I can't believe I didn't get any mod informative points for all those links. I suppose it has nothing to do with Rowling's lawsuit, but Card's novels and all the hoo-ha surrounding them is really juicy interesting stuff. Well worth the clicks & page flips. =)
-"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him,
then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody,
what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in
that very moment when I love them-"
-"You beat them."
the book was written "by committee" yet it never says who they are. I originally read this post in '05 but I specifically remember someone in the discussion thread postulating that he was assisted by English Lit students, and the suggestion was that perhaps some threads were woven into the story as a bit of a gag on Card. It's hard to sort out, really. Is Ender Hitler? Jesus? Did Card intend him to be one while his students inserted the subtext for the other as a clever stab at their overbearing pedagogue? You decide.
Personally I don't care if he wrote the novels or not - I've read most of his work and I enjoy it greatly. After reading the essays and all the studies on Ender's Game, I just want to read it all over again. All this discussion and debate is interesting stuff and, ultimately, it sums up to well-deserved flattery of Card's work (in that its worth critiquing) and only encourages you to read his books.
the author never tells who he is, nor 'Elaine" You didn't click through too far.:-) I linked Elaine Radford's essay in the postscript. The author of that famous post is Roger Williams; his home page and this wikipedia entry about his novel are the only links I could find for you, besides his other posts on kuro5hin.
I have never read Ender's Game I really recommend you do read the Ender series, because they are a great read. I wouldn't recommend reading the essays by John Kessel and Elaine Radford beforehand though; might ruin the fun.
That being interesting and all, the Potter encyclopedia clearly isn't a clear-cut case of plagiarism because Rowling gets all the credit for invention. This sort of thing happens all the time, under the "unauthorized" banner. Asshat or not, Card has a point.
I don't know if I'd advocate greed, because customer abuse doesn't pay off in the long run, but I think that its important to remember that the value here is in services. Software licensing isn't the big cost, its the humans that cost a lot. And how easy it is to mitigate risks associated with using one package or another.
From a business perspective, the value proposition for open source only works when the scale of the deployment makes the cost of maintaining internal resources worthwhile. For example, if you have 40+ linux boxen and 2 primarily Linux admins, no worries. If you have only one Linux box and NO Linux admins, its a risk. You need to shore that up with external service contracts, professional services, something. That cost = Microsoft's opportunity.
The maturity and breadth of deployment abroad of the package makes a big difference too. For example, Apache is an easy win. Some obscure package in 0.8a release, not so much. Again, Microsoft's opportunity (even in 1.0) is consolidating the risk vis-a-vis the humans on hand.
Microsoft's value is in the breadth of offering they have for customers, and the abundance of support partners, documentation, yadda yadda. That's real and tangible and worth money.
Where they are being greedy is how little they offer for your license cost. They think in huge numbers, so saving a buck per ding is really an interesting proposition for them. No surprise people call it "Microsoft Tax"; they have so much market power they think like government.
One great thing about open source is the opportunity it creates for us all to turn what would have been licensing cost into professional services income. The math looks great when its the actual package developers selling the services. But when its just some third party selling their time, and no benefit is flowing back to the people who invented package X... well, who's being greedy? I think in some sense that is where Billy Gee is coming from.
If open source is going to continue to compete and be free in the greater sense, we need to remember to put our money where our collective mouth is and support our projects. Prove Bill wrong.
It is not the tech that we should sanctify, but the freedom of thoughts and actions that seek to satisfy curiousity and a thirst for knowledge.
And the freedom to do anything you please with something you rightfully own - most especially an object.
But so long as the burden is on Them to have to sue Us one by one to exercise their so-called "rights" and "licenses", I really don't see a real threat to these freedoms - at worst a nuisance. Possession is nine-tenth's the law, after all.
I am saying to nationalize the cables
Last mile isn't just cables though. You've got to get up to Layer 4.
And did you just suggest that everyone who does not like Bell start to lay its own cable? People do it all the time. Bell isn't the only action in town.
What I was proposing isn't a new idea. You get together with some people and buy a commercial feed and share it. This is how it's done in lots of places. Big business doesn't have to be the only action going.
As for running wires... On a small scale, wireless works.
