While MS costs more to "buy", linux I'd say costs more to install. Almost anyone can setup and use a MS windows platform.
Virtually no-one installs Windows in the first place. They either get it installed by their vendor or their corporate IT department.
Compariatively noone can install and use a linux distro.
In no other area of technology would expecting an end user to perform major maintanance tasks be considered sensible. Do you have "easy to assemble" cars, etc?
Ask some business student to install Apache [when they aren't that computer literal to begin with] is fun:-)
So how are they going to install IIS, as a regular user?
Re:Cute, but impractical
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
If you crash at 70mph then you are as good as dead. It doesn't matter how many airbags you have or how much armour plating you've welded on.
Actually rather than armour plating what you need is a structure which crumples and disintegrates. Which adsorbs the energy, like a race car. Drivers regually walk out uninjured from collisions a lot faster than 70mph.
With your current little debacle in the Middle East, I would have thought the idea of ridding yourselves of dependance on gas/petrol would be a good incentive.
But then the US would have to find somewhere else to go to war with:)
It is another mark of great science fiction that an author can create alien races and cultures that, while possessing enough cognates to human culture that they are not totally enigmatic, are not just humans with bugs on their foreheads. Too many authors confuse 'not looking human' with 'not being human'.
It's all too easy, especially on TV and in movies to have "men in suits syndrome".
An alien race can be a powerful tool to examine or illustrate humanity and human culture, but it has to have its own culture first to create that vantage point.
It's perfectly possible to have a people who are human, but who have a culture which is "alien".
I am a taxpayer. Most programmers are. So are corporations.
At least in theory, many large corporations appear to be very good at tax avoidance.
And, for the love of Bob, I'd pray that if the DoD considers any sort of open source licensing, they have legal attack dogs go over the license with ten fine toothed combs. The last thing we need is some jackass managing to snag targetting programs for ICBM's.
How would having the targetting program help you if you came under attack from such missiles?
The "Institute" would be called The Klingon Alliance or the Ku Klux Klan if MS thought it would help.
Like other lobbying groups they pick a name which makes them sound more authoriative and more representative than they actually are. same thinking as having a preassure group called "moral majority".
The real claims of the movement are that it will cut into proprietary software houses right to earn a buck. This are also useless claims based on continued extortion of government dollars. These companies wish to continue taking excessive amounts of money from the government.
In a capitalist system a commercial enterprise has no right to make money in the first place. What they appear to be asking for is "socialism", "communism" or "corporate welfare".
The government should own the software it uses. Would you be happy if all the tanks owned by the government were actually owned by Laidlaw and were supplied to the government on contract? A contract that could be cancelled at any time. That software controlling the battleship-sub-airplane-tank is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft reserves the right to disable it at any time should the government not keep it happy.
Or even worst what would happen if the software used turns out to be owned by OBL. Or there is an "easter egg" in the software which activates when you attempt to target certain places...
I was at a talk once where a guy from Lockheed was saying how they were using more and more commercial off-the-shelf systems to reduce costs. They were moving away from specialized systems custom developed for each plane, to a more general system that didn't need as much work.
How often does COTS mean that you end up with a bespoke system built on top of proprietary software?
But he said that even though Linux would be great, they could not have a foreign national have control over their system. Sure, they could see exactly what they have, but any changes to the kernel would have to be checked out completely (expensive), so they would be right back at having a specialized system. Politics maybe, but they ended up with a proprietary OS.
Whereby they can't even audit it at all, let alone find out the nationality of whoever wrote a specific bit of code...
Interesting way to phrase this. Communist as defined by Soviet Union and China was a top down archetecture where one (or a small group of ppl) control what goes on. Also, they are the ones who have high profits. But anybody who supports them, will get some decent scrapes.
Which sounds closer to proprietary software than open source. Especially when you consider the way Microsoft likes to pay people in stock options.
I don't know what regulations open source is suppose to violate, but a great deal of closed source software violates second sourcing regulations. Second sourcing, having a minimum of two suppliers, has been in use for fifty years by the DoD and the military.
Plenty of other government related organisations and even commercial businesses supposedly have similar rules.
