From the Motley Fool: "Allen also owns a quarter of Dreamworks SKG, the Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen film studio, and nearly 16 million shares of Barry Diller's USA Networks (Nasdaq: USAI), which also controls the Home Shopping Network and Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch (Nasdaq: TMCS)."
Had the article not mentioned Allen, then it would have been offtopic to joke about his connection to Ticketmaster, but since he was mentioned, his investments are quite relevant. Clearly Allen is not a "free as in beer" or "free as in GPL" kind of guy.
"Whey we're dealing with a monopoly, the rules are different."
Well, we no longer have to speculate on the nature of those rules as far as MS is concerned. There are not, as many slashdot posters have claimed in the last year, infinite but in fact are limited to what the judge recently decided. Unless this information indicates to the judge that MS isn't following the rules, or the Bush administration decides to start a brand new antitrust case, I don't see that these statistics will have any impact with the possible exception of the private lawsuits.
I'm even older than you and I know where you're coming from.
It always amuses me that on Slashdot often the measure of your programming manhood is based on whether you program for Unix in C using command-line tools. To paraphrase Henry V, I would hold my manhood cheap if I hadn't written assembly code without an OS.
Having said all that, I don't believe in making anything harder than it needs to be. We did all that low-level stuff because we had to, not because we were trying to prove something.
One factor about being an old fart that you may have noticed: It's not just your age and salary that makes you harder to employ, but the fact that you know too damn much for your own good. The last thing a younger supervisor wants to hear about his pet idea is that you tried something like it before and found it didn't work. My hard-won advice is not to give people the value of your experience unless they really want it.
I was giving them the value of the doubt (based on the fact that I didn't do my homework). The fact that they have lost money makes the case for companies making a profit off of open source that much more difficult to make.
"All of the following companies do this, with more or less success:"
I took a quick look at sendmail.com and noted it is privately held so its profits (or lack of them) don't have to be published. I note that Red Hat is one of their investors, thus the company is supported indirectly through the unpaid efforts of the GNU and Linux contributors. I haven't looked at the others in your list.
It would be nice to see some hard data indicating profitability and comparing it with closed source companies.
"I think CNBC has given people the idea that the only companies that matter are publicly traded ones."
Well, if you have a program about investments it doesn't make much sense to cover companies that the general public can't invest in.
"If you don't want the uphill battle informing people about your product being closed source, you should just follow the Linux business model of charging only for code custimization and support."
It seems to me that what you describe isn't the real Linux business model. One of the few profitable Linux-based companies is RedHat. They are essentially in the business of distributing a product based on other people's unpaid work. If they actually had made the R&D investment to create the GNU libraries and the Linux kernel, it's unlikely that they would be profitable selling Linux at the current price.
The real question is whether you can make money in the open source arena when your business is creating your own software rather than being a marketing and distribution company.
Actually, it wasn't the "Bob Newhart" show that was a dream. The show called "Newhart" was just a dream of Newhart's character in the older "Bob Newhart" show. It was a parody of the 1986-1987 season of Dallas. Very funny.
"We've all heard the speculation that Microsoft is paying people to read/. and fill its discussions with pro-M$ comments. I always thought this sounded kind of paranoid.."
You were right. What possible value would MS derive from posting positive MS comments on/.? The shedding of excess karma?
The assumption you make is that you can tell the difference between intended behavior and a bug. In the general case that is not possible unless you have documentation that establishes what the requirements actually were. Of course, in the case of "reinventing the wheel" applications, you can usually spot a bug because you already know how things are supposed to work from your experience with similiar programs. But even in that case you're more likely to discover the bug through using the product then reading the source.
Source code includes all the information about what the program will do, but not always in the best form for humans to understand. Depending on the quality of the comments it may not include any information on design or requirements. Thus you may not be able to tell the difference between bugs and features if you only have the source.
"I'm not saying she took a bribe. I am saying that it would explain the verdict, and that judges are, when all's said and done, only human."
I suggest you read her ruling if you want to understand the verdict.
The idea that she ruled in good faith is much more plausable than believing she would risk the destruction of her career and reputation (not to mention her liberty) for a few bucks from MS.
You don't give MS enough credit either. Even if you think Gates would do this if he thought he'd get away with it, he's not stupid enough to try.
