Windows2000 is just fine for public access computers.
One of the requirements was that the system be multi-lingual. With Linux you can select language at login, even customise gdm/kdm to make this selection easy. AFAIK you can't do this with W2K, people would have to login and then change the language.
Alternatively, they could maybe drill a hole 4km down and lay the cable as is customary on the sea floor. At least it'd only break along the last 4km. We can drill 4km holes in ice, right? (send a hot metal thing down?)
You'd probably want a 4km deep trench. Otherwise you'd need some kind of mole to drag 1,600 km of cable behind it.
Now, as an earlier post mentioned, running the cable to a coastal area or an island beyond the serious ice and relaying the signal via wireless is a lot more feasible.
The pole is in the middle of the landmass. Anywhere on the coast would not have line of sight to the pole. Bouncing a signal of the ionosphere isn't going to work too well here either. Aurora might look nice, but charged paticles slamming into the atmosphere does not a stable ionosphere make.
Surely for this amount of money one could devices a wireless repeater system to be more stable.
So you want to build a set of towers on 4km thick ice, in the middle of nowhere and in an environment which makes pouring concrete impossible and needs exotic steels to be of any use at all? This will come with a high price tag and well as a high cost of fixing any bits which break.
There are no obstructions in the path except for snow/ice storms in the air - surely one can find a frequency that deals with this problem well and provides decent bandwidth ver a decent distance right?
What do you propose to power these stations with? About the only workable system would be RTG or fission. IIRC there is a treaty which would prevent beinging in the required nuclear fuel.
If you can go 20km at a time it's only 100 repeater stations along the way (or maybe you'd place 2-3 of them 1 km or so apart at each repeat point for redundancy)
Your repeaters would probably cost several million dollers each, plus maintanance. The estimated $250M for the fibre link looks considerably cheaper.
We have already seen what "picking one" can do to the office suites. Incompatible fileformats. Hard to transfer beetween one prog and another.
Since you have one in use within the organisation this isn't at issue. As for exchanging files with outside parties you have problems whatever you do, even if you go the Microsoft route.
Hard/Impossible to get into the market.
What "market", this is a telephone company? The only type of software they are ever likely to consider selling has absolutly nothing to do with office desktops.
For deployment in the corporate environment, will the IT department not choose the packages to be installed? The user will be presented with the corporate standard desktop with a word processor, spreadsheet, email program etc. The difference with Linux is that the IT department has a greater choice of which packages to install.
The important factor is that the choice is being made by either in house people or contractors to fit the specific requirements of the tasks in hand.
Also an open source Linux package is much easier for them to customise to the corporate requirements than a proprietary Windows one would be. Having picked software most suited to the tasks in hand you can now make it fit these tasks even better. Not many businesses operate out of an absolutly standard office, with a standard number and placement of telephone, network and power points. Typically they use custom converted or custom constricted buildings or parts of buildings. Software is an infrastructure service, should it not be treated like any other such service?
Without starting a war, I think that in order for linux to be deployed successfully in a corporate envrironment, someone is going to have to build a highly functional, standardized desktop environment.
All you need is a corporate wide standard, which could by very inflexable for the end user. Trying to have one system for everyone means a lot of work and probably ending up with something not ideal for anyone.
Choice is great for geeks, but not for the standard fare business environment.
When it comes to building offices and the services within them choice is very important at the planning stage. Even though you'd probably end up with the thing built by one builder, with all the sockets from one supplier, etc.
I don't think the majority of the Linux community are anti-corporate per se, they tend to be anti-corporate-abuse from what I can see.
The idea that the GPL and by extension Linux is "anti-corporate" tends to be a claim of the those opposing the GPL, especially the tiny number of producers of proprietary software as an off the shelf product.
The advantage of open source software (including BSD, etc) is that it is apt (or can be made apt) for your purposes as opposed to someone else's,
Which is possibly even more important to a corporate user. Since having a less than optimal software setup can seriously damage their business. But since their requirements may be highly specific there is no off the shelf option.
while the advantage of libre software (GPL and other "strong" licenses) is that it's resistant to abuse in certain common ways,
The ways of abuse might be common, but the actual abusers are uncommon.
First, Microsoft, as the
richest company in the world, HAS to keep INCREASING profits. A company
that has made so much money for its stockholders has to not just keep
making money, but increasing profits. Its the nature of our economy. If
you're not growing, you're not making money for your shareholders.