Suppliers didn't like it then, suppliers are not going to like it now.
The point is to protect against suppliers holding the customer hostage.
While BSD licenses are OK using GPL licenses violate congressional norms (in particular they make commercial software impossible)
Nothing in the GPL licence procludes commercial software. N.B. "commercial" and "proprietary" do not mean the same thing. AFAIK the US DoD isn't in the business of selling software anyway. Nor is the US Congress.
The DoD also must use their equipment for many years beyond the typical lifespan of a commercial software product. Look at when various peices of military equipment that's designed, rolled out, and supported for decades.
The time between design and rollout could easily be longer than the "lifespan" according to a proprietary software company.
Proprietary software means more expense for the government due to non-competition, and it also puts the government in the hands of a private corporation.
Worst case senario with the latter is that the corporation has links with someone you are about to go to war with. Considering the number of "easter eggs" which make it into proprietary software you probably really don't want it running on a weapons system.
Unfortunately, OSS is much more suitable for military applications than in corporate America... a typical workstation on a submarine will have one purpose, say, to look at radar or fire weapons...so you have an OS, some special hardware, and typically a single application built specifically for you to control it all.
How is this different from a single purpose workstation in a corporate environment? e.g. call centre, stock control system, supermarket till, parcel tracking, airline check in, etc. Single task workstations are commonplace in supporting commercial busines. Even an "office" may only require a handful of applications, email, web browser, wordprocessor, spreadsheet.
If I BUY a piece of software, I do have the right to do just about anythign I want to it EXCEPT distribute it, for free or profit.
Often with proprietary software you are buying a permission to use the software, with conditions which go far beyond any incarnation of copyright law. Though what a court might think of the blatent "bait and switch" sales tactics which are frequently involved is an open question.
Basically the same definition used by copyright law, or by a typical software license. Distribution within an organisation doesn't tend to count as "distribution" from the point of view of copyright law, but practically everything else does.
Except that many EULAs count internal distribution. Otherwise the likes of per seat licencing would be impossible to enforce.
That depends on what you mean by distribute. I would tend to think that distributing inside your company is still distributing, but it looks like I'm wrong.
A company is legally one "person". "Distribution" in this context means to outside parties.
But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the users, under the GPL.
There is a difference between making a program available to "the public" and making it available to specific individuals. The GPL only requires that you make source available to the same people you distribute binaries to.
you only have to release the sourcecode and make your software open source IF YOU DISTRIBUTE IT.
With the GPL, or similar, you only have to make the source code available to the same people you distribute the binaries to. You'd only need to make the source publically available if you made the binaries publically available. Were you to supply the binaries to a finite group of people (including corporate "people") only they would be able to insist that you supplied the source to them.
I'm reasonably confident that the US military isn't all to concerened about the ability of linux to play high quality mp3's.
With open source if you don't need some piece of functionality you can remove it. With a proprietary system, especially one like Windows which is orientated around providing a nice GUI desktop, there might be lots of bits of code you don't need, but can't get rid of.
Not only is proprietary softare inherently insecure, it's inherently more expensive, inherently doesn't work as well, and inherently causes the government to be screwed if the company goes out of business or decides to stop supporting the software.
With proprietary software a commercial software company's idea of "lifespan" can quite easily be at odds with military ideas of lifespan.
In fact, the government got screwed by using HP-UX when HP decided not to make new versions of the OS backwards-compatible with the older HP processors being used in most of our submarines.
At a guess they won't support the older version and the newer hardware either hasn't been certified for use in a submarine or requires a major refit to install.
In other news, Microsoft reports that it has purchased the rights to the next edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Among the changes expected to appear in this edition, the word "choice" will henceforth be defined as "the act of giving Microsoft more money, esp. against one's better judgment."
In the followining edition they will change the spelling to "coyce" and the definition to "whatever Microsoft says it is".
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MS turned the PC market into a commodity market.
MS had nothing to do with it. The clone makers turned the PC market into a commodity market.
While MS costs more to "buy", linux I'd say costs more to install. Almost anyone can setup and use a MS windows platform.
:-)
Virtually no-one installs Windows in the first place. They either get it installed by their vendor or their corporate IT department.
