Well, "user-friendly" isn't the same as "perfectly secure". Since the world is full of people using Windows to "get on the internet", I think it lives up to its hype in that regard. Whether or not all those people have secure installations is, of course, a different issue.
It would be interesting to see someone apply the same reviewing standards to both the new Windows firewall and the firewalls that are packaged these days with many desktop-oriented Linux distributions. (And I say that as someone who has used Linux on his desktop for several years.)
The vast majority of computer users -- Windows, Linux, OS X -- lack the knowledge to correctly configure a firewall. They also lack the will and intent to acquire that knowledge. Almost all computer users don't have the foggiest notion of how IP networks function, and will never acquire that knowledge.
Badmouthing Microsoft for rolling out a less-than-perfect firewall is more than a bit hypocritical when much of it comes in the form of kneejerk ritualistic abuse from open source users who couldn't implement a firewall if it involved anything more complicated than selected "Yes" during their Linux installation.
Insecurity on the network is, in the end, a human problem. Computers do what they're told. The only effective solution is to go after the behavior and the people who cause the insecurity.
Why do so many people seem to believe that the internet deserves to be exempt from the same principles, constitutions, and lawd that govern every other communications and publication medium.
Whether you support or oppose any given law, does it really make sense to argue that the technology used to communicate or publish take precedence over the actual behavior of the communicator or publisher? Why is it permissible to regulate behavior implemented with one kind of tool but not another kind of tool?
I'vr never seen a coherent justification for treating behavior on the internet differently than the same behavior using a different tool.
Consider: speed limits existed prior to the popularity of the auto. Could someone have argued a century ago that autos should be immune from speed limit laws because they represented a new technology?
Except for the obligatory, and meaningless, slam on the U.S. and corporations, his explanation reads like any corporate PR post.
Of course, Craig incorporated. Otherwise, he -- personally -- would carry all the financial obligation and risk for anything related to his business. Only a fool would choose to run the risk of bankrupting himself if his business goes under.
Of course, it is expected that Slashdot -- part of the OSTG corporation would pander to the bigotry of its fantasy-ridden core audience.
Re:Let's Call Spyware "Fraud" and Be Done With It
on
P2P vs. The Clones
·
· Score: 1
Greed versus preaching ideals many people will never support?
Yeah, that'll work...
Let's Call Spyware "Fraud" and Be Done With It
on
P2P vs. The Clones
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Marketing a product that secretly does something other than what the seller acknowledges seems to me to be equivalent to fraud.
Before the F/OSS community gets all hot and bothered about changing licensing language (ignoring how they might enforce any language) maybe the best course is to go after spyware using the fraud laws.
...someone from taking a popular open source application, adding some nefarious code of their own, rebranding and selling it as a proprietary, closed product?
If the license violation was detected, would anyone have the resources to enforce the license? E.g., if someone in Shanghai pulls this off, who's the FSF going to sue?
Few of us read books about auto safety, either, but automobiles and the roads they travel on are demonstrably safer than in years past. This happened because manufacturers designed and built safer cars. Sometimes legislation mandated those improvements, other times the market mandated the changes.
Imagine if someone started selling a hardware or software gizmo that promised to keep your machine free of all spam and viruses, forever, period. Imagine that this gizmo actually worked. Imagine the sales boost for PC's that sell with this gizmo built in.
Ditto for computer security. The best way to make home and SOHO computing more secure is to build that security into the hardware and software we use and in the networks are traffic moves on. And, yes, some of that will be legislated as the net becomes increasingly critical to our daily wellbeing.
We can't expect any but a tiny fraction of computer users to "learn" their way to better security. Nor can we pretend that the wide open and unregulated nature of the infant internet will survive.
It's all well and good for Timothy to be soliciting pageviews with yet another whine about alleged rights violations. (Just more "I don't like it, so it must be wrong" nonsense.)
