The Soyuz can barely carry a crew of three. If getting three people to orbit with no supplies, no equipment and the ability to sustain life for several days is your objective, it can do the job. If you want to build and support an infrastructure in LEO that can sustain long-term habitation and serve as a platform for lunar and planetary exploration, the Soyuz cannot do that job. The former is the job we could do 40 years ago, the latter is the job we need to do today.
BYW, that ballistic reentry was possible thanks to the primitive design of the Soyuz. Ballistic reentries are risky, despite that crew's safe arrival home.
Re: IIS and the Soyuz: The Soyuz cannot support the station, It cannot carry sufficient crew or supplies. Even the Progress ( an unmanned modified Soyuz) can't be operated at a sufficient launch rate to support the station in the long-term. As for using the Soyuz or its launcher to finish constricution of the station....no way.
The Russians fly a tiny 40-year-old spacecraft launched on a booster from the same era. In practical terms, the Energiya no longer exists. Reports of the new Russian spacecraft were subsequently downplayed. And, the Russians, like their NASA counterparts, have been floating "plans" for Mars expeditions for decades. None of them count because none of them have been funded. Nothing counts unless it is funded.
ISS has lots of Russian tech but it is not "holding" the station together. Claiming that the Russians are flying Americans for "free" is disingenuous given the the American funding that has been transferred to the Russian program.
The ISS never had a real purpose, but the U.S. would have been better off doing it alone.
The point is that the Russian program has not moved beyond the technology and missions it inherited from the Soviet era, while the Shuttle program has been a 30-year closed loop for the U.S.
I'm well aware of the capabilities of the Saturn, and the Energiya. But, there aren't any to "grab". Crews to support and launch them do not exist. Missions requring them do not exist. Payloads with a mass of 100 tons do not exist and no one is planning to build any.
More importantly, no one in the private sector is going to spend $10 billion on an endeavour unless that mission earns more than $10 billion in revenue. Do you know how to get that kind of return from a single launch?
I'm not rejecting private sector space travel. I hope it happens. But, the private sector can't take on money-losing activities.
Well, the X-Prize folks haven't gone anywhere yet and the Russians can barely afford their current feeble effort and don't seem to have any plans to pay for the design and development of new spacecraft or missions outside LEO.
(I'm deliberately discounting that little coast up to 60 miles. I want to see the private sector put payloads on the order of at leat 100 tons in orbit. That's the kind of capability we need to actually go somewhere.)
I went to projectcensored.org looking for their definition of "censored" and the criteria they use to determine "most censored". I found neither.
In my book, you aren't being censored when an editor turns down your story. You aren't being censored when your story is cut from the final edition to make room for the piece about an explosion in a local church.
If the Ministry of Information orders you not to write that story, that's censorshp. Ditto if the orders come from your corporate headquarters.
Projectcensored says it tracks the news from "independent" sources (not that these sources are listed on their site), but neglects to tell us about the political agendas of any of those sources. (Of course, the word "independent" is usually, and incorrectly, construed to mean "impartial".) An organization might be "independent" of outside financing, but it will lack credibility as an "independent" source if its purpose is to foster a political agenda. In any case, with a personality like Noam Chomsky helping them spot "censorship", claims of "independence" evaporate.
Saeed's smarmy dig about this week's ISS EVA and the risk of a Hubble mission is wrongheaded. A Hubble repair mission is riskier than an ISS mission precisely because the crew can't shelter in the ISS if damage to the Shuttle precludes its safe reentry. EVA wasn't part of that decision.
>> you just have to check it from somewhere else...
And if I check wikipedia and find it is wrong, why should I trust it enough to ever come back?
More worrisome than the simple factual mistakes is the probability that people will deliberately inject biased and bigoted information into wikipedia to further their agenda, and that no one with the required skills, knowledge and judgment will notice and/or edit it.
Just because it touts itself as "open", there's no reason to use it if it can't be trusted. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for...
The first U.S. spy satellites, the Corona series, sent its exposed film back via capsules that were gathered by crews in, I believe, C-130's. This was almost 40 years ago.
