Several years ago at a previous job I had to go to a law conference given by a big firm in downtown Chicago that was getting into the internet law business.
There was some discussion about the patentability of software - at the time (1995?) software patents weren't easy to come by. (At least that's what it seemed like - I was the only non-lawyer there, and I'm still a programmer.)
The argument posited by a young attorney there basically was as follows: Software is basically programmable hardware - i.e., anything that is stored as software could have also been burned directly into the circuitry of a computer. Circuitry and computer hardware -is- patentable; hence, any person that wanted to patent software could in principle place it into the circuitry in the hardware. The fact that a program is stored on magnetic disks is simply a convenience for updating the software.
So his argument basically came down to the notion that if you could patent hardware that did the same thing as software, patenting software makes sense for everyone.
Interestingly, noone at the conference had any questions after his presentation. I don't think anyone had even considered the ramifications of what he was talking about - or even cared back then.
I'd be interested in counterarguments to this line of reasoning . . .
Fortune 500 companies have very little interest in saving what amounts to be nominal costs related to software licensing.
For them, it's a cost of doing business - and having someone ready on the other end of the phone at a moment's notice is well worth it. I'd imagine that a General Electric would have a much better service experience on the phone with Microsoft than would Turkey Joe's Software.
That being said, small to medium-sized enterprises can really benefit from OSS. Here's how:
1. The obvious. None of all those expensive licenses. Server licenses, client access licenses, end-user licenses . . . they really add up when you're in the 10-250 user space.
2. The not-so-obvious. These days, businesses are under the scrutiny of the software license police. Every unlicensed piece of software can cost the company $150,000 - that adds up in a hurry. Naturally, the auditors and SPA are more than happy to negotiate a multimillion dollar fine down to whatever they think the small business can pay - $80-100,000. This results in a high business risk for using unlicensed software (one ad actually stated "You're one disgruntled employee away from an audit"); and a large cost for maintaining records in order to ensure compliance and defend against such an audit. At my company, we have an employee that spends more than half his time just on software licensing compliance. Costly indeed.
Fact is, smaller enterprises don't often have the extremely complex data processing and networking needs that Fortune 500 companies have. And many (if not all) their needs can be met by using open source software.
If you're looking for corporate adoption of OSS, don't look in the Fortune 500 space. Look at the thousands of smaller enterprises out there.
Or you could just put in the metatags telling M$ not to alter your content.
Don't get me wrong - this "opt-out" will be far more effective for M$ than an "opt-in" strategy - who would voluntarily allow a browser to add links to their site in ways that they couldn't control?
And if noone would do it voluntarily, it kind of begs the question . . .
IBM is a company. It exists to make money. It uses Linux and Open Source software because it helps make them money.
Even -if- they made no additional contribution to Open Source software, do they owe -any- of us -anything? Does the fact that they do contribute to the development and widespread acceptance of Linux and Open Source software have no value at all?
Comply with the GPL, and you don't have to worry about anyone parking themselves on your doorstep demanding money (or something that will cost you.) Something about not biting the hand... you get the idea.
Hm... at 150K per unlicensed piece of software, I'd imagine that one could purchase at least one (really competent) sysadmin for each piece. One unlicensed copy of Office 97 should not have the same liability for a company than paying a sysadmin.
The real issue, at least where I work, is not one of real cost. We have a person who earns in the mid-40s whose primary function is license compliance. That's a justifiable business expense, considering what an audit might cost us if only a few stray copies of something or other turned up.
What switching to StarOffice (for example) where it's practical buys us is a reduction in our exposure. If noone is running a Microsoft Office suite, then we don't have to worry about a stray copy costing us $150K. The cost of the software license is nominal next to the very real risk of a costly audit, and whatever fines/settlement arrangement gets worked out.
In February here in Chicago, there was a radio ad in which some threatening sounding guy was telling businesses that they were "one disgruntled employee away from an audit." Responsible liability management suggests (to me at least) that you spend money to make sure you're in compliance, and reduce dependence on potentially risky software everywhere possible. Open source makes great sense in this context.
Free Software will continue to grow in market share at Microsoft's expense, if for no other reason that the risk/reward for ownership continues to grow in Free Software's favor.
Consider this, and this. Businesses not only must wade through enormously complex licensing from Microsoft, but they run the very real risk of being audited - with the price of running an unlicensed copy at $150,000 per instance ! Massive effort is required to maintain software licensing compliance, with no real guarantee that the auditors couldn't find something - anything - if they tried hard enough.
It begins to feel like anyone choosing to run Microsoft software does so at grave risk to their businesses, which at any moment may be invaded by the software licensing gestapo, and be fined as much as the SPA figures they can pay.
Microsoft, faced with declining revenues, is going hard against businesses running their software to ensure software license compliance. Even a good faith effort doesn't provide enough protection.
