Oh, and for the thousandth time FUD does not mean "negative gossip". It means announcements made by a major/monopoly player about future product plans, announcements that are presented as "helpful for customer planning" but which also have the effect of throwing an aura of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt around any decision to use a competitors product.
As an example, Windows itself was originally FUD. VisiCorp was demoing a windowing OS layer called VisiOn at a tradeshow. BillG, still pushing DOS 2 and at that time making only modest plans to screw partner Apple on the Mac "mouse" interface, was humiliated that another company was in the limelight. So Microsoft announced "Windows". Only after he got back to Bellevue did the project get launched. Microsoft was a smaller player at the time, but it had already established itself as the OS company, with an attitude, and the future of VisiOn was thrown into doubt.
Only companies with a dominence in some area can practice FUD.
it's fine to be skeptical, and of course "the internet" (Slashdot?:) is full of junk, but if you try submitting a tip to Infoworld or PCWeek you'll discover: they call you, and they call around and verify before publishing: I've been through it. Just because they write in the column "anonymous source" should not imply that they are just printing an answering machine message.
the SEC requires that public companies disclose "material" information about the company, information that shareholders have the right to know because it impacts the value of the shares.
marketing had everything to do with it. IBM's own AIX is also great technology, and yet... that unquantifiable difference between what is good about Linux vs what is good about AIX is within the realm of marketing.
Motorola's disappointing results despite their engineering achievements illustrates the value of a strong marketing department, one they don't have.
Customers buy benefits, not features. The PowerPC had a long list of impressive features, but customers who did not see benefit in switching, didn't.
your definitions of "marketing" and "engineering" don't bear up to much scrutiny: you seem to use them as synonyms for "failure in the marketplace" and "success in the marketplace".
good marketing and good engineering both follow the credo "satisfying customer needs", and when they both do, success in the eyes of the customers is the outcome.
when I first upgraded to an AMD back in the 486 days, I moved my "Intel Inside" sticker to the lid of my kitchen trashcan:) it lived there collecting yuks for several years
huh? biases changing over time is not better evidence of personal bias than financial... it is probably better evidence of serving a new master. I'm not trying to accuse him of anything, just responding to your argument.
I have been reading Tom for a long time, and I think he has a lot of integrity, the kind that comes from being ornery in general. However, it is also true that when you do what he's been doing as long as he has you can get worn down by the fight, and with money flowing in you can start to have a slight bias in favor of taking the easy path. All that just to say that it is worth raising the question from time to time.
Slashdot I think suffers from a related syndrome. The environment here has grown a lot friendlier to Windows in a server environment, and with ad revenue being what it is and the relative size of the internet audiences for Windows vs. Unix... I'd just like to hear less about Windows. I don't care how stable it gets, it still treats sysadmin like it's a first person shooter dungeon, where you win by being at the console and knowing where the magic is, and being willing to click your way to it over and over... but, with all those Windows eyeballs, there's no way Slashdot is going to meta-moderate them all to hell.
So, the real question for sites like Slashdot's and Tom's is whether they can keep their "edge" by keeping their "edginess". It's a tough challenge.
According to that article, there were no "just among us pals" copyright violations in the sense of sharing copyrighted works. The allegation is that the trojan-horsed version was "pedalled", by which I think they mean "sold"... otherwise, if the Canadiennes were downloading warez... what do they expect?
You are restricting trapped users of non-free platforms in rather unpleasant ways
you are focusing (I think, you don't say) on the desire of these users to see source code. The license is trying to solve a different problem, how to make money. Yes, there are many users who are trapped, but many users have a choice about their platform, and the choosers are much more apt to be programmers with a need for source than are the trapped. The trapped can purchase the same product, the choosers can choose the source if they want.
More importantly, you are encouraging an incompatible world. This is not only an unpleasant situation, but
it may be strategically very unwise for the free software movement..
you may feel that the use of this license may risk an incompatible world, but it explicitly doesn't encourage it. The license encourages selling stuff to people who've chosen a proprietary platform, and sharing stuff with people who've chosen to share. Same stuff, total compatibility.
I'm not coming down in favor of this license, but I don't think you are fairly portraying what this license intends.
without oxygen, earth would be lifeless. so, do you call it "oxygen/earth"?
without C, most GNU tools would not exist: do you call them C/GNU?
