Heck, even "Free Software" doesn't necessarily even mean you get discount prices. The Free Software Foundation's GNU bundle sells for a whopping $5000.:)
Actually Microsoft can still sell their products in Vietnam. However, the government and the government run businesses aren't interested in buying Microsoft products. On the flip side the U.S. government probably isn't interested in Vietnamese software either.
The interesting bit is the decree that computers assembled in Vietnam will come pre-installed with Free Software. This sounds like a slam against Microsoft, but really this is merely an effort to lower their piracy ratio. Vietnamese PCs assembled for the Vietnamese market almost certainly used to come with a pirated version of Windows. Now Vietnam can go to the WTO and point out that none of the PCs assembled in their country come with absolutely no pirated software.
If you really wanted Windows on one of these things, I am sure that Microsoft could arrange for a licensed copy.
The difference is that this mandate is based on simple economics. Vietnam can't afford to purchase the commercial software they are currently using, and they can't get into the WTO unless they seriously curtail their use of pirated software. Vietnam didn't have any choice but to go with Free Software.
In a country where the average income is under $500 a year it simply makes good economic sense to fix Free Software so that it does what you want over paying for expensive commercial software licenses.
In short, this migration is not based in politics. Microsoft (and the other commercial software vendors) really didn't leave Vietnam much choice.
I would bet that exceptions could be made for computers slated for export, as long as they were loaded with legal copies of Windows. After all, this isn't really about replacing Windows with Linux. It is about replacing illegal installs of Windows with legal Linux installs. Vietnam is simply trying to cut down their piracy ratio so that they can get into the WTO.
Re:I love the smell of GNUpalm in the morning. . .
on
Vietnam Going Open Source
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The countries looking at Free Software are the countries in which the price of labor is so low that it is cheaper to pay someone to fix Free Software than it is to purchase proprietary software.
Basically these countries are poor (primarily due to their past economic policy choices), and they are looking for an inexpensive way to create a computing infrastructure. Free Software is basically a sure thing in this type of environment. Heck, there are plenty of countries in the first world that are looking at Free Software to save cash. In places like Vietnam where labor is so ridiculously cheap there is no way that Microsoft can justify their premium prices.
Basically, Microsoft is simply failing to be competitive in these lower-margin markets. Vietnam can't afford to pay Microsoft (or Sun, or IBM, etc.), and so their best bet is to take the excellent body of Free Software and put their own (inexpensive) hackers to work on it.
The reason that Vietnam is doing this is that they have to lower their piracy ratio or the won't be allowed into the WTO. That leaves Vietnam with two choices. Either they can start cracking down on piracy, or they can mandate that all computers be installed with Free Software on them.
Of the two the Free Software route is certainly easier. They can go to the WTO, and with straight faces say that all of the PCs shipped in the country ship with legal software. Sure, there will still be a bustling software piracy business going on underneath the surface, but Vietnam will be able to say that they are taking steps.
This is especially true because it would appear that Vietnam is very serious about shifting the government and government held businesses to Free Software. This, IMHO, makes perfect sense. The cost of using Microsoft software is simply too high for countries like Vietnam where the average yearly income is less than $500. Microsoft's TCO numbers assume that the cost of labor is going to be far higher than the cost of software licenses, and in Vietnam that simply isn't the case.
In Vietnam it probably *is* cheaper to fix Free Software so that it does what they want than to purchase software from Microsoft.
In short, this moves makes a whole lot of sense. Not only will this help jumpstart their own local software industry, but it will lower costs and cut down dramatically on piracy as well (which, of course, is the major goal). When the WTO treaties were written up the first world countries probably thought that this would force Vietnam to purchase more software. Instead it drove them to consider Free Software.
Spot on. If software becomes a cookie-cutter affair then I lose my biggest advantage over the folks in India. I am available, on site, and can create software that fits the business precisely. Free Software gives me the ability to create custom standards-based applications that are at a price that is comparable to the one-size-fits all variants that the big software companies are selling.
Yes, because there is a correlation between wealth and intelligence. You'll also notice that poor people spend a dis-proportionate amount on things like the lottery (a tax on people who are bad at math).
In other words, stupid people make poor choices... Film at eleven.
Your point is that it is at least theoretically possible that non-MS applications might be made compatible with Microsoft's DRM. Without access to the licensing terms, however, it is not possible to guess how likely that would be.
Personally I believe that Microsoft should have every right to create whatever products they want. I am not one of those folks that believes that the DOJ dropped the ball prosecuting Microsoft. However, I also think that you should call a spade a spade. Microsoft's new IRM services are specifically designed to entice customers into moving towards an all-Microsoft solution.
