What, exactly, do you read into those 'initiatives' that the RIAA corps have made?
The pricing model and licensing setup is made to make damn certain that they dont sell any significant amount that way.
They want you to pay for at least a CD's worth per month, and then pay for the rest of your life or what you've paid for stops working.
Even the most dense consumer will realize they're being ripped off completely, since it's not far from your average friendly neighborhood protection scheme. That is not a buisness plan that someone who wants to sell a product would make.
Um, considering the RIAA is behind the greatest push to remove any possibility of the artists getting paid for downloaded music (of course, the RIAA wants to get paid, but they want to be the only ones getting paid, the artists should get nothing), the choice isnt between the artist getting paid and not, it's between the the artist not getting paid and the artist not getting paid.
Since that is the case, to either through boycott or downloading, deprive the RIAA of its means to retain the stranglehold it has on the music industry isnt an ethical problem.
Once they dont have the clout to trick unsuspecting artists into enslavement and debt contracts, maybe a more healthy online distribution can be set up. Preferably where the artists and writers get the most of the money.
Personally I dont buy any CD's anymore unless from the band itself, and I dont even listen to RIAA crap if I can avoid it.
Um, if I remember correctly, those were the aggregate statistics for _all_ linux distributions combined, including all software installed on those distributions.
Yes, those statistics were higher than for a clean Windows install. Counted separately they were lower, last I checked. And if you'd lump similar software in Windows as is usually included in a Linux dist, you'd get a far far far worse record for Windows.
Amazing that it actually works sometimes. We got a 'well, it may be a problem, yes, but it just works that way and we arent going to fix it'.
Now, with opensource, if your contracted support vendor tells you that, you dump them, then you get another. And you pay someone else to fix the problem.
Who do I pay to fix my MS OS problems when they wont do it?
This isnt beyond al Qaeda in any way. These arent your random acts of terrorism but long-term plans, so they could easily have had sleepers inside MS for more than half a decade (who could be anywhere they wished. I doubt MS practices random reassignment and random teaming, since that would be a good way to make anyone not a terrorist quit).
MS could do nothing to prevent it. QA doesnt catch maliciously coded bugs, it barely catches the easy bugs with regression tests. Peer review would have to be two or three people meticulously inspecting every programmers code (it's often slower to read and understand code than it is to write it), and the interaction it has with other parts of code. That just wont happen anywhere. If you're lucky you have someone else going over the code for simple mistakes, or looking through it to find a known bug.
And just imagine the fun. 10-20 random root attacks with no available fix, and then inject 5 worms like NIMDA with multiple transmission ways at the same time in different networks in different parts of the world. By the time the anti-virus companies get in order and realize it's more than one or two worms it will be far too late. There wouldnt be a MS machine running in the world after a few hours. Combine it with internal sabotage at MS and it would be weeks or months before service would be back... and then... do it again... and again...
Ironic, wouldnt it be, since out of the corporate websites of computer companies that I visited after the 9/11 attack, MS was the only one who didnt mention their sympathies for the victims.
The RIAA/MPAA believe they want it because they havent been in bed with MS for a long time yet. They will have a rude awakening when MS starts charging them $20M for the rights to encode in DRM media formats (which at that time will be the only legal media to encode in, and the only playable format). At that point they'll start getting bought up or run out of buisness by MS.
Some hardware companies believe they want it because it lets them offer another feature. They're a bit more sceptical tho since they know the pitfalls of cooperating with MS.
The public doesnt understand what is slowly happening and they wont object until they notice they're paying 30-50 percent of their paycheck to MS.
I dont think this would be a problem. The 'trusted' OS _is_ running, and you would allow it to deal with the handshaking.
As long as you have control of the hardware you can bullshit the OS running in a virtual machine all you want, up to inserting false responses, editing its own code, reading out the VM system (since the reads of the VM system would take place outside the context of the virtualized OS it wouldnt even know they were happening).
