Novell's problem is that the FSF controls the development of large pieces of software that are critical to the SuSE Linux distribution. Sure, The FSF can't retroactively change the license of existing versions of these software packages, but Novell is going to find itself in serious trouble if it is unable to distribute future versions of this software which will be release under the redesigned GPLv3. Even worse, there are plenty of people outside of the FSF in organizations like the Samba developers that have equally strong feelings about the Novell/Microsoft deal. Like it or not, new versions of a significant portion of the SuSE distribution are going to be released under the GPLv3. If Novell has to take on the added expense of maintaining its own GPLv2 forks of all of this software then it may as well go back to hawking Netware because its aspirations of becoming a powerhouse in the Free Software world will be finished. Novell is having a hard enough time simply competing with Red Hat. There is no way that it can compete with Red Hat and the entire Free Software community while trying to maintain SuSE, all of the software that switched to the GPLv3, and Netware to boot.
Unfortunately for Novell it also needs the money that Microsoft provided as part of the deal.
So Novell is going to pretend that everything is hunky dory and hope that somehow the FSF is bluffing about the GPLv3. Of course, RMS is the kind of guy that decided to write his own operating system rather than live in a proprietary software world. I think that the chances of him being persuaded by Novell is essentially nil.
My take on this sort of thing is that whoever is hosting the servers should be free to collect whatever sort of stats they might want to collect. If you have a problem with that then use someone else's servers.
Servers, bandwidth, and the admins to make everything run just don't drop out of the sky.
So the new code phrase on blogs will be "don't contact your legislator about this, but..."
The difference between lobbyists and some of the more powerful bloggers appears to me to be that the lobbyists are at least honest about what they are up to. Seriously, the folks at moveon.org brag about the real life effects that their messages have had on politics. How, exactly, is that different from what the "evil" lobbyists are doing?
Personally, I'm hoping the whole system is dragged down by its own weight. People should be able to spend their time and effort on political speech without having to hire an accountant.
So the idea would be to only punish bloggers and or lobbyists that are actually successful at raising money. All of the sites that are "just scraping by" wouldn't be considered lobbyists, but would instead fit inside some other category that was exempt.
That would work fine. Just don't be surprised if every lobbyist on capital hill change his or her operation so that it fit the loophole. There are lots of ways to take a large organization with piles of money and make it appear to be "just scraping by." Accountants in DC will love that sort of a law.
That's the problem with regulating lobbyists. At the end of the day it is all free speech. Just because my broadsheets cost more than yours doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to collect the money. What's more, if I want to spend my hard earned cash promoting ridiculous political candidates shouldn't that be my right?
Everyone knows that the only jobs that count are the jobs in the United States. The rest of the folks in the world don't need jobs, they just need government cheese.
I totally agree with you that there are other ways to skin this particular cat. However, the ability to use Microsoft's software to set up "impromptu" servers is part of the reason that Windows is so ubiquitous. A huge part of the Microsoft draw was that it took very little training or knowledge to set up simple file and print solutions for small businesses.
Ubuntu isn't such a bad solution either. It's probably less expensive (and more flexible) than a dedicated NAS. More reliable than trusting the bundled 40G hard drive and an external drive, and way less expensive than SBS.
Perhaps it is just because I grew up in a small town, but I am used to people knowing who I am. When I go shopping in my home town chances are good that the person behind the counter not only knows who I am, but who my parents and grandparents are as well. Heck, chances are good that they taught me in Sunday School and know all sorts of embarrassing stories about me.
Likewise I have never considered my full name to be some sort of secret. I'll happily supply my name to anyone that asks. In fact, I don't post to/. using a pseudonym.
I personally think that one of the real problems with the Internet is that too many people feel that their actions online shouldn't reflect on "real life." Aliases and pseudonyms bring out the worst in some people. I don't care if the phone company knows who I am, or my ISP, or Microsoft, or the government. I am not the least bit ashamed of my actions online.
Most physical stores I enter actually *film* me the entire time I am in the store. I fail to see how monitoring my clickstream is more intrusive than that.
Here's the deal. When I am in public (and the Internet certainly counts as a public place) I try to behave myself with a certain sense of decorum. If someone wants to take notes so that they have a better chance of selling me stuff that's fine by me. I buy stuff every day. I would just as soon spend my money with retailers that are paying attention to what I want.