My company has begun using Open Source/Free Software everywhere it can to reduce our software license liability. I expect that as Microsoft muscles in on more and more businesses, we won't be the last.
Enforcing this patent may just reduce the number of companies/number of people who actually produce/purchase these devices, thereby harming Microsoft's WinCE.
While Microsoft might not be a defendant, I'm sure their lawyers would be more than happy to provide amicus briefs against NCR's position. Or help out defending - should Compaq or any of the other WinCE-based device makers get named.
And your hostility does nothing to improve your argument.
You can't seriously be advocating dismantling the internet, can you? *laugh*
I agree with you, mostly. Yes, there's a demarcation between right and wrong. Yes, we as a society draw that line; in addition to drawing it ourselves personally.
But the answer is certainly not taking down the network, but (as you rightly pointed out) finding better ways to make it difficult to spread the filth.
But when you go saying that humans built it, and can take it apart, you're not going to be taken seriously.
It should come as no surprise that esoteric scientific journals cost as much as they do. Really.
A number of factors are in play here.
Consider who buys them - namely, university libraries, and corporate libraries.
Consider also that publishing a periodical like that takes a lot of money - peer reviewers need to get paid, production costs can be high for really nice paper and graphics printing, the distribution jobbers need money, etc. etc. etc.
The costs of production are spread over relatively few subscribers, when compared with periodicals like Maxim or even Scientific American, so the prices get very high.
University libraries get less and less use as the internet grows as an information resource, so their funding gets squeezed.
With the advent of large-scale interlibrary loan sharing via computers (for more than a decade now), libraries have been able to (informally) band together to reduce the number of journal subscriptions they carry. Can't afford a dozen journals at $10K a year? Library X agrees to maintain subscriptions to 6, and Library Y agrees to maintain subscriptions to the other 6; and they both agree to share articles as needed between them.
Both libraries save money (temporarily), but the publisher's subscription base gets even smaller, and the prices go up even more. Pretty soon those six subscriptions each are too expensive to maintain.
Factor in how easy it is to move documents around on the internet now, and it's easy to understand both why journal subscriptions are so expensive, and why publishers are running scared.
I think the point was... it really doesn't matter what the "right" choice is. Most of us work in the environment that's created around us.
Most of us have limited, if any, say in what operating systems are used around us. You work with what you have to - we don't often get to decide which system we get to use.
I'm sure we all have opinions regarding what the best OS or development platform is for this task or that - and good people can disagree.
I personally work in an environment where we use everything from Win32 to Macs to Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD, based on the task at hand. It's necessity - not a religious decision.
Aside, is it me, or does it seem that here on Slashdot the stories are becoming harder and harder to distinguish from the trolls?
But then, whipping the crowd into a froth generates lots of activity, which -has- to be good for advertising rates. Or maybe I'm just cynical after reading crap like this.
Actually, working for a company where we dupe a -lot- of CD's (not CD-R's), I've found that adding serialization to the content is -very- easy, retailing at pennies per copy.
Which is not to say that finding the serialization and spoofing it somehow wouldn't be easy enough.
You've gotten to what I think is a critical issue here - liability risk management for the business. Risk management is what the business owner is all about here.
I don't see this as a 1st amendment issue - it's not about the government, or a publicly funded entity (school, library) preventing free exchange of ideas. It's about a shop owner who is worried that material that might violate community standards may appear in his store, especially since he's located right across from a junior high school.
The debate as to whether this is an appropriate concern is irrelevant - it's the owner's business, and the owner makes the rules.
The bad press created by kids seeing porn because no steps were taken to prevent it, so close to their school, would cause bad things to happen to his business. And that's before the legal trouble started.
My suggestion, and I'm not sure it's a good one, would be to install very tight censorware on the machines. Make it no secret. And then put up disclaimers everywhere, saying nothing is perfect. "Inappropriate material" (whatever that means) may get through. Material that's okay might be blocked. Give the attendant on duty the ability to override the block, upon request - should help with the "false positive" problem.
The owner is making a good-faith effort to do whatever he thinks is right; you might not agree with the conclusions he reached, but it's his store, his legal liability, his reputation in the community on the line here. It's therefore the owner's call as to what to do.
And if you refuse, there are plenty of people out there who would be glad to do it. If it's against your morals, feel free to walk away. He's free to do what he must; you're free not to do anything repugnant to your own ideals.
Actually, I find that an opposing view forces both sides to think harder - which I assume has -some- value here.
Who gives a damn where he works? And why does being a Microserf (if he is one) make you persona non grata here?
Such a narrow breadth of viewpoints reduces the relevance of any Slashdot discussion - makes me wonder sometimes why anyone with the obvious expertise that floats around here would continue to come here and wade through the trolls and partisan schlock.
