was simply a fact of life, like getting up in the morning and feeding your horse.
Chips like this may or may not usher in a new age where levels of personal privacy return to the level they were at a few decades ago, but at least they'll require that the spooks do a little work (hopefully hard work) whenever they feel compelled to violate ours.
Chances are, the ones you were looking at took an analogue signal from the host adapter and reconverted it to digital for the display. Check out the SGI monitors (digital signal, no D->A->D conversion). Fonts which are unusable in 1600x1200 on a regular CRT (such as xterm's "tiny" font) because of fuzziness are crisp, clear, and readable on the SGIs at 1600x1024.
However, a couple of cheap analogue flatpanels we have do have some fuzziness, both due to the lower resolution of the device (1024x768, 15") and because of electromagnetic artifacts in a noisy environment (they were deployed on the floor of one of the options exchanges). Even so, they are much easier on the eyes than the CRTs -- so much so that the other clerks and traders are screaming for them.
Posting private emails in a public forum without the author's expressed permission is one of the more heinous violations of accepted netiquette anoyone can engage in. Whether it be USENET or a personal (or in this case corporate) webpage, it is clear that Mindcraft not only lacks the integrity to do a reasonable and well balanced benchmark comparison, they also lack the integrity to refrain from violating people's privacy by holding up private correspondence to public ridicule.
Do I approve of the flames these messages contain? No. Such immature flamage only hurts the image of Linux to those less clueful. Nevertheless, Mindcraft's abuse of the net in publishing the emails in question are far and away worse than anything anyone wrote them could have been. Perhaps someone should point Mindcraft towards a FAQ or two on proper behavior and netiquette.
So what happens when the Microsoft MindWindows interface in the base of your skull freezes with a General Protection Fault? Epeleptic seizures, convulsions, autisticism, coma? And after the reboot, are you still you, or merely an imperfect copy? Do you have to pay Bill Gate's heirs to stay you, lest they turn you off for license infringement? Who owns the rights to your creativity? You, or Microsoft? For that matter, who owns you? You, Microsoft, or Your Benign Government, via the Good Citizen(tm) module required in every federally licensed neural interface? If we think using Linux or *BSD gives us a competitive edge today, just imagine tommorow!
A friend of mine (perhaps you, AC?) made this exact point to a school board somewhere in the midwest (location obscured to protect my friend) which was grossly underpaying their sysadmin for this very reason, even though the guy was sharp as a tack on the tech side. Apparently their perception was precisely what you're describing -- he even used the same verbiage as you to try and explain to the board what it was they were doing wrong, and how fucked the entire school district would be if this guy ever discovered his true market value and found a job that would pay him accordingly.
Heinlein as an author was full of interesting dichotomies. On the one hand, he was contemptious of the "unwashed masses." On the other hand, he was very strongly of the opinion that individuals make all of the difference (indeed many of his writings are unashamedly promoting of libertarian / anarchist ideals). He was at times unbelievably optomistic about the future, and at other times terribly pessemistic.
Like most of us, his views are probably more complex than anyone can reasonably summarize, and full of contradictions. Although I strongly agree with most of what David Brin wrote in his essay about the Star Wars debacle (and I am a fan of much of his other work), I think there is a very real danger of reading too much into a person from the fiction that they wrote.
Just some idle thoughts. With all the different "Open Source" licenses out there, it seems worthwhile to develop some kind of metric to allow someone, at a glance, to determine if the license is free (speach) enough to be used in their project(s). Two orthoganal measurements come to mind immediately: Freedom of use (what limits if any, are there?) and Protection from forking (perhaps based on historical stats of othe projects under the same license, or an evaluation of the likelihood based on the license characteristics themselves). A third might be "hijackability" of the code, though I think the other two measures cover that pretty well.
E.g. on a scale of 0 to 9, the GPL might fall have an "f" value of 7 and a "p" value of 8, while the BSD license would perhaps have an "f" value of 8, but a "p" value that is much lower. Public domain software would have an "f" value of 9, and a "p" value of 0. (Proprietary licenses would presumably have an "f" value of 0, but a "p" value of 9.) No idea how one would actually go about quantifying such things, or how to do so in an "open" manner (as opposed to, say, just appointing a committee we're all supposed to trust to do this). Whatever the solution, it seems some kind of measurable metric that has a little more precision than "so-and-so has said it meets the Open Source definition" is IMHO really needed, though.
