The issue here isn't doc/xls/ppt. Those are secret formats, but over the years people have figured them out. Microsoft is phasing out those formats; by default Office 12 won't save files using them.
What's being discussed is Microsoft's new XML formats, which will be used in Office 12. Microsoft has patents on them, so it is ILLEGAL to read them except under the terms that Microsoft permits. For example, there's universal agreement that it's illegal to write a GPL program that reads them, by those terms. So KOffice and Gnumeric, for example, cannot use them.
Groklaw
has posted a lengthy legal analysis by Marbux, a retired lawyer
(updated April 1, 2005). His detailed analysis found that
Microsofts specification excluded competition, in contrast with
Microsofts public claims. Competitors are... effectively
precluded from bidding against Microsoft or its suppliers for
any... contract specifying use of Microsofts software file
formats.”
The headline from the original article should win the "War is Peace" award for misleading the reader.
Symantec's report counts up only the vulnerabilities acknowledged by the vendor. If you don't want to have a vulnerability included in their study, just don't acknowledge it. If you go to Secunia and add in all the unacknowledged vulnerabilities (but that are still known to the public), you find out that Internet Explorer has had more vulnerabilities in the same amount of time than Firefox. My thanks to Bruce Perens for pointing that out.
There are already a number of
Article validation proposals,
many of them aimed at trying to help produce a paper version of Wikipedia. Many of them might also be useful for creating a "tighter editorial controls".
Early on, it wasn't clear if there would be enough people to create a Wikipedia, and opening edits to the world has made it astonishingly detailed. Now that they have lots of material, perhaps they need to tighten up. You can see this as a lifecycle -- early on, they need ANY material, later on, they need to get stricter about quality and accuracy.
It might even be possible to create that lifecycle inside the Wikipedia itself. E.G., articles that have been around for a while might have less-tight controls than ones that have been around a while.
That might simply mean "if the article is more than 3 years old, anonymous users can't change it."
But allowing edits by literally everyone is part of the charm of Wikipedia. I hope and expect they will work to create the least limit possible.
You forgot about another set of problems: vote-buying & extortion.
You don't want people to be able to sell their votes, or be threatened to vote a certain way. If they get proof they voted a certain way, then those become easy.
You want a paper trail, but you want that RETAINED at the voting both; NO copy should go to a voter.
Condorcet methods have their advantages, but they're somewhat vulnerable to strategic voting, and almost no one understands them. If you want a different system, use approval voting -- it's better, and much easier for Joe Voter to understand.
This is no different than from the proprietary case. The purpose of a patent is to ensure that the patent-holder can determine who is allowed to implement the idea (including, possibly, no one). A proprietary product isn't necessarily a better risk; a patent-holder might sue a vendor out of a market, and not bother with the OSS implementation. Heck, the patent-holder might BE an OSS vendor (Red Hat holds patents) or favorable to a vendor (IBM holds the most patents).
The only real difference is that a large company who is the target of a patent suit can usually buy enough lawyers to prevent a patent from actually taking effect.
But there's no guarantee of that.
Disagree, although I'm not sure we're really "opposed"; I think we're really just emphasizing different things.
Let's take astronomy (your example), and say that there's a controversial finding, for example, "we have evidence of a planet around star X". What do people do? They measure the same darn stuff, to confirm or deny.
In fact, there were many earlier reports about planets that were later rebuffed, so much so that the most recent reports were examined VERY carefully.
The relativitistic effects on gravity and time are constantly re-checked.
Think of the phantom planet Vulcan, which
turned out to be relativistic effects instead.
The major discoveries in Astronomy have often been this interaction between observation and theory,
with theory predicting things that are later checked by observation... and observation
reporting failures in theory.
When the "correction" to a theory is made,
we then try to observe that in a reproduceable
way.
Now, it's true that once a reading is made in history, you can't go back and make more readings;
accurately recording data is critical. And I'd agree with you that the observational sciences have a lot in common with forensics,
particularly archaelogy.
But try to get someone to accept a big
change in archaelogy:
"Look! We found a digital watch in King Tut's tomb! The ancient Egyptians were making integrated circuits!"
I feel very confident that such big changes wouldn't be accepted without LOTS more digs confirming the hypothesis.
In other words, reproduceable experiments.
Actually, that's more or less what it says.
Here's the text:
Darcs,
in particular, is very interesting for its technology.
