> If a potential customer of yours sees more > value in reimplementing your stuff than buying > it from you
I would have thought the problem would be with competitors free riding on the expense involving in creating a market for implementing these particular APIs.
This is called 'competition' and is a good thing. There is no such thing as 'creating a market' anyway, nor is anybody entitled to 'own' some particular market niche.
Aside from that the GPL is the perfect poison pill against that kind of free riders.
We realize that if we do keep the source closed, but open the API or docs, someone will clone it because they don't want to pay for our work.
Let me start with something obvious: there is no legal way to seprate somebody from his money who doesn't want to be seperated from it after having judged the alternatives. If a potential customer of yours sees more value in reimplementing your stuff than buying it from you then you have priced yourself out of that particular market anyway. So the debate is moot.
As usual in business life, offer something of value to the customer he is willing to pay for.
"We've looked at the common model right now which is to sell support and give the code away [...] since our product needs to operate in a five-9's environment, where if it doesn't work right it's never even allowed in the building.
I work in a five-9s environment. This is the perfect place for high-end support contracts. Of course no 'we will help you on the phone if you happen to get us on a free line' type of support, but a 'yes sir, we will be on site within 30 minutes 7 days a week 24 hours a day and make it work again' type of support. Priced, of course, accordingly.
90 percent of the support contracts of this kind are cover-my-ass contracts anyway, but in a five-9s environment you practically have to have these.
It seems to me that when OpenBSD was mentioned, the good professor probably didn't know much, if anything, about it, and merely stated one of his prepositions:
Actually, I'd be surprised if there's not code by him in OpenBSD from the BSD heritage - even if its only a few contributed paches. Spaf is not exactly a new kid on the block.
Oh man... you just had to make yourself an idiot, had you ? Gene Spafford is longer around (on the net, and specifically in the computer security field) than most of you knew computers, let alone heard the Word "Internet". He is about the last person someone with a grasp for net.history might call "Dr. So-and-so".
is defining trusted as being designed to a formal spec. That definition is constructed, whether the intention is there or not, in such a manner that he is right
Well, Spaf is one of the foremost experts in his field. So, you redefine "Trusted Systems" - thereby disagreeing with him - and your credentials are... what ?
Under that definition, Open Source cannot be a trusted system
Others in this thread have already shown this this be false.
My assertion is that open source challenges the notion that you need a formal spec to develop trusted software.
My assertion is that you don't have the faintest idea what you are talking about
ICANN doesn't provide much (if any) services to ccTLDs
they could easily run local root servers.
Some people seem to confuse root servers with zone servers for the messed up US ("generic") zones. These are not necessarily identical. A non-US root server would just have to point to the comparatively few generic zone servers plus.us. Not much of a deal....
This is actually what I would envision, except allow the foriegn governments to decide. ICANN would simply point all of a given TLD to another root server, run by the target country. Couple hundred lines in the root server does the trick. They don't want to support ICANN, great. Let 'em do it themselves. Simple solution
This is exactly the current status quo. All major ccTLDs run their own set of central servers. The only thing the root servers do is pointing to them
Actually the root name servers are some very specialized machines that cost big bucks to make and maintain. If your machine dosen't know where to get a specific domains information from it has to talk to the root domain servers to be told where to look.
This is nonsense. Root name servers are just plain vanilla Unix systems running BIND. And, to add insult to injury, actually some of them are already run in Europe.
To illustrate the problem: the root name server does not answer the question "who knows about paris.fr" but only "who knows about fr". Then the french run and of course already pay the server who tells you about paris.fr.
In short, I have no Idea what they are trying to get millions for. Their main task is to (re)organize the mess that the US (aka 'generic') toplevel domains have become, and that should be entirely financed by their US stakeholders.
Other countries TLDs already work quite nicely, have shared registries, appropriate oversight and so on. And now we are supposed to finance an organization whose most important task is to clean up the mess the US of A created when giving away its registry to some private company without appropriate contractual safeguards.
The BSD kernel was originally develloped for the 8086 instruction set on the old IBM PC's. Larry Ellison once said that upgrading the kernel to anything much better then a 386 was (as I remember), "akin to putting a 4 cylinder engine into a corvette, sure it'll get you where you want but you won't get there very fast
With all due respect, this is entirely utter hogwash. Both the ellison quote and the 8086 reference apply to DOS/Windows (WIN 98 still contains quite some 8086 code).
BSD originated from a set of modifications to various versions of the 'original' AT&T Unix, which mostly (and especially at Berkeley) ran on DEC PDP11s and Vaxen.
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Re:Political thought and intellectual philosophy
on
At The Crossroads
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· Score: 1
But your definition of liberalism does not apply to the quote-unquote "liberals" of our current government.