I could go on, but you get the message. You should take a course in linguistics and you'd realize that the morpheme "linux" has all of the meaning you prefer associated with it already. The morpheme pair "GNU/Linux", BTW, does contain an extra semantic bit in that it classifies the user as coming from a particular side of this debate. Therefore, it would actually be an error for that AC to use it if that is not her belief.
you got it slightly wrong, but it's not necessarily your fault because that website contains ambiguous use of free: it's not free as beer, it's free as speech. With "free as speech" software, you can charge money for it, but you cannot restrict other people's right to copy it. It's like the GPL except it has the extra restriction that you may not run it on a non free-as-open-source operating system, and because it is a click-wrap contract, not simply a license to use copyrighted material.
agree with what you say, but I don't understand how that invalidates my argument.
I didn't say your argument was invalid, I said you went too far.
I still think that there is
this basic flaw in open source... that it doesn't reach a lot of
people outside of the community
yes, making your assumption that the goal is to have already reached all people outside of the community, then it must be flawed...
you also seem to be saying it will never reach people outside of the community because of this flaw, and again I think you are wrong, I think it is on the way and it will. It is too compelling a paradigm for programmers and development managers to avoid. Open source is the low-cost producer in the software industry which economics tells us will be the ultimate winner.
mmmmm, you go too far calling that a "basic flaw" in open source. Rather, that's a basic flaw in geeks and you've missed opensource's "basic strength"
Open source is designed and built by and for geeks as you point out, but rather than creating a flaw, it explains its success: Open source is already a 100% success because it provides the vast bulk of the people in the community what they wanted, unencumbered access to unix source code. It is an embarassment of riches as it actually provides several alternatives, and on many inexpensive platforms.
It's basic strength is that the kind of "not designed by geeks" UI you are thinking of could now be layered on top without breaking anything. CS Geeks hated the old unix because they couldn't have the source, and they hate the old Microsoft/Apple approach for that reason and because the UI was completely embedded within cheesey, legacy, retrovitted, non-multitasking, non-networked OSes.
um... not very good reasoning. consider that lot's of types of evidence are falsifiable, yet those types of evidence are still accepted and falsification is still illegal.
misuse of PHB, I think, a TLA that is mostly misused. In Dilbert, the pointy haired boss is either clueless and impotent, or arbitrary and capricious, but in neither case would "the facts" about linux have any effect on the outcome of his decisions.
"suits" or "powers that be", or even Grand Poobahs... PHB does not work.
4C is 39F. in the Russian submarine news over the last few days they've been estimating the temperature of the water around the sub at 36F... oops! good candidates to work on the next Mars probe:)
but why did you say we might notice a decline in sea level?
There is NO EVIDENCE that ANY
humans have ever seen the arctic ocean turn to liquid.
but that's not evidence of anything either. Just because something unprecedented (which I doubt this is) happens, doesn't mean that your explanation of it is the right one.
Over a period of a few
decades, coincidentally with an unprecedented increase in carbon emissions, we see the arctic ocean turn to mush.
... and coincidentally without without a measurable temperature increase... because the earth has been this warm before. You see, that's the problem with your theory... er... hypothesis: it's not self consistent.
And, BTW, the carbon emissions may be unprecedented (maybe not: vast forest fires in the past?), but higher carbon percentages existed in the atmosphere before biological infestation of the planet took the carbon out of the atmosphere. Why is it OK with you that plants take carbon out of the atmosphere but not OK that we put it in?
But to make you happy, I will renew my call for an end to paper recylcing. Putting paper in the earth is the only way we have of reversing the carbon flow from fossil fuels to the atmosphere.
I don't pay much attention to what Microsoft specifically does, so I could easily have that fact wrong. Microsoft is extremely profitable so they probably do have enough cash to fund their own growth. Note I did attempt to carve out wriggle room by saying "a company like Microsoft".
In any case, we do need to clean up a couple og things you said. New offerings do not devalue current stockholder value. New offerings do dilute their percentage ownership, but the new shareholders are paying exactly what the new shares are worth. The real key is what the new money is put to work doing. If the company has investment opportunities which are as good as the ones they've had in the past, the new money will generate as much profit as the old and there will be no devaluation. Even if the new opportunities are not as lucrative (as is often the case for ths zillionth McDonald's) the opportunities can be seen as decreasing overall risk and lead to a higher valuation anyway.
