Use an non-Microsoft OS? Ha, that's a laugh! MacOS X can't run half the apps I use at work, and Linux currently runs even less than that (though I will make the switch as soon as it's tenable; right now it's not). What a joker you are. It seems you live and breathe the Microsoft dream, but I assure you that dream is as disconnected from reality as can be. Perhaps it is because you work for Microsoft, but I'll give you a break since almost everybody who works for them espouses the "Microsoft Way". Microsoft IS a corporate thug, among the very worst in all of history. Do you know your history? The amount of money at stake in this case is immense, more so than any anti-trust case before it, but there is something even greater in peril: the control of information, vital to democracy and the fight against tyranny. Indeed, there are things in this life worse than murder. If Microsoft is allowed to continue its accumulation of power, I doubt there is little they wouldn't be capable of doing to defend that power. It's just that Microsoft already wields sufficient power to achieve their ends without having to resort to the more violent forms of skulduggery. But a murderer of truth is a murderer nonetheless; history will show you that the two usually go hand-in-hand. Microsoft excels in butchering the truth. I suspect Goebbels would be proud.
Let's get some things straight. Microsoft lost the DOJ case; anyone who says otherwise is lying. What happened is that the Bush administration forced the DOJ to reduce terms of punishment to near-nothing. It's like being tried for murder and convicted of murder, but the Judge reduces the sentence of capital punishment to a fine payable in funny money. That's a more accurate analogy. The DOJ won and had the advantage; Microsoft could very well have had the book thrown at them if the DOJ chose to throw it, but Bush forced them to back down. The public sector still supports punishment, but the political sector and the courts backed down due to financial incentives given by Microsoft to the Bush Administration. The public sector's view on this matter is not represented by opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal. There is still widespread sentiment in the public, the part of it that cannot be manipulated by Microsoft marketing, that supports significant punishment for Microsoft. I suspect the greater part of the public cannot be manipulated by Microsoft marketing anyway, judging from the poor sales of WinXP. Can you say DOA? But no matter, the carcass of WinXP will be forced down their throats regardless. This is a perfect example of one of the many consequences of the abuse of monopoly power.
I could respond to the rest of your statement, full of lies and doublespeak as it is, but my point is clear. Microsoft, among the most thuggish corporations in history, has violated anti-trust laws in the most egregious manner and requires punishment. If we fail to punish them, we will surely relinquish our control of the information infrastructure. And if we relinquish that, we relinquish the possibility of preserving a free and just society. We embrace tyranny and all that goes with it. We will repeat the worst mistakes of history, and accept the consequences, dire as they will be.
Clearly Microsoft has been found guilty of a criminal offense. They are corporate criminals, proven beyond a reasonable doubt. My question is, since when do criminals get to determine the punishment for their misdeeds? And for that matter, since when do fines get to be paid in funny money (free software, which in terms of real money costs Microsoft nothing)? In fact, this can hardly be called punishment. It's like if a thief was convicted of a robbery in which multiple people were shot dead and millions were stolen, and the punishment was that they had to deposit the money they stole in an account at the bank they robbed. It's utterly preposterous, an affront to any human being with any sense of justice.
Call me cynical, but Microsoft, arguably one of the most thuggish corporations in history, is getting off the hook, without even a slap on the wrist.
The objective here should be to punish them to 1) make up for the damage they have caused to consumers and the industry, and 2) make sure they do not continue to engage in this behavior. If you are looking for real punishment, I would suggest fining them a real dollar amount equivalent to their ill-gotten financial gains, somewhere on the order of $30B in CASH MONEY (nearly the money they have in the bank), and use that money to fund open source projects and further anti-trust enforcement. Apparently the anti-trust division has no problem fining other corporations for price-fixing (recent corporate anti-trust fines to the vitamin industry neared the $1B range, and that's just for vitamins!). Why make such an egregious exception to the worst anti-trust offender of all time?
Corporations are already controlling your life, but it's so pervasive you just don't know it, as you have never known anything else. Go talk to somebody who is a little older than yourself and ask them how it used to be. Or go read some books on history. If you were a little more observant, you might realize that corporations are becoming like feudal lords and wresting power away from governments. Unlike governments, they do not listen to the masses at all, and they will exert far more influence over your life than your government ever did.
Is this the kind of world you would prefer? A return to the old days of Machiavellian Feudalism? Once again, check out some history books and see for yourself how people (serfs) suffered in under such Feudal systems. Feudalism was absolute tyranny on par with the worst of governments. And that is what you are choosing right now.