But the discussion is a valid one, with many intelligent answers. I don't happen to group this one in that number.
Slashdot Mirror
There was some discussion about the patentability of software - at the time (1995?) software patents weren't easy to come by. (At least that's what it seemed like - I was the only non-lawyer there, and I'm still a programmer.)
The argument posited by a young attorney there basically was as follows:
Software is basically programmable hardware - i.e., anything that is stored as software could have also been burned directly into the circuitry of a computer. Circuitry and computer hardware -is- patentable; hence, any person that wanted to patent software could in principle place it into the circuitry in the hardware. The fact that a program is stored on magnetic disks is simply a convenience for updating the software.
So his argument basically came down to the notion that if you could patent hardware that did the same thing as software, patenting software makes sense for everyone.
Interestingly, noone at the conference had any questions after his presentation. I don't think anyone had even considered the ramifications of what he was talking about - or even cared back then.
I'd be interested in counterarguments to this line of reasoning . . .
For them, it's a cost of doing business - and having someone ready on the other end of the phone at a moment's notice is well worth it. I'd imagine that a General Electric would have a much better service experience on the phone with Microsoft than would Turkey Joe's Software.
That being said, small to medium-sized enterprises can really benefit from OSS. Here's how:
1. The obvious. None of all those expensive licenses. Server licenses, client access licenses, end-user licenses . . . they really add up when you're in the 10-250 user space.
2. The not-so-obvious. These days, businesses are under the scrutiny of the software license police. Every unlicensed piece of software can cost the company $150,000 - that adds up in a hurry. Naturally, the auditors and SPA are more than happy to negotiate a multimillion dollar fine down to whatever they think the small business can pay - $80-100,000.
This results in a high business risk for using unlicensed software (one ad actually stated "You're one disgruntled employee away from an audit"); and a large cost for maintaining records in order to ensure compliance and defend against such an audit.
At my company, we have an employee that spends more than half his time just on software licensing compliance. Costly indeed.
Fact is, smaller enterprises don't often have the extremely complex data processing and networking needs that Fortune 500 companies have. And many (if not all) their needs can be met by using open source software.
If you're looking for corporate adoption of OSS, don't look in the Fortune 500 space. Look at the thousands of smaller enterprises out there.
That's where the revolution will be happening.
Don't get me wrong - this "opt-out" will be far more effective for M$ than an "opt-in" strategy - who would voluntarily allow a browser to add links to their site in ways that they couldn't control?
And if noone would do it voluntarily, it kind of begs the question . . .
And . . . there's something to be said for brevity.
*wishing I had a mod point about now*
I hope your attitude at work is better than the one you're displaying in your post.
Even -if- they made no additional contribution to Open Source software, do they owe -any- of us -anything? Does the fact that they do contribute to the development and widespread acceptance of Linux and Open Source software have no value at all?
Comply with the GPL, and you don't have to worry about anyone parking themselves on your doorstep demanding money (or something that will cost you.) Something about not biting the hand... you get the idea.
The real issue, at least where I work, is not one of real cost. We have a person who earns in the mid-40s whose primary function is license compliance. That's a justifiable business expense, considering what an audit might cost us if only a few stray copies of something or other turned up.
What switching to StarOffice (for example) where it's practical buys us is a reduction in our exposure. If noone is running a Microsoft Office suite, then we don't have to worry about a stray copy costing us $150K. The cost of the software license is nominal next to the very real risk of a costly audit, and whatever fines/settlement arrangement gets worked out.
In February here in Chicago, there was a radio ad in which some threatening sounding guy was telling businesses that they were "one disgruntled employee away from an audit." Responsible liability management suggests (to me at least) that you spend money to make sure you're in compliance, and reduce dependence on potentially risky software everywhere possible. Open source makes great sense in this context.
Whoops! That first Internet Week link should have gone here. Got an extra piece of punctuation there.
Consider this, and this. Businesses not only must wade through enormously complex licensing from Microsoft, but they run the very real risk of being audited - with the price of running an unlicensed copy at $150,000 per instance ! Massive effort is required to maintain software licensing compliance, with no real guarantee that the auditors couldn't find something - anything - if they tried hard enough.
It begins to feel like anyone choosing to run Microsoft software does so at grave risk to their businesses, which at any moment may be invaded by the software licensing gestapo, and be fined as much as the SPA figures they can pay.
Microsoft, faced with declining revenues, is going hard against businesses running their software to ensure software license compliance. Even a good faith effort doesn't provide enough protection.
My company has begun using Open Source /Free Software everywhere it can to reduce our software license liability. I expect that as Microsoft muscles in on more and more businesses, we won't be the last.
