Go back and reread the parent post. The guy is NOT advocating a long copyright period. He said 30 years or the author's life plus 18 years and 9 months, WHICHEVER COMES FIRST. This actually pretty close to the original Constitutional term of 14 years with one possible renewal.
Your entire diatribe assumes that this guy wants to lock up his life's work forever. Nothing is further from the truth. He's on your side, OK?
I'm sorry, I have to disagree with you. While the concept of RFC1918 is OK, it doesn't take care of a fairly common situation; the merger, acquisition, or splitting of organizations.
Any time this kind of event occurs, the first thing that the network geeks have to do is establish an internal NAT boundary as a stopgap while they sort out how they will re-address the two networks as one big 10.x.x.x network. After months of planning and political wrangling, the actual work starts. For big organizations that are spread all over the place, completing the transition can easily take up to 2 years. Just about the time the net geeks are completing their task, another major re-org is announced and they have to start over again.
I've been through this exercise at a mid-sized company (~1,800 employees) and a large one (started at 14,000, now at 55,000+). In both cases I was faced with this hassle several times.
It was actually easier at the smaller company because they primarily targeted smaller acquisitions. We could generally just go in and re-assign stuff to meet our design. This was still a time consuming exercise that we would just as soon avoided if we could.
The larger company has generally aimed for a mix of smaller acquisitions punctuated by "merger of equals". I've lived through 2 of the latter. The headaches of re-addressing the new, combined network has proven to be a painful, drawn out process in that type of network redesign.
BTW, we're now looking at having to split off one division as an autonomous outfit with their own NOC and datacenter. While most of their subnet assignments happen to fall into a couple of contiguous ranges, there are a couple that are going to have to be re-assigned before they are separated from the corporate environment. Again, not much fun. Having to deal with duplicated addresses and subnets means we'll be back to an internal NAT gateway before we're done.:(
I'm half tempted to recommend a move to a hybrid IPv6 IPv4 network just so at least part of our work won't have to be redone when the next inevitable acquistion is announced.
Nope, NAT sucks. As far as I'm concerned it's a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
Question: Why would you want a
private device making requests on a public network?/blockquote?
Any geek who has had to suffer re-addressing a big corporate network after a merger knows the answer to this one.:) Or do you regard dealing with 100,000 devices and/or ~2500 subnets fun?
Actually, POS environments is one place that IBM sees growth in sales for their Linux business. We've been talking to them off and on about what is going in Europe. The drivers for devices that affect some industries are getting written and donated under OSS licenses.
Of course, just because the platform is OSS doesn't mean that the apps on it are.
In fact, the financial industry in Europe has seen some big moves to OSS platforms. The big difference between Europe and North America is that European banks are far more likely to have homegrown apps as part of their core infrastructure.
In addition, the big 3 app vendors in this marketplace in the NA market are at least looking at creating a Linux port of their app. Those that have POSIX compliant APIs are finding that it's not all that difficult to port.
So, at least in some markets, POS environments are ripe for a move to Linux for the platform with closed source apps on top. A typically hybrid environment going forward, I think.
Look at the evidence this way: Every Single Time the FSF has approached a company about violating the GPL or the LGPL, the company has capitulated. The empirical evidence would lead me to believe that most corporate attorneys are the ones who are scared to death of the GPL. Therefore, the only logical conclusion that I think we can infer is that the GPL is so enforceable no one wants to challenge it in court!
Connectivity is probably still using SNA although tcp/ip may be a
possibility.
"
Actually, TCP/IP is becoming common for mainframes at financial institutions. A lot of the newer software (less than 10 years old) either requires it, or runs better with it as the networking stack. I work for one of the Big 10 banks in the US. We've had it up and operational here ever since I started working here more than 7 years ago.
We've gone through a few iterations of interfaces since then. Our latest is several Cisco CIPs. Of course, purists will insist that a Cisco CIP isn't really ON the mainframe per se....:)
Oh? So they continued to distribute the SOURCE CODE for their Linux distro and never noticed that it duplicated some of their own? That smacks of mind boggling incompetence. Any judge worth his or her robe will slap upside the head with a big foam cluebat and tell them to get out of their courtroom.
