There are a few of us who have a soft spot for the theoretical Communist ideal of "from each according to his ability, to his each according to his need"; but I am certain that even that minority would not care to be associated with the totalitarian and murderous government of Communist China -- unrepentant perpetrators of numerous atrocities against its own people.
I "met" ESR about ten years ago, when I was an undergraduate reading talk.politics.misc and similar netnews groups. He failed to convince me to become an anarcho-capitalist; I failed to convince him that libertarianism was bunk. But we both tried really, really hard.
The mainstream media now see ESR as a spokesman for Open Source in general and for Linux in particular, and it seems like most geeks are hard-core libertarians. ESR could use his media visibility to argue for libertarian political goals, instead of arguing that Open Source software is good for people of all political stripes.
As one of the people who has a soft spot for "from each according to his ability...", I am glad that he passed up his most recent opportunity to do this.
(Note that in his article, ESR does not criticize the Chinese government's control over the economy; the only specific Chinese atrocity he mentions is the Tiannamen Square massacre.)
As someone worded earlier, the punishment has to be dealt soon, because in 5 years, Microsoft may no longer have a true monopoly. Well, isn't this a stronger case to leave this market alone... and that it will eventually situate itself for the better?
"Your Honor, maybe the prosecution is correct; maybe my client did steal a thousand dollars from Mr. Jones. But Mr. Jones is 95 years old, he has no heirs, and now that he has Alzheimer's disease, he can't make a will. In a few years, it will become completely irrelevant to Mr. Jones whether or not he gets his thousand dollars back. By the time I finish using all the techniques I have at my disposal for delaying this case, Mr. Jones could be dead... my client could be dead... heck, someone could drop anthrax on this city and we'd all be dead. Therefore, why don't you just dismiss this case?"
how successful would the Baby Bills turn out?
on
Everything Microsoft
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· Score: 3
the assets will be worth more if MS is broken up (see Standard Oil and AT&T as two examples)
I wonder if this is true.
AT&T, during the time that it was a monopoly, was trying to wire all of the US into a common telephone system. Once they achieved that, they were itching to branch out into other services, but they didn't want to get into antitrust trouble for doing so. By the time they settled with the DOJ, they practically wanted to be broken up, because every Baby Bell could sell products and services that a monopolistic AT&T couldn't get away with.
I don't know about Standard Oil. In the long run, certainly, the post-split companies have done very well, but how well would Standard Oil have done, by comparison (in terms of cumulative stock growth and dividends), if it had never been split up?
Hoo, boy, did he miss the point. The FoF was not complaining about how Microsoft got its OS monopoly. It was complaining about how Microsoft used it. Pournelle hardly touches on the latter point in his column; I wonder if, at the time he wrote the column, he had even read past paragraph 61.
How is technology any more tragic than other aspects of human existence?
Eating allows us to live, and gives us opportunities for physical or aesthetic enjoyment. But there are also people who hurt themselves with bad diets or eating disorders, and people who hurt others by encouraging them to adopt bad eating practices.
Clothes provide us with protection from the elements, allowing human beings to live almost anywhere in the world. But people also buy overpriced clothes simply to fit in with a popular crowd, or they stigmatize other people because of the clothes they wear (insert obligatory Columbine reference here:-).
By listening to or reading stories (in any medium), people can escape from the stresses of their normal lives, and learn to empathize with people different from themselves. But stories can also encourage people to follow a certain set of social norms, without defending the validity of those norms through logic. (As the late John Gardener said: nothing has the power to enslave like good fiction.)
In the article, the HP rep talked about a cell phone that would negotiate with carriers and choose the one offering the cheapest rate at that moment. Phone companies would hate to give consumers that kind of negotiating power, so even if e-speak takes off, don't expect the auto-rate-negotiating phone to arrive any time soon. (Coke machines, on the other hand...:-)
For business-to-business commerce, it's another matter entirely. I can see Compaq, for example, requiring all its suppliers to use an e-speak-compatible protocol; then, every time Compaq wants to order another thousand motherboards for its factory, its computers can call its supplier's computers and order from whichever supplier quotes the best terms.