From what I've seen, darcs is currently more of a prototype
of some very innovative ideas for SCM, and maybe a tool for smaller
projects, rather than a useful tool
for large projects, though it can be used.
A few people are looking at SCMs as an interesting technology area to do research in. We need those people, because they create the great new ideas that we want to use! Please research!
But most people are looking for a tool to use, today, to solve their problems in managing very large, complex systems. There are risks to using Darcs that way.
The reasons are actually pretty straightforward.
The GPL is the single most common OSS/FS license today, by far.
Freshmeat Stats of April 17, 2005 show the GPL at 67.88% of all projects they track;
the next most common are LGPL
(5.98%) and BSD-original (3.47%).
SourceForge
reports 43,155 projects under the GPL;
the next more common, the LGPL (6995 projects).
The biggest problem with license proliferation is that you can't combine OSS/FS programs with each other unless the licenses are compatible. So if your OSS/FS code isn't compatible with the most common OSS/FS license, there's a problem.
Especially when you consider that the other OSS/FS software not licensed under the GPL is usually GPL-compatible (BSD-new, MIT, LGPL).
If you make sure your license is at least GPL-compatible, then the problems of "how do I combine this software" generally vanish... no
matter what, you can license the combination under the GPL, and use the results.
You don't need to agree with the GPL at all; lots of companies who certainly aren't wholehearted supporters of it use the GPL for completely pragmatic reasons.
Wikipedia does have problems with "controversial" topics. Scientists generally don't.
That's not true at all.
When someone has a minor tweak to a pre-existing theory, or reports results consistent with the common model, sure, no problem. But those aren't controversial because they're tweaks to what's widely accepted.
But there are definitely problems with controversial topics in science.
Quantum mechanics, relativity, plate tectonics, and other theories took many years between the first person to theorize it and wide acceptance.
And let's face it, science explicitly limits itself to the "easy" cases.
You cannot call something scientific unless you can have reproduceable experiments, and usually they have to be measurable too.
Many things in life don't lend themselves to reproduceable experiments, e.g., did person X commit crime Y?
There's certainly a risk of groupthink in anything, but I think the Wikipedia approach actually handles that well. Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" simply requires that all sides be described in a way that all can agree to -- not that all need to agree on a particular side.
You can even declare which side is more popular; this can be done factually, since the more popular side is not always right.
Religious topics can actually be handled clearly too. Simply say group X believes this, or religious text Y believes that.
It's not perfect (see "edit war"). But it seems to work well enough to produce useful results.
Please, protest this plan!! You have until April 4, 2005, to send your comments to PassportRules@state.gov and tell them to abandon this wireless approach, and use a system that REQUIRES contact instead (no more RFID). Do it, before someone dies.
As noted here and
here, it actually looks like there's been
a LOT of progress in getting OpenOffice.org to
run on open source software / Free software implementations of Java.
Perhaps just make "must run on an open source
Java implementation" one of the blocking bugs
for OpenOffice.org, and don't ship until it works.
There are still style issues in Python. Heck, even indent style complaints. Do you use tabs or spaces? And if it's spaces, how many spaces per indent? If it's a continued line, what do you deal with the continuation?
And there's more to style than indenting, anyway.
Nope, you won't be able to avoid style decisions just because you use Python.
Not from where I'm sitting. Rio, Neruos, and iRiver all include support for Ogg Vorbis. Many games, such as Unreal Tournament 2003, use Ogg Vorbis. MP3 is certainly more popular, but it's patent-encumbered, and just about any other format (including Ogg Vorbis) gives better-quality results. And I _use_ Ogg Vorbis.
Anyway, it's a reasonable concern: a reasonable criteria for an audio player is that it play a number of formats. If you're trying to avoid patented formats, Ogg Vorbis is a valuable format.
I'll use whatever the indentation style of a current project is, and carry on. If you like that style, then go ahead, use it. I'll go along, too, if you're the project lead.
But many "newbies" such as Kernighan, Ritchie, and Torvalds all highly recommend the One True Brace (OTB) style. It's the one used in the K&R's C book, among other things. In other words, some of the people MOST exerienced with C use this style.
There are serious advantages to the OTB style. In particular, it eliminates useless white space so that you can actually see more vertical text simultaneously -- even with big screens that's helpful.
If you want to use a different style, go ahead! If you're the lead, I'll gladly use your style. But in programs I lead, I'll continue to use OTB and expect others to follow suit. Oh, and I've been using C since 1985, so !newbie.
