Part of the trick is understanding the difference between your job and your business. Example is the collapse of the railway tycoons who forget their purpose was transporation and not constructing superfast trains. Companies that understand what fundamental role they play and can stick with the "last-mile" to the consumer will have a decent chance of surviving disruptions. Thus companies like Coca-cola have shifted from dominating the carbonated drinks segment, to being the market gorilla of the liquid refreshment sector, to the mindshare game (associating their taste with pleasant memories such as rock concerts). It is usually the less complicated systems that are the most robust to disruptions (something to keep in mind when designing software). Any complex manufactured capital good can usually be undercut by a lower cost substitute and any fad (whether toys/games/culture) will be difficult to sustain.
One can apply this trick to existing OpenSource vendors to ask what their role is. The clearest example I think of is: Mandrake - bundling/packaging MacMillen - distribution/catalog LinuxCare - support/reassurance
Thus Mandrake could probably be more profitable customising/bundling specific packages for various predefined sectors (business, education, small business, etc), MacMillen on finding alternative distribution channels besides books (e.g. sponsor contests to find who can convert the largest number of boxes to Linux), and LinuxCare in demonstrating key metrics such as cost of repair/replacement, as well as alternative mechanisms of support (e.g. user groups to weed out basic computer problems unrelated to Linux). So long as each company understands the core role and what are bolt-on businesses, then they can adapt even if new technology comes along.
The disk manufacturers are in a bit of a bind since they compete with anything that can store bits ranging from punch-card to next-gen holographic crystals. At least the file system experts like Veritas are less vulnerable.
Technology is like a treadmill in Alice in Wonderland, you have to run as fast as you can just not to go backwards. Stick with coke if you don't like the guessing game.
Hmmm.... having a family member who's part of the medical fraternity could be dangerous to your faith in the hospital system. People sometimes conveniently ignore the fact that the point of a health system is public reassurance, ie to avoid the suggestion of public rorting and keep psychos/mortalities off the front page. Hence you may be surprised at the ratio of managers, biostatisticians, procurement specialists, ethical reviewers, etc to actual medical staff. Adding an unstable IT system to the mix sounds like a recipe for disaster. If you think your medical bills are expensive, wait until you add the cost of a multimillion dollar system (+ ongoing maintenance/replacement) and another layer of staff onto the bill. Also, if trends are any indication, management will take this opportunity to replace highly trained auxiliary medical staff with less skilled button-pushers. It's bad enough having bank tellers believing the printout as gospel truth when you know there has been a screwup but with a medical system, who bears the utimate risk of mistakes/errors? I'd like the see the end-user-license for this one! Plus with more detailed records being permanently kept, expect litigation to go up.
The whole point of a hospital system should be to keep people out as much as possible, ie focus on preventive health rather than fixing up the mistakes where the costs are so much more significant. Ie more time on the design rather than final quality control to the afterlife. This is where I see IT making more of an impact in the long-term like mobile devices that make periodic medical checks. Also giving people more information about the efficiency (and thus cost) of their insurance coverage allows them to make more informed choices. Given the advances in basic health, most medical problems nowadays are life-style related (obesety, alcohol-related liver damage, lung cancer, mental health, etc). With better information, expect to see more carefully targeted insurance plans. By tying costs back to the source, it will hopefully create a dampening feedback cycle.
Sure the medical system will change but don't expect it to happen overnight.
bukvich wrote One nitpick here: there isn't really a free market in surgery. The American Medical Association regulates the supply. They have a guild.
I did mention the magic words "pricing inelasticity" (ie can charge without regard to market forces) and "natural entry barriers" didn't I:-). It is a rather interesting idea, in the Middle Ages, guilds were organised to designate a certain level of skill, apprenticeship training and quality (old-style branding). Now while it may be expediant to import Indian doctors (according to another posting they did mention that Indians regarded doctors and engineers as good careers), would the average consumer trust them? While on paper they would be better, it is all too easy to discriminate. Until service industries like medicine become goegraphically independent (I don't see people shipping themselves to Central America for surgery just yet), there will be no real incentive to change the system.
If all those Asian/Indian firms start producing top-quality knock-down software clones with some serious marketing dollars behind them, then expect to see Silicon Valley screaming out for protection. Statistics-wise, not all the smarts are living in the US so sooner or later, another domineering force (perhaps in India? Malaysian Multimedia Supercorridor?) will arise and all those web-sites will relocate like magic and you can kiss your 6-figure income goodbye.
Is technology suppose to make your life easier or harder? I sure hope those supra-geniuses can come up with stuff that us normal sub-par users can use to explain stuff to joe-blog consumers. The claim of getting $20K x 700K doctors = $14 B/year is a little optimistic. In my personal observation, for every $10 of IT money,
$1 = hardware $2 = software $3 = operations/maintenance $4 = ongoing training and helpdesk
So while the company might be looking at the cream, the hospital system is probably having a hernia about feeding the whole cow. The bottom line is does the cost of technology (minus hype) less than the improvments in productivity/profitability? Otherwise it becomes a financial black-hole and adoption rates will be marginal after the early adopters get burnt. Peter Drucker (that famous management guru) once visited a hardware manufacturer which created handdrills - he spent the day listening to employees crowing that variable speed, multi-bit this, retractable cords, various do-dackys, etc. When asked for his opinion, he replied.... your customers are interested in holes not powertools.
The trap that too many smart people (and it appears the company is full of them) is that they assume everyone else around is them equally smart. Sure doctors may be, but only in their speciality. Unfortunately as the Holloween documents note, simplicity means low-entry barriers which destroys the value of software sold as a product. Hence the rather unconcious need to produce something too difficult for the competition to replicate.
Software development at this early life-form sorta reminds me of the oil-well discovery stage where the intent (and high payoffs) was the wildcat teams sinking and discovering the black gold. However, if you compare those cowboy days and today's modern energy infrastructure and distribution networks, there is an incredible difference. So before we sacrifice the sacred IPO cow on the altar of reality, I hope people, especially the new group of geeks keen to show off their prowess, keep in mind that if its something your mother can't use, then nobody will use it.
The problem with technology is that it comes in waves and therefore everybody starts paddling furiously at the same time. Naturally this leads to a severe shortage of the fad-to-be, whether programming language, app or digital-whatsits. The only real shortage is that of management talent as companies without a clue are losing people left, right and centre to those firms which do appreciate and treat their people well instead of trying to hire the lowest cost fresh-out-of-college app-builder. Given a choice between 120 hour weeks paying $250K or 60 hours paying $100K what would people choose? Burning out your engineers through stock option pyramid scams in order to cash out on an IPO is not a sustainable practice. Like in any industry boom/busts occur but IT is a portable skillset and if you're willing to travel, there will always be more relaxed opportunities elsewhere.
Part of the problem IMHO is the relentless hyping of certain technologies. Sure the internet will change things but it will still be around (and cheaper) 5, 10 years later. It's absurb to think new businesses won't still be created n years in the future. From what I understand, part of this is market priming in order to adopt the most expensive components now (and thus preserve fat profit margins) before it becomes a commodity.
Let's look carefully, people are paid (roughly) according to the value the market places on their labor, skills and talent. Society has deemed that a surgeon with megayears of specialist training is worth more than a janitor. Thus skills which are not easily acquired or substituted (e.g. high manual dexterity, intensive knowledge, or natural leadership) tend to be more highly rewarded. Oh and pick a field which is likely to be in long-term demand, pricing inelasticities and has natural barriers to entry. Plastic surgery sounds like a nice area:-). I recall this SF story (name escapes me at the moment) which invented a device that could immortalise a worker's assembly skills but once they've captured the performance of their best worker, they fired him. With increasing IP going into software, I wonder who else will be next on the firing block.
It always interests me from a scientific/economic point of view how these future worlds might evolve. I recall one projection early this century of what South Africa might look like 50 years later. Absolutely nobody predicted that the landscape would be changed by skyscrapers. It's always the individuals (and their ego boosting activities) that leave the strongest mark (pyramids, Great Wall, etc). One wonders what crazy advertising stunts companies will get up to next... colonising the moon just to plant a permanent billboard sign? The future will probably be stranger than we can ever expect.
Perhaps/.ers could indulge in creation a chain of events that would create plausible scenarios leading to situations described in the post-cyberpunk SF scene. Example...
Someone discovers longevity drug (since 17 patent monopolies are the only guarenteed way of making profits) -> military enrolments plummet (nobody wants to risk their future) -> recruitment of lower-class from other countries to do dirty jobs -> need to steal tech to survive.
What other interesting events could transpire? Oh well, more ways of killing time between coding runs.:-(
Now that Linux is becoming more "mainstream" (or is it mainstream becoming more tolerant of hackers?), I think people should apply a bit more critical thought to people/companies jumping on the bandwagon. Are they pulling or getting a free-ride?
While its a free world for any group to try and make money, one has to ask are they delivering a service better/faster/cheaper than existing ones. In the case of LinuxFund, it would be interesting to ask what scales of economies they offer, what value they provide beyond existing services (besides the feel-good of supporting anything reciting the Linux magic incantation) and whether if you removed the Linux rah-rah, would they be better or worse than any existing bank/financial house/credit union. If they do, then the market will decide how successful they will become.
A famous management guru once said that the epitome of a business plan was that even if you showed it to everyone else, it would still work and they couldn't easily copy it. While trading code/ads for T-shirts and freebies may appeal to some, would you trust your money and any personal information to such an outfit? Not knocking these guys but I hope they've got better business sense than a lot of the IPOs that are springing up. Oh well, judging from previous posts like the Linux hotel, at least the company selling stuffed penguins seems a worthwhile investment:-).
One might also point out that the value system of scientists and businessmen are different. Let's face it, after achieving a certain point in living standards, material goods become only a small facet of lifestyle. People forget that money is only an intermediate exchange between what they would like (health, travel, whatever). For the pure scientists, nothing is more exciting than being out in the field, exchanging debates with colleagues and satisfying their curiosity. If, on the other hand, a manager enjoys satisfaction in crushing competitors, controlling the system and acting as a petty tyrant, then they will act in that way (with predictable results). Fortunately the capitalistic society allows people to have some degree of choice over their life, provided they are not economic slaves to external programmed conventions. As Buddha once noted, desire leads to suffering so it all comes down to what you desire in life and what you are willing to sacrifice to achieve it. The gift culture is one aspect of hackerdom where the desire is for peer respect which has to be earned, not bought. All the other economic analysis is related to the economic landscape of the times where portions of the system react against other forces. While the details of the shift may be debated by academics over the coming years, participating in the fray is more fun:-).
