I liken Freenet to Usenet in some ways. A system of interdependant servers who all agree to publish one anothers data.
As we all know, Usenet is subject to gross abuses. How do you propose to prevent such abuse on Freenet. Is there a Freenet 'death penalty?' Whats to prevent me from creating a porn site, or spam site on Freenet that could easily consume most of the available bandwidth and resources of the entire network?
The media coverage of this story was very interesting to me.
It seems that these days fairness in the mainstream media means not taking a mega-corporation to task when they have been proven to be corrupt and unlawful. It's almost as if they don't recognize the damages that THEY incurred along with the rest of us.
Predominately, it seemed like the mainstream press, Washington Post, NY Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN, were all very soft on Microsoft, tending to focus on strength of appeal for Microsoft, rather than the crimes Microsoft was determined to have committed. It's ironic that in all the discussion focusing on the Microsoft spin, i.e. they would easily appeal, it was never mentioned that it is very hard for appellate court to overturn the finding of fact of a lower judge, it is far easier for them to determine that the judge reached the wrong conclusion based on the facts, but something would have to be seriously wrong with the finding for it to be overturned factually. Thus even if the sentence is reduced it is likely that the finding of fact will always be that Microsoft is both predatory and monopolistic. Moreover, Microsoft's direct damage to other companies, such as Apple, Intel, and Netscape was rarely mentioned in more than a sentence or two.
Its funny that almost oppositely, the computing media, such as Wired, PC-Week, etc. all seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief over the verdict.
I'm going to dig out my copy of Manufacturing Consent.
and its terrific. I use their online bank and if you maintain a minimum balance billpay is included.
I have only one thing to say about bill pay: I havn't been late for a payment, or had to lick a stamp, close or address an envelope in about four months!
For ongoing bills you just set and forget, for monthly statements you just logon and schedule a payment.
Now if I could just eliminate the paper statements everything would be perfect. I would reccomend this to anyone.
As a Debian and not a Redhat(can you say 'MicroSoft') user, I'm constantly reminded that my distribution is not the main distribution used by the average stuffed shirt.
The key to not forking, is avoiding distribution bias. Most software I download these days comes in RPM format. Can you say distribution bias? I yearn for the good old days of about two years ago when everything you downloaded was a tar.gz.
The main processor in most video game consoles is just a controller for other activites and the user interface of the game, i.e., load/save, etc. In particular the PS2 derives most of it's performance from the custom graphics coprocessors, and the important thing to remember is the bandwidth of the CPU is directly porportional to the number of instructions fetched from memory and the speed of that memory. The graphics coprocessors have 16Mb memory banks on the same silicon wafer with no external bus to get in the way. This kind of bandwidth has a significant impact on performance.
In the PC model, one fast processor does everything, and it usually uses external memory, from the standpoint of game consoles, this is neither how it is done, nor a good way to do it.
Within reason, I believe actual abilities will have little impact on the outcome of this race. Early and ongoing support of the Playstation is likely to steamroll it into many homes before the X-Box is even released. The X-box will really have to be something special to win out, moreover, MicroSoft will have to be prepared to dump a significant chunk of change into the X-box to get the level of support that the PS has, I'm not sure if they are going to be prepared to spend on this level to win. They may be after just a share of the market to help expand thier empire...
There are a number of Microsoft loyalists who seem to buy anything that Microsoft produces...I'm not sure if these people are also gamers, however, and I can't quite remember ever having seen a killer game come out of Microsoft games.
The fact that this question would or could even be asked shows the fundamental lack of understanding and knowledge of the conditions of most of the rest of the world. In particular, US citizens have such a high standard of living that they forget that most of the third world does not have reliable access to fresh clean drinking water, to nutrient rich food supplies, or to vaccines for Polio and other diseases considered 'cured' in the more wealthy nations.
This doesn't even get us started, but if we did we would arrive at the fact that many of the telephone systems in these countries are unreliable, cycling on and off at night, or on an hourly basis.
Do I need to go on? How would access to medicine, food and water effect social change? Moreover, what social change would that represent in the wealthy nations who say things like 'oh, those poor people don't have the Internet.'
Octave is perfect for you. It's an excellent all around tool. Great for prototyping mathematical problems that you might later impliment in another language, or even just for solving problems and working things out.
The NAVY can do anything they want with money like that. They probably think they are saving money by using shrink wrap products, but not with a cutthroat company like MS. They could DEVELOP any productivity apps they want for that kind of money.