Likewise, if a motherboard manufacturer can use the same e-speak-compatible protocol with Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc., it can have a server that examines the orders sent from various OEMs and decides how much to quote each one. (The manufacturer's director of sales could say, "Those guys at Compaq are such a pain to deal with, I don't want their business unless they offer 10% more than their competitors"; translating that demand into logic on the server would be a Simple Matter of Programming.)
Furthermore, while Compaq might want to negotiate with its suppliers in this way, they probably don't want to pay licensing fees to HP (their competitor in the Intel-compatible PC market) for the privilege.
So HP did well for society by making the protocol open-source; we'll see if they can do well for themselves by selling e-speak-related products to other companies. (For an explanation of why the GPL is better for this situation than the BSD, see my comment on the selfish case for the GPL.)
Years ago, I learned that Net debates about libertarianism generate more heat than light, so I won't argue against the claim that "a company in the free market cannot coerce".
Regarding the MS-Apple deal: From an antitrust point of view, this is suspicious because it's so lopsided. On Microsoft's end, the Mac version of Office is a complicated piece of software that costs them a lot of money to maintain. (Obviously, they get a profit from selling it, but if the profits alone justified the cost of maintaining the program, then why cut any deal at all with Apple?) If Microsoft had killed Office for the Mac, it would probably have hurt Apple a lot more than it hurt Microsoft (except for the antitrust considerations); at the time Jobs cut his deal with Gates, Apple was widely considered to be in its death throes, and losing such a widely-used piece of office software would have been seen as the coup de grace. Meanwhile, since Microsoft was giving away Internet Explorer, it wasn't directly sending any revenue to them.
Therefore, the deal of "we'll keep developing Office if you make Explorer the default browser" was, from Apple's point of view, a steal. The only way it makes business sense for Microsoft to offer such a deal is as an attack against Navigator.
Here's my summary of the judge's line of argument:
Netscape and Sun, with Navigator and Java respectively, could not clone the Win32 API (IBM tried doing that with OS/2, and gave up), but they tried to make it irrelevant.
Both products had (or tried to have) APIs that were the same across platforms. If these products become technically successful (instead of being "write once, debug everywhere") and gain enough market share, then third-party software developers will be able to write programs in Java, or programs using the Netscape APIs, and they will work on any platform that supports Java or Navigator. If enough third-party applications depend on Java, Navigator, Lotus Notes, Perl/Tk, or some other cross-platform middleware application, then people investigating a non-Windows operating system would have a lot more applications to choose from -- and Microsoft's monopoly goes bye-bye.
When Microsoft realized that they faced this competitive threat, they exploited the monopoly power they already had to attack Navigator and Java. To boost Internet Explorer's market share, Microsoft employed several strong-arm tactics that only could work because of Microsoft's monopoly power, and could not be justified (in the judge's opinion) as attempts to make things better for the consumer. Examples given in the FoF:
Microsoft told Intel-compatible-PC OEMs to make Explorer their default browser, in exchange for deep discounts on Windows licenses, lucrative co-marketing deals, and early access to Windows beta copies and technical information. OEMs who refused to cooperate were at a massive competitive disadvantage, and since no other operating system for Intel-compatible PCs has anything close to Windows's market share, they could not simply walk away from Microsoft.
After IBM announced that they would preinstall Lotus SmartSuite (another middleware application) on their PCs, Microsoft halted negotiations on giving IBM a Windows 95 announcement. IBM ended up receiving the license fifteen minutes before Windows 95 was officially launched (on August 24, 1995); other OEMs had Windows 95 PCs ready for the back-to-school market, but IBM didn't. Microsoft also shut IBM out of a number of other programs for OEMs. IBM lost large accounts representing about $180 million in revenue, because the customers thought that due to the strained IBM-Microsoft relationship, Windows wouldn't work as well on IBM hardware as on machines from other OEMs.
To limit Navigator's market share for MacOS, Microsoft cut a deal with Apple, in which Microsoft promised to continue to produce Microsoft Office for the Mac in exchange for Apple making Explorer the default browser.
In exchange for preferred treatment on the Windows desktop, a number of ISPs had to make Explorer their default browser, refrain from promoting Navigator, and had to make their home pages use some Explorer-specific tags.