LL
Too many Geeks, spoil the company
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Managing Geeks
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· Score: 4
One major problem I find is that IT professional is rather too broad a term to apply. Instead, I suspect that as the whole sector matures, distinct classes will evolve. Let's use a medical analogy to explain the point
IT Field (Medical Field)
System Admin (Nurse) the indispensible field support of bandaging leaky systems using the ever-present duct tape (perl) and keeping life and limb together.
Help Desk (Public Health Education) informing the public of health issues and general reccomended practices. Greatly undervalued for their role in preventive health and reducine epidemics (viruses)
System Analysis (GP) first call for problem diagnosis and treatment, able to assemble a team of interns (programmers) to offer prompt (well hopefully) treatment and patient care.
Software Vendors (Drug pushers, errr... pharmeceutical dispensary) while quality ranges from the ubiquitious silicon snake oil to peer-reviewed double-blind testing (openSource), the truely valuable unbiased ones have a mastery grasp of the industry and is able to offer a range of competitive solutions covering herbal remedies to highly engineered solutions from the bewildering range of products
Consultant (Specialist) who understand the very detailed processes that keeps the system alive and has an intimate grasp of details. Highly trained in deep technical arcana, their expensive knowledge is highly sought to solve deep problems not normally apparent to general practictioners
Creative Source (Surgeon) one of the rare breed that have the imagination and high talent to create entirely new fields, these individuals, backed up by the appropriate team, form the seed of every major and complex software system (e.g. kernel).
Anyway, I'm sure there are other appropriate analogies people can draw. While Geek/Nerd may be a subcultural badge of distinction, in the long run it denigrates the immense levels of skills and undermines the credibility of the profession. One observation is that the IT field needs much better structure, training and certification to ensure people understand what they are getting and improve the confidence they have in the skill and/or advice they are receiving. In particular, IMHO eliminating the dominance of unnecessary administration management and returning to a more natural pyramid of talents might achieve a better job of professionals providing cost effective solutions (good information infrastructure design) instead of wasteful addiction to expensive and overrated drugs (software).
I think the point should be made that coexistance between Open and Closed is perfectly possible. In fact, it gives some rather interesting pricing information. If 2 compilers are priced at $5K each, then it might be harder to distinguish the features as compared to a free one where you know that if you wait some time N, features might become available. It then acts as a natural queuing system, separating people according to their time perference. It also has the benefit of being a quality bar in that any commercial product must be at the minimum be better than the "free" and thus force the company to keep on their toes and pour some of those profits back into development (ie discourage rent-seeking behaviour).
The point about Microsoft is rather interesting. If its role is to "act" as a convenient target due to its "innovative" business practices, if MS wasn't around would OpenSource be more conflict-driven and less cohesive or even not feasible? Much like the Blitz in WW2, if everyone is suffering in equal misery, then there are less complaints about ownership/sharing of kudos as the focus is on the external "threat". I would see this as a future problem as more projects become commercialised and money becomes a influencing factor rather than idealism or passion.
The only area which might be a little lacking is the comment about technical support. If ESR's Magic Cauldron thesis is correct in that maintenance becomes the primary cost function in software as a service rather than manufactured good, then it makes sense to pay for the value of support/hand-holding (or risk reduction) and OpenSource then becomes the advertising sheet (if 50% of peers use it then it must be worthwhile). In any complex problem especially software systems, if you don't understand it, you can't support it and any competitor would have a significant time penalty. I think some studies on the true cost of IT would be rather illuminating.
The other point about scientists having capped financial rewards (ie low salary compared with equivalent industry experience) is that it is a trade-off between what you enjoy (research). It seems to me that you get paid for doing things you don't like and pay out (or salary sacrifice) for fun things. Would it be fair to say that OpenSource is to some people a hobby for relaxation? If so, then it is understandable why people prefer the GPL as it is probably offensive to see others benefit disproporationately from an act of generosity.
So in a world of Open/Closed, it opens up a whole new set of rules that should be interesting to watch. Personally I see it like a snowstorm, you require the chaotic elements to initially form (small = more likely to be creative), but then you need the balanced framework to grow (formal documentation, etc). Together, they make rich and varied beautiful structures.
adamhupp wrote I actually don't think the port would be all that difficult, relativly speaking. AFAIK the "emotion engine" is running the MIPS instruction set which we already have a port for.
I think you might be underestimating the task a little here. Because it is backwards compatible with the exising Sony Playstations, it will use that CPU as the hub I/O chip and the EmotionEngine and GraphicsSynthesiser are independent but connected via fast memory pipes. So I suspect it would be more akin to programming a SMP with slightly different CPUs, not to mention slightly different bits of scratchpad RAM scattered gods-know where. I'd also like to see their memory hierarchy and timing models for their vector units as well, not to mention how the hell they're going to stream video simultaneously (probably one of those secret instructions they're not going to tell anyone). Thus Mesa would have to be threaded and tuned, X designed to synchronise with the I/O hub, and of course, the kernel has to boot off the DVD into a measy 32M. Perhaps someone who's got the dev kit with Cynus compilers can give us a clue as to what needs to be done?
If you're so keen to get started, why don't you show us a bootable Linux for the existing PlayStation?
to say about this. Sony has got very very good technology. Their know-how in consumer electronics and media production is phenomenal. However, the content and media tools field is creativity and software driven with many firms holding content franchises and/or proprietary visual special effects close to their chest. Despite the inroads of the NT juggernaut, SGI does still hold some sway in the media industry with Apple probably filling the lower niche. Also developing efficient code and compilers for multiprocessors is not trivial. How many programs are currently optimised to use Apple's Velocity or the Intel/AMD SIMD extensions? The silicon hardware is willing but the carbon wetware (ie brain-power) is weak. I'm not saying that a revolution of the media industries can't be done, the Japanese are brilliant engineers but the competition for skilled developers and creative storyline writers (the so-called Gold Collar workers) is going to hurt. Also the content is going to be revved up if you don't want 3D reruns of old scripts. I suppose a holoplex where instead of a sit-down film, you have Indianna Jones experience for hormone driven teenagers can't be too far off.
An interesting world, I wonder what Shakespear would have done in today's time.
I think there are some major fundamental problems here that having multiple DNS root servers will just paper over. The major issue is that certain vested interests want to turn addresses into property rights (with associated price and thus shareholder value). Unfortunately it fails one fundamental test in that a name is not unique. Thus while a physical property has well defined boundaries as recorded by land deeds (remember that your forefathers fought for this by carving out a homestead in the wilderness), there is no natural constraints on a name/address pair. If the impact of the participants weren't so serious on the rest of the world, it'll form the basis of a Monty Python sketch...
{humor on} News Flash: The McDonald clan descended on the embattered hamburger chain waving haggis and yelling war cries, claiming the appropriation of their proud Scottish ancestry by a burger flipping clown was an insult to their heritage and the direct cause of the 75% unemployment rate in the internet economy. PR spokeman declinced to comment noting that kilt-wearing assistants would lead to an immediate decline in sales....
Switch to Hospital Bedside: Expectant mother.... "I'll like to name him Bill Gates the CCCLXVII", "sorry, all booked out until DCLXV". "How about XYsaer sfgyuer". "No can do, apparently reserved for a punk rock group sometime next decade. Those music companies are really getting desperate nowadays to come up with half a good idea". "Sigh, OK, looks like I'll have to settle for a random lottery draw instead. "Will 345694857 do?"
The conflict is that NSI is wanting to act simulatneous roles of registrar (usually government fixed-fee recording service), data developer (in holding onto its yellow pages database for perhaps advertising purposes) and judge/jury in resolving name conflicts (with associated legal vigorish). There are specific reasons why land property rights have evolved separate functional groups as it has been found to be a workable solution for the last 500 odd years. Asking a bunch of companies to divvy up a name space limited by the number of recognisable English words of 7 characters or less (let's face it, most people can't remember much more than 1-2 syllables) is a sure way to degrade the language (yeah, invent more useless buzzwords). I expect a patent any day for adding new letters to the alphabet:-). Frankly, the role of branding has gotten way out of control like a hydra on amphetimines. Whether it is one variety of sugared water or another variation on a PC is becoming too mind-numbing to keep up. If the Net doesn't collapse from sheer marketing hype, the collective ennui from watching the same ads day after day will turn people off. If there was sanity in the world, I hope another Postel-in-training comes up with a naming distribution system that is not dependent on centralised roots. Alternatively emigrate to the far side of the moon just to get away from the cybernoise and pollution.
While world domination might be the trademark of Wall Street (as enshrined in US corporate law), I'd like to respectfully point out that other countries might not share the same extreme values. A study of the best US corporation compared with the second best revealed a long-term vision and strong NON-financial values where critical to their success. Sure you can be as successful as Bill Gates at the cost of half the planet hating your guts/products but then a few hundred billion will smooth that burden, right? Frankly, from the point of view of Wall Street, they wouldn't care less if Red Hat staff stripped naked and ran a circus because next year there will be another fad, another media frenzy, another roll of the dice. As the day traders are finding out with the brokerage fees and vigorish (mandatory payments to the dealer) the only people guarenteed to make money are the financial wheeler-dealers (guess who's pocket their mulimillion dollar bonuses are coming out of?). Now capital markets have a role but they are not the end-all and be-all that some people think. Basically companies are trading labor, goods or services to satisfy the wishes of consumers and if what you have to offer is superior and at the low-cost end of the efficiency spectrum, then natural dominance results. Growth for the sake of growth is rather pointless. Afterall, in biology we call unlimited growth a cancer.
So I wish Red Hat luck along with the rest of the Linux distributors.