The reason companies buy back shares is actually a sneaky little trick, a way of getting around income taxes. If a company pays dividends, they get taxed at the marginal rate for investors, a fairly high rate. If a company buys back shares, they transfer money from the treasury to the investors just the same as a dividend, but only a portion (the capital gain) is taxed, and it's taxed at a lower rate. Furthermore, individual investors can choose at that moment whether they want the income or not (by selling or not) based on the rest of their position. There is a requirement that companies pay a dividend, but there are enough loopholes that most can avoid it.
yes including them. Note that I said "steadily growing": if a company needed a wad of cash for a particular project (or, for example, to buy another company) they can generally find an investor to put up the dough. But if the funding that a company needs isn't a one-time thing, but is easily anticipated as large and growing, and sort of run-of-the-mill, the easiest way to "solve the problem once and for all" is to go public. Companies like Kleiner make their money evaluating new ideas and lending their support creating credibility; it's a different business.
One of the big reasons a compony goes public is to get some working capital to make investments (factories,
expensave talent, marketing blitz) that will make an even bigger profit.
you're not using "working capital" accurately. Factories are long term investments. Working capital is short term.
The need for short term capital comes from the time delays between when Transmeta buys silicon, and when their customers pay them for the chips, a matter of a few months. And, when a company is growing, this payout is ahead of the income on the growth curve, so the amount of working capital required continues to grow.
Companies go public when their need for capital of all kinds exceeds the amounts that individual investors or venture capitalists are willing to raise. There are large private companies, but if they have an aggressive plan for growth, they generally need to go public. Most investors don't have a steadily growing stream of cash to keep pumping in.
A deficit is not debt. It doesn't have to be paid back
your post does a good job of explaining the bit about a deficit, but it also contains a nuanced error of its own:
Corporate debt mostly doesn't get paid back, either. Yes, bonds are retired when they mature, but they are generally paid off with money raised by issuing new debt. From the company's perspective, the debt did not decrease: the debt essentially never gets paid back. In fact, company's generally increase the amount of debt they carry as they grow.
Most people are used to personal debt so this can non-intuitive. Personal debt represents a shift of future income to the present. You want more than you can afford now so you borrow, but in the future you'll be able to afford less. Corporate debt is a different matter. It represents "ownership" of the company just like shares of equity do, more precisely "subordinated ownership". Because it has lower risk than equity and the interest paid is less than the returns that shareholders expect, debt is a cheaper way of raising capital for companies. Because interest paid is tax deductile (e.g. subsidized by non-owning taxpayers), it is an even more desirable form of ownership for the other shareholders.
as to the error about the shareholders absorbing the loss... I correct that in a separate post.
the current owners didn't absorb the losses, the company did.
When you put money into a company and get stock in exchange, it's not your money anymore, just like when you buy a car or a bottle of milk.
And, the company absorbed the losses by spending the money. They are going to need more money for spending in the future. Even profitable companies need money to finance growth: that's why a company like Microsoft constantly sells more shares.
I sometimes wonder if the Linux crowd will use Linux for ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous, just so they
can point out that there's yet another thing Linux can do.
Um... linux people were doing this years ago, is why there are so many. Yeah, this linksys boxlet is great and cheap today, but where was it last year? the year before? the year before that?
BTW, Windows 2000 can do this stuff now too, though it insists on being a DHCP server just like the Linksys... if you use Linux, you can used fixed IP.
Slashdot Mirror
As an example, Windows itself was originally FUD. VisiCorp was demoing a windowing OS layer called VisiOn at a tradeshow. BillG, still pushing DOS 2 and at that time making only modest plans to screw partner Apple on the Mac "mouse" interface, was humiliated that another company was in the limelight. So Microsoft announced "Windows". Only after he got back to Bellevue did the project get launched. Microsoft was a smaller player at the time, but it had already established itself as the OS company, with an attitude, and the future of VisiOn was thrown into doubt.
Only companies with a dominence in some area can practice FUD.
it's fine to be skeptical, and of course "the internet" (Slashdot? :) is full of junk, but if you try submitting a tip to Infoworld or PCWeek you'll discover: they call you, and they call around and verify before publishing: I've been through it. Just because they write in the column "anonymous source" should not imply that they are just printing an answering machine message.
Isn't this highly material information?
marketing had everything to do with it. IBM's own AIX is also great technology, and yet... that unquantifiable difference between what is good about Linux vs what is good about AIX is within the realm of marketing.
