I'll say it until people understand it or refute it: you cannot be both for free trade and against outsourcing.
That's a straw-man. First off trade is trade and jobs are jobs. Not the same in about a dozen ways. Out-sourcing the building of your widget is not the same as a company over-seas making it and selling it in the US to consumers at all. Also, you're presenting a connection between two things without pointing out that being against outsourcing or free trade isn't the same as being against the outsourcing of key, high-skill jobs.
I'm for free trade in the sense that I think we should trade freely with our peer nations. I also think that we should trade freely in certain sectors with less developed nations. Same goes for jobs.
But when you're dealing with goods that are on the cutting edge, and where their production requires the most highly skilled in your work-force (not design, production), and you allow those goods (or work) to come from over-seas without a measure of protectionism, you hurt our country's economy substantially.
Protectionism in its various forms is not all bad, and mixing it with free trade is a good way to stimulate growth in less developed nations while allowing for a graceful influx of world labor into the dynamics of local economy.
From the article: However, Microsoft (with Longhorn) and Apple (with Tiger) have made it clear that they consider the filesystem of the future to be a database of information to be mined, and that client PCs will be a major part of the next chapter in the "search wars." The future of Linux may depend on whether Linux filesystems continue to innovate.
Ugh. First off, who says MS is right? Do we see people chomping at the bit to write database-like filesystem using apps? Do we have any notion that this is a good idea?
Ok, that's point one, and I can argue both sides of it. I just want to point out that it's not a foregone conclusion.
Point two: Since when did keeping up with Microsoft constitute innovation?
Reiser was the first B-tree directory-structured filesystem that performed on-par with existing filesystems. Ext3 was the first backward-compatible journaling filesystem. And of course, there are dozens of innovations that have been absorbed via JFS and XFS which were released to Linux by their owners.
I'd like to see more innovation on the sceduling, thread/process-control and inter-process-messaging fronts. I'd like to see the availability of more passive messaging (e.g. like alert(2), but for more system events than just time and user-defined events beyond just SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2). In short I'd like the steady stream of real innovation in Linux to not get bogged down because the grass looks greener over in Redmond....
Until unmanned systems are intelligent and self-directing, you're always going to have an advantage where you have the actual people. If that location happens to be at the top of a gravity well, you multiply the value of that pesence by quite a bit.
Right now, the value would be marginal at best because it's impossible to be self-sufficient in space for very long, but that's mostly a matter of technology, scale and experience. Don't under-estimate the value of a command-presence. Troops (or drones in this case) are great, but when you have to direct them from a remote location you have a strategic vulnerability.
On to the topic of a space station not being a "fort"... oh so? And if you want to "take" a space station (e.g. because it's launching missiles at your country), how do you do that? Lasers are about the only weapon that don't suffer from the fact that you have to expend hugely more energy to get to them than they have to expend to get to you. You can launch missiles at them, but there are several simple mechanical ways to deal with a missile if you have gravity as an ally.
Space-based combat is going to see a whole new set of rules, and whoever is there in force first, learning those rules is going to have an advantage, no?
Again, not a critical flaw. Red Hat was the first one putting out CDs of Linux as far as anyone in the english-speaking world of business was concerned. Slackware established a brand in the free-as-in-cheap software world. SuSE established a brand in Germany and its neighbors and later in the rest of the world. This is EXACTLY the kind of branding I meant,and SuSE would not have been bought by Novell had they had the exact same technology, but never established their brand and reputation. That has value. Q.E.D.
The value of that brand, as I said in a fairly minor point in my original post, has been invaluable to Red Hat and has sustained them through the rocky waters of figuiring out how open source business models work. If anyone doubts that innovation can occur in the free software world, they have just to look at the strides made in the Linux world, which all stand on the shoulders of the X, BSD, and POSIX contributions that come before them, which in turn stand on the shoulders of such greats as Multics, Parc and Arpanet.
The proof in the pudding that software is a valuless comodity, and that the ability to craft, market and maintain good software is a highly valuable skill is pretty much there for the historical browsing.
Why do people nit-pick like this? I don't see how your comment changes my assessment of the value of branding at all, and for the specific examples that you cited, Slackware was never in the same market as Red Hat, so I don't count them (Red Hat strove to be a commercial distribution with support services from very early on, where Slackware was just selling CDs "on the side"). SuSE on the other hand was not available to most of the world until LONG after Red Hat was shipping CDs.