No Ogg Vorbis, no FLAC. I want to encode my CD-ROMs into a format that's not patent-encumbered. Looks like neither Sony nor Apple have a product for me. And it looks like Sony's product costs more than Apple's - are you kidding?
The directory structure standard was developed a long time ago - see the
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS).
Most major distributions have moved towards it, at least in part.
FHS is part of the Linux Standard Base specification, which is in progress to become an ISO standard.
In short, the directory structures are being taken care of.
Slashdot Mirror
What's being discussed is Microsoft's new XML formats, which will be used in Office 12. Microsoft has patents on them, so it is ILLEGAL to read them except under the terms that Microsoft permits. For example, there's universal agreement that it's illegal to write a GPL program that reads them, by those terms. So KOffice and Gnumeric, for example, cannot use them.
Groklaw has posted a lengthy legal analysis by Marbux, a retired lawyer (updated April 1, 2005). His detailed analysis found that Microsofts specification excluded competition, in contrast with Microsofts public claims. Competitors are... effectively precluded from bidding against Microsoft or its suppliers for any... contract specifying use of Microsofts software file formats.”
Symantec's report counts up only the vulnerabilities acknowledged by the vendor. If you don't want to have a vulnerability included in their study, just don't acknowledge it. If you go to Secunia and add in all the unacknowledged vulnerabilities (but that are still known to the public), you find out that Internet Explorer has had more vulnerabilities in the same amount of time than Firefox. My thanks to Bruce Perens for pointing that out.
This isn't new. The name for this phenomina is a "reverse Turing test". See the Wikipedia entry on Revese Turing test.
You might want to look at this essay: Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn't)
There are already lots of studies. See Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!, which lists lots of them. While I certainly like the idea of getting even more information, the claim that "there are no independent studies" is ludicrous.
Early on, it wasn't clear if there would be enough people to create a Wikipedia, and opening edits to the world has made it astonishingly detailed. Now that they have lots of material, perhaps they need to tighten up. You can see this as a lifecycle -- early on, they need ANY material, later on, they need to get stricter about quality and accuracy.
It might even be possible to create that lifecycle inside the Wikipedia itself. E.G., articles that have been around for a while might have less-tight controls than ones that have been around a while. That might simply mean "if the article is more than 3 years old, anonymous users can't change it."
But allowing edits by literally everyone is part of the charm of Wikipedia. I hope and expect they will work to create the least limit possible.
You want a paper trail, but you want that RETAINED at the voting both; NO copy should go to a voter.
Condorcet methods have their advantages, but they're somewhat vulnerable to strategic voting, and almost no one understands them. If you want a different system, use approval voting -- it's better, and much easier for Joe Voter to understand.
The only real difference is that a large company who is the target of a patent suit can usually buy enough lawyers to prevent a patent from actually taking effect. But there's no guarantee of that.
In fact, there were many earlier reports about planets that were later rebuffed, so much so that the most recent reports were examined VERY carefully.
The relativitistic effects on gravity and time are constantly re-checked. Think of the phantom planet Vulcan, which turned out to be relativistic effects instead. The major discoveries in Astronomy have often been this interaction between observation and theory, with theory predicting things that are later checked by observation... and observation reporting failures in theory. When the "correction" to a theory is made, we then try to observe that in a reproduceable way.
Now, it's true that once a reading is made in history, you can't go back and make more readings; accurately recording data is critical. And I'd agree with you that the observational sciences have a lot in common with forensics, particularly archaelogy.
But try to get someone to accept a big change in archaelogy: "Look! We found a digital watch in King Tut's tomb! The ancient Egyptians were making integrated circuits!" I feel very confident that such big changes wouldn't be accepted without LOTS more digs confirming the hypothesis. In other words, reproduceable experiments.
A few people are looking at SCMs as an interesting technology area to do research in. We need those people, because they create the great new ideas that we want to use! Please research!
But most people are looking for a tool to use, today, to solve their problems in managing very large, complex systems. There are risks to using Darcs that way.
The biggest problem with license proliferation is that you can't combine OSS/FS programs with each other unless the licenses are compatible. So if your OSS/FS code isn't compatible with the most common OSS/FS license, there's a problem. Especially when you consider that the other OSS/FS software not licensed under the GPL is usually GPL-compatible (BSD-new, MIT, LGPL). If you make sure your license is at least GPL-compatible, then the problems of "how do I combine this software" generally vanish... no matter what, you can license the combination under the GPL, and use the results.
