But it's not an incentive to produce. Prior to copyright law content creators had to keep creating to feed themselves, whereas the system we have now says, "Create a winner, milk it for the rest of your life."
prior to copyright law, methods of mass production did not exist.
if the art you created (a song, piece of software,etc) is popular still, then you deserve to milk it for as long as people are willing to pay you for it. This, however, won't last forever. You can't force things down people's throats forever. Eventually your art loses traction, and people move on.
The vendor continues making improvements to your code, but again, the majority of them are useless without the right keys. Eventually the vendor is making $2-4B dollars a year using software that is 98% your work yet you don't get to enjoy any of the benefits of modifications to the code you wrote.
Does that just about sum up the position you are supporting?
When you release software under the GPL, there is a very high probability that someone will take your code, make money from it, and not release anything back into the community. This is the chance you take.
When I first heard about the GPL, I thought it was a good idea. A community of programmers working together to create applications. It seems like it has turned into a way to trap corporations and businesses into having to release their source code.
I don't know why any company in their right mind would want to use software licensed under the GPL in their products. It forces you to give your product to your competition on a silver platter. I think as FSF decides to sue more and more companies for violations, there will be an even greater resistance to free software in the business world. It's starting to become more of a liability than anything else. Businesses don't care about the spread of free source code. They care about their bottom line, which is greatly improved if work that otherwise would cost a large amount of money hours has a $0 price tag.
As a software developer, I don't care if a corporation uses my GPLd code in their apps without re-releasing it. It's still free in my mind.
The vendor continues making improvements to your code, but again, the majority of them are useless without the right keys. Eventually the vendor is making $2-4B dollars a year using software that is 98% your work yet you don't get to enjoy any of the benefits of modifications to the code you wrote.
it sounds now like you would be bitter that someone else is making money from your code.
Think of DRM as a dictatorship and the GNU as communism. As both start to get closer to their true selves, they both become just as restrictive. The GPLV3 is starting to show this.
Rent A Coder is for slaves. Everyone should boycott. Nobody wants to work for pennies an hour except low life scum you find at Rent A Coder. Literally scraping the bottom of the barell for garbage code
you boycott by charging more for your services. In my experience, when I charge a little bit more money for my consulting services, I get higher-quality companies and more business.
The companies willing to pay shit will get just that. I think that many companies have learned that the communication issues and terrible coding practices of many of the indian programmers/groups just arent's worth the low price.
I think it has less to do with source and more to do with the fact that there aren't really that many viruses for linux.
how many people actually go through the entire source of a program they are about to compile?
also, when you randomly search for hosts on a network, you will be more likely to find a windows box to infect than a linux box. This is why windows viruses are more likely to spread in the wild.
if someone buried a virus in the sourcecode of a large program, I think it would be awhile before it was found.
Your forgetting, this is the U.S. We dont need to CONVINCE libya of anything, we just need to liberate them
you're also forgetting that other countries don't need or deserve our help. Terrible dictators should continue to starve and murder their own people. We should also let them build nuclear weapons..because they won't hurt anyone.
If other countries want freedom, they should get it themselves.
I realize that you are too young to remember this, but before p2p we had Cassette taps. Go to your mommies house and check the drawers or boxes in the attic. you will find lots of little "tape" type disk looking thingies that have music on them. Before p2p people bought cassettes and pirated music by hand..... ahh those were the days.
and before cassetts they had 8-track tapes and 45's. Im afraid you need to go to your mommies house.
you never read my post, did you.
cassetes could not be traded with thousands of other people within a few hours. With cassetes, it wasn't a problem. With p2p..it is.
You can't tell me there isn't a correlation between p2p networks and cheap cdrs in the hands of the masses and the recent loss in sales (and im saying over the last 5 years). The fact of the matter is: people just aren't buying music anymore because they can either 1) download it for free from the internet or 2) burn it from a friend. Before p2p, people were forced to buy music if they wanted to listen to it. Why bother buying music if you can download it for free and burn it onto a CD? (and the quality is near-perfect). The main reason people are downloading music is because they are too cheap and lazy to go out and buy it. (proof: itunes sells songs for.99 and p2p networks are bigger than ever)
I can't even remember the last time I or any of my friends have bought music. I only stopped using various p2p networks because of the RIAA scare tactics. But im not trying to fool myself or other people into believing that what im doing is right.