You do understand that the original complaint was written by the NTBUGTRAQ list owner and maintainer? A guy who has shown again and again that he clearly understands the MS world? A guy who was (don't know if he is or not at this point) a self professed Microsoft admirer when he started NTBUGTRAQ?
Actually, I thought that was the point of the story; the company had a working email system that a sysadmin swapped out for a broken one. It was broken BECAUSE the sysadmin was a doorknob, granted. He still deserved to be fired for such an incompetent email migration.
The below is NOT meant to be a scientific comparison. These are just my experiences.
Actually, the core engine for OpenOffice (which is the same one used in StarOffice) seems to have been pretty seriously rewritten between 5.2 and 6.0. It is a MUCH nicer Office Productivity Suite now.
I couldn't stand StarOffice 5.2 at all, while OpenOffice has replaced MS Office for me as an OPS. I almost never fire up Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint any more. The only time that I do is for the very rare document that OO can't handle. For me, those tend to be very very old Powerpoints. Everything else I see Just Works.
I followed the court case day by day. I do remember one incident where MS swore up and down that removing IE would cripple their OS to the point that it would never run. The government produced a demo Win98 machine with IE completely removed. They added back in a handful of files (3? 5? 7?) from Win95 so the box had an TCP/IP stack and away it went.
Then there was the time that MS was caught doctoring taped evidence during the trial. I can't remember if it was related to the same issue or not.
Anyhow, the point is that any user level program, including browsers, can't be considered core components of the OS. They are applications that leverage services that the OS provides.
There is nothing that says that an OS vendor, even one with a monopoly, can't extend their offering by including a bunch of free applications. Microsoft might have gotten away clean except that they were shown to have deliberately added their browser as part of an attempt to drive Netscape out of the browser business.
If they hadn't compounded their problems by consistently lying in court, they might still have walked away with a much reduced finding of fact. As it is, they have been convicted of illegally leveraging their monopoly. This will have longterm impacts on their business, even with the slap on the wrist that they negotiated with the DOJ.
Great analysis. However, it completely misses the point from a business perspective. I work for a good sized US bank (50,000+ employees). I am one of several dozen OSS advocates here. Most of us have been in the trenches for years, some of us for a few decades.
We understand very clearly what benefits OSS brings to the table. We understand that the Googling/FAQ/mail list/patch yourself support model has worked and worked well for many institutions.
The thing is; we don't want to use that model. If it's an effort that doesn't generate revenue, then we want to spend as little time on it as possible. From our point of view, our time is worth too much to the company to be duplicating the efforts of thousands of others with the same issues. We want to pay someone else to do the heavy lifting. We want a support contract with guaranteed SLAs measured in hours from a big 10 vendor. Even RedHat would be a tough sell here.
The truly wonderful, but for some reason hidden, news is that we not only can get such a contract, we can put it out for bid! HP, IBM, Oracle, even Sun will sell you such a support contract.
Our IBM sales rep has admitted that they are willing to do so for less money than what they charge for AIX support. Why? Because they know that they will have a better profit margin because they don't have to hire the same number of programmers to get the same level of support for AIX.
So, the real question isn't, "How to I get a 24/7 support contract?" No, the REAL question is, "Who do I want to pay for a 24/7 support contract?"
Remember this is intended to be run as a single user system, and by people who are not tech-savvy.
Actually, whether Robertson realises it or not he is NOT selling a single user system, he is selling a single household system. This means that you have Mom, Dad, the kids, Granny, the neighborhood kids, the dog, and who knows who else over playing on and working with the thing.
This is a big deal. I'm a single dad with two small kids. I share a PC with them. Note that I'm not a professional admin. I know I don't lock down my boxes as well as they could be. I do the best I can, though. The Win2K image has ZA on it, we don't use Outlook for email, etc. I started them on Win2k when they were 4. I migrated them (well, except for games) over to their own Linux accounts when they were 7 (the youngest) and 11. Both of them have managed to muck up the Win2K install in the past.
