As a technologist I'm very sceptical to economic calculations. I believe that they can be twisted in any direction.
And not just deliberately twisted. The definition of TCO can be very different depending on who you listen to, where you draw the organizational boundaries of your IT effort, and what you can measure accurately. Anyway, most organizations don't have the financial systems in place to accurately attribute costs, even if their definitions of TCO were comparable. This is a bit shocking, but true. I know this because I advise firms on this subject for a living. Some of those firms are well-known industry leaders. You'd be amazed.
Besides the measurement error and apples-and-oranges issue, I have a couple of other concerns:
1. Over the past five years, some additional costs will appear in the Linux column due to the learning curve in adopting a new technology. This will show up both organizationally (for example, overstaffing Linux admins using the Windows rule of thumb for admin/server ratio, or attempting to apply Windows-specific system management practices on Linux -- "gotta defrag every week!") and in terms of individual staff (initially, Linux admins did get better salaries than MCSE's because of scarcity, but that difference has shrunk over time; similarly, there's a training cost in bringing IT staff up to speed who are new to Linux). So you're partially measuring the cost of change, not just the cost of Linux.
2. The downstream cost of recovery from problems caused by forced upgrades is difficult to quantify (since it mostly shows up as disruption to the business processes, not as costs in the IT budget) but can potentially be significant. The ability to introduce changes incrementally, at a time of your own choosing, is a great advantage of Linux-based systems.
While I don't think the results of this study will be borne out by more controlled analyses, I agree with the central observation that up-front costs and the costs of ongoing licenses and support contracts can be insignificant compared to staff and downtime costs. In many circumstances, I continue to advise my clients to consider the benefits of changing over to Linux and free software. What I also tell them is that making the change will cost money, but it can be worth it in the long run. Some of the payback comes in terms of operational flexibility and system scalability, not just in the IT department's bottom line.
I'm another former Mac user who now uses Linux. I had to give up on Apple because I couldn't afford them, despite the fact that, with Linux, you end up having to do some of the integration yourself (though the situation is constantly improving). I have never met anyone who gave up Linux in favor of the MacOS.
Anyway, Apple's attention to good human factors engineering has declined markedly since the return of Jobs, in favor of flashy case design and cute consumer software bundles. Another post compared Apple/M$ to BMW and GM, but based on the functionality, Mini Cooper to Chevy Caprice might be more precise. Less capacity, but much more fun, and less crappy.
I wish Apple well, but I personally can't pay a premium of several hundred dollars a year as a way of continuing to express my support.
2. My clients almost all live in a Windows-only world.
At home I use Linux (as well as some aging Macs). When clients are Linux-clueful, I bring in the Linux laptop. So the short answer to the question is "network effect."
I've worked as a consultant in both the public and private sectors.
There are some good, highly-motivated people in the public sector. But there are also far more free-riders, so the good people get exploited and overtaxed, unless they adopt a don't-give-a-shit attitude. And it's even harder to get rid of incompetent staff than it is in the private sector.
Government is prone to long periods of under-investment, punctuated by buying sprees. As a result, many (most?) government IT shops contain outdated and/or incorrectly deployed systems. The government capital-budgeting process is nightmarish, so solving such a problem might take years, if you can do it at all. And politics is often more of a consideration than technical correctness. Remember the recent California deal with Oracle?
There's a lot of talk about job security, but I earn over twice what I'd get in government. So I'd have to be unemployed 50% of the time to break even. I haven't been unemployed in 20 years. None of my peers have been either.
On the other hand, you are more likely to become collateral damage as a consequence of mismanagement in the private sector. One way idiot managers protect themselves is by firing others. Private-sector firms are driven in the long run by demand and performance-- but in the short run, individual agendas matter too. And competition is not some ideal, abstract thing: many people cheat, and they compete by ass-kissing and window-dressing as well as by delivering the goods. So you have to deal with that. Of course, the difference in the public sector is that the BS-ing boss will still be there in 15 years.
So, your real choice is between a public-sector job where you endure frustration and obsolescence in exchange for bad pay and slightly better job security, or a private-sector job where you're nearer the cutting edge, marginally more likely to be unemployed, far better paid, and have more opportunity to influence events in a meaningful way.
For these reasons, I'm in a risky part of the private sector, even though I have a wife and kids.
...which was precisely my point. The market led us to the present only-just-good-enough software. So it seems odd to advocate lawsuits over product quality when the market has chosen something else as being more important, like animated paperclips or the joys of Passport authentication. Not what I would have chosen, but that's what they're buying.
I'm also against the government getting involved in things they do disastrously badly. The bad news is that there are strong incentives for the government to do just that, few of which are even remotely connected with the public interest.
So I think we're agreeing, except that I'm more pessimistic as to the likely outcome.
Incidentally, I'm writing this on Mozilla on my Linux box. I voted with my feet long ago, and have convinced my consulting clients that free software is a better choice in many (but not all) circumstances. In bullshit-free evaluations, free software is highly competitive.