True, but it's not the only reason. Among the others are:
* Moving humans off of earth. Building stable colonies away from earth is key to sustaining humanity (global catastrophies do happen), and making them self-sustaining will take generations upon generations, so starting now makes sense.
* Mining ore from asteroids is something that can mostly be automated, but having a human being present solves for a lot of sticky problems.
* Building a stable Lagrange point station would make manned and unmanned exploration of the solar system much easier.
* The first nation to develop a strong and stable, manned presence in space will have a substantial tactical advantage over the rest of the globe.
Of course, if it is viable as an OSS project, every established OSS vendor can support it as well
But there is always value in being first and developing a brand and a reputation. This is why Red Hat is successful. They were cutting Linux CDs long before anyone else, and they developed a reputation and a brand that worked for them.
The shocking thing about open source business is that it's no different from any other business. It's not less risky. It's not more risky. It's not even particularly hard to understand.
The problem that people usually have is that they were brought up to believe that software as a good had value. Once you disabuse yourself of such a notion, open source is no different from selling water or iron nails. (Relatively) valuless items have been sold on the basis of branding and reputation for millenia. all that software companies have to do is determine what their angle is (support, packaging, bundling, etc).
None of those companies makes money selling CDs with Linux on them
That's a side point that has no bearing. Please re-read this from the grandparent:
The only way to avoid this is to sell it to that person for the price of developing, which means that there will only be incentive for a company to write software if it's in-house or built-to-order. There goes company innovation.
Now take that, and compare it to my example companies and tell me, how is it that Red Hat continues to produce software that they do develop for and do innovate on (though, obviously, they are not the only entity working on Linux and related software)? According to the above, that's impossible.
The answer is that support makes it a viable business.
That's just the point, here. You're working with 1960s models of software innovation... please step out of the Studabaker and look around at the code!
Seriously though, innovation no longer means "writing an entire product from scratch" in software, just as innovation in architecture does not mean having to re-think the way you build a roof. You innovate where you need to, and only there. This is the PRIMARY strength of open source software development.
Secondly, isn't it the case that they sell support rather than software?
Absolutely! That, again is the point. The post I was responding to (yours?) was claiming that companies would not innovate any longer past a supposed "1.0" because there was no incentive, but the profits shown on support from companies like Red Hat certainly show this to be incorrect.
Profit, innovation and open source software get along just fine.
Talk is cheap. If Ted is so pissed, why doesn't he do something about it? He certainly has the power to.
Actually, he doesn't. The companies that he owned that are in the class he's complaining about, he has since sold, and as a public figure, it's arguable that his most valuable contribution in this area is to spark and/or legitimize debate.
someone has to develop OSS programs so you can sell maintenance
Yes they do. Look at it this way: it's the same sort of bootstrapping problem as going public. You might develop software on your own time, as part of an existing company, or get a loan in order to start a company that writes the software... you might even adapt an existing open source product.
Once you have written the program, and it has gained a popular footing with the public, you can bootstrap support services around it. It's hard, and 9 out of 10 such efforts will likely fail (just as 9 out of 10 new businesses fail). But you're going to write the software anyway if you're scratching your own itch (which is most-often why I write software), and when it's good enough and useful enough to enough people, you will have yourself a viable business.
if a company spends thousands or millions of $CURRENCY developing a product, and then the first person they sell it to can make as many copies as they want and sell them on for half the price, that person will make more profit per copy, because they didn't have the overheads, and will sell more copies to boot. The only way to avoid this is to sell it to that person for the price of developing, which means that there will only be incentive for a company to write software if it's in-house or built-to-order. There goes company innovation.
I present you with a refuting example: Red Hat Software (RHAT). Want another? SuSE (now Novell (NOVL)). Another? IBM (which is not pure open source, but has spent in excess of $1B on Linux alone. These companies make open source software and act as project managers for hundreds of projects that are external to them. They are neither in-house only or custom only software.
Please explain how your view meshes with the reality.
"Linux" does not need to standardize on anything. A distribution can, and that's fine.
This is an important distinction, since getting everyone in the world who works with open source, Linux-kernel-based OSes to standardize on anything is not going to happen (nor should it), while getting, say, Red Hat to chose one desktop might.
This is like Bill Gates bemoaning monopolistic business practices in the software industry.
NO This is like Bill Gates saying "Microsoft should be broken up to prevent it's detrimental impact on the software market that sifles small business growth." I, for one, would stand up and cheer if Bill Gates said that, but we all know he's not man enough to do the right thing.
