This license is less free than others because of the new provisions. I predict that the new wording will drive more new projects to BSD style licensing.
heh. That depends on what you mean by free:
A) Free as in free to do what you like with. eg, GPLv2 is more "free" in this sense because businesses have more "freedom" to DRM or patent encumber software under this license.
B) GPLv3 has more restrictions in place to guarantee that software licensed under it is not encumbered by patents or DRM restrictions. Thus it guarantees that DRM and patent restrictions don't restrict people "freedom" to use the software.
BSD style is more free in terms of (A) and less free in terms of (B). For example I am "Free" to contribute secretly patented code to your BSD project and then take you to court for patent infringement when you distribute said software. Is that a freedom you intended to grant me or would you actually have preferred to use a more restrictive license after all?
Let's say I wrote a book on German history and after publishing it once I was requested to remove the chapters on the Holocaust and republished it for the german readership at the request of the German Nazi party.
At what point exactly does this sort of thing become OK? * When I have other books that i publish in germany? * When there is a lot of money at stake? * When my book might be banned altogether? * When other publishers are removing all references to the holocaust?
I think perhaps if I sent them the book with a chapter titled "holocaust" and white pages reading "removed at the request of the Nazi party" then it only seems a bit evil. But if I was removing all references to the chapter and you couldn't even see the title then it seems like I am actively participating in 1984-esque regime.
Everyone is running IBM architecture still today and Apple was screwed precisely because IBM missed a beat, it's design was reverse engineered and IBM's monopoly was broken by cheaper clones. Windows was popular because it was out before OS2 and ran on all the crappy hardware.
Microsofts entry into the server market was obviously an attack on Unix and they have gained much ground helped by the ever faster x86 architecture and cheaper wintel pricing at the low end of the market. Obviously this happened after there OS was re-written from scratch by VMS developers. I'm not sure how many systems are converted from unix to NT but unix systems are eventually decomissioned and replaced by either NT or Linux system which is only going to happen faster now IBM is pouring man-hours into Linux.
A lot depends on if Microsoft can keep the target moving fast enough. I think with the OS this is hard as I haven't seen much innovation coming from osX that they can steal, possibly document sharing and collaborative working in Office 2009 might keep them ahead of the game for a bit longer. And then of course there is.NET whilst the development tools are fairly crap, the platform has the advantage that they could fix some of the crappy bits of Java.
I'm not sure you could say a move to opensource would form a completely new monopoly (by your logic at least) since IBM has been looking for a way to regain control of the x86 market for some time. First by co-developing an x86 Unix with Caldera/SCO and then as they saw the market swinging away from unix by contributing very similar high end x86 code into Linux and sucking up to the open source community. Still, i'm not complaining.
every desktop and laptop computer in the world can trace its ancestry back to that original IBM PC line, and nearly all of them are running software written by the company that IBM contracted to supply an OS for that original PC. It _is_ the same monopoly with the same behaviour -- the only thing that has changed is the names of the people who are running it.
Ok so we switched from a hardware monopoly owned by IBM to an Operating System monopoly owned by Microsoft. I fail to see quite how this is the same monopoly, unless you define whatever the current monopoly in the IT industry is as the same monopoly.
As I've already mentioned I think large multinationals and government may start demanding an open document format for future compatibility reasons and if MS falls into line then the monopoly is already heavily crippled. I also think home users will use whatever is the cheapest office suit that is "good enough" and can read/write normal word files they use at work/school/government.
The lock in to VBA-backend databases is more of an issue but I think you exaggerate the usage of this. A business could still mandate all normal word documents are saved in an open document format but allow MS office VBA applications. My view is that if VBA excel spreadsheet applications did die a death the financial industry as a whole would be better a place anyway, unlikely as it is. As you are probably aware some governments *are* now telling microsoft that they might switch to a different office suite unless MS support an open document format in MS office.
Microsofts strength has always been seeing another companies new idea, cloning the technology and adding it into the windows portfolio.
I think the "new" monopoly company after MS could be using open source technologies and might even be web based. With so many companies now jumping on the opensource bandwagon MS finds itself being attacked on all fronts (OS, WebBrowser, Office, google-internet) by a nebulous enemy that for the first time in history is eating it from the cheap end up in the same way as MS did to Unix.
If I was to put money on it then I would guess that over the next 25 years microsoft will have a substantially smaller proportion of worldwide IT revenues than it's had over the last 25 years.