Eventually, piracy causes the recording industry (or whoever's IP is being infringed) to lose money. This is because more and more people see it as worthless and aren't willing to pay for it.
Im not justifying the RIAAs actions or prices, but I don't think the people infringing on copyrights should be justified either.
I dunno.. Redhat seem to have no problems with this.
In the real world most end users don't give a crap if the source is available.. they're not programmers. They want support (which the likes of IBM/Redhat give them) and they're prepared to pay to get it.
redhat makes money off of the backs of hard working free software developers. They are basically a support company that just happens to support OSS.
He just said that you need to include the source when you ship the binary copy. If he'd wanted everything to be free as in beer as well as free as in freedom, he would have written that into the license.
This means that the end-user can compile it and legally pass it around to anyone they want promptly destroying any hope of the orignal company turning a profit.
If you charge money for your software and release it under the GNU license, you are forced you to compete with a free version of your software (why would someone pay for something that they can get for free..from you (and im talking about an exact copy). Small software companies have trouble making a profit as it is.
The only way I can see free software benefiting companies is the fact that it's free (as in beer), which is exactly what the original poster was talking about.
Indeed. Linux distros already had a lot of issues in the late nineties, like installing any server under the Sun, and enabling them. Been there, done that already. Your point being?
in the late nineties, linux had considerably less market share than it does now. It also was hardly known by the average computer user. Some issues will not be apparent until it has a lot more marketshare in the desktop market, which remains to be seen.
Oh yes, nazi policies for Security Enhanced Linux would! I suggest you read up on it
You can have nazi policies for any operating system (even windows). as secure as a linux distro might be, it may prevent the average user from switching from windows (because of its difficulty).
The other major distros would have made Security Enhanced Linux with tight policies the default. This would break a lot, and be a pain for many users. Installing third party software would be really laborious. But the distros and the users would put up with that if malware bacame a big deal on Linux.
if millions of people were already using the software unsecured, we would have the same problems (and installing third-part software is what we have right now, on the windows platform).
Also, even if malware couldn't run in admin mode, there would be nothing stopping it from trashing user's data...which is just as bad and equally as difficult to fix.
If you're looking over my shoulder every minute of the day, checking my email, checking my browsing I'm liable to punch you in the mouth, trash all the code i've written for you, and walk out.
Bash is Copyright (C) 1989-2004 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc." "Emacs was written by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation." "gcc, g++ - GNU project C and C++ Compiler (gcc-3.2.1)"
yeah, I know.
Stallman did not invent c or c++, merely a compiler. If I create a program that was compiled with gnu/c, it does not mean that stallman had anything to do with it. It would be like giving credit to the guy who cut down the tree for creating my house...which is completly ridiculous.
Stallman is a nutjob radical that is hurting the open source community more than helping.
Let's keep the Government's representatives' religious beliefs and traditions out of our personal lives please
well, he's not forcing his beliefs onto anyone. You are free to believe in creationalism or science.
If the ways of the bible are showing up in our public education systems and you don't agree with it, teach your kids your alternative beliefs. I think this is one of the biggest problems these days. Parents don't want to spend enough time teaching their kids the differences between right and wrong.
What use is a kernel alone? Linux would be nowhere without GNU
IF the GNU wasn't around, we would have some other license..most likely public domain. I don't think the GNU itself had anything to do with the success of linux.
Remember children, these are the same people who contiued charging 13 dollars for an inexpensive donut shaped slice of polycarbonate and aluminum years after they promised a price drop
and artists continue to charge large amounts of money for bits of paint and paper. What is the world coming to?
can we please stop basing the value of a CD on the cost of the materials? If it was all about the materials, you would get just that: a blank cd (and those are $.10 a piece).