I've never understood this myself. Microsoft and friends are going to push ads at us either way, I would just as soon see ads for stuff that I am actually interested in. When I go to a store and the salesman knows me well enough to actually be helpful I chalk that up to good service. Why should a website be any different?
I think that the real problem is that a lot of slashdotters don't like the picture that the sum of their online information paints about them. If you don't like the picture that your online experience paints of you, then you might want to reconsider how you act while online.
The big deal is that I get a "real world" 40 mpg out of my 96 Honda Civic, and I don't have a trunk full of toxic batteries. Sure all EPA gas mileage ratings are currently very optimistic, but they are especially optimistic for hybrids, and that's a problem.
The Prius is a great car, but you could almost certainly have gotten a non-hybrid car that was more efficient in real world driving at a much lower price. You wouldn't have to worry about batteries either. As a concrete example my 96 Civic gets much better gas real world mileage than my mother's 2005 Civic hybrid.
Novell's customers aren't going to appreciate any shenanigans. If Novell can't legally distribute a GPLed version of Samba then Novell's prospective customers are simply going to get their service and support from someone else. After all, for a similar price Red Hat will happily sell you support and indemnify you against patent lawsuits. Red Hat is already the leader in the Linux arms race.
If the Samba team (or the Free Software Foundation) even breathed a word of a lawsuit for copyright infringement Novell's potential customers would dry up and blow away. It's one thing for Microsoft to hint that there are potential patent issues with Linux. No one seriously believes that Microsoft is going to sue end users, and even if Microsoft did sue end users it would have to prove that it had a valid patent claim in court. Meanwhile Free Software developers would be hard at work creating a workaround so that the Free Software in question no longer used the patented techniques.
A charge of copyright infringement, on the other hand, is a pretty straightforward case. No one is pretending that the Samba Team or the Free Software Foundation didn't write the software in question. If the Samba team says that it believes a certain vendor doesn't have the right to distribute newer versions of its software then software buyers are going to take the Samba team at its word.
Either they're stupid or they already planned for GPLv3.
This is Novell we are talking about. My money is on stupid. Especially considering the fact that version 3 of the GPL hasn't been finalized yet and Eben Moglen has specifically stated that it will be revised so that deals of this nature won't be permitted. Sure, Novell and Microsoft could "tweak" their deal afterwards, but any tweaking they do will almost certainly bring the deal more into line with what the Free Software community wants. What's more, the FSF can continue to "change" its license until either Novell decides that it isn't going to distribute software written by the FSF (and the Samba team and many others) or until Novell's newly tweaked deal with Microsoft makes the FSF happy.
When push comes to shove the FSF and the Samba team have all the cards. Without software controlled by the FSF and the Samba team Novell might as well go back to trying to sell Netware.
Sure, Novell could swap out Samba for something written by Microsoft that does the same thing. Of course then Novell would be 100% dependent on Microsoft for an important piece of its network operating system stack. Beta versions of Samba are currently able to completely replace an AD domain controller. What do you think the chances are of Microsoft delivering something like that to Novell? If Microsoft's Samba replacement is anything like the other bits and pieces of UNIX software Microsoft has written over the years Novell will be lucky if it doesn't turn every single file served up into kiddie porn.
Samba is already an entrenched part of the enterprise, and it is shipped by every large vendor except Microsoft. Windows filesharing for basically every OS on the planet (except Windows) is based on Samba, and a new version of the GPL isn't going to change a thing.
Well, Novell will be left out in the cold. That will be different. The once mighty king of fileserving will be relegated to depending on Microsoft for a Windows filesharing solution.
Novell will continue to be able to distribute GPLv2 versions of Samba. However, the new versions and added functionality will be unavailable to Novell and Novell's customers. Old versions of Samba are hardly a recipe for increased interoperability with Windows. Now, Novell could try and fork Samba from the newest GPLv2 version and compete with the official branch, but seeing as how Novell just lost their chief Samba hacker that's not likely to be a very good plan. Even if they could keep up Novell will still have the added expense of maintaining its own branch of Samba all by itself. Hardly a winning strategy.