This kind of thing is basically a pyramid scheme. Which is unsustainable long term. The most likely fate of Microsoft would be to "Enron", assuming that those running the company have somewhere safe to flee to.
This is maybe true only more recently, where dividends are less and less
the reason that people invest in corporations.
The payment of dividends is a sustainable paradigm, since it simply requires making a profit, rather than making an ever increasing profit. Making a fairly static profit or a decent profit averaged over 10, 25, 50 even 100 years is rather more attainable than making an ever increasing profit.
People invest because they
expect the market value of their shares to increase. (especially with
Microsoft, who IIRC doesn't pay dividends to shareholders)
Problem is that stock market valuations have become meaningless as measures of anything other than the thoughs of stock traders.
Microsoft has accumulated so much cash, so quickly, that if they don't
continue to do so, their stock value will go down.
But just as they have accumulated it quickly they can also lose it quickly. The way things look is that if Microsoft's stock value starts fall they would lose a lot of their cash reserves in covering stock options. Maybe even in trying to manipulate the markets by their own stock trading, governments have lost more money than Microsoft have trying (and generally failing) to prop up their currencies..
I think that
corporations judgement of Linux as a desktop OS has so much to do with the
window manager, especially KDE. Not to start any flame wars here, but I
think more minimalistic window managers (while not as attractive) have the
potential to be much more simple and stable on the desktop.
Something being pretty is really not any kind of big issue here, especially it it's an application or application suite specific to the organisation in question.
(And much more
customizable). People say KDE is customizable, but I think its very
difficult to do correctly.
What's important here is administrative rather than end user customisation. Indeed it may well be a requirement to restrict end user customisation. I don't think the problem is really technical, so much as everything being judged by a Windows yardstick.
Terminals in business are commodities. Paying a premium for all the features in Windows is expensive.
Does every terminal need Digital camera capabilities when you've got 100 terminals in the room?
The number needing a camera may well be exactly zero. Ditto for a large number of "features" Microsoft likes to tightly embed into their software. Also you may want to have any user able to use any terminal. Microsoft's approach of "roaming profiles" just dosn't scale.
When every penny counts the case for sticking with windows for the clients grows harder. If you've invested in servers you can probably keep those going while you phase in alternatives.
Especially if the extra money dosn't make the workstation more reliable or more resistant to the user feeding it too much coffee.
At home people want easy set up of perphierals, esspecially modems, games, dvd viewing and all sorts of other applications.
Even in this environment people will tend to use far more that they set up either hardware or software. IMHO most people would not really have too many issues with a machine which had a user mode and a setup mode. Since they are already familiar with this concept on other domestic applicances. What I think would be a good design would be a system with unprivleged users; a more priveleged setting for software/driver install and configuration, user management, network settings, etc and a fully priveleged setting for maintance of the OS and critical settings. Most importantly applications which would only run in a non privileged user mode.
I don't believe that linux is ready or designed for home use just as 4 years ago the consumer would not want to run NT.
It dosn't really matter if they want to or if it's well designed for home use. People don't really have much of a choice. In many cases it's XP, not even, "or nothing".
That is exactly my point as well as that of the original poster. Proprietary software vendors should not get special treatment and neither should open source projects. In my opinion the GPL would amount to special treatment of open source efforts.
Proprietary software vendors are PSVs out of their own choice. No third party went to them and said "you are a PSV, you will always and forever be a PSV". Should corporations be protected form possible negative consequences of their own actions?
Given that you have some software that was funded by the government what should be done with it? In my opinion you want to maximize that value of the software to the people who paid for it, i.e. the people of the country.
By this criteria Microsoft probably shouldn't be considered part of the people who paid for it in the first place.
My opinion is that the best way to maximize the benefits for the people is to choose a license that maximizes use while also ensuring interoperability and thus competition.
If the US government cannot release GPL code then the only way they could make use of GPL code is to use the programs unmodified. This potentially places a huge and expensive restriction on the US government. Where they could have taken a GPL program and modified it a bit they now have to either develop from scratch or buy from a PSV.
The GPL does not maximize use while the public domain does nothing to ensure interoperability.