But, the OSTG legal staff would very likely cite this case if OSTG went after someone who took on one of their sites in the same way. Slashdot is trademarked, so is Sourceforge, Newsforge and a batch of the others.
The judge's decision need to be legally correct, not morally correct.
There's only one legal code, but many moral codes to choose from.
That's why Timothy and the/. gang get their knickers twisted everytime someone wins a suit against some jerk who deliberately violated a trademark. They -- Timothy, et al -- believe trademarks and copyrights are immoral, so they look at issues based on their dreams and wishes, not on reality.
OOo would not exist if MSOffice didn't exist. It is designed, literally, to offer a very familiar work-alike environment to MSOffice users. Kopete and the other IM apps would not exist if the proprietary IM apps had not inspired them.
No software can be truely innovative if it uses existing software as a model. The points you have raised do not meet by criteria for innovation.
You don't need to clone another product to adhere to the same model. E.g., Mozilla, Firefox, etc., are fine browsers. But, even IE must follow the model established by Mosaic and Netscape. A truely innovative design would impress people so much that they would willingly abandon their current browsers and learn to use the new one.
I don't consider adding menu entries to OOo to be innovative. It's feature-itis. As you said, the OOo team valued acceptance by Microsoft users more than creating innovative software.
There is no absolute yardstick for fair use. The law doesn't specify that quoting anything below a specific percentage of a copyrighted work is fair use, or that anything above is not.
That's why copyright is a civil, not criminal issue. Ziff-Davis probably sends these letters to hundreds of sites every year. (And, it seems to work. When was the last time you saw someone pointing, regularly, to Z-D sites?) Most sites lack the money and means to challenge Z-D in court. Z-D knows they might lose a Fair Use case, but also knows that the recipients won't take them to court. Hence the letters.
It's a silly thing to do -- driving away potential traffic -- but Z-D has the right to do this. And, they will keep on doing it until someone takes them to court and wins.
I've been using computers for more than 20 years. Some of that time was spent coding. And, yes, I've used emacs on Unix, Linux and Windows. And, yes, I've dabbled in elisp a bit.
But, no, I've never felt a need to modify any F/OSS app to meet my needs and I know no one who has. Unless you write code for fun or for cash, it is simply easier to find another app to get the job done.
Of course, emacs is popular. But the fact that it is freely available on means that developers have that much less incentive to build something better. (No, I do not believe emacs is the crowning achievement of software engineering.)
Absolutely. Innovation happens before any code is written. F/OSS certainly provides tools to people who might not otherwise have that access. But, the ability to leverage existing code has a downside: it reduces the incentive, or need, to create something new.
The IT industry is a conservative industry. Everyone is dragging around great amounts of legacy code and hardware. Change is expensive; typically, it doesn't happen as long as hobbling along with the "old stuff" is cheaper than switching to the new. Even then, the new stuff will need to accommodate the biggest link in the legacy chain: people and their habits.
So, yes, you're correct: innovation is difficult. But, the IT world is one in which one successful program can effectively dominate the market. On the proprietary side, there's Windows, of course. And, on the F/OSS side, there's Apache and X Windows. Is it possible to build better tools to do the jobs that Windows, Apache and X Windows do? Sure. But don't hold your breath.
What evidence do you have that emacs is easy to use? I assert that if you asked users who had never seen emacs to use it to create, save, and reopen a file, the vast majority would not be able to do that.
If the application I use -- open source or proprietary -- doesn't do what I want, I will use another application. Even for a skilled developer, writing code is the least efficient way to accomplish a task. The F/OSS community needs to understand that the ability to review and revise source code is utterly unimportant to the overwhelming majority of software users.
Yes, emacs has been widely ported. That fact alone testifies to a lack of innovation. Rather than coming up with something better, developers on those other platforms simply ported existing code.
>>" It is all the other parts involved in making a good product like creating production quality code, QA, bug fixes, usability studies, HCI/GUIs, help system, wizards, tutorials, documentation and so on that are usually lacking. Much of the work is at times tedious and plain out boring - stuff you usually have to pay people to do, you know?"
