That was the first question that came to mind for me, too.
The relevant part of the actual announcement on Microsoft's site reads "To reiterate, today we are announcing that we are not planning on releasing a VFP 10 and will be releasing the completed Sedna work on CodePlex at no charge. The components written as part of Sedna will be placed in the community for further enhancement as part of our shared source initiative. You can expect to see the Sedna code on CodePlex sometime before the end of summer 2007."
How about we constantly bash a law for being unfair, unnecessary, and convoluted, and then turn around and expect a corporation to follow it to the letter!
Well, yes, that's what they pay their legal team the big bucks for.
Speaking of which, how much are they paying you? They're not getting their money's worth: being subject to a DMCA takedown notice doesn't mean you're violating the DMCA.
I remember in Computer Science at UIUC, we had a student who had worked as an intern with the Microsoft Kernel team. He always viewed the Linux kernel as sort of a deprecated joke- just barely nipping at the heels of NT and Win95.
Methinks he doth exaggerate for rhetorical effect. The only thing that was nipping at the Windows 9x "kernel"'s heels was classic Mac OS, and then only because you could count the operating systems in their peer group on your thumbs... without being a mutant. God those beggars were horrible.
I think the weakness of the Linux Kernel is most apparent to people on the Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Wind River, or Green Hills kernel teams.
Try the various places the UCB CSRG mob ended up. That's where Apple got their kernel, and I honestly don't think they improved it in the process. The kernel's not OS X's strength by a long shot, its main advantage over Linux is a solid base in 4BSD and a stable kernel API.
Sun? Sun's the Microsoft of the traditional UNIX world, you got a Sparcstation over an Indy or Alpha because you could actually get applications for it... not because it had the fastest hardware or the best OS.
Realtime and embedded systems are a whole different ball game, as Microsoft found out.
And you might be surprised who's seen on places like slashdot. It's not old-time traditional Usenet of course. Nothing is, or ever will be again, I suspect.
If MS is smart their next Windows installment will have a rebranded Linux kernel
The strength of Linux isn't the kernel, it's the userland. First, there have been dozens of radically different UNIX kernel architectures over the past decades and all of them have served the same purpose as Linux, some better than others. The NT kernel and the Windows Networking environment has some real strengths (and if you don't see that, you're fooling yourself and hurting your own business), and its biggest shortcomings - the relentlessly single-instance nature of the Win32 subsystem and the handful of single-instance components in the kernel - are going to be seen as less important as people rush to OS-supported virtualization.
Microsoft acquired an excellent UNIX-compatibility subsystem with Interix, and they can easily parley this into an environment that can run open-source applications seamlessly and painlessly if they need to. Currently Interix is only available for Vista Enterprise and Ultimate, and (if you have a copy) for XP and earlier, but they can turn on SUA ("Subsystem for UNIX Applications") elsewhere if they need to with the flip of an update.
The difference between NT with Interix/SFU/SUA and Linux/UNIX is pretty much academic for most people. They buy computers to run applications... the operating system is at best a nice framework for running those applications, and more often an obstacle to running them the way they want. One of these days Microsoft is going to wise up about open source software and realize that they can sell people Windows to run Apache just as easily as IIS.
If Tony couldn't even sell pirate software any more then how will anyone sell software?
By writing it, and selling it to the people who aren't looking for something that fell off the back of a truck.
I mean, consider this as a survey. If someone went to a bunch of pubs and surveyed people about their drinking habits, you'd end up with different results than if you went to a bunch of churches and passed around the same paper. All this article shows is that among people who are already looking to buy stolen goods, the demand for high priced poor quality knockoffs is way down.
The first thing Microsoft needs to do to get ANY credibility at all where security is involved is to take immediate and rapid steps to eliminate the role of the HTML control as an element of the security system.
That means getting rid of "Security zones". All documents displayed by the HTML control must be considered "untrusted".
To do this, start by getting rid of the ability for documents viewed in the HTML control to request the use of ActiveX objects, since no documents are considered trusted, ActiveX can't be used anyway.
At the same time, provide a mechanism like IO Slaves for applications to install controls... a mechanism that can not be requested by a document.
Modify Windows Explorer and Software Update to use this application-controlled mechanism to install components into the HTML control.
Create an IE shell that installs an "ActiveX IO Slave" to restore the existing behaviour. This shell will display windows with some visual indication that they are untrustable and dangerous. Users who acually require this functionality during the transition can run the "Insecure IE" shell.
In the next major release of Windows, remove that component.