I'm reminded of the joke that while travelling through Ireland (no disrespect to the Irish!), a economist, biologist and mathematician spotted a black sheep in a flock and noted respectively
economists - all sheep are blackish
biologist - the sheep in that flock is black
mathematician - there exist one sheep in Ireland who's black on its side
The point being is that "truth" is relative to depth of overview, knowledge of the details and ability to sort out the sheep from the goats:-). The "myths on Linux" is as relevant as standing in a thunderstorm and saying "the patch of sky above me is clear". The whole computer industry is moving so fast (the so-called Internet time) that claiming any correlation between isolated past datapoints is like claiming you can stay dry by avoiding certain puddles. Any information, particularly business/marketing guff can be biased through
- not telling the entire story - sampling over a small domain - not calibrating experiments to measure the desired variable (compare with double-blind medical tests) - ad homien attacks, focusing on non-critical issues - glossing over details, a major sin as the diversity of software means you need to understand where certain packages have comparative advantages, Linux domain is the value for price-concious consumers - thinking that your solution is the only solution (why aren't we all driving model-T fords?) - ignoring the future pathway and credibility - comparing items at different stages of growth
Thus while Linux certainly have weaknesses, it is all to easy to draw false conclusions. From a structural point of view, Linux has specific advantages - unliked canned applications, open-source can be tuned to give comparative advantages, if everyone is using the same package (something that app-servers forget) then there is no commercial points of differentiation - long-term credibility as noted by Linus and ESR - licensing costs are independent of per user or per machine basis - the development process leads to better peer review and stability - provides alternative vehicle for independent companies
These structural efficiencies make it a viable long-term competitor, especially as it benefits service-based companies which is what the Internet enables. For example, supposing I come up with a brilliant compiler that runs everything 2 times faster, then by setting up as drop-in web-site where people can leave code and pick up compiled binaries you can compact two whole layer of costs in the marketing and distribution (you might be surprised at how little money actually goes into product development as a percentage of costs).
Oh well, time will tell how efficient the OpenSource model is compared with ClosedSource.
If you ignore the situation where the lecturer pushes his/her pet interpretation to make a quick buck off captive markets, then you'd note that law, history, mathematics, medicine and a whole raft of undergraduate fields are pretty persistent. The classic authors are still cited for their major contributions. Afterall the basic foundations for a lot of topics remain unchanged even though the style and pretty pictures might be different.
It is the mark of a more sophisticated market that different roles are taken by increasingly specialised companies. For example, the initial method of selling milk (driving cattle through streets) has been replaced by farmers, producers, transportation networks, wholesale distribution, retail, and marketing, all done by different entities. I see no reason why software won't go the same way with creation, porting, packaging, distribution, and support all going to different companies. By letting each component in the value chain focus and improve on their respective roles, a wider and more robust market can be reached. If the only complaint is the name or branding, then that can be easily solved.
The increasing competition between RedHat, Mandrake, Suse etc can only lead to more refinements and (hopefully) better software solutions provided nobody uses standover tactics. T'is good.
It is also interesting to note that studies have shown that there is little instructional benefit in computers as currently deployed. In fact, some people decry the increasing commoditisation of education. The biggest problem I see is that while information in books can last for decades, computer technology is outdated within 3 years, leading to increasing reinventment of time to update teaching material, often at a higher penalty. Hence the interest in OpenSource which is human readable and can be adapted for whatever technology is likely to arrive. The ongoing costs, both operational and replacement is an invisible overhead that is ulimately bourne by the students, whether in fees or additional staffing overheads. The open question is whether this leads to "superior" pedalogical benefits. While neater essays (downloaded from the web) may be easier on the marker's eyes and encyclopedias can be more compactly stored, highly technical or professional areas are dependent on the understanding and mastery of quite difficult concepts and I've yet to see any technology that can accelerate this task. Also what computer can teach creativity, curiosity or the love of learning?
As for the role of corporations in universities, the issue is that either the individual pays (through loans or parental support), industry chips in with scholarships or the state subsidises (through regressive taxes). Thus education can be funded through future, present or past income (with endless policy debates among the funders). The increasing elimination of low-end blue and white collar jobs lost to automation and computerisation means that a larger bulk of the population shifts onto the higher education system which was never designed for massification. The question still remains is who gets to pay for this education? If the army could sponsor people through the GI Bill, why not corporations? If RedHat or TransMeta sponsored internships, would people be complaining? If so, then you could shift to Britain or Australia where studies have shown it is 30-40% cheaper. Given the increasing global mobility and availability of choice, there's probably a place somewhere that fits people's desires and budgets but ultimately you only get out what you invest in sweat.
Besides, there are many ways to learning about the world, backpack through Europe/Asia, raid a library, chat with your grandparents abour the lessons of their youth, or listen to the great speeches of past leaders. Given the wide variety, there's no need for formal schooling to get in way of an education.
Speaking as a layperson, is it the tools that characterise cyberterrorism or the intent of the individual/group/state that matters? Take a look at Peters' "Our New Old Enemies." Summer 1999 of Parameters. pp. 22-37 for some background.
It is easy to focus on the big baddies like chemical, biological, nuclear weapons as they are tangible tools and computer/communications infrastructure is going to occupy a Frankenstein niche for a while until people realise to balance between potential risks and rewards (after all we still use cars despite the high road carnage). Judging from history though, I would guess that white collar crime by individuals or small groups would be much more likely than state-sponsored subversion as the economic payoffs are much more obvious and direct. To postulate one example, the electricity market is shifting towards greater deregulation and adopting the use of complex derivatives to smooth out the supply/demand curves. Speculation becomes a moral risk if you know or even prearrange certain effects such as sabotaging a critical transmission pylon and clean up on placing a "sure" bet. Expanding this to a mass scale as in an entire industry sector or nation is much harder as it becomes beyond the means and abilities of individuals. The more people that know, the more likely something will slip up leading to discovery and nullation.
Most of the current transnational conflicts at the moment tend to be between states of low-medium technological sophistication. Despite trade friction and rhetoric, it's hard to see 2 first world countries like say Canada and US slagging it out, especially given the high level of C4I capabilities. Given today's modern capital markets, any signs of potential political conflict leads to rather rapid flight of money and vocal outcries from the citizens. However, unscrupulous subgroups may elect to target high capacity limited infrastructure (e.g. robot subs to cut underwater cables) if they think they could get away with it.
The only two other groups I can think of that would have the motive and mindset for mass disruption through cyberterrorism would be closed religious or fanatical groups whose value systems are so out of sync with mainstream that they feel threatened enough to take as much of the world with them as they "go under". The other would be individuals or companies on the fringe of legal juristictions deploying modern equivalents of extortion (threatening to disrupt business or services), theft (altering electronic records of property rights such as land titles or share quity ownership), fraud (diverting goods/money to different addresses), or systematic standover tactics to control and maintain monopoly profits (wreck reputations, steal customers by price dumping, fostering unwanted goods by scare-mongering, hire/scare away talented staff, etc). Old tactics in new guises and using computer leverage to accelerate the process. The biggest problem is that the larger it becomes, the more visible a target the group becomes to law enforcement agencies which, if necessary, can redefine what is lawful to control perceived excesses (e.g. RICO act against mob). IT is only a step up from indust rial espionage to industrial sabotage. For example, supposing someone wanted to compete against Amazon or Ebay, then by hiring insiders to sabotage equipment or arms-length outsiders to disrupt activities, can gain a temporary advantage. You can extend this to more critical and irreplaceable functions like financial clearance houses, genetic/fingerprint banks, blood records, tax history (now that would be an interesting target), credit checks, pension funds, international settlements, GPS maps etc. The other nasty trick is to insert fake data such as insurance scams then collecting on fake policies, falsify employment/death records to gain benefits, rig electronic lottery/gambling events, etc. However, this would require systematic planning and quite detailed inside process knowledge which would cut down on the list of suspects.
Mass terror, on the other hand, as a random and emotional act to demonstrate the lack of control and powerlessness of governments is IMHO harder to scale up to. The AIDS epidemic, while quite hyped by the press has settled into the background on the media horizon which shows that it is difficult to sustain a fear campaign across a wide geographical and temporal scope (even guns is an intermitent issue). The fear of nanotechnology (a la grey gloop) or the equivalent of the blob is probably a little too fanciful for the average joe unlike the persistant public fear of mutual assured destruction where everyone could look at the result of Japan. After all, turning a threat into execution is rather irreversible as it is hard to extort advantage from people that have reverted to stone age and any ongoing nebulous threat could quite likely be nullified given the usual capitalistic incentives. A series of ongoing semi-random cyber-attacks could be one possibility as it would force a country to spend on costly defences in depth across a range of infrastructure such that the economic costs are high enough to hurt. But being deprived of their MTV or other creature comforts is not the same as being physically threatened by fertiliser bombs so I suspect people (outside computer security experts) would eventually become rather blase about it. If the terror is suppose to obtain a political end, the sheer stubbonness of the human mind (e.g. reaction to bombing in Ireland) is enough to cause enough backlash to twart the original aim and thus force resolution through the normal political process.
On the other hand, it is much more feasible for a high-tech country to threaten or dominate a low-tech one (who knows that self-destruct signals are in the microchip they ship?) as the information asymmetry creates a significant disadvantage. From the point of view of the smaller country, cyberterrorism is probably all too real. Unforunately, technology is no substitute for trust.
After browsing the hundred-odd replies, I'm struck by the fact that most people are not happy (one way or another) but nobody has suggested any viable alternative. Now, given the usual libertarian attitude (at least if that is what OpenSource is suppose to be in empowering individuals), if you were a parent, what would you physically do? I'd like to toss in an idea (which unfortunately fell through for lack of funding... so what's new with local government:-( ) that I once discussed with a community liason with a police parent partnership group.
{Put on flame-retardent overalls}
The concept was to install a number of "playpen" computers that kids could use to "break in". Similar in principle to providing rollerblade rinks to avoid them killing themselves on the roads. Would select a mix of OSs like Linux, FreeBSD, TrustedIRIX in order of increasing difficulty and tools for hunting down security holes and the philosophy of true hackerdom. The goal is to immerse them into the cultural landscape by providing reading material of role models and what traits the hacker community admired (talent, knowledge, modesty?) Then encourage kids to form groups/tribes to alternatively protect and to penetrate as far as possible undetected (home/away game) whilst the machines were still in a relatively controlled environment (ie in the community centre overlooked by someone responsible). That way they could learn skills (can we say forensic computing here!) and understand the role of a civil society at the same time (the only cyberlaws are what you can technologically enforce yourself!). Remember the only difference between a locksmith and a burgler is intent. By turning their energy into a competitive attitude towards computer mastery rather than notoriety, positive traits can in theory be reinforced.