That's funny. Market forces are the reason so much mass-market software is crap now. Customers preferred more features, mostly idiotic bells and whistles, and the illusion of tech support, to product quality.
OK, now that there's a monopoly situation, it's not just the market in the driver's seat anymore, at least on the desktop. But it was still a relatively free market when consumers had the choice between feature-laden dreck and more tightly-focused products with better quality. So now they change their minds and want quality? The market allocates resources according to buyer's preferences, and generally does that efficiently. That doesn't mean that buyers always choose the technically best product.
Anyway, the real driving force in this initiative is the lawyers trying to get their mouthparts into a nice big pool of cash. And if they happen to destroy another industry in the process, well, it won't be the first time.
And there's not even the consolation that more regulation will hurt Microsoft. Higher barriers to entry tend to protect monpolies, not break them up. It's the little guys and the innovators who will be screwed. They don't have the deep pockets to pay the lobbyists to subvert the regulations. And if GPL'd software happens to become a victim of collateral damage, Congress and the legal profession won't give a shit, because there's no money in it for them anyway.
So it's not about us needing more laws, it's about which laws will most benefit the greed and lust for power of those who actually run this country. Parasites don't care about their host's freedom, only about how much blood they can extract. The underlying problem is that they're making the decisions in the first place, not us. Nothing will change until that changes.
Publishing the API and clearing the patent/copyright minefield are needed. However, knowledge of an API is necessary but not sufficient information. To do proper integration, you also need to know what the system is doing in response to the API calls. Otherwise you just keep running into unexpected behavior, undocumented features, etc. Even if it were assumed that the API documentation were done with the best will in the world, this would be true. In the case of Microsoft, I would assume that they would deliberately obfuscate and corrupt the documentation.
This implies that M$ should be forced to open-source IE. Since Microsoft abused their monopoly position to establish IE as a de facto standard, that standard should no become part of the public domain to prevent Microsoft from continuing to profit from their criminal activity.
They understand the issue perfectly. It's just that a different issue matters more to them. Consider this hypothetical calculation:
Contribution from the RIAA: $50,000.
Contribution from you: zero dollars, or close to it.
Since the primary goal of an elected official is to get re-elected, which way do you think they'll decide? Name three recent Senators who have risked electoral defeat defending ordinary people's rights against Big Government or corporate interests. The only reason the CBDTA might be defeated is that big industrial interests are opposed to it. What WE think doesn't matter to those bastards, unless the backlash is so strong that they'd be driven from office. Given the ignorance and apathy of the electorate, short of massive tax increases, Congress can and does get away with anything they damned well please. And there are no "checks and balances." Unless you think the Supreme Court will protect us...
The way things stand now, it's a very simple dichotomy, really. Owned by a big corporation -> private property forever. Owned by you -> public domain, until the big corporation aggregates it for resale, at which point it becomes theirs. From the corp's' view: what's mine is mine, what's yours is mine too.
I agree that recognizing a person's ownership rights in the data stream that they generate when going about their everyday life should become the core of future privacy laws.
It's not incompetence. They're quite competent, it's just that they're not competent at delivering services. They're competent at keeping their jobs. They're optimizing something else.
Governments (big as well as small) are very bad at committing capital to improve their IT because the cost of a new system will show up in this year's budget as a big number with lots of zeros after it. Far easier to piss away money in small increments over many years, as service gradually degrades and finally crashes, than to make a needed investment that will save money later. Those savings will happen on someone else's watch, so why bother? Better to do something that gets in the newspapers right now, like another teenage-sex abstinence program. That's how legislators think when they vote funding for projects.
They may well be corrupt too, but I think that much of this odd behavior can be explained by short-term thinking and simple cynicism.
It's a good medium for culturing disease organisms, that's about it.
It's clear to me that the next step in Microsoft's strategy is to pervert the legal environment to criminalize free software. They will do this in the name of "capitalism," which in Gates' parlance has nothing to do with the free market. Instead, it has to do with maintaining their monopoly through subversion of the legal system, threatening suppliers and distributors, and sucking up to the government.
We should take this very seriously indeed. I find it especially ironic that so many so-called "free marketeers" are on the intellectual-property bandwagon, defending government-granted monopolies (which is what patents are), and putting their trust in bureaucrats rather than the market to decide what consititutes original ideas.
Foolish me, I thought that the market only worked when there's a free flow of information and impartial enforcement of law. The situation with software has degenerated to the point where neither of these conditions will remain true for much longer.
While this is a delightful little entertainment, and quite fun to play with (though a bit of a hog while it's running, not to mention my difficulty in getting it to run in Mozilla on Win32), semantic networks have been around forever. Let's hope the patent application is meant to keep things like this in the public domain, rather than fencing in yet another area of the commons.
Fact: the average slashdotter is college age or lower
Not fact, supposition.
Fact: the average slashdotter is male
Probably so, but supposition again, unless you've found some way to measure.