Too bad innovation is so difficult for these major govenerment agencies, not to mention the number of parasites that will take the development cash, not produce anything, and run.
Privacy centers around two issues. Truely private information and information we might want to keep private but which is actually in the public domain.
Like it or not, information that we enter into a website or reveal to the power company, phone company, grocery store or other organization is not private.
Individuals rarely have a sense of the bargain involved in information interchange. When I give a bookstore my address to ship books to me, the bargain is that they will have my home address, and they will use it to ship me the books. Likewise, when you use your credit card, you are implying that you expect your purchases to be tracked, at least for billing, if nothing else.
In this age of diminished privacy it is important to draw a distinction between information which is and should be truely private and other information such as mouse clicks, home address, posts on slashdot, or taste in music, which may not be private if you allow outside agents access to it.
The privacy debate may just end up another tower of babel, if individuals don't police their own information.
I did read it, if you had read it carefully, you would know that Mitnick argued that the files may contain exculpatory evidence which the fifth amendment requires disclosure of.
The argument stated above is that 'I know there is damaging information in these files, and therefore I invoke the fifth amendment to protect me from revealing it.' -- this is the traditional sense of the use of the fifth amendment.
I think the fifth amendment protects you from being induced to give information that would lead to incrimination or conviction.
Most crypto-systems involve a key of somekind or even a pass-phrase along with the key. Being induced to give the pass-phrase is tantamount to giving information that would lead to incrimination, IMO.
This is exactly how I, and I'd guess most open source developers, like it. The Microsoftian vision of user interface innovation where features are replaced with ignorance is not for me or anyone who really wants to get the most out of their computer system.
Actually, opposite to the points in this article, I find myself increasingly unhappy with the current trend in user interfaces which is to do some kind of "question and answer" based model where I can't get to what I wan't directly, and I have to reverse engineer the interface to do what I want.
I find most open-source (not all) interfaces to be simple, intuitive, widely functional, and very useful. I havn't seen interface innovation that beats it either.
These guys seem like they don't have much experience with system management.
Bells and whistles rarely get the job done. In fact, this article makes it out that LinuxConf is the only administrative option? Any experienced UNIX professional has stacks and stacks of options above and beyond LinuxConf, most I know would only use this type of software to manage their enterprise in a pinch or as a last resort?
If your enterprise is a home office, maybe these guys have a leg to stand on, but can Windows compete with any of the remote management options of any of the other OSes compared?
I also like how they draw a distinction between an OS, operating system, and NOS, or network opeating system. Can you say PC-background? To me there is no difference, the difference is MicroSoft marketing, trying to convince people that networking is an add-on feature? Don't believe the hype!
Moreover, they seem to draw the summary as a foregone conclusion, not even based on their own results but based on thier impression of others impressions of these systems? It appeared to me like Linux came in second or third in almost every comparison, where did SCO come from?
John
PS. They claim to talk about 'Enterprise,' but they don't even mention Mainframe?
I say we use their tactics against them. Everything I do in this day and age seems to get merged into this quagmire. I find myself increasingly interested and aware of all the gobs of gadgetry, often through places like/. However at the same time I find myself increasingly aware and disturbed by the ongoing trends of corportization, such events as kids being suspended from school for wearing a 'coke-shirt' on 'pepsi-day' and other equally crazy corporate culture.
There is no easy solution to this very difficult problem. I do see that we all have a part in it. I recently quit my job at the new AOL mega-corp. I've had enough, but now my choice is to work at some other mega-corp with equally bad tactics and practices. The problem is systemic, and endemic. I boycott Amazon because I believe the fact that they have a trademark on "One-Click(tm)" and a patent on the underlying technology is absolutely ludicrous, however, I see the increasing number of technologies which are patented out from under me and feel like I had better file for a few patents if I want to be able to continue writing software, i.e., in order to have the technology to work with to produce software.
Moreover, I feel like dropping out doesn't work. Most of 'the sixties' drop-outs are the drooling sheep that we complain about here. Maybe we should begin to embrace, extend, and destroy just like the MicroSoft tactic. Jump in grab the technology and take it where they never thought it would or could go.
Angry about the DeCSS lawsuits? Download the source-code and compile it yourself. Convert all your DVDs to MPEGs on your HD and screw them. Angry about amazon.com, support your local bookstore, or start your own non-fascist one. We embrace, some of these ideas are good and well healed, we extend, make it the way WE want it, destroy, screw them, these businesses would take you to task over nothing... do the same to them.
John
You can't take what you don't have.