{Flame suit off}
While the idea hasn't found any gung-ho mainstream champions to get it off the ground as yet, instead of whinging about the ineffectiveness of governments (which afterall is collectively suppose to represent your desires no matter how klutzy the implementation) perhaps/.ers can think of other potential feasible solutions and have an idea bake-off. As the old saying goes, if you're not part of the solution, then you're the problem.
Just to be the daemon's... errr... devil's advocate here:-), I'd like to ask where else do people get taught social mores and customs, internet or otherwise? For example, where was it picked up that it was not kosher to go around opening random neighbour's doors? (apart from those grisly TV reports a few years ago of people bing shot). Assuming that parents are the first stage in teaching kids the difference between right and wrong through the Pavlov technique of response-stimulus (ie a spank when they played up), then there is a fair chance that given the newness of the medium, they lack a few clues and therefore the community police see a small role to do some preemptive behaviour modification. How else would youngsters realise that certain behaviour is just not acceptable? Given the rate lawyers are inventing rules, I doubt whether anyone reads law books any more so how do people get shown the correct etiquette, and you can lump in all the silly things like mail pyramid schemes, procedures for not revealing passwords, etc.
That said, I suspect there are bigger problems that lead to cracker behaviour than a simple education campaign can solve. I recall a survey that noted crackers had a tendency to be poorly socialised with peers and come from broken households. Plastering over the results and ignoring the causes seem a little like taking the easy path. Also, given kids' usual attitude to authority, I wonder how effective any campaign would be, or whether it would make "hacking" cool and thus a legitimate activity for gaining peer respect and bragging rights.
I bet they had grafetti in caveman times as well. Oh well, technology comes and technology goes but social problems remain forever intractable.
I fail to see how this will encourage more companies to open up closed source applications. Supposing a company has got a killer product that is 5 years ahead of anyone else. Now the open source community could threaten to reproduce it (given enough time any software functionality can be replicated) and by throwing enough warm bodies at the problem, could perhaps come up with equivalent features in say 3 years. Now from the company's point of view, all they need to do is sit tight for 3 years of additional profits, then perhaps release it as LimitedSource. The question should really be, how should the payoffs be rearranged to encourage companies to release source now, without cannibalising their expected profits? Unless both sides can benefit, it will just not happen.
A couple of possibilities, if you look at the price of software (assuming it is a manufactured product) then we would have components like
+------------------+----------+----------------+ | Development cost | Know How | Marketing Hype | +------------------+----------+----------------+
Now from the OpenSource community, amortising the development cost over a wider base and eliminating the hype and know-how (ie stupidity tax for not understanding how it all hangs together) creates cheaper and more robust solutions. Would it be fair to say that all the community really wants is the source but not the hassles of marketing, distributing and supporting the product? If so, then value in excess of potential "lost profits" can be restored via:
inclusion of history with embedded links to the originator for support and value-added stuff
giving originator first rights of distribution for each release for a limited period (ie only original company can release binaries + branded documentation for say 3 months before becoming open slather
segment the market into budget (source-only, limited edition), value (binaries) and premium (bells and whistles) with a matching recommended price
relicensing, if someone comes up with a vastly superior hack, then the originator has first right of refusal to market the improvements
In essense, this is looking at the GNU license and seeing what areas could be temporarily weakened without losing the principle of OpenSource. If people think hard enough, perhaps they can come up with other win-win scenarios. A trade is not a deal unless both sides can benefit.
While I think that Stallman truely believes that free software equals freedom, I would be willing to bet that in reality this idea was born from the true hacker's desire to understand how everything works.
And is this a bad ideal? If you look back at historical stuff like patent laws, they were always intended to encourage dissemination of knowledge to further the arts and sciences. Scientists have spent decades trying to understand how the world works. I recall one escaped negro slave from Civil War times who self-educated himself to escape the "bondage of ignorance". Freedom is a rather nebulous term with many subtle interpretations but the principle of an uncoerced informed choice will probably persist.
If anything, the availability of another piece of software in the world increases the power in hands of the user. They can choose to use it or not. Each new piece of software, irregardless of its license, empowers the user and cannot, by itself, shackle the individual and result in the diminshment of personal freedom.
Well said. The software which you define here fits the Perl Artistic License, any code can be modified and combined in new ways relatively easily. However, there may be subtle hidden costs due to specific interactions of the license conditions and the wider environment. Slow erosion of rights (which are another great area of debate) may prove more corrosive and even lead to catastrophic failure. Suppose a license said you could only run software on platform x, then if x disappears you are stuffed. The tendency towards a software monoculture raises the risk profile which is not directly observable, yet ultimately creates a potential failure. I'm sure lawyers must love designing licenses because the devil is always in the details.
If we look at the Linux kernel as an example I would assert that the GPL has actually reduced freedom. As Red Hat and others strive for multi-billion dollar capitalization on the world market, the authors of code are relegated to sidelines.
I would agree that given the current economic system, distributors are favored over creators. In fact, I've questioned the ability of OpenSource to scale up to really large projects, and one reason is that small groups can retain ownership of the code more effectively (e.g. Apache). As for your assertion of reducing freedom, the GPL does shift the balance of power away from the individual contributor to the user but with the viral effect of (forced?) conversion of the user to be a contributor. While the individual loses some rights (e.g. absolute control of distribution), some reciprocal rights are gained from feedback as well as the property that the license would still be valid for the nth user as for the first. This is a rather imporatant side-effect as down-stream users cannot exclude marginal users such as alternate platforms. While facists governments like Nazi Germany wants to exclude "outcasts" like gypsies, jews, homosexuals from mainstream, a democractic system attempts to be inclusive. Rules, whether embodied in laws or licenses tries to achieve certain social effects and I suspect RMS thought very carefully about the GPL design to fit the circumstances as he saw them. You may disagree with the intent but then you've also got the choice of following specific project leaders, whether Linux GPL, *BSD or whatever based on their licensing variants.
Their code is not longer under their control, they have abdicated their own freedom, and it has been usurped by others. Some have found patronage and thus the ability to earn an hourly wage and the promise of stock options. Explain to me how this is the embodiment of freedom?
As compared to the alternative of giving all rights to your thoughts to a corporation? Freedom is a relative concept, back in the Middle Ages serfs didn't even own their bodies. It is the hallmark of a civilisation that as we (supposedly) grow more enlightened, more rights are transferred to the individual. My bet is that the software ecosystem will oscillate between open/closed until an equilibrium is reached. Currently the momentum is with OpenSource but if RedHat or any other group abuses the outcome, the pendulum will swing the other way. New models of software creation/distribution will open up as a result creating more opportunities which we can't even imagine at the moment. If you take a look at say the evolution of companies, you see different structures according to whether it is a family firm (typically hierarchical control), corporations (separation between goverance (directors), operations (executive) and ownership (shareholders)), and modern multinational corporations with loose coalition of subsidaries held by a common subculture (e.g. Disney). As OpenSource matures, new and more sophisticated organisational structures will evolve which will better reflect the balance between all the stakeholders but it is still early days to say what shape it will take.
Freedom should never be a zero-sum game. The GPL and the Free Software movement is about empowering users at the expense of programmers. It is no better that the most restrictive of comercial licenses.
I agree that on the spectrum between completely open and complete closed, FSF and commercial end-user-licenses probably lie on the extremes with very little degrees of movement. However, the growing diversity of the OpenSource licenses like *BSD, Mozilla, Apache, etc allows people to choose various tradeoffs to suit various social/economic objectives. Being the pragmatic (balance between optimism of human nature and cynicism of individuals) type, I would say choose whatever makes you happy. Dogma shouldn't be the reason why people blindly choose one license over another and a little bit of thinking about what you wish to achieve with releasing source will probably go a long way. It still comes down to what relative freedoms (frankly pretty open-ended list) are being negotiated and only time will tell as to what is the most efficient balance between coders, distributors and users. However, the general philosophy of releasing source code does have the advantage of preserving the seed corn for the next generation of hackers/programmers and that, in itself, is a worthy endeavour.
Every society needs a causa belli or reason to rebel, whether it is feminism, environmentalism, whatever. It's just the nature of human beings that there is always some segment that doesn't like conforming to social norms and the computing industry is no exception, especially when the creativity to push beyond known limits already puts the innovators at the fringe. Now whether you put this trait down to pure human orniness or the fact that in every flock of sheep, there are always a few itching to be the underdogs, is irrelevant.
The philosophy of "free code" (as in freedom of speech) first mooted by RMS has crystalised around Linux probably due to good timing and some inspired leadership. Also the OpenSource movement has been helped by mainstream sympathisers (both individual and corporate) who have been stomped on quite heavily by the current market gorillas. Now whether Solaris could have played that same role is a little debateable as it could have been perceived as being contaminated by corporate strings (witness the current doubts about Sun's Community License). Would it have the right elements to provoke a similar response if there was no external motivating factors? Like most grassroot social movements, OpenSource requires the right environmental factors (in this case repulsion by existing market leaders, technological changes exposing previous high priests of computing, and new communications medium of the internet to link the individual elements into a more cohensive whole) and a simple rallying standard to invoke the passions of the supporters (despite what people think, greed doesn't create the same motivating force). Solaris might be very well suited as an enterprise computing platform but it would not have the cheap hardware base to attract entry-level Linux hackers, nor the non-profit motive of supporting (to them) fringe hardware and functions. For example, Microsoft wouldn't be interested in a market unless they could sell a million units.