Both have managed to muck up their own apps and/or data on the Linux side a few times. The difference is that when they've done it on the Linux side I haven't had to rebuild the box!
This is why I think even a Joe Sixpack distro should have a distinct user and admin separation. I do think we need a better way of making that distinction obvious without scaring people away. I wish I had some ideas there, but I don't.:(
First, either switch to cell phone (suggested elsewhere) or pay to have the standard "go away" message from your phone company added. It'll cost you a few bucks a month, but it's worth it.
Second, for that handful running automated tape scams, hang up in the first few seconds.
Just doing this reduced phone interruptions from 5-10 a day to maybe 5 quick hangups a week.
Look at it this way. If WINE ever reaches the point that I can run whatever ugly Windows app that some twit in a business line bought because the sales guy picked up the tab at a bar, then I won't have to run Windows on every desktop in a company with 55,000+ desktops.
We have 600 (count 'em!) apps that are supported by our IT organization. Approximately 15% of the user population uses more than the core 12 or so apps. Yet the 15% of the users are the ones who drive our desktop technology decisions.
Give me stable, robust, full featured WINE for the 85% of the desktops that have reasonable app requirements and I have a much stronger argument for moving off Windows. (No, it's not there yet IMO.) And this weakens Linux how? OSS maybe. NOT Linux.
I can only speak for myself. However, when I see posthumous a videotape of a pregnant teenage mother praising Allah and proudly proclaiming that she is happily going to be a suicide bomber out to kill a bunch of other women and kids, I don't think I see a representative of a downtrodden, outgunned, pathetic, and desparate state. I think I see a poor, deluded girl who has been systematically lied to by her parents, her teachers, her political leaders, and her priests who is going to kill herself and her unborn child and as many other innocents as possible. She is committing a sin that will stain her soul black when she finally does meet Allah.
In my mind suicide bombers demonstrate the complete breakdown of their society. I frequently think that the Palestinians may be the only true example of an insane society. The Isrealis, for all their faults, have demonstrated over and over that they are FAR more civilized than the psychotic bastards who cynically use their own children to kill someone else's women and kids.
Every suicide bomber story just convinces me a little more that the Palestinian leadership can never be trusted. IMO most of them should be brought to trial as war criminals of the worst stripe.
Funny, the judicial branch of the US seems to think Microsoft is a monopoly.
According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary a monopoly is:
Main Entry: monopoly Pronunciation: m&-'nä-p(&-)lE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -lies Etymology: Latin monopolium, from Greek monopOlion, from mon- + pOlein to sell Date: 1534 1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action 2 : exclusive possession or control 3 : a commodity controlled by one party 4 : one that has a monopoly
As I understand it, the legal definition of a monopoly keys off the 3rd definition. If a single party has control of a commodity and alternatives are not considered viable for whatever reasons, then a case can be made that a monopoly exists. From a legal standpoint in the USA, it has been determined that Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop OS and (I believe) the desktop office productivity suite.
Monopolies in and of themselves are perfectly legal in the USA. However, it is illegal to leverage your monopoly to extend control into other market segments. This is what Microsoft has been convicted of.
Granted, it may not seem that way when you look at the slap on the wrist that the settlement gave them. Nevertheless, they do stand convicted of illegally leveraging a monopoly position in a marketplace. If they attempt their old tactics in other arenas, I believe that the burden of proof has shifted to them from the prosecution. It should be easier to check them, as long as action is taken at the appropriate time.
Yes, they did by tying the browser to the OS. In order to upgrade your browser, you have to upgrade the OS.
Actually, the bigger problem with browsers is the lock-in to proprietary extensions. IE 5.5 at one time was the most standards compliant out there. Now that Microsoft feels no pressure to conform because they believe that the competition is essentially eliminated, IE 6.0 goes back to the bad old days of 'embrace, extend, and extinguish.' While I think they are wrong about the state of browser competition (posting from a Mozilla browser on Win2k), I do regularly run into sites that have IE dependencies that are not necessary.