Thi is an entirely amercan phenomenon. In most parts of the world politics like that would be decribed socialist or social demoractic. In fact, British Labour premier Blair is quite successfully imitating Clintonesque politics and selling it as 'new labour' (while Germany's Social Democrat Chancellor Schroeder is not so successfull at imititating Blair's rhetoric and selling it as politic).
Liberalism is an old (perhaps one of the oldest) political streams of the modern time, and certainly is opposed to socialist Ideas in most places.
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Re:Political thought and intellectual philosophy
on
At The Crossroads
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· Score: 1
Political liberalism (same disclaimer as above) can be reduced to the idea that people (defined as "everyone but *me*" by most liberals) are too ignorant, selfish, or cruel to Do The Right Thing on their own, so there must be a (theoretically) benevolent government there to make sure that everyone gets a fair share.
Where in all worlds did you get this ridicolous nonsense ? Liberal ideas are exactly the opposite. You did a fairly good job to decribe left wing socialist/social democrat approaches - but the basic idea of liberalism is that Freedom - that is the absence of control by a third party - is in any case the preferred solution. Now Liberals differ in emphasis where to apply this basic assumption - some find it more important in economical matters, while others think individual issues to be more iminent - but the guiding line is Freedom itself.
To the contrary I have never met a conservative who's not got a few areas where he thinks his own moral views should be forced upon others not sharing his views.
Ah, the wonders of American education...
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Re:Failure to implement open standards.
on
Linux Failover?
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· Score: 1
The only clueless idiot around here is the gobshite who posted the prior article.
Whatever you say. If you think ripping software from open source projects without contributing back is an intelligent long term strategy, then you live in a world I neither want nor like. I prefer places where some kind of logical reasoning can previal
> Ah, whatever. Sorry for the rant - > this whole HA scene seems to be more > annoying than the rest of the bunch. > They all operate in "a customer who > needs that must have money to burn > - let's charge him hefty" mode.
Hmmm you have a peculiar notion of what is HA. Banks etc are not interested in mickey mouse h0x3r solutions with no support.
That is excatly the attitude I meant. HA isn't for banks only - maybe your mon'n'pop shop next door wants a HA solution as well ? Why should they spend tens and hundreds of k$ on a few hundred lines of less complicated C code ? HA may be tricky, but its not more comlicated than memory paging strategies or a modern file systems.
mickey mouse h0x3r solutions with no support.
You're talking about Linux or BSD, are you ? Why don't you go trolling somewhere else ?
Somebody get this guy his flamebait mark he so desperately wants....
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Re:Shoot your consultant [begging the question]
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Linux Failover?
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· Score: 1
Who said anything about unsecured machines? The solution to that is to a) secure them, or b) firewall them.
In many security environments machines that talk to the internet (such as HTTP servers) are by definition insecure, or less trusted)
Who said anything about core router? The first problem is a) you are talking about a single point of failure, and b) the network(s) with all the linux boxes can be behind there own set of routers/firewalls/load distributors.
This means essentially that you have to run a completely seperate network for these machines - the involved routers may not communicate routing updates with your core of routing protocol speaking machines. To get a little bit more precise, in order to avoid a linux driver that can support redundant links, we have now reached additional hardware needs in the oder of at least, say, 2 cisco 7xxx with an appropriate number of interfaces (we _are_ talking about speeds of around 100Mbit and more, are we ?). This can easily reach six figure sums.
I you must support a machine that can't deal with listening to OSPF bounce it's traffic off of a set of HSRP CISCOs that can. That's just easy.
It isn't. If you do that these machines get routes installed via icmp redirect messages. This in turn means that here your convergence mechanism doesn't work any more - any session they have open will break in case of an OSPF announced route flap/failover.
Network design is tricky. Anything but 'just easy'.
talk to (resp. across) a small set of routers (or routing protocol using hosts).
Correct. You talk to two routers or just differnt ifaces on one that connect you to the backbone (via different layer 2 devices - switches or hubs). And from there on with the entire internet.
In a similar internal corporate scenario you talk to the routers or the RSM on the switch that separate the servers from the lusers.
Hm... let's consider the switch with RSM as a special case of a switch/router combo. Anyway, this will fail if your web server has to talk to another host on that network, e.g. the foobar database, which for various reasons runs on RedmontOS. Or if company security policy doesn't allow a router (considered higly sensitive) to accept OSPF/RIP updates from a host considered unsecure, because it is on a publicly accessible network. Or if you consider gated (needed for OSPF on Unix) to be less stable than necessary for such an environment. Or if the next hox on the same segment you're talking to runs some gizmo HA solution that doesn't tolerate dynamic routing.
I can give you a number of examples where it won't work at all.