Indeed. Although I'm a satisfied Linux user, I can't tell you how many times I've clicked on "Help" only to find that there isn't any. If Microsoft released a product with a help menu with nothing behind it, it would be instant fodder for F/OSS zealots everywhere. Yet, their side does it all the time.
In another example, last night I used Konquerer to run a search, from/, for "*.png". The app locked up after the file tally rolled past 15,000. I'm guessing an allocation problem, but why, exactly, do I need more than 15,000 png files on my machine?
The market does not necessarily reward innovation. Why? Because people usually won't buy what they think they don't need. That's the conundrum for F/OSS: Follow the existing models and risk being dismissed as a copycat wannabe, or deliver new, arguably better, but frighteningly unfamiliar products.
Adding new features to software that is mimicing another product is not terribly innovative. An innovative F/OSS email product, as I suggested, would be one that replaces that Outlook model with a new and better model.
All but a tiny minority of F/OSS users have both the skills and the desire to add features to existing products. Source availability inspires no more creativity among them than their use of a keyboard inspires them to create narrative art.
The core of my argument, though, is that the availability of code -- open or proprietary -- does not drive creativity. That comes from the imaginations of developers.
The open source community appears to be full of people who loath anything or anyone connected with Microsoft. That's not entirely rational, but there you go.
All true, but "fighting" in Microsoft's product segments is one agenda, and creating innovative software is another. Down the road, Evolution and OpenOffice may add their own unique features, but they have already cast their lot with the Microsoft model.
If someone's goal is to displace Microsoft products with F/OSS products, then mimicing MS software makes sense. If the goal, however, is to deliver innovative software, it doesn't make sense.
If emacs and mutt are so good, why isn't everyone already using them?
It's a bit arrogant to argue that the only reason that the vast majority of users -- on any platform -- don't use eamcs or mutt is because they are attracted to eye candy. Most people, including myself, believe computers should make life easier. Software, therefore, is better when it offers more fnctionality combined with a flatter learning curve. That's where emacs, mutt and similar applications fall down: a lot of functionality combined with a very steep learning curve. Worse, once learned, that knowledge is essentially not transferrable elsewhere, which increases the demands on the user without providing an equivalent payoff.
I didn't comment on the quality of Outlook. I said it is widely loathed, which is true, at least in the open source community.
However, are you arguing that the open source community can't do something better? That Outlook is, to all intents and purposes, the last email client?
You've exposed an underlying fallacy of open source and the GPL: No direct link exists between source availability and innovation.
In this particular case, the open source community is using a widely loathed proprietary program -- Outlook -- as both model and yardstick for one of it's premier offerings, Evolution. Ditto OpenOffice.
If the GPL does foster the creation of new and innovative applications, why has the community not already brought forth an email client and an office client that are so convincingly innovative, useful and attractive that people will happily abandon the Outlook/MSOffice paradigms in order to adopt them?
Granted, source availability does spread innovative ideas once they occur in the mind of a given developer. But, it seems clear that a developer working in a closed, proprietary environment can be just as innovative as one working in an free and open environment. Financial reward can, in fact, be a wonderful spur to creativity.
It could be argued, as well, that the availability of code works against innovation because developers often use existing code as a model rather than strike out into new territory.
The GPL and open source represent many good things, but they are no better or no worse at fostering creativity than the proprietary model.
I heard Bowers on NPR today make his case that SUV's over 6000 pounds should be classified, regulated and taxed as trucks, and that their drivers be required to get truck licenses.
He's right. Almost every SUV I see has only one person in it: the driver. Except for the biannual trip to Home Depot, they aren't hauling cargo. And they sure aren't hauling a bunch of kids, because no self-respecting SUV-owning couple would ever have more than 2 kids.