Microsoft's developer tools for Java used a native calling interface that differed from Sun's interface. They could easily have given developers the option to use both methods, but they didn't. A Java-bytecode program that used Sun's native code interface wouldn't even work on Microsoft's JVM, and one that used Microsoft's interface wouldn't work on any other JVM.
Economists and business analysts could argue about whether or not all these things harmed consumers, and in fact both sides did argue about this in front of the judge. It's a judgement call, but this is the sort of judgement call that judges are paid to make.
Microsoft could have responded to the Navigator/Java/etc. threat by concentrating their resources on improving Windows -- just as Intel responds to AMD and Cyrix by trying to improve the Pentium. But merely building better products wasn't enough for them; they used every technique they could get away with to punish their competitors, using the sorts of punishments that only monopolies can mete out.
The judge hasn't issued his findings of law yet, and IANAL, but... Guilty, I say! Guilty, guilty, guilty!
THe fof written by Jackson was so poorly constructed from a legal point of view that any appeal is likely to succeed regardless of the merits of the case. The fof contains many holes and overreaching conclusions that any judge would find unexceptable.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I have read the FoF.
This is a finding of fact, not of law. It's the judge's opinion of what the events were and what their market effects are, based on how he weighed the credibility of everyone who testified. Appeals courts, unless there's a very clear and gross error, don't challenge the lower-level courts on findings of fact. Given this, how can you say the FoF was "poorly constructed from a legal point of view"?
What are the "many holes and overreaching conclusions" in the FoF? Remember, the opening paragraph (before paragraph 1) says "...the Court finds the following facts to have been proved by a preponderance of the evidence". Even if some of the conclusions are overreaching from a physical scientist's point of view, or even from a criminal court's point of view, that doesn't make them invalid in this context.
The best way out for Microsoft, as far as I can tell, is to convince a higher court that "Intel-compatible PC operating systems" (see FoF paragraph 18) is too narrow a field to constitute a "market" for purposes of antitrust law, and therefore its market share of Intel-compatible PC operating systems doesn't constitute a monopoly, and therefore its strong-arming of distributors, competitors, and potential competitors is legal. I wouldn't buy such an argument, but I don't know what the Supremes would do.
TV reporters covering rallies against the Vietnam War would usually point their cameras at the scruffy hippies or the people waving Vietcong flags, and not at the protesters who looked like normal college students.
This (a)convinced the average TV-watching American that the movement against the Vietnam War was populated entirely by weirdos, because that's what they saw on TV; (b)encouraged people in the antiwar movement to act more scruffy and dangerous, because they confused getting their images on TV with having an impact on public opinion.
For more details, see Todd Gitlin's book, The Whole World is Watching.
See this column by James Surowiecki in Slate. (Disclaimer: Slate is published by Microsoft.)
In (ahem) brief: Investors have been expecting the judge to rule against Microsoft for months. Therefore, before the judge issued the FoF, the MSFT stock price already took the effect of a negative ruling into account.
Remember, a company's day-to-day stock prices are not based on what it "realistically" (in some ideal universe of rational omniscient analysts) is worth, or what it "should" (according to someone's moral standards) be worth -- they're based on what the investors think it's worth.
I think the basic principles of antitrust law in the US are: It's ok to get a monopoly through the standard free-market techniques, but once you've got it, there are certain things you can't do with it.
So, for example, if so many consumers buy Acme hammers that Acme gets 90% of the market share, that's just fine. Once that happens, though, if Acme goes to Sears and says, "you can only buy Acme hammers if you buy Acme nails to go with them", or pulls various other tricks that take advantage of its monopoly position, then the Federal government takes an interest.
The following are all rhetorical questions that have no direct relationship with the GPL, so if you have the urge to post your answers, please feel free (ahem) to suppress the urge.
Is a country with strict child-abuse laws more or less free than a country where parents may whip their children?
Is a country where children cannot get a high-risk, high-potential-reward medical treatment more or less free than a country where parents may authorize such treatments?
Is a country where a 15-year-old can legally consent to have sex with a 30-year-old more or less free than a country where that relationship would be called "statutory rape"?
Is a country with high taxes and a strong welfare state more or less free than a country with low taxes and a laissez-faire economy?