Given enough time, any piece of software can be recreated (from scratch if necessary, and probably unnecessarily given the number of commercial clones on freshmeat) and the internet allows people with the interest and spare time to band together and create software edfices they could never achieve on their own. Despite what most people feel, probably only a fraction of the OpenSource projects will ever become commercially competitive, much less viable. However, it does allow people to express themselves and gain a feeling of achievement that can not be recreated by running canned applications. In short, I suspect it satisfies more the goals of individual internal mastery in the mental sphere similar in a way atheletes do in winning competitions with nice side effects of producing robust software that doesn't suck. Companies that recognise this and can act as patron and sponsor will probably benefit the most from the OpenSource movement. SGI probably has a clue, IBM has so much tech, they can afford to throw a few fish to encourage Linux supporters. Whether some Solaris/Java manager gets a clue and Sun sees the light is probably a matter of time but they would be starting back in the pack (there are limits to the number of talented Linux hackers in the world, no matter how fast the movement is growing).
Slashdot Mirror
Why?
:-).
:-(.
The Tax Department hates competition
Last time I heard, the US government still had a monopology on organised violence.
Oh the other hand, maybe that's why they're so keen to put NT into all those cruisers
LL
Part of the trick is understanding the difference between your job and your business. Example is the collapse of the railway tycoons who forget their purpose was transporation and not constructing superfast trains. Companies that understand what fundamental role they play and can stick with the "last-mile" to the consumer will have a decent chance of surviving disruptions. Thus companies like Coca-cola have shifted from dominating the carbonated drinks segment, to being the market gorilla of the liquid refreshment sector, to the mindshare game (associating their taste with pleasant memories such as rock concerts). It is usually the less complicated systems that are the most robust to disruptions (something to keep in mind when designing software). Any complex manufactured capital good can usually be undercut by a lower cost substitute and any fad (whether toys/games/culture) will be difficult to sustain.
One can apply this trick to existing OpenSource vendors to ask what their role is. The clearest example I think of is:
Mandrake - bundling/packaging
MacMillen - distribution/catalog
LinuxCare - support/reassurance
Thus Mandrake could probably be more profitable customising/bundling specific packages for various predefined sectors (business, education, small business, etc), MacMillen on finding alternative distribution channels besides books (e.g. sponsor contests to find who can convert the largest number of boxes to Linux), and LinuxCare in demonstrating key metrics such as cost of repair/replacement, as well as alternative mechanisms of support (e.g. user groups to weed out basic computer problems unrelated to Linux). So long as each company understands the core role and what are bolt-on businesses, then they can adapt even if new technology comes along.
The disk manufacturers are in a bit of a bind since they compete with anything that can store bits ranging from punch-card to next-gen holographic crystals. At least the file system experts like Veritas are less vulnerable.
Technology is like a treadmill in Alice in Wonderland, you have to run as fast as you can just not to go backwards. Stick with coke if you don't like the guessing game.
LL
Hmmm .... having a family member who's part of the medical fraternity could be dangerous to your faith in the hospital system. People sometimes conveniently ignore the fact that the point of a health system is public reassurance, ie to avoid the suggestion of public rorting and keep psychos/mortalities off the front page. Hence you may be surprised at the ratio of managers, biostatisticians, procurement specialists, ethical reviewers, etc to actual medical staff. Adding an unstable IT system to the mix sounds like a recipe for disaster. If you think your medical bills are expensive, wait until you add the cost of a multimillion dollar system (+ ongoing maintenance/replacement) and another layer of staff onto the bill. Also, if trends are any indication, management will take this opportunity to replace highly trained auxiliary medical staff with less skilled button-pushers. It's bad enough having bank tellers believing the printout as gospel truth when you know there has been a screwup but with a medical system, who bears the utimate risk of mistakes/errors? I'd like the see the end-user-license for this one! Plus with more detailed records being permanently kept, expect litigation to go up.
The whole point of a hospital system should be to keep people out as much as possible, ie focus on preventive health rather than fixing up the mistakes where the costs are so much more significant. Ie more time on the design rather than final quality control to the afterlife. This is where I see IT making more of an impact in the long-term like mobile devices that make periodic medical checks. Also giving people more information about the efficiency (and thus cost) of their insurance coverage allows them to make more informed choices. Given the advances in basic health, most medical problems nowadays are life-style related (obesety, alcohol-related liver damage, lung cancer, mental health, etc). With better information, expect to see more carefully targeted insurance plans. By tying costs back to the source, it will hopefully create a dampening feedback cycle.
Sure the medical system will change but don't expect it to happen overnight.
LL
bukvich wrote
:-). It is a rather interesting idea, in the Middle Ages, guilds were organised to designate a certain level of skill, apprenticeship training and quality (old-style branding). Now while it may be expediant to import Indian doctors (according to another posting they did mention that Indians regarded doctors and engineers as good careers), would the average consumer trust them? While on paper they would be better, it is all too easy to discriminate. Until service industries like medicine become goegraphically independent (I don't see people shipping themselves to Central America for surgery just yet), there will be no real incentive to change the system.
One nitpick here: there isn't really a free market in surgery. The American Medical Association regulates the supply. They have a guild.
I did mention the magic words "pricing inelasticity" (ie can charge without regard to market forces) and "natural entry barriers" didn't I
If all those Asian/Indian firms start producing top-quality knock-down software clones with some serious marketing dollars behind them, then expect to see Silicon Valley screaming out for protection. Statistics-wise, not all the smarts are living in the US so sooner or later, another domineering force (perhaps in India? Malaysian Multimedia Supercorridor?) will arise and all those web-sites will relocate like magic and you can kiss your 6-figure income goodbye.
LL
Is technology suppose to make your life easier or harder? I sure hope those supra-geniuses can come up with stuff that us normal sub-par users can use to explain stuff to joe-blog consumers. The claim of getting $20K x 700K doctors = $14 B/year is a little optimistic. In my personal observation, for every $10 of IT money,
.... your customers are interested in holes not powertools.
$1 = hardware
$2 = software
$3 = operations/maintenance
$4 = ongoing training and helpdesk
So while the company might be looking at the cream, the hospital system is probably having a hernia about feeding the whole cow. The bottom line is does the cost of technology (minus hype) less than the improvments in productivity/profitability? Otherwise it becomes a financial black-hole and adoption rates will be marginal after the early adopters get burnt. Peter Drucker (that famous management guru) once visited a hardware manufacturer which created handdrills - he spent the day listening to employees crowing that variable speed, multi-bit this, retractable cords, various do-dackys, etc. When asked for his opinion, he replied
The trap that too many smart people (and it appears the company is full of them) is that they assume everyone else around is them equally smart. Sure doctors may be, but only in their speciality. Unfortunately as the Holloween documents note, simplicity means low-entry barriers which destroys the value of software sold as a product. Hence the rather unconcious need to produce something too difficult for the competition to replicate.
Software development at this early life-form sorta reminds me of the oil-well discovery stage where the intent (and high payoffs) was the wildcat teams sinking and discovering the black gold. However, if you compare those cowboy days and today's modern energy infrastructure and distribution networks, there is an incredible difference. So before we sacrifice the sacred IPO cow on the altar of reality, I hope people, especially the new group of geeks keen to show off their prowess, keep in mind that if its something your mother can't use, then nobody will use it.
LL
The problem with technology is that it comes in waves and therefore everybody starts paddling furiously at the same time. Naturally this leads to a severe shortage of the fad-to-be, whether programming language, app or digital-whatsits. The only real shortage is that of management talent as companies without a clue are losing people left, right and centre to those firms which do appreciate and treat their people well instead of trying to hire the lowest cost fresh-out-of-college app-builder. Given a choice between 120 hour weeks paying $250K or 60 hours paying $100K what would people choose? Burning out your engineers through stock option pyramid scams in order to cash out on an IPO is not a sustainable practice. Like in any industry boom/busts occur but IT is a portable skillset and if you're willing to travel, there will always be more relaxed opportunities elsewhere.
:-). I recall this SF story (name escapes me at the moment) which invented a device that could immortalise a worker's assembly skills but once they've captured the performance of their best worker, they fired him. With increasing IP going into software, I wonder who else will be next on the firing block.
Part of the problem IMHO is the relentless hyping of certain technologies. Sure the internet will change things but it will still be around (and cheaper) 5, 10 years later. It's absurb to think new businesses won't still be created n years in the future. From what I understand, part of this is market priming in order to adopt the most expensive components now (and thus preserve fat profit margins) before it becomes a commodity.
Let's look carefully, people are paid (roughly) according to the value the market places on their labor, skills and talent. Society has deemed that a surgeon with megayears of specialist training is worth more than a janitor. Thus skills which are not easily acquired or substituted (e.g. high manual dexterity, intensive knowledge, or natural leadership) tend to be more highly rewarded. Oh and pick a field which is likely to be in long-term demand, pricing inelasticities and has natural barriers to entry. Plastic surgery sounds like a nice area
LL
It always interests me from a scientific/economic point of view how these future worlds might evolve. I recall one projection early this century of what South Africa might look like 50 years later. Absolutely nobody predicted that the landscape would be changed by skyscrapers. It's always the individuals (and their ego boosting activities) that leave the strongest mark (pyramids, Great Wall, etc). One wonders what crazy advertising stunts companies will get up to next ... colonising the moon just to plant a permanent billboard sign? The future will probably be stranger than we can ever expect.
/.ers could indulge in creation a chain of events that would create plausible scenarios leading to situations described in the post-cyberpunk SF scene. Example ...
:-(
Perhaps
Someone discovers longevity drug (since 17 patent monopolies are the only guarenteed way of making profits) -> military enrolments plummet (nobody wants to risk their future) -> recruitment of lower-class from other countries to do dirty jobs -> need to steal tech to survive.
What other interesting events could transpire? Oh well, more ways of killing time between coding runs.
LL
Now that Linux is becoming more "mainstream" (or is it mainstream becoming more tolerant of hackers?), I think people should apply a bit more critical thought to people/companies jumping on the bandwagon. Are they pulling or getting a free-ride?
:-).
While its a free world for any group to try and make money, one has to ask are they delivering a service better/faster/cheaper than existing ones. In the case of LinuxFund, it would be interesting to ask what scales of economies they offer, what value they provide beyond existing services (besides the feel-good of supporting anything reciting the Linux magic incantation) and whether if you removed the Linux rah-rah, would they be better or worse than any existing bank/financial house/credit union. If they do, then the market will decide how successful they will become.
