But it isn't about that. It doesn't really matter whether they can make money or not. What matters is that anybody can do to Facebook what Facebook did to Myspace.
What happens is that there are several networks around. Almost everyone uses at least one (generally the most popular one) and many people use two or three or five. At some point something happens to cause people to want to use one of the less popular networks instead of the most popular one -- some scandal with the most popular network, or some interesting new features that the second most popular network has that the most popular one doesn't. So more people sign up for the less popular networks and many people start using the second most popular network more and the most popular network less.
And that snowballs very, very quickly. If your friends aren't updating Facebook then you have less incentive to sign in, which means you update it less and your friends have less incentive to sign in, ad infinitum. Whether or not you can make a profit from your users doesn't matter, because once the new shiny arrives, inside of a year all yours users disappear.
If MPEG-LA believes that VP8 infringes, then they are well within their rights to question it.
I don't think that's the issue. It isn't that if someone has a patent that reads on VP8 they aren't allowed to enforce it. It's that the people who control the rights to VP8's primary competitor are trying to gain control over rights to VP8.
know how to get scp to tunnel through lots of hops.
You can set up a bunch of port forwarding or something, but really this seems pretty easy: 'ssh hop1host ssh hop2host ssh hop3host cat/some/file/you/want >/local/filename'.
I would love to, however while it exists and courts uphold them it still stands in the way of a competitor duplicating the feature set of a piece of software, irregardless of open / closed status.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't really do that, at least as long as the person doing the duplicating is supported by a large company. Because that large company inevitably has patents that the first patent holder is infringing, which means that the first patent holder can't enforce the patent due to mutually assured destruction.
Drastically undercutting your opponents prices in a new market by leveraging profits from a different market to support it can be seen as anti-competitive. Many for profit vendors see google pushing open source products as this.
Except that that doesn't make any sense. The point of undercutting competitors in a secondary market is that once they go out of business, you can charge monopoly prices in the secondary market. If you support open source software and the competing proprietary software goes out of business, you still can't charge monopoly prices in the secondary market because somebody will just fork your code and distribute it for free.
one of the simpler reasons for such a long wait is patents
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I don't think this is really true. The trouble with software patents is that they're so broken that you can't even use them as designed.
I mean you go through all the effort of hiring a bunch of patent lawyers at five hundred dollars an hour, who in turn consume the time of your engineers that they could have spent engineering stuff but instead have to disclose their inventions to the lawyers. Then the lawyers spend (this is not an exaggeration) three years arguing with the patent office about whether you should get the patent, again at five hundred bucks an hour. Finally you get your patent.
Then you repeat the process a thousand times every year. Then you hire a bunch of different lawyers to spend another three years negotiating cross-licenses with other companies where your hard-earned patents mostly go to cancel out theirs.
And therein lies the rub. You've got your whiz bang patent which covers your flagship software product and you want to stop the guy who is making some free app that implements your great feature. The trouble is, that app is now part of the business model of various other huge software companies, and if you try to stop the app using any of your patents then that company (or companies) will show up at your door with a list as long as your arm of their patents which your flagship product is infringing and politely request that you Back Off.
At best you can sell the patent to a patent troll who you hope will go and molest your competitor, but if the competitor has deep pockets then all you accomplish is to shovel some of your competitor's money into the pockets of a patent troll -- which makes the troll stronger and as likely as not to come after you next time. Conversely, if the competitor has no money then the patent troll has no real incentive to go after them.
So yeah, software patents. They should get rid of them.
There is considerably more than one exception - MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Windows, OS X... On and on.
Sure, there are exceptions, but are they really exceptions or did open just not win yet?
There was a time when AOL was the most popular ISP. There was a time when the main alternative to proprietary UNIX for a server OS was Novell Netware.
And certain markets take longer. Software which is very specialized in particular, so Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc. But it's only because the open alternative correspondingly attracts fewer developers and therefore takes longer to reach feature parity. Right now GIMP isn't on par with Photoshop. But it's not like Photoshop from 2011 is light years ahead of Photoshop from 2006. Can you say GIMP won't have substantially caught up in five years? In ten years? And can you imagine anyone paying four figures for Photoshop once it has?