We slammed Netscape and website developers for this kind of behavior years ago when they were the browser king. Microsoft shouldn't get a free ride on this.
Anyway, enough off topic stuff. Back to our regularly scheduled argument...
Mandrake Club subscribers have access to a set of mirrors that aren't open the general public. I don't think there'd be a whole lot of point in releasing to us first.
Slashdot Mirror
Go back and reread the parent post. The guy is NOT advocating a long copyright period. He said 30 years or the author's life plus 18 years and 9 months, WHICHEVER COMES FIRST. This actually pretty close to the original Constitutional term of 14 years with one possible renewal.
Your entire diatribe assumes that this guy wants to lock up his life's work forever. Nothing is further from the truth. He's on your side, OK?
NOTHING I've seen from Darl McBride suggests that he is anything but dumber than mud. IMO calling him that insults mud.
I'm sorry, I have to disagree with you. While the concept of RFC1918 is OK, it doesn't take care of a fairly common situation; the merger, acquisition, or splitting of organizations.
:(
Any time this kind of event occurs, the first thing that the network geeks have to do is establish an internal NAT boundary as a stopgap while they sort out how they will re-address the two networks as one big 10.x.x.x network. After months of planning and political wrangling, the actual work starts. For big organizations that are spread all over the place, completing the transition can easily take up to 2 years. Just about the time the net geeks are completing their task, another major re-org is announced and they have to start over again.
I've been through this exercise at a mid-sized company (~1,800 employees) and a large one (started at 14,000, now at 55,000+). In both cases I was faced with this hassle several times.
It was actually easier at the smaller company because they primarily targeted smaller acquisitions. We could generally just go in and re-assign stuff to meet our design. This was still a time consuming exercise that we would just as soon avoided if we could.
The larger company has generally aimed for a mix of smaller acquisitions punctuated by "merger of equals". I've lived through 2 of the latter. The headaches of re-addressing the new, combined network has proven to be a painful, drawn out process in that type of network redesign.
BTW, we're now looking at having to split off one division as an autonomous outfit with their own NOC and datacenter. While most of their subnet assignments happen to fall into a couple of contiguous ranges, there are a couple that are going to have to be re-assigned before they are separated from the corporate environment. Again, not much fun. Having to deal with duplicated addresses and subnets means we'll be back to an internal NAT gateway before we're done.
I'm half tempted to recommend a move to a hybrid IPv6 IPv4 network just so at least part of our work won't have to be redone when the next inevitable acquistion is announced.
Nope, NAT sucks. As far as I'm concerned it's a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
Actually, POS environments is one place that IBM sees growth in sales for their Linux business. We've been talking to them off and on about what is going in Europe. The drivers for devices that affect some industries are getting written and donated under OSS licenses.
Of course, just because the platform is OSS doesn't mean that the apps on it are.
In fact, the financial industry in Europe has seen some big moves to OSS platforms. The big difference between Europe and North America is that European banks are far more likely to have homegrown apps as part of their core infrastructure.
In addition, the big 3 app vendors in this marketplace in the NA market are at least looking at creating a Linux port of their app. Those that have POSIX compliant APIs are finding that it's not all that difficult to port.
So, at least in some markets, POS environments are ripe for a move to Linux for the platform with closed source apps on top. A typically hybrid environment going forward, I think.
Look at the evidence this way: Every Single Time the FSF has approached a company about violating the GPL or the LGPL, the company has capitulated. The empirical evidence would lead me to believe that most corporate attorneys are the ones who are scared to death of the GPL. Therefore, the only logical conclusion that I think we can infer is that the GPL is so enforceable no one wants to challenge it in court!
Actually, TCP/IP is becoming common for mainframes at financial institutions. A lot of the newer software (less than 10 years old) either requires it, or runs better with it as the networking stack. I work for one of the Big 10 banks in the US. We've had it up and operational here ever since I started working here more than 7 years ago.