So maybe you;d need something else for software originated by the US government. The thing is that the issue is more about the US government creating derived works under licence. You'd also need to ensure that they are not restrained from modifying someone elses code, where the copyright holder is perfectly happy for them to do so. Otherwise this would be restricting the interests of the directly involved parties, the US Government and the GPL copyright holder, in order to satisfy some third party PSV.
Picking GPL is a selection; one that specifically excludes certain models.
It's an implicit choice, since they started with GPL material and obeyed the licence. N.B. none of the actual copyright holders are complaining about this.
But this is just my point. The U.S. government shouldn't be in the business of selecting a particular business model to favor.
Which is exactly what they are doing by letting Microsoft dictate to them.
Keeping it all open and public is correct for the U.S. government.
Which is something the GPL does perfectly. So what's the issue.
I am, however, quite painfully aware of what it means to me as an intellectual property worker to consider integrating GPL code. It's a big deal.
It's a big deal to the tiny minority in the business of producing proprietary software for sale to third parties. For the vast majority of people, including the vast majority of people who work with software, it is no deal at all.Most software development is done for a specific requirement either in house or by contractors. If the work is done in house there is no distribution to third parties. If it's done by a contractor then the client gets a copy including the source and the contractor can still use what they did for future contracts. Is your pain of integrating GPL code really a problem caused by the GPL or is it actually a pain caused by proprietary code?
While I have nothing at all against a private intellectual property owner releasing their own things under GPL, I'm very much against the government doing so as a matter of preference.
So you are saying that the US government cannot take and alter GPL code? Even if doing so would cost far less that either writing something from scratch or buying licences to third party proprietary software. Maybe the US government should take a census of the objectors to their using GPL code, so that if they need to spend extra money they know who to send the bill to:)
It's fully discriminatory in the sense that it discriminates against an entire business model.
As opposed to discriminating to protect a minority business model. I'm sure in it's history the US Government has trashed lots of business models. Sometimes inadvertantly, as in this case, sometimes very much deliberatly. Should the US allow slavery, stop building public roads, remove all regulation of public utilities, disband all publicly funded law enforcement, etc. Just because these discriminate against someone's business model?
The government should _NOT_ be in the business of doing that.
Wrong goverments should not put private profits before fulfiling their mandates. The mandate of the NSA is the protection of the national security of the USA. It is not protecting the profitability the Microsoft Corporation or any other corporation or individual present on US territory. It cannot be stated often enough that there is no right to make a profit from commercial enterprise in general. In a free market capitalist economy if you no longer can make a profit from a specific business model (for any reason) they either you change business model or cease trading (if you are smart you do this whilst you still have assets). It's quite possible for your busines to become unviable due to government, indeed some business models are explicitally made illegal. WHy should proprietary software have special protection not given to slave traders, ice cutters, buggy whip makers, etc?
At my old home, I had a dialup connection to my ISP. About once or twice a month when I would dial in for the evening, I would hear *static* on the phoneline. I'm talking like a noisy AM radio type of static. I would hang up the modem, dial in again, and the static would be gone. My best guess is that there was a faulty wire *somewhere* in the telco's network that was causing the static, and I was unfortunate enough for my call to end up on that wire. (Remember, POTS is a circuit switched network [techtarget.com], the same set of wires is used for the duration of the connection)
On anything other that museum pieces the only individual set of wires are the local loop. Anything else is multiplexed over either copper or more likely fibre. A T1 isn't a bundle of 24 pairs it's a single 1.5M connection split into 24 channels. If it breaks 24 channels break, not one out of the 24.
But they had no choice! They *found* Linux licenced under GPL (well, large parts of it) and just added their own stuff. Which thus legally had to be GPLed as well.
Alternatively they could have written their own OS from scratch, a *huge* job.
Also a more expensive job.
Or built on BSD. Less likely to become ever useful in American society at large, the way Linux looks set to become.
Unless using BSD would have been much less expensive they would still have been failing to provide best value to the people who actually paid for the work.
but I think that it is important that properietary software vendors don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to use the results of government sponsored software research.
It isn't the job of government to ensure any business models work and never break. Why shoudl proprietary software vendors get special treatment?
A corporation cannot, as a matter of reduction to practice, incorporate a (full) GPL product in a release of its own software, because doing so requires them to give up intellectual property rights on their own works (the linking clause, read it yourself).