You can't nationalize the internet because then you put freedom of speech at threat (in case you want to rebutt "not in Canada!" I respond: Harper.) It's easier to keep an eye on private interest and for the state to regulate minimally.
Anyway, those services you describe are farmed out to contractors. The state doesn't own very many garbage trucks or asphalt plants.
(In Canada) if the gov't was your ISP, it would be "free", except your taxes would go up equivalent to the amount you are already paying, service would diminish in quality, the technology would gradually get further and further behind the times, and the union would have their new favorite service to interrupt during strike actions.
"The government" is not the answer to every problem. Healthcare yes, intertubes mmm not so much.
If you are not happy, use your spending power to switch from Bell. If you don't find a viable alternative in your area, start one. This internet thing is still open for business.
So, if I can save 80% of my money buying a "counterfeit" motherboard, is my little indiscretion going to break the global economy?
Just because you cannot directly witness the results of your action does not make it right.
This is the same as people who uncap their cable modem at the expense of their neighbors' bandwidth.
As for your "cheap out on a motherboard" logic, let me know how that plays out in the long run... if you make it to the end of this sentence without blue screening.
The French article states that 47% of French (as in, in France) companies run pirated software. ('entreprises' is more generic in French; so this implies small/medium/big biz) They don't quote the source of their statistic.
I think its fair for RH to position themselves as a leader in the industry and, at risk of getting flamed, I humbly submit that, overall, they have contributed positively to OSS.
But I think that Jim's aim might be a little off. He points to enterprise, but I think that there is a massive swath of small to medium sized solution providers who are hording their code when they build enhancements for customers. This is their little cachet, their angle on the (primarily local) market, their "solution". A number of times I've pointed out to consulting firms I've worked for/with that they weren't compliant with GPL because they weren't putting their code improvements back into the wild, and they looked at me blank-faced, "Isn't it free??" "Sorry, boss, that's the BSD license. This is GPL. You gotta share." A frequent example that comes immediately to mind from a couple years back is Asterisk solution providers.
As for enterprise, you need to show them value in the form of professional services. If they can get expertise and help, they will be open to play ball. This is an area that RH can show their strength as a services company. If Jim puts his money where his mouth is, it could work.
My own focus is on professional services and I perceive OSS as a great opportunity to 1) improve the quality (security, interoperability, all that) through sharing of knowledge, which is just good science; 2) improve the professional services opportunity for Slashdot types. Services should be the biggest piece of the pie, not hardware or licensing, and this will help elevate the profession as well.
As a post-script, I think that developers have a certain amount of professional responsibility to point out the licensing model for any code they seek to build into their solution. If this was discussed more often, it might enhance awareness, dissolving some of the misconceptions about OSS. People aren't going to decide to share their code in hind-sight. You want to get them involved from the start of their project. I think Jim gets this and he's got to speak to it now and form customer partnerships to get that rolling.
There is no doubt that this is also a business development tactic for RH, but I see nothing wrong with that.
Even without the internet, people have been hating Apple for decades.
Especially Apple partners. I have vivid and amusing memories of attending Apple VAR meetings back in the early 90s. Ah, the fanfare, the drama, the free t-shirts.
Every meeting they would try to appease us with free food. Never worked. Within an hour it would devolve into everyone yelling at the poor shmuck that Apple would assign the task of dealing with us. We were all getting screwed on margins, greymarketing, service repair order compensation that was inconsistent, the fucking Apple Store coming in and destroying the channel and screwing the people who had helped promote the brand for so many years. I've taken the occasional peek at how the deal has evolved for partners since then, and its so much worse now its not even funny.
Most memorable was the day the Pres of Apple Canada came in person to announce that Apple had just marked the sale of their 20 millionth Macintosh. I was 19 at the time and I didn't have the sense not to blurt out "hey, thats as many as Commodore sold C64s!"
Okay I dug down a bit more in the comments since I posted and, to be fair, I'm not the only one who has read TFA, and some of my comment was redundant.
But I am still convinced that free and open is better for community wifi.