A third metric comes to mind -- how compatible is the license with other open licenses. I.e. how much would using a particular piece of code "pollute" the rest of the code? How would one best define and measure this "c" factor?
Well, some of that money would be well spent developing an OPEN DVD standard -- something which could be to DVD what mp3 is to the RIAA. Hardware vendors of DVD decoding products are prevented from giving us specs to write drivers for their product by the DVD consortium. DVD, alas, is NOT an open standard, but unfurtunately this hasn't really slowed down its adoption in the home electronics industry. Maybe in the computer industry we could come up with a better alternative that is open...
The letter has criticized the agreement because it spends German taxpayer money on products of dubious quality, when there are superior, freely available products which do the same thing. It is true that Microsoft are the most notorious for selling shoddy software products, but they are hardly the only ones. It is the idea that tax dollars (or, rather, Marks) are being spent on inferior, commercial products when better, free (as in speach, and in many cases also as in beer) products are availabe that would cost the taxpayers little or nothing.
There is also a legitimate philosophy against subsidizing industry in general -- there are numerious ethical as well as economic arguments against this kind of thing (it does, I think anyone would agree, severely distort the free market no matter how it is done, and many people rightly think this is a bad thing irrespective of the ethical arguments pro or con). Subsidizing a monopolistic entity, which has caused such havoc in the IT industry in the last decade is to many a particularly perverse and noxious example of this practice.
3dfx has a link on their homepage to Linux drivers, which forwards one to Daryll's 3dfx page (Daryll is a volunteer who has made heroic efforts to get 3dfx hardware running under Linux, sometimes with 3dfx's support, sometimes not). 3dfx is clearly representing themselves on their homepage as supporting, at least marginally, Linux, and seem happy to ride on Daryll's coattails and take credit for supporting the Linux community. Buy any reasonable definition this makes them, at least periferally, a member of the community. A member which until fairly recently enjoyed a pretty good reputation and a lot of goodwill. They have squandered this, and are now behaving poorly, and it behooves us to make this point clear to them in the one way they are sure to understand: with our purchasing dollars.
There's nothing impressive about it. They are, or at least represent themselves as, a member of our community, in the hopes we'll buy their stuff. If this is misrepresentation, shame on them. If not, shame on them for being such poor citizens of the community. Either way, I am not buying any more of their stuff, and I encourage others who feel likewise to do the same.
This has some disturbing connotations, if taken to its logical conclusion. How long before writing foul language to a newsgroup in America results in extradition to Australia, or posting dirty stories results in incarceration in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or elsewhere?
Allowing one jurisdiction to start reeling in users whose alleged "crime" was committed sitting at a computer in a distant geographical location is a very, very slippery slope to an ugly future, where the most repressive and restrictive jurisdiction prevails everywhere.
Unfortunately this isn't the first time this has happened -- back in the BBS days there was a California man who stood trial in (I think it was) Kentucky or Tennessee for violating local obscenity laws, even though the postmaster who had accessed the "obscene" material had deliberately dialed into the BBS (located in California). I do not recall how the case ended up, but it wouldn't surprise me if it had been cited to justify this instance of jurisdictional abuse.
This kind of ruling gives governments a very heavy hand in choosing not only who they want to punish, but under what set of mutually inconsistent rules.
If this angers you as much as it does me, voice your feelings in the only language these people understand -- money. Support their competitors and do not purchase their products. Whatever the legal merits of the case, 3dfx is IMHO clearly behaving as a poor citizen of the open source community. I have a 3dfx card. A number of my friends are interested in doing 3d under Linux, and I volunteered to be the guinie pig. I am now going to purchase a TNT2 card and get it working under Linux, then recommend to my friends that they do the same. I am even going to go as far as to explicitely tell them that if they buy a 3dfx product they will be on their own -- I will not help them install or configure it. And yes, I am going to be very up front with them as to exactly why I am doing this.