Likewise, it's no surprise that more than half the software titles people are quoting at me are from Microsoft. Yes, Exchange, Office, Windows, these are still very popular. But it's not especially because they're great stuff that everybody loves, is it? It's because Microsoft has a dominant market position and long history of playing dirty. You can read the last line in my post above -- monopolies can keep things closed. Although even there, Microsoft is in a bit of a precarious position, because they don't have an external monopoly propping them up from the outside, they only have two internal ones that buttress each other. Which puts them in a bit of a spot if one or the other is ever dethroned -- you don't need Windows in order to run Office if you don't need Office, and conversely if Windows starts to decline then allowing Office to run on the new dominant platform will hasten Windows' demise, but refusing to will sink Office along with it.
Which pretty much leaves OS X...which I'm not sure makes a very good counterexample. It only has 10% market share in a market dominated by Microsoft, and Microsoft is uncharacteristically friendly to it (e.g. Office runs on it), so it seems to be in a fairly unrepresentative class. It'll be interesting to see what happens to it if Microsoft is ultimately dethroned, actually.
Oh yeah. I forgot that 'Openness' is what makes or breaks products in the marketplace.
Let's see, open vs. closed:
Internet vs. AOL CD vs. minidisc Linux vs. UNIX gzip/lzma/bzip2 vs. bzip OpenSSH vs. SSH OpenSSL vs. anything closed AES vs. anything closed Apache vs. IIS
Yup, that sounds about right.
Almost everything you use won because it's open, you just don't notice it anymore because it won so long ago that it just seems like part of the scenery now. DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, C++, Kerberos, LDAP, 802.3, 802.11, USB, the BSD sockets API, etc. etc. All things equal, customers prefer open to closed. Which means that closed is a state that can only exist prior to an open competitor reaching compatibility and substantial feature parity with the leading closed alternative, at which point customers choose the open alternative.
The only way closed is a long-term condition is when it is propped up by a monopoly, a cartel or a government.
It's really very simple. Any lobbyist for a business or industry has one message for their politician targets: "We want more money, and we'll make it worth your while to give us more money."
Any other message coming from lobbyists or corporate spokespeople is basically nonsense used to create a false explanation for the politician's actions which just so happen to benefit the lobbyist's industries.
That's not true at all. There's at least one other kind of message that comes from, in particular, media companies: "Do what we want or we'll publish unfavorable things about you to media consumers in your constituency."
That's about the only one that kind of makes sense on some level, i mean it's much easier to secure funding to develop IP when that IP itself has value.
Your implicit assumption is that open source software has no value. Which is, of course, false.
Plus, it's easier to create something better than what exists when you don't have to start from scratch, e.g. LibreOffice from OpenOffice, Firefox from Netscape, Chromium from WebKit, all the various BSDs from the original Berkeley version, all the various Linux distributions plus Android from the underlying platform, etc.
Is that really supposed to be a believable excuse for kicking free software developers out of the store? I don't think Microsoft is going to be winning many hearts and minds thinking like that.
So what? There is nothing stopping them from distributing copyleft software in a different way than proprietary software. It's not like it takes more than a trivial amount of developer time to add a URL to an FTP server where you can get source code, or setting the number of copies to 'unlimited' or whatever.
How do you imagine that would have a different result than what I described? If anything it seems like the worst of both worlds for Microsoft. The Linux Foundation doesn't exactly have deep pockets, so there isn't much to collect as damages, but they have enough resources to put up a strong fight and are likely to be defended by others if attacked. On top of that they're more likely than e.g. IBM to make the arguments likely to set a precedent substantially weakening or eliminating software patents.
And it's not like Linux Torvalds is going to remain unemployed even if the Linux Foundation were entirely destroyed, or even that Linux would fail without him.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of stagnating?
Microsoft is having trouble capturing new markets. They still own the desktop, but the desktop is becoming less and less important. Android and iOS are taking over mobile devices and desktop platforms are becoming more and more a commodity as things move into "the cloud" (whatever that is).