PLEASE, let's not pummel this guy for a) doing the right thing b) doing it in a way that will hurt his interestes and c) for his move toward colorizing movies almost 20 YEARS ago
Most of the applications one buys for Linux these days are high-end, highly customized software (I work for a company which makes such software, and makes a VERY good business selling it as both product and service).
As far as the desktop goes, that's as yet an untapped market, but as it grows, rest assured that new players and old will start to target the Linux desktop. You'll probably see games and security software first. The other thing that I think you'll see, which is kind of unique to Linux, is a set of desktop unification tools that let you do what Red Hat's switchdesk did, but on a much higher level. In other words, you'll see things like a tool that sets up all the right Gnome bits, makes sure all of the MIME types and gconf settings are right, tightens up the Mozilla security settings and makes sure that evolution is configured to open the right browser when you click on a link. That kind of thing.
Someone could make a killing selling that tool, perhaps with some high-level layer on top of apt updating at the same time.
therwise the only thing "informative" about this post is that ajs has no sense of humor. I know, I know, don't feed the trolls
I wasn't trolling, and I do have what I consider to be a highly developed sense of humor. It's just that there are risks you don't take.
Let's follow this one out. You send a message saying "you got it all wrong, I'm at [insert address here] and my name is [insert someone you hate]."
The next day, you find out the guy you mentioned is dead. Now, you can go to court and say "but there was NO WAY this was serious. It HAD TO BE A JOKE," but that does not change the fact that you sent mail to someone who sent you a death threat, telling them to target someone else instead, and there's just nothing reasonable about that.
So, to make the joke on Slashdot along the lines of "let's do this thing that puts our political/finacial opponents' lives at (small) risk," I don't buy that it's harmless. It's joking about killing a person, and that's just never funny.
Sense of humor? Sure. Make a joke about sending them your address and travel habits along with a promise that if they kill you then they can claim the $18M that you leave behind without any heirs... now THAT I would find funny.
Suggest that Darl McBride is probably going to say it's a Linux advocate sending these out, and now he needs more bodyguards. That I would find funny.
Describe how you sent them a note requesting a picture of them holding the gun they would use to kill you as proof. That I would find funny.
"I'm going to send them after [insert name] instead," just isn't remotely a joking matter.
I asked Taco for a comment spell checker several YEARS ago when I ran into him in Boston. He said it was an interesting idea (as soon as he realized I was asking for it for myself, and not complaining about his spelling), but nothing ever came of it.
When Slashdot has a spell checker, I'll us it. Until then, try contributing to the conversation at hand, rather than fixating on spelling mistakes that you obviously understood the correct meaning of anyway.
"I take it you've never heard of Assassination politics?"
I have, and I think it's a wonderful example of how to outline the problems with large-scale politics. It's a very good accedemic tool.
However, when you say, even jokingly, that someone should be killed because of their political or financial misbehavior, I think that's a line across which no reasonable person should tread.
Suppose you made that joke. Suppose that joke became common-place. Suppose tomorrow someone walks up to the person about whom you made that joke and shoots them. I, for one, don't want to hear "Slashdot told me to do it" on the evening news. Yes, that person would be wrong, and we know we were joking, but that's not going to help you when his sobbing wife tells the press "Slashdot must be stopped".
This is the danger of casual incitement to violence.
Software downloads - I get all of my Linux ISOs from Gnutella and BitTorrent Photographs - Yes, 99% of what's shared on Gnuttella in the way of images is porn. That 1% can be DAMN interesting. Video feeds - Back when the towers fell, the Internet was slow, but usable. Major news sites were effectively dead, though. Gnutella was klunky then compared to now, but was still your best bet for getting video of what was going on. Rare music - bands that have yet to make a name. Rare recordings from over seas that have never been for sale in the US. There are just so many GOOD things to listen to after you wade through the mainstream garbage.
P2P is a healthy, vibrant community of free speach. That means that a lot of the speach is the sort of thing you'd hear out of the average high school student, true, but that doesn't make the rare, considered speech any less valuable!
Ok, I didn't listen to the recording (will try to get a chance later), but I'm curious: did he say anything that was actually antisemitic or did he just express the opinion that the holocaust was a hoax? The latter is almost certainly an incorrect opinion (I've met too many people who were there or whose parents were there not to believe), but holding that opinion does not make one an antisemite... obviously, it is in the political favor of an antisemite's arguments to hold such an opinion, and for their opponents to label anyone who holds such an opinion as either a crackpot (probably true) or antisemite (unfounded).