Is a country with strict gun-control laws and a low crime rate more or less free than a country with lenient gun control and a high crime rate?
Is a slave whose master has a legal obligation to provide food and housing more or less free than a factory worker who can be fired at the owner's whim?
Is a Christian more or less free than an atheist?
Some people will find the answers to all these questions intuitively obvious, and speak as if anyone who would answer differently is a fool. This behavior is not a sign of intelligence. Sometimes, people who act this way have never seriously considered the arguments for alternative points of view, because study would actually exercises their brains, and it wouldn't be as much fun as staying in their current circle-j^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmutual admiration society.
MS has sunk a great deal of money into NT, and they have to maintain fast revenue growth to keep the stock analysts happy. Where are they going to get more revenue?
They can't charge too much for their consumer-oriented products (such as Win98 or the low-end versions of MS Office). If they did, it would just increase the attractiveness of (a) not upgrading a Win95 or Win98 system at all; (b) getting an email-and-web-only box instead of a PC.
By the same token, there are so many serious competitors for WinCE that Microsoft has to offer it cheap to OEMs.
That leaves the WinNT world. There are plenty of medium-sized and large businesses out there whose employees are running Microsoft Office on Microsoft NT workstations connected to Microsoft NT servers, with their email served by Microsoft Exchange, and their tech support staff populated by Microsoft Certified System Engineers. For those companies, the total cost of owning Linux/*BSD might make those systems competitive with Microsoft, but the total cost of switching away from Microsoft would outweigh the cost of W2K.
My wife has a Ph.D. in chemistry. Her dissertation is about 700 pages long. Unfortunately, she had already written about 300 pages of it in Microsoft Word before she learned that she could get TeX for her Windows machine. The, er, experience of writing such a long technical document in Word, and moving the file back and forth between her Windows 95 machine at home and the Mac in her advisor's secretary's office, made her eager to get Linux. (And this is someone who "hates computers".)
A friend of mine (who now works at Bitstream) claims to have written a BASIC interpreter in TeX. (TeX has variables, it has conditionals, it has loops -- presto, it's a programming language!) I once asked him if I could see the source code for this intepreter, but he demurred, saying he wants to be known for the high-quality programs he's written.
How often (due to system load, bugs in the software, network congestion, or an errant backhoe) does slashdot, or another popular Web site, become inaccessable to a user? How often does a critical server at the average high-tech company go down, taking some server-based applications (if not the company's whole intranet) with it? Do you really want mundane office applications that you (and the non-geek office workers in your company) use all the time to depend on an Internet connection to one group of servers?
To make matters worse: A system like this will probably be most heavily stressed at a time when the people who use it need it the most. Just imagine people all over the United States using a spreadsheet or accounting application through opendesk.com, and then all of them trying to run it simultaneously on April 14th. (Note to non-US readers: that's the day before US Federal taxes are due.) If this thing is installed on one company's server and run over an intranet, it makes a little more sense, but if the people who maintain that server aren't competent, the server and the intranet become a point of failure for all the company's office applications.
Desktop machines and desktop applications have plenty of administrative problems, but at least if one of them goes down, only one person's work is hosed.
For our embryonic network at home, we're using the names of plants in the nightshade family. (Atropine, a heart stimulant, is the chemical that makes deadly nightshade, a.k.a. belladona, deadly.) My wife's computer is "eggplant" and mine is "petunia"; when I get a certain 486 box up and running as a firewall, I'll call it "nettle". For future expansion, we have "belladona", "henbane", "potato", "tomato", "tobacco"....
If the fellow who owns the EROS copyright wants to be friendly to other businesses, then yes, he should use the BSD license. But maybe he doesn't want to be friendly. If he wants to turn EROS-related services into some kind of commercial venture, then the GPL acts as a "poison pill".
Anyone can now take EROS and add features to it, but they can't use those added features to gain a competitive advantage over EROS's creator, because he has access to the same source code that they use. This is an especially important trump-card if a company with deep pockets decides that they like EROS, but they don't like it enough to give its creator a piece of their action.