We've gone through a few iterations of interfaces since then. Our latest is several Cisco CIPs. Of course, purists will insist that a Cisco CIP isn't really ON the mainframe per se....
Oh? So they continued to distribute the SOURCE CODE for their Linux distro and never noticed that it duplicated some of their own? That smacks of mind boggling incompetence. Any judge worth his or her robe will slap upside the head with a big foam cluebat and tell them to get out of their courtroom.
You do understand that the original complaint was written by the NTBUGTRAQ list owner and maintainer? A guy who has shown again and again that he clearly understands the MS world? A guy who was (don't know if he is or not at this point) a self professed Microsoft admirer when he started NTBUGTRAQ?
Actually, I thought that was the point of the story; the company had a working email system that a sysadmin swapped out for a broken one. It was broken BECAUSE the sysadmin was a doorknob, granted. He still deserved to be fired for such an incompetent email migration.
The below is NOT meant to be a scientific comparison. These are just my experiences.
Actually, the core engine for OpenOffice (which is the same one used in StarOffice) seems to have been pretty seriously rewritten between 5.2 and 6.0. It is a MUCH nicer Office Productivity Suite now.
I couldn't stand StarOffice 5.2 at all, while OpenOffice has replaced MS Office for me as an OPS. I almost never fire up Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint any more. The only time that I do is for the very rare document that OO can't handle. For me, those tend to be very very old Powerpoints. Everything else I see Just Works.
I followed the court case day by day. I do remember one incident where MS swore up and down that removing IE would cripple their OS to the point that it would never run. The government produced a demo Win98 machine with IE completely removed. They added back in a handful of files (3? 5? 7?) from Win95 so the box had an TCP/IP stack and away it went.
Then there was the time that MS was caught doctoring taped evidence during the trial. I can't remember if it was related to the same issue or not.
Anyhow, the point is that any user level program, including browsers, can't be considered core components of the OS. They are applications that leverage services that the OS provides.
There is nothing that says that an OS vendor, even one with a monopoly, can't extend their offering by including a bunch of free applications. Microsoft might have gotten away clean except that they were shown to have deliberately added their browser as part of an attempt to drive Netscape out of the browser business.
If they hadn't compounded their problems by consistently lying in court, they might still have walked away with a much reduced finding of fact. As it is, they have been convicted of illegally leveraging their monopoly. This will have longterm impacts on their business, even with the slap on the wrist that they negotiated with the DOJ.
Great analysis. However, it completely misses the point from a business perspective. I work for a good sized US bank (50,000+ employees). I am one of several dozen OSS advocates here. Most of us have been in the trenches for years, some of us for a few decades.
We understand very clearly what benefits OSS brings to the table. We understand that the Googling/FAQ/mail list/patch yourself support model has worked and worked well for many institutions.
The thing is; we don't want to use that model. If it's an effort that doesn't generate revenue, then we want to spend as little time on it as possible. From our point of view, our time is worth too much to the company to be duplicating the efforts of thousands of others with the same issues. We want to pay someone else to do the heavy lifting. We want a support contract with guaranteed SLAs measured in hours from a big 10 vendor. Even RedHat would be a tough sell here.
The truly wonderful, but for some reason hidden, news is that we not only can get such a contract, we can put it out for bid! HP, IBM, Oracle, even Sun will sell you such a support contract.
Our IBM sales rep has admitted that they are willing to do so for less money than what they charge for AIX support. Why? Because they know that they will have a better profit margin because they don't have to hire the same number of programmers to get the same level of support for AIX.
So, the real question isn't, "How to I get a 24/7 support contract?" No, the REAL question is, "Who do I want to pay for a 24/7 support contract?"
A sysadmin caught short due to lack of planning on someone else's part. :)
Well, if you live alone I guess you *only* care about *your* personal files. What if you share a computer with roommate(s)? gf? wife? kids?
Hmmmm. Having an OS that is built to contain damage on a household PC suddenly seems like a good idea, doesn't it?