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
The bleating, drooling masses need their content spoon fed to them through media outlets like AOL - Time Warner, this much is true. But get down off your high horse, everybody here goes wild over the ridiculous, overpriced, business-man buyout, IPOs (VA, RedHat, etc.). We all have a contribution here, good and bad, but you have to remember, they can't take what they don't have.
If I have to, I'll buy a gigabit router, unplug the DSL, and throw a RJ45 line over to my neighbors house.
The disclaimer in the GPL works for most instances but if someone breaks the law, with or without knowledge of it, they can be held responsible.
For example, a clause stating that the author does not take responsibility for any patented algorithms doesn't make it okay to distribute even if there are.
Another example is where the author may willfully commit some crime by releasing the software. The GPL does not protect you from this.
You have to be responsible for your actions to a certain extent. If it can be shown that you willingly release software that is harmful to others, and you have foreknowledge of this, GPL or not, you could be in big trouble.
Combine this survey with the following from www.attrition.org:
Index Statistics for 99.11: (Analysis of/home/web/mirror/attrition/1999-11.html)
Reported Hacks: 639 # of AIX : 1 # of BSDi : 12 # of IRIX : 10 # of Linux : 105 # of FreeBSD : 11 # of OpenBSD : 1 # of OSF1 : 1 # of DigUnix : 3 # of SCO : 2 # of Solaris : 56 # of Win-NT : 425
Anybody ever look at the output from a packet sniffer?
Moreover, there are three key problems:
1. Any protocol for transmitting data, can also transmit encrypted data.
2. Any protocol is a software specification, and therefore must be adopted by the industry before having impact on the community.
3. Any Internet protocol must support the wide variety of computers on the Internet, including, old computers, legacy systems, and technology being deployed TODAY. Who's gonna upgrade software to facilitate snooping their data?
IT amazes me how two things that are so simalar that they are almost equivalent, can be seen as not only different but helpful in one case, and harmful in another.
If I read a disclosure over E-mail, its exactly the same as snail mail, and the failure rate for snail is, I would guess, higher than the failure rate for delivery of E-mail, but even if it wasn't thats my choice...
This bill is so you can sign up for something, and recieve disclosure information online, it doesn't mandate it.
If you are afraid of the Internet and what will happen to your discloser CHOOSE snail instead.
*sigh* progress is overwhelming, people are underwhelming.
As a community we are very naive. Don't think for one second that any of them are interested in the success of Linux when it doesn't benefit them to want it.
This is all about scoreboard. Sun, and Digital are selling hundreds of millions of dollars annually in Linux based workstations and servers. IBM, and SGI want a peice of the pie in a UNIX market that is almost stagnant otherwise. The bottom line is that all of these companies didn't even mention the word Linux once until they saw a multimillion dollar market emerge, ordering servers but NO OS.
On the other hand don't throw the baby out with the bath water. This is the beauty of the fundamental protections in the GPL, Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, and I can all sell Linux, rewrite it, or anything.
Your worst fears are realized. Sun pulls support for StarOffice at some time in the future. Beyond that, Sun dumps their entire Linux bandwagon into the nearby bog.
So what? You still have your GPL'ed Linux kernel, and your free version of StarOffice that you downloaded and continue to use legally.
Ultimately, you benefit, and your benefit can not be taken away from you, so what's the problem?
Realistically, this type of change has been occuring in institutions of all types in both directions. If Microsoft can make inroads with some Universities, they are more than likely to create a similar percentage of Windows haters as they have created in other areas.
Lets face it, nearly every Linux user, and especialy Linux activist, has moved away from another, in their opinion, lesser OS, be that MVS, VMS, OS2, MacOS, and even WIN32. Everybody's reasons are individualized, but usually center around usability, stability, assessability, and pleasure derived from using the system.
If you believe in Linux, then you know it has what it takes to fill the OS needs of many different types of users, realistically we also know that it doesn't suit every user.
Just wait and see how many universitys who "switch to Windows" find their administrators running Linux on crucial servers that they don't wan't to rebuild from the ground up once a month, or reboot once a day. Just like the domination of Linux in IT groups in corporate America.
Slashdot Mirror
Its written in Java.
John
I liken Freenet to Usenet in some ways. A system of interdependant servers who all agree to publish one anothers data.
As we all know, Usenet is subject to gross abuses. How do you propose to prevent such abuse on Freenet. Is there a Freenet 'death penalty?' Whats to prevent me from creating a porn site, or spam site on Freenet that could easily consume most of the available bandwidth and resources of the entire network?
