Thank you. The actual sections weren't readily apparent when I read the links, and I really did want to know what they were. I'm glad they are actually major issues, and not something SCO could easily get out of, like say... all press releases must be in 10 point Times Roman...
What I'd like to see (and which will never happen) is a fairly simple and very limited set of standard EULA "concepts" which are the only legally binding sort of EULA.
There would be a fixed (and very small, i.e. 7-10) set of catagories, such as:
And each of these catagories would have a small set of well-defined rights. For example, "Redistribution" might have the options:
- No redistribution
- Distribution with in altered form
- Distribution in altered form is attributed
- No restrictions
Of course these catagories would need to be much more well thought out than this, and by definiton they would not provide enough flexibility for a lot of the more "tricky" software out there. If your application fits nicely into these boxes, then you can use an EULA. If not, then you are screwed, and you can't use clickwrap.
If a license can't be reduced down to such a simple form, then I think it's not reasonable to expect the general public to accept it with a mouseclick.
I've heard of a celebrity who lost a lot in a divorce, even though the couple had a pre-nup. The pre-nup was written on a napkin, but because the other party didn't have a laywer to advise him/her it wasn't binding.
Well, it depends on where you live. Where I grew up (St. Louis, Missouri) there were a lot of 100+ year old houses, and a fair number had lead plumbing. Due to the mineral content of the water, there was virtually no lead in the water of these homes because a protective mineral sheath accumulated on the insides of the pipes over the years. Personally, I'd still opt for copper, but there were lots of people who just tested regualarly.
I totally agree. I'm in the process of converting the messaging protocol of a product at work. While it is really nice, clean, and easy to follow/debug, it bring a lot of overhead. We're using it because our message structure changes a lot and is open to third parties. For cases where the message is always going to be following the same rules, a custom format is alway quicker, smaller, and less error prone.
Implimentors could certainly write a simple method which just parses the SPF XML (and handles nothing else), but that locks them out of future changes. Implimentors who incorporate a full XML parser bloat the hell out of their product and inherit any bugs the parser has.
Tivoli Systems (Which was started by ex-IBM employees, and then acquired by IBM) was briefly located in the same office park as Origin. I can't speak for the inside of the Origin offices, but the Tivoli ones we had were pretty darn sweet. (Panoramic cliff views, deer, bobcats, a little stream that ran _under_ a raised portion of the building....) Of course, that was the temporary space IBM rented until they could complete moving the Tivoli division back to the "Pink Buildings" on Burnett Road.
I don't beleive the space has been rented yet, and they have had signs up for 1.5+ years. Yeah, it's a great location, and would be pricey, but tech is still in a slump, and I doubt you're gonna find anyone to buy that space any time soon.
You have to remember Austin is the city which gave massive tax and financial breaks to Intel to build the some kinda "office of tomorrow" downtown, and when the tech industry hit the skids, we got a half finished skeleton of building. (Which, lacking any other suitors is finally being knocked down and reclaimed as a courthouse I think....)
My mom is the directory of a public library. She was working at the front desk one day a while back, and this paniciky old woman comes up to the desk practically in tears.
The woman is whispering: "I swear, I didn't do anything... I just happened... and it won't stop.... and I would never do anything like... and.... oh... my... I just went to check my email.... and...."
Yup.... you guessed it. She was emailing her grandkids, and typed "hotmale" instead of "hotmail". (Evidentally unleashing a storm of pop-ups) So, this sort of thing does happen.
Story aside, I don't see a problem with whoever registered "hotmale" which is a lot easier to confuse than MikeRoveSoft. To get MikeRoveSoft confused with Microsoft, the user would have to not only have serious issues spelling, but likely would have to have never seen the word in print. I can't beleive a user meeting those qualifications is going to be making any major software purchases soon...
The parent post could well be correct. In software development, "time to market" is a huge factor. As a result a lot of features get developed without time for proper testing. It's not common to leave untested features in one release of a product which are disabled, test them later when time permits, and enable them as part of the next release. The obvious danger is that if the untested feature contains bugs, then.... doh!