I agree that BSD-style licenses have a practical value when it comes to networking standards, and one could argue that the BSD is more altruistic than the GPL. However, if you don't want other people to prosper from your code at your expense, and both the proprietary route and a Mozilla-style license have failed to get you the financial benefits you hoped for, then the GPL is a better fallback position than the BSD. (I think this is why Red Hat puts all the software it writes under the GPL.)
Let's say that I have a service within EROS that could be invoked at any time, and many other processes have the capabilities to invoke that service. Now, let's say I want to upgrade to a new version of that service that has a backwards-compatible interface, without disturbing any other process in the system. How does EROS handle this? Do system utilities have a "replace me" capability? Is there some kind of package manager that stands as an abstraction barrier between a service and the processes that use it?
I wish I'd known about this yesterday -- I read some of the papers on EROS a few months ago, and it looked like a very, very cool design.
I had to reinstall Linux on my machine last night (moral: when the RH6.0 upgrade program says you don't have enough free space on/, don't click on the "Continue Upgrade Anyway" button... but I digress), and if I'd known I could get a GPL'd EROS, I'd have set up a partition for it.
Despite my interest in EROS, though, I don't have a lot of experience in C programming (and virtually none in C++), so I'm not sure how much I could accomplish by fumbling around in a completely new OS. Are there any high-level languages that run under EROS and that allow one to manipulate its special features? (A crude but standards-compliant Scheme implementation shouldn't take too long to write... unless, of course, I'm the one writing it....:-)
So the millions of people out there who believe they're christians because they follow their bible are... what? Simply deluded?
People who claim that the text of "the Bible" is the only foundation for their religion, and then make no effort to learn to read the Bible in its original languages, are ignorant. They are not really basing their religion on the Bible; they are basing it on a translation, or translations, of the Bible.
Human language is ambiguous, and the words and concepts in Biblical Hebrew and Greek don't always map very well onto modern English. Therefore, someone who translates the Bible into modern English has to make numerous judgement calls about what an obscure text really means. Scholars from different flavors of Christianity make different judgement calls. This is all very well and good, but when people confuse a translator's judgement call about the Bible with the Bible itself, then they are being ignorant.
If they go out and missionize us unwashed heathen, claiming that they have The Truth and we don't, because they read The Truth in "the Bible", then they're being -- to use your own language -- dumb and arrogant.
Perhaps you should enlighten us as to which bible all those pseudo-christians should have been using?
If some evangelical Protestant sect were to declare certain Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic manuscripts as canonical, and then took steps to make sure its members could read that manuscript without translation, I would have a lot more respect for it. I would be so astounded by this development that I wouldn't quibble about their precise choice of manuscript.
bringing up a child in a wealthy country is prohibitivly expensive
To be more precise: in an agricultural economy, children are an asset, because after only a few years they can help their parents out in the fields. In a developed industrial economy, children are a liability, because parents have to support them through years and years of formal education, and then they move out.
Can you recommend a program available for PalmOS that has the same features (and the same level of security) as Password Safe?
I could really use a utility like this -- although first, I have to save up enough quarters to get a Palm machine -- but even if I had source code, I wouldn't be able to distinguish a good security implementation from a bad one.
The bible says 'thou shalt not kill.' It doesn't say 'thou shalt only kill if it's a metaphor' or 'thou shalt only kill demons.'
Actually, the Bible says "lo tirtzach" (that's the best transcription I can do in the Roman alphabet; the "ch" is that non-English sound that's pronounced like "ch" in Scottish "loch"). In English, this is "do not murder". When the Bible refers to murder, it uses the "r-tz-ch" root; it uses other terms (such as "q-t-l" or "m-w-t") when it refers to other forms of homicide, such as the execution of someone who has committed a capital crime.
The King James version of the Bible preserves this distinction. In the dialect of English used at that time, the word "kill" refers only to murder. For non-murderous homicide, they used "slay".
Unfortunately, the King James version succeeded so well as a literary work that (a)new translations that kept up with the language, and sometimes were based on better scholarship, didn't have the same literary power as King James; (b)ignorant twits think that because they've read one translation of the Bible, they've read "the Bible".
Slashdot Mirror
The mainstream media now see ESR as a spokesman for Open Source in general and for Linux in particular, and it seems like most geeks are hard-core libertarians. ESR could use his media visibility to argue for libertarian political goals, instead of arguing that Open Source software is good for people of all political stripes.