"You cannot do X, because in order to do X you would need to do Y." When nothing stops you doing Y, is an interesting piece of "logic". Also you are making the false assumption that most corporations are in the business of selling proprietary software, which is simply untrue. So the argument is utterly meaningless, since they have none of their "own" software in the first place or if they do it's a set of alterations to GPL code which are utterly useless on their own. Indeed there are probably quite a few corporations, for whom owning (not licencing) proprietary software would cost money. Since their business has so little to do with selling software, they'd be like a bookshop which owned pedigree kittens. For the vast majority of corporations software is part of their infrastructure. It's not really much different from cables, pipes, even the buildings they use.
Here's the truth: GPL's license restricts only, for all intents and purposes, private parties from adding other restrictions to software, so it favors everyone, and disfavors those who would take away freedoms from the public.
Very few entities have any interest in slapping restrictions on pieces of software in the first place. The only ones who do are those who sell proprietary software as their main or only line of business.
MS's EULA restricts people from viewing, talking about, benchmarking, copying, reverse-engineering, etc., etc., their code, so it favors only Microsoft (by easing their business-model issues) and disfavors everyone else.
A sizable proportion of people would want to do one or more of these things.
These licenses are public-minded in the sense that they are specifically authored to ensure long-term free public access to the code -- the source [GPL] or the binaries derived therefrom [BSD], put simply -- and they do not discriminate against any individual or organization, nor do they restrict freedoms such as of speech once any such entity accepts the terms of these licenses. It is precisely this sort of public-minded, freedom-oriented licensing that Microsoft finds frightening,
When did "to further progress of science and the useful arts" become "to further the profits of big business" anyway?
because it cannot conceive of a future in which its business model, of selling closed software under licenses that stifle speech to people who think Software Is Magical And Thus Requires Great Expenditures By Huge Corporations,
To the vast majority of companies software is infrastructure. Even people who may think having clean water piped through out a building, electricity, high speed LANs, telephones, etc are "magical" generally understand that to get these sort of things sorted you can either employ people who know about them or get an external contractor in. No-one in their right mind would chase half way across a continent (or even the planet) to get a magic plumbing kit or a magic cabling kit or even a magic building kit. But somehow Microsoft has managed to sell the idea of a magic software kit, an off the shelf product which will cover all your companies needs without needing to employ an expert to set it up. Maybe because software is newer than buildings, plumbing, etc and there is no real material cost involved in deploying it.
The government could release the code as public domain and it could be used in a GPL project.
If it's original code it would have to be public domain. But if they were to do this with GPL derived code they would effectivly be destroying copyright, which the US Government cannot do, at least not without compensating the copyright holder(s).
To release source code under the GPL, you have to hold the copyright to the code.
The US Government (in this case represented by NSA) cannot hold a copyright, the law does not allow for it.
IIRC it actually works that they cannot create or destroy copyright. But can have copyright assigned to them and are subject to licencing of copyright works. If the latter didn't hold the US government could simply buy one copy of any Microsoft product they wanted to use and do whatever they liked. Which would really annoy Microsoft.
No copyright, no GPL, end of story.
A lot of the things they are likely to have done involved creating a derived work. In the US derived works retain the original copyright holder. Under the current rules the US government can't just take someone elses copyright away. So where is the problem? If there was a problem it would be for one or more of the kernel copyright holders to raise a complaint, rather than some third party.
Simply put, I do not want MY tax dollars going towards development of software licensed under the GPL. If my tax dollars fund development that goes into the public domain, fine. If my tax dollars fund development that gets licensed under the GPL, NOT FINE.
So you'd be happy to pay more taxes to compensate for the inability of government to modify GPL software in any way. You'd prefer if instead they either wrote from scratch (and released as public domain) or paid for proprietary software, either of which are likely to cost a lot more tax dollers than taking some GPL code, modifying it a bit then complying with both the rules requiring the publically funded work be made public and the GPL... When it comes to spending public money there are usually rules about not squandering the money. Not allowing government departments to modify GPL software (which is effectivly what a "government may not release GPL software" type rule does, since, unlike private individuals and corporations, they are obliged to publish any modifications made) means that they can have to spend considerably more money, with no apparent benefit to anyone, except possibly a few corporations who didn't contribute their fair share of tax dollers in the first place.
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Windows2000 is just fine for public access computers.
One of the requirements was that the system be multi-lingual. With Linux you can select language at login, even customise gdm/kdm to make this selection easy. AFAIK you can't do this with W2K, people would have to login and then change the language.