I wouldn't understimate the effect of price, most people do not like paying for things if they can get by with something free! Most peole would also be happy with MS Office 5 years ago from a functionality perspective. Also, most people don't use VBA(or even know what it is) nor do they access databases from office files. If some goverments/countries switch to OpenOffice it's likely some companies will also switch to OpenOffice. The more users it has the more developer hours will get put in and the more pressure will be on microsoft to support it's doc formats.
Microsoft may be unsucessful at blocking OEMs from installing OpenOffice/StarOffice on new PCs in the wealthy west too. Once one OEM rolls out free unlimited office suites there is going to be more pressure on the others (OEMs even on Dell).
Once upon a time no one thought IBM would lose it's dominant position either.
I pretty much agree with the gist of what you are saying.
I have no objection to OEMs choosing to distribute just Windows, based on it's merits. However, Microsoft structure their deals with OEMs to force those OEMs to distribute and push Windows exclusively on the desktop otherwise they can't compete with the OEMs who *are* in bed with MS.
They do this for the same reason as they heavily drop the price of Windows in developing countries to ensure that Windows and it's competitors are not judged on their relative merits prior to the monopoly being established. After people are locked into windows they can always up the prices later.
Of course Microsoft isn't the only company to do this. Walkers buy up all the shelf space in shops so competing brands can't display new products.
As long as microsoft keeps bribing OEMs to only push Windows and it keeps it's binary dump office document format it sucessfully stops competing OS's from even having a *chance* of entering the mainstream market.
In fact I would say the biggest threat to Microsofts monopoly is OpenOffice and the pro "open-document-standard" lobby groups, whom, if they are successful, might break part of the MS monopoly. Once this is done some governments/states might use OpenOffice. If china/brazil start using OpenOffice/Linux rather than MSOffice/Windows I would guess the major hardware/software vendors would have to start supporting Linux and the issues about what version of linux to target would get solved in one way or another (standardised package format based on meta data etc,)
People aren't given a fair choice between running the Windows and Linux *OS* since the software,drivers and support for Windows is not available for Linux.
It's what we call a vicious circle and what the EU and US antitrust departments call a monopoly.
That in its-self is not a problem but Microsoft also uses unethical and possibly illegal deals with OEMs as one of it's many methods of what I and various anti-trust lawyers consider are illegal practices to ensure they maintain their monopoly.
This knowledge is not some hidden conspiracy, as you put it. There have in fact been several high profile anti-trust cases that Microsoft have basically lost. It's just that none of the proposals to open up the software market to fair competition and stop the Microsofts monopoly abuses have been successful.
That was Mr. Salesguy Number 3. Mr. Salesguy 1 & 2 got fired for not managing to sell some product or feature that is 9 months late and was incorrectly specified in the first place.
DHTML effects like moving text or images are much faster in IE than Firefox. And I mean an order of magnitude faster. The bugs have been sitting in the firefox bugtraq since the early releases.
Mind you DHTML/AJAX stuff tends to leak memory in IE if you don't implement work arounds, so in my case I have a slow implementation in firefox or one that runs fast but crashes IE after a couple of hours.
Of course the whole web platform was never designed for writing client side apps so it's not suprising using the technology in this way is either slow or unstable in both the major browsers.
I suppose it's possible, they could threaten to filter googles traffic unless they coughed up. But wouldn't their paying customers be a little upset if they blocked the most popular site on the internet?
that would be a shame. MS office is already pretty established in the developed world if we could make Openoffice run in less ram it could be viable on the new $100 laptop or on the refurbished computers charities ship to developing countries.
At the moment the only decent office suite that will run on 64meg is MS office which requires windows. Open office is struggling to compete even with 128.
Maybe they could make it more modular and lazy load the modules as needed that way they could be unload them when short of ram. That would allow the system to start up quicker and use less ram in 99% of cases.
"The business i'm in is really competitive and our margins aren't big enough. Companies higher up the food chain have better business models and make more money. That's not fair"
In other news: Farmers want more money from Supermarkets. Mining companies want more money from Processor Manufacturers. Paper manufacturers want more money from the sale of modern art.
Everyone who bulk sells something cheap is going to see someone else making wads of cash higher up the commercial food chain. The reality is can you either a) set up a cartel so you can illegally overcharge or b) offer the same service yourself and actually compete.
In this case my guess is that they can't do diddly squat about it.
Expensive enterprise consulting. They've moved up the stack from hardware to OS to software and development tools up to consulting. Now they will "solve your business problems" by sending in expensive J2EE consultants.
Banks love this kind of thing, they can't waste enough money just by paying contractors (rather than fulltime employees), so instead they pay IBM oodles of cash to borrow their software developers and consultants.