Yeah, sure. I have seen gazillion of b0rken network designs written by experts.
That's called real life. There's a lot of crap out there, and's getting more every day:-)
Most of them with a minesweeper and/or solar certificate.
Sorry to disappoint you - no vendor certification here. Just a good old-fashioned CS degree and a number of years experience.
OSPF on just ethernet segments will converg before you know ! And He actually presented a *working* solution - read it again please.
I read and understood it the first time, thanks. It is only that's just not a magic bullet. It is a solution to some problems, but it has its own set of limitations.
I am also sick of people like who got no clue about routing - and thinks the whole world is a *single* flat network. His first line is *telling* everything - unix knows about layer 3 and can use it very well.
The point of networking is interoperability. Other systems might not know about routing, and then there are those who know but won't listen to you for security reasons.
Would you let your core router allow to listen to OSPF updates from an unsecured machine ? If yes, I've got a bridge to sell...
The white paper for EIGRP is on the Cisco website.
No. At least not at a place a cisco customer could find it. I did not see a single document decribing the full protocol down to the packet format. And I lokked at quite a lot.
Any competitor can implement it,
Of course. After agreeing to hefty license fees and probably signing some NDAs.
I could give you a detailed rant style answer but I think it is not worth it.
Whatever you say.
Most root DNS servers, primary mail relays, etc use exactly what I said.
This may well be. Your solution certainly works in well defined circumstances and under well defined requirements.
And there is no such thing as what you said. Been there done, that.
While I don't doubt your anectdotal evidence this just implies that you have only worked in such well defined environments. To be more precise, if you only require service availability (but not session availability) and/or you only talk to (resp. across) a small set of routers (or routing protocol using hosts), than it will probably work. I can give you a number of examples where it won't work at all.
Solutions using routing protocols cause serious trouble if and only if designed and ipmplemented by Minesweeper Consultants and Solitaire Experts.
You don't happen to post in certain de newgroups... ? This somehow sounds... familiar:-)
Shoot your consultant. With a big gun. Only an idiot will suggest a layer 2 failover for a unix system.
1. Your consultant should learn routing protocols 2. Your consultant should learn the concept of a loopback alias. 3. Your consulatnt should have an IQ of above 25 4. There is absolutely no need for link layer 2 failover where layer 3 will do. Unix is not WinHoze. It knows about routing.
Start shooting yourself.
You can't attach to a fully redundant switched architecture by the help of routing protocols. (and, FWIW, I doubt simple channel bondig would help, either). On the IP level this looks like a normal LAN to which you are connected via two Interfaces.
So, unless you do some serious magic on all systems involved, you will have the problem of route timeouts, wrong arp entries and whatever. Any solution involving routing protocols is going to cause serious trouble.
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Re:Failure to implement open standards.
on
Linux Failover?
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· Score: 1
Has anyone considered VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol)? It's an actual open standard, and it works. It not only works, it works amazingly well.
One of the major users of VRRP technology is Nokia. They've done extensive work on the protocol, and use it in their line of firewalls (which btw run a heavily modified FreeBSD codebase).
Oh, that was a good joke. Yes, Nokia uses it. And nobody else. The standard was authored by them and built into their (FreeBSD based) ridiculously overprized firewall products. But of course they didn't even bother to contribute it back to the FreeBSD Project. Talk about clueless corporate idiots.
Yes, there is VRRP. But there is no publicly available implementation I know of, not to mention two independent interoperable ones (as the IETF ususally requires for standard track RFCs). There's also HSRP. Everybody and his dog uses it in their Cisco routers. Why not take that ? After all, as Cisco never stops to tell us, all their stuff is standardized and open ?
Ah, whatever. Sorry for the rant - this whole HA scene seems to be more annoying than the rest of the bunch. They all operate in "a customer who needs that must have money to burn - let's charge him hefty" mode.
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P.S. You don't happen to work for Nokia's IPRG division ?
And this is the difference between Cisco and Microsoft, IMHO. Our APIs, if you will, are protocols such as IP, RIP, OSPF, BGP, IS-IS, SNMP, HTTP (to some extent), COPS, and RSVP, all protocols that were done in the open, in full view of the public, with public participation
Um.. strong words. Easily refuted, too: EIGRP. Ask any Cisco Specialist what routing Protocol you should use in order to get all and any stuff working on Ciscos. Answer: EIGRP. And that one's super duper secret proprietary.
It does not, however, make any difference with respect to the argument of the article:
One Argument of that article now falls on its face: your quality claims. You explained away any technical shortcomings of Motif by reference to available add-on widget sets. This doesn't hold true for an open source motif, since those aren't open source as well.
Now Motif will be judged on its own - and if it's still remotely in the shape it was when I touched it last time (95) it will fail this judgement.
