The Republican party is hardly unified under Bush. Rather they don't seem to pay much attention to him at all.
His popularity rating is pretty much because people don't expect much out of the chump.
The 1.35 trillion tax cut is going to happen as he would like, it'll be reduced by the moderate Republicans who aren't enthralled by his worshipness.
The opposition was talking about a small tax cut well before six months ago. Not sure whose ass you pulled that one out of.
He will likely fail with the missile defense. It's a bad idea we can't afford either economically or politically.
I hope to God that we don't end up with the Texas education plan across the country. We is alredy dum enuf.
Bush is an interesting temporary president. It'll be interesting to see how well he does with "bipartisanship" when he no longer has Congress in his back pocket. I guess we'll see in 2003.
Any time Microsoft does something which is an improvement it is an attempt to stifle competition.
Look at the recent whining regarding.Net, etc.:(
It's just a fact of life, we move on and ignore these people.
Re:Let's call it 'source available'
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 2
My point was that what Microsoft is proposing to do is really no different than most other examples in history.
As has been pointed out VAX/VMS, Mainframes, RTOS, most commercial Unices, etc. have all had 'shared source' meaning the vendor shared the source with the consumer.
But this has never given them the right to redistribute the OS source. Although in many cases they were certainly allowed to make modifications and redistribute that binary.
Honestly, I just don't see it as that big of a deal. Microsoft already releases the source code for their C++ runtime libraries in Visual Studio.
Furthermore with.Net and C# and the CLR the source is readily available for everything by simply looking at the IL.
That's the reason why Microsoft is moving this direction, because using a psuedo-code compiled JIT intermediate language like is in.Net you really can't hide the source.
As long as freedb.org wrote their own software, and started a database from scratch from user submissions... they could not possibly be accused of "stealing" from gracenote.
Gracenote doesn't own the contents of the CDs, that and the identifiers put on the discs are the property of the record labels.
On the other hand, I have no sympathy for roxio. Their software is pretty low quality and high priced. Given what they charge, I think giving 6 cents per user to those maintaining the cddb database seems fair.
Now what does this have to do with P2P and IP laws?
Yes, sometimes new technologies replace old technologies. But the airlines became successful by convincing passengers to travel with them, not by swooping down picking up the rail cars and forcing them to fly.
If you were deathly afraid of flying, wouldn't you rather have a choice?
Re:He's getting closer, but it's still a miss...
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 2
You appear confused.
DEC VAX/VMS wasn't a completely open source operating system.
It was a shared source OS, exactly the same concept as Microsoft is proposing.
The problem with the business model of spending $1 Million on a product, giving it away for free and then depending on charging for support to make money...
When you go to buy a Black & Decker drill, do you pay the $10 million that it cost to design the one drill? Or do you buy it for $50?
Personally I prefer buying the drill for $50. The nice thing is, my neighbor and his buddy can also buy a drill for $50.
Nobody I know can afford $10 million to buy a drill. Well except for the government, and guess where they get their money?
It's amazing to me how incredibly naive software people are with regards to economics. I suppose it's becaus Econ 101 isn't a required course in ComSci.:(
Go ask Richard Stallman some time about his opinion of the LGPL.
He regards it solely as a necessary evil to extend and embrace the software market. Eventually if he has his way, the license will go away and there will be only the GPL.
Uhh, could you please quote from the Mundie article where he makes that claim?
I have yet to see that, and am puzzled why so many people keep reading things into the article.
The GPL has some incredible mindshare. Most people on/. just seem to accept it without any thinking whatsoever. Microsoft is simply pointing out why the alternatives are much better, not just for them, but for the industry as a whole.
Microsoft isn't forcing you to not use the GPL either.
However they are warning of the inherent dangers of it, and lobbying our government to insure they don't make the mistake of allowing government funding projects using it as a license.
Uhh, the GPL has nothing to do with standards, it only licenses code.
Microsoft can just as easily reverse engineer a piece of GPL'ed code, as you can reverse engineer commercial software. Easier in fact, because the source is freely available.
Oh god no, I'm horrible at drawing ASCII graphics.
But Mundie already addresses your point very early in his response.