Dunno if the Soviets needed to try that, since they had all that empty space to bring a payload down safely and away from prying eyes.
Your Opinion Not Newsworthy; Editors at Slashdot?
on
Gnome 2.8 RC1 Released
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· Score: 1
>> I don't think it was rediculous to have an opinion to discuss put in a news article.
Sorry, but your opinion isn't newsworthy. Neither is mine. That's why it's in this comment. You just felt like taking a gratuitous shot at Gnome.
As for "editors" at Slashdot: Story pickers might be the better description. Slashdot plays a game of disavowing responsibility for what's on the site ("it's not us talking, it's our users") while at the same time welcoming (undeserved) praise as a news site and touting its brand of "journalism". No journalism here.
1. Given any number of individual members of any species and a resource supply that is sufficient for a smaller number, the individuals who succesfully compete for those resources will survive. The others won't. There is nothig wrong with that.
2. There will never be a "post-scarcity" world. People needs and wants increase at a faster pace than the means to satisfy them.
3. Capitalism is about meeting needs, not limiting supply. Resources must be put into the system to generate supply. Absent selling products at a product, the only other way to support production is government mandate and government control. That way leads to tyranny.
4. The F/OSS example isn't applicable outside its own artificial environment. More to the point, F/OSS development and developers must, by definition, have an income stream coming from somewhere in order to continue doing F/OSS work.
5. Captialism gives me the choice to buy or not to buy Microsoft. It gives me the choice to buy or not to buy computers. It doesn't send me orders from a central planning office ordering me to use the government-mandated OS. I'll trade companies like Microsoft for government central planning every time.
6. Have never seen a Matrix movie. Besides, it's only a movie. Pretend stuff. Like a comic book.
7. Profits benefit the seller. They aren't supposed to beneift "society".
8. Make no assumptions about my political opinions. Have an ideology is fine. I don't care what people believe. I care very much if people become convinced that the assumed correctness of their beliefs gives them the right to impose behavior on others.
9. Companies aren't Limiting production to maximize profits. Have you ever heard of Microsoft "running out" of XP? If you want it, they'll sell it to you. In any case, no company has any obligation to continue selling anything that it does not want to sell.
10. Sharing is fine. Taking something that doesn't belong to you and "sharing" it is wrong. If I create something, I own it. No one has any rights to it at all unless I give them those rights. That's what copyright law recognizes and protects.
11. The F/OSS model won't work in thereal world because it cannot generate sufficient resources to sustain itself, much less an entire economy, Who pays for the input when all the output is given away? What generates new money?
I don't owe anyone an apology and I'm well aware of what the copyright clause says.
The fact is that the historical background to that clause is one of widescale violation of authors' exclusive rights to their works by publishers who copied and sold works without agreement with or payment to their authors. That's the problem the copyright clause addressed -- the reason it is in the Constitution in the first place -- by striking a reasonable balance between the rights of authors and inventors and the future needs of everyone else.
What anti-copyright people forget is that the absence of protection for authors is the surest way to discourgae people from publishing anything that promotes "the progress of science and the useful arts". Why? Because, absent copyright or patent protection, no one would be assured of an opportunity to reap the rewards of their work. That is, most writers, inventors etc., would stop creating if they stood to make no money from it while watching others reap the proceeds from selling copies of their work without permission.
(I suppose some people might argue that "true" artists would continue to create even if they weren't paid for it, but that's both naive and elitist, and wrong. too.)
My core argument, which remains intact, is that the copyright clause recognizes, rather than creates, the "exclusive rights" to a work resident with its creator. Following from that, then, it seems quite clear to me that any rights to that work which anyone else may, in the future, acquire must necessarily flow from their point of origin, which is the work's creator. So long as copyright is in effect, the work's creator determines who, if anyone, can copy and disseminate his creation.
At no point did I argue in support of the current copyright term. I support limiting it to the lifetime of the work's creator, with no sale, transfer, renewal or inheritance possible. The work would go into the public domain on the death of its author. In addtion, the copyright holder would be required to be a person, not a corporation or other organization.
