"Its not like their pointing a gun at us... or are they?"
And what's with the mundie speech?:) (the one that used be around for some weeks where mundie attacked the GPL...)
But I donnot see why both sides (Free)OpenSource & Microsoft cannot simply concentrante on making good products as they're both supposed to do, but hack on each other...
Small Pox was specialized on a general human weekness same way on native americans as europens, but europeans had already developed counter strategies against it... Will maybe there is some interstellar biohazard capable to infiltrate all kind of life... but could be ever recoqnize it as such? beeing there even after looking at it for days?
And even if live exists on mars, and even if it survifes the space travel, and even if it survives our erath conditions, I hardly doubt that this life is "specifalized" to pentetrate human lifeforms, look all diseases we've today are playing really a lot of swift trick to confuse and pass by our body defensive sytem, and needed time to learn this since we exist. It's like most animal disease's, can it hurt humans? No, because the lifeform is specialized to it's victim. Now how much chance are that even if life exists on mars, it's seciliazied on humans? Or any artificial life?
why does ms bother about the GPL?
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I mean why do they bother about it at all?
If windows would be really such much bether, why even look at the tiny ones? Why do they make public speeches? Beeing simply better there would be nothing to worry about.
But in my mortal opinion one major strategies of ms was not to the classic make good products at reasonable prices, but more concentrate on crushing your competitors. Buying their shares (corel), buying of their people (borland), sue them, betray them in contracts (sun), etc.
Now none of these ways works on crushing the competitor GPL/Opensource, they're trying to munch them through public relations.
I mean in what sense do speeches and responses from mundie make windows better? or cheaper?
I've a theory about software growth, however I bet somebody else has it written down already:o)
I think quality of the product in classic software development (closed source, paying devs, selling copies) grows linear. You've more or less the same size of devteam all the way. (yes it may grow if the product sells good, since you can pay more people, but this effect is not going strong in)
However in the OpenSource way you've exponential growth. In the time you get more and more users, you'll get in the same factor devs to your project. The more devs you have the better gets the product, getting you more users, getting you more devs, letting you improve even more quickly.
The difference between these two is the linear classic way starts of quite a lot steeper, while an OpenSource product goes really quite flat in the beginning. But as mathematics say -every- exponential function will at one point fly by any linear one.
In some points windows might really be better than linux (or other not that public OpenSource OSes) today. But how things are evolving the GPL platform it is right now already growing steeper than microsoft. (even if still at some points beeing at a lower point in the graph) it might change quickly in the coming future.
(btw. GPL platform != linux... linux is "only" the kernel, remember?:o))
I know software improvement is something you can hardly messure, nor do I have any experiements or fundamentals to proove it on, so this theory is everything but scientific. So let's call it a "draft":o)
How I understood the whole sense of intellectual property laws they were created and formed to HELP the authors.
To allow them to do more good stuff (of what ever) be it software, music, painting, books etc.
However to my understanding the whole context of IP laws was not to make somebody "fabulously wealthy".
IP laws were there to support creators of intellectual good, to help them to make it all, and to encorage them to do more good stuff.
However if plain effective usage of IP laws made you the richest man of world, there is something wrong with them. - my opinion
I think this weakness you draw out is actually the strength that makes ms so uncomfortable about it.
* They can't buy ""Linux Inc."", or better "OpenSource Inc".
(rembember linux itself is only the kernel....)
* They can't sue them.
* They can't drag away their key-people.
* They can't start a strategic (manipulative) alliance with them, (and the end betraying them)
* They can't buy 40% non-votable shares
So all the standard strategies to strangle possible competetitors early won't work. That's why they seem to me that's it's actual fear shining through articles (and speeches) like this.
"""There are limited developer tools available for Linux."""
Yes this is absolute true, there is an finite amount of software aviable:o)
But don't tell me windows has an INFINITE amount of development-software aviable:o)
""" ?Open source? means that anyone can get a copy of the source code. Developers can find security weaknesses very easily with Linux. The same is not true with Microsoft Windows."""
Hi-hi-hI-hii!