Fact: the average slashdotter has not attended a high school that requires coursework in econ, statistics, or logic
High schools generally don't teach economics and statistics because instruction in those subjects is pointlessly trivial without calculus. Without the appropriate mathematical background, you get nothing but a collection of unmotivated rules of thumb. This leads to the kind of half-baked economic discussions that take place on/.
Logic is taught at many, if not most, high schools. Logic is a good subject, but critical thinking can be acquired just as well in other ways.
Fact: the average school teacher in America is not qualified to teach the subjects they teach, especially in science and math
Possibly true, though I question whether you're in a position to judge that.
Fact: the average school teacher's political leanings are leftist.
Maybe true, by American standards. But American "extreme leftists" would be centrists in most Western European countries. The US policial "mainstream" runs from center-right to rabid right. Clinton and the DLC killed off what remained of the "real" left. There are European conservative parties that are to the left of most US Democrats. The terms of political debate in this country are so constrained that expression of any original idea leads to dogmatism and name-calling responses, particularly when it doesn't map cleanly to the left/right continuum. More anecdotally, I found most of my own teachers mindlessly right-wing. It was their mindlessness that bothered me far more than their political views: some of my friends are on the right. From what I've seen of my kids' teachers, little has changed. And I'm much closer to 50 than to high-school age.
And, yes, you're right. I've never seen a "differential" opinion.
I tend to have integral opinions myself. Smoother, with fewer discontinuity problems that way.
Purchasing managers are very much driven by the "one throat to choke" myth. They think that, if something is screwed up with commercial software, there's someone they can sue. This, despite the fact that nobody really has done so, because both the licenses and the law protect the vendors. Same goes with support. I've dealt with the major commercial vendors as well as developers of several OSS efforts, and I've had consistently better bug-fix turnaround with open-source. But the old habits die hard. The good thing is that we'll outlive them.
How many votes does Hollings actually have for this bill? And what about the House? Any idea if Dubya would veto it?
I understand that there are people whose business is to know such things. Are any of you on/.?
This is Crypto export restrictions 100 times over.
US-manufactured technology will be hobbled and frozen in a time warp, while other countries pass us by.
The depressing part is that this legislation for hire will destroy the only source of growth in the US economy in the past decade (even taking into account the recent recession) for the benefit of the content oligopolies that contribute relatively little in the way of jobs, GDP or potential future growth. Even more depressing is that the Congress seems completely unable to make any legislation that protects citizen's rights against the government (the absolutist inanity that is called the Patriot Act) or multinationals.
Where can we even start to reform this pervasively corrupt system? Where's Teddy Roosevelt?
Spreadsheets are data and behavior bundled together. Sounds more like the definition of an object than of code or data. And yes, code is data, and data can be code, and all that. But that's kind of beside the point.
Your problem is what the MGC and state law consider to be software, not what we Slashdotistas think. That has little or nothing to do with technology, sanity, or best practice in the industry. That involves our learned friends in the legal profession.
First, the disclaimer: I haven't used Cocoon. But some of the things that are said about Zope in the Ariel article don't seem quite right.
They mention lack of defect tracking in Zope. There is a bug-tracking plug-in for Zope, though I haven't tested it. Look on the Zope Products page at www.zope.org.
Similarly, I'm not at all sure that the lack of native XSLT support is a bad thing. I've used XSLT and Xpath extensively, and it's verbose and quite limited. If you really need it, you can integrate the 4suite solution into Python external functions in your Zope instance, but I wouldn't bother, unless you have some externally-imposed requirement to support XSLT. There are easier ways to skin a cat.
Also, the article discussed Zope up to version 2.43. Zope 2.5 has Zope Page Templates, which are wonderful things, much nicer than DTML for templating. It's the most natural templating aproach I've seen anywhere. Well worth trying.
I've only used Zope for small numbers of users, so I can't comment on scalability. But for the purposes I've used it for, it's a wonderful product. And you don't need to know Python to use it, though you can do more with it if you do. You can also write Zope business logic in Perl if that floats your boat. Zope's written in Python, but they've done a good job in not locking Zope users to Python.
Wait until after the drought, then look for the survivors that are healthy. Work for them.
My worry is that the ability to survive drought might also constrain the ability to grow. And I'm out to make some money (as well as having nice managers and a steady job). That might require only-just-good-enough management. I'd trade a few weeks' lost work in a recession for big opportunities in times of growth.
Incidentally, I'm working for a firm now that's doing very well, and this has been a topic of internal debate-- do we need to shift strategy from thriving-in-adversity to surfing-the-next-big-wave? If so, when?
I worked in a firm that had a dual track, but generally promoted developers to become managers. Everyone started as a developer. As a result, the management sucked, since delegation, facilitation and dealing with clients wasn't part of their background, and their technical skill-sets, like tropical fruit, didn't have much of a shelf life. So failed techies became managers.