Rather than address that basic point, I saw a lot of rhetoric alleging I was advocating "ownership" of ideas, although I repeatedly stated I believed ideas, by their very nature, cannot be owned. Hoever, this "idea" schtick is a favorite hobbyhorse of the anti-copyright crowd, because it sounds so good while having nothing at all to do with the substance of the debate.
People are competitive by nature, not cooperative. So is every other living species. That's because if that Darwinian thing, you know. Short of a fantasy utopia that magically supplies al of our needs and wants, and keeps us all competely free of disease and discomfort, that kind of "cooperation" can only imposed by force, usually by ideologues who think they've got all the right answers and, hence, have the right to impose their will on others. If the 20th Century taught us anything, it should have taught to be frightened of ideologies.
I'm always amazed by people who apparently believe engaging in business is unethical, or that making a profit is unethical. It's as if these people read Marx but never heard of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, , Castro or Pol Pot. Perhaps, though, they are outnumbered by people, like me, who believe it is immoral to compel individuals to "share" what they have earned with "society" in the the name of "cooperation."
>>...it'd be better if those Windows were free software.
It would be better if people had better software, whether or not it was "free". I've used Linux for a long time because I like Unix and because Linux runs better than Windows on my machines. The fact that Linux is "free" has nothing to do with it. I'd still use it if it wasn't, and I never avoid using good software just because it isn't "free".
In that, I suspect I'm like most people, who make software decisions based on cost and capabilities, not on a belief system that is trying to impose a software development model on the rest of the activities of the human race.
Having worked both sides of the tech/management divide, I can attest that managers would be thrilled never to sit in another meeting talking about software issues. Typically, they've been burned more than once by vendors promising, but not quite delivering, wonderful things. (Ever see managers agree to some high-falutin' "guaranteed" reliability rate on the order of 98.5 percent only to find out that means they'll be offline for, say, 24 consecutive hours every 3 months and there's not a damn thing they can do about it except change the contract and give the vendor more money?)
Don't get me wrong. Countries should not chain themselves to a single variety or source of IT. Ideally, they should develop it at home. I just get a bit tired of all the ideological rhetoric and ranting about "Evil Corporations", etc. Those guys are trying to play politics, but they're in w-a-y over their heads.
The world is full of "very powerful entities with very few checks". Most considerably more powerful than corporations. (What do anti-business people wnat to do, replace corporations with village cobblers?)
In truth, most people haven't a clue about how to install an OS, don't want to have a clue, and are quite happy that their PC comes with an OS already installed. That may not nexessarily be a good thing, but it is reality.
And, Linus was right, swithcing to a new OS is difficult. That's why people don't want to do it.
The computing industry is, by nature, conservative. The industry and its customers do not really want a variety of choices. Variety leads to incompatibilities, from their perspective. The most potent phrase in the industry is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Like it or not, the world has a lot of Windows in it that aren't broken.
You implied that commerical support for open source infrastructures was both poor and unnecessary. I can only conclude if you don't believe it is necessary to provide commercial support for open source IT, you assume someone will do it for free.
I did not denigrate free software developers (not that developers have any business runnning networks). Since you as much as declared that knd of support could be provided by people in their spare time, I concluded you must be talking about hobbyists.
"Development support", in my experience, rarely comes into play on a working network. The last thing the network's owners want is to bother with development. They want their software to work out of the box. They don't want to maintain inhouse developers to fix other people's software or to write their own. They want to acquire software once, install it, use it, and forget about it.
You asserted that money saved buying open source would be transferred to domestic computer scientists. I find that naive and believe much of it could be drain off via corruption. It is relevant because it reduces the value returned from using open source.
Money that countries save is likely to go to a myriad of places rather than domestic computer scientists. In many countries, a substantial chunk of that money would, very likely, go into the pocket of the minister in charge of the product.
>> What is the support that you refer to? What value are vendors of commercial software adding beyond what is available for free?