Of course, the fact that anyone (well, any total geek) wanting to could run in circles around this type of DRM doesnt actually solve anything since it wouldnt be exactly totally legal in some countries.
So either way, a DRM future is something that has to be avoided.
The problem here isnt exactly supporting the file format (which is partly a good thing), the problem is licensing the technology from Microsoft, which makes the eventual takeover and control likely.
The problems with MPEG-4 are mostly related to high compression, not any failure in the technology itself, so full DVDs with WMF encoded video will be as good as or better than MPEG-2.
WMF will very likely include stronger protection in the future, and I think it likely that such protection will eventually include network validated access controls. That means we go back to square 1 with the fun DIV-X. Only this time it wont be just gearheads who know what they're buying who are the customers.
First migrate WMF into players. After a while, pressure/entice movie studios to release in WMF format (better copy protection, whatever). When critical mass is obtained on WMF encoded films, enter clauses into WMF contracts that to license WMF, the player must not be able to play any format compatible with anything but Windows, nor interoperate with anything but Windows (sole exception being MPEG-2). Then phase out MPEG-2 capabilities, also through contracts preventing shipping of chips and/or players capable of anything but WMF.
After critical mass is reached they wont have a choice; either cater to 70-80 percent of the market which is by then WMF, or you dont get to sell WMF capability at all. Which vendor do you think is gonna care about a few thousand complaining customers when their alternative is that their players wont be able to play the format that most films get released in at that point?
The customers or people with older dvds... well, they are just gonna have to buy their stuff again (if it's buyable by then, probably it will all be pay-per-view).
By the time players start going Only-WMF it will be far too late to change anything. At that point the only recourse will be ten to twenty years of trustbusting court litigation... if even that will change anything.
RAID (0/1 or 5) = continuity protection against hardware failure. RAID wont do a thing for you when you do that rm -rf in the wrong place.
Tape storage = short term protection against fuckups. This is what a disk to disk backup does. Tape is not useful as archiving due to the MASSIVE failure rates of tapes. You'd be amazed at the amount of tapes that your average tape silo ejects as defective every day... My personal estimate is that about 1 in 5 restores of the small installation 'buy tapedrive and use as backup' type are successful. Too few actually test the backups, and too many tapes get corrupted.
Optical media - often used for archiving since optical is among the more reliable medias we have today. Burn archive and store offsite.
Hard drive is actually IMO the most sane method for small scale installations today. Yes, if either the media or the reader fails, your backup is toast. But a) you still have the original and b) you're more likely to notice a failing drive than a borked tape.
For stuff you no longer want online, burn it on a cd and store away... CD's are fairly reliable as long as you just store them and dont leave them all over the desk:).
They have been found guilty because the civil suit is based on the DOJ case, and because the standards for civil lawsuits are lower. Usually, defendants can be found more guilty in a civil suit than in a criminal proceeding, but rarely less.
The pressure isnt entirely seductive. They usually wait until the developer is built into and dependent on the MS product, then they start hitching prices until the developer agrees to use MS software for the other components too. Then they get a year or two decent pricing, and then the price starts to go up again, except now the only thing MS wants is money so there's nothing the developer can do to placate MS. The price hikes will eventually make it difficult to compete in the market place, at which point MS offers to buy the company for pocket change.
Those viable buisnesses will probably get the info under an NDA which means they will not be able to distribute modified opensource products without violating the NDA.
Right. And when Windows 3.0 was released, Windows 2.0 was the beta. And when W2k was released, all their earlier versions were just betas, and it was ok even for MS employees to admit they sucked.
Why would it be true this time?
It's still crap, it will always be crap, it's just that it's sortof usable and kinda stable (like every previous 'but this time it's good' incarnation of MS products) until you install the third application on it, or second driver update, at which point it all blows up in your face and you're still back counting bluescreens per day.
