Re:Money is necessary and motivates here's why
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Why Do Open Source?
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· Score: 2
Quoth the poster: (emphasis added)
Money defines us.
And there, in a nutshell, is the defining belief of modern corporatism/consumerism. Here, in my own opinion, is the competing antithesis, the core belief of the FSOS movement and of humanism in general:
Not all values are economic values.
I can't speak for others, least of all the poster, but I can say that money doesn't define me. With my background, my credentials, and my skills, I could be pulling in a much larger salary... perhaps nearly double. If money defined me, I sure as heck wouldn't have opted to become a high school teacher and I wouldn't be sweating every day for low pay.
I do it because (a) it's important; (b) I'm good at it; and (c) I enjoy it.
Money facilitates my life. Would I like a new machine? Sure. Do I like to spend money on books or trips? Sure. So do I expect a living wage, a chance not to sweat every night over my bills? Of course. (Do I receive it? Well...:) )
Further sayeth the poster:
If I don't get enough money to support my computer hardware habbits then most likely development will suffer or maybe I don't have enough to buy technical books or whatever. Also similar to many Americans my psychological well being rests on getting money and avoiding the state that comes from not having money. This is just logic pure and simple.
If your pyschological well-being rests on getting money, I feel little but pity for you. Your life must be so empty and fearful that I cannot imagine it. If, on the other hand, your life is not, then I'm sure looking hard enough we'd find things more important to you than money.
Either way, it isn't logic. It's just the peculiarities of your own personal history. The peculiarities of my history lead me to the job I do.
And finally the poster offers:
spending your entire life giving only to realize at the end of the day that you have nothing yourself is a severe blow to personal progress.
to which I reply: No, spending your entire life slaving only to realize at the end of your days that you have nothing but little green pieces of paper -- no fond memories, no loved ones nearby, no lasting contribution to humanity -- that must be a severe blow.
Re:People work on Open Source because they are laz
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Why Do Open Source?
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· Score: 2
Quoth the poster:
Without any basis to back up my claims at all, I will assert that (most) people work on open source because they are lazy.
You say that like it was a bad thing...
There's nothing wrong with being lazy, as long as you are productively lazy. I teach physics -- at least, that's what my contract says I do -- and I spend all year trying to hammer home that point. In physics, properly understood, the goal is to take new phenomena and (as much as possible) understand them in terms of or at least by analogy to known phenomena. Sure, sometimes something totally new comes along... but even quantum mechanics draws heavily on good old wave motion.
Look to science as an example. Are people being "lazy" learning Newton's Laws or Feynman's QED theory? Shouldn't they just re-invent all that from the ground up? Of course not. That would be worse than silly. You see farther standing on the shoulders of giants.
I cannot comprehend this deep-set cultural obsession with work for its own sake... for doing something, anything, just for the sake of doing something. It's part-and-parcel with the mentality that work can't and shouldn't be fun or impassioned or interesting. The separation between "work" and "play" is one of the most unfortunate schisms in human history.
So yeah,
I do it for fun. Money doesn't really motivate me - as long as I can pay the bills and buy a cool toy every once in a while, I'm not concerned.
And this is why we, as geeks, mystify and terrify the corporate drones. They can't get their minds around the fact that we don't value money (or power, for that matter) the way they do. We have other goals in life and so we have slipped off the chain of the modern industrial machinery. In doing so we have slipped below their radar, too.
Fun is an all-too-often overlooked reason for people to do things (OSS being an example, but only one). All the drones and most of the sheep would be shocked if you were to say, "I enjoy my work. I like what I'm doing". In the modern world, you can be pleasured but you cannot have fun -- fun is random, and individual, and cannot be reduced to a bar graph and a bottom line. Fun cannot be marketed, and so corporations must spend literally billions convincing people that so-called entertainment is fun.
And as geeks, we must not imagine we are alone in this stance. Our allies are few, too few, but they are powerful. They are musicians and artists, writers and poets, teachers and preachers -- those motivated by a love of what they do and a passion for life and for human enrichment and a corresponding disdain for consumerism and corporatism. Together we all hover on the margin, in the society but not of it, witness to its excess and its own loud silence, its final utter futility. We observe the corporate world and its tainted society and we wonder what happens when it finally collapses in on itself.
But by living on the margins, we also happen to ring the beast. And if -- no, when -- we all wake up from our enforced slumber -- when all those on the edge, living life for the sake of living -- finally link hands, the days of corporatism will be numbered. We will have surrounded and removed our enemy -- by cooption, by the example of a better way. To end a long rant, let me reiterate: It is all about the fun. That is the key that keeps this movement, like others, going forward.
Re:Why do they assume motives are selfish?
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Why Do Open Source?
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· Score: 2
Quoth the poster:
The good feeling that one gets from finishing a software project and releasing it to the world is just as selfish a motiveas "greed" or "self-aggrandizement"... Simply put, there is a "good" kind of selfishness too, and that is the selfishness practiced by healthy, self-actualized people. They are selfish, but make sure their selfishness doesn't step on other people.
I see this a lot, and I simply have a problem with it. People seem to say that, by definition, you do things only through self-interest. Then they invent things like the warm, fuzzy feeling or the satisfaction of a commitment fulfilled, and use them to justify the assumption that there is a selfish motive involved.
Either this statement is true but meaningless -- it's true for all interactions and thus distinguishes none -- or it's deep but untrue. Some people some of the time do some actions for reasons that I think cannot be accurately labeled "selfish".
So here's "gilroy's hierarchy of motivation":
* Most people can be motivated only by considering themselves as the most important (or only!) factor in the Universe. They choose their actions without regard for what it does to others, and if they help others, it is only to hedge their bets against future need.