Now, it is possible that the lawyers at Novell and Microsoft will find a way to circumvent the GPLv3. The question is whether or not the lawyers will be able to come up with a way to circumvent the GPLv3 that customers will actually bite on. Remember, to a certain extent it is accepted that the GPLv2 doesn't cover this particular case simply because Eben Moglen said so. Microsoft and Novell would be unwise in the extreme to distribute some else's copyrighted material that was covered by the GPLv3 under terms that Eben says are contradictory to that license. After all, he would likely make a very compelling witness if a court case should come up, and the penalties for distributing someone else's copyrighted material illegally are ridiculous.
Novell has a serious problem. Somewhere along the line it forgot that it doesn't actually own the copyrights to most of the software that it distributes as SuSE Linux.
It's easy enough to say that, but Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG, and AIG Technologies are not likely to be very happy when the next version of Samba rolls out and they can't use it because it is licensed under version 3 of the GPL and Novell can't distribute GPLv3 apps and still maintain its deal with Microsoft.
Novell has a vested interest in keeping the Free Software community happy because there is no way that Novell can compete if it has to maintain its own forks of popular Free Software projects. Novell is having enough trouble trying to convince customers that a migration from Netware to SuSE Linux makes more sense than a migration from Netware to Windows. The last thing Novell needs is this sort of drama.
Yes, you probably would. However, you probably also wouldn't do business with a salesdroid that bounced your emails because his inbox was limited to 25M. In the end most purchasing agents and sales reps aren't technical people. They don't care where the email ends up as long as it gets answered. They're just normal people trying to get their job done with the tools given them.
I used to think that education would be one of the first segments to switch to Free Software. After all, Linux has so much to offer educational institutions, and thin clients and Free Software offer such amazing cost advantages that these perpetually cash strapped operations would essentially be "forced" to switch.
However, for the reasons you cited above I now believe that education will likely be on the trailing edge of Free Software adoption. However, that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to radically reduce costs while improving reliability and maintainability by switching to Free Software.
And even if Linux doesn't make huge inroads this go around in five more years Linux will be much improved and Microsoft will have to come up with a whole new set of reasons why you should upgrade to its newest version. Unlike Microsoft's previous competitors Linux isn't going away.
Re:We have a bigger problem...
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Saving U.S. Science
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We still have tons of people trying to immigrate here, but they're all dirt-poor uneducated Mexicans who want to work as landscapers, and they're certainly not going to be the next generation of scientists.
At one time the same thing was said about every wave of immigrant that has come to the United States. Yesterday it was the Irish, Italians, or Chinese (to name a few of the more controversial groups), and today it is the "Mexicans." A certain part of the American population has always been prejudiced against the current wave of "dirt poor" immigrants. Yet somehow these immigrants (and their children) have generally managed find a way to contribute in the long term. The company doing my landscaping this year was run by a very nice man formerly from Ecuador. If his kids work half as hard as their father I am sure that the sky is the limit for them. If not, well, someone has got to cut the grass. I sure don't want to.
Of course, I happen to speak Spanish (I went to high school in South America), so I might feel a little different about "dirt poor" Mexicans than some Americans. People are people no matter what color their skin, and no matter what sort of opportunities they have had to get an education. America has plenty of jobs for those people that are willing to work.
So if we want to continue to lead, we have to grow our own here. Unfortunately, that's not happening; our education system sucks, we have an anti-intellectual culture that favors football and NASCAR, and jobs in science don't pay squat.
I am not going to argue that it wouldn't pay to improve our school system. I've got three children myself, and I have a vested interest in making sure that they do well in life. Not that I am particularly concerned. There are plenty of academic opportunities for American children that apply themselves. Those students that don't apply themselves are unlikely to do well no matter how much money we throw at the system. That's the real difference between Americans and the rest of the world. The price of failure here is not really that great. If you fail to get into the "good" school in India then your life is basically over. Like the article said the other day India will graduate more than a million students this year that are unqualified to work in India's growing outsourcing industries. Instead of making hundreds of dollars a month in the outsourcing business these graduates will make tens of dollars. That's the sort of difference that tends to really focus people's attention. Students outside the U.S. work much harder because the stakes are higher.