Compariatively noone can install and use a linux distro.
In no other area of technology would expecting an end user to perform major maintanance tasks be considered sensible.
Do you have "easy to assemble" cars, etc?
Ask some business student to install Apache [when they aren't that computer literal to begin with] is fun
So how are they going to install IIS, as a regular user?
If you crash at 70mph then you are as good as dead. It doesn't matter how many airbags you have or how much armour plating you've welded on.
Actually rather than armour plating what you need is a structure which crumples and disintegrates. Which adsorbs the energy, like a race car. Drivers regually walk out uninjured from collisions a lot faster than 70mph.
With your current little debacle in the Middle East, I would have thought the idea of ridding yourselves of dependance on gas/petrol would be a good incentive.
:)
But then the US would have to find somewhere else to go to war with
It is another mark of great science fiction that an author can create alien races and cultures that, while possessing enough cognates to human culture that they are not totally enigmatic, are not just humans with bugs on their foreheads. Too many authors confuse 'not looking human' with 'not being human'.
It's all too easy, especially on TV and in movies to have "men in suits syndrome".
An alien race can be a powerful tool to examine or illustrate humanity and human culture, but it has to have its own culture first to create that vantage point.
It's perfectly possible to have a people who are human, but who have a culture which is "alien".
The GPL requires the release of source code and the right to redistribute thus defeats most commercial models of software sales.
Not models, one single model, that of pretending that a computer program is like a physical object.
I am a taxpayer. Most programmers are. So are corporations.
At least in theory, many large corporations appear to be very good at tax avoidance.
And, for the love of Bob, I'd pray that if the DoD considers any sort of open source licensing, they have legal attack dogs go over the license with ten fine toothed combs. The last thing we need is some jackass managing to snag targetting programs for ICBM's.
How would having the targetting program help you if you came under attack from such missiles?
The "Institute" would be called The Klingon Alliance or the Ku Klux Klan if MS thought it would help.
Like other lobbying groups they pick a name which makes them sound more authoriative and more representative than they actually are. same thinking as having a preassure group called "moral majority".
We have data we keep on clinical trials that must be saved for 15 years after the patient dies. So we have to store data for 20 to 40 years.
Depending on the age of your trialists that 20-40 years could turn into somewhere in the region of a century.
The real claims of the movement are that it will cut into proprietary software houses right to earn a buck. This are also useless claims based on continued extortion of government dollars. These companies wish to continue taking excessive amounts of money from the government.
In a capitalist system a commercial enterprise has no right to make money in the first place. What they appear to be asking for is "socialism", "communism" or "corporate welfare".
The government should own the software it uses. Would you be happy if all the tanks owned by the government were actually owned by Laidlaw and were supplied to the government on contract? A contract that could be cancelled at any time. That software controlling the battleship-sub-airplane-tank is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft reserves the right to disable it at any time should the government not keep it happy.
Or even worst what would happen if the software used turns out to be owned by OBL. Or there is an "easter egg" in the software which activates when you attempt to target certain places...
I was at a talk once where a guy from Lockheed was saying how they were using more and more commercial off-the-shelf systems to reduce costs. They were moving away from specialized systems custom developed for each plane, to a more general system that didn't need as much work.
How often does COTS mean that you end up with a bespoke system built on top of proprietary software?
But he said that even though Linux would be great, they could not have a foreign national have control over their system. Sure, they could see exactly what they have, but any changes to the kernel would have to be checked out completely (expensive), so they would be right back at having a specialized system. Politics maybe, but they ended up with a proprietary OS.
Whereby they can't even audit it at all, let alone find out the nationality of whoever wrote a specific bit of code...
Interesting way to phrase this. Communist as defined by Soviet Union and China was a top down archetecture where one (or a small group of ppl) control what goes on. Also, they are the ones who have high profits. But anybody who supports them, will get some decent scrapes.
Which sounds closer to proprietary software than open source. Especially when you consider the way Microsoft likes to pay people in stock options.
I don't know what regulations open source is suppose to violate, but a great deal of closed source software violates second sourcing regulations. Second sourcing, having a minimum of two suppliers, has been in use for fifty years by the DoD and the military.