* A minority of people are motivated by their sense of the universal. Leaving behind the grounding in their baser selfish instincts, they see the Other as more important than themselves. They subjugate their own needs to the needs of the Other. If they look after themselves (for example, drawing a salary while working at a non-profit), it is only to provide the necessities required for continuing their work. These are the martyrs.
* A very, very few manage to slip past that fallacy, too. They value the individual, and since they too are individuals, they value themselves. They balance the needs of the Other against the needs of the Self and figure a best-fit path walking between them. They recognize that there are times that they, as human beings as well, are entitled to respect and protection.
That last is a tough, slippery line to walk. But no one said this would be easy.
Quoth the poster: We, as a community, need to take off the rose-colored Open Source glasses, and look at patents in a broader scope. Most of the patents that are issued every year have nothing to do with software. Many of them are not even related to technology. Before we start "reforming" patent law, maybe we should look at other areas that have a lot of patent activity. Ecellent point. Maybe the real issue is not patents but their application to the computer industry. Remember, these problems only grew exponentially once the courts broadened the realm of possible patents to include software and business models -- notoriously non-physical items. Perhaps it is time to recognize that cyberspace is not real space simulated in a computer. As we've heard ad naseum for the past year, the Internet has created a "New Economy" and the old rules don't work, or don't work the same way, in this new regime.
I don't think this was intention on Billington's part, but read if you will this statement:
He also stated that the Reformation was largely fought with the printing press, and that "media revolutions provoke intense debate."
This is happening, now, too, but Billington is on the wrong side of this reformation. He decries that the Net "seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing".
The commercial Net might be doing those things. (OK, there's no "might" about it.) But wherein that denunciation is SET@home, or Project Gutenberg, or World Hunger Watch? It's easy to say that letting everyone communicate leads to a lot of noise from riff-raff. But that's part and parcel of the new dynamism enabled by a new mode of communication.
Earlier in the article, Billington states that libraries are no longer the preserve of the elite and the royalty. Yet he then condemns popular expression on the Net. It seems that Mr. Billington is not willing to venture out into the big, bad Net to see what's actually going on. He's content to sit back and sniffle at the rabble. Sounds pretty elitist to me, in all the wrong ways.
Remember, at the time, lots of intellectuals derided Shakespeare's play as "simple mass entertainment" and lamented the fact that the printing press opened up books to the masses.
There's one thing wrong with that argument. Since the Library of Congress has such a vast collection, a person who wants to have access to the most information would do best to access the library stacks. But not everyone can afford to go to where the books are - so now, it is not discriminating against those who are not royalty or elites, but against those who simply don't have the funds.
But on the Corporate Earth, those with funds are the new royalty.
Quoth the poster (responding to someone else, shown in italics)
I think you must not have. Have you ever voted? Ever? If not, STOP **** COMPLAINING. The government answers directly to the voters.
I've voted every year since I turned 18, and not one of the people I've voted for has ever won. You want to tell me the government is reflecting my interests?
In an elected representative democracy, the government isn't supposed to reflect your interests. It's supposed to reflect the interests of the people, with a weight according to the percentage that vote a certain way. (Note: Not "feel a certain way". It only counts, in democracy, if you actually vote.) If most of the country doesn't agree with you, then the government shouldn't reflect your interests.
An important corrollary is that you must always retain the legal right to make your P.O.V. known, so that you have the opportunity to convince the rest of the country that your interests are their interests, too. But until you achieve that, sorry, you don't actually have a right to influence.
Those people aren't paying taxes to the government of the US, so they don't get their interest served!
Oh I see, so they aren't US citizen,s and so therefore there's nothing wrong with killing them by the truckload!... Does the concept of human rights mean anything to you?
But the concept of rights, especially enforceable ones, is the fundament of government and is anathema to a utterly free-market world. Human rights are rights you possess for the mere fact of being human -- they supersede (in theory) the rights and powers accrued by money, or guns, or anything else. They are intrinsically political, and thus intrinsically linked to government. In fact, the Enlightenment conception of government -- the philosophical basis of the entire system in the US, at least -- holds that governments (a) exist to secure the human rights of their citizens and (b) are necessary for that purpose, to some extent (open to debate).
Corporations, on the other hand, have no commitment to human rights. They exist to maximize shareholder profit, and if that means squashing someone, well, that's part of the plan. They play by the rules when they're being watched (by potential consumers) or when they're being forced to (by government), but playing by the rules is not part of their intrinsic nature. Because to a corporatist, the only value is economic value.
I'd also like to comment on an almost-quotation used by the original poster. The correct quote is
The power to tax
involves the power to destroy. --Chief Justice John Marshall
Note that he didn't say it is the power to destroy. Sure, taxation poses certain risks and imposes certain burdens. It shouldn't be left unwatched and unchecked. But Marshall never intended his words to argue against the very existence of taxation.
If I fail to pay my taxes, I will get thrown in jail. That's coercion. I never consented to the authority of the government, and I see no reason why I am bound to obey their command.
Unless the government has somehow blocked your emigration, you have consented to the authority of the government, since you remain a citizen and remain in the country. You are free to lobby to change things, or you are free to leave. If your personal comfort is such that you would find it inconvenient to leave, well, that isn't really the concern of the US government.
I don't like what Clinton's doing. Who do you propose I vote for, Bush? What is he going to do differently?
I see this a lot and frankly, it is beginning to annoy me. If the two parties have evolved towards each other, then it means that they are moving towards the common center of the country. Otherwise, one party would attempt to seize an advantage by moving more closely to the center of gravity of opinion. (Read: Democrats 1992, or for that matter, Republicans 1980.) If you really think the last eight years under Clinton would have proceeded exactly the same under Bush and then Quayle, then you simply haven't been paying attention.