I quote:
"As the U.S. Department of Commerce stated in a report titled "International Science and Technology": "Innovation relies on a partnership between the public and private sectors in which the government invests in long-range science and technology and in mechanisms to promote private-sector risk-taking and investment."
The innovations you gave examples of are just that, government investments. The Internet was all part of DARPA, etc.
What Mundie is addressing is the R&D and innovation which is required to take technology A and make it into a marketable product.
I'm a fan of cars, as well as Venn diagrams. So let me use another example.
Honda is a huge proponent of Variable Valve Timing in engines. They call it VTEC. Honda didn't invent this technology, actually I believe it dates back at least 30 some years.
But what Honda has done is transcend it from an interesting idea that can be used to squeeze some power out of high priced racing cars, into a technology which can squeeze some power and fuel economy out of low priced consumer automobiles.
That is, their innovation was making it cheap and efficient to sell.
Honda most certainly has patents on the improvements they made that relate to VTEC which prevents others in the industry from doing the same thing.
But that hasn't stopped other auto manufacturers from also having forms of variable valve timing. Toyota calls theirs VVT, Nissan VVL(variable valve lift), etc.
But they aren't quite like Honda's solution, and that is what makes cars like the S2000 unique. By pulling 240 hp out of a normally aspirated 2.0 liter engine.
So I guess instead of attacking a strawman argument, why don't you contemplate Microsoft's true position.
Instead why don't you envision a world in which all government funded research projects are licensed with something akin to the GPL. Imagine this world and how it will impact our economy?
History is really quite interesting, you missed a piece of it which links Bell and Edison.
Bell invented the telephone, and tried to market it. It was something of a flop because their equipment was of horrible quality, didn't work well, etc.
Along came another company at the time called Western Union who wanted to expand from telegraph into telephone. I don't know if they approached Bell's AT&T initially, but they decided to instead roll their own telephone system.
Western Union went to Thomas Edison to help them. Edison rolled out a telephone system which worked better than the Bell system. These were primarily improvements to the handset design, transmission mechanisms, etc.
This controversy sparked off a series of lawsuits and a giant battle royale between the companies.
In the end it was resolved by deciding to work together and sharing their technology. As a result Western Union got a piece of the telephone market, and AT&T got a better built telephone.
This is why up until the AT&T breakup in the early 1980's all telephones you rented for them were manufactured by a company called Western Electric. This was the spinoff of Western Union which manufactured Edison's telephone designs.
"Whitney's gin brought the South prosperity, but the unwillingness of the planters to pay for its use and the ease with which the gin could be pirated put Whitney's company out of business by 1797. "
http://www.invent.org/book/book-text/108.html
Sounds like another good example for Mundie to use.
Let me give this a crack. It's been a long time since I had a logic class and I've forgotten the syntax of my P's and Q's... but ohwell:
Set A defines all software
Set B defines all software which is Open Source
Set C defines all software which is licensed under the GPL
Set D defines all software which is Open Source which is not licensed under the GPL
Set C is a subset of Set B which is a subset of Set A. Set D is a subset of Set B, but contains no members of Set C.
Mundie is pointing out the inadequacies of Set C.
You are using examples of Set D to claim that Mundie's attacks on Set C are wrong.
What you claim to be doing is what is called a counterexample, unfortunately you have instead resorted to what is called a strawman argument.
You unfortunately have proved nothing except how to troll for moderation points and argue ineffectively.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I don't know. As out of touch this Malda guy is as far as computers, he at least has a grasp of politics down.
BTW, Bush didn't win any election. Unless you could 5-4 ruling by the supreme court as an election of sorts.
Well let's see...
The Republican party is hardly unified under Bush. Rather they don't seem to pay much attention to him at all.
His popularity rating is pretty much because people don't expect much out of the chump.
The 1.35 trillion tax cut is going to happen as he would like, it'll be reduced by the moderate Republicans who aren't enthralled by his worshipness.
The opposition was talking about a small tax cut well before six months ago. Not sure whose ass you pulled that one out of.
He will likely fail with the missile defense. It's a bad idea we can't afford either economically or politically.
I hope to God that we don't end up with the Texas education plan across the country. We is alredy dum enuf.
Bush is an interesting temporary president. It'll be interesting to see how well he does with "bipartisanship" when he no longer has Congress in his back pocket. I guess we'll see in 2003.