The real trouble for that is that if Android or iOS is still popular by the time mobiles get fast enough that everyone demands they can do their entire job from the top of any mountain with cellular reception, businesses will demand that all new software is either web-based or cross platform -- or at least, runs on whatever mobile platform they've standardized on, which may not be Microsoft. And lack of specialized third party software support on other platforms is a major contributor to Microsoft's continued dominance in the desktop market, so lose that and they're in trouble.
Just bear in mind, they have patents (rightly or wrongly) and *could* use them against Linux - but so far have not done so.
I don't really see how they can use patents against "Linux" -- you can't sue "Linux" as an organization. In theory they could sue IBM or Google or someone like that, but those companies have their own patent arsenals. Conversely, they could sue one of these little guys who has no patents, but the little guys also have no money. So Microsoft might get an injunction, but then they've tipped their hand and three days later there is a version that works around whatever patent the old version was allegedly infringing.
And on top of that, any real aggression against Linux would be bad PR for the open source developers they're allegedly trying to woo here, plus any potential antitrust problems for going after a competitor to their monopoly, plus the risk of IBM or someone retaliating, or the EFF or someone else starting a project to invalidate whatever patents they're using to rattle sabers.
It's a lot safer for them to just spread FUD and not actually litigate anything. Although it makes you question their stance in favor of software patents -- one wonders whether a bunch of patent lawyers who don't want to be out of a job aren't lobbying the lobbyists.
The whole point of.NET is to not be properly cross-platform. That's why Mono is perpetually behind -- so that applications using the latest features from Microsoft won't run on Linux. There is no argument to be made that if Microsoft wanted Mono to have a first-class implementation of the latest version of.NET, it would. And it doesn't.
So businesses like netflix.com or google.com should just be able to connect to the internet without paying a fee? Hmmm.
Maybe I should start a business (of one) so I too can get free internet access.
It's not free internet access. It's free access to Comcast customers. But first you have to get a permit and dig up the street to put a strand of fiber between where you are and the Comcast peering point. Then you have to do the same thing for every other ISP whose customers you want "free" access to. Did you still want to do that?
What did Comcast do to these companies, and why is it a "bad thing" in your opinion?
It's simple. Comcast should not be charging another network any money for traffic which is destined for Comcast customers. Comcast has a complete monopoly over access to those customers from the perspective of other networks, and being allowed to charge peers, rather than the customers themselves who have the option to cancel their Comcast service, would unacceptably allow them to charge monopoly prices. It also greatly distorts the content market, because it significantly increases costs for content providers like Netflix who compete with Comcast owned and affiliated content providers like NBC.
What about ESPN360 and Disneyconnection.com charging ISPs extra fees to access their websites (or else blocking them). Is that also a bad thing?
It is, and I really wish all the ISPs had just told them to piss up a rope, because that would have solved it. But since that didn't happen, now we have to argue about whether requiring an ISP to pay for all their customers rather than just the customers who actually want the service is anti-competitive etc. But that has everything to do with regular old antitrust and competition law and nothing to do with network neutrality.
What this actually does is accept the fact that a corporate merger can specify what is blocked and what isn't. This is actually a dangerous trend for network neutrality, because we are seeing the Justice Department agree with the idea that what is blocked and what isn't is a matter of contractual language between corporations, instead of the inherent right to a free internet.
I can see your point, but I'm not at all sure that this is a negative development in the interim. Because what it does is drive a wedge between the different ISPs.
Before this deal if you tried to propose network neutrality rules, all the ISPs were against it with a united front. Now, if Comcast already has to follow the rules, why shouldn't they take the position that their competitors should have to as well? They certainly don't want a situation where AT&T can block or delay NBC content in favor of AT&T's "preferred" partners or whatever, or charge NBC for access to AT&T customers.