You don't need to agree with the GPL at all; lots of companies who certainly aren't wholehearted supporters of it use the GPL for completely pragmatic reasons.
For more info, see Make your Open Source Software GPL-compatible. Or Else.
See Comments on Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS) Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems for more information on OSS/FS SCMs. There are several relatively mature centralized SCMs, but the distributed ones are less mature. See paper for details.
That's not true at all. When someone has a minor tweak to a pre-existing theory, or reports results consistent with the common model, sure, no problem. But those aren't controversial because they're tweaks to what's widely accepted. But there are definitely problems with controversial topics in science. Quantum mechanics, relativity, plate tectonics, and other theories took many years between the first person to theorize it and wide acceptance.
And let's face it, science explicitly limits itself to the "easy" cases. You cannot call something scientific unless you can have reproduceable experiments, and usually they have to be measurable too. Many things in life don't lend themselves to reproduceable experiments, e.g., did person X commit crime Y?
There's certainly a risk of groupthink in anything, but I think the Wikipedia approach actually handles that well. Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" simply requires that all sides be described in a way that all can agree to -- not that all need to agree on a particular side. You can even declare which side is more popular; this can be done factually, since the more popular side is not always right.
Religious topics can actually be handled clearly too. Simply say group X believes this, or religious text Y believes that.
It's not perfect (see "edit war"). But it seems to work well enough to produce useful results.
There are lots of such tools, including CVS, Subversion (SVN), GNU arch, Monotone, Aegis, CVSNT, Darcs, FastCST, OpenCM, Vesta, Superversion, Codeville, Bazaar, Arx, and Bazaar-NG.
Please, protest this plan!! You have until April 4, 2005, to send your comments to PassportRules@state.gov and tell them to abandon this wireless approach, and use a system that REQUIRES contact instead (no more RFID). Do it, before someone dies.
As noted here and here, it actually looks like there's been a LOT of progress in getting OpenOffice.org to run on open source software / Free software implementations of Java. Perhaps just make "must run on an open source Java implementation" one of the blocking bugs for OpenOffice.org, and don't ship until it works.
And there's more to style than indenting, anyway.
Nope, you won't be able to avoid style decisions just because you use Python.
Thanks! I knew about that one (you can see its link in the paper), but it didn't get into my cut-n-paste.
There are lots of OSS/FS software configuration management (SCM) tools. CVS, Subversion (SVN), and GNU arch get lots of press, but there are many others such as Aegis, CVSNT, Darcs, FastCST, OpenCM, Vesta, Codeville, Bazaar and Bazaar-NG.
You might also take a peek at my paper Software Configuration Management (SCM) Security.
Anyway, it's a reasonable concern: a reasonable criteria for an audio player is that it play a number of formats. If you're trying to avoid patented formats, Ogg Vorbis is a valuable format.
But many "newbies" such as Kernighan, Ritchie, and Torvalds all highly recommend the One True Brace (OTB) style. It's the one used in the K&R's C book, among other things. In other words, some of the people MOST exerienced with C use this style.
There are serious advantages to the OTB style. In particular, it eliminates useless white space so that you can actually see more vertical text simultaneously -- even with big screens that's helpful.
If you want to use a different style, go ahead! If you're the lead, I'll gladly use your style. But in programs I lead, I'll continue to use OTB and expect others to follow suit. Oh, and I've been using C since 1985, so !newbie.
No Ogg Vorbis, no FLAC. I want to encode my CD-ROMs into a format that's not patent-encumbered. Looks like neither Sony nor Apple have a product for me. And it looks like Sony's product costs more than Apple's - are you kidding?
In short, the directory structures are being taken care of.
You might want to take a peek at my paper Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!". Feel free to share it, or quote (attributed) information from it. The paper has lots of useful facts and figures on why people should consider OSS/FS.
This is absolute nonsense. In the U.S., you do not need to register a trademark to be the owner of it - just use the mark. Perhaps the MAME folks ought to register the name to prevent another clown from trying to steal their name. I've posted a trademark notice on my own site to keep away at least some of the predators. I did that after learning of the problems of problems of Katie Jones, owner of the katie.com domain. Linus Torvalds eventually had to register "Linux" everywhere because of a similar set of thefts.