The biggest hurdle is gonna be migrating Lotus Notes. Pretty much the entire world runs off Notes within IBM. (Except the stuff on VM, which is being phased out...) R5 runs fairly well (but far from flawlessly) under Wine, but R6 doesn't work at all.
I work at IBM, and Linux is the only OS I use. It's a little rough in some spots, but ultimately workable. For me, the combo is:
SameTime (The Lotus Messenger) => Sanity (a Perl based clone) Notes R5 => Notes R5 under CrossOver Office MS Office => MS Office under CrossOver Office (when needed)
If Linux were the official desktop, that would be awesome.
Note: While I work at IBM, I'm not in any of the areas which decide these issues, and have no information is support or refutation of the rumors in the report. (But I can dream...)
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've never done Ecstasy (MDMA). But... for one thing, the "real" thing used to be an FDA approved drug for weight loss. The only danger is that in high enough doses you get stupid and don't realize you are overheating and dehydrating, both of which will kill you.
Now, the chemistry to make MDMA is relatively hard and expensive. As a result the majority of X is cut with cheaper (and more dangerous) substances.
I can't speak towards the additiveness other than to say the friends I had who did it a lot seemed to stop when they felt like it. (Scientific, eh?)
Another thing to note is that the original "ecstasy is bad" study was completely flawed. The substance they tested turned out to be a completely different drug! (Congress Passed Ecstasy Law on Flawed Science)
There may be dangers with X, but they are likely much less than the current batch of: "if you do X, you'll instantly become a brain-damaged addict" ads on TV.
There is one other important element in how "fast" the human eye sees: Where you are looking. The receptors in the certer of the eye respond much more slowly than the receptors on the edges; however, the center of the eye has much greater resolution. The reason for this is that you need detail for subjects you are actually looking at, and you need speed in your peripheral vision to see things sneaking up or being throw at you.
I've played with this effect when configuring monitors before. Set the vertical refresh to something painfully slow, then try looking at it out of the corner of your eye. Ouch...
So, I would suspect that on really large screens (ie movie theaters) the refresh rate is more critical than on smaller screens.
Me? I own a plain old low-def 24" TV, so this is all moot for me.:)
My father works at a major university and showed me something amazing. Back in the late 90's when tech-money was booming, the school's technology center requested a large amount of money to expand their server room. The grant was approved, and work began. All told, there were 7 layers of removable computer floor had laid down on top of each other, (one for each OSI layer?) complete with cabling over the years. It was amazingly like an archilogical dig. Anyway, simply removing the old layers of floor increased the floor to ceiling height from like 7 feet to something like 14. The money that was slated for ripping out walls went to some nice racks which now fit in the taller space, and the space recovered was larger than the proposed addition.
I think they still have a section of the old floors in a corner as an exhibit.
Austin is a great place for geeks. We get all sorts of nice perks. For example, we have movie theater which not only serves beer, but also has had open 802.11b access for a long time.
The government also has pockets of very tech-savvy people, but they are often hampered by a lack of support. A current canidate for state representative Mark Strama is pretty "with it" technology-wise. (Founded NewVoter.com which was the first online voter registration in the US, and whose tech resulted in over 700K voter registrations in 2000.) Strama really wants to leverage new technology and open source where possible in his campaign, but hasn't had a lot of luck finding a full time technicial manager to oversee things.
Moving groups of non-technicial people to a new product (be it OpenOffice, Linux, or anything) requires some sort of on site advocate. The key to transition is having a knowledgable support person to make the technology "just work" as opposed to leaving the user to struggle on his or her own.
If you're interested in seeing open source succeed, consider helping out your local canidate use it in his or her race. Teach the leaders, the people will follow.