If people wanna drive around in big, useless, trucks, they oughta be treated like truckdrivers, not soccer moms.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, "user-friendly" isn't the same as "perfectly secure". Since the world is full of people using Windows to "get on the internet", I think it lives up to its hype in that regard. Whether or not all those people have secure installations is, of course, a different issue.
It would be interesting to see someone apply the same reviewing standards to both the new Windows firewall and the firewalls that are packaged these days with many desktop-oriented Linux distributions. (And I say that as someone who has used Linux on his desktop for several years.)
The vast majority of computer users -- Windows, Linux, OS X -- lack the knowledge to correctly configure a firewall. They also lack the will and intent to acquire that knowledge. Almost all computer users don't have the foggiest notion of how IP networks function, and will never acquire that knowledge.
Badmouthing Microsoft for rolling out a less-than-perfect firewall is more than a bit hypocritical when much of it comes in the form of kneejerk ritualistic abuse from open source users who couldn't implement a firewall if it involved anything more complicated than selected "Yes" during their Linux installation.
Insecurity on the network is, in the end, a human problem. Computers do what they're told. The only effective solution is to go after the behavior and the people who cause the insecurity.
Paranoia. Into your heart it will creep.
Why do so many people seem to believe that the internet deserves to be exempt from the same principles, constitutions, and lawd that govern every other communications and publication medium.
Whether you support or oppose any given law, does it really make sense to argue that the technology used to communicate or publish take precedence over the actual behavior of the communicator or publisher? Why is it permissible to regulate behavior implemented with one kind of tool but not another kind of tool?
I'vr never seen a coherent justification for treating behavior on the internet differently than the same behavior using a different tool.
Consider: speed limits existed prior to the popularity of the auto. Could someone have argued a century ago that autos should be immune from speed limit laws because they represented a new technology?
Except for the obligatory, and meaningless, slam on the U.S. and corporations, his explanation reads like any corporate PR post.
Of course, Craig incorporated. Otherwise, he -- personally -- would carry all the financial obligation and risk for anything related to his business. Only a fool would choose to run the risk of bankrupting himself if his business goes under.
Of course, it is expected that Slashdot -- part of the OSTG corporation would pander to the bigotry of its fantasy-ridden core audience.
Greed versus preaching ideals many people will never support?
Yeah, that'll work...
Marketing a product that secretly does something other than what the seller acknowledges seems to me to be equivalent to fraud.
Before the F/OSS community gets all hot and bothered about changing licensing language (ignoring how they might enforce any language) maybe the best course is to go after spyware using the fraud laws.
...someone from taking a popular open source application, adding some nefarious code of their own, rebranding and selling it as a proprietary, closed product?
If the license violation was detected, would anyone have the resources to enforce the license? E.g., if someone in Shanghai pulls this off, who's the FSF going to sue?
Perhaps this has already happened. Anyone know?
Few of us read books about auto safety, either, but automobiles and the roads they travel on are demonstrably safer than in years past. This happened because manufacturers designed and built safer cars. Sometimes legislation mandated those improvements, other times the market mandated the changes.
Imagine if someone started selling a hardware or software gizmo that promised to keep your machine free of all spam and viruses, forever, period. Imagine that this gizmo actually worked. Imagine the sales boost for PC's that sell with this gizmo built in.
Ditto for computer security. The best way to make home and SOHO computing more secure is to build that security into the hardware and software we use and in the networks are traffic moves on. And, yes, some of that will be legislated as the net becomes increasingly critical to our daily wellbeing.
We can't expect any but a tiny fraction of computer users to "learn" their way to better security. Nor can we pretend that the wide open and unregulated nature of the infant internet will survive.
It's all well and good for Timothy to be soliciting pageviews with yet another whine about alleged rights violations. (Just more "I don't like it, so it must be wrong" nonsense.)
But, the OSTG legal staff would very likely cite this case if OSTG went after someone who took on one of their sites in the same way. Slashdot is trademarked, so is Sourceforge, Newsforge and a batch of the others.