The real problem is if the settlement rules aren't really effective. If Comcast can still pull the sort of thing they are with Level 3 and Netflix and that isn't considered a violation of the settlement then the settlement is meaningless, because it isn't a barrier to bad behavior -- it's a fence post they can just walk around. In which case they retain a shared interest with the other ISPs to be able to keep doing things like that.
What is Samba 4 meant to accomplish? In simplest terms, Samba 4 is an ambitious, yet achievable, reworking of the Samba code. Major features for Samba 4 already include:
* support of the 'Active Directory' logon and administration protocols
* new 'full coverage' testsuites
* full NTFS semantics for sharing backends
* Internal LDAP server, with AD semantics
* Internal Kerberos server, including PAC support
* Bind9 integration for AD DNS support
That's how credibility works. If you go 60 years and every time you say something is a standard, everybody agrees that it is a standard, you get credibility -- when you say something is an open standard then everyone believes you without having to independently verify it. As soon as you start allowing companies to strong arm you into applying your imprimatur to whatever they want, nobody can blindly defer to your judgment anymore, because they have to start carving out exceptions for your mistakes.
This article is a case in point. Suppose the UK wants only actual, implementable-by-anyone open standards. They can't just say "open standards are what ISO says they are" anymore and still get the desired result, because that saddles them with the non-open OOXML transitional standard. In order to solve that problem they would have to muck about trying to define "open standards" without reference to ISO in a way that encompasses 99.9% of what ISO does but weeds out the ones influenced by strong arming, and then you run into definitional false negatives and false positives etc.
The alternative is to start with ISO and maintain an exclusion list and add all of the non-open standards to it, but at that point you have to evaluate everything ISO publishes and whoever is maintaining the exclusion list is effectively standing in for the standards body.
In either case the purpose behind the corrupted standards organization is greatly eroded because people can no longer rely on its output, and many resources are wasted contending with their mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
FB can capitalize big in so many ways.
But it isn't about that. It doesn't really matter whether they can make money or not. What matters is that anybody can do to Facebook what Facebook did to Myspace.
What happens is that there are several networks around. Almost everyone uses at least one (generally the most popular one) and many people use two or three or five. At some point something happens to cause people to want to use one of the less popular networks instead of the most popular one -- some scandal with the most popular network, or some interesting new features that the second most popular network has that the most popular one doesn't. So more people sign up for the less popular networks and many people start using the second most popular network more and the most popular network less.
And that snowballs very, very quickly. If your friends aren't updating Facebook then you have less incentive to sign in, which means you update it less and your friends have less incentive to sign in, ad infinitum. Whether or not you can make a profit from your users doesn't matter, because once the new shiny arrives, inside of a year all yours users disappear.
If MPEG-LA believes that VP8 infringes, then they are well within their rights to question it.
I don't think that's the issue. It isn't that if someone has a patent that reads on VP8 they aren't allowed to enforce it. It's that the people who control the rights to VP8's primary competitor are trying to gain control over rights to VP8.
know how to get scp to tunnel through lots of hops.
You can set up a bunch of port forwarding or something, but really this seems pretty easy: 'ssh hop1host ssh hop2host ssh hop3host cat /some/file/you/want > /local/filename'.
I would love to, however while it exists and courts uphold them it still stands in the way of a competitor duplicating the feature set of a piece of software, irregardless of open / closed status.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't really do that, at least as long as the person doing the duplicating is supported by a large company. Because that large company inevitably has patents that the first patent holder is infringing, which means that the first patent holder can't enforce the patent due to mutually assured destruction.
What's wrong with scp?
Drastically undercutting your opponents prices in a new market by leveraging profits from a different market to support it can be seen as anti-competitive. Many for profit vendors see google pushing open source products as this.
Except that that doesn't make any sense. The point of undercutting competitors in a secondary market is that once they go out of business, you can charge monopoly prices in the secondary market. If you support open source software and the competing proprietary software goes out of business, you still can't charge monopoly prices in the secondary market because somebody will just fork your code and distribute it for free.
comScore: Android surpasses iOS in U.S. market share
Obviously that is some kind of pro-Android blog. But look at the graph based on data from comScore.
one of the simpler reasons for such a long wait is patents
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I don't think this is really true. The trouble with software patents is that they're so broken that you can't even use them as designed.