A famous management guru once said that the epitome of a business plan was that even if you showed it to everyone else, it would still work and they couldn't easily copy it. While trading code/ads for T-shirts and freebies may appeal to some, would you trust your money and any personal information to such an outfit? Not knocking these guys but I hope they've got better business sense than a lot of the IPOs that are springing up. Oh well, judging from previous posts like the Linux hotel, at least the company selling stuffed penguins seems a worthwhile investment
LL
One might also point out that the value system of scientists and businessmen are different. Let's face it, after achieving a certain point in living standards, material goods become only a small facet of lifestyle. People forget that money is only an intermediate exchange between what they would like (health, travel, whatever). For the pure scientists, nothing is more exciting than being out in the field, exchanging debates with colleagues and satisfying their curiosity. If, on the other hand, a manager enjoys satisfaction in crushing competitors, controlling the system and acting as a petty tyrant, then they will act in that way (with predictable results). Fortunately the capitalistic society allows people to have some degree of choice over their life, provided they are not economic slaves to external programmed conventions. As Buddha once noted, desire leads to suffering so it all comes down to what you desire in life and what you are willing to sacrifice to achieve it. The gift culture is one aspect of hackerdom where the desire is for peer respect which has to be earned, not bought. All the other economic analysis is related to the economic landscape of the times where portions of the system react against other forces. While the details of the shift may be debated by academics over the coming years, participating in the fray is more fun :-).
LL
One major problem I find is that IT professional is rather too broad a term to apply. Instead, I suspect that as the whole sector matures, distinct classes will evolve. Let's use a medical analogy to explain the point
... pharmeceutical dispensary) while quality ranges from the ubiquitious silicon snake oil to peer-reviewed double-blind testing (openSource), the truely valuable unbiased ones have a mastery grasp of the industry and is able to offer a range of competitive solutions covering herbal remedies to highly engineered solutions from the bewildering range of products
IT Field (Medical Field)
System Admin (Nurse) the indispensible field support of bandaging leaky systems using the ever-present duct tape (perl) and keeping life and limb together.
Help Desk (Public Health Education) informing the public of health issues and general reccomended practices. Greatly undervalued for their role in preventive health and reducine epidemics (viruses)
System Analysis (GP) first call for problem diagnosis and treatment, able to assemble a team of interns (programmers) to offer prompt (well hopefully) treatment and patient care.
Software Vendors (Drug pushers, errr
Consultant (Specialist) who understand the very detailed processes that keeps the system alive and has an intimate grasp of details. Highly trained in deep technical arcana, their expensive knowledge is highly sought to solve deep problems not normally apparent to general practictioners
Creative Source (Surgeon) one of the rare breed that have the imagination and high talent to create entirely new fields, these individuals, backed up by the appropriate team, form the seed of every major and complex software system (e.g. kernel).
Anyway, I'm sure there are other appropriate analogies people can draw. While Geek/Nerd may be a subcultural badge of distinction, in the long run it denigrates the immense levels of skills and undermines the credibility of the profession. One observation is that the IT field needs much better structure, training and certification to ensure people understand what they are getting and improve the confidence they have in the skill and/or advice they are receiving. In particular, IMHO eliminating the dominance of unnecessary administration management and returning to a more natural pyramid of talents might achieve a better job of professionals providing cost effective solutions (good information infrastructure design) instead of wasteful addiction to expensive and overrated drugs (software).
LL
I think the point should be made that coexistance between Open and Closed is perfectly possible. In fact, it gives some rather interesting pricing information. If 2 compilers are priced at $5K each, then it might be harder to distinguish the features as compared to a free one where you know that if you wait some time N, features might become available. It then acts as a natural queuing system, separating people according to their time perference. It also has the benefit of being a quality bar in that any commercial product must be at the minimum be better than the "free" and thus force the company to keep on their toes and pour some of those profits back into development (ie discourage rent-seeking behaviour).
The point about Microsoft is rather interesting. If its role is to "act" as a convenient target due to its "innovative" business practices, if MS wasn't around would OpenSource be more conflict-driven and less cohesive or even not feasible? Much like the Blitz in WW2, if everyone is suffering in equal misery, then there are less complaints about ownership/sharing of kudos as the focus is on the external "threat". I would see this as a future problem as more projects become commercialised and money becomes a influencing factor rather than idealism or passion.
The only area which might be a little lacking is the comment about technical support. If ESR's Magic Cauldron thesis is correct in that maintenance becomes the primary cost function in software as a service rather than manufactured good, then it makes sense to pay for the value of support/hand-holding (or risk reduction) and OpenSource then becomes the advertising sheet (if 50% of peers use it then it must be worthwhile). In any complex problem especially software systems, if you don't understand it, you can't support it and any competitor would have a significant time penalty. I think some studies on the true cost of IT would be rather illuminating.
The other point about scientists having capped financial rewards (ie low salary compared with equivalent industry experience) is that it is a trade-off between what you enjoy (research). It seems to me that you get paid for doing things you don't like and pay out (or salary sacrifice) for fun things. Would it be fair to say that OpenSource is to some people a hobby for relaxation? If so, then it is understandable why people prefer the GPL as it is probably offensive to see others benefit disproporationately from an act of generosity.
So in a world of Open/Closed, it opens up a whole new set of rules that should be interesting to watch. Personally I see it like a snowstorm, you require the chaotic elements to initially form (small = more likely to be creative), but then you need the balanced framework to grow (formal documentation, etc). Together, they make rich and varied beautiful structures.
LL
adamhupp wrote
I actually don't think the port would be all that difficult, relativly speaking. AFAIK the "emotion engine" is running the MIPS instruction set which we already have a port for.
I think you might be underestimating the task a little here. Because it is backwards compatible with the exising Sony Playstations, it will use that CPU as the hub I/O chip and the EmotionEngine and GraphicsSynthesiser are independent but connected via fast memory pipes. So I suspect it would be more akin to programming a SMP with slightly different CPUs, not to mention slightly different bits of scratchpad RAM scattered gods-know where. I'd also like to see their memory hierarchy and timing models for their vector units as well, not to mention how the hell they're going to stream video simultaneously (probably one of those secret instructions they're not going to tell anyone). Thus Mesa would have to be threaded and tuned, X designed to synchronise with the I/O hub, and of course, the kernel has to boot off the DVD into a measy 32M. Perhaps someone who's got the dev kit with Cynus compilers can give us a clue as to what needs to be done?
If you're so keen to get started, why don't you show us a bootable Linux for the existing PlayStation?
LL
to say about this. Sony has got very very good technology. Their know-how in consumer electronics and media production is phenomenal. However, the content and media tools field is creativity and software driven with many firms holding content franchises and/or proprietary visual special effects close to their chest. Despite the inroads of the NT juggernaut, SGI does still hold some sway in the media industry with Apple probably filling the lower niche. Also developing efficient code and compilers for multiprocessors is not trivial. How many programs are currently optimised to use Apple's Velocity or the Intel/AMD SIMD extensions? The silicon hardware is willing but the carbon wetware (ie brain-power) is weak. I'm not saying that a revolution of the media industries can't be done, the Japanese are brilliant engineers but the competition for skilled developers and creative storyline writers (the so-called Gold Collar workers) is going to hurt. Also the content is going to be revved up if you don't want 3D reruns of old scripts. I suppose a holoplex where instead of a sit-down film, you have Indianna Jones experience for hormone driven teenagers can't be too far off.
An interesting world, I wonder what Shakespear would have done in today's time.
LL
I think there are some major fundamental problems here that having multiple DNS root servers will just paper over. The major issue is that certain vested interests want to turn addresses into property rights (with associated price and thus shareholder value). Unfortunately it fails one fundamental test in that a name is not unique. Thus while a physical property has well defined boundaries as recorded by land deeds (remember that your forefathers fought for this by carving out a homestead in the wilderness), there is no natural constraints on a name/address pair. If the impact of the participants weren't so serious on the rest of the world, it'll form the basis of a Monty Python sketch ...
....
.... "I'll like to name him Bill Gates the CCCLXVII", "sorry, all booked out until DCLXV". "How about XYsaer sfgyuer". "No can do, apparently reserved for a punk rock group sometime next decade. Those music companies are really getting desperate nowadays to come up with half a good idea". "Sigh, OK, looks like I'll have to settle for a random lottery draw instead. "Will 345694857 do?"
:-). Frankly, the role of branding has gotten way out of control like a hydra on amphetimines. Whether it is one variety of sugared water or another variation on a PC is becoming too mind-numbing to keep up. If the Net doesn't collapse from sheer marketing hype, the collective ennui from watching the same ads day after day will turn people off. If there was sanity in the world, I hope another Postel-in-training comes up with a naming distribution system that is not dependent on centralised roots. Alternatively emigrate to the far side of the moon just to get away from the cybernoise and pollution.
{humor on}
News Flash: The McDonald clan descended on the embattered hamburger chain waving haggis and yelling war cries, claiming the appropriation of their proud Scottish ancestry by a burger flipping clown was an insult to their heritage and the direct cause of the 75% unemployment rate in the internet economy. PR spokeman declinced to comment noting that kilt-wearing assistants would lead to an immediate decline in sales
Switch to Hospital Bedside: Expectant mother
The conflict is that NSI is wanting to act simulatneous roles of registrar (usually government fixed-fee recording service), data developer (in holding onto its yellow pages database for perhaps advertising purposes) and judge/jury in resolving name conflicts (with associated legal vigorish). There are specific reasons why land property rights have evolved separate functional groups as it has been found to be a workable solution for the last 500 odd years. Asking a bunch of companies to divvy up a name space limited by the number of recognisable English words of 7 characters or less (let's face it, most people can't remember much more than 1-2 syllables) is a sure way to degrade the language (yeah, invent more useless buzzwords). I expect a patent any day for adding new letters to the alphabet
LL
While world domination might be the trademark of Wall Street (as enshrined in US corporate law), I'd like to respectfully point out that other countries might not share the same extreme values. A study of the best US corporation compared with the second best revealed a long-term vision and strong NON-financial values where critical to their success. Sure you can be as successful as Bill Gates at the cost of half the planet hating your guts/products but then a few hundred billion will smooth that burden, right? Frankly, from the point of view of Wall Street, they wouldn't care less if Red Hat staff stripped naked and ran a circus because next year there will be another fad, another media frenzy, another roll of the dice. As the day traders are finding out with the brokerage fees and vigorish (mandatory payments to the dealer) the only people guarenteed to make money are the financial wheeler-dealers (guess who's pocket their mulimillion dollar bonuses are coming out of?). Now capital markets have a role but they are not the end-all and be-all that some people think. Basically companies are trading labor, goods or services to satisfy the wishes of consumers and if what you have to offer is superior and at the low-cost end of the efficiency spectrum, then natural dominance results. Growth for the sake of growth is rather pointless. Afterall, in biology we call unlimited growth a cancer.