Motorola's disappointing results despite their engineering achievements illustrates the value of a strong marketing department, one they don't have. Customers buy benefits, not features. The PowerPC had a long list of impressive features, but customers who did not see benefit in switching, didn't.
your definitions of "marketing" and "engineering" don't bear up to much scrutiny: you seem to use them as synonyms for "failure in the marketplace" and "success in the marketplace". good marketing and good engineering both follow the credo "satisfying customer needs", and when they both do, success in the eyes of the customers is the outcome.
when I first upgraded to an AMD back in the 486 days, I moved my "Intel Inside" sticker to the lid of my kitchen trashcan :) it lived there collecting yuks for several years
I have been reading Tom for a long time, and I think he has a lot of integrity, the kind that comes from being ornery in general. However, it is also true that when you do what he's been doing as long as he has you can get worn down by the fight, and with money flowing in you can start to have a slight bias in favor of taking the easy path. All that just to say that it is worth raising the question from time to time.
Slashdot I think suffers from a related syndrome. The environment here has grown a lot friendlier to Windows in a server environment, and with ad revenue being what it is and the relative size of the internet audiences for Windows vs. Unix... I'd just like to hear less about Windows. I don't care how stable it gets, it still treats sysadmin like it's a first person shooter dungeon, where you win by being at the console and knowing where the magic is, and being willing to click your way to it over and over... but, with all those Windows eyeballs, there's no way Slashdot is going to meta-moderate them all to hell.
So, the real question for sites like Slashdot's and Tom's is whether they can keep their "edge" by keeping their "edginess". It's a tough challenge.
According to that article, there were no "just among us pals" copyright violations in the sense of sharing copyrighted works. The allegation is that the trojan-horsed version was "pedalled", by which I think they mean "sold"... otherwise, if the Canadiennes were downloading warez... what do they expect?
you are focusing (I think, you don't say) on the desire of these users to see source code. The license is trying to solve a different problem, how to make money. Yes, there are many users who are trapped, but many users have a choice about their platform, and the choosers are much more apt to be programmers with a need for source than are the trapped. The trapped can purchase the same product, the choosers can choose the source if they want.
More importantly, you are encouraging an incompatible world. This is not only an unpleasant situation, but it may be strategically very unwise for the free software movement..
you may feel that the use of this license may risk an incompatible world, but it explicitly doesn't encourage it. The license encourages selling stuff to people who've chosen a proprietary platform, and sharing stuff with people who've chosen to share. Same stuff, total compatibility.
I'm not coming down in favor of this license, but I don't think you are fairly portraying what this license intends.
without C, most GNU tools would not exist: do you call them C/GNU?
I could go on, but you get the message. You should take a course in linguistics and you'd realize that the morpheme "linux" has all of the meaning you prefer associated with it already. The morpheme pair "GNU/Linux", BTW, does contain an extra semantic bit in that it classifies the user as coming from a particular side of this debate. Therefore, it would actually be an error for that AC to use it if that is not her belief.
BTW, the annotated explanation of the license contains the erroneous assertion that licence is a verb and license is a noun.
I didn't say your argument was invalid, I said you went too far.
I still think that there is this basic flaw in open source ... that it doesn't reach a lot of
people outside of the community
yes, making your assumption that the goal is to have already reached all people outside of the community, then it must be flawed...
you also seem to be saying it will never reach people outside of the community because of this flaw, and again I think you are wrong, I think it is on the way and it will. It is too compelling a paradigm for programmers and development managers to avoid. Open source is the low-cost producer in the software industry which economics tells us will be the ultimate winner.
Open source is designed and built by and for geeks as you point out, but rather than creating a flaw, it explains its success: Open source is already a 100% success because it provides the vast bulk of the people in the community what they wanted, unencumbered access to unix source code. It is an embarassment of riches as it actually provides several alternatives, and on many inexpensive platforms.
It's basic strength is that the kind of "not designed by geeks" UI you are thinking of could now be layered on top without breaking anything. CS Geeks hated the old unix because they couldn't have the source, and they hate the old Microsoft/Apple approach for that reason and because the UI was completely embedded within cheesey, legacy, retrovitted, non-multitasking, non-networked OSes.
um... not very good reasoning. consider that lot's of types of evidence are falsifiable, yet those types of evidence are still accepted and falsification is still illegal.
or are CNN and ZDNet breaking the law because they routinely link to SlashDot? :)
"suits" or "powers that be", or even Grand Poobahs... PHB does not work.
but why did you say we might notice a decline in sea level?
but that's not evidence of anything either. Just because something unprecedented (which I doubt this is) happens, doesn't mean that your explanation of it is the right one.