Meraki patched a not-for-profit group's hardware from remote without permission so that it would no longer run the firmware same not-for-profit developed in-house. They did this to hardware that was BSD licensed when purchased. They either employed a backdoor or abused known customer access credentials (likely the former) to do it.
This is probably illegal and certainly wrong.
(TFA doesn't say if a contract was in play between Meraki and the client that would have authorized them to apply the patches, but its clear that the customer had put an end to the agreement so a complaint against Meraki would be legit.)
At the very least, this is a malicious hack against a customer. But I think its more than that.
If the peeps in Vancouver were left to continue their work, they certainly would have had a "competitive" solution which they would likely have offered up online for all to use. This would effectively make them a competitor, and a dangerous one because unhappy Meraki customers would be the most likely to check it out. I would go so far to say that this was a pre-emptive sabotage (with poor Vancouverites in the crossfire).
I have no problem with Meraki adapting their business model to find something that works. But their actions way overstepped the boundaries of the law. They would have been wiser to handle the whole affair in a more benevolent fashion in the first place. They could have, for example, cut a partnership deal with the non-profit to allow them to participate in feature development under NDA and enjoy a subsidized service. Both parties would have come out winners.
Whenever financiers get involved, they always want to lock up the tech because it is the only tangible asset they can claim ownership of. Meanwhile, they miss the essence of business value, which is in the people and the partnerships and the innovation.
I think that the only way community wifi is going to work is if it is community-run, not-for-profit, and vendor independent. There is no question that we will have this soon enough and it will be running on top of WRTs and other similar APs which are abundant and cheap and have loads of after-market conversion options for outdoor use. I'm disappointed to read all these comments bashing the Vancouver hackers, who deserve kudos for their inventiveness, determination, and good will.
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet Russia, the equivalent to first post glee was being at the front of the line for beets and pickles.
Cheers mate. Happy belated bday!!
I can't believe I didn't get any mod informative points for all those links. I suppose it has nothing to do with Rowling's lawsuit, but Card's novels and all the hoo-ha surrounding them is really juicy interesting stuff. Well worth the clicks & page flips. =)
-"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him,
then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody,
what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in
that very moment when I love them-"
-"You beat them."
- Ender and Valentine, from Ender's Game
Personally I don't care if he wrote the novels or not - I've read most of his work and I enjoy it greatly. After reading the essays and all the studies on Ender's Game, I just want to read it all over again. All this discussion and debate is interesting stuff and, ultimately, it sums up to well-deserved flattery of Card's work (in that its worth critiquing) and only encourages you to read his books.
the author never tells who he is, nor 'Elaine" You didn't click through too far.
I have never read Ender's Game I really recommend you do read the Ender series, because they are a great read. I wouldn't recommend reading the essays by John Kessel and Elaine Radford beforehand though; might ruin the fun.
Considering that Card may not have even written the Ender books himself, I'm not surprised that he continues to advocate using other people's ideas.
That being interesting and all, the Potter encyclopedia clearly isn't a clear-cut case of plagiarism because Rowling gets all the credit for invention. This sort of thing happens all the time, under the "unauthorized" banner. Asshat or not, Card has a point.
P.S. Ender and Hitler essay was recently put online
I don't know if I'd advocate greed, because customer abuse doesn't pay off in the long run, but I think that its important to remember that the value here is in services. Software licensing isn't the big cost, its the humans that cost a lot. And how easy it is to mitigate risks associated with using one package or another.
From a business perspective, the value proposition for open source only works when the scale of the deployment makes the cost of maintaining internal resources worthwhile. For example, if you have 40+ linux boxen and 2 primarily Linux admins, no worries. If you have only one Linux box and NO Linux admins, its a risk. You need to shore that up with external service contracts, professional services, something. That cost = Microsoft's opportunity.
The maturity and breadth of deployment abroad of the package makes a big difference too. For example, Apache is an easy win. Some obscure package in 0.8a release, not so much. Again, Microsoft's opportunity (even in 1.0) is consolidating the risk vis-a-vis the humans on hand.
Microsoft's value is in the breadth of offering they have for customers, and the abundance of support partners, documentation, yadda yadda. That's real and tangible and worth money.