So I wish Red Hat luck along with the rest of the Linux distributors.
LL
The point being is that "truth" is relative to depth of overview, knowledge of the details and ability to sort out the sheep from the goats
- not telling the entire story
- sampling over a small domain
- not calibrating experiments to measure the desired variable (compare with double-blind medical tests)
- ad homien attacks, focusing on non-critical issues
- glossing over details, a major sin as the diversity of software means you need to understand where certain packages have comparative advantages, Linux domain is the value for price-concious consumers
- thinking that your solution is the only solution (why aren't we all driving model-T fords?)
- ignoring the future pathway and credibility
- comparing items at different stages of growth
Thus while Linux certainly have weaknesses, it is all to easy to draw false conclusions. From a structural point of view, Linux has specific advantages
- unliked canned applications, open-source can be tuned to give comparative advantages, if everyone is using the same package (something that app-servers forget) then there is no commercial points of differentiation
- long-term credibility as noted by Linus and ESR
- licensing costs are independent of per user or per machine basis
- the development process leads to better peer review and stability
- provides alternative vehicle for independent companies
These structural efficiencies make it a viable long-term competitor, especially as it benefits service-based companies which is what the Internet enables. For example, supposing I come up with a brilliant compiler that runs everything 2 times faster, then by setting up as drop-in web-site where people can leave code and pick up compiled binaries you can compact two whole layer of costs in the marketing and distribution (you might be surprised at how little money actually goes into product development as a percentage of costs).
Oh well, time will tell how efficient the OpenSource model is compared with ClosedSource.
LL
If you ignore the situation where the lecturer pushes his/her pet interpretation to make a quick buck off captive markets, then you'd note that law, history, mathematics, medicine and a whole raft of undergraduate fields are pretty persistent. The classic authors are still cited for their major contributions. Afterall the basic foundations for a lot of topics remain unchanged even though the style and pretty pictures might be different.
LL
It is the mark of a more sophisticated market that different roles are taken by increasingly specialised companies. For example, the initial method of selling milk (driving cattle through streets) has been replaced by farmers, producers, transportation networks, wholesale distribution, retail, and marketing, all done by different entities. I see no reason why software won't go the same way with creation, porting, packaging, distribution, and support all going to different companies. By letting each component in the value chain focus and improve on their respective roles, a wider and more robust market can be reached. If the only complaint is the name or branding, then that can be easily solved.
The increasing competition between RedHat, Mandrake, Suse etc can only lead to more refinements and (hopefully) better software solutions provided nobody uses standover tactics. T'is good.
LL
It is also interesting to note that studies have shown that there is little instructional benefit in computers as currently deployed. In fact, some people decry the increasing commoditisation of education. The biggest problem I see is that while information in books can last for decades, computer technology is outdated within 3 years, leading to increasing reinventment of time to update teaching material, often at a higher penalty. Hence the interest in OpenSource which is human readable and can be adapted for whatever technology is likely to arrive. The ongoing costs, both operational and replacement is an invisible overhead that is ulimately bourne by the students, whether in fees or additional staffing overheads. The open question is whether this leads to "superior" pedalogical benefits. While neater essays (downloaded from the web) may be easier on the marker's eyes and encyclopedias can be more compactly stored, highly technical or professional areas are dependent on the understanding and mastery of quite difficult concepts and I've yet to see any technology that can accelerate this task. Also what computer can teach creativity, curiosity or the love of learning?
As for the role of corporations in universities, the issue is that either the individual pays (through loans or parental support), industry chips in with scholarships or the state subsidises (through regressive taxes). Thus education can be funded through future, present or past income (with endless policy debates among the funders). The increasing elimination of low-end blue and white collar jobs lost to automation and computerisation means that a larger bulk of the population shifts onto the higher education system which was never designed for massification. The question still remains is who gets to pay for this education? If the army could sponsor people through the GI Bill, why not corporations? If RedHat or TransMeta sponsored internships, would people be complaining? If so, then you could shift to Britain or Australia where studies have shown it is 30-40% cheaper. Given the increasing global mobility and availability of choice, there's probably a place somewhere that fits people's desires and budgets but ultimately you only get out what you invest in sweat.
Besides, there are many ways to learning about the world, backpack through Europe/Asia, raid a library, chat with your grandparents abour the lessons of their youth, or listen to the great speeches of past leaders. Given the wide variety, there's no need for formal schooling to get in way of an education.
LL
Speaking as a layperson, is it the tools that characterise cyberterrorism or the intent of the individual/group/state that matters? Take a look at Peters' "Our New Old Enemies." Summer 1999 of Parameters. pp. 22-37 for some background.
It is easy to focus on the big baddies like chemical, biological, nuclear weapons as they are tangible tools and computer/communications infrastructure is going to occupy a Frankenstein niche for a while until people realise to balance between potential risks and rewards (after all we still use cars despite the high road carnage). Judging from history though, I would guess that white collar crime by individuals or small groups would be much more likely than state-sponsored subversion as the economic payoffs are much more obvious and direct. To postulate one example, the electricity market is shifting towards greater deregulation and adopting the use of complex derivatives to smooth out the supply/demand curves. Speculation becomes a moral risk if you know or even prearrange certain effects such as sabotaging a critical transmission pylon and clean up on placing a "sure" bet. Expanding this to a mass scale as in an entire industry sector or nation is much harder as it becomes beyond the means and abilities of individuals. The more people that know, the more likely something will slip up leading to discovery and nullation.
Most of the current transnational conflicts at the moment tend to be between states of low-medium technological sophistication. Despite trade friction and rhetoric, it's hard to see 2 first world countries like say Canada and US slagging it out, especially given the high level of C4I capabilities. Given today's modern capital markets, any signs of potential political conflict leads to rather rapid flight of money and vocal outcries from the citizens. However, unscrupulous subgroups may elect to target high capacity limited infrastructure (e.g. robot subs to cut underwater cables) if they think they could get away with it.
The only two other groups I can think of that would have the motive and mindset for mass disruption through cyberterrorism would be closed religious or fanatical groups whose value systems are so out of sync with mainstream that they feel threatened enough to take as much of the world with them as they "go under". The other would be individuals or companies on the fringe of legal juristictions deploying modern equivalents of extortion (threatening to disrupt business or services), theft (altering electronic records of property rights such as land titles or share quity ownership), fraud (diverting goods/money to different addresses), or systematic standover tactics to control and maintain monopoly profits (wreck reputations, steal customers by price dumping, fostering unwanted goods by scare-mongering, hire/scare away talented staff, etc). Old tactics in new guises and using computer leverage to accelerate the process. The biggest problem is that the larger it becomes, the more visible a target the group becomes to law enforcement agencies which, if necessary, can redefine what is lawful to control perceived excesses (e.g. RICO act against mob). IT is only a step up from indust rial espionage to industrial sabotage. For example, supposing someone wanted to compete against Amazon or Ebay, then by hiring insiders to sabotage equipment or arms-length outsiders to disrupt activities, can gain a temporary advantage. You can extend this to more critical and irreplaceable functions like financial clearance houses, genetic/fingerprint banks, blood records, tax history (now that would be an interesting target), credit checks, pension funds, international settlements, GPS maps etc. The other nasty trick is to insert fake data such as insurance scams then collecting on fake policies, falsify employment/death records to gain benefits, rig electronic lottery/gambling events, etc. However, this would require systematic planning and quite detailed inside process knowledge which would cut down on the list of suspects.
Mass terror, on the other hand, as a random and emotional act to demonstrate the lack of control and powerlessness of governments is IMHO harder to scale up to. The AIDS epidemic, while quite hyped by the press has settled into the background on the media horizon which shows that it is difficult to sustain a fear campaign across a wide geographical and temporal scope (even guns is an intermitent issue). The fear of nanotechnology (a la grey gloop) or the equivalent of the blob is probably a little too fanciful for the average joe unlike the persistant public fear of mutual assured destruction where everyone could look at the result of Japan. After all, turning a threat into execution is rather irreversible as it is hard to extort advantage from people that have reverted to stone age and any ongoing nebulous threat could quite likely be nullified given the usual capitalistic incentives. A series of ongoing semi-random cyber-attacks could be one possibility as it would force a country to spend on costly defences in depth across a range of infrastructure such that the economic costs are high enough to hurt. But being deprived of their MTV or other creature comforts is not the same as being physically threatened by fertiliser bombs so I suspect people (outside computer security experts) would eventually become rather blase about it. If the terror is suppose to obtain a political end, the sheer stubbonness of the human mind (e.g. reaction to bombing in Ireland) is enough to cause enough backlash to twart the original aim and thus force resolution through the normal political process.
On the other hand, it is much more feasible for a high-tech country to threaten or dominate a low-tech one (who knows that self-destruct signals are in the microchip they ship?) as the information asymmetry creates a significant disadvantage. From the point of view of the smaller country, cyberterrorism is probably all too real. Unforunately, technology is no substitute for trust.
LL
After browsing the hundred-odd replies, I'm struck by the fact that most people are not happy (one way or another) but nobody has suggested any viable alternative. Now, given the usual libertarian attitude (at least if that is what OpenSource is suppose to be in empowering individuals), if you were a parent, what would you physically do? I'd like to toss in an idea (which unfortunately fell through for lack of funding ... so what's new with local government :-( ) that I once discussed with a community liason with a police parent partnership group.
/.ers can think of other potential feasible solutions and have an idea bake-off. As the old saying goes, if you're not part of the solution, then you're the problem.