And far be it from me to stifle your personal right to express yourself. I just thought that the idea that companies won't use open source because of a lack of accountability is difficult to reconcile with evil open source developers forcing honest hardworking software devs into bankrupcy. By your earlier argument, we would expect industry to choose the proprietory offering and the developers to prosper.
They have. Most companies are still using proprietary software. Also, with my comment about open source developers putting hard working developers out of business: right now, this may not be the case, but eventually, it will harm even in-house developers. Why would a company even bother hiring developers to create something to fulfull their needs when they can get it for free from the community (I see myself doing this. As an example, I was going to purchase a commerical bulletin board, but found a better, free one and used it instead. I am not going to ever need developers to come in and work on the code. It's an all inclusive package, for nothing (and since im not re-releasing it, I don't even have to give anything back into the community).
Most companies will never give anything back into the community. They will just take the program and use it to their advantage.
Well, that's a controversial issue in some quarters, but it's easy to see how monopolies can be abused. With no competition, a monopoly can crank up profit margins as high as it likes. There is no spur to improve the product offered (look at the stagnation of IE since the collapse of Netscape for example) and the monopoly holder can further abuse its power to make and break other companies by withholding goods and services at a whim
Microsoft may have abused its position of power by letting IE go, but there still is competition (firefox and safari come to mind). Developers saw a need for a better browser and they created one. This is all you need to do to defeat Microsoft (rather than bitch about getting a law passed). Create something better that most people will want to use (of course this is easier said than done).
None intended. I'm just getting some mixed signals. You say you're okay with open source, but you equate free software development with Embrace and Extend which is generally reckoned to be one of Microsoft's dirtier tricks. Your comment about using open source in your own development leads me to imagine a small independant software house, and yet you seem to be an ardent apologist for Microsoftv
I am mostly using Open Source because there are no licensing fees and it's solid enough to do the job.
in certain respects, Microsoft is evil (strongarming companies like dell to only use their operating systems). I talk about open source in this way because I just want to point out that its developers can be just as evil as Microsoft.
no licensing fee to a company also means there isn't anyone thaey can blame when something goes wrong. This is why commerical applications are used.
rather than reading the article and using someone else's opinion, I gave my own on the subject. I was talking about why large commercial firms haven't really started to embrace the open source world.
For instance, most of slashdotters would agree that competition in the marketplace is a good thing
competition is a good thing in my opinion, but companies that are successful shouldn't be punished. If a company becomes a monopoly only because they are the best, they shouldn't be forced to break apart.
I don't think it's anywhere near that monolithic. I think lots of different people write open source software for different reasons. I expect there must be one or two that think "I'm going to totally destroy application X", but I reckon the majority are more along the lines of "Why won't this stupid program work the way I want it to?", "Why can't I read this data?", and "I've got an idea that is just so cool!"
and if it's a nice, polished piece of software, people will be more likely to go with the free version over the paid version (which will eventually put the commerical vendor out of business).
And as reported i slashdot today, it sees that Firefox has spurred MS into improving their ageing and unappealing product for the first time in years. That's competition at work, which is supposed to be a good thing, right?
yeah, it is competition at work. Do I sense some sarcasm in your statement?
Maybe it's just me, but I have difficulty with "embrace" as meaning "write a program to handle a certain generic class of problem, for which commercial offerings may already exist". Call me picky if you will
but the purpose of OSS is the same: to destroy the commercial counterpart.
Anyway, what's your problem? If you want to compete with open source, all you have to do is write better software. Considering how scathing MS has been in the past about the quality of open source code, that wouldn't seem to present an insurmountable challenge, would it?
I have no problems with open source. Not only do I use open source in my business (mysq, php,etc) but I have written some additions and given back to the community.
More to the point, E&E tends to apply to issues of standards and interoperability. We FOSS types tend to like standards so so they can do what they were designed to do. When MS embraces and extends a standard, it does so to destroy it. You'll never see an open source project try and do that
maybe so, but open source can just as easily challenge microsoft by creating a better product with open standards (look at firefox).