I haven't quite worked out why, possibly so the middle managers in the banks have someone else to blame when the project isn't completed 2 years later.
Sure if i had a spare million to invest and it wasn't worth putting it into drugs research I could invest it in a chocolate company or a retail outlet or a petrol company.
Investors want to make money they aren't going to divert the money they might have spent on a pharmaceuticals to building drinking-wells in africa or something.
Personally I think some other kind of arrangement could be made like basing the pricing of patented drugs in each country on that countries percentage of global GDP.
Good luck to 'em all, I say; saving lives trumps patents.
While i agree with the sentiment, can't you extend that argument to say we should ignore all medical patents even within the US. But without *some* kind of protection from cheap cloning of drugs this might result in many drugs never being developed.
Rather than saying "saving lives trumps patents" perhaps one should argue that in this particular case the number of lives saved in the short term will probably outweigh the damage it will do to longer term drugs development and life saving.
good, well-maintained, and BSD licensed replication software available.
Desperately looking for replication software that could be used for single-master multi-slave replication for postgresql (1 master 10 slaves, enterprise enviroment can't afford downtime).
Which one of the projects are you talking about? The only one we've tried was so unpolished we felt that we could have kludged the table level copying functions ourselves.
Seems like that'd be the definition of compilation.
Yes any time of compilation, my preferred type is a caching JIT compiler built into a virtual machine.
Or C, or C++, or perl, or fortran, or any language.
Sure i don't care about the language as long as it runs on my VM which of course won't support direct memory addressing and guarantees all objects are deallocated when they are no longer referenced, etc, Of course, that language isn't quite going to be like C or C++ anymore once we've taken out those dangerous error prone features and added a better security model. It could use some C++ like syntax though. I don't know what we'd call it, maybe C#. A kind of C/C++ for this decade.
I much prefer to trust my Virtual machine than hope every C coder in the world is using all the software libraries, compile time and runtime safety features/checks you mention.
Slashdot Mirror
This license is less free than others because of the new provisions. I predict that the new wording will drive more new projects to BSD style licensing.
heh. That depends on what you mean by free:
A) Free as in free to do what you like with. eg, GPLv2 is more "free" in this sense because businesses have more "freedom" to DRM or patent encumber software under this license.
B) GPLv3 has more restrictions in place to guarantee that software licensed under it is not encumbered by patents or DRM restrictions. Thus it guarantees that DRM and patent restrictions don't restrict people "freedom" to use the software.
BSD style is more free in terms of (A) and less free in terms of (B). For example I am "Free" to contribute secretly patented code to your BSD project and then take you to court for patent infringement when you distribute said software. Is that a freedom you intended to grant me or would you actually have preferred to use a more restrictive license after all?
Let's say I wrote a book on German history and after publishing it once I was requested to remove the chapters on the Holocaust and republished it for the german readership at the request of the German Nazi party.
At what point exactly does this sort of thing become OK?
* When I have other books that i publish in germany?
* When there is a lot of money at stake?
* When my book might be banned altogether?
* When other publishers are removing all references to the holocaust?
I think perhaps if I sent them the book with a chapter titled "holocaust" and white pages reading "removed at the request of the Nazi party" then it only seems a bit evil.
But if I was removing all references to the chapter and you couldn't even see the title then it seems like I am actively participating in 1984-esque regime.
heh, me too
Microsoft does not own Gator/Claria.
Everyone is running IBM architecture still today and Apple was screwed precisely because IBM missed a beat, it's design was reverse engineered and IBM's monopoly was broken by cheaper clones. Windows was popular because it was out before OS2 and ran on all the crappy hardware.
.NET whilst the development tools are fairly crap, the platform has the advantage that they could fix some of the crappy bits of Java.
Microsofts entry into the server market was obviously an attack on Unix and they have gained much ground helped by the ever faster x86 architecture and cheaper wintel pricing at the low end of the market. Obviously this happened after there OS was re-written from scratch by VMS developers. I'm not sure how many systems are converted from unix to NT but unix systems are eventually decomissioned and replaced by either NT or Linux system which is only going to happen faster now IBM is pouring man-hours into Linux.
A lot depends on if Microsoft can keep the target moving fast enough. I think with the OS this is hard as I haven't seen much innovation coming from osX that they can steal, possibly document sharing and collaborative working in Office 2009 might keep them ahead of the game for a bit longer. And then of course there is
I'm not sure you could say a move to opensource would form a completely new monopoly (by your logic at least) since IBM has been looking for a way to regain control of the x86 market for some time. First by co-developing an x86 Unix with Caldera/SCO and then as they saw the market swinging away from unix by contributing very similar high end x86 code into Linux and sucking up to the open source community. Still, i'm not complaining.
every desktop and laptop computer in the world can trace its ancestry back to that original IBM PC line, and nearly all of them are running software written by the company that IBM contracted to supply an OS for that original PC. It _is_ the same monopoly with the same behaviour -- the only thing that has changed is the names of the people who are running it.