Well, first they get an advance, which, after paying for the RIAA owned recordings, marketing, etc usually pays a whole lot less over the production time than I make on my computer job. Then they get to repay the whole thing out of their CD profits. Break even is (IIRC) something like several 100K CD's. A few percent of the artists make it to break even. The rest end up in debt.
For anyone feeling like becoming a RIAA owned artist, dont. Do a career spending welfare checks on national lottery, because it's sure to make you more money, and it Might Make You Rich!
Every distribution can provide a supported and working fix for this within seconds: _turn off ftp and wait for a patch_.
If exploits come out an immense amount of damage can be done within the timeframe from exploit discovery and patch release. I do not want to get haxxored during that time.
Well, you dont have to release under the GPL itself if you link against GPL software. You do however have to release under the GPL or some license that is more 'free' than the GPL.
For example, it is prefectly acceptable to mix and match (revised) BSD licensed code with GPL code and distribute that. The GPL parts are under GPL, the BSD parts are under BSD license. But you cannot throw proprietary code (or proprietarize the BSD code) into it without first removing the GPL code.
The viral aspect of the GPL is sortof misunderstood. It doesnt affect any other code, it just affects wether or not you can distribute the original GPL code, and you can do that as long as the other licenses in the distributed source arent in conflict with the GPL granted freedoms.
Not that I have read through the MPlayer license so I dont know if it conflicts with any GPL clauses.
If there's one thing that is a total complete pain in the ass with SysV, it is the theory of installing separate applications in/opt. Well, nice and fine when you have/opt/oracle, but when you have about 50 to 100 applications in/opt, not to mention library paths, not to mention having those 2000 symlinks in/usr/local instead, and then keeping track of them or keeping track and managing the paths, library paths, etc, agh... I maintain systems like this every day, and if it wasnt for estoteric things like self contained HA cluster packages I'd throw it all in/usr and be rid of all the grief that clean separation causes.
If someone wants to go back and do it all manually, go ahead. Hell, compile it all from source and decide exactly where to put everything, but I got over that several years ago and I'll take the rpm managed stuff in/usr/bin _please_ and my own compiled cruft in/usr/local.
True, most people wont compile their own, but those most people _SHOULD_ be using the package manager and _nothing_ else to manage their application installation places or they're gonna break'em anyway.
The virtual separation the package manager provides is enough.
Any sane model based on Open Source software does not even include the concept of making money by selling software, because that idea is doomed to fail.
You _save_ money by using opensource software, driving some other buisness model entirely. Using open source software to reduce IT budgets, using open source software in the solutions that you sell, using open source software to drive hardware, and using it to compete with your poor license beridden or proprietary development beridden competitors who simply cannot match your cost effectiveness. Of course, there are also several possible services based models, but these require real added value and/or a large market base.
I'd worry if IBM dropped the idea, because they have a buisness model suited to using opensource. Sun has always been sorta-maybe about opensource, and I think their corporate subconscious ID really would prefer replacing MS and Intel with themselves. But they see the pragmatic benefits of fostering development that doesnt leave them alone facing the Final Conflict of Doom. SGI have their own problems.
What really would be good is if some of the other huge consultant corporations start bidding wars against eachother for largescale corporate implementations of linux installations.
You do not _make_ money _selling_ opensource software.
You _save_ money by _using_ opensource software.
How hard is this concept to grasp?
These models are used in, for example, companies doing something else entirely, such as the auto industry, finance or research. The main goal is to reduce IT costs.
Other examples would be companies like IBM selling complete solutions based on opensource software, where the goal is to reduce your pricetag as compared to your competitors. A lot of the failures have been proprietary companies whos buisness is going the way of the dodo anyway, often because their products are competing directly with opensource products and the advantage their product offers above using the free, opensource, product just isnt worth their license fees. If, for example, your product will save a company 10 manweeks of programming as compared to just hacking something together in perl, you cannot charge $50000 for a license, because a) 10 manweeks dont cost that much even if the company hires a consultant and b) dealing with the friggin license manager is going to take half that time at least.