As one of the people who has a soft spot for "from each according to his ability...", I am glad that he passed up his most recent opportunity to do this.
(Note that in his article, ESR does not criticize the Chinese government's control over the economy; the only specific Chinese atrocity he mentions is the Tiannamen Square massacre.)
AT&T, during the time that it was a monopoly, was trying to wire all of the US into a common telephone system. Once they achieved that, they were itching to branch out into other services, but they didn't want to get into antitrust trouble for doing so. By the time they settled with the DOJ, they practically wanted to be broken up, because every Baby Bell could sell products and services that a monopolistic AT&T couldn't get away with.
I don't know about Standard Oil. In the long run, certainly, the post-split companies have done very well, but how well would Standard Oil have done, by comparison (in terms of cumulative stock growth and dividends), if it had never been split up?
Hoo, boy, did he miss the point. The FoF was not complaining about how Microsoft got its OS monopoly. It was complaining about how Microsoft used it. Pournelle hardly touches on the latter point in his column; I wonder if, at the time he wrote the column, he had even read past paragraph 61.
For business-to-business commerce, it's another matter entirely. I can see Compaq, for example, requiring all its suppliers to use an e-speak-compatible protocol; then, every time Compaq wants to order another thousand motherboards for its factory, its computers can call its supplier's computers and order from whichever supplier quotes the best terms.
Likewise, if a motherboard manufacturer can use the same e-speak-compatible protocol with Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc., it can have a server that examines the orders sent from various OEMs and decides how much to quote each one. (The manufacturer's director of sales could say, "Those guys at Compaq are such a pain to deal with, I don't want their business unless they offer 10% more than their competitors"; translating that demand into logic on the server would be a Simple Matter of Programming.)
Furthermore, while Compaq might want to negotiate with its suppliers in this way, they probably don't want to pay licensing fees to HP (their competitor in the Intel-compatible PC market) for the privilege.
So HP did well for society by making the protocol open-source; we'll see if they can do well for themselves by selling e-speak-related products to other companies. (For an explanation of why the GPL is better for this situation than the BSD, see my comment on the selfish case for the GPL.)
Regarding the MS-Apple deal: From an antitrust point of view, this is suspicious because it's so lopsided. On Microsoft's end, the Mac version of Office is a complicated piece of software that costs them a lot of money to maintain. (Obviously, they get a profit from selling it, but if the profits alone justified the cost of maintaining the program, then why cut any deal at all with Apple?) If Microsoft had killed Office for the Mac, it would probably have hurt Apple a lot more than it hurt Microsoft (except for the antitrust considerations); at the time Jobs cut his deal with Gates, Apple was widely considered to be in its death throes, and losing such a widely-used piece of office software would have been seen as the coup de grace. Meanwhile, since Microsoft was giving away Internet Explorer, it wasn't directly sending any revenue to them.
Therefore, the deal of "we'll keep developing Office if you make Explorer the default browser" was, from Apple's point of view, a steal. The only way it makes business sense for Microsoft to offer such a deal is as an attack against Navigator.
Netscape and Sun, with Navigator and Java respectively, could not clone the Win32 API (IBM tried doing that with OS/2, and gave up), but they tried to make it irrelevant.
Both products had (or tried to have) APIs that were the same across platforms. If these products become technically successful (instead of being "write once, debug everywhere") and gain enough market share, then third-party software developers will be able to write programs in Java, or programs using the Netscape APIs, and they will work on any platform that supports Java or Navigator. If enough third-party applications depend on Java, Navigator, Lotus Notes, Perl/Tk, or some other cross-platform middleware application, then people investigating a non-Windows operating system would have a lot more applications to choose from -- and Microsoft's monopoly goes bye-bye.
When Microsoft realized that they faced this competitive threat, they exploited the monopoly power they already had to attack Navigator and Java. To boost Internet Explorer's market share, Microsoft employed several strong-arm tactics that only could work because of Microsoft's monopoly power, and could not be justified (in the judge's opinion) as attempts to make things better for the consumer. Examples given in the FoF:
Economists and business analysts could argue about whether or not all these things harmed consumers, and in fact both sides did argue about this in front of the judge. It's a judgement call, but this is the sort of judgement call that judges are paid to make.