In order to create an IRM consumer you have to sign a licensing agreement with Microsoft. The terms of this agreement are not on Microsoft's website, but what do you bet that the chances are that Microsoft is going to allow an Open Source client?
I would say that the chances are precisely NULL. The security in this scenario is entirely dependent on control of the clients. For example, let's say that I wrote an IRM enabled email client that disregarded what the IRM server had to say about printing the email.
This is very similiar to the situation that xpdf is in when it comes to "secure" PDF files. Modifying xpdf so that will disregard any security flags is almost certainly something that could be done in an afternoon.
In short, Microsoft's IRM scheme can only work if they tightly control what programs can connect to the IRM server.
It's anti-competitive because other mail readers aren't going to be able to read these emails at all. Or is Microsoft's IRM going to work with Emacs/Gnus, Thunderbird, or Evolution?
Not to mention the fact that Windows 3.1 sucked, and Windows 2000/XP, well... doesn't. People were dying for Windows 95 because Windows 3.1 was barely useable and they needed something to run on all that nifty inexpensive x86 hardware.
Back when Windows 95 came out Microsoft actually had the potential for competition (in the form of OS/2). Microsoft ramped up the vaporware parade to keep developers from looking to see if the grass was greener on the OS/2 side. Now Linux is pressing and Microsoft is dipping into the same bag of tricks.
You can pretty much guarantee that Longhorn will be unstable when Microsoft first releases it. Debian stable, on the other hand, has had 2.5 years of real world testing by the time it gets released.
Clearly you must be young enough to still believe that kids are actually helpful.
My father said it best, "By the time I tell you what I want done, show you how to do it, and then make sure that you actually get it done I could have done the job myself three times over. I don't make you work to make my life easier, I make you work because someday you are going to need to know how to work."
In the past an organization had one of two choices when it came to acquiring the software they needed. They could either buy something off the shelf and make it fit their organization, or they could build custom software from scratch. It's a small wonder that purchasing software off the shelf became so popular when the alternative was to gamble on your own software development project.
Nowadays, however, there is a third choice, and it is a fairly compelling one. That choice is to take a piece of Free Software and modify it to fit the needs of the organization. Reusing Free Software has a whole host of advantages. It allows for highly custom software without most of the risks (and cost) of starting from scratch. As an added bonus it becomes fairly easy for several unrelated organizations to share the costs of software development.
This trend is almost certainly going to drive down the profit margins of commercial software companies in the long run.
SCO is a special case. They don't care about the long term survival of their company.
Everyone else, however, from Apple to Microsoft, when faced with a lawsuit over the GPL has folded. Like the article says their have been hundreds of cases where there have been "issues" over the years, and yet the FSF has yet to try the GPL in court.
First of all, the FSF doesn't "settle," they get the offender to release the code in question, and then they forgive them. The FSF hasn't had to settle, because only a fool would stare them down in court. The FSF has a pretty good case with the GPL, and their lawyers are top drawer. Not to mention the fact that if you go to court against the FSF and lose that they get your source, your profits, and punitive damages.
In short, the FSF has the biggest stick imaginable, and there hasn't been a company yet that has wanted to risk taking a drubbing over simply giving in to the FSF's moderate demands. The FSF folks are nice guys, they just want their due.
The reason that the FSF always is front and center in these sorts of arguments is that they have a big pile of code that they own the copyrights too. Part of becoming official GNU software is signing over the copyrights to the work so that the FSF can defend these copyrights in court. Linux is much trickier to defend because each individual retains their own copyrights. Frankly, that is one of the drawbacks of the way that licensing for the Linux kernel has been handled. It makes it much more difficult to enforce copyright infringement.
That's not how copyright works at all. If you take the text from my copyrighted book, for example, and sell it. I am not only entitled to the profits that you made from the sale of my copyrighted material, but you owe me punitive damages as well. In egregious cases this can be several times the profit that you made.
In other words, it doesn't matter how much I charge for the software (note the FSF charges $5000 for their deluxe Free Software bundle), it only matters how much you made with my software.
Cisco is lucky that the FSF is as nice as they are.
Oh please. That's why I called it a "port" to Mono. Granted moving from.NET with Winforms won't be as easy as dropping your assemblies on a Linux box, but it certainly won't be as hard as rewriting the whole thing again from scratch. Not only are the Mono folks teaming up with the Wine guys to create a Winforms library that should be very compatible with Microsoft's Winforms library, but the GTK# library should be mostly source compatible.
In short, porting your application should take a little global search and replace and a bit of testing. That's a fair sight better than rewriting in some other language.