Plenty of other government related organisations and even commercial businesses supposedly have similar rules.
Suppliers didn't like it then, suppliers are not going to like it now.
The point is to protect against suppliers holding the customer hostage.
While BSD licenses are OK using GPL licenses violate congressional norms (in particular they make commercial software impossible)
Nothing in the GPL licence procludes commercial software. N.B. "commercial" and "proprietary" do not mean the same thing. AFAIK the US DoD isn't in the business of selling software anyway. Nor is the US Congress.
The DoD also must use their equipment for many years beyond the typical lifespan of a commercial software product. Look at when various peices of military equipment that's designed, rolled out, and supported for decades.
The time between design and rollout could easily be longer than the "lifespan" according to a proprietary software company.
Proprietary software means more expense for the government due to non-competition, and it also puts the government in the hands of a private corporation.
Worst case senario with the latter is that the corporation has links with someone you are about to go to war with.
Considering the number of "easter eggs" which make it into proprietary software you probably really don't want it running on a weapons system.
Unfortunately, OSS is much more suitable for military applications than in corporate America... a typical workstation on a submarine will have one purpose, say, to look at radar or fire weapons...so you have an OS, some special hardware, and typically a single application built specifically for you to control it all.
How is this different from a single purpose workstation in a corporate environment? e.g. call centre, stock control system, supermarket till, parcel tracking, airline check in, etc. Single task workstations are commonplace in supporting commercial busines. Even an "office" may only require a handful of applications, email, web browser, wordprocessor, spreadsheet.
If I BUY a piece of software, I do have the right to do just about anythign I want to it EXCEPT distribute it, for free or profit.
Often with proprietary software you are buying a permission to use the software, with conditions which go far beyond any incarnation of copyright law. Though what a court might think of the blatent "bait and switch" sales tactics which are frequently involved is an open question.
Basically the same definition used by copyright law, or by a typical software license. Distribution within an organisation doesn't tend to count as "distribution" from the point of view of copyright law, but practically everything else does.
Except that many EULAs count internal distribution. Otherwise the likes of per seat licencing would be impossible to enforce.
That depends on what you mean by distribute. I would tend to think that distributing inside your company is still distributing, but it looks like I'm wrong.
A company is legally one "person". "Distribution" in this context means to outside parties.
But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the users, under the GPL.
There is a difference between making a program available to "the public" and making it available to specific individuals. The GPL only requires that you make source available to the same people you distribute binaries to.
you only have to release the sourcecode and make your software open source IF YOU DISTRIBUTE IT.
With the GPL, or similar, you only have to make the source code available to the same people you distribute the binaries to.
You'd only need to make the source publically available if you made the binaries publically available.
Were you to supply the binaries to a finite group of people (including corporate "people") only they would be able to insist that you supplied the source to them.
I'm reasonably confident that the US military isn't all to concerened about the ability of linux to play high quality mp3's.
With open source if you don't need some piece of functionality you can remove it. With a proprietary system, especially one like Windows which is orientated around providing a nice GUI desktop, there might be lots of bits of code you don't need, but can't get rid of.
Free software is not about zero-cost, it's about FREEDOM - as in the FREEDOM to see the code, and the FREEDOM to make changes to it.
Also freedom to use it as you see fit, freedom to use it according to your timescale.
Not only is proprietary softare inherently insecure, it's inherently more expensive, inherently doesn't work as well, and inherently causes the government to be screwed if the company goes out of business or decides to stop supporting the software.
With proprietary software a commercial software company's idea of "lifespan" can quite easily be at odds with military ideas of lifespan.
In fact, the government got screwed by using HP-UX when HP decided not to make new versions of the OS backwards-compatible with the older HP processors being used in most of our submarines.
At a guess they won't support the older version and the newer hardware either hasn't been certified for use in a submarine or requires a major refit to install.
In other news, Microsoft reports that it has purchased the rights to the next edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Among the changes expected to appear in this edition, the word "choice" will henceforth be defined as "the act of giving Microsoft more money, esp. against one's better judgment."
In the followining edition they will change the spelling to "coyce" and the definition to "whatever Microsoft says it is".