As for our "anti-intellectual" culture here in the U.S., I think that you will find that sports heroes are revered the world over. I worked for a fantasy sports website for a while and Indians are every bit as crazy for cricket as Americans are for football and NASCAR. We can simply afford to pay our heroes more money. On the plus side we also pay our scientist far more money as well, including giving them access to toys that folks in other parts of the world can only dream of. No matter how you slice things up America still does far more research than any other country on the planet. If you want to play in the big leagues and snag the big money you have to come to America. As long as that's the case, that's precisely what people will do.
Once folks are here, whether their last name is O'Malley, Xin, Gupta, or Hernandez, they still end up becoming Americans. Personally, I like it that way. Like I said before that's the real trick. America is a nation that will happily claim the credit for the accomplishments of folks who were born all over the globe:).
Re:We have a bigger problem...
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Saving U.S. Science
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The secret to America's success in maintaining the science gap with the rest of the world is that we have historically poached the best and the brightest from everywhere on the planet. That's the truly scary thing about the current outsourcing trends. It isn't surprising that there are piles of intelligent and motivated Chinese and Indians that are making real breakthroughs in all sorts of fields. It *is* surprising, however, that for the first time in a generation many of these folks are not moving to the West to take advantage of their skills. The U.S. economy holds all sorts of bonuses for educated folks with drive and ambition. People in the U.S. have access to funding that is unmatched in the rest of the world. As long as it is relatively easy for smart people to emmigrate to the U.S., and as long as the U.S. is seen as *the* place to go to turn your ideas into fat piles of money, then the U.S. will maintain its technology lead.
Despite what educators believe (especially primary educators) the state of the American primary education system really has very little to do with America's technological lead. Who cares how much smarter Ethiopian high school students are than American high school students if the Ethiopian students have to come to the U.S. to do advanced research? America is more than happy to let other countries pay to have their young educated and then poach the best and brightest when they start to be income earners.
Like most everything else America's technological lead really is more a question of economics than education. Only idiots think that our success has something to do with race. Of course our leading technologist, scientists, and thinkers used used to be foreigners. Now, however, they are Americans. When some other country learns that particular trick then the U.S. will have real problems.
Which is why the obvious solution is to purchase thin clients instead of PCs. Heck, if you are careful to buy motherboards that support PXE you can even buy cheap barebones computers without an OS or hard drive and use them for thin clients. If you are really looking to go cheap get yourself a pile of donated Dell or HP machines, pull out the hard drives and throw them away. Now connect them to a Linux terminal server and enjoy.
Instead of hundreds of boxes to administer you have one server (possibly two for redundancy). If one of the clients breaks you send a monkey out to throw it away and you pull another preconfigured box off the shelf. Since anything faster than 700Mhz or so is fast enough and since donating to schools is a tax write off you probably never will run out of potential thin clients.
A single beefy server on a switched 100M network can handle hundreds of clients (assuming everyone doesn't try and watch a video at the same time), and Linux provides more than enough software for the average school kid to get their work done. Want faster computers? Simply upgrade the server and everyone gets a boost.
I agree that Linux doesn't really save you that much if you are talking about purchasing new computers (probably running Windows) and installing Linux on them. Although these days it is not that difficult to find inexpensive new computers that don't come with Windows. If you are set on rolling out PCs the real cost savings come from axing MS Office, not Windows.
Yes, and if you train them using Microsoft Office and Microsoft comes out with a version of Microsoft Office with a completely different user interface they will likely need to be retrained if you want to use the new version of MS Office. Whatever software you use to train the high school kids of today they'll probably have to learn something else when they get a real job. That's just the nature of the beast. In the meantime Linux thin clients running Firefox and OpenOffice.org are a heck of a lot less expensive, and far easier to maintain than Microsoft's offerings.
In fact, Linux thin clients are so much less expensive to obtain and maintain than Windows Desktops running MS Office that it is entirely possible that by the time little Johnny finishes school that's what software his employer will be using.
Schools are never likely to become good at guessing what kind of software people are going to be requiring three to four years in the future. So they should pick software the same way most businesses do. Most small businesses (and small businesses provide the bulk of jobs in the U.S.) choose the software that is "good enough" at the lowest possible price.
Competent African labor isn't likely to be any cheaper than Indian labor is now, and this article is a good example of why that is so. India will graduate 1.5 million people this year, and only a fraction of these people are capable of replacing Americans in the customer service business (much less the software development business). That's in a country where English has a firm foothold and where the necessary infrastructure is mostly in place. That isn't the case in most of Africa (excluding South Africa to a certain extent).