How about this: you tell said CEO to f-off (or whatever), CEO tells corporate thugs to kick the crap out of you, steal your car, burn your house, put cement shoes on you and send you to the bottom of the lake. You scream, "Why isn't the free-market protecting me against these abusive corporate powers?" as you plunge to the bottom of the lake. You realize then, but only then, that democratic government is the antidote to tyranny, whether that tyranny, whether it comes in the form of a dictatorship, feudal lord, or corporation, is still tyranny.
It astounds me when people think that corporations are any different than governments when it comes to power. Just because they do not have badges or official positions does not mean they cannot control your life if they have the power to do so. Once a corporation has sufficient power, it can make you just as miserable as this over-intrusive government you seem to despise.
The key is not to have too much power concentrated in the hands of too few people. That's the problem with big government and big corporations. There's little difference; either institution tends to abuse power when it possesses too much of it. The key is to have distributed power, and that is achieved only by democratic means of governance.
What a mess. This could probably be mostly attributed to a lack of diplomacy on DeRaadt's part, but it seems to me Reed is trying to have his cake and eat it too, and that Theo has done the right thing by removing IPFilter from OpenBSD. The "clarification" of the IPFilter license clearly makes it non-compliant with the BSD license, and therefore it has no business being part of the base distribution. End of story. Yes, Reed is free to do whatever he pleases with his software, but is he truly interested in limiting its usage in this way? What's the use of putting free, open-source software out there and putting such limitations on its usage? And given that the IPFilter license is not a BSD license, and despite Reed's insistence that he will continue to work with the Free/NetBSD crowds, doesn't his license preclude any of the BSDs from distributing IPFilter as part of the OS? If the Free/NetBSD people are serious about their license, they would have to follow DeRaadt's lead on this decision. And then IPFilter's userbase will drop to a handful of people, basically Darren Reed and his closest buddies. Is that what he wants?
As an OpenBSD user, I am disappointed to see IP Filter go, but I understand Theo's decision behind eliminating it. On the principal of it, and despite how I would prefer to see everybody work together instead of get into pissing matches, I would have to agree with him. Theo is a controlling, inflexible person, yes, but he writes good code and sticks to the essential principals behind his OS, including the proactive nature of the code review and the open/free license for its distribution. OpenBSD is, in my experience, clean, stable, straightforward, and secure, and that's probably because of the guiding principals behind it. I'm glad to see Theo continue to stick to his guns, in that regard. Let's hope he refines his diplomatic skills in the future, and perhaps next time he can convince someone like Darren Reed to join the cause out of goodwill instead of react against it out of spite.
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Use an non-Microsoft OS? Ha, that's a laugh! MacOS X can't run half the apps I use at work, and Linux currently runs even less than that (though I will make the switch as soon as it's tenable; right now it's not). What a joker you are. It seems you live and breathe the Microsoft dream, but I assure you that dream is as disconnected from reality as can be. Perhaps it is because you work for Microsoft, but I'll give you a break since almost everybody who works for them espouses the "Microsoft Way". Microsoft IS a corporate thug, among the very worst in all of history. Do you know your history? The amount of money at stake in this case is immense, more so than any anti-trust case before it, but there is something even greater in peril: the control of information, vital to democracy and the fight against tyranny. Indeed, there are things in this life worse than murder. If Microsoft is allowed to continue its accumulation of power, I doubt there is little they wouldn't be capable of doing to defend that power. It's just that Microsoft already wields sufficient power to achieve their ends without having to resort to the more violent forms of skulduggery. But a murderer of truth is a murderer nonetheless; history will show you that the two usually go hand-in-hand. Microsoft excels in butchering the truth. I suspect Goebbels would be proud.
Let's get some things straight. Microsoft lost the DOJ case; anyone who says otherwise is lying. What happened is that the Bush administration forced the DOJ to reduce terms of punishment to near-nothing. It's like being tried for murder and convicted of murder, but the Judge reduces the sentence of capital punishment to a fine payable in funny money. That's a more accurate analogy. The DOJ won and had the advantage; Microsoft could very well have had the book thrown at them if the DOJ chose to throw it, but Bush forced them to back down. The public sector still supports punishment, but the political sector and the courts backed down due to financial incentives given by Microsoft to the Bush Administration. The public sector's view on this matter is not represented by opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal. There is still widespread sentiment in the public, the part of it that cannot be manipulated by Microsoft marketing, that supports significant punishment for Microsoft. I suspect the greater part of the public cannot be manipulated by Microsoft marketing anyway, judging from the poor sales of WinXP. Can you say DOA? But no matter, the carcass of WinXP will be forced down their throats regardless. This is a perfect example of one of the many consequences of the abuse of monopoly power.
I could respond to the rest of your statement, full of lies and doublespeak as it is, but my point is clear. Microsoft, among the most thuggish corporations in history, has violated anti-trust laws in the most egregious manner and requires punishment. If we fail to punish them, we will surely relinquish our control of the information infrastructure. And if we relinquish that, we relinquish the possibility of preserving a free and just society. We embrace tyranny and all that goes with it. We will repeat the worst mistakes of history, and accept the consequences, dire as they will be.