Our wallets are unfortunately the only way we have to voice our objections effectively. It probably won't work, but it *might* help reign in the overly litigious corporate culture which threatens to engulf us. I urge others to take a similar stance, and to make sure 3dfx knows exactly how you feel (in a polite, well considered manner).
As an aside, does anyone have any recommendations for TNT or TNT2 based cards they have working under Linux, and if so, what issues (if any) did you have?
While I agree that, in an ideal world, grammatical, spelling, and other, similar errors, would be caught prior to publication, I think it is worth pointing out that the author is from Europe. There is a fairly high probability that English is not his native toung. A spell checker or proof reader might have been useful, but if Linus Torvalds and Linux have been added to his dictionary (as they have mine), I doubt it would have caught "Linux Torvalds" or similar errors.
/. may find a little too repugnant. (As an aside, and in the interest of disclosing my own biases, I never cared much for "Language Nazis" -- as we used to call them -- when I was growing up, and those feelings persist even today.)
The man posted his opinions in a very well thought out manner, in an electronic forum. Unless someone wants to pay slashdot to hire an English major to proofread all of its articles, I don't think we can be too picky about these things. This is particularly true when the author is not a native speaker of the English language. And frankly, employing an English major may involve a philisophical compromise which the folks at
Rather than nit-picking the inevitable grammatical errors, perhaps a more constructive way to address these sorts of issues is to emphesize both the grass-roots and international base of support and collective intellect upon which the Free Software movement is based. In that context, judging the veracity of the Linux movement on the basis of some grammatical or spelling errors by opponents of Free Software will be exposed as uninformed and baseless at best, and ethnocentric at worst.
The paradigm shift from closed source / proprietary solutions and standards to open standards, open source, and peer review as a model for software development is simply too fundamental for Microsoft, or anyone else, to do more than throw a momentary splash of cold water on the movement. The free software movement applies the scientific and intellectual paradigm of free information exchange and peer review that has been the foundation of western culture's technological advancement for the last several centuries to a medium ideally suited to foster and enhance it: the internet.
Microsoft, and others like them who cling to the old proprietary, closed, buggy, unreliable way of doing things are much like the old alchemests, with their jelously guarded secret formulas and haphazard methods of research. Bring in the scientific method, with its free flow of information, openly shared knowledge, and (often merciless) peer review. The result? While the alchemests of the day undoubtably dismissed, and then derided the early chemists in much the same way Microsoft does Linux, and the Free Software community as a whole, it was the chemists who thrived, unlocking a torrent of secrets hitherto incomprehensible to humankind. Today chemistry thrives as a science and an industry. Alchemy on the other hand is dead.
Consider the worst case scenerio: Microsoft succeeds in convincing the whole of corporate America, or even the entire corporate world, that Linux and Open Source is a farce. What happens? We keep on doing exactly what we're doing. Sooner or later someone starts a company competing with MicrosoftUser Corp., but likes Linux or FreeBSD better and uses it. We all know the advantages of Linux et. al. over the offerings of Microsoft. All other things being equal, the startup company crushes MicrosoftUser Corp.
Even if Microsoft ties up Linux companies in software patent lawsuits (frivolouse or otherwise) and succeeds in killing Linux in the US, there is still the rest of the planet. The likely result: the United States becomes a backwater in the software world while the rest of the planet rushes forward, applying a vastly superior paradigm which is not only proving itself in the software world in the form of Open Source, but has already proven itself time and time again in every other field of scientific and engineering endeaver. Against the free exchange of ideas and peer review the alchemists and proprietary software vendors, with their secret, mysterious formulas, simply cannot win.
Even with the might of the US Government behind them (which they clearly do not, and probably never will, have), the only way for Microsoft and its ilk to kill the free software movement would be to kill or imprison every last developer, user, and supporter of it, worldwide. Kill Linus Torvalds? Alan Cox steps forward to take his place. Kill Alan? Someone else steps forward. The Catholic church, with its grip on power, was unable to stop the renaissance and the birth of modern science, even by torturing and killing as many early scientists as they could get their hands on. Does anybody think Microsoft will fare any better against us?
This doesn't mean Microsoft can't cause us a great deal of grief with their immense wealth, only that, no matter the grief they do cause us, in the long run they've already lost the war.