It never stops to amaze me the length to which some/.ers will go to try to find faults with how economics work.
If the company outsourcing does not stipulate that the contractor has to respect the local copyright law then they deserve whatever they get, which would be the same in any other case since a company is open to the same improperties without mattering at all the location of the consulting company. A local outsourcing company could also introduce copyrighted work, so I see this lame attempt to seed FUD associating this problem with overseas outsourcing as a very crass reasoning aimed to explaining, once again, how some countries lack a competitive advantage.
In which sense was MS "right"???? Morally, maybe. Legally, give me a break. Morality and legality are issues that non necessarily intersect.
MS was found in violation of a patent that the holder registered legally and defended it in consequence. If the US patent system is in shambles that is a completely different matter, MS was not in the right as proven by a court of law.
With SCO we have a company that has nothing, has been shown to be lying in a public forum and in ignorance of what is in their own obsolete code.
What you want is a software company that also provides consultancy.
Let me tell you what happens with that: the software company the software and sell it to you, then comes the consultancy part (that where you get the brochures, training, and the system set for you, all this followed by maintenance and hand holding. No warranites though, read your licenses).
Here you have an intrinsec conflict of interest, this company will do the upmost to keey you locked with them. I know of companies that when they train you will not teach you all the tricks (reason: that bites in their consultancu side of the business). There are companies (most, all) that let you down with perfectly working systems whnt the price of the consultancy and suppot of your application is uneconomical. In other words, the consultancy work you need becomes irreperably attached to your provider's interest on their own software. Your needs may or may not be important, but they are not their main concern.
With OSS applications you find the software you need, make sure you have all the code, and then ask bids form consultants to customize that software.
OSS demands more work on the side of the "client", specially during the analysis and design phases of a given project, but once the solution is in place then you are free to hire the best consultants, change the code, do the support yourself or whatever is best for you and your organization.
If you have found OSS software that almost fits your needs, then ask the developpers for case examples of successful uses of their software and then try to hire the respective consultants.
It does not work all the time (maybe the implementators of a solution are employess of a company that is not into consultancy) but to rennounce to the freedom and costs savings that OSS provides just for lack of brochures and slime ball salesmen is most regretable.
Not even in Presidential systems the President has so much power as to mandata absolutely everything, in a system like the UK's there ministers and senior civili servants with ideas of their own, in spite of being appointed by Blair.
Also it would be terribly bad for a PM to find leaked news about ordering his ministers and the civil service to use his "friend"'s products in place of looking for alternatives that better serve the British people.
Two atoms moving in exactly opossite directions at the speed of light from the big bang would today be 30 billion years appart (if we take your second guess).
I will leave it to professional astronomers/cosmologists to mercilessly point my ignorance or clarify this....
AD is LDAP or the other way around. The point is that that point is not a point at all.
What is the downside for a 6th grader of not having Office? It is not like children go around sharing Word documents to their clients... It is like somebody saying "oh poor students, they don't have pens to write their assignment". Ludicrous.
Why would schools want to run MS Office? Mental blockage and lack of respect for budgetary concerns are the only reasons I can think of.
If you go back to that article (vain hope) you will find tha the company that issued that study is completely discredited as a source of trustworthy information.
This is your fashion: it is cheaper to outsource, at least in the short term. This is here to stay (is not even a fashion, it has been common sense since the early 90s). If your company makes doughnouts why should it devote resources to accounting, IT or cleaning? All this can be done by specialists in the respective fields. And if those highly skilled specialists happen to live in Gujarat and charge you substantially less for the outsourcing, you, as the person responsible for increasing shareholders value (and you own stock options) would be mad not to take the oportunity.
End of the history. In an economic system where quarterly reports are king you did not expect long term vision, or did you?
Honestly, why people playing games compulsively need to validate the love for their hooby with spurious claims like this?
Games are an untilitarian product, and as long as this is what takes precedence over aesthetic values, games will rigthly continue to be classed as what they are: a passtime.
Netscape is gone thanks to anticompetitve practices.
The PC manufacturers are hostages to MS.
But all is well, and any concerns are just overblown stupidity in/.
We are approaching the IT monoculture were one company alone has the power to decide where the whole industry is going.