Has it occured to you that people are more than just revenue-generators for the government?
Has it occured to you than people are more than just revenue-generators for the corporations? That's what ticks off the corporations so much -- when consumers end up having opinions, rather than simply open wallets. Why was Nike upset about revelations about working conditions? Because the American citizenry has values other than the coolest shoes... they did care about working conditions.
At the very least, the government at its core has the citizens. The corporations has only its shareholders. I'd prefer the former.
I would hardly claim the US government is universally beneficient. I would never claim it never oversteps its bounds, or that it never wastes our tax money, or that it never ignores its citizens. I would never argue that it is a perfect representative democracy or that the system works perfectly all the time.
But I would, and do, and will forever, argue that it works amazingly well considering all the different systems that litter history. It can be criticized because it all too often and all too casually fails to live up to its own professed ideals. But those ideals are real and valuable and vital. It is better to do evil by failing your purposes than to do evil by having evil purposes.
But the dinosaur analogy is a flawed one. Herds imply a certain homogeneity, that is, everything is essentially one species, but corporations, especially large ones, aren't like that
Since it's my original analogy that's getting mangled here, I'd like to put my two cents back in.:)
I'm not sure what sugarman was trying to say, but I was saying that each corporation is like a dinosaur (or other large animal). Sure, the dinosaur is make of lots of little cells -- brain cells, blood cells, etc. There are discrete types and each type has its own agenda and needs. In that sense, the dinosaur is far from homogenuous -- it's not a bundle of undifferentiated protoplasm.
But on a separate level, those sub-divisions don't matter. The dinosaur as a whole has its own agenda and needs and it doesn't really pay attention -- directly -- to the sub-levels. Now, there are also small fuzzy mammals on this playing field. They, too, are made of sub-levels, and those sub-levels are recognizably similar to the sub-levels of the dinosaur.
Yet the dinosaur doesn't recognize kinship to the mammal and (as I argued) doesn't even understand the concerns of the small players.
Now, the herd argument is different (I think). From my POV, I don't see any given corporation as a herd. As Hrunting mentioned, the members of a corporation are too diverse to really make the herd analogy work (on that level). On the other hand, I don't see too much difficulty in modeling corporations as each a member of a herd -- a corporatist herd. Notice that most of Big Business thinks much alike (there are exceptions, but they are a minority).
Quoth the poster: (My original post is in italics.)
To some extent, we all "own" Captain Kirk, Luke Skywalker, Rick Blaine.
I'd have to disagree. You may "feel" like you own them, but the specific characters are owned by those who created them.
Characters and settings take on a life of their own and, to an extent, pass beyond the control of the creators.
True to an extent. You're free to take any characters you want and write a story about them but just try and sell a story with Captain Kirk or any of the others without permission and see how far you get. ... Disney takes what is common property and fences it off as its own.
Again I disagree. It's the manner in which the story is told that is unique to Disney, not the story itself.... You could easily make an animated Snow White movie. Obviously it couldn't be set in a forest or have a wicked queen etc. etc.
But don't you see? That's exactly what I was trying to say about Disney "claiming" and fencing off IP. The dark forest, the wicked stepmother, the evil queen -- those are part of the original folktale and were around along time before Disney slapped together an animated film about them. But if you tried to release a retelling of that story, based on the historic folktales, you'd be harassed by Disney. They might even win in court.
My point is, fanfic is sort of the reverse of that. I recognize that, legally, ownership does not "dilute", that (say) Paramount retains legal ownership of Captain Kirk. But not all laws are good laws, and not all laws reflect the true reality of a situation. I am not encouraging IP theft, but I am trying to say that, in reality, Paramount has already lost control of that character. And, from my point of view, I guess I see that as a good thing.
Of course, the more money one tries to make off this, the less it can be argued to have passed in quasi-public, pan-cultural ownwership and the easier it is for Paramount to argue that your use of Captain Kirk is, in fact, theft. (Of course, you'd have to believe that intellectual property is property in the first place, but that's a whole 'nother flamewar...)
I might not have been clear, even by hedging my language as I did, but I was only commenting on the sociological reality, not the legal structure.
Netcraft lists 2,742,931 IIS servers as of last month, thats a heck of a lot more than the 12,000 your claiming
It certainly is. I wasn't exactly claiming any number at all. I was making a wild (apparently ludicrously low) guess, since I really had no idea how many machines would be suffering from the bug. This, of course, moves the estimate into the "hundreds of millions" range.
In my own defense, at least I got the percentage more or less right. As for the hard numbers, hey, what's a factor of a 1000 between friends?:)
As the phenomenon grows in its cultural significance, I think the ownership "dilutes". To some extent, we all "own" Captain Kirk, Luke Skywalker, Rick Blaine. They remain popular because they speak to our natures and because they have become woven into the fabric of our society. Characters and settings take on a life of their own and, to an extent, pass beyond the control of the creators.
I see fanfic as the reverse of Disneyfication: The Great Banal Mouse likes to take common folktales and appropriate the characters. (Go ahead, just try to make an animated movie about Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or Aladdin. These were part of the culture long before The Great Banal Mouse seized them.) Disney takes what is common property and fences it off as its own.
Fanfic does the opposite. It liberates fenced-off IP, moving characters and settings out of the realm of the few and into the hands of the society at large. Sure, most fanfic -- way more than Sturgeon's famous 90% -- is crap. But some are gems, and all of it is meaningful, to the author if no one else. People might be hackney writers, but they aren't hack writers. As such, the characters are freed from their status as a revenue source. Fanfic authors, in general, don't expect recompense, at least not in money.