I have to admit the main link was a bit of a let-down, but after following the link to the pictures page, I start see why this is a big deal. A few things happened which aren't well expressed in the main link:
Participants were sent credentials which were supposed to serve as a second form of ID. The activists circumvented this second ID by simply claiming to be someone else and showing a generic fake ID. The list of participants was available beforehand, which was a mistake. Think of it like if an airport published lists of all the passengers on a plane and allowed "ticketless" travel using any form of ID. (instead of governement issued photo ID) You just need to say you're "John Smith" and present a fake anything (library card, etc...)
Notice all the cameras in the photos? That's sorta creepy. My bank doesn't have that many.
There are pictures of RFID scanners, which means the whole "they are gonna track participants movements" bit isn't entirely tinfoil-hat paranoia. The presence of the sensors implies they plan to track.
There were metal detectors and X-Ray machines maned by the Swiss Army (insert knife joke here) at the entrances, but they didn't get placed until very later. The "safety" this buys the participants is marginal unless the entire conference center was sweep very, very carefully after the gates were put up. Most people with the motive to blow up an international conference don't do it as a spur of the moment thing. When a head of state visits somewhere, an advance team sweeps the room/route/etc and seals it as they go.
Privacy and data security are totally lacking. The organizers failed to inform participants about what information was to be collected, and more severely, couldn't produce a detailed accounting when asked. The data collected was visible on monitors to casual observers, which completely negates most of the value and allows for theft.
In short, the photos show a group that appears to know how to spend a lot of money on toys, but doesn't know how to use them. I think this is a serious concern. The information they are collecting isn't providing security, and could actually undermine it.
The illusion of security is worse than no security at all.
I get paid to write code, and one of the things I like most about Linux (and open source in general) is that the majority of contributors are people who aren't paid to work on it.
Nearly all for-profit software projects have a small set of key customers. These customers dicate the vast majority of the product's content because the developers must please them to continue eating. If a feature Joe Public wants isn't on the same list these key customers come up with, Joe may not get his feature at all. Not because the feature is too hard or not important, but because there is only so much time in a release schedule.
Open source projects are certainly not without process, but their process is often focused on only the core areas. The rest of the product evolves as needed. Linux is a great example. The official kernel development process is a well structured, but there are countless modifications and addons which range from industrial grade (ALSA, FreeS/WAN, etc...) to completely ad-hoc. The side projects like these make Linux useful and powerful. If users have a reliable core, and for items outside that core, there are still options. More importantly, as particular options become more mature (and popular) they can be absorbed into the more strucutured core process. (ALSA again comes to mind)
Bruce is absolutely correct in pointing out that there is often superior quality in open source. This is because quality is defined differently from different viewpoints. The code I write for work has to be internationalized into 15 languages to be allowed to go to market. We currently don't have any non-english speaking customers, but we spend enormous amounts of time making sure all the GUI components, error messages, log files, and documentation are completely internationalized. My company will eventually market the product globally so it is not "wrong" to internationalize the product. In the long term it will pay off, but right now it does mean fixing a few of the smaller bugs or adding some of the lower priority features gets deferred.
The beauty of open source is that projects can evolve in a much more wild and Darwinian manner. The strongest code and best ideas win. If products reach a point where they are wildly used or mission critical, the "process" which makes MBA's and ISO auditors happy can be adopted and retroactively applied.
Okay, so users might pick a password which is less than 20 characters and is dictionary based. Guess what? They always will... Security is a balancing act. If you make security too cumbersome, then users will find a shortcut and abuse it, making it worse than no security. If the spec enforced something like: "passphrases must be at least 128 hex characters" you'd end up with a bunch of passwords which were all "AAAAA..." (or something similiar)
The simple truth is people are lazy. How many passwords do you have? And how many password guarded accounts? I bet even the most diligent of us out there only have a small number of "good" passwords which we use for damn near everything and never rotate.
The problem with WEP was flawed crypto. No matter how good my password was, someone could crack it with unacceptable ease. At least with this new scheme those of us with "good" passwords have a chance.
About a year back I was at a manadatory division meeting, and the first marketing doofus gets up and goes on and on about all the great press a particular product we produce has been getting. Citing all the articles written about it, the clever slogans, etc...