I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic, but you are 100% correct. There are plenty of folks willing to share their source under a more permissive license. Using GPLed code, and then painting the FSF in a bad light because they are protecting their copyrighted material is just poor form.
Chances are good that it was easier to "borrow" Linux than to make the BSD code do what Linksys needed, and now they are paying the piper. The fact of the matter is that licensing matters.
Exactly. The reason that Linksys was able to sell 400,000 units is that they stole a jump on their competitors by using Free Software as the base of their product. They didn't write that software and the license that Linux is distributed under is very explicit. Linksys sold nearly a half million units of a product that someone else did the bulk of the work developing and now they want to complain about the terms?
That's just ridiculous.
The reason that Cisco is going to settle is that they know that if they didn't settle they would lose,be forced to cough up the source code, and pay damages to boot. They are fortunate that they stole from the FSF and not someone else.
Yes, and the folks writing applications for VMS back in the day thought that was a good idea too, as did the folks writing VB code before it became VB.Net. People that sold toolkits that allowed for migrations away from poor platform choices have traditionally made pretty good money. Especially when the legacy platform was popular.
Anyway you slice it Free Software hackers who are working on development tools have to find some way to entice Windows developers, because Windows is where all of the development happens nowadays. Current day Pythonistas, Perl Monks, and Java developers all (at one point) probably had to be lured away from Windows development. Making it easy to port.NET applications is likely to be a fairly successful enticement. I personally wish that Miguel's prodigious talents were focused on Python, because that is what I am using, but I can understand why he is targetting.NET.
The people who are really cranky with Miguel are the Java folks. After all, they have been the heir apparent to usurp Microsoft's spot at the top of the development totem pole for a long time, and.NET is starting to look like it is going to take the wind out of the Java sails. Unfortunately, Sun completely failed to convert the Free Software camp (mostly due to their licensing issues), and they never did deliver a sensible way to develop GUI applications.
Mono, on the other hand, is poised to deliver both a compelling set of server-side tools, and an even more compelling set of client-side tools. The fact that Mono itself is cross-platform (it runs nearly everywhere) and the fact that it is fairly easy to port.NET code, and you end up with a very compelling case.
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Yes, good point. Free Software allows Vietnam to allocate its resources more efficiently.
Heck, even "Free Software" doesn't necessarily even mean you get discount prices. The Free Software Foundation's GNU bundle sells for a whopping $5000. :)
Actually Microsoft can still sell their products in Vietnam. However, the government and the government run businesses aren't interested in buying Microsoft products. On the flip side the U.S. government probably isn't interested in Vietnamese software either.
The interesting bit is the decree that computers assembled in Vietnam will come pre-installed with Free Software. This sounds like a slam against Microsoft, but really this is merely an effort to lower their piracy ratio. Vietnamese PCs assembled for the Vietnamese market almost certainly used to come with a pirated version of Windows. Now Vietnam can go to the WTO and point out that none of the PCs assembled in their country come with absolutely no pirated software.
If you really wanted Windows on one of these things, I am sure that Microsoft could arrange for a licensed copy.
The difference is that this mandate is based on simple economics. Vietnam can't afford to purchase the commercial software they are currently using, and they can't get into the WTO unless they seriously curtail their use of pirated software. Vietnam didn't have any choice but to go with Free Software.
In a country where the average income is under $500 a year it simply makes good economic sense to fix Free Software so that it does what you want over paying for expensive commercial software licenses.
In short, this migration is not based in politics. Microsoft (and the other commercial software vendors) really didn't leave Vietnam much choice.
I would bet that exceptions could be made for computers slated for export, as long as they were loaded with legal copies of Windows. After all, this isn't really about replacing Windows with Linux. It is about replacing illegal installs of Windows with legal Linux installs. Vietnam is simply trying to cut down their piracy ratio so that they can get into the WTO.
The countries looking at Free Software are the countries in which the price of labor is so low that it is cheaper to pay someone to fix Free Software than it is to purchase proprietary software.
Basically these countries are poor (primarily due to their past economic policy choices), and they are looking for an inexpensive way to create a computing infrastructure. Free Software is basically a sure thing in this type of environment. Heck, there are plenty of countries in the first world that are looking at Free Software to save cash. In places like Vietnam where labor is so ridiculously cheap there is no way that Microsoft can justify their premium prices.
Basically, Microsoft is simply failing to be competitive in these lower-margin markets. Vietnam can't afford to pay Microsoft (or Sun, or IBM, etc.), and so their best bet is to take the excellent body of Free Software and put their own (inexpensive) hackers to work on it.
It's the Free Market at its finest.