However, I would think that this late in the game, we would understand the difference.
Worse, labeling someone who doesn't acknowledge that tragedy as being against any one group devalues the lives of the other groups (e.g. homosexuals, Gypsies and political prisoners) who were killed.
"I patently reject your characterization of me as an "ambulance chaser.""
I'm sorry, I don't characterize you that way at all. However (and I'm dissapointed at Slashdot's editors for retroactively changing my submission without noting that it was no longer a direct quote (that's just bad journalism)), I was not refering to you. I'm refering to the bottom-feeding lawyers that started this suit. They are not your friends; they are not doing this because they knew anything about the situation before it became a press release; and they are most certainly not going to pause for a beat if it looks like the chance of winning this one is slim.
Take a look at the history of the cases that the firms involved had started. You'll find that most of them end fast. It's just a shotgun approach. I don't know who your particular lawyers are, but the general approach is this: you read the filings of all of the publically traded companies. Any time a company files a negative restatement you watch the stock price that day and/or the next day. If it results in a substantial drop in price, you take a standard form-suit and write in the names and cursory facts.
The goal of such a suit is to get into discovery and find that there's some kernel of wrong-doing. You don't KNOW that there is, but when you start with all of the companies that had to re-state earnings your chances are fair that one in ten or so will yield something juicy enough to merit settlement, and that's going to net enough money to pay for your lawyers (of course, it's rarely enough to benefit the people like you who are actually concerned about the case).
"If you want to report both sides, fine, but I resent the one-sidedness of your submission."
I think you're looking at this from a "I lost money because RHAT's price went down," perspective, so I'm not so interested in "sides" as the objective facts. Fact: Red Hat re-stated revenues. Fact: Red Hat did so after their new auditors told them to. Fact: Red Hat's old auditors signed off on the books using the old method of reporting for three years. Fact: this kind of change as a result of different auditors is rare, but certainly not unheard of. Fact: the change did not result in different revenues for RHAT, only the months in which they were reported. Fact: As a result, Red Hat is down to twice the price that they were at last year.... that's right, they're up 100% over last year, after their price dropped. Fact: At their 52-week high, RHAT's price was around 300x their earnings, a valuation that was only appropriate in the context of speculation, FAR outside of RHAT's projections and guidance. Fact: Analysts were cautioning investors just before the pre-earnings drop that Red Hat was "priced for perfection", and that any mis-step in their implementation would result in failure to achive the lofty goals that were calculated into their price by the market.
It seems to me that, unless the discovery yields some as-yet-uncovered facts that hurt RHAT, your case simply doesn't stand a chance, and will end up costing you time while being nothing more than an "acceptable" loss to the ambulance chasers.
Re:Red Hat versus reality is more like it...
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Red Hat Vs. The Lawyers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When you say that the were "not really telling the truth", you do mean, "they were not really telling every version of the truth, though they were telling one of the versions that satisfy current rules to the extent that their previous auditors signed off on it", right?
I mean, we're not forgetting that all of this surrounds, not a failure on Red Hat's part, but a difference of opinion between two auditors (the rules require Red Hat and all publically traded firms to rotate auditors periodically, which is what Red Hat did).
Also, on the point of the one month period... To go from "hey, you should change your reporting strategy" in an audit to a full public disclosure and revised reports for 3 years, retroatively in a month... I'm no accountant, but isn't that pretty damn fast?
Oh, sorry... one more thing in the interests of full disclosure: I'm a (minor) Red Hat stock holder and am not involved in any law suits (though if there were a stockholders-vs-the-ambulance-chasers class action, I might think about it).
Re:Red Hat versus reality is more like it...
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Red Hat Vs. The Lawyers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think you misunderstood what I was suggesting. I'm not saying that Red Hat did the right thing, I'm just saying that what they did -- at worst -- constituted poor market management, but if the law suits read "Red Hat propped up their stock price for a month before reporting the comments of their auditors", then I could understand (not sure it would go very far, but that's another thing).
What the suit alleges (at least the first one) is that Red Hat scammed the public out of... something (it's really not clear what, since they've never reported more earnings than they had, total)... FOR THREE YEARS! Now, that's the part I don't get. They seem to feel that had Red Hat used this new accounting practice, then some magical thing would have happened that would result in their being a better investment today, AND that Red Hat knew that for three years. It really just sounds like a fishing expedition designed to find some dirt during discovery to me....