John
The media coverage of this story was very interesting to me.
It seems that these days fairness in the mainstream media means not taking a mega-corporation to task when they have been proven to be corrupt and unlawful. It's almost as if they don't recognize the damages that THEY incurred along with the rest of us.
Predominately, it seemed like the mainstream press, Washington Post, NY Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN, were all very soft on Microsoft, tending to focus on strength of appeal for Microsoft, rather than the crimes Microsoft was determined to have committed. It's ironic that in all the discussion focusing on the Microsoft spin, i.e. they would easily appeal, it was never mentioned that it is very hard for appellate court to overturn the finding of fact of a lower judge, it is far easier for them to determine that the judge reached the wrong conclusion based on the facts, but something would have to be seriously wrong with the finding for it to be overturned factually. Thus even if the sentence is reduced it is likely that the finding of fact will always be that Microsoft is both predatory and monopolistic. Moreover, Microsoft's direct damage to other companies, such as Apple, Intel, and Netscape was rarely mentioned in more than a sentence or two.
Its funny that almost oppositely, the computing media, such as Wired, PC-Week, etc. all seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief over the verdict.
I'm going to dig out my copy of Manufacturing Consent.
and its terrific. I use their online bank and if you maintain a minimum balance billpay is included.
I have only one thing to say about bill pay: I havn't been late for a payment, or had to lick a stamp, close or address an envelope in about four months!
For ongoing bills you just set and forget, for monthly statements you just logon and schedule a payment.
Now if I could just eliminate the paper statements everything would be perfect.
I would reccomend this to anyone.
John
As a Debian and not a Redhat(can you say 'MicroSoft') user, I'm constantly reminded that my distribution is not the main distribution used by the average stuffed shirt.
The key to not forking, is avoiding distribution bias. Most software I download these days comes in RPM format. Can you say distribution bias? I yearn for the good old days of about two years ago when everything you downloaded was a tar.gz.
John
The main processor in most video game consoles is just a controller for other activites and the user interface of the game, i.e., load/save, etc. In particular the PS2 derives most of it's performance from the custom graphics coprocessors, and the important thing to remember is the bandwidth of the CPU is directly porportional to the number of instructions fetched from memory and the speed of that memory. The graphics coprocessors have 16Mb memory banks on the same silicon wafer with no external bus to get in the way. This kind of bandwidth has a significant impact on performance.
In the PC model, one fast processor does everything, and it usually uses external memory, from the standpoint of game consoles, this is neither how it is done, nor a good way to do it.
Within reason, I believe actual abilities will have little impact on the outcome of this race. Early and ongoing support of the Playstation is likely to steamroll it into many homes before the X-Box is even released. The X-box will really have to be something special to win out, moreover, MicroSoft will have to be prepared to dump a significant chunk of change into the X-box to get the level of support that the PS has, I'm not sure if they are going to be prepared to spend on this level to win. They may be after just a share of the market to help expand thier empire...
There are a number of Microsoft loyalists who seem to buy anything that Microsoft produces...I'm not sure if these people are also gamers, however, and I can't quite remember ever having seen a killer game come out of Microsoft games.
John
The fact that this question would or could even be asked shows the fundamental lack of understanding and knowledge of the conditions of most of the rest of the world. In particular, US citizens have such a high standard of living that they forget that most of the third world does not have reliable access to fresh clean drinking water, to nutrient rich food supplies, or to vaccines for Polio and other diseases considered 'cured' in the more wealthy nations.
This doesn't even get us started, but if we did we would arrive at the fact that many of the telephone systems in these countries are unreliable, cycling on and off at night, or on an hourly basis.
Do I need to go on? How would access to medicine, food and water effect social change? Moreover, what social change would that represent in the wealthy nations who say things like 'oh, those poor people don't have the Internet.'
John
Octave is perfect for you. It's an excellent all around tool. Great for prototyping mathematical problems that you might later impliment in another language, or even just for solving problems and working things out.
I reccomend it.
John
The NAVY can do anything they want with money like that. They probably think they are saving money by using shrink wrap products, but not with a cutthroat company like MS. They could DEVELOP any productivity apps they want for that kind of money.
Too bad innovation is so difficult for these major govenerment agencies, not to mention the number of parasites that will take the development cash, not produce anything, and run.
John
Privacy centers around two issues. Truely private information and information we might want to keep private but which is actually in the public domain.
Like it or not, information that we enter into a website or reveal to the power company, phone company, grocery store or other organization is not private.