Alternatively, they could maybe drill a hole 4km down and lay the cable as is customary on the sea floor. At least it'd only break along the last 4km. We can drill 4km holes in ice, right? (send a hot metal thing down?)
You'd probably want a 4km deep trench. Otherwise you'd need some kind of mole to drag 1,600 km of cable behind it.
Hands up: who thinks wireless (microwave, 802.11, whatever) would be a much better idea here?
When did 802.11 aquire a range of just over 1,000 miles?
Now, as an earlier post mentioned, running the cable to a coastal area or an island beyond the serious ice and relaying the signal via wireless is a lot more feasible.
The pole is in the middle of the landmass. Anywhere on the coast would not have line of sight to the pole. Bouncing a signal of the ionosphere isn't going to work too well here either. Aurora might look nice, but charged paticles slamming into the atmosphere does not a stable ionosphere make.
Surely for this amount of money one could devices a wireless repeater system to be more stable.
So you want to build a set of towers on 4km thick ice, in the middle of nowhere and in an environment which makes pouring concrete impossible and needs exotic steels to be of any use at all? This will come with a high price tag and well as a high cost of fixing any bits which break.
There are no obstructions in the path except for snow/ice storms in the air - surely one can find a frequency that deals with this problem well and provides decent bandwidth ver a decent distance right?
What do you propose to power these stations with? About the only workable system would be RTG or fission. IIRC there is a treaty which would prevent beinging in the required nuclear fuel.
If you can go 20km at a time it's only 100 repeater stations along the way (or maybe you'd place 2-3 of them 1 km or so apart at each repeat point for redundancy)
Your repeaters would probably cost several million dollers each, plus maintanance. The estimated $250M for the fibre link looks considerably cheaper.
We have already seen what "picking one" can do to the office suites. Incompatible fileformats. Hard to transfer beetween one prog and another.
Since you have one in use within the organisation this isn't at issue. As for exchanging files with outside parties you have problems whatever you do, even if you go the Microsoft route.
Hard/Impossible to get into the market.
What "market", this is a telephone company? The only type of software they are ever likely to consider selling has absolutly nothing to do with office desktops.
For deployment in the corporate environment, will the IT department not choose the packages to be installed? The user will be presented with the corporate standard desktop with a word processor, spreadsheet, email program etc. The difference with Linux is that the IT department has a greater choice of which packages to install.
The important factor is that the choice is being made by either in house people or contractors to fit the specific requirements of the tasks in hand.
Also an open source Linux package is much easier for them to customise to the corporate requirements than a proprietary Windows one would be.
Having picked software most suited to the tasks in hand you can now make it fit these tasks even better.
Not many businesses operate out of an absolutly standard office, with a standard number and placement of telephone, network and power points. Typically they use custom converted or custom constricted buildings or parts of buildings. Software is an infrastructure service, should it not be treated like any other such service?
Without starting a war, I think that in order for linux to be deployed successfully in a corporate envrironment, someone is going to have to build a highly functional, standardized desktop environment.
All you need is a corporate wide standard, which could by very inflexable for the end user. Trying to have one system for everyone means a lot of work and probably ending up with something not ideal for anyone.
Choice is great for geeks, but not for the standard fare business environment.
When it comes to building offices and the services within them choice is very important at the planning stage. Even though you'd probably end up with the thing built by one builder, with all the sockets from one supplier, etc.
I don't think the majority of the Linux community are anti-corporate per se, they tend to be anti-corporate-abuse from what I can see.
The idea that the GPL and by extension Linux is "anti-corporate" tends to be a claim of the those opposing the GPL, especially the tiny number of producers of proprietary software as an off the shelf product.
The advantage of open source software (including BSD, etc) is that it is apt (or can be made apt) for your purposes as opposed to someone else's,
Which is possibly even more important to a corporate user. Since having a less than optimal software setup can seriously damage their business. But since their requirements may be highly specific there is no off the shelf option.
while the advantage of libre software (GPL and other "strong" licenses) is that it's resistant to abuse in certain common ways,
The ways of abuse might be common, but the actual abusers are uncommon.
First, Microsoft, as the richest company in the world, HAS to keep INCREASING profits. A company that has made so much money for its stockholders has to not just keep making money, but increasing profits. Its the nature of our economy. If you're not growing, you're not making money for your shareholders.