Slashdot Mirror
I'll say it until people understand it or refute it: you cannot be both for free trade and against outsourcing.
That's a straw-man. First off trade is trade and jobs are jobs. Not the same in about a dozen ways. Out-sourcing the building of your widget is not the same as a company over-seas making it and selling it in the US to consumers at all. Also, you're presenting a connection between two things without pointing out that being against outsourcing or free trade isn't the same as being against the outsourcing of key, high-skill jobs.
I'm for free trade in the sense that I think we should trade freely with our peer nations. I also think that we should trade freely in certain sectors with less developed nations. Same goes for jobs.
But when you're dealing with goods that are on the cutting edge, and where their production requires the most highly skilled in your work-force (not design, production), and you allow those goods (or work) to come from over-seas without a measure of protectionism, you hurt our country's economy substantially.
Protectionism in its various forms is not all bad, and mixing it with free trade is a good way to stimulate growth in less developed nations while allowing for a graceful influx of world labor into the dynamics of local economy.
From the article: However, Microsoft (with Longhorn) and Apple (with Tiger) have made it clear that they consider the filesystem of the future to be a database of information to be mined, and that client PCs will be a major part of the next chapter in the "search wars." The future of Linux may depend on whether Linux filesystems continue to innovate.
Ugh. First off, who says MS is right? Do we see people chomping at the bit to write database-like filesystem using apps? Do we have any notion that this is a good idea?
Ok, that's point one, and I can argue both sides of it. I just want to point out that it's not a foregone conclusion.
Point two: Since when did keeping up with Microsoft constitute innovation?
Reiser was the first B-tree directory-structured filesystem that performed on-par with existing filesystems. Ext3 was the first backward-compatible journaling filesystem. And of course, there are dozens of innovations that have been absorbed via JFS and XFS which were released to Linux by their owners.
I'd like to see more innovation on the sceduling, thread/process-control and inter-process-messaging fronts. I'd like to see the availability of more passive messaging (e.g. like alert(2), but for more system events than just time and user-defined events beyond just SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2). In short I'd like the steady stream of real innovation in Linux to not get bogged down because the grass looks greener over in Redmond....
Until unmanned systems are intelligent and self-directing, you're always going to have an advantage where you have the actual people. If that location happens to be at the top of a gravity well, you multiply the value of that pesence by quite a bit.
Right now, the value would be marginal at best because it's impossible to be self-sufficient in space for very long, but that's mostly a matter of technology, scale and experience. Don't under-estimate the value of a command-presence. Troops (or drones in this case) are great, but when you have to direct them from a remote location you have a strategic vulnerability.
On to the topic of a space station not being a "fort"... oh so? And if you want to "take" a space station (e.g. because it's launching missiles at your country), how do you do that? Lasers are about the only weapon that don't suffer from the fact that you have to expend hugely more energy to get to them than they have to expend to get to you. You can launch missiles at them, but there are several simple mechanical ways to deal with a missile if you have gravity as an ally.
Space-based combat is going to see a whole new set of rules, and whoever is there in force first, learning those rules is going to have an advantage, no?
Again, not a critical flaw. Red Hat was the first one putting out CDs of Linux as far as anyone in the english-speaking world of business was concerned. Slackware established a brand in the free-as-in-cheap software world. SuSE established a brand in Germany and its neighbors and later in the rest of the world. This is EXACTLY the kind of branding I meant,and SuSE would not have been bought by Novell had they had the exact same technology, but never established their brand and reputation. That has value. Q.E.D.
The value of that brand, as I said in a fairly minor point in my original post, has been invaluable to Red Hat and has sustained them through the rocky waters of figuiring out how open source business models work. If anyone doubts that innovation can occur in the free software world, they have just to look at the strides made in the Linux world, which all stand on the shoulders of the X, BSD, and POSIX contributions that come before them, which in turn stand on the shoulders of such greats as Multics, Parc and Arpanet.
The proof in the pudding that software is a valuless comodity, and that the ability to craft, market and maintain good software is a highly valuable skill is pretty much there for the historical browsing.
SuSE and Slackware both predate Red Hat.
Why do people nit-pick like this? I don't see how your comment changes my assessment of the value of branding at all, and for the specific examples that you cited, Slackware was never in the same market as Red Hat, so I don't count them (Red Hat strove to be a commercial distribution with support services from very early on, where Slackware was just selling CDs "on the side"). SuSE on the other hand was not available to most of the world until LONG after Red Hat was shipping CDs.