Next speaker, another marketing doofus. What's his pitch about? "We're gonna be rebranding all our offerings under the new name...."
At least the audience had a few souls brave enough to ask why we were going to spend a bunch of money and effort to change a name which we had just spent a bunch of money and effort to get people to recognize.
We never did get a clear answer, just nervous laughter and more blather about cross-product market synergy...
"Geeks" certainly often don't know a whole lot about running a business, but I am pretty convinced that MBAs know even less...
Absolutely. I was just off getting a company provided flu shot, and the nurse asked me: "Do you know how much Office usually sells for?" Evidentially she's in some college program, and students have the ability to buy the suite for $35. She wanted to know if that was a good price... Moral of the story: The average consumer doesn't really even know how much software costs because he or she is so used to stealing it.
What I worry most about is how this will impact corporate perception of "free" software. Even if RedHat decides to back down from this policy, the MicroSoft marketing drones will almost certainly use this as an example of: "Look how crazy those open source nuts are! You never can count of the product to be around long term." Obviously this would be the pot calling the kettle black given MS's record of forced upgrades, but a little hypocrisy seldom gets in the way of an MBA on a rant.:)
This promises to be interesting. I like RedHat, but mainly because of inertia. I've been running it since 6.2 and haven't been sufficently motivated to change. As a result, when asked what distro to run for professional applications, I say "RedHat" due mainly to farmiliarity.
Microsoft has been rumored to almost encourage "piracy" of their office suite because it leads to adoption by paying customers. RedHat is obviously a stepping stone to RHEL. Without providing a "personal" version, RedHat will be able to devote much more energy to large dollar corporate customers, but the lack of grassroots support may offset the increase.
What I don't understand is why the industry thinks it can "broadcast" a signal through the public airwaves and maintain this level of control. If I get a permit and hold a parade down a residential street, don't the people in the houses along the route have the right to record the sights and sounds which can be seen and heard from their own property? Certainly they don't have the right to sell sheet music derivied from listening to the performance, but by the virtue of the performance being "public" some rights should be lost.
I don't have an issue with a "flag" on a signal sent over a privately owned and funded cable, but the airwaves are different. If they won't let me do what I wish with a signal with enters my property, why can't I tell them not to trespass? (I sound like a militia member here....)
The broadcasting industry wants the right to send a signal into people's property without consent and then they want to place restrictions on what can be done with it?
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. The actual sections weren't readily apparent when I read the links, and I really did want to know what they were. I'm glad they are actually major issues, and not something SCO could easily get out of, like say... all press releases must be in 10 point Times Roman...
To help out, I've summarized sections 2(b)(v), 2(b)(viii) and 3(g) of the Exchange Agreement:
2(b)(v) : Presumption of Correctness
2(b)(viii) : Failure to Pass the "Laugh Test" Clause
3(g) : General Asshattery Clause
What I'd like to see (and which will never happen) is a fairly simple and very limited set of standard EULA "concepts" which are the only legally binding sort of EULA.
There would be a fixed (and very small, i.e. 7-10) set of catagories, such as:
- Redistribution
- Ownership
- Modification
- Impact to host computer
- Privacy
- Liability
And each of these catagories would have a small set of well-defined rights. For example, "Redistribution" might have the options:
- No redistribution
- Distribution with in altered form
- Distribution in altered form is attributed
- No restrictions
Of course these catagories would need to be much more well thought out than this, and by definiton they would not provide enough flexibility for a lot of the more "tricky" software out there. If your application fits nicely into these boxes, then you can use an EULA. If not, then you are screwed, and you can't use clickwrap.
If a license can't be reduced down to such a simple form, then I think it's not reasonable to expect the general public to accept it with a mouseclick.
I've heard of a celebrity who lost a lot in a divorce, even though the couple had a pre-nup. The pre-nup was written on a napkin, but because the other party didn't have a laywer to advise him/her it wasn't binding.