The Global economy can't even find work for more than a fraction of India's college graduates. Africans don't have a chance in Hell.
Slashdot Mirror
Novell's problem is that the FSF controls the development of large pieces of software that are critical to the SuSE Linux distribution. Sure, The FSF can't retroactively change the license of existing versions of these software packages, but Novell is going to find itself in serious trouble if it is unable to distribute future versions of this software which will be release under the redesigned GPLv3. Even worse, there are plenty of people outside of the FSF in organizations like the Samba developers that have equally strong feelings about the Novell/Microsoft deal. Like it or not, new versions of a significant portion of the SuSE distribution are going to be released under the GPLv3. If Novell has to take on the added expense of maintaining its own GPLv2 forks of all of this software then it may as well go back to hawking Netware because its aspirations of becoming a powerhouse in the Free Software world will be finished. Novell is having a hard enough time simply competing with Red Hat. There is no way that it can compete with Red Hat and the entire Free Software community while trying to maintain SuSE, all of the software that switched to the GPLv3, and Netware to boot.
Unfortunately for Novell it also needs the money that Microsoft provided as part of the deal.
So Novell is going to pretend that everything is hunky dory and hope that somehow the FSF is bluffing about the GPLv3. Of course, RMS is the kind of guy that decided to write his own operating system rather than live in a proprietary software world. I think that the chances of him being persuaded by Novell is essentially nil.
My take on this sort of thing is that whoever is hosting the servers should be free to collect whatever sort of stats they might want to collect. If you have a problem with that then use someone else's servers.
Servers, bandwidth, and the admins to make everything run just don't drop out of the sky.
Best Post Ever.
So the new code phrase on blogs will be "don't contact your legislator about this, but..."
The difference between lobbyists and some of the more powerful bloggers appears to me to be that the lobbyists are at least honest about what they are up to. Seriously, the folks at moveon.org brag about the real life effects that their messages have had on politics. How, exactly, is that different from what the "evil" lobbyists are doing?
Personally, I'm hoping the whole system is dragged down by its own weight. People should be able to spend their time and effort on political speech without having to hire an accountant.
So the idea would be to only punish bloggers and or lobbyists that are actually successful at raising money. All of the sites that are "just scraping by" wouldn't be considered lobbyists, but would instead fit inside some other category that was exempt.
That would work fine. Just don't be surprised if every lobbyist on capital hill change his or her operation so that it fit the loophole. There are lots of ways to take a large organization with piles of money and make it appear to be "just scraping by." Accountants in DC will love that sort of a law.
That's the problem with regulating lobbyists. At the end of the day it is all free speech. Just because my broadsheets cost more than yours doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to collect the money. What's more, if I want to spend my hard earned cash promoting ridiculous political candidates shouldn't that be my right?
Everyone knows that the only jobs that count are the jobs in the United States. The rest of the folks in the world don't need jobs, they just need government cheese.
Eventually the folks working on web forums will realize that they are just recreating NNTP and move on to something else.
I totally agree with you that there are other ways to skin this particular cat. However, the ability to use Microsoft's software to set up "impromptu" servers is part of the reason that Windows is so ubiquitous. A huge part of the Microsoft draw was that it took very little training or knowledge to set up simple file and print solutions for small businesses.
Ubuntu isn't such a bad solution either. It's probably less expensive (and more flexible) than a dedicated NAS. More reliable than trusting the bundled 40G hard drive and an external drive, and way less expensive than SBS.
Perhaps it is just because I grew up in a small town, but I am used to people knowing who I am. When I go shopping in my home town chances are good that the person behind the counter not only knows who I am, but who my parents and grandparents are as well. Heck, chances are good that they taught me in Sunday School and know all sorts of embarrassing stories about me.
Likewise I have never considered my full name to be some sort of secret. I'll happily supply my name to anyone that asks. In fact, I don't post to /. using a pseudonym.
I personally think that one of the real problems with the Internet is that too many people feel that their actions online shouldn't reflect on "real life." Aliases and pseudonyms bring out the worst in some people. I don't care if the phone company knows who I am, or my ISP, or Microsoft, or the government. I am not the least bit ashamed of my actions online.