Microsoft could have responded to the Navigator/Java/etc. threat by concentrating their resources on improving Windows -- just as Intel responds to AMD and Cyrix by trying to improve the Pentium. But merely building better products wasn't enough for them; they used every technique they could get away with to punish their competitors, using the sorts of punishments that only monopolies can mete out.
The judge hasn't issued his findings of law yet, and IANAL, but... Guilty, I say! Guilty, guilty, guilty!
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I have read the FoF.
The best way out for Microsoft, as far as I can tell, is to convince a higher court that "Intel-compatible PC operating systems" (see FoF paragraph 18) is too narrow a field to constitute a "market" for purposes of antitrust law, and therefore its market share of Intel-compatible PC operating systems doesn't constitute a monopoly, and therefore its strong-arming of distributors, competitors, and potential competitors is legal. I wouldn't buy such an argument, but I don't know what the Supremes would do.
This (a)convinced the average TV-watching American that the movement against the Vietnam War was populated entirely by weirdos, because that's what they saw on TV; (b)encouraged people in the antiwar movement to act more scruffy and dangerous, because they confused getting their images on TV with having an impact on public opinion.
For more details, see Todd Gitlin's book, The Whole World is Watching.
In (ahem) brief: Investors have been expecting the judge to rule against Microsoft for months. Therefore, before the judge issued the FoF, the MSFT stock price already took the effect of a negative ruling into account.
Remember, a company's day-to-day stock prices are not based on what it "realistically" (in some ideal universe of rational omniscient analysts) is worth, or what it "should" (according to someone's moral standards) be worth -- they're based on what the investors think it's worth.
I think the basic principles of antitrust law in the US are: It's ok to get a monopoly through the standard free-market techniques, but once you've got it, there are certain things you can't do with it.
So, for example, if so many consumers buy Acme hammers that Acme gets 90% of the market share, that's just fine. Once that happens, though, if Acme goes to Sears and says, "you can only buy Acme hammers if you buy Acme nails to go with them", or pulls various other tricks that take advantage of its monopoly position, then the Federal government takes an interest.
- Is a country with strict child-abuse laws more or less free than a country where parents may whip their children?
- Is a country where children cannot get a high-risk, high-potential-reward medical treatment more or less free than a country where parents may authorize such treatments?
- Is a country where a 15-year-old can legally consent to have sex with a 30-year-old more or less free than a country where that relationship would be called "statutory rape"?
- Is a country with high taxes and a strong welfare state more or less free than a country with low taxes and a laissez-faire economy?
- Is a country with strict gun-control laws and a low crime rate more or less free than a country with lenient gun control and a high crime rate?
- Is a slave whose master has a legal obligation to provide food and housing more or less free than a factory worker who can be fired at the owner's whim?
- Is a Christian more or less free than an atheist?
Some people will find the answers to all these questions intuitively obvious, and speak as if anyone who would answer differently is a fool. This behavior is not a sign of intelligence. Sometimes, people who act this way have never seriously considered the arguments for alternative points of view, because study would actually exercises their brains, and it wouldn't be as much fun as staying in their current circle-j^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmutual admiration society.They can't charge too much for their consumer-oriented products (such as Win98 or the low-end versions of MS Office). If they did, it would just increase the attractiveness of (a) not upgrading a Win95 or Win98 system at all; (b) getting an email-and-web-only box instead of a PC.
By the same token, there are so many serious competitors for WinCE that Microsoft has to offer it cheap to OEMs.
That leaves the WinNT world. There are plenty of medium-sized and large businesses out there whose employees are running Microsoft Office on Microsoft NT workstations connected to Microsoft NT servers, with their email served by Microsoft Exchange, and their tech support staff populated by Microsoft Certified System Engineers. For those companies, the total cost of owning Linux/*BSD might make those systems competitive with Microsoft, but the total cost of switching away from Microsoft would outweigh the cost of W2K.
A friend of mine (who now works at Bitstream) claims to have written a BASIC interpreter in TeX. (TeX has variables, it has conditionals, it has loops -- presto, it's a programming language!) I once asked him if I could see the source code for this intepreter, but he demurred, saying he wants to be known for the high-quality programs he's written.