Enforcing this patent may just reduce the number of companies/number of people who actually produce/purchase these devices, thereby harming Microsoft's WinCE.
While Microsoft might not be a defendant, I'm sure their lawyers would be more than happy to provide amicus briefs against NCR's position. Or help out defending - should Compaq or any of the other WinCE-based device makers get named.
And your hostility does nothing to improve your argument.
Which means that Shoeboy simply added slashdot.org to his local hosts file, mapped it to his own machine, and ran tracert.
Not a bad troll, though.
I agree with you, mostly. Yes, there's a demarcation between right and wrong. Yes, we as a society draw that line; in addition to drawing it ourselves personally.
But the answer is certainly not taking down the network, but (as you rightly pointed out) finding better ways to make it difficult to spread the filth.
But when you go saying that humans built it, and can take it apart, you're not going to be taken seriously.
A number of factors are in play here. Consider who buys them - namely, university libraries, and corporate libraries.
Consider also that publishing a periodical like that takes a lot of money - peer reviewers need to get paid, production costs can be high for really nice paper and graphics printing, the distribution jobbers need money, etc. etc. etc.
The costs of production are spread over relatively few subscribers, when compared with periodicals like Maxim or even Scientific American, so the prices get very high.
University libraries get less and less use as the internet grows as an information resource, so their funding gets squeezed.
With the advent of large-scale interlibrary loan sharing via computers (for more than a decade now), libraries have been able to (informally) band together to reduce the number of journal subscriptions they carry. Can't afford a dozen journals at $10K a year? Library X agrees to maintain subscriptions to 6, and Library Y agrees to maintain subscriptions to the other 6; and they both agree to share articles as needed between them.
Both libraries save money (temporarily), but the publisher's subscription base gets even smaller, and the prices go up even more. Pretty soon those six subscriptions each are too expensive to maintain.
Factor in how easy it is to move documents around on the internet now, and it's easy to understand both why journal subscriptions are so expensive, and why publishers are running scared.
Just don't know where it ends.
Most of us have limited, if any, say in what operating systems are used around us. You work with what you have to - we don't often get to decide which system we get to use.
I'm sure we all have opinions regarding what the best OS or development platform is for this task or that - and good people can disagree.
I personally work in an environment where we use everything from Win32 to Macs to Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD, based on the task at hand. It's necessity - not a religious decision.
Aside, is it me, or does it seem that here on Slashdot the stories are becoming harder and harder to distinguish from the trolls?
But then, whipping the crowd into a froth generates lots of activity, which -has- to be good for advertising rates. Or maybe I'm just cynical after reading crap like this.
Probably the same number of people that are in the emergency rooms now from drug-related/gang-related shootings, stabbings, muggings, etc.
Not nearly so many innocent bystanders though.
Curious.
Which is not to say that finding the serialization and spoofing it somehow wouldn't be easy enough.
You've gotten to what I think is a critical issue here - liability risk management for the business. Risk management is what the business owner is all about here.
I don't see this as a 1st amendment issue - it's not about the government, or a publicly funded entity (school, library) preventing free exchange of ideas. It's about a shop owner who is worried that material that might violate community standards may appear in his store, especially since he's located right across from a junior high school.
The debate as to whether this is an appropriate concern is irrelevant - it's the owner's business, and the owner makes the rules.
The bad press created by kids seeing porn because no steps were taken to prevent it, so close to their school, would cause bad things to happen to his business. And that's before the legal trouble started.
My suggestion, and I'm not sure it's a good one, would be to install very tight censorware on the machines. Make it no secret. And then put up disclaimers everywhere, saying nothing is perfect. "Inappropriate material" (whatever that means) may get through. Material that's okay might be blocked. Give the attendant on duty the ability to override the block, upon request - should help with the "false positive" problem.
The owner is making a good-faith effort to do whatever he thinks is right; you might not agree with the conclusions he reached, but it's his store, his legal liability, his reputation in the community on the line here. It's therefore the owner's call as to what to do.
And if you refuse, there are plenty of people out there who would be glad to do it. If it's against your morals, feel free to walk away. He's free to do what he must; you're free not to do anything repugnant to your own ideals.
Ain't freedom great?
Not pricey at all, given its utility.
Actually, I find that an opposing view forces both sides to think harder - which I assume has -some- value here.
Who gives a damn where he works? And why does being a Microserf (if he is one) make you persona non grata here?
Such a narrow breadth of viewpoints reduces the relevance of any Slashdot discussion - makes me wonder sometimes why anyone with the obvious expertise that floats around here would continue to come here and wade through the trolls and partisan schlock.
But the discussion is a valid one, with many intelligent answers. I don't happen to group this one in that number.
Or maybe I just need my coffee this morning.
Frankly, I'd be scared as hell of using GPL'd code in anything after seeing this.