This kind of thing is basically a pyramid scheme. Which is unsustainable long term. The most likely fate of Microsoft would be to "Enron", assuming that those running the company have somewhere safe to flee to.
This is maybe true only more recently, where dividends are less and less the reason that people invest in corporations.
The payment of dividends is a sustainable paradigm, since it simply requires making a profit, rather than making an ever increasing profit. Making a fairly static profit or a decent profit averaged over 10, 25, 50 even 100 years is rather more attainable than making an ever increasing profit.
People invest because they expect the market value of their shares to increase. (especially with Microsoft, who IIRC doesn't pay dividends to shareholders)
Problem is that stock market valuations have become meaningless as measures of anything other than the thoughs of stock traders.
Microsoft has accumulated so much cash, so quickly, that if they don't continue to do so, their stock value will go down.
But just as they have accumulated it quickly they can also lose it quickly. The way things look is that if Microsoft's stock value starts fall they would lose a lot of their cash reserves in covering stock options. Maybe even in trying to manipulate the markets by their own stock trading, governments have lost more money than Microsoft have trying (and generally failing) to prop up their currencies..
I think that corporations judgement of Linux as a desktop OS has so much to do with the window manager, especially KDE. Not to start any flame wars here, but I think more minimalistic window managers (while not as attractive) have the potential to be much more simple and stable on the desktop.
Something being pretty is really not any kind of big issue here, especially it it's an application or application suite specific to the organisation in question.
(And much more customizable). People say KDE is customizable, but I think its very difficult to do correctly.
What's important here is administrative rather than end user customisation. Indeed it may well be a requirement to restrict end user customisation.
I don't think the problem is really technical, so much as everything being judged by a Windows yardstick.
Terminals in business are commodities. Paying a premium for all the features in Windows is expensive.
Does every terminal need Digital camera capabilities when you've got 100 terminals in the room?
The number needing a camera may well be exactly zero. Ditto for a large number of "features" Microsoft likes to tightly embed into their software.
Also you may want to have any user able to use any terminal. Microsoft's approach of "roaming profiles" just dosn't scale.
When every penny counts the case for sticking with windows for the clients grows harder. If you've invested in servers you can probably keep those going while you phase in alternatives.
Especially if the extra money dosn't make the workstation more reliable or more resistant to the user feeding it too much coffee.
At home people want easy set up of perphierals, esspecially modems, games, dvd viewing and all sorts of other applications.
Even in this environment people will tend to use far more that they set up either hardware or software. IMHO most people would not really have too many issues with a machine which had a user mode and a setup mode. Since they are already familiar with this concept on other domestic applicances.
What I think would be a good design would be a system with unprivleged users; a more priveleged setting for software/driver install and configuration, user management, network settings, etc and a fully priveleged setting for maintance of the OS and critical settings. Most importantly applications which would only run in a non privileged user mode.
I don't believe that linux is ready or designed for home use just as 4 years ago the consumer would not want to run NT.
It dosn't really matter if they want to or if it's well designed for home use. People don't really have much of a choice. In many cases it's XP, not even, "or nothing".
That is exactly my point as well as that of the original poster. Proprietary software vendors should not get special treatment and neither should open source projects. In my opinion the GPL would amount to special treatment of open source efforts.
Proprietary software vendors are PSVs out of their own choice. No third party went to them and said "you are a PSV, you will always and forever be a PSV". Should corporations be protected form possible negative consequences of their own actions?
Given that you have some software that was funded by the government what should be done with it? In my opinion you want to maximize that value of the software to the people who paid for it, i.e. the people of the country.
By this criteria Microsoft probably shouldn't be considered part of the people who paid for it in the first place.
My opinion is that the best way to maximize the benefits for the people is to choose a license that maximizes use while also ensuring interoperability and thus competition.
If the US government cannot release GPL code then the only way they could make use of GPL code is to use the programs unmodified. This potentially places a huge and expensive restriction on the US government. Where they could have taken a GPL program and modified it a bit they now have to either develop from scratch or buy from a PSV.
The GPL does not maximize use while the public domain does nothing to ensure interoperability.
So maybe you;d need something else for software originated by the US government. The thing is that the issue is more about the US government creating derived works under licence. You'd also need to ensure that they are not restrained from modifying someone elses code, where the copyright holder is perfectly happy for them to do so. Otherwise this would be restricting the interests of the directly involved parties, the US Government and the GPL copyright holder, in order to satisfy some third party PSV.