;)
Ok so we switched from a hardware monopoly owned by IBM to an Operating System monopoly owned by Microsoft. I fail to see quite how this is the same monopoly, unless you define whatever the current monopoly in the IT industry is as the same monopoly.
As I've already mentioned I think large multinationals and government may start demanding an open document format for future compatibility reasons and if MS falls into line then the monopoly is already heavily crippled. I also think home users will use whatever is the cheapest office suit that is "good enough" and can read/write normal word files they use at work/school/government.
The lock in to VBA-backend databases is more of an issue but I think you exaggerate the usage of this. A business could still mandate all normal word documents are saved in an open document format but allow MS office VBA applications. My view is that if VBA excel spreadsheet applications did die a death the financial industry as a whole would be better a place anyway, unlikely as it is. As you are probably aware some governments *are* now telling microsoft that they might switch to a different office suite unless MS support an open document format in MS office.
Microsofts strength has always been seeing another companies new idea, cloning the technology and adding it into the windows portfolio.
I think the "new" monopoly company after MS could be using open source technologies and might even be web based. With so many companies now jumping on the opensource bandwagon MS finds itself being attacked on all fronts (OS, WebBrowser, Office, google-internet) by a nebulous enemy that for the first time in history is eating it from the cheap end up in the same way as MS did to Unix.
If I was to put money on it then I would guess that over the next 25 years microsoft will have a substantially smaller proportion of worldwide IT revenues than it's had over the last 25 years.
Time will tell
I think you are unnecessarily pessimistic.
I wouldn't understimate the effect of price, most people do not like paying for things if they can get by with something free! Most peole would also be happy with MS Office 5 years ago from a functionality perspective. Also, most people don't use VBA(or even know what it is) nor do they access databases from office files.
If some goverments/countries switch to OpenOffice it's likely some companies will also switch to OpenOffice. The more users it has the more developer hours will get put in and the more pressure will be on microsoft to support it's doc formats.
Microsoft may be unsucessful at blocking OEMs from installing OpenOffice/StarOffice on new PCs in the wealthy west too. Once one OEM rolls out free unlimited office suites there is going to be more pressure on the others (OEMs even on Dell).
Once upon a time no one thought IBM would lose it's dominant position either.
I pretty much agree with the gist of what you are saying.
I have no objection to OEMs choosing to distribute just Windows, based on it's merits.
However, Microsoft structure their deals with OEMs to force those OEMs to distribute and push Windows exclusively on the desktop otherwise they can't compete with the OEMs who *are* in bed with MS.
They do this for the same reason as they heavily drop the price of Windows in developing countries to ensure that Windows and it's competitors are not judged on their relative merits prior to the monopoly being established. After people are locked into windows they can always up the prices later.
Of course Microsoft isn't the only company to do this. Walkers buy up all the shelf space in shops so competing brands can't display new products.
As long as microsoft keeps bribing OEMs to only push Windows and it keeps it's binary dump office document format it sucessfully stops competing OS's from even having a *chance* of entering the mainstream market.
In fact I would say the biggest threat to Microsofts monopoly is OpenOffice and the pro "open-document-standard" lobby groups, whom, if they are successful, might break part of the MS monopoly. Once this is done some governments/states might use OpenOffice. If china/brazil start using OpenOffice/Linux rather than MSOffice/Windows I would guess the major hardware/software vendors would have to start supporting Linux and the issues about what version of linux to target would get solved in one way or another (standardised package format based on meta data etc,)
People aren't given a fair choice between running the Windows and Linux *OS* since the software,drivers and support for Windows is not available for Linux.
It's what we call a vicious circle and what the EU and US antitrust departments call a monopoly.
That in its-self is not a problem but Microsoft also uses unethical and possibly illegal deals with OEMs as one of it's many methods of what I and various anti-trust lawyers consider are illegal practices to ensure they maintain their monopoly.
This knowledge is not some hidden conspiracy, as you put it. There have in fact been several high profile anti-trust cases that Microsoft have basically lost. It's just that none of the proposals to open up the software market to fair competition and stop the Microsofts monopoly abuses have been successful.
I wonder if there will be some other design problems we can laugh at instead.