The reason that Vietnam is doing this is that they have to lower their piracy ratio or the won't be allowed into the WTO. That leaves Vietnam with two choices. Either they can start cracking down on piracy, or they can mandate that all computers be installed with Free Software on them.
Of the two the Free Software route is certainly easier. They can go to the WTO, and with straight faces say that all of the PCs shipped in the country ship with legal software. Sure, there will still be a bustling software piracy business going on underneath the surface, but Vietnam will be able to say that they are taking steps.
This is especially true because it would appear that Vietnam is very serious about shifting the government and government held businesses to Free Software. This, IMHO, makes perfect sense. The cost of using Microsoft software is simply too high for countries like Vietnam where the average yearly income is less than $500. Microsoft's TCO numbers assume that the cost of labor is going to be far higher than the cost of software licenses, and in Vietnam that simply isn't the case.
In Vietnam it probably *is* cheaper to fix Free Software so that it does what they want than to purchase software from Microsoft.
In short, this moves makes a whole lot of sense. Not only will this help jumpstart their own local software industry, but it will lower costs and cut down dramatically on piracy as well (which, of course, is the major goal). When the WTO treaties were written up the first world countries probably thought that this would force Vietnam to purchase more software. Instead it drove them to consider Free Software.
Spot on. If software becomes a cookie-cutter affair then I lose my biggest advantage over the folks in India. I am available, on site, and can create software that fits the business precisely. Free Software gives me the ability to create custom standards-based applications that are at a price that is comparable to the one-size-fits all variants that the big software companies are selling.
Yes, because there is a correlation between wealth and intelligence. You'll also notice that poor people spend a dis-proportionate amount on things like the lottery (a tax on people who are bad at math).
In other words, stupid people make poor choices... Film at eleven.
Your point is that it is at least theoretically possible that non-MS applications might be made compatible with Microsoft's DRM. Without access to the licensing terms, however, it is not possible to guess how likely that would be.
Personally I believe that Microsoft should have every right to create whatever products they want. I am not one of those folks that believes that the DOJ dropped the ball prosecuting Microsoft. However, I also think that you should call a spade a spade. Microsoft's new IRM services are specifically designed to entice customers into moving towards an all-Microsoft solution.
In order to create an IRM consumer you have to sign a licensing agreement with Microsoft. The terms of this agreement are not on Microsoft's website, but what do you bet that the chances are that Microsoft is going to allow an Open Source client?
I would say that the chances are precisely NULL. The security in this scenario is entirely dependent on control of the clients. For example, let's say that I wrote an IRM enabled email client that disregarded what the IRM server had to say about printing the email.
This is very similiar to the situation that xpdf is in when it comes to "secure" PDF files. Modifying xpdf so that will disregard any security flags is almost certainly something that could be done in an afternoon.
In short, Microsoft's IRM scheme can only work if they tightly control what programs can connect to the IRM server.
It's anti-competitive because other mail readers aren't going to be able to read these emails at all. Or is Microsoft's IRM going to work with Emacs/Gnus, Thunderbird, or Evolution?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
Not to mention the fact that Windows 3.1 sucked, and Windows 2000/XP, well... doesn't. People were dying for Windows 95 because Windows 3.1 was barely useable and they needed something to run on all that nifty inexpensive x86 hardware.
Back when Windows 95 came out Microsoft actually had the potential for competition (in the form of OS/2). Microsoft ramped up the vaporware parade to keep developers from looking to see if the grass was greener on the OS/2 side. Now Linux is pressing and Microsoft is dipping into the same bag of tricks.
You can pretty much guarantee that Longhorn will be unstable when Microsoft first releases it. Debian stable, on the other hand, has had 2.5 years of real world testing by the time it gets released.
I personally have had very good luck with ReportLab. If you would like to use Python, look no further.
Clearly you must be young enough to still believe that kids are actually helpful.
My father said it best, "By the time I tell you what I want done, show you how to do it, and then make sure that you actually get it done I could have done the job myself three times over. I don't make you work to make my life easier, I make you work because someday you are going to need to know how to work."
Thanks Dad. Now I better get back to work!
In the past an organization had one of two choices when it came to acquiring the software they needed. They could either buy something off the shelf and make it fit their organization, or they could build custom software from scratch. It's a small wonder that purchasing software off the shelf became so popular when the alternative was to gamble on your own software development project.
Nowadays, however, there is a third choice, and it is a fairly compelling one. That choice is to take a piece of Free Software and modify it to fit the needs of the organization. Reusing Free Software has a whole host of advantages. It allows for highly custom software without most of the risks (and cost) of starting from scratch. As an added bonus it becomes fairly easy for several unrelated organizations to share the costs of software development.