Last time I was involved in hiring one Linux sys admin, we figured out total annual costs for that position were just about $250,000. That includes salary, insurance, pension, etc. That's not quite free, right?
Do you imagine that Linux hobbyists can support substantial mission-critical networks in their spare time using Google as their resource? You wanna tell the chief of payroll for some country's government employees that you don't have time to fix his server, so the workers will just have to wait for their money?
When businesses and institutions are dependent on their IT structure, they require 24/7 support. You don't get that for nothing.
Exactly how much IT support, commercial or otherwise, have you been involved in purchasing?
1. I've not said "software is no help or unimportant in developing markets" or anything of the kind.
2. Tell me, if you need a staff of sys admins and floor support people to keep, let's say. your network of 26 servers running Lotus Notes on Linux, 13 application and database servers running Linux, plus a few web servers, along with several hundred client machines in several dispersed buildings, how you're gonna support that with Google??
Of course, there is a differencd between what you get from open source and what you get from MS. And, of course, at any price that difference would remain,
But, then, that's not what I said, is it? I said MS can lower its software acquistion prices. Free software cannot; it is already free. MS could also lower the price of contract support. Sure, open source companies could also do that, but my guess is they don't have a $40 billion cushion.
I'm not arguing against open source and for MS. I'd just like to see a little more realism and a lot less ideological fervor.
I didn't argue that using open source was not economically advantageous, or that any country, including the U.S., should become dependent on any single OS or vendor.
I simply said what I said in that post. Go read it again, and don't infer things that aren't there.
I'm not talking aout you supporting one system. I'm talking about businesses and institutions and government needing support for thousands of installations and hundreds of networks. That kind of support doesn't come from "young, smart people" eager to help out or from calling a help line. It comes from in-house or contract professional staff who expect to be paid.
Slashdot Mirror
The Soyuz can barely carry a crew of three. If getting three people to orbit with no supplies, no equipment and the ability to sustain life for several days is your objective, it can do the job. If you want to build and support an infrastructure in LEO that can sustain long-term habitation and serve as a platform for lunar and planetary exploration, the Soyuz cannot do that job. The former is the job we could do 40 years ago, the latter is the job we need to do today.
BYW, that ballistic reentry was possible thanks to the primitive design of the Soyuz. Ballistic reentries are risky, despite that crew's safe arrival home.
Re: IIS and the Soyuz: The Soyuz cannot support the station, It cannot carry sufficient crew or supplies. Even the Progress ( an unmanned modified Soyuz) can't be operated at a sufficient launch rate to support the station in the long-term. As for using the Soyuz or its launcher to finish constricution of the station....no way.
The Russians fly a tiny 40-year-old spacecraft launched on a booster from the same era. In practical terms, the Energiya no longer exists. Reports of the new Russian spacecraft were subsequently downplayed. And, the Russians, like their NASA counterparts, have been floating "plans" for Mars expeditions for decades. None of them count because none of them have been funded. Nothing counts unless it is funded.
ISS has lots of Russian tech but it is not "holding" the station together. Claiming that the Russians are flying Americans for "free" is disingenuous given the the American funding that has been transferred to the Russian program.
The ISS never had a real purpose, but the U.S. would have been better off doing it alone.
The point is that the Russian program has not moved beyond the technology and missions it inherited from the Soviet era, while the Shuttle program has been a 30-year closed loop for the U.S.
I'm well aware of the capabilities of the Saturn, and the Energiya. But, there aren't any to "grab". Crews to support and launch them do not exist. Missions requring them do not exist. Payloads with a mass of 100 tons do not exist and no one is planning to build any.
More importantly, no one in the private sector is going to spend $10 billion on an endeavour unless that mission earns more than $10 billion in revenue. Do you know how to get that kind of return from a single launch?
I'm not rejecting private sector space travel. I hope it happens. But, the private sector can't take on money-losing activities.
Well, the X-Prize folks haven't gone anywhere yet and the Russians can barely afford their current feeble effort and don't seem to have any plans to pay for the design and development of new spacecraft or missions outside LEO.