Sistina with its GFS is a perfect example. I mean, sure, I think it sounds great. However, with me being a sysadmin in a 80K employee company who could really use something like that, and even I cant see us migrating to something like GFS in the next 10 to 20 years, where are the customers? It doesnt matter if it's opensource or proprietary.
I mean, come on, it's hard to even create a reliable SAN solution that doesnt blow up in your face every week unless you have DMP _and_ host based mirroring, not to mention the complexities of ordinary various forms of filesharing, not to even try to attempt to get into the corporate politics that would be necesary to implement something like it. It aint gonna happen this decade.
On top of that they're competing with virtually every filesharing hack and strategy in existence. Great idea, but the product will require massive marketing to the right people to even have the slightest chance, and they'll have to target the ones who have an environment where the benefits are larger than the costs (um... clean-slate new 10k plus employee companies? Corporations whose datacenters have caught fire and they can reimplement it all from scratch? The migration pains for this make me shudder).
The same applies to the most of the other companies there. You can live off services if you have the marketshare, but you cant breathe new life in a product that faces killer competition already. The same applies for anyone going the other way. You cant make your product proprietary if it means your marketshare will hit ZERO the second you make the announcement because what you offer has no value. Linux distributions are a perfect example of that. Make it proprietary and you dont have any customers anymore, because you have annihilating competition and part of the value is that there isnt any friggin license hassle involved. You _have_ to have the marketshare to run on services and support or offer something of real value on and above what everyone else offers.
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What, exactly, do you read into those 'initiatives' that the RIAA corps have made?
The pricing model and licensing setup is made to make damn certain that they dont sell any significant amount that way.
They want you to pay for at least a CD's worth per month, and then pay for the rest of your life or what you've paid for stops working.
Even the most dense consumer will realize they're being ripped off completely, since it's not far from your average friendly neighborhood protection scheme. That is not a buisness plan that someone who wants to sell a product would make.
Um, considering the RIAA is behind the greatest push to remove any possibility of the artists getting paid for downloaded music (of course, the RIAA wants to get paid, but they want to be the only ones getting paid, the artists should get nothing), the choice isnt between the artist getting paid and not, it's between the the artist not getting paid and the artist not getting paid.
Since that is the case, to either through boycott or downloading, deprive the RIAA of its means to retain the stranglehold it has on the music industry isnt an ethical problem.
Once they dont have the clout to trick unsuspecting artists into enslavement and debt contracts, maybe a more healthy online distribution can be set up. Preferably where the artists and writers get the most of the money.
Personally I dont buy any CD's anymore unless from the band itself, and I dont even listen to RIAA crap if I can avoid it.
Um, if I remember correctly, those were the aggregate statistics for _all_ linux distributions combined, including all software installed on those distributions.
Yes, those statistics were higher than for a clean Windows install. Counted separately they were lower, last I checked. And if you'd lump similar software in Windows as is usually included in a Linux dist, you'd get a far far far worse record for Windows.
Interesting thin client solution running linux on even old 486 computers.
The implementing companys press release is here: http://www.codefactory.se/news/?1+1.
The IE-only sites pop up all over the place. Usually made by completely clueless idiot webdesigners who've read JavaScript for Dummies.
Of course, these IE only sites usually dont work with anything but IE 5.0 either and break as bad on IE 6 as on mozilla....
I cant see anything preventing you from either using a shared red-carpet cache or a proxy cache in front of your machines.
:).
That is a Good Idea (tm) to do anyway, unless your internet connection is faster than your LAN
Since you are paying for the actual access to the faster servers I cant see that Ximian would mind either really...
Amazing that it actually works sometimes. We got a 'well, it may be a problem, yes, but it just works that way and we arent going to fix it'.
Now, with opensource, if your contracted support vendor tells you that, you dump them, then you get another. And you pay someone else to fix the problem.
Who do I pay to fix my MS OS problems when they wont do it?