Individuals rarely have a sense of the bargain involved in information interchange. When I give a bookstore my address to ship books to me, the bargain is that they will have my home address, and they will use it to ship me the books. Likewise, when you use your credit card, you are implying that you expect your purchases to be tracked, at least for billing, if nothing else.
In this age of diminished privacy it is important to draw a distinction between information which is and should be truely private and other information such as mouse clicks, home address, posts on slashdot, or taste in music, which may not be private if you allow outside agents access to it.
The privacy debate may just end up another tower of babel, if individuals don't police their own information.
John
I did read it, if you had read it carefully, you would know that Mitnick argued that the files may contain exculpatory evidence which the fifth amendment requires disclosure of.
The argument stated above is that 'I know there is damaging information in these files, and therefore I invoke the fifth amendment to protect me from revealing it.' -- this is the traditional sense of the use of the fifth amendment.
Please try to understand before you flame.
John
I think the fifth amendment protects you from being induced to give information that would lead to incrimination or conviction.
Most crypto-systems involve a key of somekind or even a pass-phrase along with the key. Being induced to give the pass-phrase is tantamount to giving information that would lead to incrimination, IMO.
John
I'm not a lawyer, but ...
...
Doesn't he just have to say, 'I refuse to give you my key on the grounds that it may incriminate me?'
There is no way they can force him to give it up due to fifth amendment protection, then it becomes a right of siezure/ownership issue
John
This is exactly how I, and I'd guess most open source developers, like it. The Microsoftian vision of user interface innovation where features are replaced with ignorance is not for me or anyone who really wants to get the most out of their computer system.
Actually, opposite to the points in this article, I find myself increasingly unhappy with the current trend in user interfaces which is to do some kind of "question and answer" based model where I can't get to what I wan't directly, and I have to reverse engineer the interface to do what I want.
I find most open-source (not all) interfaces to be simple, intuitive, widely functional, and very useful. I havn't seen interface innovation that beats it either.
John
These guys seem like they don't have much experience with system management.
Bells and whistles rarely get the job done. In fact, this article makes it out that LinuxConf is the only administrative option? Any experienced UNIX professional has stacks and stacks of options above and beyond LinuxConf, most I know would only use this type of software to manage their enterprise in a pinch or as a last resort?
If your enterprise is a home office, maybe these guys have a leg to stand on, but can Windows compete with any of the remote management options of any of the other OSes compared?
I also like how they draw a distinction between an OS, operating system, and NOS, or network opeating system. Can you say PC-background? To me there is no difference, the difference is MicroSoft marketing, trying to convince people that networking is an add-on feature? Don't believe the hype!
Moreover, they seem to draw the summary as a foregone conclusion, not even based on their own results but based on thier impression of others impressions of these systems? It appeared to me like Linux came in second or third in almost every comparison, where did SCO come from?
John
PS. They claim to talk about 'Enterprise,' but they don't even mention Mainframe?
and age seems to get merged into this quagmire. I find myself
increasingly interested and aware of all the gobs of gadgetry, often
through places like
increasingly aware and disturbed by the ongoing trends of
corportization, such events as kids being suspended from school for
wearing a 'coke-shirt' on 'pepsi-day' and other equally crazy
corporate culture.
There is no easy solution to this very difficult problem. I do
see that we all have a part in it. I recently quit my job at the new
AOL mega-corp. I've had enough, but now my choice is to work at some other
mega-corp with equally bad tactics and practices. The problem is
systemic, and endemic. I boycott Amazon because I believe the fact
that they have a trademark on "One-Click(tm)" and a patent on the
underlying technology is absolutely ludicrous, however, I see the
increasing number of technologies which are patented out from under me
and feel like I had better file for a few patents if I want to be able
to continue writing software, i.e., in order to have the technology to
work with to produce software.
Moreover, I feel like dropping out doesn't work. Most of
'the sixties' drop-outs are the drooling sheep that we complain about here.
Maybe we should begin to embrace, extend, and destroy just like the
MicroSoft tactic. Jump in grab the technology and take it where they
never thought it would or could go.
Angry about the DeCSS lawsuits? Download the source-code and compile
it yourself. Convert all your DVDs to MPEGs on your HD and screw
them. Angry about amazon.com, support your local bookstore, or start
your own non-fascist one. We embrace, some of these ideas are good
and well healed, we extend, make it the way WE want it, destroy,
screw them, these businesses would take you to task over nothing...
do the same to them.