Where they are being greedy is how little they offer for your license cost. They think in huge numbers, so saving a buck per ding is really an interesting proposition for them. No surprise people call it "Microsoft Tax"; they have so much market power they think like government.
One great thing about open source is the opportunity it creates for us all to turn what would have been licensing cost into professional services income. The math looks great when its the actual package developers selling the services. But when its just some third party selling their time, and no benefit is flowing back to the people who invented package X... well, who's being greedy? I think in some sense that is where Billy Gee is coming from.
If open source is going to continue to compete and be free in the greater sense, we need to remember to put our money where our collective mouth is and support our projects. Prove Bill wrong.
Who buys CDs any more? Download, upload. It's the latest thing.
It is not the tech that we should sanctify, but the freedom of thoughts and actions that seek to satisfy curiousity and a thirst for knowledge.
And the freedom to do anything you please with something you rightfully own - most especially an object.
But so long as the burden is on Them to have to sue Us one by one to exercise their so-called "rights" and "licenses", I really don't see a real threat to these freedoms - at worst a nuisance. Possession is nine-tenth's the law, after all.
Last mile isn't just cables though. You've got to get up to Layer 4.
And did you just suggest that everyone who does not like Bell start to lay its own cable? People do it all the time. Bell isn't the only action in town.
What I was proposing isn't a new idea. You get together with some people and buy a commercial feed and share it. This is how it's done in lots of places. Big business doesn't have to be the only action going.
As for running wires... On a small scale, wireless works.
You can't nationalize the internet because then you put freedom of speech at threat (in case you want to rebutt "not in Canada!" I respond: Harper.) It's easier to keep an eye on private interest and for the state to regulate minimally.
Anyway, those services you describe are farmed out to contractors. The state doesn't own very many garbage trucks or asphalt plants.
(In Canada) if the gov't was your ISP, it would be "free", except your taxes would go up equivalent to the amount you are already paying, service would diminish in quality, the technology would gradually get further and further behind the times, and the union would have their new favorite service to interrupt during strike actions.
"The government" is not the answer to every problem. Healthcare yes, intertubes mmm not so much.
If you are not happy, use your spending power to switch from Bell. If you don't find a viable alternative in your area, start one. This internet thing is still open for business.
Just because you cannot directly witness the results of your action does not make it right.
This is the same as people who uncap their cable modem at the expense of their neighbors' bandwidth.
As for your "cheap out on a motherboard" logic, let me know how that plays out in the long run... if you make it to the end of this sentence without blue screening.
That is really silly. Nobody in their right mind is going to want to be having customers plugging USB drives into their POS.
BUT, if you want the data.... it would be fairly trivial to have the receipt emailed to you as part of the transaction. Reasonable opt-in feature...
"Honey, get of the computer and come help me cook!"
Um, Tim Horton's is not a part of Canada's national identity.
That's just what their marketing department wants you to think.
Canadian Tire, maybe. The actual Tim Horton, for sure. The Horton's donut shop? Please.
P.S. Gretzky's ours too. You can keep Celine.
There is nothing intuitive about this because it doesn't relate to how our brains work.
Colorful moving imagery on a vertical surface that fills the field of view = yes.
Tactile responsive interface = yes.
Enhancing and bringing the two closer together = YES.
This cup is very creative, original, and even interesting enough to be worthy of a post, but not remotely practical.
But it does take you out of the box far enough to consider: what other objects would be more suitable as metaphorical hosts for a futuristic computer?
Note to self: add "Web 2.0" keyword to resume.
The French article states that 47% of French (as in, in France) companies run pirated software. ('entreprises' is more generic in French; so this implies small/medium/big biz) They don't quote the source of their statistic.
I think its fair for RH to position themselves as a leader in the industry and, at risk of getting flamed, I humbly submit that, overall, they have contributed positively to OSS.
But I think that Jim's aim might be a little off. He points to enterprise, but I think that there is a massive swath of small to medium sized solution providers who are hording their code when they build enhancements for customers. This is their little cachet, their angle on the (primarily local) market, their "solution". A number of times I've pointed out to consulting firms I've worked for/with that they weren't compliant with GPL because they weren't putting their code improvements back into the wild, and they looked at me blank-faced, "Isn't it free??" "Sorry, boss, that's the BSD license. This is GPL. You gotta share." A frequent example that comes immediately to mind from a couple years back is Asterisk solution providers.