Then it was decided that "professional" managers would be better. This effectively killed the promotional track for ambitious techies (there was a technical track, but it was harder to advance that way and compensation was worse), but the generic managers ("In terms of management, there's no difference between making soda and writing avionics software") couldn't understand enough about the nature of the work to tell what was going on, and their arrogance prevented the techies from wanting to tell them. So our rate of failed projects didn't change that much, and morale was even worse. But the PowerPoint slides looked nicer, and we made more use of standard business terminology.
It was around that time that I quit.
Lesson learned: hire the person, not the resume. Find the exceptional techie that can deal with her peers, or the rare MBA who also can contribute meaningfully to a technical discussion (this doesn't mean that they're necessarily giving technical input-- it might be business considerations that impact the technical choices). And avoid having a robotic HR policy that arbitrarily constrains your ability to get the good people. Nothing can kill a good project faster than asshole managers.
Did you know that the PTO does not get too keep the revenues it earns? Much of it is funneled away to other areas, and does not benefit the PTO at all.
I'm aware of that. The real mechanism is only slightly more complex: more patents to process, more headcount in the department. In the civil service, that's what matters, more than revenue. Now let's look at the demand side: higher likelihood of marginal patents being approved leads directly to more patent submissions.
Are you suggesting they are systematically granting bad patents (and therefore knowingly breaking the law) so that they can increase their budget?
I'm saying that the incentives are for them to err towards granting a patent rather than refusing it when they're in the gray area between valid and invalid (say, barely discernible incremental improvements). I'd also say that, whether they've been spurred on by the Supremes or the door has been left open by ambiguous legislation, they have undeniably embraced mission creep. Regulations are developed (at least nominally) to comply with the law, but their interpretation is seldom clear-cut, and there are endless opportunities for systemic bias. I have worked for governments, and administrative discretion hides a multitude of sins (as does judicial "interpretation" which often subverts legislative intent). But if your point is that it's the whole system that needs reform, not just the PTO in isolation, then I strongly share your view.
One explanation of the growth of inappropriate patents is simply that the USPTO has been seeking to expand its bureaucratic turf. The fact that their funding is proportionate to the number of patents granted only reinforces this behavior.
This explains the USPTO's endless series of IP brainfarts: patenting gene sequences, business methods, algorithms. Of course, this also plays into the hands of large corporate interests with well-funded legal staffs. There's always money to be made in claiming ownership of something that wasn't owned before. Far more efficient than coming up with new ideas yourself. In a different time and different context, it used to be called claim-jumping. Most of that was also done by the rich and powerful (look at who ended up owning most of the land in the Western US: railroads and East Coast investment consortia).
This has never been about the market. The only solution is legislation to restrict the scope of patents.
And that is the crux of his argument regarding privacy laws. We cannot tell companies or governments to mind their own business!
The reason you can tell people at the other table to mind their own business is because, unlike the government, they generally don't have massive, disproportionate force at their disposal if they choose to push the issue.
While I find Brin's arguments interesting, I am pessimistic that the huge imbalance of power between the government and the people can be rectified solely through oversight. Cutting off their supply of money also has to be part of the real solution. Though I do think that an independent Inspectorate would be a positive step. But weren't the congress and courts supposed to be doing that?
The only way I could see OSS dying would be through government regulation - (ie the introduction of software liability laws, for one!). And at this point, it seems very unlikely that it will happen.
This is a point that we agree on. My concern about monopolies (and MS is not unique in this regard) is that they use non-market means to protect their monopoly positions. Promoting legislation that raises barriers to entry is a common tactic. Say, government mandated "product standards." With the auction that is our current legislative system, and with the present Supreme Court, I can only hope that SSCA, or something like it, doesn't slip in under the radar. In the short term, I would not be optimistic about checks and balances working, or that a public outcry would make all that much of a difference in the outcome.
By the way, in response to your earlier exhortation to switch to Linux: I don't use MS products, except at work where they force me to. So I've already voted with my feet for OSS. I'm just saying that the market doesn't work in isolation-- there's some very filthy politics going on too, and that can lead to a rigged market where the race goeth not to the fittest, nor bread to the wise. When the other guy is coming at you with a lead pipe, it's disadvantageous to continue following the Marquis of Queensberry's rules. The OSS movement must act politically, not by solely economic means. This might mean compromising the purity of our position in some cases. The alternative is to find ourselves outmaneuvered, on the wrong side of the law.
I've worked with government agencies, both within and outside the US, and have advised them on IT procurement policy. I admire Lessig and agree that it is in the public interest for governments to promote the free exchange of ideas.
There are two obstacles to this agenda: first, large governments have a tendency to acquire multiple, mutually incompatible solutions to the same problem. So it's not a simple problem of fighting lock-in to the de facto standard illegally imposed by the Beast of Redmond: there's also Star Office, Word Perfect, and four others that nobody has ever heard of. This is because the various departments responded to whoever lobbied them the hardest, or just applied their procurement rules differently. So, the current support and training requirements are unnecessarily complex, and there is a real need to cut down the list of solutions for any given problem. In a competitive environment of that kind, it's hard to displace a market leader. The sight of yet another alternative frightens them. And, to sort the mess out, budget is needed, and quick fixes always win out against correct long-term strategy.