I mean you go through all the effort of hiring a bunch of patent lawyers at five hundred dollars an hour, who in turn consume the time of your engineers that they could have spent engineering stuff but instead have to disclose their inventions to the lawyers. Then the lawyers spend (this is not an exaggeration) three years arguing with the patent office about whether you should get the patent, again at five hundred bucks an hour. Finally you get your patent.
Then you repeat the process a thousand times every year. Then you hire a bunch of different lawyers to spend another three years negotiating cross-licenses with other companies where your hard-earned patents mostly go to cancel out theirs.
And therein lies the rub. You've got your whiz bang patent which covers your flagship software product and you want to stop the guy who is making some free app that implements your great feature. The trouble is, that app is now part of the business model of various other huge software companies, and if you try to stop the app using any of your patents then that company (or companies) will show up at your door with a list as long as your arm of their patents which your flagship product is infringing and politely request that you Back Off.
At best you can sell the patent to a patent troll who you hope will go and molest your competitor, but if the competitor has deep pockets then all you accomplish is to shovel some of your competitor's money into the pockets of a patent troll -- which makes the troll stronger and as likely as not to come after you next time. Conversely, if the competitor has no money then the patent troll has no real incentive to go after them.
So yeah, software patents. They should get rid of them.
There is considerably more than one exception - MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Windows, OS X... On and on.
Sure, there are exceptions, but are they really exceptions or did open just not win yet?
There was a time when AOL was the most popular ISP. There was a time when the main alternative to proprietary UNIX for a server OS was Novell Netware.
And certain markets take longer. Software which is very specialized in particular, so Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc. But it's only because the open alternative correspondingly attracts fewer developers and therefore takes longer to reach feature parity. Right now GIMP isn't on par with Photoshop. But it's not like Photoshop from 2011 is light years ahead of Photoshop from 2006. Can you say GIMP won't have substantially caught up in five years? In ten years? And can you imagine anyone paying four figures for Photoshop once it has?
Likewise, it's no surprise that more than half the software titles people are quoting at me are from Microsoft. Yes, Exchange, Office, Windows, these are still very popular. But it's not especially because they're great stuff that everybody loves, is it? It's because Microsoft has a dominant market position and long history of playing dirty. You can read the last line in my post above -- monopolies can keep things closed. Although even there, Microsoft is in a bit of a precarious position, because they don't have an external monopoly propping them up from the outside, they only have two internal ones that buttress each other. Which puts them in a bit of a spot if one or the other is ever dethroned -- you don't need Windows in order to run Office if you don't need Office, and conversely if Windows starts to decline then allowing Office to run on the new dominant platform will hasten Windows' demise, but refusing to will sink Office along with it.
Which pretty much leaves OS X...which I'm not sure makes a very good counterexample. It only has 10% market share in a market dominated by Microsoft, and Microsoft is uncharacteristically friendly to it (e.g. Office runs on it), so it seems to be in a fairly unrepresentative class. It'll be interesting to see what happens to it if Microsoft is ultimately dethroned, actually.
Oh yeah. I forgot that 'Openness' is what makes or breaks products in the marketplace.
Let's see, open vs. closed:
Internet vs. AOL
CD vs. minidisc
Linux vs. UNIX
gzip/lzma/bzip2 vs. bzip
OpenSSH vs. SSH
OpenSSL vs. anything closed
AES vs. anything closed
Apache vs. IIS
Yup, that sounds about right.
Almost everything you use won because it's open, you just don't notice it anymore because it won so long ago that it just seems like part of the scenery now. DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, C++, Kerberos, LDAP, 802.3, 802.11, USB, the BSD sockets API, etc. etc. All things equal, customers prefer open to closed. Which means that closed is a state that can only exist prior to an open competitor reaching compatibility and substantial feature parity with the leading closed alternative, at which point customers choose the open alternative.
The only way closed is a long-term condition is when it is propped up by a monopoly, a cartel or a government.