Picking GPL is a selection; one that specifically excludes certain models.
It's an implicit choice, since they started with GPL material and obeyed the licence. N.B. none of the actual copyright holders are complaining about this.
But this is just my point. The U.S. government shouldn't be in the business of selecting a particular business model to favor.
:)
Which is exactly what they are doing by letting Microsoft dictate to them.
Keeping it all open and public is correct for the U.S. government.
Which is something the GPL does perfectly. So what's the issue.
I am, however, quite painfully aware of what it means to me as an intellectual property worker to consider integrating GPL code. It's a big deal.
It's a big deal to the tiny minority in the business of producing proprietary software for sale to third parties. For the vast majority of people, including the vast majority of people who work with software, it is no deal at all.Most software development is done for a specific requirement either in house or by contractors. If the work is done in house there is no distribution to third parties. If it's done by a contractor then the client gets a copy including the source and the contractor can still use what they did for future contracts.
Is your pain of integrating GPL code really a problem caused by the GPL or is it actually a pain caused by proprietary code?
While I have nothing at all against a private intellectual property owner releasing their own things under GPL, I'm very much against the government doing so as a matter of preference.
So you are saying that the US government cannot take and alter GPL code? Even if doing so would cost far less that either writing something from scratch or buying licences to third party proprietary software. Maybe the US government should take a census of the objectors to their using GPL code, so that if they need to spend extra money they know who to send the bill to
It's fully discriminatory in the sense that it discriminates against an entire business model.
As opposed to discriminating to protect a minority business model. I'm sure in it's history the US Government has trashed lots of business models. Sometimes inadvertantly, as in this case, sometimes very much deliberatly. Should the US allow slavery, stop building public roads, remove all regulation of public utilities, disband all publicly funded law enforcement, etc. Just because these discriminate against someone's business model?
The government should _NOT_ be in the business of doing that.
Wrong goverments should not put private profits before fulfiling their mandates. The mandate of the NSA is the protection of the national security of the USA. It is not protecting the profitability the Microsoft Corporation or any other corporation or individual present on US territory.
It cannot be stated often enough that there is no right to make a profit from commercial enterprise in general. In a free market capitalist economy if you no longer can make a profit from a specific business model (for any reason) they either you change business model or cease trading (if you are smart you do this whilst you still have assets). It's quite possible for your busines to become unviable due to government, indeed some business models are explicitally made illegal.
WHy should proprietary software have special protection not given to slave traders, ice cutters, buggy whip makers, etc?
At my old home, I had a dialup connection to my ISP. About once or twice a month when I would dial in for the evening, I would hear *static* on the phoneline. I'm talking like a noisy AM radio type of static. I would hang up the modem, dial in again, and the static would be gone.
My best guess is that there was a faulty wire *somewhere* in the telco's network that was causing the static, and I was unfortunate enough for my call to end up on that wire. (Remember, POTS is a circuit switched network [techtarget.com], the same set of wires is used for the duration of the connection)
On anything other that museum pieces the only individual set of wires are the local loop. Anything else is multiplexed over either copper or more likely fibre. A T1 isn't a bundle of 24 pairs it's a single 1.5M connection split into 24 channels. If it breaks 24 channels break, not one out of the 24.
But they had no choice! They *found* Linux licenced under GPL (well, large parts of it) and just added their own stuff. Which thus legally had to be GPLed as well. Alternatively they could have written their own OS from scratch, a *huge* job.
Also a more expensive job.
Or built on BSD. Less likely to become ever useful in American society at large, the way Linux looks set to become.
Unless using BSD would have been much less expensive they would still have been failing to provide best value to the people who actually paid for the work.
but I think that it is important that properietary software vendors don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to use the results of government sponsored software research.
It isn't the job of government to ensure any business models work and never break. Why shoudl proprietary software vendors get special treatment?
A corporation cannot, as a matter of reduction to practice, incorporate a (full) GPL product in a release of its own software, because doing so requires them to give up intellectual property rights on their own works (the linking clause, read it yourself).