In this gruesome, corporate, consumerist world, there's something beautiful about that.
You certainly should be able to have one segment of a program under a proprietary license and have other segments under the GPL
You can certainly argue the merits of this position. However, I think from reading the GPL and the Gnu statements on it, it's pretty clear the GPL is a tar-baby: Once a piece of code is touched by the GPL, it's stuck with it ad infinituum, forever and ever, world with end amen. This goes for any piece of the code, too -- RMS explicitly wants to "force" people to use the GPL, by releasing cool bits of code under it.
Put that way, the GPL is almost like a virus -- it tries to replicate itself in any program it touches.:)
Neologism? Re:books will always be around
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RMS On eBooks
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I thought this was a funny type that might very well serve to characterize (demonize?) the current generation of e-books, etc.: Quoth the poster (emphasis added):
When I study for school, I cannot take my computer to bed, even my laptop gets to
awkware to hold above my head
I believe the poster meant "too awkward", but I sort of like "awkware" for computerized tools that are simply too awkward for general use -- whose form ill-fits function.
Um, I am 99 and 44/100 percent certain that the first poster was referring to EverQuest (=EQ) tokens, the unit of currency in the Sony EverQuest shared universe. From the context of the original post (with apologies to Arlo Guthrie, "Remember the original post? This is a song about the original post"), it's pretty clear that the poster was discussing EverQuest, not the European currency unit (ecu).
Believe it or not, this wasn'tYet Another Example of American Cluelessness.
although I have to admit that an earlier poster's RPG analogy has given me pause. I haven't worked out that part yet, and I might have to change my stance.
Unnecessary. His analogy was idiotic. Unless you equate the right to life to the absolute right to become rich off a particular business model.
I'm not sure how I've ended up defending someone who was trying to demolish my argument, but..:)
I don't think you raise a fair criticism. When discussing ethics, morals, etc., it is customary to pick an extreme example, often involving death. This sharpens the debate a bit. Of course we could decide that the very extremeness of the example moves it to a different realm -- and for now, that is how I feel -- but that doesn't per se invaliadate the analogy.
Anyway, I don't know if anyone will take him seriously but (as I said) I'm going to spend some thought integrating this analogy into my worldview, and I'd like to think I am open-minded enough that there's a chance I might be persuaded. Otherwise, this isn't a discussion board, it's a bunch of semi-evolved monkeys shouting at each with bullhorns.
Any post that does not conform to the Open Source Movement party line is instantly moderated to oblivion where no user, especially no non-logged in user... is likely to see it, thereby supressing dissenting opinions
It's not really suppression, at least in the classic sense, in that all such messages are still posted and still archived and still available. On the other hand, such action is certainly dubious, at the least.
On the other hand, (and you knew it was coming), I see an awful lot of these "Anyone not toting the Open Source party light is moderated to oblivion". Now, admittedly, by definition I cannot know the complete extent of something I do not see, but the sheer number of such posts seems to undercut their thesis. After all, if the moderators were some great camarilla ("camarilla: n. a group of unofficial often secret and scheming advisers", from MW Online) gleefully moderating down non-Open Source comments, wouldn't they be cackling and moderating the complaints down to invisibility?
I surf at a level of "1", which means a logged-in user will automatically show up for me unless moderated down. ACs have a higher threshhold. Despite this, I see an awful lot of dissenting comments. Heck, some days, that's about all I see.
Clearly your mileage may vary but the moderation system seems to be working alright for me. But maybe I'm just another Linux groupie.:)
OK, OK, it's not really fair to harp on spelling errors... Goodness knows, I'm at fault at least as often as anyone else.
But... did anyone else find it hilarious that this poster confused the word "vulnerability" with "venerability". The latter, I assume, would mean "capable of being venerated", defined by MW Online (http://www.m-w.com/netdict.htm) as " to honor (as an icon or a relic) with a ritual act of devotion".
Considering the quasi-religious fervor on both sides of the issue, this struck me as wonderfully a propos.
have two points to make about this. Farther along you did point out that installing patches is in the job description. True enough. Installing patches to correct a backdoor, as this was alleged to be, should not be. But, your calculations leave out a number of other factors. The cost of an employee's time doesn't stop at his paycheck. There was server downtime involved. There are also other non-salary costs in keeping employees: benefits, the employer's contribution to Social Security, office space, etc.
Guilty as charged. All that stuff should be considered. But including it all would be hard (in the sense of "non-trivial") and that defeats the purpose of a back-of-the-envelope calculation. BOECs are intended to be quick or they're pointless.
Look at it this way: Do you believe I underestimated these other costs by a factor of 1000? That's about what it takes to move $480,000 to the realm of "hundreds of millions of dollars". I agree there are other costs, but to say that an admin's paycheck makes up only 0.5% of the actual cost seems to be stretching things...
Sorry to go all pedantic, but I teach physics and I'm always trying to get across the use of back of the envelope. It can be the most important space available...
Um, as has been pointed out, this story seemed to have a lot of confirmation to it... A competent respected source (NTBugtraq) spoked to a competent respected paper (Wall Street Journal), who decided to publish. (This generally means they sought confirmation of some kind.) The 'backdoor' was confirmed by people at Microsoft, and their whole mantra is that only they can know the software well enough to find these things...
Now, after analysis -- an analysis in line with the philosophy of Open Source, though certainly not technically Open, and though in line with other standards of good conduct -- it is discovered that the original implication of a stored key (ie, a back door) seems not to be true or at least not as bad as it seems. (I'm no net admin but it still seems like this passphrase allows people to do unintended thing, but the scope is much reduced.)