"So we're supposed to blame MS for Spyware? Windows doesn't ship with system-crashing spyware, and it's not even like viruses are its primary way in. Most spyware is willingly installed by clueless users."
This is true. I have a windows 2003 server and have had no blue-screens or problems. The only time I ever have to reboot it is for updates.
My windows XP machine at home is the same way. I, of course use firefox and have managed to keep it spyware clean for a long time.
Microsoft windows is used by people that don't know anything about computers. Spyware companies realize this, and create applications to exploit this fact. The reason Linux doesn't suffer from spyware is because there isn't any created for it. It's more of a lack of demand than better security measures. Even though you might not be able to trash an entire linux system because of spyware, you could still create spyware for it.
If and when linux becomes as mainstreamed as windows, it will suffer from the exact same issues.
I'm all for creating something better, but I think we have a right to complain when we do and MS piss all over it.
free software developers are just as bad. They put commerical programmers out of business by creating free, open source application that have the exact same function as the commercial counterpart. It's a form of "embrace and extend".
Embrace = adopt the same functionality as commercial counterpart. Extend = release it, for free, making it very difficult for a commercial developer to sell it (most people choose free over pay).
Besides last time I checked linux is not some company that can be bought over in a hostile takeover
true, but its best developers can be bought off. I think a developer that is making very little per year wouldn't think twice about accepting a high paying job with Microsoft. It's difficult to make open source a full-time job (which is what I think needs to happen for it to surpass microsoft's popularity).
You don't understand what the term means. It's a reference to the way Microsoft pretends to accept a standard (embracing), then it quietly modifies it until it's no longer compatible with the original standard anymore (extending). Meanwhile the "microsoft standard" has collected critical mass of people developing towards it, since after all it is "standard" and should work with everything. By the time it turns out that no, it only works with Microsoft software (surprise, surprise) it's too late to get people to move away from it
which is a brilliant move in business. People shouldn't be bitching about it. They should be trying to create something better.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's not an incentive to produce. Prior to copyright law content creators had to keep creating to feed themselves, whereas the system we have now says, "Create a winner, milk it for the rest of your life."
prior to copyright law, methods of mass production did not exist.
if the art you created (a song, piece of software,etc) is popular still, then you deserve to milk it for as long as people are willing to pay you for it. This, however, won't last forever. You can't force things down people's throats forever. Eventually your art loses traction, and people move on.
The vendor continues making improvements to your code, but again, the majority of them are useless without the right keys. Eventually the vendor is making $2-4B dollars a year using software that is 98% your work yet you don't get to enjoy any of the benefits of modifications to the code you wrote.
Does that just about sum up the position you are supporting?
When you release software under the GPL, there is a very high probability that someone will take your code, make money from it, and not release anything back into the community. This is the chance you take.
When I first heard about the GPL, I thought it was a good idea. A community of programmers working together to create applications. It seems like it has turned into a way to trap corporations and businesses into having to release their source code.
I don't know why any company in their right mind would want to use software licensed under the GPL in their products. It forces you to give your product to your competition on a silver platter. I think as FSF decides to sue more and more companies for violations, there will be an even greater resistance to free software in the business world. It's starting to become more of a liability than anything else. Businesses don't care about the spread of free source code. They care about their bottom line, which is greatly improved if work that otherwise would cost a large amount of money hours has a $0 price tag.
As a software developer, I don't care if a corporation uses my GPLd code in their apps without re-releasing it. It's still free in my mind.
The vendor continues making improvements to your code, but again, the majority of them are useless without the right keys. Eventually the vendor is making $2-4B dollars a year using software that is 98% your work yet you don't get to enjoy any of the benefits of modifications to the code you wrote.
it sounds now like you would be bitter that someone else is making money from your code.
Think of DRM as a dictatorship and the GNU as communism. As both start to get closer to their true selves, they both become just as restrictive. The GPLV3 is starting to show this.
Rent A Coder is for slaves. Everyone should boycott. Nobody wants to work for pennies an hour except low life scum you find at Rent A Coder. Literally scraping the bottom of the barell for garbage code
you boycott by charging more for your services. In my experience, when I charge a little bit more money for my consulting services, I get higher-quality companies and more business.