The second problem is that, in government as in much of the private sector, control of information is power. Open dissemination of information is typically not in the interest of any bureaucrat, since it might enhance accountability. Much of the bizarre and seemingly inept behavior of government employees is really a well-executed way of concealing who made which decision. Anything that blows away the smokescreen might well be in the public interest, but not in the interest of the honcho providing the service. So there is a strong lobby opposing openness, and this inertia must be overcome. Usually that takes a scandal or two, otherwise the public is just too apathetic.
So, we agree on what's in the public interest. The bad news is that civil servants and politicians only care about the public interest when it bites them on the ass, and then, only until the teeth let go.
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Besides the measurement error and apples-and-oranges issue, I have a couple of other concerns:
1. Over the past five years, some additional costs will appear in the Linux column due to the learning curve in adopting a new technology. This will show up both organizationally (for example, overstaffing Linux admins using the Windows rule of thumb for admin/server ratio, or attempting to apply Windows-specific system management practices on Linux -- "gotta defrag every week!") and in terms of individual staff (initially, Linux admins did get better salaries than MCSE's because of scarcity, but that difference has shrunk over time; similarly, there's a training cost in bringing IT staff up to speed who are new to Linux). So you're partially measuring the cost of change, not just the cost of Linux.
2. The downstream cost of recovery from problems caused by forced upgrades is difficult to quantify (since it mostly shows up as disruption to the business processes, not as costs in the IT budget) but can potentially be significant. The ability to introduce changes incrementally, at a time of your own choosing, is a great advantage of Linux-based systems.
While I don't think the results of this study will be borne out by more controlled analyses, I agree with the central observation that up-front costs and the costs of ongoing licenses and support contracts can be insignificant compared to staff and downtime costs. In many circumstances, I continue to advise my clients to consider the benefits of changing over to Linux and free software. What I also tell them is that making the change will cost money, but it can be worth it in the long run. Some of the payback comes in terms of operational flexibility and system scalability, not just in the IT department's bottom line.
I'm another former Mac user who now uses Linux. I had to give up on Apple because I couldn't afford them, despite the fact that, with Linux, you end up having to do some of the integration yourself (though the situation is constantly improving). I have never met anyone who gave up Linux in favor of the MacOS.
Anyway, Apple's attention to good human factors engineering has declined markedly since the return of Jobs, in favor of flashy case design and cute consumer software bundles. Another post compared Apple/M$ to BMW and GM, but based on the functionality, Mini Cooper to Chevy Caprice might be more precise. Less capacity, but much more fun, and less crappy.
I wish Apple well, but I personally can't pay a premium of several hundred dollars a year as a way of continuing to express my support.
1. My employer provides me with a Win2k laptop.
2. My clients almost all live in a Windows-only world.
At home I use Linux (as well as some aging Macs). When clients are Linux-clueful, I bring in the Linux laptop. So the short answer to the question is "network effect."
I've worked as a consultant in both the public and private sectors.
There are some good, highly-motivated people in the public sector. But there are also far more free-riders, so the good people get exploited and overtaxed, unless they adopt a don't-give-a-shit attitude. And it's even harder to get rid of incompetent staff than it is in the private sector.
Government is prone to long periods of under-investment, punctuated by buying sprees. As a result, many (most?) government IT shops contain outdated and/or incorrectly deployed systems. The government capital-budgeting process is nightmarish, so solving such a problem might take years, if you can do it at all. And politics is often more of a consideration than technical correctness. Remember the recent California deal with Oracle?
There's a lot of talk about job security, but I earn over twice what I'd get in government. So I'd have to be unemployed 50% of the time to break even. I haven't been unemployed in 20 years. None of my peers have been either.
On the other hand, you are more likely to become collateral damage as a consequence of mismanagement in the private sector. One way idiot managers protect themselves is by firing others. Private-sector firms are driven in the long run by demand and performance-- but in the short run, individual agendas matter too. And competition is not some ideal, abstract thing: many people cheat, and they compete by ass-kissing and window-dressing as well as by delivering the goods. So you have to deal with that. Of course, the difference in the public sector is that the BS-ing boss will still be there in 15 years.
So, your real choice is between a public-sector job where you endure frustration and obsolescence in exchange for bad pay and slightly better job security, or a private-sector job where you're nearer the cutting edge, marginally more likely to be unemployed, far better paid, and have more opportunity to influence events in a meaningful way.
For these reasons, I'm in a risky part of the private sector, even though I have a wife and kids.
...which was precisely my point. The market led us to the present only-just-good-enough software. So it seems odd to advocate lawsuits over product quality when the market has chosen something else as being more important, like animated paperclips or the joys of Passport authentication. Not what I would have chosen, but that's what they're buying.