As for enterprise, you need to show them value in the form of professional services. If they can get expertise and help, they will be open to play ball. This is an area that RH can show their strength as a services company. If Jim puts his money where his mouth is, it could work.
My own focus is on professional services and I perceive OSS as a great opportunity to 1) improve the quality (security, interoperability, all that) through sharing of knowledge, which is just good science; 2) improve the professional services opportunity for Slashdot types. Services should be the biggest piece of the pie, not hardware or licensing, and this will help elevate the profession as well.
As a post-script, I think that developers have a certain amount of professional responsibility to point out the licensing model for any code they seek to build into their solution. If this was discussed more often, it might enhance awareness, dissolving some of the misconceptions about OSS. People aren't going to decide to share their code in hind-sight. You want to get them involved from the start of their project. I think Jim gets this and he's got to speak to it now and form customer partnerships to get that rolling.
There is no doubt that this is also a business development tactic for RH, but I see nothing wrong with that.
As is blind hatred.
True enough, but the only thing cooler than being "in" is bashing the "in" from the sidelines. In the end its pointless...
Still, I find it amusing to point out that a google search for simply the word "smugness" reveals many pages complaining about Apple.
Even without the internet, people have been hating Apple for decades.
Especially Apple partners. I have vivid and amusing memories of attending Apple VAR meetings back in the early 90s. Ah, the fanfare, the drama, the free t-shirts.
Every meeting they would try to appease us with free food. Never worked. Within an hour it would devolve into everyone yelling at the poor shmuck that Apple would assign the task of dealing with us. We were all getting screwed on margins, greymarketing, service repair order compensation that was inconsistent, the fucking Apple Store coming in and destroying the channel and screwing the people who had helped promote the brand for so many years. I've taken the occasional peek at how the deal has evolved for partners since then, and its so much worse now its not even funny.
Most memorable was the day the Pres of Apple Canada came in person to announce that Apple had just marked the sale of their 20 millionth Macintosh. I was 19 at the time and I didn't have the sense not to blurt out "hey, thats as many as Commodore sold C64s!"
Okay I dug down a bit more in the comments since I posted and, to be fair, I'm not the only one who has read TFA, and some of my comment was redundant. But I am still convinced that free and open is better for community wifi.
Did anyone read TFA?
Meraki patched a not-for-profit group's hardware from remote without permission so that it would no longer run the firmware same not-for-profit developed in-house. They did this to hardware that was BSD licensed when purchased. They either employed a backdoor or abused known customer access credentials (likely the former) to do it.
This is probably illegal and certainly wrong.
(TFA doesn't say if a contract was in play between Meraki and the client that would have authorized them to apply the patches, but its clear that the customer had put an end to the agreement so a complaint against Meraki would be legit.)
At the very least, this is a malicious hack against a customer. But I think its more than that.
If the peeps in Vancouver were left to continue their work, they certainly would have had a "competitive" solution which they would likely have offered up online for all to use. This would effectively make them a competitor, and a dangerous one because unhappy Meraki customers would be the most likely to check it out. I would go so far to say that this was a pre-emptive sabotage (with poor Vancouverites in the crossfire).
I have no problem with Meraki adapting their business model to find something that works. But their actions way overstepped the boundaries of the law. They would have been wiser to handle the whole affair in a more benevolent fashion in the first place. They could have, for example, cut a partnership deal with the non-profit to allow them to participate in feature development under NDA and enjoy a subsidized service. Both parties would have come out winners.
Whenever financiers get involved, they always want to lock up the tech because it is the only tangible asset they can claim ownership of. Meanwhile, they miss the essence of business value, which is in the people and the partnerships and the innovation.
I think that the only way community wifi is going to work is if it is community-run, not-for-profit, and vendor independent. There is no question that we will have this soon enough and it will be running on top of WRTs and other similar APs which are abundant and cheap and have loads of after-market conversion options for outdoor use. I'm disappointed to read all these comments bashing the Vancouver hackers, who deserve kudos for their inventiveness, determination, and good will.