And Linux and MacOS are not the same damn operating system, and do not run the same software.
They both run any UNIX software out there.
Linux has a bunch of extra APIs on top of the basic UNIX OS. So does OS X. So does Solaris and AIX. That doesn't keep them all from being UNIX. And that's the important bit.
1. Every object in the system is a file in the same filesystem namespace. 2. Every object in the system can be interacted with via the same small set of system calls. 3. All communication is through ports that look like open files. 4. Every program runs in its own address space, communicating with other programs through already opened files.
Thirty years ago this was a revolution. Most operating systems have adopted some of these principles to some extent, but there are too many exceptions outside UNIX sytsems for you to be able to really take advantage of them. For example, in Windows, you can't create network services by running scripts under a network superserver because open network sockets cant be accessed through read() or write().
You can use OS X through the Aqua shell only, and pretend the UNIX part isn't there, but the same is true of a Linux system wrapped up in a KDE or Gnome shell. In both cases you're missing a lot of the possibilities inherent in the system, and in both cases you're not learning anything about UNIX.
And that's a genuine problem. There's a lot of Linux users I know who have no idea what UNIX is. They think a system without X-Windows and Perl and their choice of KDE or Gnome *isn't UNIX*. I'm not talking about new users here, or even run-of-the-mill developers, I'm talking about core developers in major free software projects.
I'd love to put a few of them down in front of a PDP-11 running Version 7 and wait for their heads to explode.
It's the same damn operating system. Runs the same software.
I swear, if Linux was in the majority we'd be seeing the same posts except they'd be going on about how the real challenge to their version of Linux was Red Hat and Suse.
I use FreeBSD and Mac, and I'm still glad to see Linux in use, because it doesn't matter WHICH version of UNIX someone's using... Solaris, AIX, Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, even HPUX, it's still an open system, still part of the software ecosystem that can't be controlled by one company... not Microsoft, not Apple, not Novell, not Sun...
If she didn't want it crawled, she should have used robots.txt. If she didn't do that, then how could she possibly claim to have notified anyone about the contract?
You can't create a contract just by claiming you have one.
1. Have you ever used Microsoft's Xenix? Not SCO's version, the one that Microsoft actually had their hands in.
2. Had you used any other multi-user small business operating systems in the early '80s, when it really was Microsoft Xenix?
Xenix was pretty much the most solid and reliable commercial UNIX in the early '80s. Some of the hardware it ran on was truly awful, but I'm not going to blame Xenix for the apalling design of the card cage in the TRS-80 model 6000.
3. Windows 2000 came out in 1999... over a decade after the announcement of OS/2, several years after the first release of NT, and almost TWO decades after they released Xenix. Are you honestly saying that Microsoft didn't learn anything over those 20 years?
4. Xenix wasn't a "clone", it was licensed AT&T UNIX code, originally based on the 7th Edition source tree.
The problem today is that "casual piracy" is getting pretty common. So common that many people I know would never even consider paying any amount for software. It is as if it is their right to download stuff and use it.
I suspect that it depends who you ask, and when you ask. When I was in college in the early '80s, "many people I know would never even consider paying any amount for software". This isn't "today's casual piracy", this isn't a new thing, this isn't a change, this is the same situation that's been there as long as the *concept* of selling personal computer software has been around. If the people you know are technical, if they can write software, they're less likely to buy it, and more likely to know where to get the cracks. If you know people who aren't technical, you'll find more of them buying software because the cost in time of finding the stuff is more than the money they're spending on it.
And, most people *can't* make a living off their hobbies. Most people making dolls clothes or stuffed toy clowns make most of their money doing something else. Most garage bands never quit their day jobs. Most shareware doesn't take off. And the ones that do, no matter what their hobbies are... programming, playing music, sewing... do it by running their hobby like a business.
That means accepting the 5% and coming out with new products all the time, spending as much time coding new programs as the guy making dolls clothes spends making dolls clothes, selling the product for cheap enough that people will spend the money instead of ripping you off, for Toys-R-Us prices. Or writing bespoke one-at-a-time software for people... what we call "being a contractor".
So, no, the fact that you can't make a living writing one great shareware application and make a living off it and not have people pirate it or clone it (and it doesn't matter if it's Microsoft or the Free Software Foundation who clones it) has nothing to do with whether Microsoft needs to treat their users like crooks.
You don't need to be 100% effective to stop 90% of piracy,
Well, assuming you mean "90% of casual piracy" and accepting that the number is pulled out of the air...