Especially now that microsoft gave the source to their 100? best costumers, it's pretty lickely it "slipped" through into the hacker comunity, now the difference is the hacker has the source, while the sysadmin doesn't. And also no "discovered" leaks by hackers flow back into the source as fixes as it is the case in linux/*bsd....
When I remember somewhat back into late 80ies early 90ies people asked a lot on magazines (the internet wasn't that big that times:), why is software expensive, i can't affort to pay $100 for my MS-DOS copy (or whatever), the usual authorative answer was, look buddy did you steal your copy? right now for every sold copy we know 10 people are using it, so it's quite logical we've to charge the 10 fold price...
well it seemed like a devil's-circle, if they would go cheaper, people would by products, if more people would buy products they promised to go cheaper.
Then the CD came, for some few years (cd burning was not normally affortable) pirating was heavily reduced, however did the prices go down a single bit? No! They just happily collected the money.
And don't let us forget what made microsoft big. It was msdos and windows 3.* And why did so many people use it? Because it didn't cost them a thing, people that had really some money to spend used big *nix machines from the big vendors that times IBM, HP, etc. however for us small 0815 man, we didn't have money to spend, the 386 times -most- pc's we selled blank, and you asked you're buddy, hey pal can you ""borrow"" me your three msdos disks for a moment please?
when pc's came up with msdos and win 3.* microsoft "free'd" us from the grip of the multi-concerns. That quite expensily selled -their- software preinstalled on -their- hardware systems, so you could really not pirate it unnoticed...
Now the swing turned heavily over and ms is today in the position they opposed once before ~10-20 years.
Let's see if history repeats again, or if things will turn out differently...
I donnot know if it is also able to also nativly compile, but it has it's basis on a VM, just like in example VB is doing also, a lot of people not beeing aware of that. (What do you think vbrun.dll is for? It's the VM for VB applications...) Howver also the specs of the VB VM are secret/non-open. I know the the newer versions have an ability to do also native builds, however the normal VB applications and when using the debugger it starts up in a VM.
I find c++ not satisfying, especially when compared to java language structure.
However java didn't provide me the speed i wanted to have, nor did I want to be forced to garbadge collection.
As I guess already several have before, I came out starting developing my own object oriented language, trying to merge c(++) and java the way I think it should be, the compiler at the actually translates to nice plain c code.
http://dtone.sourceforge.net
Well, I'm the only develeper and user of that language, however having quite some fun with it:) (Just keeping hoping that one day the lonlyness vanishes, and some other might enthusiated as well:)
As C#'s name might suggest it is a successor or familar to c, that's wrong.
To my opinion in most facts c# is java in a good disquise, I think c# has been chosen, since that name does it's job as best to masquarade what technology is in, and it did well having a lot of people to believe it's a c(+ü) famliar, what it's not.
C is a language running nativly and orginally developed and optimized for OSes and OS-close applications. However has spread in a far wider area.
Java and C# run in a virtual machine, with it's virtual registers and such, having the application not to worry about details like what registers you cpu has or such.
I personally still think java stands before c#, as the java.class specifications are open, java runs very well on non-windows systems, where the internal.net specs are kept secret, and also you're loosing cross-platform.
However they say nothing about the real speed of a PC. How many wait-states it needs for ram access, how chaching is perfoming, how good simulanous code excecution works (forgot the technical name for that, super###something:).. how fast the FPU is. etc.
When talking to a friend you say wow I got a 1.2 Ghz... you're not saying I've i.e. a supermodern zero-waitstate machine or such.
I read in some news article after it the 1.7 intel started really calculating producing some warmth, it switches down to 750 Mhz.... meaning you've only 1.7 Ghz while you're not calculating anything... or for short calc burst, like moderm operating systems need them for their flashing/fading menues:)
I've seen the same Briannia over and over since UO4... yes it was always slightly different. In UO8 minoc was suddendly an island. SkaraBrea was always doomes etc:)
But actually I'm personally not hot to see just the next incarnation of the same map again.
I enjoyed the new fresh map of Serpent Island...
However the map of UO9 was a try-to-be brittain, where more or less my heart hurted how it looked like. (and how small it was)
"Brittania" I guess this is not trademarked by OSI/EA, also is "Lord British", not as far i know, or "Lord Blackthrone".