So, I think venting spleen is a little disproportionate here, although it'd be nice if now that the backdoor angle is disproved, people would stop waving the bloody shirt over it.
On the other hand, the sudden scrutiny of the obscure DLL revealed other vulnerabilities of a more serious nature. These vulnerabilities have remained undetected and hence unfixed for four years, due to security by obscurity. The poster says plaintively,
BIND itself sure has been the source of a number of root exploits so far, and there is no guarantee whatsoever that this won't happen again in the future
and I do not doubt the veracity of the statement. But I wonder if these root exploits remained available for four years. I suspect they were discovered and removed much more quickly than that.
Of course, the whole point of an Open Source approach is exactly the knowledge that "here is no guarantee whatsoever that this won't happen again in the future". Thus, it's important to mobilize the greatest possible resources to combat these problems. I like to use the following analogy: You can handle disease in one of two ways: (a) You can live your life in an antiseptic plastic bubble or (b) you can allow yourself to be exposed to lots of diseases, counting on a reactive immune system to figure out ways to counteract them.
Model (a) will keep you disease free, until your bubble is breached (for whatever reason). Then, you find yourself with an underdeveloped immune system and the smallest bug might kill you before your body can adapt. Model (b) runs the risk of continual low-grade infection, but the more serious cases are caught more often and dealt with more quickly and more safely.
To state the obvious, Open Source is more like (b). Microsoft's security through obscurity is more like (a). I hope I've hit you all over the head hard enough.:)
To wrap up, the poster then states
FUD should not become a standard for Linux advocacy...
to which I say "Amen!". Linux advocates shouldn't resort to FUD because they don't have to: On its merits, Linux will trump Windows. No need to distort the truth, when the truth is on your side...
If Slashdot would like to start posting essays on every Linux buffer overrun that comes down the pike,
I might be naive, because (not being a net admin) I don't actually track these particular threads, but are you sure vulnerabilities in Linux aren't discussed here? I seem to remember them being posting. I concede that MS vulnerabilities rile up the troops and generate a higher volume of posts, but I'm not sure the others are really ignored, per se.
Besides that, it's still unfair to rip into Slashdot for quoting a WSJ article that quoted MS as admitting this was a big problem. Here is the dilemma, apparently: Many people complain that Slashdot reported something (admitted, at the time, even by MS to be a problem) and didn't wait to see where the chips fell. But many -- and sometimes the same people -- like to post and complain that Slashdot news is old and has been reported in other places.
Since Slashdot is equally reviled for both extremes, they are probably doing something right.:)
Quoth Zico, first quoting someone else (whose post I can't see):
All bold is the mark of the troll.
Well, I guess it's appropriate then -- hell, people around here just see my name and immediately start marking down my posts as "trolls" anyway!;-)
I can't`speak to the latter, but I can't see how a pre-declared bold font makes one a troll. Actually, an all-bold post is more the mark of someone who misses the point of bold: to call attention to a piece of text. By filling my entire screen with bold font, you just remove the emphasis you were hoping to add. Indeed, unbolded text becomes the highlighted part then.:)
Nor will it compensate their bosses for what could be millions of dollars in expenses and business losses.
Now, I don't want to sound like a flamebait poster, but this reminded me of the companies that got Kevin Mitnick in jail. "We lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of him", they said. Were they exaggerating or not?
OK, that "millions of dollars" bothered me, too, because either a source or at least a back-of-the-envelope calculation would have been nice. But it will certainly cost something. Let's do that back-of-the-envelope:
Number of affected servers: 3000 (This is almost certainly way low, in that I'm assuming 25% of approximately 12,000 servers on the Internet. I have no real idea how many servers there are.)
Number of hours spent by a net admin to following the problem, creating or downloading a patch, and verifying both the problem and the solution: 4?
Average hourly wage of a net admin: $40?
Putting it together: 3000x4x40 = $480,000. Unless my estimates are off by a combined three orders of magnitude, it's probably not going to be "hundreds of millions of dollars". Sorry, ESR.
Also quoth the poster:
Isn't installing patches already the webmasters job? How can there be additional expenses?
Well, for one, this is an urgent security fix so this means bringing such people in on short notice, not as part of their day-to-day. But more importantly, sure, this is what net admins do. But in this particular case, you can point to the exact cause of this cost. What's more, it isn't even a case of code written in good faith that happens to break under real world conditions. This is a designed flaw.
Farmers have insurance in case of flood. That doesn't excuse the guy who blows the dam.
No, this isn't Heaven's Gift, it's Satan's Blessing. Too many people see Microsoft as the sort of God of software and when your God fails you, where do you turn? Certainly not to the meek.
Yet on the other hand, the meek shall inherit the earth... yet another piece of avant-garde revolutionary counterintuition.
When is the last time you, or anyone else, used Napster to trade legal MP3's? How would you go about doing it?
I can't speak for anyone else. (Does this make me a Slashdot heretic?:) ) For myself, the number is 0. Of course, I don't happen to use MP3s.. I have a couple of legal ones (from mp3.com, plus one I took from my own Jackson Browne CD just to try our the tech) but I'm not into it.
Since I've never visited napster.com nor used napster, I have no idea how to find legal MP3s. I have no idea how to find illegal ones, either. I don't see the relevance... although I have to admit that an earlier poster's RPG analogy has given me pause. I haven't worked out that part yet, and I might have to change my stance.
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I do it because (a) it's important; (b) I'm good at it; and (c) I enjoy it.