No, you don't even need to be 10% effective. All you need to do to stop 90% of casual piracy is to put any kind of barrier at all, even just a CD key.
But to get much more than that, you need to be pretty damn close to 100% effective, because once you get past people who aren't stopped by an "honor system" reminder you're climbing a pretty steep curve... because it's a small step from using a stolen key to using a canned patch or script, and a canned patch can defeat pretty much anything it's possible to defeat.
So while it's not a big deal, it still demonstrates that Microsoft's customer bashing is futile.
"...the company has few successful businesses outside of Internet search and advertising."
Microsoft, 1980, one successful business, compilers and programming languages.
Microsoft, 1990, one successful product, operating systems. Their language business has become part of the support for their OS business.
Microsoft, 2000, finally have a really *solid* operating system for the first time since they dumped Xenix, and a handful of secondary businesses leveraged off their OS business.
It took Microsoft over 20 years to get to the point where they were more than a one-product company, and they're really not good at all where they can't use their position in the OS market to give people a magician's choice of products.
If google has a few successful businesses outside of Internet Search they're doing better than Ballmer did over the same period in the company's life cycle.
Just provide whatever is the easiest distro for Joe Sixpack to handle, and documentation and source for all drivers, and let the bloke wanting Gentoo show that he really understands what a source code distro is about.
I loved both A Deepness in the Sky and Fire Upon the Deep, and Deepness is the better choice of that pair... it only rarely bends known physical law.
The stories in his nearer-term Fairmont High universe (Rainbow's End, Fast Times at Fairmont High) are practically ideal, with so much of the action centering around a future high school.
True Names is also interesting, though somewhat dated now, since it's the earliest story I know of to play with the concept of 'cyberspace' (called 'the other plane' in that story).
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on how much they've got backed up in their colos, I guess.
That was the first question that came to mind for me, too.
The relevant part of the actual announcement on Microsoft's site reads "To reiterate, today we are announcing that we are not planning on releasing a VFP 10 and will be releasing the completed Sedna work on CodePlex at no charge. The components written as part of Sedna will be placed in the community for further enhancement as part of our shared source initiative. You can expect to see the Sedna code on CodePlex sometime before the end of summer 2007."
Shared Source is not Open Source.
The longer they wait to cut the price the less it will matter whether they cut the price or not.
If they're keeping the price up to avoid cannibalizing the sales of Blu-ray standalone players, they're just duplicating the whole Beta-VHS fiasco.
You can't blame the lightning strikes on Emmet Brown, that was three years earlier.
How about we constantly bash a law for being unfair, unnecessary, and convoluted, and then turn around and expect a corporation to follow it to the letter!
Well, yes, that's what they pay their legal team the big bucks for.
Speaking of which, how much are they paying you? They're not getting their money's worth: being subject to a DMCA takedown notice doesn't mean you're violating the DMCA.
Maybe they can top that off by locking the kernel and not allowing the system to boot if you're running unauthorized drivers?
I remember in Computer Science at UIUC, we had a student who had worked as an intern with the Microsoft Kernel team. He always viewed the Linux kernel as sort of a deprecated joke- just barely nipping at the heels of NT and Win95.
Methinks he doth exaggerate for rhetorical effect. The only thing that was nipping at the Windows 9x "kernel"'s heels was classic Mac OS, and then only because you could count the operating systems in their peer group on your thumbs... without being a mutant. God those beggars were horrible.
I think the weakness of the Linux Kernel is most apparent to people on the Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Wind River, or Green Hills kernel teams.
Try the various places the UCB CSRG mob ended up. That's where Apple got their kernel, and I honestly don't think they improved it in the process. The kernel's not OS X's strength by a long shot, its main advantage over Linux is a solid base in 4BSD and a stable kernel API.
Sun? Sun's the Microsoft of the traditional UNIX world, you got a Sparcstation over an Indy or Alpha because you could actually get applications for it... not because it had the fastest hardware or the best OS.
Realtime and embedded systems are a whole different ball game, as Microsoft found out.
And you might be surprised who's seen on places like slashdot. It's not old-time traditional Usenet of course. Nothing is, or ever will be again, I suspect.
If MS is smart their next Windows installment will have a rebranded Linux kernel
The strength of Linux isn't the kernel, it's the userland. First, there have been dozens of radically different UNIX kernel architectures over the past decades and all of them have served the same purpose as Linux, some better than others. The NT kernel and the Windows Networking environment has some real strengths (and if you don't see that, you're fooling yourself and hurting your own business), and its biggest shortcomings - the relentlessly single-instance nature of the Win32 subsystem and the handful of single-instance components in the kernel - are going to be seen as less important as people rush to OS-supported virtualization.
