A forced breakup is likely useless, and will probably fail. And is a very heavy-handed government intervention (which causes political problems). Forced open sourcing of Windows is also a bad idea - it completely goes against the spirit of how open-source projects are done.
As usual, RMS hit the nail on the head with his proposal to force Microsoft to reveal/document all internal interfaces and binary file formats in their products - enabling the creation of compatibile competing products, open source or not. Companies (and open-source projects) can still complete on features (even Microsoft) but on a level playing field.
This achieves the nearly same effect in the marketplace as a breakup, without the incentive for the Microsoft (or "baby Bills") to fork their code base (more than it already is, that is).
Who knows, it might also be considered a precedent for how all SW companies should behave (but to make it a universal rule would require legislation). Imagine, a world where software connector conspiracies are illegal!
I find Perl to be the most fun to program in, of all the languages I know: C, C++, Basic, Asm, Forth, AWK, Bourne Shell, Java... too bad I can't use it for everything.
Feeling of obligation, of moral debt to the community, and the effort to contribute back to that community has very little in common with the bogus and completely out of date "Labor Theory Of Value".
Yes, in fact I recently bought 2 distros for full price: Debian 2.1 (with contribution) and SlackWare 3.6. Why? several reasons:
Downloading a distro is a pain in the neck. I did it once with SlackWare 3.3 (my first Linux install) and I never wish to do it again. Impossibly slow at home and the corporate firewall blocks everything except HTTP and Netscape's FTP. (Point and click for a zillion files - ouch!)
The CD storage format is convienent to use, and it is nice to put the disk in and have things work.
I can afford it, and I consider it a point of pride to contribute, especially to Debian.
Even though I could build everything from scratch, I consider my time more valuable than that.
I got the Debian distro to upgrade my main computer; the Slackware was partly nostalgia and also to put ZipSlack on my wife's Windows box without disturbing her current setup.
The free availablity of the source has nothing to do with the above reasons, except as an essential selling point.
The are several things about this story that just burns my butt.
AOL whiners that don't understand the meaning of the word volunteer, and are suprised that their free accounts get yanked when they start putting their hands out. (Remember, these are the same people that are enforcing AOL's facist TOS.)
Sleazy lawyers that will take any case, no matter how stupid and wrong.
Goverment regulators sticking their noses where they don't belong.
The sinking feeling that, in the US in this day and age, this whole thing will go much further than it ought to.
It really troubles me that they are creating a new crime, the crime of using crypto to to conceal the comission of any other crime.
Think about this a minute. Suppose someone commits a minor crime, one that would normally carry the penalities of, say, a fine and community service. If that person (naturally) trys to conceal the commission of this crime by using crypto, then he could be facing hard time! Are they still with equating crypto with munitions here - since I believe that peanalities are increased (in some parts of the USA) when crimes are committed with guns? Basically it seems that the increased punishment is being dealt out not because of actual increased harm or potential harm (like more traditional aggravating circumstances), but because of the increased inconvience that crypto causes law enforcement agencies, i.e. this is a political gesture.
This seems part of the a general trend in the USA to criminalize everything possible, and thereby reduce every problem to a law-n-order issue. Every time this happens, the police state grows, and out freedom shrinks.
Remember: Your local police are armed and dangerous!
A word of advice - root can be dangerous, you have to be careful what you type. As a rule, I create a user account for myself and do most of my work in it, and only dip quickly (look up the su command) into root for sysadmin tasks. Sometimes you only need to execute one or a few root command(s) - for this purpose I have found the sudo command also useful, though it's permissions file needs to be set up first.
I always enjoy your posts (as I have stated before, I like long posts), keep it up.
I progressed from TRS-80 Model II Basic (A early MS Basic - something like Level 2 basic for the model I and III, line based editor, etc.) to Z-80 assembler (on the same platform - it was a disk version of the cheap tape assembler, no macros, and it had line editor environment just like Basic one), and then we dumped TRS-Dos and got Pickels & Trout CP/M for it - and I learned C (Aztec C). C was easy to understand after dealing with assembler, I've built a career on it. C introduced me to Unix and all of it varied and specialized languages. More recently, after using many OO languages, and dallying with Java for a while, I've been sinfully enjoying myself with Perl.
But when presented with the prospect of teaching programming to my son, with the rich variety of languages available to me on my Debian Linux system, it seems the simplest and most expedient to use the shell (Bash). After all, you can get pretty far with (unix) shell script programming, and it's just an extension of the basic concept of a command line. I plan to switch over to other languages later (AWK, Perl, then compiled languages), but shell script seems the best way to get his feet wet - the large result for a little work provides good reinforcement.
The only thing that Basic had to recommend it for teaching in the old days was it's availability and it's interactive interpreter environment. Nowadays, there is no need to put up with all it's flaws anymore, since there are so many better alternatives.
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As usual, RMS hit the nail on the head with his proposal to force Microsoft to reveal/document all internal interfaces and binary file formats in their products - enabling the creation of compatibile competing products, open source or not. Companies (and open-source projects) can still complete on features (even Microsoft) but on a level playing field.
This achieves the nearly same effect in the marketplace as a breakup, without the incentive for the Microsoft (or "baby Bills") to fork their code base (more than it already is, that is).
Who knows, it might also be considered a precedent for how all SW companies should behave (but to make it a universal rule would require legislation). Imagine, a world where software connector conspiracies are illegal!
I find Perl to be the most fun to program in, of all the languages I know: C, C++, Basic, Asm, Forth, AWK, Bourne Shell, Java ... too bad I can't use it for everything.
I can't help but remark on your sig. It is illogical - because, if the only humans are cannibals, then who are they eating? :)
Feeling of obligation, of moral debt to the community, and the effort to contribute back to that community has very little in common with the bogus and completely out of date "Labor Theory Of Value".
In fact, he sounded like he was arguing for price supports (like farming and dairy). Insane!
The free availablity of the source has nothing to do with the above reasons, except as an essential selling point.
I just had to get that off my chest.
I'm sombody, and it's the only editor I ever want to use for anything beyond quickly editing a file in /etc (I use vi for that).
He's no relation of mine, sorry to say.
Think about this a minute. Suppose someone commits a minor crime, one that would normally carry the penalities of, say, a fine and community service. If that person (naturally) trys to conceal the commission of this crime by using crypto, then he could be facing hard time! Are they still with equating crypto with munitions here - since I believe that peanalities are increased (in some parts of the USA) when crimes are committed with guns? Basically it seems that the increased punishment is being dealt out not because of actual increased harm or potential harm (like more traditional aggravating circumstances), but because of the increased inconvience that crypto causes law enforcement agencies, i.e. this is a political gesture.
This seems part of the a general trend in the USA to criminalize everything possible, and thereby reduce every problem to a law-n-order issue. Every time this happens, the police state grows, and out freedom shrinks.
Remember: Your local police are armed and dangerous!
There is a psycological term for his behavior: projection.
I always enjoy your posts (as I have stated before, I like long posts), keep it up.
But when presented with the prospect of teaching programming to my son, with the rich variety of languages available to me on my Debian Linux system, it seems the simplest and most expedient to use the shell (Bash). After all, you can get pretty far with (unix) shell script programming, and it's just an extension of the basic concept of a command line. I plan to switch over to other languages later (AWK, Perl, then compiled languages), but shell script seems the best way to get his feet wet - the large result for a little work provides good reinforcement.
The only thing that Basic had to recommend it for teaching in the old days was it's availability and it's interactive interpreter environment. Nowadays, there is no need to put up with all it's flaws anymore, since there are so many better alternatives.