This isnt beyond al Qaeda in any way. These arent your random acts of terrorism but long-term plans, so they could easily have had sleepers inside MS for more than half a decade (who could be anywhere they wished. I doubt MS practices random reassignment and random teaming, since that would be a good way to make anyone not a terrorist quit).
MS could do nothing to prevent it. QA doesnt catch maliciously coded bugs, it barely catches the easy bugs with regression tests. Peer review would have to be two or three people meticulously inspecting every programmers code (it's often slower to read and understand code than it is to write it), and the interaction it has with other parts of code. That just wont happen anywhere. If you're lucky you have someone else going over the code for simple mistakes, or looking through it to find a known bug.
And just imagine the fun. 10-20 random root attacks with no available fix, and then inject 5 worms like NIMDA with multiple transmission ways at the same time in different networks in different parts of the world. By the time the anti-virus companies get in order and realize it's more than one or two worms it will be far too late. There wouldnt be a MS machine running in the world after a few hours. Combine it with internal sabotage at MS and it would be weeks or months before service would be back... and then... do it again... and again...
Ironic, wouldnt it be, since out of the corporate websites of computer companies that I visited after the 9/11 attack, MS was the only one who didnt mention their sympathies for the victims.
The were pushing XP tho.
I do extend my sympathy for their victims.
The RIAA/MPAA believe they want it because they havent been in bed with MS for a long time yet. They will have a rude awakening when MS starts charging them $20M for the rights to encode in DRM media formats (which at that time will be the only legal media to encode in, and the only playable format). At that point they'll start getting bought up or run out of buisness by MS.
Some hardware companies believe they want it because it lets them offer another feature. They're a bit more sceptical tho since they know the pitfalls of cooperating with MS.
The public doesnt understand what is slowly happening and they wont object until they notice they're paying 30-50 percent of their paycheck to MS.
I dont think this would be a problem. The 'trusted' OS _is_ running, and you would allow it to deal with the handshaking.
As long as you have control of the hardware you can bullshit the OS running in a virtual machine all you want, up to inserting false responses, editing its own code, reading out the VM system (since the reads of the VM system would take place outside the context of the virtualized OS it wouldnt even know they were happening).
Of course, the fact that anyone (well, any total geek) wanting to could run in circles around this type of DRM doesnt actually solve anything since it wouldnt be exactly totally legal in some countries.
So either way, a DRM future is something that has to be avoided.
The problem here isnt exactly supporting the file format (which is partly a good thing), the problem is licensing the technology from Microsoft, which makes the eventual takeover and control likely.
The problems with MPEG-4 are mostly related to high compression, not any failure in the technology itself, so full DVDs with WMF encoded video will be as good as or better than MPEG-2.
WMF will very likely include stronger protection in the future, and I think it likely that such protection will eventually include network validated access controls. That means we go back to square 1 with the fun DIV-X. Only this time it wont be just gearheads who know what they're buying who are the customers.
Ok. This is how it will work out.
First migrate WMF into players. After a while, pressure/entice movie studios to release in WMF format (better copy protection, whatever). When critical mass is obtained on WMF encoded films, enter clauses into WMF contracts that to license WMF, the player must not be able to play any format compatible with anything but Windows, nor interoperate with anything but Windows (sole exception being MPEG-2). Then phase out MPEG-2 capabilities, also through contracts preventing shipping of chips and/or players capable of anything but WMF.
After critical mass is reached they wont have a choice; either cater to 70-80 percent of the market which is by then WMF, or you dont get to sell WMF capability at all. Which vendor do you think is gonna care about a few thousand complaining customers when their alternative is that their players wont be able to play the format that most films get released in at that point?
The customers or people with older dvds... well, they are just gonna have to buy their stuff again (if it's buyable by then, probably it will all be pay-per-view).
By the time players start going Only-WMF it will be far too late to change anything. At that point the only recourse will be ten to twenty years of trustbusting court litigation... if even that will change anything.