John
The bleating, drooling masses need their content spoon fed to them through media outlets like AOL - Time Warner, this much is true. But get down off your high horse, everybody here goes wild over the ridiculous, overpriced, business-man buyout, IPOs (VA, RedHat, etc.). We all have a contribution here, good and bad, but you have to remember, they can't take what they don't have.
If I have to, I'll buy a gigabit router, unplug the DSL, and throw a RJ45 line over to my neighbors house.
John
IANAL, but...
The disclaimer in the GPL works for most instances but if someone breaks the law, with or without knowledge of it, they can be held responsible.
For example, a clause stating that the author does not take responsibility for any patented algorithms doesn't make it okay to distribute even if there are.
Another example is where the author may willfully commit some crime by releasing the software. The GPL does not protect you from this.
You have to be responsible for your actions to a certain extent. If it can be shown that you willingly release software that is harmful to others, and you have foreknowledge of this, GPL or not, you could be in big trouble.
John
Combine this survey with the following from www.attrition.org:
/home/web/mirror/attrition/1999-11.html)
Index Statistics for 99.11:
(Analysis of
Reported Hacks: 639
# of AIX : 1
# of BSDi : 12
# of IRIX : 10
# of Linux : 105
# of FreeBSD : 11
# of OpenBSD : 1
# of OSF1 : 1
# of DigUnix : 3
# of SCO : 2
# of Solaris : 56
# of Win-NT : 425
What does this tell you?
Tapping is already built into 'the net.'
Anybody ever look at the output from a packet sniffer?
Moreover, there are three key problems:
1. Any protocol for transmitting data, can also transmit encrypted data.
2. Any protocol is a software specification, and therefore must be adopted by the industry before having impact on the community.
3. Any Internet protocol must support the wide variety of computers on the Internet, including, old computers, legacy systems, and technology being deployed TODAY. Who's gonna upgrade software to facilitate snooping their data?
John
IT amazes me how two things that are so simalar that they are almost equivalent, can be seen as not only different but helpful in one case, and harmful in another.
If I read a disclosure over E-mail, its exactly the same as snail mail, and the failure rate for snail is, I would guess, higher than the failure rate for delivery of E-mail, but even if it wasn't thats my choice...
This bill is so you can sign up for something, and recieve disclosure information online, it doesn't mandate it.
If you are afraid of the Internet and what will happen to your discloser CHOOSE snail instead.
*sigh* progress is overwhelming, people are underwhelming.
John
As a community we are very naive. Don't think for one second that any of them are interested in the success of Linux when it doesn't benefit them to want it.
This is all about scoreboard. Sun, and Digital are selling hundreds of millions of dollars annually in Linux based workstations and servers. IBM, and SGI want a peice of the pie in a UNIX market that is almost stagnant otherwise. The bottom line is that all of these companies didn't even mention the word Linux once until they saw a multimillion dollar market emerge, ordering servers but NO OS.
On the other hand don't throw the baby out with the bath water. This is the beauty of the fundamental protections in the GPL, Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, and I can all sell Linux, rewrite it, or anything.
In the end YOU decide what you wan't to use.
GO DEBIAN!
John
Okay,
Your worst fears are realized. Sun pulls support for StarOffice at some time in the future. Beyond that, Sun dumps their entire Linux bandwagon into the nearby bog.
So what? You still have your GPL'ed Linux kernel, and your free version of StarOffice that you downloaded and continue to use legally.
Ultimately, you benefit, and your benefit can not be taken away from you, so what's the problem?
John
Realistically, this type of change has been occuring in institutions of all types in both directions. If Microsoft can make inroads with some Universities, they are more than likely to create a similar percentage of Windows haters as they have created in other areas.
Lets face it, nearly every Linux user, and especialy Linux activist, has moved away from another, in their opinion, lesser OS, be that MVS, VMS, OS2, MacOS, and even WIN32. Everybody's reasons are individualized, but usually center around usability, stability, assessability, and pleasure derived from using the system.
If you believe in Linux, then you know it has what it takes to fill the OS needs of many different types of users, realistically we also know that it doesn't suit every user.
Just wait and see how many universitys who "switch to Windows" find their administrators running Linux on crucial servers that they don't wan't to rebuild from the ground up once a month, or reboot once a day. Just like the domination of Linux in IT groups in corporate America.
John
1. Any accessible system can be hacked.
2. Any key escrow system must be accessible.
:. any key escrow system can be hacked.
... and what a fitting target for Joe Hacker.