Most physical stores I enter actually *film* me the entire time I am in the store. I fail to see how monitoring my clickstream is more intrusive than that.
Here's the deal. When I am in public (and the Internet certainly counts as a public place) I try to behave myself with a certain sense of decorum. If someone wants to take notes so that they have a better chance of selling me stuff that's fine by me. I buy stuff every day. I would just as soon spend my money with retailers that are paying attention to what I want.
I've never understood this myself. Microsoft and friends are going to push ads at us either way, I would just as soon see ads for stuff that I am actually interested in. When I go to a store and the salesman knows me well enough to actually be helpful I chalk that up to good service. Why should a website be any different?
I think that the real problem is that a lot of slashdotters don't like the picture that the sum of their online information paints about them. If you don't like the picture that your online experience paints of you, then you might want to reconsider how you act while online.
The big deal is that I get a "real world" 40 mpg out of my 96 Honda Civic, and I don't have a trunk full of toxic batteries. Sure all EPA gas mileage ratings are currently very optimistic, but they are especially optimistic for hybrids, and that's a problem.
The Prius is a great car, but you could almost certainly have gotten a non-hybrid car that was more efficient in real world driving at a much lower price. You wouldn't have to worry about batteries either. As a concrete example my 96 Civic gets much better gas real world mileage than my mother's 2005 Civic hybrid.
Novell's customers aren't going to appreciate any shenanigans. If Novell can't legally distribute a GPLed version of Samba then Novell's prospective customers are simply going to get their service and support from someone else. After all, for a similar price Red Hat will happily sell you support and indemnify you against patent lawsuits. Red Hat is already the leader in the Linux arms race.
If the Samba team (or the Free Software Foundation) even breathed a word of a lawsuit for copyright infringement Novell's potential customers would dry up and blow away. It's one thing for Microsoft to hint that there are potential patent issues with Linux. No one seriously believes that Microsoft is going to sue end users, and even if Microsoft did sue end users it would have to prove that it had a valid patent claim in court. Meanwhile Free Software developers would be hard at work creating a workaround so that the Free Software in question no longer used the patented techniques.
A charge of copyright infringement, on the other hand, is a pretty straightforward case. No one is pretending that the Samba Team or the Free Software Foundation didn't write the software in question. If the Samba team says that it believes a certain vendor doesn't have the right to distribute newer versions of its software then software buyers are going to take the Samba team at its word.
This is Novell we are talking about. My money is on stupid. Especially considering the fact that version 3 of the GPL hasn't been finalized yet and Eben Moglen has specifically stated that it will be revised so that deals of this nature won't be permitted. Sure, Novell and Microsoft could "tweak" their deal afterwards, but any tweaking they do will almost certainly bring the deal more into line with what the Free Software community wants. What's more, the FSF can continue to "change" its license until either Novell decides that it isn't going to distribute software written by the FSF (and the Samba team and many others) or until Novell's newly tweaked deal with Microsoft makes the FSF happy.
When push comes to shove the FSF and the Samba team have all the cards. Without software controlled by the FSF and the Samba team Novell might as well go back to trying to sell Netware.
Sure, Novell could swap out Samba for something written by Microsoft that does the same thing. Of course then Novell would be 100% dependent on Microsoft for an important piece of its network operating system stack. Beta versions of Samba are currently able to completely replace an AD domain controller. What do you think the chances are of Microsoft delivering something like that to Novell? If Microsoft's Samba replacement is anything like the other bits and pieces of UNIX software Microsoft has written over the years Novell will be lucky if it doesn't turn every single file served up into kiddie porn.
Samba is already an entrenched part of the enterprise, and it is shipped by every large vendor except Microsoft. Windows filesharing for basically every OS on the planet (except Windows) is based on Samba, and a new version of the GPL isn't going to change a thing.
Well, Novell will be left out in the cold. That will be different. The once mighty king of fileserving will be relegated to depending on Microsoft for a Windows filesharing solution.
What a clever plan!
Novell will continue to be able to distribute GPLv2 versions of Samba. However, the new versions and added functionality will be unavailable to Novell and Novell's customers. Old versions of Samba are hardly a recipe for increased interoperability with Windows. Now, Novell could try and fork Samba from the newest GPLv2 version and compete with the official branch, but seeing as how Novell just lost their chief Samba hacker that's not likely to be a very good plan. Even if they could keep up Novell will still have the added expense of maintaining its own branch of Samba all by itself. Hardly a winning strategy.