(I'm deliberately discounting that little coast up to 60 miles. I want to see the private sector put payloads on the order of at leat 100 tons in orbit. That's the kind of capability we need to actually go somewhere.)
I went to projectcensored.org looking for their definition of "censored" and the criteria they use to determine "most censored". I found neither.
In my book, you aren't being censored when an editor turns down your story. You aren't being censored when your story is cut from the final edition to make room for the piece about an explosion in a local church.
If the Ministry of Information orders you not to write that story, that's censorshp. Ditto if the orders come from your corporate headquarters.
Projectcensored says it tracks the news from "independent" sources (not that these sources are listed on their site), but neglects to tell us about the political agendas of any of those sources. (Of course, the word "independent" is usually, and incorrectly, construed to mean "impartial".) An organization might be "independent" of outside financing, but it will lack credibility as an "independent" source if its purpose is to foster a political agenda. In any case, with a personality like Noam Chomsky helping them spot "censorship", claims of "independence" evaporate.
Saeed's smarmy dig about this week's ISS EVA and the risk of a Hubble mission is wrongheaded. A Hubble repair mission is riskier than an ISS mission precisely because the crew can't shelter in the ISS if damage to the Shuttle precludes its safe reentry. EVA wasn't part of that decision.
>> you just have to check it from somewhere else ...
And if I check wikipedia and find it is wrong, why should I trust it enough to ever come back?
More worrisome than the simple factual mistakes is the probability that people will deliberately inject biased and bigoted information into wikipedia to further their agenda, and that no one with the required skills, knowledge and judgment will notice and/or edit it.
Just because it touts itself as "open", there's no reason to use it if it can't be trusted. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for...
The first U.S. spy satellites, the Corona series, sent its exposed film back via capsules that were gathered by crews in, I believe, C-130's. This was almost 40 years ago.
Dunno if the Soviets needed to try that, since they had all that empty space to bring a payload down safely and away from prying eyes.
>> I don't think it was rediculous to have an opinion to discuss put in a news article.
Sorry, but your opinion isn't newsworthy. Neither is mine. That's why it's in this comment. You just felt like taking a gratuitous shot at Gnome.
As for "editors" at Slashdot: Story pickers might be the better description. Slashdot plays a game of disavowing responsibility for what's on the site ("it's not us talking, it's our users") while at the same time welcoming (undeserved) praise as a news site and touting its brand of "journalism". No journalism here.
1. Given any number of individual members of any species and a resource supply that is sufficient for a smaller number, the individuals who succesfully compete for those resources will survive. The others won't. There is nothig wrong with that.
2. There will never be a "post-scarcity" world. People needs and wants increase at a faster pace than the means to satisfy them.
3. Capitalism is about meeting needs, not limiting supply. Resources must be put into the system to generate supply. Absent selling products at a product, the only other way to support production is government mandate and government control. That way leads to tyranny.
4. The F/OSS example isn't applicable outside its own artificial environment. More to the point, F/OSS development and developers must, by definition, have an income stream coming from somewhere in order to continue doing F/OSS work.
5. Captialism gives me the choice to buy or not to buy Microsoft. It gives me the choice to buy or not to buy computers. It doesn't send me orders from a central planning office ordering me to use the government-mandated OS. I'll trade companies like Microsoft for government central planning every time.
6. Have never seen a Matrix movie. Besides, it's only a movie. Pretend stuff. Like a comic book.
7. Profits benefit the seller. They aren't supposed to beneift "society".
8. Make no assumptions about my political opinions. Have an ideology is fine. I don't care what people believe. I care very much if people become convinced that the assumed correctness of their beliefs gives them the right to impose behavior on others.
9. Companies aren't Limiting production to maximize profits. Have you ever heard of Microsoft "running out" of XP? If you want it, they'll sell it to you. In any case, no company has any obligation to continue selling anything that it does not want to sell.