"You cannot do X, because in order to do X you would need to do Y." When nothing stops you doing Y, is an interesting piece of "logic". Also you are making the false assumption that most corporations are in the business of selling proprietary software, which is simply untrue. So the argument is utterly meaningless, since they have none of their "own" software in the first place or if they do it's a set of alterations to GPL code which are utterly useless on their own.
Indeed there are probably quite a few corporations, for whom owning (not licencing) proprietary software would cost money. Since their business has so little to do with selling software, they'd be like a bookshop which owned pedigree kittens.
For the vast majority of corporations software is part of their infrastructure. It's not really much different from cables, pipes, even the buildings they use.
Here's the truth: GPL's license restricts only, for all intents and purposes, private parties from adding other restrictions to software, so it favors everyone, and disfavors those who would take away freedoms from the public.
Very few entities have any interest in slapping restrictions on pieces of software in the first place. The only ones who do are those who sell proprietary software as their main or only line of business.
MS's EULA restricts people from viewing, talking about, benchmarking, copying, reverse-engineering, etc., etc., their code, so it favors only Microsoft (by easing their business-model issues) and disfavors everyone else.
A sizable proportion of people would want to do one or more of these things.
These licenses are public-minded in the sense that they are specifically authored to ensure long-term free public access to the code -- the source [GPL] or the binaries derived therefrom [BSD], put simply -- and they do not discriminate against any individual or organization, nor do they restrict freedoms such as of speech once any such entity accepts the terms of these licenses. It is precisely this sort of public-minded, freedom-oriented licensing that Microsoft finds frightening,
When did "to further progress of science and the useful arts" become "to further the profits of big business" anyway?
because it cannot conceive of a future in which its business model, of selling closed software under licenses that stifle speech to people who think Software Is Magical And Thus Requires Great Expenditures By Huge Corporations,
To the vast majority of companies software is infrastructure. Even people who may think having clean water piped through out a building, electricity, high speed LANs, telephones, etc are "magical" generally understand that to get these sort of things sorted you can either employ people who know about them or get an external contractor in. No-one in their right mind would chase half way across a continent (or even the planet) to get a magic plumbing kit or a magic cabling kit or even a magic building kit. But somehow Microsoft has managed to sell the idea of a magic software kit, an off the shelf product which will cover all your companies needs without needing to employ an expert to set it up. Maybe because software is newer than buildings, plumbing, etc and there is no real material cost involved in deploying it.
You misunderstand, it wasn't an accusation. Microsoft is including GPL software in some of the packages they sell.
Too many people appear to misuderstand. Maybe it's the result of Microsoft's "viral" FUD, maybe something else.
The government could release the code as public domain and it could be used in a GPL project.
If it's original code it would have to be public domain. But if they were to do this with GPL derived code they would effectivly be destroying copyright, which the US Government cannot do, at least not without compensating the copyright holder(s).
To release source code under the GPL, you have to hold the copyright to the code.
The US Government (in this case represented by NSA) cannot hold a copyright, the law does not allow for it.
IIRC it actually works that they cannot create or destroy copyright. But can have copyright assigned to them and are subject to licencing of copyright works. If the latter didn't hold the US government could simply buy one copy of any Microsoft product they wanted to use and do whatever they liked. Which would really annoy Microsoft.
No copyright, no GPL, end of story.
A lot of the things they are likely to have done involved creating a derived work. In the US derived works retain the original copyright holder. Under the current rules the US government can't just take someone elses copyright away. So where is the problem? If there was a problem it would be for one or more of the kernel copyright holders to raise a complaint, rather than some third party.
Simply put, I do not want MY tax dollars going towards development of software licensed under the GPL. If my tax dollars fund development that goes into the public domain, fine. If my tax dollars fund development that gets licensed under the GPL, NOT FINE.
So you'd be happy to pay more taxes to compensate for the inability of government to modify GPL software in any way. You'd prefer if instead they either wrote from scratch (and released as public domain) or paid for proprietary software, either of which are likely to cost a lot more tax dollers than taking some GPL code, modifying it a bit then complying with both the rules requiring the publically funded work be made public and the GPL...
When it comes to spending public money there are usually rules about not squandering the money. Not allowing government departments to modify GPL software (which is effectivly what a "government may not release GPL software" type rule does, since, unlike private individuals and corporations, they are obliged to publish any modifications made) means that they can have to spend considerably more money, with no apparent benefit to anyone, except possibly a few corporations who didn't contribute their fair share of tax dollers in the first place.