Microsoft acquired an excellent UNIX-compatibility subsystem with Interix, and they can easily parley this into an environment that can run open-source applications seamlessly and painlessly if they need to. Currently Interix is only available for Vista Enterprise and Ultimate, and (if you have a copy) for XP and earlier, but they can turn on SUA ("Subsystem for UNIX Applications") elsewhere if they need to with the flip of an update.
The difference between NT with Interix/SFU/SUA and Linux/UNIX is pretty much academic for most people. They buy computers to run applications... the operating system is at best a nice framework for running those applications, and more often an obstacle to running them the way they want. One of these days Microsoft is going to wise up about open source software and realize that they can sell people Windows to run Apache just as easily as IIS.
If Tony couldn't even sell pirate software any more then how will anyone sell software?
By writing it, and selling it to the people who aren't looking for something that fell off the back of a truck.
I mean, consider this as a survey. If someone went to a bunch of pubs and surveyed people about their drinking habits, you'd end up with different results than if you went to a bunch of churches and passed around the same paper. All this article shows is that among people who are already looking to buy stolen goods, the demand for high priced poor quality knockoffs is way down.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
If you're getting into the retail computer business, then you want to know market share.
:)
If you're getting into the software development business, then you want to know installed base.
If you're getting into marketing or blogging, then you want o know both so you can pick the one that supports your argument.
The first thing Microsoft needs to do to get ANY credibility at all where security is involved is to take immediate and rapid steps to eliminate the role of the HTML control as an element of the security system.
That means getting rid of "Security zones". All documents displayed by the HTML control must be considered "untrusted".
To do this, start by getting rid of the ability for documents viewed in the HTML control to request the use of ActiveX objects, since no documents are considered trusted, ActiveX can't be used anyway.
At the same time, provide a mechanism like IO Slaves for applications to install controls... a mechanism that can not be requested by a document.
Modify Windows Explorer and Software Update to use this application-controlled mechanism to install components into the HTML control.
Create an IE shell that installs an "ActiveX IO Slave" to restore the existing behaviour. This shell will display windows with some visual indication that they are untrustable and dangerous. Users who acually require this functionality during the transition can run the "Insecure IE" shell.
In the next major release of Windows, remove that component.
Very interesting.
Sorry, GNU's Not UNIX.
Linux isn't Hurd.
And Linux and MacOS are not the same damn operating system, and do not run the same software.
They both run any UNIX software out there.
Linux has a bunch of extra APIs on top of the basic UNIX OS. So does OS X. So does Solaris and AIX. That doesn't keep them all from being UNIX. And that's the important bit.
1. Every object in the system is a file in the same filesystem namespace.
2. Every object in the system can be interacted with via the same small set of system calls.
3. All communication is through ports that look like open files.
4. Every program runs in its own address space, communicating with other programs through already opened files.
Thirty years ago this was a revolution. Most operating systems have adopted some of these principles to some extent, but there are too many exceptions outside UNIX sytsems for you to be able to really take advantage of them. For example, in Windows, you can't create network services by running scripts under a network superserver because open network sockets cant be accessed through read() or write().
You can use OS X through the Aqua shell only, and pretend the UNIX part isn't there, but the same is true of a Linux system wrapped up in a KDE or Gnome shell. In both cases you're missing a lot of the possibilities inherent in the system, and in both cases you're not learning anything about UNIX.
And that's a genuine problem. There's a lot of Linux users I know who have no idea what UNIX is. They think a system without X-Windows and Perl and their choice of KDE or Gnome *isn't UNIX*. I'm not talking about new users here, or even run-of-the-mill developers, I'm talking about core developers in major free software projects.
I'd love to put a few of them down in front of a PDP-11 running Version 7 and wait for their heads to explode.
Linux is UNIX.
OS X is UNIX.
It's the same damn operating system. Runs the same software.
I swear, if Linux was in the majority we'd be seeing the same posts except they'd be going on about how the real challenge to their version of Linux was Red Hat and Suse.
I use FreeBSD and Mac, and I'm still glad to see Linux in use, because it doesn't matter WHICH version of UNIX someone's using... Solaris, AIX, Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, even HPUX, it's still an open system, still part of the software ecosystem that can't be controlled by one company... not Microsoft, not Apple, not Novell, not Sun...
If she didn't want it crawled, she should have used robots.txt. If she didn't do that, then how could she possibly claim to have notified anyone about the contract?