10. Sharing is fine. Taking something that doesn't belong to you and "sharing" it is wrong. If I create something, I own it. No one has any rights to it at all unless I give them those rights. That's what copyright law recognizes and protects.
11. The F/OSS model won't work in thereal world because it cannot generate sufficient resources to sustain itself, much less an entire economy, Who pays for the input when all the output is given away? What generates new money?
I don't owe anyone an apology and I'm well aware of what the copyright clause says.
The fact is that the historical background to that clause is one of widescale violation of authors' exclusive rights to their works by publishers who copied and sold works without agreement with or payment to their authors. That's the problem the copyright clause addressed -- the reason it is in the Constitution in the first place -- by striking a reasonable balance between the rights of authors and inventors and the future needs of everyone else.
What anti-copyright people forget is that the absence of protection for authors is the surest way to discourgae people from publishing anything that promotes "the progress of science and the useful arts". Why? Because, absent copyright or patent protection, no one would be assured of an opportunity to reap the rewards of their work. That is, most writers, inventors etc., would stop creating if they stood to make no money from it while watching others reap the proceeds from selling copies of their work without permission.
(I suppose some people might argue that "true" artists would continue to create even if they weren't paid for it, but that's both naive and elitist, and wrong. too.)
My core argument, which remains intact, is that the copyright clause recognizes, rather than creates, the "exclusive rights" to a work resident with its creator. Following from that, then, it seems quite clear to me that any rights to that work which anyone else may, in the future, acquire must necessarily flow from their point of origin, which is the work's creator. So long as copyright is in effect, the work's creator determines who, if anyone, can copy and disseminate his creation.
At no point did I argue in support of the current copyright term. I support limiting it to the lifetime of the work's creator, with no sale, transfer, renewal or inheritance possible. The work would go into the public domain on the death of its author. In addtion, the copyright holder would be required to be a person, not a corporation or other organization.
Rather than address that basic point, I saw a lot of rhetoric alleging I was advocating "ownership" of ideas, although I repeatedly stated I believed ideas, by their very nature, cannot be owned. Hoever, this "idea" schtick is a favorite hobbyhorse of the anti-copyright crowd, because it sounds so good while having nothing at all to do with the substance of the debate.
I'm confused. :-) Explain?
>> ...I'd rather have cooperatives...
...it'd be better if those Windows were free software.
People are competitive by nature, not cooperative. So is every other living species. That's because if that Darwinian thing, you know. Short of a fantasy utopia that magically supplies al of our needs and wants, and keeps us all competely free of disease and discomfort, that kind of "cooperation" can only imposed by force, usually by ideologues who think they've got all the right answers and, hence, have the right to impose their will on others. If the 20th Century taught us anything, it should have taught to be frightened of ideologies.
I'm always amazed by people who apparently believe engaging in business is unethical, or that making a profit is unethical. It's as if these people read Marx but never heard of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, , Castro or Pol Pot. Perhaps, though, they are outnumbered by people, like me, who believe it is immoral to compel individuals to "share" what they have earned with "society" in the the name of "cooperation."
>>
It would be better if people had better software, whether or not it was "free". I've used Linux for a long time because I like Unix and because Linux runs better than Windows on my machines. The fact that Linux is "free" has nothing to do with it. I'd still use it if it wasn't, and I never avoid using good software just because it isn't "free".
In that, I suspect I'm like most people, who make software decisions based on cost and capabilities, not on a belief system that is trying to impose a software development model on the rest of the activities of the human race.
Having worked both sides of the tech/management divide, I can attest that managers would be thrilled never to sit in another meeting talking about software issues. Typically, they've been burned more than once by vendors promising, but not quite delivering, wonderful things. (Ever see managers agree to some high-falutin' "guaranteed" reliability rate on the order of 98.5 percent only to find out that means they'll be offline for, say, 24 consecutive hours every 3 months and there's not a damn thing they can do about it except change the contract and give the vendor more money?)
Don't get me wrong. Countries should not chain themselves to a single variety or source of IT. Ideally, they should develop it at home. I just get a bit tired of all the ideological rhetoric and ranting about "Evil Corporations", etc. Those guys are trying to play politics, but they're in w-a-y over their heads.