The judge's decision need to be legally correct, not morally correct.
/. gang get their knickers twisted everytime someone wins a suit against some jerk who deliberately violated a trademark. They -- Timothy, et al -- believe trademarks and copyrights are immoral, so they look at issues based on their dreams and wishes, not on reality.
There's only one legal code, but many moral codes to choose from.
That's why Timothy and the
OOo would not exist if MSOffice didn't exist. It is designed, literally, to offer a very familiar work-alike environment to MSOffice users. Kopete and the other IM apps would not exist if the proprietary IM apps had not inspired them.
No software can be truely innovative if it uses existing software as a model. The points you have raised do not meet by criteria for innovation.
You don't need to clone another product to adhere to the same model. E.g., Mozilla, Firefox, etc., are fine browsers. But, even IE must follow the model established by Mosaic and Netscape. A truely innovative design would impress people so much that they would willingly abandon their current browsers and learn to use the new one.
I don't consider adding menu entries to OOo to be innovative. It's feature-itis. As you said, the OOo team valued acceptance by Microsoft users more than creating innovative software.
There is no absolute yardstick for fair use. The law doesn't specify that quoting anything below a specific percentage of a copyrighted work is fair use, or that anything above is not.
That's why copyright is a civil, not criminal issue. Ziff-Davis probably sends these letters to hundreds of sites every year. (And, it seems to work. When was the last time you saw someone pointing, regularly, to Z-D sites?) Most sites lack the money and means to challenge Z-D in court. Z-D knows they might lose a Fair Use case, but also knows that the recipients won't take them to court. Hence the letters.
It's a silly thing to do -- driving away potential traffic -- but Z-D has the right to do this. And, they will keep on doing it until someone takes them to court and wins.
I've been using computers for more than 20 years. Some of that time was spent coding. And, yes, I've used emacs on Unix, Linux and Windows. And, yes, I've dabbled in elisp a bit.
But, no, I've never felt a need to modify any F/OSS app to meet my needs and I know no one who has. Unless you write code for fun or for cash, it is simply easier to find another app to get the job done.
Of course, emacs is popular. But the fact that it is freely available on means that developers have that much less incentive to build something better. (No, I do not believe emacs is the crowning achievement of software engineering.)
Absolutely. Innovation happens before any code is written. F/OSS certainly provides tools to people who might not otherwise have that access. But, the ability to leverage existing code has a downside: it reduces the incentive, or need, to create something new.
The IT industry is a conservative industry. Everyone is dragging around great amounts of legacy code and hardware. Change is expensive; typically, it doesn't happen as long as hobbling along with the "old stuff" is cheaper than switching to the new. Even then, the new stuff will need to accommodate the biggest link in the legacy chain: people and their habits.
So, yes, you're correct: innovation is difficult. But, the IT world is one in which one successful program can effectively dominate the market. On the proprietary side, there's Windows, of course. And, on the F/OSS side, there's Apache and X Windows. Is it possible to build better tools to do the jobs that Windows, Apache and X Windows do? Sure. But don't hold your breath.
What evidence do you have that emacs is easy to use? I assert that if you asked users who had never seen emacs to use it to create, save, and reopen a file, the vast majority would not be able to do that.
If the application I use -- open source or proprietary -- doesn't do what I want, I will use another application. Even for a skilled developer, writing code is the least efficient way to accomplish a task. The F/OSS community needs to understand that the ability to review and revise source code is utterly unimportant to the overwhelming majority of software users.
Yes, emacs has been widely ported. That fact alone testifies to a lack of innovation. Rather than coming up with something better, developers on those other platforms simply ported existing code.
>>"
/, for "*.png". The app locked up after the file tally rolled past 15,000. I'm guessing an allocation problem, but why, exactly, do I need more than 15,000 png files on my machine?