Now, it is possible that the lawyers at Novell and Microsoft will find a way to circumvent the GPLv3. The question is whether or not the lawyers will be able to come up with a way to circumvent the GPLv3 that customers will actually bite on. Remember, to a certain extent it is accepted that the GPLv2 doesn't cover this particular case simply because Eben Moglen said so. Microsoft and Novell would be unwise in the extreme to distribute some else's copyrighted material that was covered by the GPLv3 under terms that Eben says are contradictory to that license. After all, he would likely make a very compelling witness if a court case should come up, and the penalties for distributing someone else's copyrighted material illegally are ridiculous.
Novell has a serious problem. Somewhere along the line it forgot that it doesn't actually own the copyrights to most of the software that it distributes as SuSE Linux.
It's easy enough to say that, but Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG, and AIG Technologies are not likely to be very happy when the next version of Samba rolls out and they can't use it because it is licensed under version 3 of the GPL and Novell can't distribute GPLv3 apps and still maintain its deal with Microsoft.
Novell has a vested interest in keeping the Free Software community happy because there is no way that Novell can compete if it has to maintain its own forks of popular Free Software projects. Novell is having enough trouble trying to convince customers that a migration from Netware to SuSE Linux makes more sense than a migration from Netware to Windows. The last thing Novell needs is this sort of drama.
Yes, you probably would. However, you probably also wouldn't do business with a salesdroid that bounced your emails because his inbox was limited to 25M. In the end most purchasing agents and sales reps aren't technical people. They don't care where the email ends up as long as it gets answered. They're just normal people trying to get their job done with the tools given them.
I used to think that education would be one of the first segments to switch to Free Software. After all, Linux has so much to offer educational institutions, and thin clients and Free Software offer such amazing cost advantages that these perpetually cash strapped operations would essentially be "forced" to switch.
However, for the reasons you cited above I now believe that education will likely be on the trailing edge of Free Software adoption. However, that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to radically reduce costs while improving reliability and maintainability by switching to Free Software.
And even if Linux doesn't make huge inroads this go around in five more years Linux will be much improved and Microsoft will have to come up with a whole new set of reasons why you should upgrade to its newest version. Unlike Microsoft's previous competitors Linux isn't going away.
At one time the same thing was said about every wave of immigrant that has come to the United States. Yesterday it was the Irish, Italians, or Chinese (to name a few of the more controversial groups), and today it is the "Mexicans." A certain part of the American population has always been prejudiced against the current wave of "dirt poor" immigrants. Yet somehow these immigrants (and their children) have generally managed find a way to contribute in the long term. The company doing my landscaping this year was run by a very nice man formerly from Ecuador. If his kids work half as hard as their father I am sure that the sky is the limit for them. If not, well, someone has got to cut the grass. I sure don't want to.
Of course, I happen to speak Spanish (I went to high school in South America), so I might feel a little different about "dirt poor" Mexicans than some Americans. People are people no matter what color their skin, and no matter what sort of opportunities they have had to get an education. America has plenty of jobs for those people that are willing to work.
I am not going to argue that it wouldn't pay to improve our school system. I've got three children myself, and I have a vested interest in making sure that they do well in life. Not that I am particularly concerned. There are plenty of academic opportunities for American children that apply themselves. Those students that don't apply themselves are unlikely to do well no matter how much money we throw at the system. That's the real difference between Americans and the rest of the world. The price of failure here is not really that great. If you fail to get into the "good" school in India then your life is basically over. Like the article said the other day India will graduate more than a million students this year that are unqualified to work in India's growing outsourcing industries. Instead of making hundreds of dollars a month in the outsourcing business these graduates will make tens of dollars. That's the sort of difference that tends to really focus people's attention. Students outside the U.S. work much harder because the stakes are higher.
As for our "anti-intellectual" culture here in the U.S., I think that you will find that sports heroes are revered the world over. I worked for a fantasy sports website for a while and Indians are every bit as crazy for cricket as Americans are for football and NASCAR. We can simply afford to pay our heroes more money. On the plus side we also pay our scientist far more money as well, including giving them access to toys that folks in other parts of the world can only dream of. No matter how you slice things up America still does far more research than any other country on the planet. If you want to play in the big leagues and snag the big money you have to come to America. As long as that's the case, that's precisely what people will do.