Actually one article I read indicated that she had to sell her Sun stock at a loss when she had been randomly selected to hear this case.
"Even non-developers benefit from having lots of programmers' eyeballs available to find bugs, backdoors."
But is this really happening to any significant degree? The last thing most programmers want to spend time doing is going over someone elses code looking for bugs. Getting paid to do it is one thing, doing it for nothing is something else.
"With Open Source, one can audit the code if one is truly paranoid. Trust isn't as necessary."
Any significant application will take a lot of time and money to audit and even more to modify if there is a problem. If a company is that paranoid perhaps it would be more cost effective to go back to pen and paper and drop computers all together.
So what? I think Sun's instructions to the attorney's general to require MS to distribute Sun's JVM, was based soley on ego. It wouldn't have rescued Java from the desktop oblivion it currently enjoys. I don't think having Java in every distribution of Linux would have any effect on Sun's bottom line either unless they intend to charge a per copy fee.
"They've got a federal ruling that Microsoft is a monopoly, so its fairly easy for them to roll the dice and hope for a nice damages ruling of $500 million or more."
Well assuming the judge doesn't just blindly accept the findings of fact at face value, this might be a tough case to prove. If I were MS I would argue that the district court was wrong about MS deceiving developers on Java. Was there any testamony in the trial in which a developer stated that they use J++ to develop a product, and after releasing it discovered it wasn't cross-platform? Or was the "evidence" entirely in the form of speculation, i.e. Everyone using Java would expect it to be cross-platform therefore MS must have deceived anyone who used J++?
"No, they don't create technology, they don't innovate with technology, they don't perfect technology. They use technology. You can't say that every company that uses technology is a 'technology company'."
But they do create technology as much as any other technology company such as Intel, AMD, IBM, Sun, Oracle etc. The fact that what they create doesn't meet your personal definition of "truly new" doesn't change that. Companies that "use" technology but don't really create any are companies like Amazon. As far as innovating with technology is concerned, that's a pretty easy target to reach. Even Amazon could meet that criteria.
As for users being more tolerant about computer problems, it's more than likely because the computer systems of 12 or 15 years ago had little or no value to the average person. Their current computers allow them to do things they haven't been able to do before, or to do them more efficiently. So for the typical user the choice is between nothing or something that mostly works. Anyone who could only afford a cheap used car understands this principle very well.
On the other hand, users that are willing to leave Windows 9x behind will find many of their problems solved.
"Bit of MS history: they bought dos, they hired the guy that wrote VMS to do it again in NT"
How shocking that MS uses the knowledge of their employees to create products. In any case the similarities of VMS and NT are farily limited. NT is not "truly new" by your definition but then neither is VMS or Unix.
"My guess is working hard to create mediocre, unreliable implementations of other people's ideas."
Which of course, is a technical, not a marketing function. By the way, you forgot highly profitable in your list.
"MS has never brought a truly new idea to the market."
Well, it depends on what you mean by a "truly new idea". I suspect that no matter what example I might give for a new idea from MS, you would claim that it wasn't truely new. So if the standard for truly new is very tough, I would say that Netscape's browser and Sun's Java are not truly new ideas since browser's had already been invented and Java's syntax was lifted from C.
"They are not a technology company; they are a marketing company."
Gee, I wonder what all those programmers at MS do all day.
"Everyone would then be programming with the windows API and ultimately cause windows to be the defacto standard."
There aren't any circumstances under which "everyone" would be programming with the windows API. On the other hand, Windows already is the defacto standard on the desktop (no news flash here). In any case, most of the Windows APIs have always been open and that's why there is so much software available for Windows.
By the time even Windows 3.0 was released, the clone market was well established. Look at it this way, which early, sucessful PC clone makers bundled a non-MS PCDOS compatible OS with their systems? Sure, there were other non-PCDOS compatible OSes availible for the PC early on, but running them on your clone would not provide "100% IBM Compatibility" and they died fairly quickly. There was no market for a non-MS PCDOS compatible OS until the MSDOS based clones made that market possible.
Slashdot Mirror
To those that think this is offtopic:
From the Motley Fool:
"Allen also owns a quarter of Dreamworks SKG, the Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen film studio, and nearly 16 million shares of Barry Diller's USA Networks (Nasdaq: USAI), which also controls the Home Shopping Network and Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch (Nasdaq: TMCS)."