It's really very simple. Any lobbyist for a business or industry has one message for their politician targets: "We want more money, and we'll make it worth your while to give us more money."
Any other message coming from lobbyists or corporate spokespeople is basically nonsense used to create a false explanation for the politician's actions which just so happen to benefit the lobbyist's industries.
That's not true at all. There's at least one other kind of message that comes from, in particular, media companies: "Do what we want or we'll publish unfavorable things about you to media consumers in your constituency."
That's about the only one that kind of makes sense on some level, i mean it's much easier to secure funding to develop IP when that IP itself has value.
Your implicit assumption is that open source software has no value. Which is, of course, false.
Plus, it's easier to create something better than what exists when you don't have to start from scratch, e.g. LibreOffice from OpenOffice, Firefox from Netscape, Chromium from WebKit, all the various BSDs from the original Berkeley version, all the various Linux distributions plus Android from the underlying platform, etc.
Is that really supposed to be a believable excuse for kicking free software developers out of the store? I don't think Microsoft is going to be winning many hearts and minds thinking like that.
Because of differences in distribution.
So what? There is nothing stopping them from distributing copyleft software in a different way than proprietary software. It's not like it takes more than a trivial amount of developer time to add a URL to an FTP server where you can get source code, or setting the number of copies to 'unlimited' or whatever.
If they actually wanted to do it, they could.
How do you imagine that would have a different result than what I described? If anything it seems like the worst of both worlds for Microsoft. The Linux Foundation doesn't exactly have deep pockets, so there isn't much to collect as damages, but they have enough resources to put up a strong fight and are likely to be defended by others if attacked. On top of that they're more likely than e.g. IBM to make the arguments likely to set a precedent substantially weakening or eliminating software patents.
And it's not like Linux Torvalds is going to remain unemployed even if the Linux Foundation were entirely destroyed, or even that Linux would fail without him.
Why not?
Go back ten years, and you're exactly the same...
Isn't that pretty much the definition of stagnating?
Microsoft is having trouble capturing new markets. They still own the desktop, but the desktop is becoming less and less important. Android and iOS are taking over mobile devices and desktop platforms are becoming more and more a commodity as things move into "the cloud" (whatever that is).
The real trouble for that is that if Android or iOS is still popular by the time mobiles get fast enough that everyone demands they can do their entire job from the top of any mountain with cellular reception, businesses will demand that all new software is either web-based or cross platform -- or at least, runs on whatever mobile platform they've standardized on, which may not be Microsoft. And lack of specialized third party software support on other platforms is a major contributor to Microsoft's continued dominance in the desktop market, so lose that and they're in trouble.
Actually that's due to incompatibilities with the GPL. If WP7 allowed GPL software then Microsoft would be VIOLATING the GPL
Right, unless they... you know... followed it?
Just bear in mind, they have patents (rightly or wrongly) and *could* use them against Linux - but so far have not done so.
I don't really see how they can use patents against "Linux" -- you can't sue "Linux" as an organization. In theory they could sue IBM or Google or someone like that, but those companies have their own patent arsenals. Conversely, they could sue one of these little guys who has no patents, but the little guys also have no money. So Microsoft might get an injunction, but then they've tipped their hand and three days later there is a version that works around whatever patent the old version was allegedly infringing.
And on top of that, any real aggression against Linux would be bad PR for the open source developers they're allegedly trying to woo here, plus any potential antitrust problems for going after a competitor to their monopoly, plus the risk of IBM or someone retaliating, or the EFF or someone else starting a project to invalidate whatever patents they're using to rattle sabers.
It's a lot safer for them to just spread FUD and not actually litigate anything. Although it makes you question their stance in favor of software patents -- one wonders whether a bunch of patent lawyers who don't want to be out of a job aren't lobbying the lobbyists.
The whole point of .NET is to not be properly cross-platform. That's why Mono is perpetually behind -- so that applications using the latest features from Microsoft won't run on Linux. There is no argument to be made that if Microsoft wanted Mono to have a first-class implementation of the latest version of .NET, it would. And it doesn't.