I'd say adventure is a good enough reason
True, but it's not the only reason. Among the others are:
* Moving humans off of earth. Building stable colonies away from earth is key to sustaining humanity (global catastrophies do happen), and making them self-sustaining will take generations upon generations, so starting now makes sense.
* Mining ore from asteroids is something that can mostly be automated, but having a human being present solves for a lot of sticky problems.
* Building a stable Lagrange point station would make manned and unmanned exploration of the solar system much easier.
* The first nation to develop a strong and stable, manned presence in space will have a substantial tactical advantage over the rest of the globe.
Of course, if it is viable as an OSS project, every established OSS vendor can support it as well
But there is always value in being first and developing a brand and a reputation. This is why Red Hat is successful. They were cutting Linux CDs long before anyone else, and they developed a reputation and a brand that worked for them.
The shocking thing about open source business is that it's no different from any other business. It's not less risky. It's not more risky. It's not even particularly hard to understand.
The problem that people usually have is that they were brought up to believe that software as a good had value. Once you disabuse yourself of such a notion, open source is no different from selling water or iron nails. (Relatively) valuless items have been sold on the basis of branding and reputation for millenia. all that software companies have to do is determine what their angle is (support, packaging, bundling, etc).
That's a side point that has no bearing. Please re-read this from the grandparent:
Now take that, and compare it to my example companies and tell me, how is it that Red Hat continues to produce software that they do develop for and do innovate on (though, obviously, they are not the only entity working on Linux and related software)? According to the above, that's impossible.
The answer is that support makes it a viable business.
RH and SuSE didn't develop Linux
That's just the point, here. You're working with 1960s models of software innovation... please step out of the Studabaker and look around at the code!
Seriously though, innovation no longer means "writing an entire product from scratch" in software, just as innovation in architecture does not mean having to re-think the way you build a roof. You innovate where you need to, and only there. This is the PRIMARY strength of open source software development.
Secondly, isn't it the case that they sell support rather than software?
Absolutely! That, again is the point. The post I was responding to (yours?) was claiming that companies would not innovate any longer past a supposed "1.0" because there was no incentive, but the profits shown on support from companies like Red Hat certainly show this to be incorrect.
Profit, innovation and open source software get along just fine.
Talk is cheap. If Ted is so pissed, why doesn't he do something about it? He certainly has the power to.
Actually, he doesn't. The companies that he owned that are in the class he's complaining about, he has since sold, and as a public figure, it's arguable that his most valuable contribution in this area is to spark and/or legitimize debate.
someone has to develop OSS programs so you can sell maintenance
Yes they do. Look at it this way: it's the same sort of bootstrapping problem as going public. You might develop software on your own time, as part of an existing company, or get a loan in order to start a company that writes the software... you might even adapt an existing open source product.
Once you have written the program, and it has gained a popular footing with the public, you can bootstrap support services around it. It's hard, and 9 out of 10 such efforts will likely fail (just as 9 out of 10 new businesses fail). But you're going to write the software anyway if you're scratching your own itch (which is most-often why I write software), and when it's good enough and useful enough to enough people, you will have yourself a viable business.
if a company spends thousands or millions of $CURRENCY developing a product, and then the first person they sell it to can make as many copies as they want and sell them on for half the price, that person will make more profit per copy, because they didn't have the overheads, and will sell more copies to boot. The only way to avoid this is to sell it to that person for the price of developing, which means that there will only be incentive for a company to write software if it's in-house or built-to-order. There goes company innovation.
I present you with a refuting example: Red Hat Software (RHAT). Want another? SuSE (now Novell (NOVL)). Another? IBM (which is not pure open source, but has spent in excess of $1B on Linux alone. These companies make open source software and act as project managers for hundreds of projects that are external to them. They are neither in-house only or custom only software.
Please explain how your view meshes with the reality.
"Linux" does not need to standardize on anything. A distribution can, and that's fine.
This is an important distinction, since getting everyone in the world who works with open source, Linux-kernel-based OSes to standardize on anything is not going to happen (nor should it), while getting, say, Red Hat to chose one desktop might.
This is like Bill Gates bemoaning monopolistic business practices in the software industry.
NO This is like Bill Gates saying "Microsoft should be broken up to prevent it's detrimental impact on the software market that sifles small business growth." I, for one, would stand up and cheer if Bill Gates said that, but we all know he's not man enough to do the right thing.