The companies willing to pay shit will get just that. I think that many companies have learned that the communication issues and terrible coding practices of many of the indian programmers/groups just arent's worth the low price.
especially in apps compiled from source
I think it has less to do with source and more to do with the fact that there aren't really that many viruses for linux.
how many people actually go through the entire source of a program they are about to compile?
also, when you randomly search for hosts on a network, you will be more likely to find a windows box to infect than a linux box. This is why windows viruses are more likely to spread in the wild.
if someone buried a virus in the sourcecode of a large program, I think it would be awhile before it was found.
Your forgetting, this is the U.S. We dont need to CONVINCE libya of anything, we just need to liberate them
you're also forgetting that other countries don't need or deserve our help. Terrible dictators should continue to starve and murder their own people. We should also let them build nuclear weapons..because they won't hurt anyone.
If other countries want freedom, they should get it themselves.
I realize that you are too young to remember this, but before p2p we had Cassette taps. Go to your mommies house and check the drawers or boxes in the attic. you will find lots of little "tape" type disk looking thingies that have music on them. Before p2p people bought cassettes and pirated music by hand..... ahh those were the days.
and before cassetts they had 8-track tapes and 45's. Im afraid you need to go to your mommies house.
you never read my post, did you.
cassetes could not be traded with thousands of other people within a few hours. With cassetes, it wasn't a problem. With p2p..it is.
1. Sales are down, so they must be piracy afoot
.99 and p2p networks are bigger than ever)
You can't tell me there isn't a correlation between p2p networks and cheap cdrs in the hands of the masses and the recent loss in sales (and im saying over the last 5 years). The fact of the matter is: people just aren't buying music anymore because they can either 1) download it for free from the internet or 2) burn it from a friend. Before p2p, people were forced to buy music if they wanted to listen to it. Why bother buying music if you can download it for free and burn it onto a CD? (and the quality is near-perfect). The main reason people are downloading music is because they are too cheap and lazy to go out and buy it. (proof: itunes sells songs for
I can't even remember the last time I or any of my friends have bought music. I only stopped using various p2p networks because of the RIAA scare tactics. But im not trying to fool myself or other people into believing that what im doing is right.
Eventually, piracy causes the recording industry (or whoever's IP is being infringed) to lose money. This is because more and more people see it as worthless and aren't willing to pay for it.
Im not justifying the RIAAs actions or prices, but I don't think the people infringing on copyrights should be justified either.
I dunno.. Redhat seem to have no problems with this.
In the real world most end users don't give a crap if the source is available.. they're not programmers. They want support (which the likes of IBM/Redhat give them) and they're prepared to pay to get it.
redhat makes money off of the backs of hard working free software developers. They are basically a support company that just happens to support OSS.
He just said that you need to include the source when you ship the binary copy. If he'd wanted everything to be free as in beer as well as free as in freedom, he would have written that into the license.
This means that the end-user can compile it and legally pass it around to anyone they want promptly destroying any hope of the orignal company turning a profit.
If you charge money for your software and release it under the GNU license, you are forced you to compete with a free version of your software (why would someone pay for something that they can get for free..from you (and im talking about an exact copy). Small software companies have trouble making a profit as it is.
The only way I can see free software benefiting companies is the fact that it's free (as in beer), which is exactly what the original poster was talking about.
Indeed. Linux distros already had a lot of issues in the late nineties, like installing any server under the Sun, and enabling them. Been there, done that already. Your point being?
in the late nineties, linux had considerably less market share than it does now. It also was hardly known by the average computer user. Some issues will not be apparent until it has a lot more marketshare in the desktop market, which remains to be seen.
Oh yes, nazi policies for Security Enhanced Linux would! I suggest you read up on it
You can have nazi policies for any operating system (even windows). as secure as a linux distro might be, it may prevent the average user from switching from windows (because of its difficulty).