RAID (0/1 or 5) = continuity protection against hardware failure. RAID wont do a thing for you when you do that rm -rf in the wrong place.
:).
Tape storage = short term protection against fuckups. This is what a disk to disk backup does. Tape is not useful as archiving due to the MASSIVE failure rates of tapes. You'd be amazed at the amount of tapes that your average tape silo ejects as defective every day... My personal estimate is that about 1 in 5 restores of the small installation 'buy tapedrive and use as backup' type are successful. Too few actually test the backups, and too many tapes get corrupted.
Optical media - often used for archiving since optical is among the more reliable medias we have today. Burn archive and store offsite.
Hard drive is actually IMO the most sane method for small scale installations today. Yes, if either the media or the reader fails, your backup is toast. But a) you still have the original and b) you're more likely to notice a failing drive than a borked tape.
For stuff you no longer want online, burn it on a cd and store away... CD's are fairly reliable as long as you just store them and dont leave them all over the desk
They have been found guilty because the civil suit is based on the DOJ case, and because the standards for civil lawsuits are lower. Usually, defendants can be found more guilty in a civil suit than in a criminal proceeding, but rarely less.
The pressure isnt entirely seductive. They usually wait until the developer is built into and dependent on the MS product, then they start hitching prices until the developer agrees to use MS software for the other components too. Then they get a year or two decent pricing, and then the price starts to go up again, except now the only thing MS wants is money so there's nothing the developer can do to placate MS. The price hikes will eventually make it difficult to compete in the market place, at which point MS offers to buy the company for pocket change.
Those viable buisnesses will probably get the info under an NDA which means they will not be able to distribute modified opensource products without violating the NDA.
Right. And when Windows 3.0 was released, Windows 2.0 was the beta. And when W2k was released, all their earlier versions were just betas, and it was ok even for MS employees to admit they sucked.
Why would it be true this time?
It's still crap, it will always be crap, it's just that it's sortof usable and kinda stable (like every previous 'but this time it's good' incarnation of MS products) until you install the third application on it, or second driver update, at which point it all blows up in your face and you're still back counting bluescreens per day.
Well, first they get an advance, which, after paying for the RIAA owned recordings, marketing, etc usually pays a whole lot less over the production time than I make on my computer job. Then they get to repay the whole thing out of their CD profits. Break even is (IIRC) something like several 100K CD's. A few percent of the artists make it to break even. The rest end up in debt.
For anyone feeling like becoming a RIAA owned artist, dont. Do a career spending welfare checks on national lottery, because it's sure to make you more money, and it Might Make You Rich!
Every distribution can provide a supported and working fix for this within seconds: _turn off ftp and wait for a patch_.
If exploits come out an immense amount of damage can be done within the timeframe from exploit discovery and patch release. I do not want to get haxxored during that time.
Well, you dont have to release under the GPL itself if you link against GPL software. You do however have to release under the GPL or some license that is more 'free' than the GPL.
For example, it is prefectly acceptable to mix and match (revised) BSD licensed code with GPL code and distribute that. The GPL parts are under GPL, the BSD parts are under BSD license. But you cannot throw proprietary code (or proprietarize the BSD code) into it without first removing the GPL code.
The viral aspect of the GPL is sortof misunderstood. It doesnt affect any other code, it just affects wether or not you can distribute the original GPL code, and you can do that as long as the other licenses in the distributed source arent in conflict with the GPL granted freedoms.
Not that I have read through the MPlayer license so I dont know if it conflicts with any GPL clauses.
True. Now explain that to the users. Then explain it to some million linux distribution newbies.
I dont want to do that. But you can. If you want to.
Definitely.
/opt. Well, nice and fine when you have /opt/oracle, but when you have about 50 to 100 applications in /opt, not to mention library paths, not to mention having those 2000 symlinks in /usr/local instead, and then keeping track of them or keeping track and managing the paths, library paths, etc, agh... I maintain systems like this every day, and if it wasnt for estoteric things like self contained HA cluster packages I'd throw it all in /usr and be rid of all the grief that clean separation causes.