You can't create a contract just by claiming you have one.
1. Have you ever used Microsoft's Xenix? Not SCO's version, the one that Microsoft actually had their hands in.
2. Had you used any other multi-user small business operating systems in the early '80s, when it really was Microsoft Xenix?
Xenix was pretty much the most solid and reliable commercial UNIX in the early '80s. Some of the hardware it ran on was truly awful, but I'm not going to blame Xenix for the apalling design of the card cage in the TRS-80 model 6000.
3. Windows 2000 came out in 1999... over a decade after the announcement of OS/2, several years after the first release of NT, and almost TWO decades after they released Xenix. Are you honestly saying that Microsoft didn't learn anything over those 20 years?
4. Xenix wasn't a "clone", it was licensed AT&T UNIX code, originally based on the 7th Edition source tree.
You may want to look into the history of Microsoft's Office product suite before you claim that they Windows is their one successful business.
And it's well documented that they used their operating systems business to leverage that.
And it took them considerably longer than Google's been in existence to get there.
The problem today is that "casual piracy" is getting pretty common. So common that many people I know would never even consider paying any amount for software. It is as if it is their right to download stuff and use it.
I suspect that it depends who you ask, and when you ask. When I was in college in the early '80s, "many people I know would never even consider paying any amount for software". This isn't "today's casual piracy", this isn't a new thing, this isn't a change, this is the same situation that's been there as long as the *concept* of selling personal computer software has been around. If the people you know are technical, if they can write software, they're less likely to buy it, and more likely to know where to get the cracks. If you know people who aren't technical, you'll find more of them buying software because the cost in time of finding the stuff is more than the money they're spending on it.
And, most people *can't* make a living off their hobbies. Most people making dolls clothes or stuffed toy clowns make most of their money doing something else. Most garage bands never quit their day jobs. Most shareware doesn't take off. And the ones that do, no matter what their hobbies are... programming, playing music, sewing... do it by running their hobby like a business.
That means accepting the 5% and coming out with new products all the time, spending as much time coding new programs as the guy making dolls clothes spends making dolls clothes, selling the product for cheap enough that people will spend the money instead of ripping you off, for Toys-R-Us prices. Or writing bespoke one-at-a-time software for people... what we call "being a contractor".
So, no, the fact that you can't make a living writing one great shareware application and make a living off it and not have people pirate it or clone it (and it doesn't matter if it's Microsoft or the Free Software Foundation who clones it) has nothing to do with whether Microsoft needs to treat their users like crooks.
You don't need to be 100% effective to stop 90% of piracy,
Well, assuming you mean "90% of casual piracy" and accepting that the number is pulled out of the air...
No, you don't even need to be 10% effective. All you need to do to stop 90% of casual piracy is to put any kind of barrier at all, even just a CD key.
But to get much more than that, you need to be pretty damn close to 100% effective, because once you get past people who aren't stopped by an "honor system" reminder you're climbing a pretty steep curve... because it's a small step from using a stolen key to using a canned patch or script, and a canned patch can defeat pretty much anything it's possible to defeat.
So while it's not a big deal, it still demonstrates that Microsoft's customer bashing is futile.
"Keep feeding us more VC money and we'll keep feeding you more info on where to put the rest of your VC money when you come around for a demo."
"...the company has few successful businesses outside of Internet search and advertising."
Microsoft, 1980, one successful business, compilers and programming languages.
Microsoft, 1990, one successful product, operating systems. Their language business has become part of the support for their OS business.
Microsoft, 2000, finally have a really *solid* operating system for the first time since they dumped Xenix, and a handful of secondary businesses leveraged off their OS business.
It took Microsoft over 20 years to get to the point where they were more than a one-product company, and they're really not good at all where they can't use their position in the OS market to give people a magician's choice of products.
If google has a few successful businesses outside of Internet Search they're doing better than Ballmer did over the same period in the company's life cycle.
Just provide whatever is the easiest distro for Joe Sixpack to handle, and documentation and source for all drivers, and let the bloke wanting Gentoo show that he really understands what a source code distro is about.
I loved both A Deepness in the Sky and Fire Upon the Deep, and Deepness is the better choice of that pair... it only rarely bends known physical law.
The stories in his nearer-term Fairmont High universe (Rainbow's End, Fast Times at Fairmont High) are practically ideal, with so much of the action centering around a future high school.
True Names is also interesting, though somewhat dated now, since it's the earliest story I know of to play with the concept of 'cyberspace' (called 'the other plane' in that story).