PLEASE, let's not pummel this guy for a) doing the right thing b) doing it in a way that will hurt his interestes and c) for his move toward colorizing movies almost 20 YEARS ago
Most of the applications one buys for Linux these days are high-end, highly customized software (I work for a company which makes such software, and makes a VERY good business selling it as both product and service).
As far as the desktop goes, that's as yet an untapped market, but as it grows, rest assured that new players and old will start to target the Linux desktop. You'll probably see games and security software first. The other thing that I think you'll see, which is kind of unique to Linux, is a set of desktop unification tools that let you do what Red Hat's switchdesk did, but on a much higher level. In other words, you'll see things like a tool that sets up all the right Gnome bits, makes sure all of the MIME types and gconf settings are right, tightens up the Mozilla security settings and makes sure that evolution is configured to open the right browser when you click on a link. That kind of thing.
Someone could make a killing selling that tool, perhaps with some high-level layer on top of apt updating at the same time.
therwise the only thing "informative" about this post is that ajs has no sense of humor. I know, I know, don't feed the trolls
I wasn't trolling, and I do have what I consider to be a highly developed sense of humor. It's just that there are risks you don't take.
Let's follow this one out. You send a message saying "you got it all wrong, I'm at [insert address here] and my name is [insert someone you hate]."
The next day, you find out the guy you mentioned is dead. Now, you can go to court and say "but there was NO WAY this was serious. It HAD TO BE A JOKE," but that does not change the fact that you sent mail to someone who sent you a death threat, telling them to target someone else instead, and there's just nothing reasonable about that.
So, to make the joke on Slashdot along the lines of "let's do this thing that puts our political/finacial opponents' lives at (small) risk," I don't buy that it's harmless. It's joking about killing a person, and that's just never funny.
Sense of humor? Sure. Make a joke about sending them your address and travel habits along with a promise that if they kill you then they can claim the $18M that you leave behind without any heirs... now THAT I would find funny.
Suggest that Darl McBride is probably going to say it's a Linux advocate sending these out, and now he needs more bodyguards. That I would find funny.
Describe how you sent them a note requesting a picture of them holding the gun they would use to kill you as proof. That I would find funny.
"I'm going to send them after [insert name] instead," just isn't remotely a joking matter.
I asked Taco for a comment spell checker several YEARS ago when I ran into him in Boston. He said it was an interesting idea (as soon as he realized I was asking for it for myself, and not complaining about his spelling), but nothing ever came of it.
When Slashdot has a spell checker, I'll us it. Until then, try contributing to the conversation at hand, rather than fixating on spelling mistakes that you obviously understood the correct meaning of anyway.
"I take it you've never heard of Assassination politics?"
I have, and I think it's a wonderful example of how to outline the problems with large-scale politics. It's a very good accedemic tool.
However, when you say, even jokingly, that someone should be killed because of their political or financial misbehavior, I think that's a line across which no reasonable person should tread.
Suppose you made that joke. Suppose that joke became common-place. Suppose tomorrow someone walks up to the person about whom you made that joke and shoots them. I, for one, don't want to hear "Slashdot told me to do it" on the evening news. Yes, that person would be wrong, and we know we were joking, but that's not going to help you when his sobbing wife tells the press "Slashdot must be stopped".
This is the danger of casual incitement to violence.
Ok, reasons to use P2P:
Software downloads - I get all of my Linux ISOs from Gnutella and BitTorrent
Photographs - Yes, 99% of what's shared on Gnuttella in the way of images is porn. That 1% can be DAMN interesting.
Video feeds - Back when the towers fell, the Internet was slow, but usable. Major news sites were effectively dead, though. Gnutella was klunky then compared to now, but was still your best bet for getting video of what was going on.
Rare music - bands that have yet to make a name. Rare recordings from over seas that have never been for sale in the US. There are just so many GOOD things to listen to after you wade through the mainstream garbage.
P2P is a healthy, vibrant community of free speach. That means that a lot of the speach is the sort of thing you'd hear out of the average high school student, true, but that doesn't make the rare, considered speech any less valuable!
Even in jest. Even in part. It's neither funny nor reasonable to suggest sending an assassin after your political or financial enemies.
Let's not even joke about the open source movement stooping to those levels, please.
Ok, I didn't listen to the recording (will try to get a chance later), but I'm curious: did he say anything that was actually antisemitic or did he just express the opinion that the holocaust was a hoax? The latter is almost certainly an incorrect opinion (I've met too many people who were there or whose parents were there not to believe), but holding that opinion does not make one an antisemite... obviously, it is in the political favor of an antisemite's arguments to hold such an opinion, and for their opponents to label anyone who holds such an opinion as either a crackpot (probably true) or antisemite (unfounded).