The other major distros would have made Security Enhanced Linux with tight policies the default. This would break a lot, and be a pain for many users. Installing third party software would be really laborious. But the distros and the users would put up with that if malware bacame a big deal on Linux.
if millions of people were already using the software unsecured, we would have the same problems (and installing third-part software is what we have right now, on the windows platform).
Also, even if malware couldn't run in admin mode, there would be nothing stopping it from trashing user's data...which is just as bad and equally as difficult to fix.
If you're looking over my shoulder every minute of the day, checking my email, checking my browsing I'm liable to punch you in the mouth, trash all the code i've written for you, and walk out.
and you wonder why you aren't a professional.
The Amateur only has to make a product.
The Professional also has to make a living
unless of course the amateur is too busy making a living to work on the product.
Bash is Copyright (C) 1989-2004 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc."
"Emacs was written by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation."
"gcc, g++ - GNU project C and C++ Compiler (gcc-3.2.1)"
yeah, I know.
Stallman did not invent c or c++, merely a compiler. If I create a program that was compiled with gnu/c, it does not mean that stallman had anything to do with it. It would be like giving credit to the guy who cut down the tree for creating my house...which is completly ridiculous.
Stallman is a nutjob radical that is hurting the open source community more than helping.
Let's keep the Government's representatives' religious beliefs and traditions out of our personal lives please
well, he's not forcing his beliefs onto anyone. You are free to believe in creationalism or science.
If the ways of the bible are showing up in our public education systems and you don't agree with it, teach your kids your alternative beliefs. I think this is one of the biggest problems these days. Parents don't want to spend enough time teaching their kids the differences between right and wrong.
What use is a kernel alone? Linux would be nowhere without GNU
IF the GNU wasn't around, we would have some other license..most likely public domain. I don't think the GNU itself had anything to do with the success of linux.
Remember children, these are the same people who contiued charging 13 dollars for an inexpensive donut shaped slice of polycarbonate and aluminum years after they promised a price drop
and artists continue to charge large amounts of money for bits of paint and paper. What is the world coming to?
can we please stop basing the value of a CD on the cost of the materials? If it was all about the materials, you would get just that: a blank cd (and those are $.10 a piece).
And far be it from me to stifle your personal right to express yourself. I just thought that the idea that companies won't use open source because of a lack of accountability is difficult to reconcile with evil open source developers forcing honest hardworking software devs into bankrupcy. By your earlier argument, we would expect industry to choose the proprietory offering and the developers to prosper.
They have. Most companies are still using proprietary software. Also, with my comment about open source developers putting hard working developers out of business: right now, this may not be the case, but eventually, it will harm even in-house developers. Why would a company even bother hiring developers to create something to fulfull their needs when they can get it for free from the community (I see myself doing this. As an example, I was going to purchase a commerical bulletin board, but found a better, free one and used it instead. I am not going to ever need developers to come in and work on the code. It's an all inclusive package, for nothing (and since im not re-releasing it, I don't even have to give anything back into the community).
Most companies will never give anything back into the community. They will just take the program and use it to their advantage.
Well, that's a controversial issue in some quarters, but it's easy to see how monopolies can be abused. With no competition, a monopoly can crank up profit margins as high as it likes. There is no spur to improve the product offered (look at the stagnation of IE since the collapse of Netscape for example) and the monopoly holder can further abuse its power to make and break other companies by withholding goods and services at a whim
Microsoft may have abused its position of power by letting IE go, but there still is competition (firefox and safari come to mind). Developers saw a need for a better browser and they created one. This is all you need to do to defeat Microsoft (rather than bitch about getting a law passed). Create something better that most people will want to use (of course this is easier said than done).
None intended. I'm just getting some mixed signals. You say you're okay with open source, but you equate free software development with Embrace and Extend which is generally reckoned to be one of Microsoft's dirtier tricks. Your comment about using open source in your own development leads me to imagine a small independant software house, and yet you seem to be an ardent apologist for Microsoftv
I am mostly using Open Source because there are no licensing fees and it's solid enough to do the job.
in certain respects, Microsoft is evil (strongarming companies like dell to only use their operating systems). I talk about open source in this way because I just want to point out that its developers can be just as evil as Microsoft.
no licensing fee to a company also means there isn't anyone thaey can blame when something goes wrong. This is why commerical applications are used.
rather than reading the article and using someone else's opinion, I gave my own on the subject. I was talking about why large commercial firms haven't really started to embrace the open source world.