Once folks are here, whether their last name is O'Malley, Xin, Gupta, or Hernandez, they still end up becoming Americans. Personally, I like it that way. Like I said before that's the real trick. America is a nation that will happily claim the credit for the accomplishments of folks who were born all over the globe :).
The secret to America's success in maintaining the science gap with the rest of the world is that we have historically poached the best and the brightest from everywhere on the planet. That's the truly scary thing about the current outsourcing trends. It isn't surprising that there are piles of intelligent and motivated Chinese and Indians that are making real breakthroughs in all sorts of fields. It *is* surprising, however, that for the first time in a generation many of these folks are not moving to the West to take advantage of their skills. The U.S. economy holds all sorts of bonuses for educated folks with drive and ambition. People in the U.S. have access to funding that is unmatched in the rest of the world. As long as it is relatively easy for smart people to emmigrate to the U.S., and as long as the U.S. is seen as *the* place to go to turn your ideas into fat piles of money, then the U.S. will maintain its technology lead.
Despite what educators believe (especially primary educators) the state of the American primary education system really has very little to do with America's technological lead. Who cares how much smarter Ethiopian high school students are than American high school students if the Ethiopian students have to come to the U.S. to do advanced research? America is more than happy to let other countries pay to have their young educated and then poach the best and brightest when they start to be income earners.
Like most everything else America's technological lead really is more a question of economics than education. Only idiots think that our success has something to do with race. Of course our leading technologist, scientists, and thinkers used used to be foreigners. Now, however, they are Americans. When some other country learns that particular trick then the U.S. will have real problems.
Which is why the obvious solution is to purchase thin clients instead of PCs. Heck, if you are careful to buy motherboards that support PXE you can even buy cheap barebones computers without an OS or hard drive and use them for thin clients. If you are really looking to go cheap get yourself a pile of donated Dell or HP machines, pull out the hard drives and throw them away. Now connect them to a Linux terminal server and enjoy.
Instead of hundreds of boxes to administer you have one server (possibly two for redundancy). If one of the clients breaks you send a monkey out to throw it away and you pull another preconfigured box off the shelf. Since anything faster than 700Mhz or so is fast enough and since donating to schools is a tax write off you probably never will run out of potential thin clients.
A single beefy server on a switched 100M network can handle hundreds of clients (assuming everyone doesn't try and watch a video at the same time), and Linux provides more than enough software for the average school kid to get their work done. Want faster computers? Simply upgrade the server and everyone gets a boost.
I agree that Linux doesn't really save you that much if you are talking about purchasing new computers (probably running Windows) and installing Linux on them. Although these days it is not that difficult to find inexpensive new computers that don't come with Windows. If you are set on rolling out PCs the real cost savings come from axing MS Office, not Windows.
Yes, and if you train them using Microsoft Office and Microsoft comes out with a version of Microsoft Office with a completely different user interface they will likely need to be retrained if you want to use the new version of MS Office. Whatever software you use to train the high school kids of today they'll probably have to learn something else when they get a real job. That's just the nature of the beast. In the meantime Linux thin clients running Firefox and OpenOffice.org are a heck of a lot less expensive, and far easier to maintain than Microsoft's offerings.
In fact, Linux thin clients are so much less expensive to obtain and maintain than Windows Desktops running MS Office that it is entirely possible that by the time little Johnny finishes school that's what software his employer will be using.
Schools are never likely to become good at guessing what kind of software people are going to be requiring three to four years in the future. So they should pick software the same way most businesses do. Most small businesses (and small businesses provide the bulk of jobs in the U.S.) choose the software that is "good enough" at the lowest possible price.
Competent African labor isn't likely to be any cheaper than Indian labor is now, and this article is a good example of why that is so. India will graduate 1.5 million people this year, and only a fraction of these people are capable of replacing Americans in the customer service business (much less the software development business). That's in a country where English has a firm foothold and where the necessary infrastructure is mostly in place. That isn't the case in most of Africa (excluding South Africa to a certain extent).
The Global economy can't even find work for more than a fraction of India's college graduates. Africans don't have a chance in Hell.
Nope, just another happy XMission customer.