I can only assume the original Poster is Scott Bender (his is the only PMail package known at freshmeat).
My fault - it wasn't Scott Bender. The actual package referenced was a perl based mail package by Pat Gunn. But my point holds - no way this has been here in the eighties, es Pegaus Mail (aka pmail) certainly was.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from that the GPL is the perfect poison pill against that kind of free riders.
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If a potential customer of yours sees more value in reimplementing your stuff than buying it from you then you have priced yourself out of that particular market anyway. So the debate is moot.
As usual in business life, offer something of value to the customer he is willing to pay for. I work in a five-9s environment. This is the perfect place for high-end support contracts. Of course no 'we will help you on the phone if you happen to get us on a free line' type of support, but a 'yes sir, we will be on site within 30 minutes 7 days a week 24 hours a day and make it work again' type of support. Priced, of course, accordingly.
90 percent of the support contracts of this kind are cover-my-ass contracts anyway, but in a five-9s environment you practically have to have these.
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There is something good to it:
It teaches Hollywood a lesson about the Curch of $cientology.
And it does so using the language Hollywood most clearly understands. Money
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there is no such existing contract
ICANN doesn't provide much (if any) services to ccTLDs
they could easily run local root servers.
.us.
Some people seem to confuse root servers with zone servers for the messed up US ("generic") zones. These are not necessarily identical. A non-US root server would just have to point to the comparatively few generic zone servers plus
Not much of a deal....
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To illustrate the problem: the root name server does not answer the question "who knows about paris.fr" but only "who knows about fr". Then the french run and of course already pay the server who tells you about paris.fr.
In short, I have no Idea what they are trying to get millions for. Their main task is to (re)organize the mess that the US (aka 'generic') toplevel domains have become, and that should be entirely financed by their US stakeholders.
Other countries TLDs already work quite nicely, have shared registries, appropriate oversight and so on. And now we are supposed to finance an organization whose most important task is to clean up the mess the US of A created when giving away its registry to some private company without appropriate contractual safeguards.
Hilarious...
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BSD originated from a set of modifications to various versions of the 'original' AT&T Unix, which mostly (and especially at Berkeley) ran on DEC PDP11s and Vaxen.
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Liberalism is an old (perhaps one of the oldest) political streams of the modern time, and certainly is opposed to socialist Ideas in most places.
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To the contrary I have never met a conservative who's not got a few areas where he thinks his own moral views should be forced upon others not sharing his views.
Ah, the wonders of American education...
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Somebody get this guy his flamebait mark he so desperately wants....
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To get a little bit more precise, in order to avoid a linux driver that can support redundant links, we have now reached additional hardware needs in the oder of at least, say, 2 cisco 7xxx with an appropriate number of interfaces (we _are_ talking about speeds of around 100Mbit and more, are we ?). This can easily reach six figure sums. It isn't. If you do that these machines get routes installed via icmp redirect messages. This in turn means that here your convergence mechanism doesn't work any more - any session they have open will break in case of an OSPF announced route flap/failover.
Network design is tricky. Anything but 'just easy'.
Regards,
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Would you let your core router allow to listen to OSPF updates from an unsecured machine ? If yes, I've got a bridge to sell...
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You can't attach to a fully redundant switched architecture by the help of routing protocols. (and, FWIW, I doubt simple channel bondig would help, either). On the IP level this looks like a normal LAN to which you are connected via two Interfaces.
So, unless you do some serious magic on all systems involved, you will have the problem of route timeouts, wrong arp entries and whatever. Any solution involving routing protocols is going to cause serious trouble.
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Yes, there is VRRP. But there is no publicly available implementation I know of, not to mention two independent interoperable ones (as the IETF ususally requires for standard track RFCs). There's also HSRP. Everybody and his dog uses it in their Cisco routers. Why not take that ? After all, as Cisco never stops to tell us, all their stuff is standardized and open ?
Ah, whatever. Sorry for the rant - this whole HA scene seems to be more annoying than the rest of the bunch. They all operate in "a customer who needs that must have money to burn - let's charge him hefty" mode.
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P.S. You don't happen to work for Nokia's IPRG division ?
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*sigh*
Talking about moderators not understanding sarcasm. Or whatever - is there any place to discuss moderator performance ?
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Now Motif will be judged on its own - and if it's still remotely in the shape it was when I touched it last time (95) it will fail this judgement.
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Nonetheless, my apologies.
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I can only assume the original Poster is Scott Bender (his is the only PMail package known at freshmeat).
This is a gnome/gtk based mail package. It is supposed to be around since when/ ? Certainly not since the eighties.
As far as I can see the only pmail that is around since the eighties is Pegasus Mail itself
Please folks get your facst straight.
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