Well, it depends on where you live. Where I grew up (St. Louis, Missouri) there were a lot of 100+ year old houses, and a fair number had lead plumbing. Due to the mineral content of the water, there was virtually no lead in the water of these homes because a protective mineral sheath accumulated on the insides of the pipes over the years. Personally, I'd still opt for copper, but there were lots of people who just tested regualarly.
I totally agree. I'm in the process of converting the messaging protocol of a product at work. While it is really nice, clean, and easy to follow/debug, it bring a lot of overhead. We're using it because our message structure changes a lot and is open to third parties. For cases where the message is always going to be following the same rules, a custom format is alway quicker, smaller, and less error prone.
Implimentors could certainly write a simple method which just parses the SPF XML (and handles nothing else), but that locks them out of future changes. Implimentors who incorporate a full XML parser bloat the hell out of their product and inherit any bugs the parser has.
Tivoli Systems (Which was started by ex-IBM employees, and then acquired by IBM) was briefly located in the same office park as Origin. I can't speak for the inside of the Origin offices, but the Tivoli ones we had were pretty darn sweet. (Panoramic cliff views, deer, bobcats, a little stream that ran _under_ a raised portion of the building....) Of course, that was the temporary space IBM rented until they could complete moving the Tivoli division back to the "Pink Buildings" on Burnett Road.
I don't beleive the space has been rented yet, and they have had signs up for 1.5+ years. Yeah, it's a great location, and would be pricey, but tech is still in a slump, and I doubt you're gonna find anyone to buy that space any time soon.
You have to remember Austin is the city which gave massive tax and financial breaks to Intel to build the some kinda "office of tomorrow" downtown, and when the tech industry hit the skids, we got a half finished skeleton of building. (Which, lacking any other suitors is finally being knocked down and reclaimed as a courthouse I think....)
Actually, I think the most interesting part will be seeing if the purchase is worth negative "Geek Points" (Or whatever they are called)
Until I can buy them at ThinkGeek I'm not gonna waste my money. :)
Why yes she is, thanks for asking! :)
True Story:
My mom is the directory of a public library. She was working at the front desk one day a while back, and this paniciky old woman comes up to the desk practically in tears.
The woman is whispering: "I swear, I didn't do anything... I just happened... and it won't stop.... and I would never do anything like... and.... oh... my... I just went to check my email.... and...."
Yup.... you guessed it. She was emailing her grandkids, and typed "hotmale" instead of "hotmail". (Evidentally unleashing a storm of pop-ups) So, this sort of thing does happen.
Story aside, I don't see a problem with whoever registered "hotmale" which is a lot easier to confuse than MikeRoveSoft. To get MikeRoveSoft confused with Microsoft, the user would have to not only have serious issues spelling, but likely would have to have never seen the word in print. I can't beleive a user meeting those qualifications is going to be making any major software purchases soon...
The parent post could well be correct. In software development, "time to market" is a huge factor. As a result a lot of features get developed without time for proper testing. It's not common to leave untested features in one release of a product which are disabled, test them later when time permits, and enable them as part of the next release. The obvious danger is that if the untested feature contains bugs, then.... doh!
I am soooo gonna try that later today! Thanks :)
The biggest hurdle is gonna be migrating Lotus Notes. Pretty much the entire world runs off Notes within IBM. (Except the stuff on VM, which is being phased out...) R5 runs fairly well (but far from flawlessly) under Wine, but R6 doesn't work at all.
I work at IBM, and Linux is the only OS I use. It's a little rough in some spots, but ultimately workable. For me, the combo is:
SameTime (The Lotus Messenger) => Sanity (a Perl based clone)
Notes R5 => Notes R5 under CrossOver Office
MS Office => MS Office under CrossOver Office (when needed)
If Linux were the official desktop, that would be awesome.
Note: While I work at IBM, I'm not in any of the areas which decide these issues, and have no information is support or refutation of the rumors in the report. (But I can dream...)
I've never done Ecstasy (MDMA). But... for one thing, the "real" thing used to be an FDA approved drug for weight loss. The only danger is that in high enough doses you get stupid and don't realize you are overheating and dehydrating, both of which will kill you.