I'm also against the government getting involved in things they do disastrously badly. The bad news is that there are strong incentives for the government to do just that, few of which are even remotely connected with the public interest.
So I think we're agreeing, except that I'm more pessimistic as to the likely outcome.
Incidentally, I'm writing this on Mozilla on my Linux box. I voted with my feet long ago, and have convinced my consulting clients that free software is a better choice in many (but not all) circumstances. In bullshit-free evaluations, free software is highly competitive.
That's funny. Market forces are the reason so much mass-market software is crap now. Customers preferred more features, mostly idiotic bells and whistles, and the illusion of tech support, to product quality.
OK, now that there's a monopoly situation, it's not just the market in the driver's seat anymore, at least on the desktop. But it was still a relatively free market when consumers had the choice between feature-laden dreck and more tightly-focused products with better quality. So now they change their minds and want quality? The market allocates resources according to buyer's preferences, and generally does that efficiently. That doesn't mean that buyers always choose the technically best product.
Anyway, the real driving force in this initiative is the lawyers trying to get their mouthparts into a nice big pool of cash. And if they happen to destroy another industry in the process, well, it won't be the first time.
And there's not even the consolation that more regulation will hurt Microsoft. Higher barriers to entry tend to protect monpolies, not break them up. It's the little guys and the innovators who will be screwed. They don't have the deep pockets to pay the lobbyists to subvert the regulations. And if GPL'd software happens to become a victim of collateral damage, Congress and the legal profession won't give a shit, because there's no money in it for them anyway.
So it's not about us needing more laws, it's about which laws will most benefit the greed and lust for power of those who actually run this country. Parasites don't care about their host's freedom, only about how much blood they can extract. The underlying problem is that they're making the decisions in the first place, not us. Nothing will change until that changes.
Publishing the API and clearing the patent/copyright minefield are needed. However, knowledge of an API is necessary but not sufficient information. To do proper integration, you also need to know what the system is doing in response to the API calls. Otherwise you just keep running into unexpected behavior, undocumented features, etc. Even if it were assumed that the API documentation were done with the best will in the world, this would be true. In the case of Microsoft, I would assume that they would deliberately obfuscate and corrupt the documentation.
This implies that M$ should be forced to open-source IE. Since Microsoft abused their monopoly position to establish IE as a de facto standard, that standard should no become part of the public domain to prevent Microsoft from continuing to profit from their criminal activity.
They understand the issue perfectly. It's just that a different issue matters more to them. Consider this hypothetical calculation:
Contribution from the RIAA: $50,000.
Contribution from you: zero dollars, or close to it.
Since the primary goal of an elected official is to get re-elected, which way do you think they'll decide? Name three recent Senators who have risked electoral defeat defending ordinary people's rights against Big Government or corporate interests. The only reason the CBDTA might be defeated is that big industrial interests are opposed to it. What WE think doesn't matter to those bastards, unless the backlash is so strong that they'd be driven from office. Given the ignorance and apathy of the electorate, short of massive tax increases, Congress can and does get away with anything they damned well please. And there are no "checks and balances." Unless you think the Supreme Court will protect us...
The way things stand now, it's a very simple dichotomy, really. Owned by a big corporation -> private property forever. Owned by you -> public domain, until the big corporation aggregates it for resale, at which point it becomes theirs. From the corp's' view: what's mine is mine, what's yours is mine too.
I agree that recognizing a person's ownership rights in the data stream that they generate when going about their everyday life should become the core of future privacy laws.
Meanwhile, I'm putting a EULA on my bitstream.
It's not incompetence. They're quite competent, it's just that they're not competent at delivering services. They're competent at keeping their jobs. They're optimizing something else.
Governments (big as well as small) are very bad at committing capital to improve their IT because the cost of a new system will show up in this year's budget as a big number with lots of zeros after it. Far easier to piss away money in small increments over many years, as service gradually degrades and finally crashes, than to make a needed investment that will save money later. Those savings will happen on someone else's watch, so why bother? Better to do something that gets in the newspapers right now, like another teenage-sex abstinence program. That's how legislators think when they vote funding for projects.
They may well be corrupt too, but I think that much of this odd behavior can be explained by short-term thinking and simple cynicism.
Monoculture is not an ecosystem.
It's a good medium for culturing disease organisms, that's about it.
It's clear to me that the next step in Microsoft's strategy is to pervert the legal environment to criminalize free software. They will do this in the name of "capitalism," which in Gates' parlance has nothing to do with the free market. Instead, it has to do with maintaining their monopoly through subversion of the legal system, threatening suppliers and distributors, and sucking up to the government.
We should take this very seriously indeed. I find it especially ironic that so many so-called "free marketeers" are on the intellectual-property bandwagon, defending government-granted monopolies (which is what patents are), and putting their trust in bureaucrats rather than the market to decide what consititutes original ideas.