Had the article not mentioned Allen, then it would have been offtopic to joke about his connection to Ticketmaster, but since he was mentioned, his investments are quite relevant. Clearly Allen is not a "free as in beer" or "free as in GPL" kind of guy.
"Whey we're dealing with a monopoly, the rules are different."
Well, we no longer have to speculate on the nature of those rules as far as MS is concerned. There are not, as many slashdot posters have claimed in the last year, infinite but in fact are limited to what the judge recently decided. Unless this information indicates to the judge that MS isn't following the rules, or the Bush administration decides to start a brand new antitrust case, I don't see that these statistics will have any impact with the possible exception of the private lawsuits.
I'm even older than you and I know where you're coming from.
It always amuses me that on Slashdot often the measure of your programming manhood is based on whether you program for Unix in C using command-line tools. To paraphrase Henry V, I would hold my manhood cheap if I hadn't written assembly code without an OS.
Having said all that, I don't believe in making anything harder than it needs to be. We did all that low-level stuff because we had to, not because we were trying to prove something.
One factor about being an old fart that you may have noticed: It's not just your age and salary that makes you harder to employ, but the fact that you know too damn much for your own good. The last thing a younger supervisor wants to hear about his pet idea is that you tried something like it before and found it didn't work. My hard-won advice is not to give people the value of your experience unless they really want it.
Good luck!
"The perfect goal of "write once, run anywhere, anything runs on anything" is just goofy."
James Gosling
All these cross-platform, cross-language, cross-vendor schemes are the perpetual motion machines of the software world.
"Creativity and innovation always builds on the past."
So I guess Lessig thinks MS is an innovator after all.
I was giving them the value of the doubt (based on the fact that I didn't do my homework). The fact that they have lost money makes the case for companies making a profit off of open source that much more difficult to make.
"All of the following companies do this, with more or less success:"
I took a quick look at sendmail.com and noted it is privately held so its profits (or lack of them) don't have to be published. I note that Red Hat is one of their investors, thus the company is supported indirectly through the unpaid efforts of the GNU and Linux contributors. I haven't looked at the others in your list.
It would be nice to see some hard data indicating profitability and comparing it with closed source companies.
"I think CNBC has given people the idea that the only companies that matter are publicly traded ones."
Well, if you have a program about investments it doesn't make much sense to cover companies that the general public can't invest in.
"Make the most of it and don't waste time by being depressed."
I appreciate the sentiment, but we should be careful about suggesting that depression is a choice.
"If you don't want the uphill battle informing people about your product being closed source, you should just follow the Linux business model of charging only for code custimization and support."
It seems to me that what you describe isn't the real Linux business model. One of the few profitable Linux-based companies is RedHat. They are essentially in the business of distributing a product based on other people's unpaid work. If they actually had made the R&D investment to create the GNU libraries and the Linux kernel, it's unlikely that they would be profitable selling Linux at the current price.
The real question is whether you can make money in the open source arena when your business is creating your own software rather than being a marketing and distribution company.
Actually, it wasn't the "Bob Newhart" show that was a dream. The show called "Newhart" was just a dream of Newhart's character in the older "Bob Newhart" show. It was a parody of the 1986-1987 season of Dallas. Very funny.
"We've all heard the speculation that Microsoft is paying people to read /. and fill its discussions with pro-M$ comments. I always thought this sounded kind of paranoid .."
/.? The shedding of excess karma?
You were right. What possible value would MS derive from posting positive MS comments on
I suspect that hunt and peck guys are less likely to have wrist problems then touch typists. The hunt and peck motion is more natural.
The assumption you make is that you can tell the difference between intended behavior and a bug. In the general case that is not possible unless you have documentation that establishes what the requirements actually were. Of course, in the case of "reinventing the wheel" applications, you can usually spot a bug because you already know how things are supposed to work from your experience with similiar programs. But even in that case you're more likely to discover the bug through using the product then reading the source.
Source code includes all the information about what the program will do, but not always in the best form for humans to understand. Depending on the quality of the comments it may not include any information on design or requirements. Thus you may not be able to tell the difference between bugs and features if you only have the source.
"I'm not saying she took a bribe. I am saying that it would explain the verdict, and that judges are, when all's said and done, only human."
I suggest you read her ruling if you want to understand the verdict.