Now, the chemistry to make MDMA is relatively hard and expensive. As a result the majority of X is cut with cheaper (and more dangerous) substances.
I can't speak towards the additiveness other than to say the friends I had who did it a lot seemed to stop when they felt like it. (Scientific, eh?)
Another thing to note is that the original "ecstasy is bad" study was completely flawed. The substance they tested turned out to be a completely different drug! (Congress Passed Ecstasy Law on Flawed Science)
There may be dangers with X, but they are likely much less than the current batch of: "if you do X, you'll instantly become a brain-damaged addict" ads on TV.
There is one other important element in how "fast" the human eye sees: Where you are looking. The receptors in the certer of the eye respond much more slowly than the receptors on the edges; however, the center of the eye has much greater resolution. The reason for this is that you need detail for subjects you are actually looking at, and you need speed in your peripheral vision to see things sneaking up or being throw at you.
:)
I've played with this effect when configuring monitors before. Set the vertical refresh to something painfully slow, then try looking at it out of the corner of your eye. Ouch...
So, I would suspect that on really large screens (ie movie theaters) the refresh rate is more critical than on smaller screens.
Me? I own a plain old low-def 24" TV, so this is all moot for me.
My father works at a major university and showed me something amazing. Back in the late 90's when tech-money was booming, the school's technology center requested a large amount of money to expand their server room. The grant was approved, and work began. All told, there were 7 layers of removable computer floor had laid down on top of each other, (one for each OSI layer?) complete with cabling over the years. It was amazingly like an archilogical dig. Anyway, simply removing the old layers of floor increased the floor to ceiling height from like 7 feet to something like 14. The money that was slated for ripping out walls went to some nice racks which now fit in the taller space, and the space recovered was larger than the proposed addition.
I think they still have a section of the old floors in a corner as an exhibit.
Austin is a great place for geeks. We get all sorts of nice perks. For example, we have movie theater which not only serves beer, but also has had open 802.11b access for a long time.
The government also has pockets of very tech-savvy people, but they are often hampered by a lack of support. A current canidate for state representative Mark Strama is pretty "with it" technology-wise. (Founded NewVoter.com which was the first online voter registration in the US, and whose tech resulted in over 700K voter registrations in 2000.) Strama really wants to leverage new technology and open source where possible in his campaign, but hasn't had a lot of luck finding a full time technicial manager to oversee things.
Moving groups of non-technicial people to a new product (be it OpenOffice, Linux, or anything) requires some sort of on site advocate. The key to transition is having a knowledgable support person to make the technology "just work" as opposed to leaving the user to struggle on his or her own.
If you're interested in seeing open source succeed, consider helping out your local canidate use it in his or her race. Teach the leaders, the people will follow.
In short, the photos show a group that appears to know how to spend a lot of money on toys, but doesn't know how to use them. I think this is a serious concern. The information they are collecting isn't providing security, and could actually undermine it.
The illusion of security is worse than no security at all.
I get paid to write code, and one of the things I like most about Linux (and open source in general) is that the majority of contributors are people who aren't paid to work on it.
Nearly all for-profit software projects have a small set of key customers. These customers dicate the vast majority of the product's content because the developers must please them to continue eating. If a feature Joe Public wants isn't on the same list these key customers come up with, Joe may not get his feature at all. Not because the feature is too hard or not important, but because there is only so much time in a release schedule.
Open source projects are certainly not without process, but their process is often focused on only the core areas. The rest of the product evolves as needed. Linux is a great example. The official kernel development process is a well structured, but there are countless modifications and addons which range from industrial grade (ALSA, FreeS/WAN, etc...) to completely ad-hoc. The side projects like these make Linux useful and powerful. If users have a reliable core, and for items outside that core, there are still options. More importantly, as particular options become more mature (and popular) they can be absorbed into the more strucutured core process. (ALSA again comes to mind)
Bruce is absolutely correct in pointing out that there is often superior quality in open source. This is because quality is defined differently from different viewpoints. The code I write for work has to be internationalized into 15 languages to be allowed to go to market. We currently don't have any non-english speaking customers, but we spend enormous amounts of time making sure all the GUI components, error messages, log files, and documentation are completely internationalized. My company will eventually market the product globally so it is not "wrong" to internationalize the product. In the long term it will pay off, but right now it does mean fixing a few of the smaller bugs or adding some of the lower priority features gets deferred.