Just tried it with Mozilla 1.3 on Win2K. Blocked them just fine. :)
First, either switch to cell phone (suggested elsewhere) or pay to have the standard "go away" message from your phone company added. It'll cost you a few bucks a month, but it's worth it.
Second, for that handful running automated tape scams, hang up in the first few seconds.
Just doing this reduced phone interruptions from 5-10 a day to maybe 5 quick hangups a week.
Look at it this way. If WINE ever reaches the point that I can run whatever ugly Windows app that some twit in a business line bought because the sales guy picked up the tab at a bar, then I won't have to run Windows on every desktop in a company with 55,000+ desktops.
We have 600 (count 'em!) apps that are supported by our IT organization. Approximately 15% of the user population uses more than the core 12 or so apps. Yet the 15% of the users are the ones who drive our desktop technology decisions.
Give me stable, robust, full featured WINE for the 85% of the desktops that have reasonable app requirements and I have a much stronger argument for moving off Windows. (No, it's not there yet IMO.) And this weakens Linux how? OSS maybe. NOT Linux.
I can only speak for myself. However, when I see posthumous a videotape of a pregnant teenage mother praising Allah and proudly proclaiming that she is happily going to be a suicide bomber out to kill a bunch of other women and kids, I don't think I see a representative of a downtrodden, outgunned, pathetic, and desparate state. I think I see a poor, deluded girl who has been systematically lied to by her parents, her teachers, her political leaders, and her priests who is going to kill herself and her unborn child and as many other innocents as possible. She is committing a sin that will stain her soul black when she finally does meet Allah.
In my mind suicide bombers demonstrate the complete breakdown of their society. I frequently think that the Palestinians may be the only true example of an insane society. The Isrealis, for all their faults, have demonstrated over and over that they are FAR more civilized than the psychotic bastards who cynically use their own children to kill someone else's women and kids.
Every suicide bomber story just convinces me a little more that the Palestinian leadership can never be trusted. IMO most of them should be brought to trial as war criminals of the worst stripe.
Perfect post. I wish I had mod points this week.
Funny, the judicial branch of the US seems to think Microsoft is a monopoly.
According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary a monopoly is:
As I understand it, the legal definition of a monopoly keys off the 3rd definition. If a single party has control of a commodity and alternatives are not considered viable for whatever reasons, then a case can be made that a monopoly exists. From a legal standpoint in the USA, it has been determined that Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop OS and (I believe) the desktop office productivity suite.
Monopolies in and of themselves are perfectly legal in the USA. However, it is illegal to leverage your monopoly to extend control into other market segments. This is what Microsoft has been convicted of.
Granted, it may not seem that way when you look at the slap on the wrist that the settlement gave them. Nevertheless, they do stand convicted of illegally leveraging a monopoly position in a marketplace. If they attempt their old tactics in other arenas, I believe that the burden of proof has shifted to them from the prosecution. It should be easier to check them, as long as action is taken at the appropriate time.
Yes, they did by tying the browser to the OS. In order to upgrade your browser, you have to upgrade the OS.
Actually, the bigger problem with browsers is the lock-in to proprietary extensions. IE 5.5 at one time was the most standards compliant out there. Now that Microsoft feels no pressure to conform because they believe that the competition is essentially eliminated, IE 6.0 goes back to the bad old days of 'embrace, extend, and extinguish.' While I think they are wrong about the state of browser competition (posting from a Mozilla browser on Win2k), I do regularly run into sites that have IE dependencies that are not necessary.
We slammed Netscape and website developers for this kind of behavior years ago when they were the browser king. Microsoft shouldn't get a free ride on this.
Anyway, enough off topic stuff. Back to our regularly scheduled argument...
Mandrake Club subscribers have access to a set of mirrors that aren't open the general public. I don't think there'd be a whole lot of point in releasing to us first.
Funny you should mention IBM. Visited their Web site lately? Had a heart to heart with your local IBM sales rep? Picked the brains of his SE?