Over a period of a few decades, coincidentally with an unprecedented increase in carbon emissions, we see the arctic ocean turn to mush.
... and coincidentally without without a measurable temperature increase... because the earth has been this warm before. You see, that's the problem with your theory... er... hypothesis: it's not self consistent.
And, BTW, the carbon emissions may be unprecedented (maybe not: vast forest fires in the past?), but higher carbon percentages existed in the atmosphere before biological infestation of the planet took the carbon out of the atmosphere. Why is it OK with you that plants take carbon out of the atmosphere but not OK that we put it in?
But to make you happy, I will renew my call for an end to paper recylcing. Putting paper in the earth is the only way we have of reversing the carbon flow from fossil fuels to the atmosphere.
In any case, we do need to clean up a couple og things you said. New offerings do not devalue current stockholder value. New offerings do dilute their percentage ownership, but the new shareholders are paying exactly what the new shares are worth. The real key is what the new money is put to work doing. If the company has investment opportunities which are as good as the ones they've had in the past, the new money will generate as much profit as the old and there will be no devaluation. Even if the new opportunities are not as lucrative (as is often the case for ths zillionth McDonald's) the opportunities can be seen as decreasing overall risk and lead to a higher valuation anyway.
The reason companies buy back shares is actually a sneaky little trick, a way of getting around income taxes. If a company pays dividends, they get taxed at the marginal rate for investors, a fairly high rate. If a company buys back shares, they transfer money from the treasury to the investors just the same as a dividend, but only a portion (the capital gain) is taxed, and it's taxed at a lower rate. Furthermore, individual investors can choose at that moment whether they want the income or not (by selling or not) based on the rest of their position. There is a requirement that companies pay a dividend, but there are enough loopholes that most can avoid it.
yes including them. Note that I said "steadily growing": if a company needed a wad of cash for a particular project (or, for example, to buy another company) they can generally find an investor to put up the dough. But if the funding that a company needs isn't a one-time thing, but is easily anticipated as large and growing, and sort of run-of-the-mill, the easiest way to "solve the problem once and for all" is to go public. Companies like Kleiner make their money evaluating new ideas and lending their support creating credibility; it's a different business.
you're not using "working capital" accurately. Factories are long term investments. Working capital is short term.
The need for short term capital comes from the time delays between when Transmeta buys silicon, and when their customers pay them for the chips, a matter of a few months. And, when a company is growing, this payout is ahead of the income on the growth curve, so the amount of working capital required continues to grow.
Companies go public when their need for capital of all kinds exceeds the amounts that individual investors or venture capitalists are willing to raise. There are large private companies, but if they have an aggressive plan for growth, they generally need to go public. Most investors don't have a steadily growing stream of cash to keep pumping in.
your post does a good job of explaining the bit about a deficit, but it also contains a nuanced error of its own:
Corporate debt mostly doesn't get paid back, either. Yes, bonds are retired when they mature, but they are generally paid off with money raised by issuing new debt. From the company's perspective, the debt did not decrease: the debt essentially never gets paid back. In fact, company's generally increase the amount of debt they carry as they grow.
Most people are used to personal debt so this can non-intuitive. Personal debt represents a shift of future income to the present. You want more than you can afford now so you borrow, but in the future you'll be able to afford less. Corporate debt is a different matter. It represents "ownership" of the company just like shares of equity do, more precisely "subordinated ownership". Because it has lower risk than equity and the interest paid is less than the returns that shareholders expect, debt is a cheaper way of raising capital for companies. Because interest paid is tax deductile (e.g. subsidized by non-owning taxpayers), it is an even more desirable form of ownership for the other shareholders.
as to the error about the shareholders absorbing the loss... I correct that in a separate post.
And, the company absorbed the losses by spending the money. They are going to need more money for spending in the future. Even profitable companies need money to finance growth: that's why a company like Microsoft constantly sells more shares.
Um... linux people were doing this years ago, is why there are so many. Yeah, this linksys boxlet is great and cheap today, but where was it last year? the year before? the year before that?
BTW, Windows 2000 can do this stuff now too, though it insists on being a DHCP server just like the Linksys... if you use Linux, you can used fixed IP.