Money facilitates my life. Would I like a new machine? Sure. Do I like to spend money on books or trips? Sure. So do I expect a living wage, a chance not to sweat every night over my bills? Of course. (Do I receive it? Well... :) )
Further sayeth the poster:
If your pyschological well-being rests on getting money, I feel little but pity for you. Your life must be so empty and fearful that I cannot imagine it. If, on the other hand, your life is not, then I'm sure looking hard enough we'd find things more important to you than money.Either way, it isn't logic. It's just the peculiarities of your own personal history. The peculiarities of my history lead me to the job I do.
And finally the poster offers:
to which I reply:No, spending your entire life slaving only to realize at the end of your days that you have nothing but little green pieces of paper -- no fond memories, no loved ones nearby, no lasting contribution to humanity -- that must be a severe blow.
There's nothing wrong with being lazy, as long as you are productively lazy. I teach physics -- at least, that's what my contract says I do -- and I spend all year trying to hammer home that point. In physics, properly understood, the goal is to take new phenomena and (as much as possible) understand them in terms of or at least by analogy to known phenomena. Sure, sometimes something totally new comes along ... but even quantum mechanics draws heavily on good old wave motion.
Look to science as an example. Are people being "lazy" learning Newton's Laws or Feynman's QED theory? Shouldn't they just re-invent all that from the ground up? Of course not. That would be worse than silly. You see farther standing on the shoulders of giants.
I cannot comprehend this deep-set cultural obsession with work for its own sake... for doing something, anything, just for the sake of doing something. It's part-and-parcel with the mentality that work can't and shouldn't be fun or impassioned or interesting. The separation between "work" and "play" is one of the most unfortunate schisms in human history.
Fun is an all-too-often overlooked reason for people to do things (OSS being an example, but only one). All the drones and most of the sheep would be shocked if you were to say, "I enjoy my work. I like what I'm doing". In the modern world, you can be pleasured but you cannot have fun -- fun is random, and individual, and cannot be reduced to a bar graph and a bottom line. Fun cannot be marketed, and so corporations must spend literally billions convincing people that so-called entertainment is fun.
And as geeks, we must not imagine we are alone in this stance. Our allies are few, too few, but they are powerful. They are musicians and artists, writers and poets, teachers and preachers -- those motivated by a love of what they do and a passion for life and for human enrichment and a corresponding disdain for consumerism and corporatism. Together we all hover on the margin, in the society but not of it, witness to its excess and its own loud silence, its final utter futility. We observe the corporate world and its tainted society and we wonder what happens when it finally collapses in on itself.
But by living on the margins, we also happen to ring the beast. And if -- no, when -- we all wake up from our enforced slumber -- when all those on the edge, living life for the sake of living -- finally link hands, the days of corporatism will be numbered. We will have surrounded and removed our enemy -- by cooption, by the example of a better way. To end a long rant, let me reiterate: It is all about the fun. That is the key that keeps this movement, like others, going forward.
Either this statement is true but meaningless -- it's true for all interactions and thus distinguishes none -- or it's deep but untrue. Some people some of the time do some actions for reasons that I think cannot be accurately labeled "selfish".
So here's "gilroy's hierarchy of motivation":
* Most people can be motivated only by considering themselves as the most important (or only!) factor in the Universe. They choose their actions without regard for what it does to others, and if they help others, it is only to hedge their bets against future need.
* A minority of people are motivated by their sense of the universal. Leaving behind the grounding in their baser selfish instincts, they see the Other as more important than themselves. They subjugate their own needs to the needs of the Other. If they look after themselves (for example, drawing a salary while working at a non-profit), it is only to provide the necessities required for continuing their work. These are the martyrs.
* A very, very few manage to slip past that fallacy, too. They value the individual, and since they too are individuals, they value themselves. They balance the needs of the Other against the needs of the Self and figure a best-fit path walking between them. They recognize that there are times that they, as human beings as well, are entitled to respect and protection.
That last is a tough, slippery line to walk. But no one said this would be easy.
Quoth the poster: We, as a community, need to take off the rose-colored Open Source glasses, and look at patents in a broader scope. Most of the patents that are issued every year have nothing to do with software. Many of them are not even related to technology. Before we start "reforming" patent law, maybe we should look at other areas that have a lot of patent activity. Ecellent point. Maybe the real issue is not patents but their application to the computer industry. Remember, these problems only grew exponentially once the courts broadened the realm of possible patents to include software and business models -- notoriously non-physical items. Perhaps it is time to recognize that cyberspace is not real space simulated in a computer. As we've heard ad naseum for the past year, the Internet has created a "New Economy" and the old rules don't work, or don't work the same way, in this new regime.
The commercial Net might be doing those things. (OK, there's no "might" about it.) But wherein that denunciation is SET@home, or Project Gutenberg, or World Hunger Watch? It's easy to say that letting everyone communicate leads to a lot of noise from riff-raff. But that's part and parcel of the new dynamism enabled by a new mode of communication.
Earlier in the article, Billington states that libraries are no longer the preserve of the elite and the royalty. Yet he then condemns popular expression on the Net. It seems that Mr. Billington is not willing to venture out into the big, bad Net to see what's actually going on. He's content to sit back and sniffle at the rabble. Sounds pretty elitist to me, in all the wrong ways.
Remember, at the time, lots of intellectuals derided Shakespeare's play as "simple mass entertainment" and lamented the fact that the printing press opened up books to the masses.
An important corrollary is that you must always retain the legal right to make your P.O.V. known, so that you have the opportunity to convince the rest of the country that your interests are their interests, too. But until you achieve that, sorry, you don't actually have a right to influence.