But "Utlima" is of course, so I bet it will defintily not been called like that:)
BTW: "Are you with us?" is also a trademark from them:)
Well there are also a lot of embedded application not requiring pure realtime, like best example: PDA's.
An advantage from linux is that it's royality free, yes I guess there are also other embedded OSes being royality free, however VxWorks is not. I donnot remember exactly how high it charges where per CPU upon which it is running, but it was quite an respectable amount.
If played strictly without passes, actually anyone still has 50% no matter what, no matter what colors he sees.
It's the old misthought people have when playing roullete. Even if after 1000 rounds the number 20 has not showed up, in the next turn it is not any more probable than usual.
Why should the color of my hat depend on the colors of two other people? They are all thrown equally.
The hat's are likely to confuse thoughts, make it simpler take dice's in example. If I throw 3 at the time, do they depend on each other? Nah, all combinations have equal chances.
Take the hat's again, say if another two pwople with another's two ramdon hats are behind a wall, and i cannot see them, thus the chances of my hat color differ on the colors of theirs?
Well funny thing is that also a lot of inventions came from reverse engineering nature.
in example example: birds -> airplanes
So if birds would have "patented" their technology to fly in the intergelactig patent office, we weren't allowe to build airplanes:)
For 20 pluto years:)
Oh, something important forgot... Can be proofed any FINITE digit combination shows up in PI at some point? Or one finite combination that will never show up....
does every possible number combination show up in PI? (if searched long enough)
((or maybe also e))
This would be a very interesting mathematical task: Can you proof any digit combiniation shows up in PI at some point? Or can you -proof- that just one given number combination will never show up in PI....
That would be mathemtical very,very intersting....
(Just to preview stuff, -if- PI contains any number does then number PI then violate every existing copyright?:)
Slashdot Mirror
A Magnet?
"Its not like their pointing a gun at us... or are they?"
:) (the one that used be around for some weeks where mundie attacked the GPL...)
And what's with the mundie speech?
But I donnot see why both sides (Free)OpenSource & Microsoft cannot simply concentrante on making good products as they're both supposed to do, but hack on each other...
Small Pox was specialized on a general human weekness same way on native americans as europens, but europeans had already developed counter strategies against it... Will maybe there is some interstellar biohazard capable to infiltrate all kind of life... but could be ever recoqnize it as such? beeing there even after looking at it for days?
And even if live exists on mars, and even if it survifes the space travel, and even if it survives our erath conditions, I hardly doubt that this life is "specifalized" to pentetrate human lifeforms, look all diseases we've today are playing really a lot of swift trick to confuse and pass by our body defensive sytem, and needed time to learn this since we exist. It's like most animal disease's, can it hurt humans? No, because the lifeform is specialized to it's victim. Now how much chance are that even if life exists on mars, it's seciliazied on humans? Or any artificial life?
Yes, I mean why do they bother about it at all?
:o)
:o))
:o)
If windows would be really such much bether, why even look at the tiny ones? Why do they make public speeches? Beeing simply better there would be nothing to worry about.
But in my mortal opinion one major strategies of ms was not to the classic make good products at reasonable prices, but more concentrate on crushing your competitors. Buying their shares (corel), buying of their people (borland), sue them, betray them in contracts (sun), etc.
Now none of these ways works on crushing the competitor GPL/Opensource, they're trying to munch them through public relations.
I mean in what sense do speeches and responses from mundie make windows better? or cheaper?
I've a theory about software growth, however I bet somebody else has it written down already
I think quality of the product in classic software development (closed source, paying devs, selling copies) grows linear. You've more or less the same size of devteam all the way. (yes it may grow if the product sells good, since you can pay more people, but this effect is not going strong in)
However in the OpenSource way you've exponential growth. In the time you get more and more users, you'll get in the same factor devs to your project. The more devs you have the better gets the product, getting you more users, getting you more devs, letting you improve even more quickly.
The difference between these two is the linear classic way starts of quite a lot steeper, while an OpenSource product goes really quite flat in the beginning. But as mathematics say -every- exponential function will at one point fly by any linear one.