For instance, most of slashdotters would agree that competition in the marketplace is a good thing
competition is a good thing in my opinion, but companies that are successful shouldn't be punished. If a company becomes a monopoly only because they are the best, they shouldn't be forced to break apart.
I don't think it's anywhere near that monolithic. I think lots of different people write open source software for different reasons. I expect there must be one or two that think "I'm going to totally destroy application X", but I reckon the majority are more along the lines of "Why won't this stupid program work the way I want it to?", "Why can't I read this data?", and "I've got an idea that is just so cool!"
and if it's a nice, polished piece of software, people will be more likely to go with the free version over the paid version (which will eventually put the commerical vendor out of business).
And as reported i slashdot today, it sees that Firefox has spurred MS into improving their ageing and unappealing product for the first time in years. That's competition at work, which is supposed to be a good thing, right?
yeah, it is competition at work. Do I sense some sarcasm in your statement?
Maybe it's just me, but I have difficulty with "embrace" as meaning "write a program to handle a certain generic class of problem, for which commercial offerings may already exist". Call me picky if you will
but the purpose of OSS is the same: to destroy the commercial counterpart.
Anyway, what's your problem? If you want to compete with open source, all you have to do is write better software. Considering how scathing MS has been in the past about the quality of open source code, that wouldn't seem to present an insurmountable challenge, would it?
I have no problems with open source. Not only do I use open source in my business (mysq, php,etc) but I have written some additions and given back to the community.
More to the point, E&E tends to apply to issues of standards and interoperability. We FOSS types tend to like standards so so they can do what they were designed to do. When MS embraces and extends a standard, it does so to destroy it. You'll never see an open source project try and do that
maybe so, but open source can just as easily challenge microsoft by creating a better product with open standards (look at firefox).
"So we're supposed to blame MS for Spyware? Windows doesn't ship with system-crashing spyware, and it's not even like viruses are its primary way in. Most spyware is willingly installed by clueless users."
This is true. I have a windows 2003 server and have had no blue-screens or problems. The only time I ever have to reboot it is for updates.
My windows XP machine at home is the same way. I, of course use firefox and have managed to keep it spyware clean for a long time.
Microsoft windows is used by people that don't know anything about computers. Spyware companies realize this, and create applications to exploit this fact. The reason Linux doesn't suffer from spyware is because there isn't any created for it. It's more of a lack of demand than better security measures. Even though you might not be able to trash an entire linux system because of spyware, you could still create spyware for it.
If and when linux becomes as mainstreamed as windows, it will suffer from the exact same issues.
What? So MS can embrace and extend that too?
I'm all for creating something better, but I think we have a right to complain when we do and MS piss all over it.
free software developers are just as bad. They put commerical programmers out of business by creating free, open source application that have the exact same function as the commercial counterpart. It's a form of "embrace and extend".
Embrace = adopt the same functionality as commercial counterpart.
Extend = release it, for free, making it very difficult for a commercial developer to sell it (most people choose free over pay).
Besides last time I checked linux is not some company that can be bought over in a hostile takeover
true, but its best developers can be bought off. I think a developer that is making very little per year wouldn't think twice about accepting a high paying job with Microsoft. It's difficult to make open source a full-time job (which is what I think needs to happen for it to surpass microsoft's popularity).
You don't understand what the term means. It's a reference to the way Microsoft pretends to accept a standard (embracing), then it quietly modifies it until it's no longer compatible with the original standard anymore (extending). Meanwhile the "microsoft standard" has collected critical mass of people developing towards it, since after all it is "standard" and should work with everything. By the time it turns out that no, it only works with Microsoft software (surprise, surprise) it's too late to get people to move away from it
which is a brilliant move in business. People shouldn't be bitching about it. They should be trying to create something better.