That explains a lot, how many dead cats are there in america?
That said some of the points are valid, but the article was basically showing how those same things were valid at one point for using frames as well.
For "valid at one point" consider using "always valid".
I wonder if we would get the same results if we repeated the experiment, and not have it funded by Microsoft.
It's traditional to fund 10 independant studies and publish the ones that came down on your side.
lol of course!
But I think 1 gig ram is optimistic for a $100 laptop!
That was Mr. Salesguy Number 3. Mr. Salesguy 1 & 2 got fired for not managing to sell some product or feature that is 9 months late and was incorrectly specified in the first place.
Matt.
DHTML effects like moving text or images are much faster in IE than Firefox. And I mean an order of magnitude faster. The bugs have been sitting in the firefox bugtraq since the early releases.
Mind you DHTML/AJAX stuff tends to leak memory in IE if you don't implement work arounds, so in my case I have a slow implementation in firefox or one that runs fast but crashes IE after a couple of hours.
Of course the whole web platform was never designed for writing client side apps so it's not suprising using the technology in this way is either slow or unstable in both the major browsers.
I suppose it's possible, they could threaten to filter googles traffic unless they coughed up. But wouldn't their paying customers be a little upset if they blocked the most popular site on the internet?
that would be a shame. MS office is already pretty established in the developed world if we could make Openoffice run in less ram it could be viable on the new $100 laptop or on the refurbished computers charities ship to developing countries.
At the moment the only decent office suite that will run on 64meg is MS office which requires windows. Open office is struggling to compete even with 128.
Maybe they could make it more modular and lazy load the modules as needed that way they could be unload them when short of ram. That would allow the system to start up quicker and use less ram in 99% of cases.
roughly translated...
"The business i'm in is really competitive and our margins aren't big enough. Companies higher up the food chain have better business models and make more money. That's not fair"
In other news:
Farmers want more money from Supermarkets.
Mining companies want more money from Processor Manufacturers.
Paper manufacturers want more money from the sale of modern art.
Everyone who bulk sells something cheap is going to see someone else making wads of cash higher up the commercial food chain. The reality is can you either a) set up a cartel so you can illegally overcharge or b) offer the same service yourself and actually compete.
In this case my guess is that they can't do diddly squat about it.
Expensive enterprise consulting. They've moved up the stack from hardware to OS to software and development tools up to consulting. Now they will "solve your business problems" by sending in expensive J2EE consultants.
Banks love this kind of thing, they can't waste enough money just by paying contractors (rather than fulltime employees), so instead they pay IBM oodles of cash to borrow their software developers and consultants.
I haven't quite worked out why, possibly so the middle managers in the banks have someone else to blame when the project isn't completed 2 years later.
Sure if i had a spare million to invest and it wasn't worth putting it into drugs research I could invest it in a chocolate company or a retail outlet or a petrol company.
Investors want to make money they aren't going to divert the money they might have spent on a pharmaceuticals to building drinking-wells in africa or something.
Personally I think some other kind of arrangement could be made like basing the pricing of patented drugs in each country on that countries percentage of global GDP.
Good luck to 'em all, I say; saving lives trumps patents.
While i agree with the sentiment, can't you extend that argument to say we should ignore all medical patents even within the US. But without *some* kind of protection from cheap cloning of drugs this might result in many drugs never being developed.
Rather than saying "saving lives trumps patents" perhaps one should argue that in this particular case the number of lives saved in the short term will probably outweigh the damage it will do to longer term drugs development and life saving.
Actually a lot have, and higher margin supermarkets have taken over.
good, well-maintained, and BSD licensed replication software available.
Desperately looking for replication software that could be used for single-master multi-slave replication for postgresql (1 master 10 slaves, enterprise enviroment can't afford downtime).
Which one of the projects are you talking about? The only one we've tried was so unpolished we felt that we could have kludged the table level copying functions ourselves.
Seems like that'd be the definition of compilation.
Yes any time of compilation, my preferred type is a caching JIT compiler built into a virtual machine.
Or C, or C++, or perl, or fortran, or any language.
Sure i don't care about the language as long as it runs on my VM which of course won't support direct memory addressing and guarantees all objects are deallocated when they are no longer referenced, etc,
Of course, that language isn't quite going to be like C or C++ anymore once we've taken out those dangerous error prone features and added a better security model. It could use some C++ like syntax though. I don't know what we'd call it, maybe C#. A kind of C/C++ for this decade.
I much prefer to trust my Virtual machine than hope every C coder in the world is using all the software libraries, compile time and runtime safety features/checks you mention.