/usr/bin _please_ and my own compiled cruft in /usr/local.
Use. The. Package. Manager.
If there's one thing that is a total complete pain in the ass with SysV, it is the theory of installing separate applications in
If someone wants to go back and do it all manually, go ahead. Hell, compile it all from source and decide exactly where to put everything, but I got over that several years ago and I'll take the rpm managed stuff in
True, most people wont compile their own, but those most people _SHOULD_ be using the package manager and _nothing_ else to manage their application installation places or they're gonna break'em anyway.
The virtual separation the package manager provides is enough.
Any sane model based on Open Source software does not even include the concept of making money by selling software, because that idea is doomed to fail.
You _save_ money by using opensource software, driving some other buisness model entirely. Using open source software to reduce IT budgets, using open source software in the solutions that you sell, using open source software to drive hardware, and using it to compete with your poor license beridden or proprietary development beridden competitors who simply cannot match your cost effectiveness. Of course, there are also several possible services based models, but these require real added value and/or a large market base.
I'd worry if IBM dropped the idea, because they have a buisness model suited to using opensource. Sun has always been sorta-maybe about opensource, and I think their corporate subconscious ID really would prefer replacing MS and Intel with themselves. But they see the pragmatic benefits of fostering development that doesnt leave them alone facing the Final Conflict of Doom. SGI have their own problems.
What really would be good is if some of the other huge consultant corporations start bidding wars against eachother for largescale corporate implementations of linux installations.
You do not _make_ money _selling_ opensource software.
You _save_ money by _using_ opensource software.
How hard is this concept to grasp?
These models are used in, for example, companies doing something else entirely, such as the auto industry, finance or research. The main goal is to reduce IT costs.
Other examples would be companies like IBM selling complete solutions based on opensource software, where the goal is to reduce your pricetag as compared to your competitors. A lot of the failures have been proprietary companies whos buisness is going the way of the dodo anyway, often because their products are competing directly with opensource products and the advantage their product offers above using the free, opensource, product just isnt worth their license fees. If, for example, your product will save a company 10 manweeks of programming as compared to just hacking something together in perl, you cannot charge $50000 for a license, because a) 10 manweeks dont cost that much even if the company hires a consultant and b) dealing with the friggin license manager is going to take half that time at least.
Sistina with its GFS is a perfect example. I mean, sure, I think it sounds great. However, with me being a sysadmin in a 80K employee company who could really use something like that, and even I cant see us migrating to something like GFS in the next 10 to 20 years, where are the customers? It doesnt matter if it's opensource or proprietary.
I mean, come on, it's hard to even create a reliable SAN solution that doesnt blow up in your face every week unless you have DMP _and_ host based mirroring, not to mention the complexities of ordinary various forms of filesharing, not to even try to attempt to get into the corporate politics that would be necesary to implement something like it. It aint gonna happen this decade.
On top of that they're competing with virtually every filesharing hack and strategy in existence. Great idea, but the product will require massive marketing to the right people to even have the slightest chance, and they'll have to target the ones who have an environment where the benefits are larger than the costs (um... clean-slate new 10k plus employee companies? Corporations whose datacenters have caught fire and they can reimplement it all from scratch? The migration pains for this make me shudder).
The same applies to the most of the other companies there. You can live off services if you have the marketshare, but you cant breathe new life in a product that faces killer competition already. The same applies for anyone going the other way. You cant make your product proprietary if it means your marketshare will hit ZERO the second you make the announcement because what you offer has no value. Linux distributions are a perfect example of that. Make it proprietary and you dont have any customers anymore, because you have annihilating competition and part of the value is that there isnt any friggin license hassle involved. You _have_ to have the marketshare to run on services and support or offer something of real value on and above what everyone else offers.