The idea that she ruled in good faith is much more plausable than believing she would risk the destruction of her career and reputation (not to mention her liberty) for a few bucks from MS.
You don't give MS enough credit either. Even if you think Gates would do this if he thought he'd get away with it, he's not stupid enough to try.
Actually one article I read indicated that she had to sell her Sun stock at a loss when she had been randomly selected to hear this case.
"Even non-developers benefit from having lots of programmers' eyeballs available to find bugs, backdoors."
But is this really happening to any significant degree? The last thing most programmers want to spend time doing is going over someone elses code looking for bugs. Getting paid to do it is one thing, doing it for nothing is something else.
"With Open Source, one can audit the code if one is truly paranoid. Trust isn't as necessary."
Any significant application will take a lot of time and money to audit and even more to modify if there is a problem. If a company is that paranoid perhaps it would be more cost effective to go back to pen and paper and drop computers all together.
"That would get Java in every distribution."
So what? I think Sun's instructions to the attorney's general to require MS to distribute Sun's JVM, was based soley on ego. It wouldn't have rescued Java from the desktop oblivion it currently enjoys. I don't think having Java in every distribution of Linux would have any effect on Sun's bottom line either unless they intend to charge a per copy fee.
"They've got a federal ruling that Microsoft is a monopoly, so its fairly easy for them to roll the dice and hope for a nice damages ruling of $500 million or more."
Well assuming the judge doesn't just blindly accept the findings of fact at face value, this might be a tough case to prove. If I were MS I would argue that the district court was wrong about MS deceiving developers on Java. Was there any testamony in the trial in which a developer stated that they use J++ to develop a product, and after releasing it discovered it wasn't cross-platform? Or was the "evidence" entirely in the form of speculation, i.e. Everyone using Java would expect it to be cross-platform therefore MS must have deceived anyone who used J++?
"No, they don't create technology, they don't innovate with technology, they don't perfect technology. They use technology. You can't say that every company that uses technology is a 'technology company'."
But they do create technology as much as any other technology company such as Intel, AMD, IBM, Sun, Oracle etc. The fact that what they create doesn't meet your personal definition of "truly new" doesn't change that. Companies that "use" technology but don't really create any are companies like Amazon. As far as innovating with technology is concerned, that's a pretty easy target to reach. Even Amazon could meet that criteria.
As for users being more tolerant about computer problems, it's more than likely because the computer systems of 12 or 15 years ago had little or no value to the average person. Their current computers allow them to do things they haven't been able to do before, or to do them more efficiently. So for the typical user the choice is between nothing or something that mostly works. Anyone who could only afford a cheap used car understands this principle very well.
On the other hand, users that are willing to leave Windows 9x behind will find many of their problems solved.
"Bit of MS history: they bought dos, they hired the guy that wrote VMS to do it again in NT"
How shocking that MS uses the knowledge of their employees to create products. In any case the similarities of VMS and NT are farily limited. NT is not "truly new" by your definition but then neither is VMS or Unix.
"My guess is working hard to create mediocre, unreliable implementations of other people's ideas."
Which of course, is a technical, not a marketing function. By the way, you forgot highly profitable in your list.
"MS has never brought a truly new idea to the market."
Well, it depends on what you mean by a "truly new idea". I suspect that no matter what example I might give for a new idea from MS, you would claim that it wasn't truely new. So if the standard for truly new is very tough, I would say that Netscape's browser and Sun's Java are not truly new ideas since browser's had already been invented and Java's syntax was lifted from C.
"They are not a technology company; they are a marketing company."
Gee, I wonder what all those programmers at MS do all day.
"Everyone would then be programming with the windows API and ultimately cause windows to be the defacto standard."
There aren't any circumstances under which "everyone" would be programming with the windows API. On the other hand, Windows already is the defacto standard on the desktop (no news flash here). In any case, most of the Windows APIs have always been open and that's why there is so much software available for Windows.
No, this was a civil case.
By the time even Windows 3.0 was released, the clone market was well established. Look at it this way, which early, sucessful PC clone makers bundled a non-MS PCDOS compatible OS with their systems? Sure, there were other non-PCDOS compatible OSes availible for the PC early on, but running them on your clone would not provide "100% IBM Compatibility" and they died fairly quickly. There was no market for a non-MS PCDOS compatible OS until the MSDOS based clones made that market possible.