In some points windows might really be better than linux (or other not that public OpenSource OSes) today. But how things are evolving the GPL platform it is right now already growing steeper than microsoft. (even if still at some points beeing at a lower point in the graph) it might change quickly in the coming future.
(btw. GPL platform != linux... linux is "only" the kernel, remember?
I know software improvement is something you can hardly messure, nor do I have any experiements or fundamentals to proove it on, so this theory is everything but scientific. So let's call it a "draft"
How I understood the whole sense of intellectual property laws they were created and formed to HELP the authors.
To allow them to do more good stuff (of what ever) be it software, music, painting, books etc.
However to my understanding the whole context of IP laws was not to make somebody "fabulously wealthy".
IP laws were there to support creators of intellectual good, to help them to make it all, and to encorage them to do more good stuff.
However if plain effective usage of IP laws made you the richest man of world, there is something wrong with them. - my opinion
I think this weakness you draw out is actually the strength that makes ms so uncomfortable about it.
* They can't buy ""Linux Inc."", or better "OpenSource Inc".
(rembember linux itself is only the kernel....)
* They can't sue them.
* They can't drag away their key-people.
* They can't start a strategic (manipulative) alliance with them, (and the end betraying them)
* They can't buy 40% non-votable shares
So all the standard strategies to strangle possible competetitors early won't work. That's why they seem to me that's it's actual fear shining through articles (and speeches) like this.
Oops, forgive my grammer, I think one should reread the text before hitting post :(
No jokes about "lickely" please, I see it's pretty stupid...
"""There are limited developer tools available for Linux."""
:o)
:o)
Yes this is absolute true, there is an finite amount of software aviable
But don't tell me windows has an INFINITE amount of development-software aviable
""" ?Open source? means that anyone can get a copy of the source code. Developers can find security weaknesses very easily with Linux. The same is not true with Microsoft Windows."""
Hi-hi-hI-hii!
Especially now that microsoft gave the source to their 100? best costumers, it's pretty lickely it "slipped" through into the hacker comunity, now the difference is the hacker has the source, while the sysadmin doesn't. And also no "discovered" leaks by hackers flow back into the source as fixes as it is the case in linux/*bsd....
When I remember somewhat back into late 80ies early 90ies people asked a lot on magazines (the internet wasn't that big that times :), why is software expensive, i can't affort to pay $100 for my MS-DOS copy (or whatever), the usual authorative answer was, look buddy did you steal your copy? right now for every sold copy we know 10 people are using it, so it's quite logical we've to charge the 10 fold price...
well it seemed like a devil's-circle, if they would go cheaper, people would by products, if more people would buy products they promised to go cheaper.
Then the CD came, for some few years (cd burning was not normally affortable) pirating was heavily reduced, however did the prices go down a single bit? No! They just happily collected the money.
And don't let us forget what made microsoft big. It was msdos and windows 3.* And why did so many people use it? Because it didn't cost them a thing, people that had really some money to spend used big *nix machines from the big vendors that times IBM, HP, etc. however for us small 0815 man, we didn't have money to spend, the 386 times -most- pc's we selled blank, and you asked you're buddy, hey pal can you ""borrow"" me your three msdos disks for a moment please?
when pc's came up with msdos and win 3.* microsoft "free'd" us from the grip of the multi-concerns. That quite expensily selled -their- software preinstalled on -their- hardware systems, so you could really not pirate it unnoticed...
Now the swing turned heavily over and ms is today in the position they opposed once before ~10-20 years.
Let's see if history repeats again, or if things will turn out differently...
Hmm, what's IL?
I donnot know if it is also able to also nativly compile, but it has it's basis on a VM, just like in example VB is doing also, a lot of people not beeing aware of that. (What do you think vbrun.dll is for? It's the VM for VB applications...) Howver also the specs of the VB VM are secret/non-open. I know the the newer versions have an ability to do also native builds, however the normal VB applications and when using the debugger it starts up in a VM.
I've developed for both c(++) and java.
:) (Just keeping hoping that one day the lonlyness vanishes, and some other might enthusiated as well :)
I find c++ not satisfying, especially when compared to java language structure.
However java didn't provide me the speed i wanted to have, nor did I want to be forced to garbadge collection.