The beauty of open source is that projects can evolve in a much more wild and Darwinian manner. The strongest code and best ideas win. If products reach a point where they are wildly used or mission critical, the "process" which makes MBA's and ISO auditors happy can be adopted and retroactively applied.
Okay, so users might pick a password which is less than 20 characters and is dictionary based. Guess what? They always will... Security is a balancing act. If you make security too cumbersome, then users will find a shortcut and abuse it, making it worse than no security. If the spec enforced something like: "passphrases must be at least 128 hex characters" you'd end up with a bunch of passwords which were all "AAAAA..." (or something similiar)
The simple truth is people are lazy. How many passwords do you have? And how many password guarded accounts? I bet even the most diligent of us out there only have a small number of "good" passwords which we use for damn near everything and never rotate.
The problem with WEP was flawed crypto. No matter how good my password was, someone could crack it with unacceptable ease. At least with this new scheme those of us with "good" passwords have a chance.
About a year back I was at a manadatory division meeting, and the first marketing doofus gets up and goes on and on about all the great press a particular product we produce has been getting. Citing all the articles written about it, the clever slogans, etc...
...."
Next speaker, another marketing doofus. What's his pitch about? "We're gonna be rebranding all our offerings under the new name
At least the audience had a few souls brave enough to ask why we were going to spend a bunch of money and effort to change a name which we had just spent a bunch of money and effort to get people to recognize.
We never did get a clear answer, just nervous laughter and more blather about cross-product market synergy...
"Geeks" certainly often don't know a whole lot about running a business, but I am pretty convinced that MBAs know even less...
Absolutely. I was just off getting a company provided flu shot, and the nurse asked me: "Do you know how much Office usually sells for?" Evidentially she's in some college program, and students have the ability to buy the suite for $35. She wanted to know if that was a good price... Moral of the story: The average consumer doesn't really even know how much software costs because he or she is so used to stealing it.
What I worry most about is how this will impact corporate perception of "free" software. Even if RedHat decides to back down from this policy, the MicroSoft marketing drones will almost certainly use this as an example of: "Look how crazy those open source nuts are! You never can count of the product to be around long term." Obviously this would be the pot calling the kettle black given MS's record of forced upgrades, but a little hypocrisy seldom gets in the way of an MBA on a rant. :)
This promises to be interesting. I like RedHat, but mainly because of inertia. I've been running it since 6.2 and haven't been sufficently motivated to change. As a result, when asked what distro to run for professional applications, I say "RedHat" due mainly to farmiliarity.
Microsoft has been rumored to almost encourage "piracy" of their office suite because it leads to adoption by paying customers. RedHat is obviously a stepping stone to RHEL. Without providing a "personal" version, RedHat will be able to devote much more energy to large dollar corporate customers, but the lack of grassroots support may offset the increase.
What I don't understand is why the industry thinks it can "broadcast" a signal through the public airwaves and maintain this level of control. If I get a permit and hold a parade down a residential street, don't the people in the houses along the route have the right to record the sights and sounds which can be seen and heard from their own property? Certainly they don't have the right to sell sheet music derivied from listening to the performance, but by the virtue of the performance being "public" some rights should be lost.
I don't have an issue with a "flag" on a signal sent over a privately owned and funded cable, but the airwaves are different. If they won't let me do what I wish with a signal with enters my property, why can't I tell them not to trespass? (I sound like a militia member here....)
The broadcasting industry wants the right to send a signal into people's property without consent and then they want to place restrictions on what can be done with it?