Any time Microsoft does something which is an improvement it is an attempt to stifle competition.
.Net, etc. :(
Look at the recent whining regarding
It's just a fact of life, we move on and ignore these people.
My point was that what Microsoft is proposing to do is really no different than most other examples in history.
.Net and C# and the CLR the source is readily available for everything by simply looking at the IL.
.Net you really can't hide the source.
As has been pointed out VAX/VMS, Mainframes, RTOS, most commercial Unices, etc. have all had 'shared source' meaning the vendor shared the source with the consumer.
But this has never given them the right to redistribute the OS source. Although in many cases they were certainly allowed to make modifications and redistribute that binary.
Honestly, I just don't see it as that big of a deal. Microsoft already releases the source code for their C++ runtime libraries in Visual Studio.
Furthermore with
That's the reason why Microsoft is moving this direction, because using a psuedo-code compiled JIT intermediate language like is in
I suppose. It's quite possible that if I was stuck using a Macintosh I'd be used to low quality and high prices and wouldn't mind Roxio Toast.
Can't get to freedb.org so can find no answers.
But what exactly is Gracenote complaining about?
As long as freedb.org wrote their own software, and started a database from scratch from user submissions... they could not possibly be accused of "stealing" from gracenote.
Gracenote doesn't own the contents of the CDs, that and the identifiers put on the discs are the property of the record labels.
On the other hand, I have no sympathy for roxio. Their software is pretty low quality and high priced. Given what they charge, I think giving 6 cents per user to those maintaining the cddb database seems fair.
Now what does this have to do with P2P and IP laws?
Yes, sometimes new technologies replace old technologies. But the airlines became successful by convincing passengers to travel with them, not by swooping down picking up the rail cars and forcing them to fly.
If you were deathly afraid of flying, wouldn't you rather have a choice?
You appear confused.
DEC VAX/VMS wasn't a completely open source operating system.
It was a shared source OS, exactly the same concept as Microsoft is proposing.
The problem with the business model of spending $1 Million on a product, giving it away for free and then depending on charging for support to make money...
Is it encourages building crap products.
When you go to buy a Black & Decker drill, do you pay the $10 million that it cost to design the one drill? Or do you buy it for $50?
:(
Personally I prefer buying the drill for $50. The nice thing is, my neighbor and his buddy can also buy a drill for $50.
Nobody I know can afford $10 million to buy a drill. Well except for the government, and guess where they get their money?
It's amazing to me how incredibly naive software people are with regards to economics. I suppose it's becaus Econ 101 isn't a required course in ComSci.
Whose freedom are you concerned with?
That of the consumer, or that of the software developer?
The GPL only concerns itself with the consumer. The BSD license concerns itself with both.
"And for all those people GPL software is a good thing, because it makes their software cheaper and more reliable. "
There is no question the GPL makes software cheaper because it's given away for free.
But can you please justify the "more reliable" statement?
thank you
Go ask Richard Stallman some time about his opinion of the LGPL.
He regards it solely as a necessary evil to extend and embrace the software market. Eventually if he has his way, the license will go away and there will be only the GPL.
Uhh, could you please quote from the Mundie article where he makes that claim?
/. just seem to accept it without any thinking whatsoever. Microsoft is simply pointing out why the alternatives are much better, not just for them, but for the industry as a whole.
I have yet to see that, and am puzzled why so many people keep reading things into the article.
The GPL has some incredible mindshare. Most people on
That and producing higher quality software than their competitors.
*cough*
Netscape
*cough*
You're right. Nobody is forcing anything.
Microsoft isn't forcing you to not use the GPL either.
However they are warning of the inherent dangers of it, and lobbying our government to insure they don't make the mistake of allowing government funding projects using it as a license.
Uhh, the GPL has nothing to do with standards, it only licenses code.
Microsoft can just as easily reverse engineer a piece of GPL'ed code, as you can reverse engineer commercial software. Easier in fact, because the source is freely available.
Oh god no, I'm horrible at drawing ASCII graphics.
But Mundie already addresses your point very early in his response.
I quote:
"As the U.S. Department of Commerce stated in a report titled "International Science and Technology": "Innovation relies on a partnership between the public and private sectors in which the government invests in long-range science and technology and in mechanisms to promote private-sector risk-taking and investment."