This trend is almost certainly going to drive down the profit margins of commercial software companies in the long run.
SCO is a special case. They don't care about the long term survival of their company.
Everyone else, however, from Apple to Microsoft, when faced with a lawsuit over the GPL has folded. Like the article says their have been hundreds of cases where there have been "issues" over the years, and yet the FSF has yet to try the GPL in court.
That's a pretty big stick.
First of all, the FSF doesn't "settle," they get the offender to release the code in question, and then they forgive them. The FSF hasn't had to settle, because only a fool would stare them down in court. The FSF has a pretty good case with the GPL, and their lawyers are top drawer. Not to mention the fact that if you go to court against the FSF and lose that they get your source, your profits, and punitive damages.
In short, the FSF has the biggest stick imaginable, and there hasn't been a company yet that has wanted to risk taking a drubbing over simply giving in to the FSF's moderate demands. The FSF folks are nice guys, they just want their due.
The reason that the FSF always is front and center in these sorts of arguments is that they have a big pile of code that they own the copyrights too. Part of becoming official GNU software is signing over the copyrights to the work so that the FSF can defend these copyrights in court. Linux is much trickier to defend because each individual retains their own copyrights. Frankly, that is one of the drawbacks of the way that licensing for the Linux kernel has been handled. It makes it much more difficult to enforce copyright infringement.
That's not how copyright works at all. If you take the text from my copyrighted book, for example, and sell it. I am not only entitled to the profits that you made from the sale of my copyrighted material, but you owe me punitive damages as well. In egregious cases this can be several times the profit that you made.
In other words, it doesn't matter how much I charge for the software (note the FSF charges $5000 for their deluxe Free Software bundle), it only matters how much you made with my software.
Cisco is lucky that the FSF is as nice as they are.
Oh please. That's why I called it a "port" to Mono. Granted moving from .NET with Winforms won't be as easy as dropping your assemblies on a Linux box, but it certainly won't be as hard as rewriting the whole thing again from scratch. Not only are the Mono folks teaming up with the Wine guys to create a Winforms library that should be very compatible with Microsoft's Winforms library, but the GTK# library should be mostly source compatible.
In short, porting your application should take a little global search and replace and a bit of testing. That's a fair sight better than rewriting in some other language.
Ah good point. The FSF wouldn't want me to use the world "steal" either. Linksys violated the FSF's copyrights, but they did not steal.
Good catch. Carry on.
I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic, but you are 100% correct. There are plenty of folks willing to share their source under a more permissive license. Using GPLed code, and then painting the FSF in a bad light because they are protecting their copyrighted material is just poor form.
Chances are good that it was easier to "borrow" Linux than to make the BSD code do what Linksys needed, and now they are paying the piper. The fact of the matter is that licensing matters.
Exactly. The reason that Linksys was able to sell 400,000 units is that they stole a jump on their competitors by using Free Software as the base of their product. They didn't write that software and the license that Linux is distributed under is very explicit. Linksys sold nearly a half million units of a product that someone else did the bulk of the work developing and now they want to complain about the terms?
That's just ridiculous.
The reason that Cisco is going to settle is that they know that if they didn't settle they would lose,be forced to cough up the source code, and pay damages to boot. They are fortunate that they stole from the FSF and not someone else.
Yes, and the folks writing applications for VMS back in the day thought that was a good idea too, as did the folks writing VB code before it became VB.Net. People that sold toolkits that allowed for migrations away from poor platform choices have traditionally made pretty good money. Especially when the legacy platform was popular.
Anyway you slice it Free Software hackers who are working on development tools have to find some way to entice Windows developers, because Windows is where all of the development happens nowadays. Current day Pythonistas, Perl Monks, and Java developers all (at one point) probably had to be lured away from Windows development. Making it easy to port .NET applications is likely to be a fairly successful enticement. I personally wish that Miguel's prodigious talents were focused on Python, because that is what I am using, but I can understand why he is targetting .NET.
The people who are really cranky with Miguel are the Java folks. After all, they have been the heir apparent to usurp Microsoft's spot at the top of the development totem pole for a long time, and .NET is starting to look like it is going to take the wind out of the Java sails. Unfortunately, Sun completely failed to convert the Free Software camp (mostly due to their licensing issues), and they never did deliver a sensible way to develop GUI applications.
Mono, on the other hand, is poised to deliver both a compelling set of server-side tools, and an even more compelling set of client-side tools. The fact that Mono itself is cross-platform (it runs nearly everywhere) and the fact that it is fairly easy to port .NET code, and you end up with a very compelling case.