Foolish me, I thought that the market only worked when there's a free flow of information and impartial enforcement of law. The situation with software has degenerated to the point where neither of these conditions will remain true for much longer.
Notice the "patent pending" notice on the site.
While this is a delightful little entertainment, and quite fun to play with (though a bit of a hog while it's running, not to mention my difficulty in getting it to run in Mozilla on Win32), semantic networks have been around forever. Let's hope the patent application is meant to keep things like this in the public domain, rather than fencing in yet another area of the commons.
Fact: the average slashdotter is college age or lower
/.
Not fact, supposition.
Fact: the average slashdotter is male
Probably so, but supposition again, unless you've found some way to measure.
Fact: the average slashdotter has not attended a high school that requires coursework in econ, statistics, or logic
High schools generally don't teach economics and statistics because instruction in those subjects is pointlessly trivial without calculus. Without the appropriate mathematical background, you get nothing but a collection of unmotivated rules of thumb. This leads to the kind of half-baked economic discussions that take place on
Logic is taught at many, if not most, high schools. Logic is a good subject, but critical thinking can be acquired just as well in other ways.
Fact: the average school teacher in America is not qualified to teach the subjects they teach, especially in science and math
Possibly true, though I question whether you're in a position to judge that.
Fact: the average school teacher's political leanings are leftist.
Maybe true, by American standards. But American "extreme leftists" would be centrists in most Western European countries. The US policial "mainstream" runs from center-right to rabid right. Clinton and the DLC killed off what remained of the "real" left. There are European conservative parties that are to the left of most US Democrats. The terms of political debate in this country are so constrained that expression of any original idea leads to dogmatism and name-calling responses, particularly when it doesn't map cleanly to the left/right continuum. More anecdotally, I found most of my own teachers mindlessly right-wing. It was their mindlessness that bothered me far more than their political views: some of my friends are on the right. From what I've seen of my kids' teachers, little has changed. And I'm much closer to 50 than to high-school age.
And, yes, you're right. I've never seen a "differential" opinion.
I tend to have integral opinions myself. Smoother, with fewer discontinuity problems that way.
Purchasing managers are very much driven by the "one throat to choke" myth. They think that, if something is screwed up with commercial software, there's someone they can sue. This, despite the fact that nobody really has done so, because both the licenses and the law protect the vendors. Same goes with support. I've dealt with the major commercial vendors as well as developers of several OSS efforts, and I've had consistently better bug-fix turnaround with open-source. But the old habits die hard. The good thing is that we'll outlive them.
How many votes does Hollings actually have for this bill? And what about the House? Any idea if Dubya would veto it? I understand that there are people whose business is to know such things. Are any of you on /.?
This is Crypto export restrictions 100 times over.
US-manufactured technology will be hobbled and frozen in a time warp, while other countries pass us by.
The depressing part is that this legislation for hire will destroy the only source of growth in the US economy in the past decade (even taking into account the recent recession) for the benefit of the content oligopolies that contribute relatively little in the way of jobs, GDP or potential future growth. Even more depressing is that the Congress seems completely unable to make any legislation that protects citizen's rights against the government (the absolutist inanity that is called the Patriot Act) or multinationals.
Where can we even start to reform this pervasively corrupt system? Where's Teddy Roosevelt?
Spreadsheets are data and behavior bundled together. Sounds more like the definition of an object than of code or data. And yes, code is data, and data can be code, and all that. But that's kind of beside the point.
Your problem is what the MGC and state law consider to be software, not what we Slashdotistas think. That has little or nothing to do with technology, sanity, or best practice in the industry. That involves our learned friends in the legal profession.
First, the disclaimer: I haven't used Cocoon. But some of the things that are said about Zope in the Ariel article don't seem quite right.
They mention lack of defect tracking in Zope. There is a bug-tracking plug-in for Zope, though I haven't tested it. Look on the Zope Products page at www.zope.org.
Similarly, I'm not at all sure that the lack of native XSLT support is a bad thing. I've used XSLT and Xpath extensively, and it's verbose and quite limited. If you really need it, you can integrate the 4suite solution into Python external functions in your Zope instance, but I wouldn't bother, unless you have some externally-imposed requirement to support XSLT. There are easier ways to skin a cat.
Also, the article discussed Zope up to version 2.43. Zope 2.5 has Zope Page Templates, which are wonderful things, much nicer than DTML for templating. It's the most natural templating aproach I've seen anywhere. Well worth trying.
I've only used Zope for small numbers of users, so I can't comment on scalability. But for the purposes I've used it for, it's a wonderful product. And you don't need to know Python to use it, though you can do more with it if you do. You can also write Zope business logic in Perl if that floats your boat. Zope's written in Python, but they've done a good job in not locking Zope users to Python.
Incidentally, I'm working for a firm now that's doing very well, and this has been a topic of internal debate-- do we need to shift strategy from thriving-in-adversity to surfing-the-next-big-wave? If so, when?