Clearly Microsoft has been found guilty of a criminal offense. They are corporate criminals, proven beyond a reasonable doubt. My question is, since when do criminals get to determine the punishment for their misdeeds? And for that matter, since when do fines get to be paid in funny money (free software, which in terms of real money costs Microsoft nothing)? In fact, this can hardly be called punishment. It's like if a thief was convicted of a robbery in which multiple people were shot dead and millions were stolen, and the punishment was that they had to deposit the money they stole in an account at the bank they robbed. It's utterly preposterous, an affront to any human being with any sense of justice.
Call me cynical, but Microsoft, arguably one of the most thuggish corporations in history, is getting off the hook, without even a slap on the wrist.
The objective here should be to punish them to 1) make up for the damage they have caused to consumers and the industry, and 2) make sure they do not continue to engage in this behavior. If you are looking for real punishment, I would suggest fining them a real dollar amount equivalent to their ill-gotten financial gains, somewhere on the order of $30B in CASH MONEY (nearly the money they have in the bank), and use that money to fund open source projects and further anti-trust enforcement. Apparently the anti-trust division has no problem fining other corporations for price-fixing (recent corporate anti-trust fines to the vitamin industry neared the $1B range, and that's just for vitamins!). Why make such an egregious exception to the worst anti-trust offender of all time?
Corporations are already controlling your life, but it's so pervasive you just don't know it, as you have never known anything else. Go talk to somebody who is a little older than yourself and ask them how it used to be. Or go read some books on history. If you were a little more observant, you might realize that corporations are becoming like feudal lords and wresting power away from governments. Unlike governments, they do not listen to the masses at all, and they will exert far more influence over your life than your government ever did. Is this the kind of world you would prefer? A return to the old days of Machiavellian Feudalism? Once again, check out some history books and see for yourself how people (serfs) suffered in under such Feudal systems. Feudalism was absolute tyranny on par with the worst of governments. And that is what you are choosing right now. How about this: you tell said CEO to f-off (or whatever), CEO tells corporate thugs to kick the crap out of you, steal your car, burn your house, put cement shoes on you and send you to the bottom of the lake. You scream, "Why isn't the free-market protecting me against these abusive corporate powers?" as you plunge to the bottom of the lake. You realize then, but only then, that democratic government is the antidote to tyranny, whether that tyranny, whether it comes in the form of a dictatorship, feudal lord, or corporation, is still tyranny. It astounds me when people think that corporations are any different than governments when it comes to power. Just because they do not have badges or official positions does not mean they cannot control your life if they have the power to do so. Once a corporation has sufficient power, it can make you just as miserable as this over-intrusive government you seem to despise. The key is not to have too much power concentrated in the hands of too few people. That's the problem with big government and big corporations. There's little difference; either institution tends to abuse power when it possesses too much of it. The key is to have distributed power, and that is achieved only by democratic means of governance.
What a mess. This could probably be mostly attributed to a lack of diplomacy on DeRaadt's part, but it seems to me Reed is trying to have his cake and eat it too, and that Theo has done the right thing by removing IPFilter from OpenBSD. The "clarification" of the IPFilter license clearly makes it non-compliant with the BSD license, and therefore it has no business being part of the base distribution. End of story. Yes, Reed is free to do whatever he pleases with his software, but is he truly interested in limiting its usage in this way? What's the use of putting free, open-source software out there and putting such limitations on its usage? And given that the IPFilter license is not a BSD license, and despite Reed's insistence that he will continue to work with the Free/NetBSD crowds, doesn't his license preclude any of the BSDs from distributing IPFilter as part of the OS? If the Free/NetBSD people are serious about their license, they would have to follow DeRaadt's lead on this decision. And then IPFilter's userbase will drop to a handful of people, basically Darren Reed and his closest buddies. Is that what he wants?
As an OpenBSD user, I am disappointed to see IP Filter go, but I understand Theo's decision behind eliminating it. On the principal of it, and despite how I would prefer to see everybody work together instead of get into pissing matches, I would have to agree with him. Theo is a controlling, inflexible person, yes, but he writes good code and sticks to the essential principals behind his OS, including the proactive nature of the code review and the open/free license for its distribution. OpenBSD is, in my experience, clean, stable, straightforward, and secure, and that's probably because of the guiding principals behind it. I'm glad to see Theo continue to stick to his guns, in that regard. Let's hope he refines his diplomatic skills in the future, and perhaps next time he can convince someone like Darren Reed to join the cause out of goodwill instead of react against it out of spite.