{Put on flame-retardent overalls}
The concept was to install a number of "playpen" computers that kids could use to "break in". Similar in principle to providing rollerblade rinks to avoid them killing themselves on the roads. Would select a mix of OSs like Linux, FreeBSD, TrustedIRIX in order of increasing difficulty and tools for hunting down security holes and the philosophy of true hackerdom. The goal is to immerse them into the cultural landscape by providing reading material of role models and what traits the hacker community admired (talent, knowledge, modesty?) Then encourage kids to form groups/tribes to alternatively protect and to penetrate as far as possible undetected (home/away game) whilst the machines were still in a relatively controlled environment (ie in the community centre overlooked by someone responsible). That way they could learn skills (can we say forensic computing here!) and understand the role of a civil society at the same time (the only cyberlaws are what you can technologically enforce yourself!). Remember the only difference between a locksmith and a burgler is intent. By turning their energy into a competitive attitude towards computer mastery rather than notoriety, positive traits can in theory be reinforced.
{Flame suit off}
While the idea hasn't found any gung-ho mainstream champions to get it off the ground as yet, instead of whinging about the ineffectiveness of governments (which afterall is collectively suppose to represent your desires no matter how klutzy the implementation) perhaps
LL
Just to be the daemon's ... errr ... devil's advocate here :-), I'd like to ask where else do people get taught social mores and customs, internet or otherwise? For example, where was it picked up that it was not kosher to go around opening random neighbour's doors? (apart from those grisly TV reports a few years ago of people bing shot). Assuming that parents are the first stage in teaching kids the difference between right and wrong through the Pavlov technique of response-stimulus (ie a spank when they played up), then there is a fair chance that given the newness of the medium, they lack a few clues and therefore the community police see a small role to do some preemptive behaviour modification. How else would youngsters realise that certain behaviour is just not acceptable? Given the rate lawyers are inventing rules, I doubt whether anyone reads law books any more so how do people get shown the correct etiquette, and you can lump in all the silly things like mail pyramid schemes, procedures for not revealing passwords, etc.
That said, I suspect there are bigger problems that lead to cracker behaviour than a simple education campaign can solve. I recall a survey that noted crackers had a tendency to be poorly socialised with peers and come from broken households. Plastering over the results and ignoring the causes seem a little like taking the easy path. Also, given kids' usual attitude to authority, I wonder how effective any campaign would be, or whether it would make "hacking" cool and thus a legitimate activity for gaining peer respect and bragging rights.
I bet they had grafetti in caveman times as well. Oh well, technology comes and technology goes but social problems remain forever intractable.
LL
A couple of possibilities, if you look at the price of software (assuming it is a manufactured product) then we would have components like
+------------------+----------+----------------
| Development cost | Know How | Marketing Hype |
+------------------+----------+----------------
Now from the OpenSource community, amortising the development cost over a wider base and eliminating the hype and know-how (ie stupidity tax for not understanding how it all hangs together) creates cheaper and more robust solutions. Would it be fair to say that all the community really wants is the source but not the hassles of marketing, distributing and supporting the product? If so, then value in excess of potential "lost profits" can be restored via:
In essense, this is looking at the GNU license and seeing what areas could be temporarily weakened without losing the principle of OpenSource. If people think hard enough, perhaps they can come up with other win-win scenarios. A trade is not a deal unless both sides can benefit.
LL
While I think that Stallman truely believes that free software equals freedom, I would be willing to bet that in reality this idea was born from the true hacker's desire to understand how everything works.
And is this a bad ideal? If you look back at historical stuff like patent laws, they were always intended to encourage dissemination of knowledge to further the arts and sciences. Scientists have spent decades trying to understand how the world works. I recall one escaped negro slave from Civil War times who self-educated himself to escape the "bondage of ignorance". Freedom is a rather nebulous term with many subtle interpretations but the principle of an uncoerced informed choice will probably persist.
If anything, the availability of another piece of software in the world increases the power in hands of the user. They can choose to use it or not. Each new piece of software, irregardless of its license, empowers the user and cannot, by itself, shackle the individual and result in the diminshment of personal freedom.
Well said. The software which you define here fits the Perl Artistic License, any code can be modified and combined in new ways relatively easily. However, there may be subtle hidden costs due to specific interactions of the license conditions and the wider environment. Slow erosion of rights (which are another great area of debate) may prove more corrosive and even lead to catastrophic failure. Suppose a license said you could only run software on platform x, then if x disappears you are stuffed. The tendency towards a software monoculture raises the risk profile which is not directly observable, yet ultimately creates a potential failure. I'm sure lawyers must love designing licenses because the devil is always in the details.
If we look at the Linux kernel as an example I would assert that the GPL has actually reduced freedom. As Red Hat and others strive for multi-billion dollar capitalization on the world market, the authors of code are relegated to sidelines.
I would agree that given the current economic system, distributors are favored over creators. In fact, I've questioned the ability of OpenSource to scale up to really large projects, and one reason is that small groups can retain ownership of the code more effectively (e.g. Apache). As for your assertion of reducing freedom, the GPL does shift the balance of power away from the individual contributor to the user but with the viral effect of (forced?) conversion of the user to be a contributor. While the individual loses some rights (e.g. absolute control of distribution), some reciprocal rights are gained from feedback as well as the property that the license would still be valid for the nth user as for the first. This is a rather imporatant side-effect as down-stream users cannot exclude marginal users such as alternate platforms. While facists governments like Nazi Germany wants to exclude "outcasts" like gypsies, jews, homosexuals from mainstream, a democractic system attempts to be inclusive. Rules, whether embodied in laws or licenses tries to achieve certain social effects and I suspect RMS thought very carefully about the GPL design to fit the circumstances as he saw them. You may disagree with the intent but then you've also got the choice of following specific project leaders, whether Linux GPL, *BSD or whatever based on their licensing variants.
Their code is not longer under their control, they have abdicated their own freedom, and it has been usurped by others. Some have found patronage and thus the ability to earn an hourly wage and the promise of stock options. Explain to me how this is the embodiment of freedom?
As compared to the alternative of giving all rights to your thoughts to a corporation? Freedom is a relative concept, back in the Middle Ages serfs didn't even own their bodies. It is the hallmark of a civilisation that as we (supposedly) grow more enlightened, more rights are transferred to the individual. My bet is that the software ecosystem will oscillate between open/closed until an equilibrium is reached. Currently the momentum is with OpenSource but if RedHat or any other group abuses the outcome, the pendulum will swing the other way. New models of software creation/distribution will open up as a result creating more opportunities which we can't even imagine at the moment. If you take a look at say the evolution of companies, you see different structures according to whether it is a family firm (typically hierarchical control), corporations (separation between goverance (directors), operations (executive) and ownership (shareholders)), and modern multinational corporations with loose coalition of subsidaries held by a common subculture (e.g. Disney). As OpenSource matures, new and more sophisticated organisational structures will evolve which will better reflect the balance between all the stakeholders but it is still early days to say what shape it will take.
Freedom should never be a zero-sum game. The GPL and the Free Software movement is about empowering users at the expense of programmers. It is no better that the most restrictive of comercial licenses.
I agree that on the spectrum between completely open and complete closed, FSF and commercial end-user-licenses probably lie on the extremes with very little degrees of movement. However, the growing diversity of the OpenSource licenses like *BSD, Mozilla, Apache, etc allows people to choose various tradeoffs to suit various social/economic objectives. Being the pragmatic (balance between optimism of human nature and cynicism of individuals) type, I would say choose whatever makes you happy. Dogma shouldn't be the reason why people blindly choose one license over another and a little bit of thinking about what you wish to achieve with releasing source will probably go a long way. It still comes down to what relative freedoms (frankly pretty open-ended list) are being negotiated and only time will tell as to what is the most efficient balance between coders, distributors and users. However, the general philosophy of releasing source code does have the advantage of preserving the seed corn for the next generation of hackers/programmers and that, in itself, is a worthy endeavour.
LL
Every society needs a causa belli or reason to rebel, whether it is feminism, environmentalism, whatever. It's just the nature of human beings that there is always some segment that doesn't like conforming to social norms and the computing industry is no exception, especially when the creativity to push beyond known limits already puts the innovators at the fringe. Now whether you put this trait down to pure human orniness or the fact that in every flock of sheep, there are always a few itching to be the underdogs, is irrelevant.
:-).
The philosophy of "free code" (as in freedom of speech) first mooted by RMS has crystalised around Linux probably due to good timing and some inspired leadership. Also the OpenSource movement has been helped by mainstream sympathisers (both individual and corporate) who have been stomped on quite heavily by the current market gorillas. Now whether Solaris could have played that same role is a little debateable as it could have been perceived as being contaminated by corporate strings (witness the current doubts about Sun's Community License). Would it have the right elements to provoke a similar response if there was no external motivating factors? Like most grassroot social movements, OpenSource requires the right environmental factors (in this case repulsion by existing market leaders, technological changes exposing previous high priests of computing, and new communications medium of the internet to link the individual elements into a more cohensive whole) and a simple rallying standard to invoke the passions of the supporters (despite what people think, greed doesn't create the same motivating force). Solaris might be very well suited as an enterprise computing platform but it would not have the cheap hardware base to attract entry-level Linux hackers, nor the non-profit motive of supporting (to them) fringe hardware and functions. For example, Microsoft wouldn't be interested in a market unless they could sell a million units.
Given enough time, any piece of software can be recreated (from scratch if necessary, and probably unnecessarily given the number of commercial clones on freshmeat) and the internet allows people with the interest and spare time to band together and create software edfices they could never achieve on their own. Despite what most people feel, probably only a fraction of the OpenSource projects will ever become commercially competitive, much less viable. However, it does allow people to express themselves and gain a feeling of achievement that can not be recreated by running canned applications. In short, I suspect it satisfies more the goals of individual internal mastery in the mental sphere similar in a way atheletes do in winning competitions with nice side effects of producing robust software that doesn't suck. Companies that recognise this and can act as patron and sponsor will probably benefit the most from the OpenSource movement. SGI probably has a clue, IBM has so much tech, they can afford to throw a few fish to encourage Linux supporters. Whether some Solaris/Java manager gets a clue and Sun sees the light is probably a matter of time but they would be starting back in the pack (there are limits to the number of talented Linux hackers in the world, no matter how fast the movement is growing).
Shold be an interesting decade ahead of us
LL