So businesses like netflix.com or google.com should just be able to connect to the internet without paying a fee? Hmmm.
Maybe I should start a business (of one) so I too can get free internet access.
It's not free internet access. It's free access to Comcast customers. But first you have to get a permit and dig up the street to put a strand of fiber between where you are and the Comcast peering point. Then you have to do the same thing for every other ISP whose customers you want "free" access to. Did you still want to do that?
What did Comcast do to these companies, and why is it a "bad thing" in your opinion?
It's simple. Comcast should not be charging another network any money for traffic which is destined for Comcast customers. Comcast has a complete monopoly over access to those customers from the perspective of other networks, and being allowed to charge peers, rather than the customers themselves who have the option to cancel their Comcast service, would unacceptably allow them to charge monopoly prices. It also greatly distorts the content market, because it significantly increases costs for content providers like Netflix who compete with Comcast owned and affiliated content providers like NBC.
What about ESPN360 and Disneyconnection.com charging ISPs extra fees to access their websites (or else blocking them). Is that also a bad thing?
It is, and I really wish all the ISPs had just told them to piss up a rope, because that would have solved it. But since that didn't happen, now we have to argue about whether requiring an ISP to pay for all their customers rather than just the customers who actually want the service is anti-competitive etc. But that has everything to do with regular old antitrust and competition law and nothing to do with network neutrality.
What this actually does is accept the fact that a corporate merger can specify what is blocked and what isn't. This is actually a dangerous trend for network neutrality, because we are seeing the Justice Department agree with the idea that what is blocked and what isn't is a matter of contractual language between corporations, instead of the inherent right to a free internet.
I can see your point, but I'm not at all sure that this is a negative development in the interim. Because what it does is drive a wedge between the different ISPs.
Before this deal if you tried to propose network neutrality rules, all the ISPs were against it with a united front. Now, if Comcast already has to follow the rules, why shouldn't they take the position that their competitors should have to as well? They certainly don't want a situation where AT&T can block or delay NBC content in favor of AT&T's "preferred" partners or whatever, or charge NBC for access to AT&T customers.
The real problem is if the settlement rules aren't really effective. If Comcast can still pull the sort of thing they are with Level 3 and Netflix and that isn't considered a violation of the settlement then the settlement is meaningless, because it isn't a barrier to bad behavior -- it's a fence post they can just walk around. In which case they retain a shared interest with the other ISPs to be able to keep doing things like that.
Samba 4:
What is Samba 4 meant to accomplish? In simplest terms, Samba 4 is an ambitious, yet achievable, reworking of the Samba code. Major features for Samba 4 already include:
* support of the 'Active Directory' logon and administration protocols
* new 'full coverage' testsuites
* full NTFS semantics for sharing backends
* Internal LDAP server, with AD semantics
* Internal Kerberos server, including PAC support
* Bind9 integration for AD DNS support
...
That's how credibility works. If you go 60 years and every time you say something is a standard, everybody agrees that it is a standard, you get credibility -- when you say something is an open standard then everyone believes you without having to independently verify it. As soon as you start allowing companies to strong arm you into applying your imprimatur to whatever they want, nobody can blindly defer to your judgment anymore, because they have to start carving out exceptions for your mistakes.
This article is a case in point. Suppose the UK wants only actual, implementable-by-anyone open standards. They can't just say "open standards are what ISO says they are" anymore and still get the desired result, because that saddles them with the non-open OOXML transitional standard. In order to solve that problem they would have to muck about trying to define "open standards" without reference to ISO in a way that encompasses 99.9% of what ISO does but weeds out the ones influenced by strong arming, and then you run into definitional false negatives and false positives etc.
The alternative is to start with ISO and maintain an exclusion list and add all of the non-open standards to it, but at that point you have to evaluate everything ISO publishes and whoever is maintaining the exclusion list is effectively standing in for the standards body.
In either case the purpose behind the corrupted standards organization is greatly eroded because people can no longer rely on its output, and many resources are wasted contending with their mistakes.