As I guess already several have before, I came out starting developing my own object oriented language, trying to merge c(++) and java the way I think it should be, the compiler at the actually translates to nice plain c code.
http://dtone.sourceforge.net
Well, I'm the only develeper and user of that language, however having quite some fun with it
As C#'s name might suggest it is a successor or familar to c, that's wrong.
.class specifications are open, java runs very well on non-windows systems, where the internal .net specs are kept secret, and also you're loosing cross-platform.
To my opinion in most facts c# is java in a good disquise, I think c# has been chosen, since that name does it's job as best to masquarade what technology is in, and it did well having a lot of people to believe it's a c(+ü) famliar, what it's not.
C is a language running nativly and orginally developed and optimized for OSes and OS-close applications. However has spread in a far wider area.
Java and C# run in a virtual machine, with it's virtual registers and such, having the application not to worry about details like what registers you cpu has or such.
I personally still think java stands before c#, as the java
Yes correctly MGHz are the marketing value....
:).. how fast the FPU is. etc.
However they say nothing about the real speed of a PC. How many wait-states it needs for ram access, how chaching is perfoming, how good simulanous code excecution works (forgot the technical name for that, super###something
When talking to a friend you say wow I got a 1.2 Ghz... you're not saying I've i.e. a supermodern zero-waitstate machine or such.
I read in some news article after it the 1.7 intel started really calculating producing some warmth, it switches down to 750 Mhz .... meaning you've only 1.7 Ghz while you're not calculating anything ... or for short calc burst, like moderm operating systems need them for their flashing/fading menues :)
I've seen the same Briannia over and over since UO4... yes it was always slightly different. In UO8 minoc was suddendly an island. SkaraBrea was always doomes etc :)
:)
:)
But actually I'm personally not hot to see just the next incarnation of the same map again.
I enjoyed the new fresh map of Serpent Island...
However the map of UO9 was a try-to-be brittain, where more or less my heart hurted how it looked like. (and how small it was)
"Brittania" I guess this is not trademarked by OSI/EA, also is "Lord British", not as far i know, or "Lord Blackthrone".
But "Utlima" is of course, so I bet it will defintily not been called like that
BTW: "Are you with us?" is also a trademark from them
Is there anything Mircosoft NOT does?
Anything where they say, "this is not our business"?
I personally think they're slowly loosing focus.
""""Microsoft has thousands of developers to throw behind whatever they want. """"
:)
Well didn't exactly the same count for IBM?
What important role plays IBM today compared to the good ol' times?
Well there are also a lot of embedded application not requiring pure realtime, like best example: PDA's.
An advantage from linux is that it's royality free, yes I guess there are also other embedded OSes being royality free, however VxWorks is not. I donnot remember exactly how high it charges where per CPU upon which it is running, but it was quite an respectable amount.
If played strictly without passes, actually anyone still has 50% no matter what, no matter what colors he sees.
It's the old misthought people have when playing roullete. Even if after 1000 rounds the number 20 has not showed up, in the next turn it is not any more probable than usual.
Why should the color of my hat depend on the colors of two other people? They are all thrown equally.
The hat's are likely to confuse thoughts, make it simpler take dice's in example. If I throw 3 at the time, do they depend on each other? Nah, all combinations have equal chances.
Take the hat's again, say if another two pwople with another's two ramdon hats are behind a wall, and i cannot see them, thus the chances of my hat color differ on the colors of theirs?
Well funny thing is that also a lot of inventions came from reverse engineering nature. in example example: birds -> airplanes So if birds would have "patented" their technology to fly in the intergelactig patent office, we weren't allowe to build airplanes :)
For 20 pluto years :)
NT
Oh, something important forgot... Can be proofed any FINITE digit combination shows up in PI at some point? Or one finite combination that will never show up....
does every possible number combination show up in PI? (if searched long enough) ((or maybe also e)) This would be a very interesting mathematical task: Can you proof any digit combiniation shows up in PI at some point? Or can you -proof- that just one given number combination will never show up in PI.... That would be mathemtical very,very intersting.... (Just to preview stuff, -if- PI contains any number does then number PI then violate every existing copyright? :)