But no, that must be idiots like me, that when faced with a XP machine for the first time could not copy tracks of my CD unless it was done in MS's propietary format.
If email communication had to be somehow authenticated, then you could demand that anybody sending you an email should authenticate himself with your email server first.
That way people without the necessary authentication could not send.
I know there are tools out there that already do that, what is missing is that a few big players in the ISP/ email market (Yahoo, MS, AOL) come together and change the defacto standard way machines interchange email with each other.
The software you mention is accountable and transparent, ideally placed to allow citizens to keep an eye in how things are done.
The products you mention come to fill a need that was already there, there is no stopping private companies to offer products that adhere to open standards.
To save money is not the only responsibility of a goverment. A goverment should be accountable and auditable, if possible by any person or organization that wishes to do so.
Accountability, transparency and protection against forced obsolescence should have far greater priority than price for a democratic goverment.
Closed software was an stop gap measure to allow goverments to take advantage of IT, but now that there is software that fits better in a democratic society goverments should pause and think which technology is more in sync with the needs of institutions accountable to the people in general.
Price is and should not be the only, not even the most important, consideration when the goverments spend money in our behalf.
It is not a religious issue, it is an ideological, political one.
To people that have few or no convictions, these seem similar but they arent.
Religious convictions are born out of inmmovable teachings.
Political and ideological convictions normally are born out of careful thought about how one wants the world to be.
To insinuate that people in favour of free software are somehow comparable to religious fundamentalists is pretty disingenious and a horse that has been beaten beyond recognition and that does not give the person saying it any more credibility.
A product may be technically the best for a certain technical task.
But a goverment has many other considerations to take into account, specially in a democratic society.
Is closed source software auditable by the goverment? Nope, normally not. And if it is you are bound by multiple NDAs that make it a minefiled to disclose possible problems.
Does closed software provide indeminity against wongful use, harming third parties, etc? Nope. Read the EULAs.
Is closed software auditbale by independent third parties? Nope.
The technical merits of some technology should not be the only considerations, and in the case of a democratic goverment, may not even be the most important one.
How do you , as a citizen, ensure transparency and accountability for software of which you don't have the source code. Voting software for example? Do you trust the goverment for that? Nope, I would not, I would like anybody to be able an audit the software used.
To be frank, goverments got away for far too long using closed source software. That kind of software has its place on society, but not in goverment where every single thing that is done shuld be fully accountable to anybody that wishes to see that things are done the right way.
Or at least I believe it should in democratic countries.
How many companies can provide the Windows set of "solutions": 1.
How many companies can provide OSS solutions: many. And new entrants have very low barriers of entry to try to do so if they feel so inclined.
Talk about misunderstanding (in purpose?) the meaning of the word monopoly.
Honestly, what are those people smoking? WHo are they supporters? Who advises them in IT matters? And in anticompetitive legal matters?
Can somebody send them one or two of the many fully documented cases (Amazon, Munich) in which Linux based offerings were cheaper than closed source based ones?
Please, can somebody educate them in case the barbarities they are saying come out of ignorance and not of knowing misrepresentation?
If you are a big company, yeah, you can get the "just fix it" treatment.
Or if you are a goverment, you may get that.
But for the rest of the world you may just forget it, "just fix it" does not work simply because you can't afford it. "Just fix it" is a reality that very few dealing with software companies experience.
Even big companies live under forced obsolecense: big companies with relatively stable (for Windows) set ups using NT4 are forced to migrate. The "just fix it" is a falacy that software companies perpetutate but that UT savvy people should dismiss as the half truth it is.
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Nobody is forcing your unadventurous self to boot Linux in your machine.
Leave that to people with natural curiosity and a passion for experimentation.
It never stops to amaze me the length to which some /.ers will go to try to find faults with how economics work.
If the company outsourcing does not stipulate that the contractor has to respect the local copyright law then they deserve whatever they get, which would be the same in any other case since a company is open to the same improperties without mattering at all the location of the consulting company. A local outsourcing company could also introduce copyrighted work, so I see this lame attempt to seed FUD associating this problem with overseas outsourcing as a very crass reasoning aimed to explaining, once again, how some countries lack a competitive advantage.