The innovations you gave examples of are just that, government investments. The Internet was all part of DARPA, etc.
What Mundie is addressing is the R&D and innovation which is required to take technology A and make it into a marketable product.
I'm a fan of cars, as well as Venn diagrams. So let me use another example.
Honda is a huge proponent of Variable Valve Timing in engines. They call it VTEC. Honda didn't invent this technology, actually I believe it dates back at least 30 some years.
But what Honda has done is transcend it from an interesting idea that can be used to squeeze some power out of high priced racing cars, into a technology which can squeeze some power and fuel economy out of low priced consumer automobiles.
That is, their innovation was making it cheap and efficient to sell.
Honda most certainly has patents on the improvements they made that relate to VTEC which prevents others in the industry from doing the same thing.
But that hasn't stopped other auto manufacturers from also having forms of variable valve timing. Toyota calls theirs VVT, Nissan VVL(variable valve lift), etc.
But they aren't quite like Honda's solution, and that is what makes cars like the S2000 unique. By pulling 240 hp out of a normally aspirated 2.0 liter engine.
So I guess instead of attacking a strawman argument, why don't you contemplate Microsoft's true position.
Instead why don't you envision a world in which all government funded research projects are licensed with something akin to the GPL. Imagine this world and how it will impact our economy?
Would it be a good thing?
History is really quite interesting, you missed a piece of it which links Bell and Edison.
Bell invented the telephone, and tried to market it. It was something of a flop because their equipment was of horrible quality, didn't work well, etc.
Along came another company at the time called Western Union who wanted to expand from telegraph into telephone. I don't know if they approached Bell's AT&T initially, but they decided to instead roll their own telephone system.
Western Union went to Thomas Edison to help them. Edison rolled out a telephone system which worked better than the Bell system. These were primarily improvements to the handset design, transmission mechanisms, etc.
This controversy sparked off a series of lawsuits and a giant battle royale between the companies.
In the end it was resolved by deciding to work together and sharing their technology. As a result Western Union got a piece of the telephone market, and AT&T got a better built telephone.
This is why up until the AT&T breakup in the early 1980's all telephones you rented for them were manufactured by a company called Western Electric. This was the spinoff of Western Union which manufactured Edison's telephone designs.
"Whitney's gin brought the South prosperity, but the unwillingness of the planters to pay for its use and the ease with which the gin could be pirated put Whitney's company out of business by 1797. "
http://www.invent.org/book/book-text/108.html
Sounds like another good example for Mundie to use.
Umm, your initial point is correct. Edison did invent the electric chair.
Not sure how Bell relates to this, and your conclusions are somewhat wrong, but...
There was no need to setup an electric company to supply power to the current. The electric chair Edison delivered had it's very own power generator.
In fact it sat just behind the chair with a big logo on the front that said... WESTINGHOUSE.
Edison created the electric chair to link AC current with death, and to link death with Westinghouse.
It did backfire. The electric chair didn't work all that well.
Let me give this a crack. It's been a long time since I had a logic class and I've forgotten the syntax of my P's and Q's... but ohwell:
Set A defines all software
Set B defines all software which is Open Source
Set C defines all software which is licensed under the GPL
Set D defines all software which is Open Source which is not licensed under the GPL
Set C is a subset of Set B which is a subset of Set A. Set D is a subset of Set B, but contains no members of Set C.
Mundie is pointing out the inadequacies of Set C.
You are using examples of Set D to claim that Mundie's attacks on Set C are wrong.
What you claim to be doing is what is called a counterexample, unfortunately you have instead resorted to what is called a strawman argument.
You unfortunately have proved nothing except how to troll for moderation points and argue ineffectively.
That's one of the more insightful pieces of commentary I've seen come out of Microsoft in a long time.
:)
Microsoft always tends to get it right in version 3!
You know, if you were starving and a new modified strain of wheat was available to help... I doubt you'd be bitching.
One of the luxuries of being fat and lazy is you don't have to worry about eating, I guess.
You'll be happy to note that the OS costs about the same as a CPU in a computer, actually slightly less.
Mass production costs may be dissimilar, but then so is after-sale product support which favors the CPU that nobody ever calls about.
It seems even by your own criteria that you disagree with your assertions.