It is all the other parts involved in making a good product like creating production quality code, QA, bug fixes, usability studies, HCI/GUIs, help system, wizards, tutorials, documentation and so on that are usually lacking. Much of the work is at times tedious and plain out boring - stuff you usually have to pay people to do, you know?"
Indeed. Although I'm a satisfied Linux user, I can't tell you how many times I've clicked on "Help" only to find that there isn't any. If Microsoft released a product with a help menu with nothing behind it, it would be instant fodder for F/OSS zealots everywhere. Yet, their side does it all the time.
In another example, last night I used Konquerer to run a search, from
The market does not necessarily reward innovation. Why? Because people usually won't buy what they think they don't need. That's the conundrum for F/OSS: Follow the existing models and risk being dismissed as a copycat wannabe, or deliver new, arguably better, but frighteningly unfamiliar products.
Adding new features to software that is mimicing another product is not terribly innovative. An innovative F/OSS email product, as I suggested, would be one that replaces that Outlook model with a new and better model.
All but a tiny minority of F/OSS users have both the skills and the desire to add features to existing products. Source availability inspires no more creativity among them than their use of a keyboard inspires them to create narrative art.
The core of my argument, though, is that the availability of code -- open or proprietary -- does not drive creativity. That comes from the imaginations of developers.
The open source community appears to be full of people who loath anything or anyone connected with Microsoft. That's not entirely rational, but there you go.
All true, but "fighting" in Microsoft's product segments is one agenda, and creating innovative software is another. Down the road, Evolution and OpenOffice may add their own unique features, but they have already cast their lot with the Microsoft model.
If someone's goal is to displace Microsoft products with F/OSS products, then mimicing MS software makes sense. If the goal, however, is to deliver innovative software, it doesn't make sense.
If emacs and mutt are so good, why isn't everyone already using them?
It's a bit arrogant to argue that the only reason that the vast majority of users -- on any platform -- don't use eamcs or mutt is because they are attracted to eye candy. Most people, including myself, believe computers should make life easier. Software, therefore, is better when it offers more fnctionality combined with a flatter learning curve. That's where emacs, mutt and similar applications fall down: a lot of functionality combined with a very steep learning curve. Worse, once learned, that knowledge is essentially not transferrable elsewhere, which increases the demands on the user without providing an equivalent payoff.
I didn't comment on the quality of Outlook. I said it is widely loathed, which is true, at least in the open source community.
However, are you arguing that the open source community can't do something better? That Outlook is, to all intents and purposes, the last email client?
You've exposed an underlying fallacy of open source and the GPL: No direct link exists between source availability and innovation.
In this particular case, the open source community is using a widely loathed proprietary program -- Outlook -- as both model and yardstick for one of it's premier offerings, Evolution. Ditto OpenOffice.
If the GPL does foster the creation of new and innovative applications, why has the community not already brought forth an email client and an office client that are so convincingly innovative, useful and attractive that people will happily abandon the Outlook/MSOffice paradigms in order to adopt them?
Granted, source availability does spread innovative ideas once they occur in the mind of a given developer. But, it seems clear that a developer working in a closed, proprietary environment can be just as innovative as one working in an free and open environment. Financial reward can, in fact, be a wonderful spur to creativity.
It could be argued, as well, that the availability of code works against innovation because developers often use existing code as a model rather than strike out into new territory.
The GPL and open source represent many good things, but they are no better or no worse at fostering creativity than the proprietary model.
I heard Bowers on NPR today make his case that SUV's over 6000 pounds should be classified, regulated and taxed as trucks, and that their drivers be required to get truck licenses.
He's right. Almost every SUV I see has only one person in it: the driver. Except for the biannual trip to Home Depot, they aren't hauling cargo. And they sure aren't hauling a bunch of kids, because no self-respecting SUV-owning couple would ever have more than 2 kids.
If people wanna drive around in big, useless, trucks, they oughta be treated like truckdrivers, not soccer moms.