But the concept of rights, especially enforceable ones, is the fundament of government and is anathema to a utterly free-market world. Human rights are rights you possess for the mere fact of being human -- they supersede (in theory) the rights and powers accrued by money, or guns, or anything else. They are intrinsically political, and thus intrinsically linked to government. In fact, the Enlightenment conception of government -- the philosophical basis of the entire system in the US, at least -- holds that governments (a) exist to secure the human rights of their citizens and (b) are necessary for that purpose, to some extent (open to debate).Corporations, on the other hand, have no commitment to human rights. They exist to maximize shareholder profit, and if that means squashing someone, well, that's part of the plan. They play by the rules when they're being watched (by potential consumers) or when they're being forced to (by government), but playing by the rules is not part of their intrinsic nature. Because to a corporatist, the only value is economic value.
I'd also like to comment on an almost-quotation used by the original poster. The correct quote is
Note that he didn't say it is the power to destroy. Sure, taxation poses certain risks and imposes certain burdens. It shouldn't be left unwatched and unchecked. But Marshall never intended his words to argue against the very existence of taxation. Unless the government has somehow blocked your emigration, you have consented to the authority of the government, since you remain a citizen and remain in the country. You are free to lobby to change things, or you are free to leave. If your personal comfort is such that you would find it inconvenient to leave, well, that isn't really the concern of the US government. I see this a lot and frankly, it is beginning to annoy me. If the two parties have evolved towards each other, then it means that they are moving towards the common center of the country. Otherwise, one party would attempt to seize an advantage by moving more closely to the center of gravity of opinion. (Read: Democrats 1992, or for that matter, Republicans 1980.) If you really think the last eight years under Clinton would have proceeded exactly the same under Bush and then Quayle, then you simply haven't been paying attention. Has it occured to you than people are more than just revenue-generators for the corporations? That's what ticks off the corporations so much -- when consumers end up having opinions, rather than simply open wallets. Why was Nike upset about revelations about working conditions? Because the American citizenry has values other than the coolest shoes... they did care about working conditions.At the very least, the government at its core has the citizens. The corporations has only its shareholders. I'd prefer the former.
I would hardly claim the US government is universally beneficient. I would never claim it never oversteps its bounds, or that it never wastes our tax money, or that it never ignores its citizens. I would never argue that it is a perfect representative democracy or that the system works perfectly all the time.
But I would, and do, and will forever, argue that it works amazingly well considering all the different systems that litter history. It can be criticized because it all too often and all too casually fails to live up to its own professed ideals. But those ideals are real and valuable and vital. It is better to do evil by failing your purposes than to do evil by having evil purposes.
I'm not sure what sugarman was trying to say, but I was saying that each corporation is like a dinosaur (or other large animal). Sure, the dinosaur is make of lots of little cells -- brain cells, blood cells, etc. There are discrete types and each type has its own agenda and needs. In that sense, the dinosaur is far from homogenuous -- it's not a bundle of undifferentiated protoplasm.
But on a separate level, those sub-divisions don't matter. The dinosaur as a whole has its own agenda and needs and it doesn't really pay attention -- directly -- to the sub-levels. Now, there are also small fuzzy mammals on this playing field. They, too, are made of sub-levels, and those sub-levels are recognizably similar to the sub-levels of the dinosaur.
Yet the dinosaur doesn't recognize kinship to the mammal and (as I argued) doesn't even understand the concerns of the small players.
Now, the herd argument is different (I think). From my POV, I don't see any given corporation as a herd. As Hrunting mentioned, the members of a corporation are too diverse to really make the herd analogy work (on that level). On the other hand, I don't see too much difficulty in modeling corporations as each a member of a herd -- a corporatist herd. Notice that most of Big Business thinks much alike (there are exceptions, but they are a minority).
Does that help? probably not. Oh, well.
My point is, fanfic is sort of the reverse of that. I recognize that, legally, ownership does not "dilute", that (say) Paramount retains legal ownership of Captain Kirk. But not all laws are good laws, and not all laws reflect the true reality of a situation. I am not encouraging IP theft, but I am trying to say that, in reality, Paramount has already lost control of that character. And, from my point of view, I guess I see that as a good thing.
Of course, the more money one tries to make off this, the less it can be argued to have passed in quasi-public, pan-cultural ownwership and the easier it is for Paramount to argue that your use of Captain Kirk is, in fact, theft. (Of course, you'd have to believe that intellectual property is property in the first place, but that's a whole 'nother flamewar...)
I might not have been clear, even by hedging my language as I did, but I was only commenting on the sociological reality, not the legal structure.
In my own defense, at least I got the percentage more or less right. As for the hard numbers, hey, what's a factor of a 1000 between friends? :)
Thanks for the correction.
I see fanfic as the reverse of Disneyfication: The Great Banal Mouse likes to take common folktales and appropriate the characters. (Go ahead, just try to make an animated movie about Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or Aladdin. These were part of the culture long before The Great Banal Mouse seized them.) Disney takes what is common property and fences it off as its own.
Fanfic does the opposite. It liberates fenced-off IP, moving characters and settings out of the realm of the few and into the hands of the society at large. Sure, most fanfic -- way more than Sturgeon's famous 90% -- is crap. But some are gems, and all of it is meaningful, to the author if no one else. People might be hackney writers, but they aren't hack writers. As such, the characters are freed from their status as a revenue source. Fanfic authors, in general, don't expect recompense, at least not in money.
In this gruesome, corporate, consumerist world, there's something beautiful about that.
Put that way, the GPL is almost like a virus -- it tries to replicate itself in any program it touches. :)
Believe it or not, this wasn'tYet Another Example of American Cluelessness.