To make matters worse: A system like this will probably be most heavily stressed at a time when the people who use it need it the most. Just imagine people all over the United States using a spreadsheet or accounting application through opendesk.com, and then all of them trying to run it simultaneously on April 14th. (Note to non-US readers: that's the day before US Federal taxes are due.) If this thing is installed on one company's server and run over an intranet, it makes a little more sense, but if the people who maintain that server aren't competent, the server and the intranet become a point of failure for all the company's office applications.
Desktop machines and desktop applications have plenty of administrative problems, but at least if one of them goes down, only one person's work is hosed.
For our embryonic network at home, we're using the names of plants in the nightshade family. (Atropine, a heart stimulant, is the chemical that makes deadly nightshade, a.k.a. belladona, deadly.) My wife's computer is "eggplant" and mine is "petunia"; when I get a certain 486 box up and running as a firewall, I'll call it "nettle". For future expansion, we have "belladona", "henbane", "potato", "tomato", "tobacco"....
Anyone can now take EROS and add features to it, but they can't use those added features to gain a competitive advantage over EROS's creator, because he has access to the same source code that they use. This is an especially important trump-card if a company with deep pockets decides that they like EROS, but they don't like it enough to give its creator a piece of their action.
I agree that BSD-style licenses have a practical value when it comes to networking standards, and one could argue that the BSD is more altruistic than the GPL. However, if you don't want other people to prosper from your code at your expense, and both the proprietary route and a Mozilla-style license have failed to get you the financial benefits you hoped for, then the GPL is a better fallback position than the BSD. (I think this is why Red Hat puts all the software it writes under the GPL.)
What if you want to upgrade or replace the forwarder? (yeah, I'm just being difficult....)
Let's say that I have a service within EROS that could be invoked at any time, and many other processes have the capabilities to invoke that service. Now, let's say I want to upgrade to a new version of that service that has a backwards-compatible interface, without disturbing any other process in the system. How does EROS handle this? Do system utilities have a "replace me" capability? Is there some kind of package manager that stands as an abstraction barrier between a service and the processes that use it?
I had to reinstall Linux on my machine last night (moral: when the RH6.0 upgrade program says you don't have enough free space on /, don't click on the "Continue Upgrade Anyway" button ... but I digress), and if I'd known I could get a GPL'd EROS, I'd have set up a partition for it.
Despite my interest in EROS, though, I don't have a lot of experience in C programming (and virtually none in C++), so I'm not sure how much I could accomplish by fumbling around in a completely new OS. Are there any high-level languages that run under EROS and that allow one to manipulate its special features? (A crude but standards-compliant Scheme implementation shouldn't take too long to write ... unless, of course, I'm the one writing it.... :-)
Human language is ambiguous, and the words and concepts in Biblical Hebrew and Greek don't always map very well onto modern English. Therefore, someone who translates the Bible into modern English has to make numerous judgement calls about what an obscure text really means. Scholars from different flavors of Christianity make different judgement calls. This is all very well and good, but when people confuse a translator's judgement call about the Bible with the Bible itself, then they are being ignorant.
If they go out and missionize us unwashed heathen, claiming that they have The Truth and we don't, because they read The Truth in "the Bible", then they're being -- to use your own language -- dumb and arrogant.
If some evangelical Protestant sect were to declare certain Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic manuscripts as canonical, and then took steps to make sure its members could read that manuscript without translation, I would have a lot more respect for it. I would be so astounded by this development that I wouldn't quibble about their precise choice of manuscript.I could really use a utility like this -- although first, I have to save up enough quarters to get a Palm machine -- but even if I had source code, I wouldn't be able to distinguish a good security implementation from a bad one.
The King James version of the Bible preserves this distinction. In the dialect of English used at that time, the word "kill" refers only to murder. For non-murderous homicide, they used "slay".
Unfortunately, the King James version succeeded so well as a literary work that (a)new translations that kept up with the language, and sometimes were based on better scholarship, didn't have the same literary power as King James; (b)ignorant twits think that because they've read one translation of the Bible, they've read "the Bible".