In which sense was MS "right"???? Morally, maybe. Legally, give me a break. Morality and legality are issues that non necessarily intersect.
MS was found in violation of a patent that the holder registered legally and defended it in consequence. If the US patent system is in shambles that is a completely different matter, MS was not in the right as proven by a court of law.
With SCO we have a company that has nothing, has been shown to be lying in a public forum and in ignorance of what is in their own obsolete code.
I think you are thorhougly confussed.
What you want is a software company that also provides consultancy.
Let me tell you what happens with that: the software company the software and sell it to you, then comes the consultancy part (that where you get the brochures, training, and the system set for you, all this followed by maintenance and hand holding. No warranites though, read your licenses).
Here you have an intrinsec conflict of interest, this company will do the upmost to keey you locked with them. I know of companies that when they train you will not teach you all the tricks (reason: that bites in their consultancu side of the business).
There are companies (most, all) that let you down with perfectly working systems whnt the price of the consultancy and suppot of your application is uneconomical. In other words, the consultancy work you need becomes irreperably attached to your provider's interest on their own software. Your needs may or may not be important, but they are not their main concern.
With OSS applications you find the software you need, make sure you have all the code, and then ask bids form consultants to customize that software.
OSS demands more work on the side of the "client", specially during the analysis and design phases of a given project, but once the solution is in place then you are free to hire the best consultants, change the code, do the support yourself or whatever is best for you and your organization.
If you have found OSS software that almost fits your needs, then ask the developpers for case examples of successful uses of their software and then try to hire the respective consultants.
It does not work all the time (maybe the implementators of a solution are employess of a company that is not into consultancy) but to rennounce to the freedom and costs savings that OSS provides just for lack of brochures and slime ball salesmen is most regretable.
Blair can't have his finger in all the pies.
Not even in Presidential systems the President has so much power as to mandata absolutely everything, in a system like the UK's there ministers and senior civili servants with ideas of their own, in spite of being appointed by Blair.
Also it would be terribly bad for a PM to find leaked news about ordering his ministers and the civil service to use his "friend"'s products in place of looking for alternatives that better serve the British people.
Don't make the waters murkier.
The "may be harmful" meme should be stopped.
The necesity or not of WiFi is for each organization to decide and should not be used as an argument while discussing safety issues.
Two atoms moving in exactly opossite directions at the speed of light from the big bang would today be 30 billion years appart (if we take your second guess).
I will leave it to professional astronomers/cosmologists to mercilessly point my ignorance or clarify this....
You are joking.
AD is LDAP or the other way around. The point is that that point is not a point at all.
What is the downside for a 6th grader of not having Office? It is not like children go around sharing Word documents to their clients... It is like somebody saying "oh poor students, they don't have pens to write their assignment". Ludicrous.
Why would schools want to run MS Office? Mental blockage and lack of respect for budgetary concerns are the only reasons I can think of.
Since when administration is reduced to fix it or ghost it?
Security, security, security.
You can't ghost your way out of that, and given the nature of todays's technology you need a competent IT support group to provide for that.
Give me a break, how anybody sensible can consider a good policy to delegate administration and problem troubleshooting in neophytes?
... spectorating all that rubish about militarizing space, the Moon begins to look like an attractive strategic location.
It may give a huge military strategic advantage to its "owner".
If fear is what is going to get us out of this planet, soo be it. The sooner space travel becomes a reality the better.
If you go back to that article (vain hope) you will find tha the company that issued that study is completely discredited as a source of trustworthy information.
Where is the cave you have been living in?
Phone companies made a killing with text messaging (thanks to teenagers) while WAP has languished completely unused.
This is your fashion: it is cheaper to outsource, at least in the short term. This is here to stay (is not even a fashion, it has been common sense since the early 90s). If your company makes doughnouts why should it devote resources to accounting, IT or cleaning? All this can be done by specialists in the respective fields. And if those highly skilled specialists happen to live in Gujarat and charge you substantially less for the outsourcing, you, as the person responsible for increasing shareholders value (and you own stock options) would be mad not to take the oportunity.
End of the history. In an economic system where quarterly reports are king you did not expect long term vision, or did you?
Truth hurts.