I agree with this.
I worked in a firm that had a dual track, but generally promoted developers to become managers. Everyone started as a developer. As a result, the management sucked, since delegation, facilitation and dealing with clients wasn't part of their background, and their technical skill-sets, like tropical fruit, didn't have much of a shelf life. So failed techies became managers.
Then it was decided that "professional" managers would be better. This effectively killed the promotional track for ambitious techies (there was a technical track, but it was harder to advance that way and compensation was worse), but the generic managers ("In terms of management, there's no difference between making soda and writing avionics software") couldn't understand enough about the nature of the work to tell what was going on, and their arrogance prevented the techies from wanting to tell them. So our rate of failed projects didn't change that much, and morale was even worse. But the PowerPoint slides looked nicer, and we made more use of standard business terminology.
It was around that time that I quit.
Lesson learned: hire the person, not the resume. Find the exceptional techie that can deal with her peers, or the rare MBA who also can contribute meaningfully to a technical discussion (this doesn't mean that they're necessarily giving technical input-- it might be business considerations that impact the technical choices). And avoid having a robotic HR policy that arbitrarily constrains your ability to get the good people. Nothing can kill a good project faster than asshole managers.
I'm saying that the incentives are for them to err towards granting a patent rather than refusing it when they're in the gray area between valid and invalid (say, barely discernible incremental improvements). I'd also say that, whether they've been spurred on by the Supremes or the door has been left open by ambiguous legislation, they have undeniably embraced mission creep. Regulations are developed (at least nominally) to comply with the law, but their interpretation is seldom clear-cut, and there are endless opportunities for systemic bias. I have worked for governments, and administrative discretion hides a multitude of sins (as does judicial "interpretation" which often subverts legislative intent). But if your point is that it's the whole system that needs reform, not just the PTO in isolation, then I strongly share your view.
One explanation of the growth of inappropriate patents is simply that the USPTO has been seeking to expand its bureaucratic turf. The fact that their funding is proportionate to the number of patents granted only reinforces this behavior.
This explains the USPTO's endless series of IP brainfarts: patenting gene sequences, business methods, algorithms. Of course, this also plays into the hands of large corporate interests with well-funded legal staffs. There's always money to be made in claiming ownership of something that wasn't owned before. Far more efficient than coming up with new ideas yourself. In a different time and different context, it used to be called claim-jumping. Most of that was also done by the rich and powerful (look at who ended up owning most of the land in the Western US: railroads and East Coast investment consortia).
This has never been about the market. The only solution is legislation to restrict the scope of patents.
While I find Brin's arguments interesting, I am pessimistic that the huge imbalance of power between the government and the people can be rectified solely through oversight. Cutting off their supply of money also has to be part of the real solution. Though I do think that an independent Inspectorate would be a positive step. But weren't the congress and courts supposed to be doing that?
By the way, in response to your earlier exhortation to switch to Linux: I don't use MS products, except at work where they force me to. So I've already voted with my feet for OSS. I'm just saying that the market doesn't work in isolation-- there's some very filthy politics going on too, and that can lead to a rigged market where the race goeth not to the fittest, nor bread to the wise. When the other guy is coming at you with a lead pipe, it's disadvantageous to continue following the Marquis of Queensberry's rules. The OSS movement must act politically, not by solely economic means. This might mean compromising the purity of our position in some cases. The alternative is to find ourselves outmaneuvered, on the wrong side of the law.
I've worked with government agencies, both within and outside the US, and have advised them on IT procurement policy. I admire Lessig and agree that it is in the public interest for governments to promote the free exchange of ideas.
There are two obstacles to this agenda: first, large governments have a tendency to acquire multiple, mutually incompatible solutions to the same problem. So it's not a simple problem of fighting lock-in to the de facto standard illegally imposed by the Beast of Redmond: there's also Star Office, Word Perfect, and four others that nobody has ever heard of. This is because the various departments responded to whoever lobbied them the hardest, or just applied their procurement rules differently. So, the current support and training requirements are unnecessarily complex, and there is a real need to cut down the list of solutions for any given problem. In a competitive environment of that kind, it's hard to displace a market leader. The sight of yet another alternative frightens them. And, to sort the mess out, budget is needed, and quick fixes always win out against correct long-term strategy.
The second problem is that, in government as in much of the private sector, control of information is power. Open dissemination of information is typically not in the interest of any bureaucrat, since it might enhance accountability. Much of the bizarre and seemingly inept behavior of government employees is really a well-executed way of concealing who made which decision. Anything that blows away the smokescreen might well be in the public interest, but not in the interest of the honcho providing the service. So there is a strong lobby opposing openness, and this inertia must be overcome. Usually that takes a scandal or two, otherwise the public is just too apathetic.
So, we agree on what's in the public interest. The bad news is that civil servants and politicians only care about the public interest when it bites them on the ass, and then, only until the teeth let go.