I don't think you raise a fair criticism. When discussing ethics, morals, etc., it is customary to pick an extreme example, often involving death. This sharpens the debate a bit. Of course we could decide that the very extremeness of the example moves it to a different realm -- and for now, that is how I feel -- but that doesn't per se invaliadate the analogy.
Anyway, I don't know if anyone will take him seriously but (as I said) I'm going to spend some thought integrating this analogy into my worldview, and I'd like to think I am open-minded enough that there's a chance I might be persuaded. Otherwise, this isn't a discussion board, it's a bunch of semi-evolved monkeys shouting at each with bullhorns.
Granted, on some days on some threads... :)
On the other hand, (and you knew it was coming), I see an awful lot of these "Anyone not toting the Open Source party light is moderated to oblivion". Now, admittedly, by definition I cannot know the complete extent of something I do not see, but the sheer number of such posts seems to undercut their thesis. After all, if the moderators were some great camarilla ("camarilla: n. a group of unofficial often secret and scheming advisers", from MW Online) gleefully moderating down non-Open Source comments, wouldn't they be cackling and moderating the complaints down to invisibility?
I surf at a level of "1", which means a logged-in user will automatically show up for me unless moderated down. ACs have a higher threshhold. Despite this, I see an awful lot of dissenting comments. Heck, some days, that's about all I see.
Clearly your mileage may vary but the moderation system seems to be working alright for me. But maybe I'm just another Linux groupie. :)
But... did anyone else find it hilarious that this poster confused the word "vulnerability" with "venerability". The latter, I assume, would mean "capable of being venerated", defined by MW Online (http://www.m-w.com/netdict.htm) as " to honor (as an icon or a relic) with a ritual act of devotion".
Considering the quasi-religious fervor on both sides of the issue, this struck me as wonderfully a propos.
Look at it this way: Do you believe I underestimated these other costs by a factor of 1000? That's about what it takes to move $480,000 to the realm of "hundreds of millions of dollars". I agree there are other costs, but to say that an admin's paycheck makes up only 0.5% of the actual cost seems to be stretching things...
Sorry to go all pedantic, but I teach physics and I'm always trying to get across the use of back of the envelope. It can be the most important space available...
Now, after analysis -- an analysis in line with the philosophy of Open Source, though certainly not technically Open, and though in line with other standards of good conduct -- it is discovered that the original implication of a stored key (ie, a back door) seems not to be true or at least not as bad as it seems. (I'm no net admin but it still seems like this passphrase allows people to do unintended thing, but the scope is much reduced.)
So, I think venting spleen is a little disproportionate here, although it'd be nice if now that the backdoor angle is disproved, people would stop waving the bloody shirt over it.
On the other hand, the sudden scrutiny of the obscure DLL revealed other vulnerabilities of a more serious nature. These vulnerabilities have remained undetected and hence unfixed for four years, due to security by obscurity. The poster says plaintively,
and I do not doubt the veracity of the statement. But I wonder if these root exploits remained available for four years. I suspect they were discovered and removed much more quickly than that.Of course, the whole point of an Open Source approach is exactly the knowledge that "here is no guarantee whatsoever that this won't happen again in the future". Thus, it's important to mobilize the greatest possible resources to combat these problems. I like to use the following analogy: You can handle disease in one of two ways: (a) You can live your life in an antiseptic plastic bubble or (b) you can allow yourself to be exposed to lots of diseases, counting on a reactive immune system to figure out ways to counteract them.
Model (a) will keep you disease free, until your bubble is breached (for whatever reason). Then, you find yourself with an underdeveloped immune system and the smallest bug might kill you before your body can adapt. Model (b) runs the risk of continual low-grade infection, but the more serious cases are caught more often and dealt with more quickly and more safely.
To state the obvious, Open Source is more like (b). Microsoft's security through obscurity is more like (a). I hope I've hit you all over the head hard enough. :)
To wrap up, the poster then states
to which I say "Amen!". Linux advocates shouldn't resort to FUD because they don't have to: On its merits, Linux will trump Windows. No need to distort the truth, when the truth is on your side...Besides that, it's still unfair to rip into Slashdot for quoting a WSJ article that quoted MS as admitting this was a big problem. Here is the dilemma, apparently: Many people complain that Slashdot reported something (admitted, at the time, even by MS to be a problem) and didn't wait to see where the chips fell. But many -- and sometimes the same people -- like to post and complain that Slashdot news is old and has been reported in other places.
Since Slashdot is equally reviled for both extremes, they are probably doing something right. :)
Number of affected servers: 3000
(This is almost certainly way low, in that I'm assuming 25% of approximately 12,000 servers on the Internet. I have no real idea how many servers there are.)
Number of hours spent by a net admin to following the problem, creating or downloading a patch, and verifying both the problem and the solution: 4?
Average hourly wage of a net admin: $40?
Putting it together: 3000x4x40 = $480,000. Unless my estimates are off by a combined three orders of magnitude, it's probably not going to be "hundreds of millions of dollars". Sorry, ESR.
Also quoth the poster:
Well, for one, this is an urgent security fix so this means bringing such people in on short notice, not as part of their day-to-day. But more importantly, sure, this is what net admins do. But in this particular case, you can point to the exact cause of this cost. What's more, it isn't even a case of code written in good faith that happens to break under real world conditions. This is a designed flaw.Farmers have insurance in case of flood. That doesn't excuse the guy who blows the dam.
"And the geek shall inherit the Net..."?? :)
Since I've never visited napster.com nor used napster, I have no idea how to find legal MP3s. I have no idea how to find illegal ones, either. I don't see the relevance... although I have to admit that an earlier poster's RPG analogy has given me pause. I haven't worked out that part yet, and I might have to change my stance.