However, I would think that this late in the game, we would understand the difference.
Worse, labeling someone who doesn't acknowledge that tragedy as being against any one group devalues the lives of the other groups (e.g. homosexuals, Gypsies and political prisoners) who were killed.
"I patently reject your characterization of me as an "ambulance chaser.""
I'm sorry, I don't characterize you that way at all. However (and I'm dissapointed at Slashdot's editors for retroactively changing my submission without noting that it was no longer a direct quote (that's just bad journalism)), I was not refering to you. I'm refering to the bottom-feeding lawyers that started this suit. They are not your friends; they are not doing this because they knew anything about the situation before it became a press release; and they are most certainly not going to pause for a beat if it looks like the chance of winning this one is slim.
Take a look at the history of the cases that the firms involved had started. You'll find that most of them end fast. It's just a shotgun approach. I don't know who your particular lawyers are, but the general approach is this: you read the filings of all of the publically traded companies. Any time a company files a negative restatement you watch the stock price that day and/or the next day. If it results in a substantial drop in price, you take a standard form-suit and write in the names and cursory facts.
The goal of such a suit is to get into discovery and find that there's some kernel of wrong-doing. You don't KNOW that there is, but when you start with all of the companies that had to re-state earnings your chances are fair that one in ten or so will yield something juicy enough to merit settlement, and that's going to net enough money to pay for your lawyers (of course, it's rarely enough to benefit the people like you who are actually concerned about the case).
"If you want to report both sides, fine, but I resent the one-sidedness of your submission."
I think you're looking at this from a "I lost money because RHAT's price went down," perspective, so I'm not so interested in "sides" as the objective facts. Fact: Red Hat re-stated revenues. Fact: Red Hat did so after their new auditors told them to. Fact: Red Hat's old auditors signed off on the books using the old method of reporting for three years. Fact: this kind of change as a result of different auditors is rare, but certainly not unheard of. Fact: the change did not result in different revenues for RHAT, only the months in which they were reported. Fact: As a result, Red Hat is down to twice the price that they were at last year.... that's right, they're up 100% over last year, after their price dropped. Fact: At their 52-week high, RHAT's price was around 300x their earnings, a valuation that was only appropriate in the context of speculation, FAR outside of RHAT's projections and guidance. Fact: Analysts were cautioning investors just before the pre-earnings drop that Red Hat was "priced for perfection", and that any mis-step in their implementation would result in failure to achive the lofty goals that were calculated into their price by the market.
It seems to me that, unless the discovery yields some as-yet-uncovered facts that hurt RHAT, your case simply doesn't stand a chance, and will end up costing you time while being nothing more than an "acceptable" loss to the ambulance chasers.
When you say that the were "not really telling the truth", you do mean, "they were not really telling every version of the truth, though they were telling one of the versions that satisfy current rules to the extent that their previous auditors signed off on it", right?
I mean, we're not forgetting that all of this surrounds, not a failure on Red Hat's part, but a difference of opinion between two auditors (the rules require Red Hat and all publically traded firms to rotate auditors periodically, which is what Red Hat did).
Also, on the point of the one month period... To go from "hey, you should change your reporting strategy" in an audit to a full public disclosure and revised reports for 3 years, retroatively in a month... I'm no accountant, but isn't that pretty damn fast?
Oh, sorry... one more thing in the interests of full disclosure: I'm a (minor) Red Hat stock holder and am not involved in any law suits (though if there were a stockholders-vs-the-ambulance-chasers class action, I might think about it).
I think you misunderstood what I was suggesting. I'm not saying that Red Hat did the right thing, I'm just saying that what they did -- at worst -- constituted poor market management, but if the law suits read "Red Hat propped up their stock price for a month before reporting the comments of their auditors", then I could understand (not sure it would go very far, but that's another thing).
... something (it's really not clear what, since they've never reported more earnings than they had, total)... FOR THREE YEARS! Now, that's the part I don't get. They seem to feel that had Red Hat used this new accounting practice, then some magical thing would have happened that would result in their being a better investment today, AND that Red Hat knew that for three years. It really just sounds like a fishing expedition designed to find some dirt during discovery to me....
What the suit alleges (at least the first one) is that Red Hat scammed the public out of