It's not propaganda, it's advertising. Ignore it.
The world is full of "very powerful entities with very few checks". Most considerably more powerful than corporations. (What do anti-business people wnat to do, replace corporations with village cobblers?)
In truth, most people haven't a clue about how to install an OS, don't want to have a clue, and are quite happy that their PC comes with an OS already installed. That may not nexessarily be a good thing, but it is reality.
And, Linus was right, swithcing to a new OS is difficult. That's why people don't want to do it.
The computing industry is, by nature, conservative. The industry and its customers do not really want a variety of choices. Variety leads to incompatibilities, from their perspective. The most potent phrase in the industry is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Like it or not, the world has a lot of Windows in it that aren't broken.
Regardless of the software you run on your network, you will still need to pay professional staff to support it.
Why is that so difficult to grasp?
Telling me about some wonderful piece of open source is a waste of time. No matter how wonderful it is, it won't support itself.
BTW, IBM isn't going to support those 26 Notes servers for nothing, either. You want support, you pay IBM.
You implied that commerical support for open source infrastructures was both poor and unnecessary. I can only conclude if you don't believe it is necessary to provide commercial support for open source IT, you assume someone will do it for free.
I did not denigrate free software developers (not that developers have any business runnning networks). Since you as much as declared that knd of support could be provided by people in their spare time, I concluded you must be talking about hobbyists.
"Development support", in my experience, rarely comes into play on a working network. The last thing the network's owners want is to bother with development. They want their software to work out of the box. They don't want to maintain inhouse developers to fix other people's software or to write their own. They want to acquire software once, install it, use it, and forget about it.
You asserted that money saved buying open source would be transferred to domestic computer scientists. I find that naive and believe much of it could be drain off via corruption. It is relevant because it reduces the value returned from using open source.
Money that countries save is likely to go to a myriad of places rather than domestic computer scientists. In many countries, a substantial chunk of that money would, very likely, go into the pocket of the minister in charge of the product.
>> What is the support that you refer to? What value are vendors of commercial software adding beyond what is available for free?
Last time I was involved in hiring one Linux sys admin, we figured out total annual costs for that position were just about $250,000. That includes salary, insurance, pension, etc. That's not quite free, right?
Do you imagine that Linux hobbyists can support substantial mission-critical networks in their spare time using Google as their resource? You wanna tell the chief of payroll for some country's government employees that you don't have time to fix his server, so the workers will just have to wait for their money?
When businesses and institutions are dependent on their IT structure, they require 24/7 support. You don't get that for nothing.
Exactly how much IT support, commercial or otherwise, have you been involved in purchasing?
1. I've not said "software is no help or unimportant in developing markets" or anything of the kind.
2. Tell me, if you need a staff of sys admins and floor support people to keep, let's say. your network of 26 servers running Lotus Notes on Linux, 13 application and database servers running Linux, plus a few web servers, along with several hundred client machines in several dispersed buildings, how you're gonna support that with Google??
That's essentially a restatement of my original post. You are assuming, of course, that domestic support can be purchased.
Of course, there is a differencd between what you get from open source and what you get from MS. And, of course, at any price that difference would remain,
But, then, that's not what I said, is it? I said MS can lower its software acquistion prices. Free software cannot; it is already free. MS could also lower the price of contract support. Sure, open source companies could also do that, but my guess is they don't have a $40 billion cushion.
I'm not arguing against open source and for MS. I'd just like to see a little more realism and a lot less ideological fervor.
I didn't argue that using open source was not economically advantageous, or that any country, including the U.S., should become dependent on any single OS or vendor.
I simply said what I said in that post. Go read it again, and don't infer things that aren't there.
I'm not talking aout you supporting one system. I'm talking about businesses and institutions and government needing support for thousands of installations and hundreds of networks. That kind of support doesn't come from "young, smart people" eager to help out or from calling a help line. It comes from in-house or contract professional staff who expect to be paid.