Honestly, why people playing games compulsively need to validate the love for their hooby with spurious claims like this?
Games are an untilitarian product, and as long as this is what takes precedence over aesthetic values, games will rigthly continue to be classed as what they are: a passtime.
MS is found guilty of abusing its monopoly power.
/.
Netscape is gone thanks to anticompetitve practices.
The PC manufacturers are hostages to MS.
But all is well, and any concerns are just overblown stupidity in
We are approaching the IT monoculture were one company alone has the power to decide where the whole industry is going.
But no, that must be idiots like me, that when faced with a XP machine for the first time could not copy tracks of my CD unless it was done in MS's propietary format.
Fucking paranoid me....
If email communication had to be somehow authenticated, then you could demand that anybody sending you an email should authenticate himself with your email server first.
That way people without the necessary authentication could not send.
I know there are tools out there that already do that, what is missing is that a few big players in the ISP/ email market (Yahoo, MS, AOL) come together and change the defacto standard way machines interchange email with each other.
The software you mention is accountable and transparent, ideally placed to allow citizens to keep an eye in how things are done.
The products you mention come to fill a need that was already there, there is no stopping private companies to offer products that adhere to open standards.
To save money is not the only responsibility of a goverment. A goverment should be accountable and auditable, if possible by any person or organization that wishes to do so.
Accountability, transparency and protection against forced obsolescence should have far greater priority than price for a democratic goverment.
Closed software was an stop gap measure to allow goverments to take advantage of IT, but now that there is software that fits better in a democratic society goverments should pause and think which technology is more in sync with the needs of institutions accountable to the people in general.
Price is and should not be the only, not even the most important, consideration when the goverments spend money in our behalf.
It is not a religious issue, it is an ideological, political one.
To people that have few or no convictions, these seem similar but they arent.
Religious convictions are born out of inmmovable teachings.
Political and ideological convictions normally are born out of careful thought about how one wants the world to be.
To insinuate that people in favour of free software are somehow comparable to religious fundamentalists is pretty disingenious and a horse that has been beaten beyond recognition and that does not give the person saying it any more credibility.
A product may be technically the best for a certain technical task.
But a goverment has many other considerations to take into account, specially in a democratic society.
Is closed source software auditable by the goverment? Nope, normally not. And if it is you are bound by multiple NDAs that make it a minefiled to disclose possible problems.
Does closed software provide indeminity against wongful use, harming third parties, etc? Nope. Read the EULAs.
Is closed software auditbale by independent third parties? Nope.
The technical merits of some technology should not be the only considerations, and in the case of a democratic goverment, may not even be the most important one.
How do you , as a citizen, ensure transparency and accountability for software of which you don't have the source code. Voting software for example? Do you trust the goverment for that? Nope, I would not, I would like anybody to be able an audit the software used.
To be frank, goverments got away for far too long using closed source software. That kind of software has its place on society, but not in goverment where every single thing that is done shuld be fully accountable to anybody that wishes to see that things are done the right way.
Or at least I believe it should in democratic countries.
.... charging the buyer when he actually buys the thing?
Like most sales or VAT taxes actually.
How many companies can provide the Windows set of "solutions": 1.
How many companies can provide OSS solutions: many. And new entrants have very low barriers of entry to try to do so if they feel so inclined.
Talk about misunderstanding (in purpose?) the meaning of the word monopoly.
Honestly, what are those people smoking? WHo are they supporters? Who advises them in IT matters? And in anticompetitive legal matters?
Can somebody send them one or two of the many fully documented cases (Amazon, Munich) in which Linux based offerings were cheaper than closed source based ones?
Please, can somebody educate them in case the barbarities they are saying come out of ignorance and not of knowing misrepresentation?
If you are a big company, yeah, you can get the "just fix it" treatment.
Or if you are a goverment, you may get that.
But for the rest of the world you may just forget it, "just fix it" does not work simply because you can't afford it. "Just fix it" is a reality that very few dealing with software companies experience.
Even big companies live under forced obsolecense: big companies with relatively stable (for Windows) set ups using NT4 are forced to migrate. The "just fix it" is a falacy that software companies perpetutate but that UT savvy people should dismiss as the half truth it is.