It seems to me that ALL software produced with our
tax dollars would represent a threat to commercial interests
and should cease and desist immediately.
-unless the development work is given to US companies.
-and ONLY to US companies. No open source licensing allowed !
At least according to Microsofts argument.
Even leaving aside the 14th ammendment issues how exactly would you define "US company"? Being incorporated in the US would include plenty of "foreign companies". Attempting to work out comany ownership is not always simple, especially when you have companies able to own parts of each other in complex ways, when all of the companies involved are traded on a public stock exchange. Maybe if someone were to come up with a definition Microsoft wouldn't actually qualify as a "US company" anyway.
The goverment doesn't design aircraft, they pay boeing and lockheed martin to do it. So why should they program a secure OS?
Not quite the same thing, since an aircraft is a physical machine which requires complex specialist manufacturing facilities
They shouldn't! Pay someone else to.
So governments should have a policy of paying private corporations, with tax payers money, even if they could do the work more cleaply themselves? Why not just have a "corporate support tax"?
So let me get this right: the National Security Agency develops a port of Linux to augment, unsurprisingly, national security. Microsoft bitches that national security runs counter to their profit interests and manages to get SE Linux terminated.
Whilst the US Constitution defends Microsoft's right to bitch as much as they like it dosn't oblige anyone, including the US government, to take any notice of them at all.
But let's be sure to mention this next time Osama bin Ballmer starts foaming at the mouth about how Linux is un-American, and remind him that Linux developers have never undermined the safety of American citizens in order to line their pockets.
If anything the GPL has more in common with the US Constitution than anything Microsoft has ever come up with.
And while we're at it, let's consider what gigantic software monopoly distributes a flight simulator capable of accurately emulating passenger airliners, along with detailed scenery of American airports and major urban centers, complete with individual office towers.
At least one news media demonstrated using this software as a means of training people to crash airliners in to specific buildings.
Of course, having already crippled Naval warships, I shouldn't be surprised that Microsoft is now trying to cripple our chief intelligence agency.
It appears that the way Microsoft operates makes it difficult for them to produce software well suited for government work. By the time people get to know the software well enough to seriously consider starting using it Microsoft is likely to have stopped making it available. That for the majority of governments they are a foreign corporation is another point against them.
You can just say "you can't more then X radio stations"
An alternatibe way to regulate would be to say "you cannot transmit more than X kW." Then it's your choice if you operate a few big stations or a lot of small stations.
SO you're saying that you are OK with one company (Clearchannel) owning most of the FM space? That is the danger of tight regulation. Makes it easy for one company to gradually push everyone else out.
That is probably more a problem with bad regulation. Also IIRC this situation came about as a result to relaxation of regulation.
But to take the extreme opposite stance that no regulation at all would lead to free use of the spectrum by "the people" is hogwash. He with the biggest transmitter would win.
Isn't this the sort if thing Starbucks are up to. Even if they don't have the "biggest transmitter" in terms of RF power they are trying for this in terms of publicity.
In fact, I have a friend who is trying to set up a similar friendly wifi network in my town, and when he approached the local University network administrator he was told flat out that if he "interfered" in "University network space" that he would be speaking to the University lawyers.
It says a lot for some people's attitudes that they would make threats rather than work out ways to coexist. Especially since it would probably cost the university far more money to pay lawyers, for a case which would probably get laughed out of court, than to have the university's techies work out solutions.
According to the article, Starbucks didn't even know there was a conflict.
You'd think the installers would check when they did the install. The other possibility is to have a system designed with tranciever stations which attempt to avoid frequency conflicts automatically.
SE Linux does not compete with private industry. Any corporation can take the techniques used to enhance linux (hence SE) and implement them in their own software. Any corporation can just grab the code and stick it in, provided they keep it separated from their proprietary code.
To the vast majority of corporations this is no issue at all. Since only a minority are in the business of making proprietary software and selling it to third parties. Even quite a few entities supplying software to third parties do so with the software bundled with a product or service and only go proprietary because that's what everyone else does.
Any corporation can benefit from this by using it within their infrastructure.
To the vast majority, software is part of their infrastructure. To these these people being able to modify/have modified any part of the software to suit their needs and a lack of a complex licencing model is likely to mean lower costs to them.
MS' claims are absurd. The US government has the responsibility to do what is best for all of its citizens (while respecting the constitution and the amendments), not just what is best for corporate America.
Corporate America does not equate to The Microsoft Corporation or even the proprietary software industry
Granted, corporate America is a part of the picture, but its not all of it. SE Linux is a great benefit to the public as a whole.
The vast bulk of corporate America is part of the public who stand to benefit in this case anyway...
Hmm, so let's get this straight, using tax-payers money to do useful research and then giving the results of the research out to the tax-payers, hurts companies, so instead the research should be handed over to a commercial company who will sell the IP at a huge profit ?
Actually it may hurt a few companies and the one whineing the most dosn't pay much in the way of taxes in the first place. Effectivly Microsoft is asking for a subsidy from the US government.
There is something wrong in American society where the needs of a few (or one) companies, outweighs the need of all the citizens, and the other 99.99% of companies, who would all benefit from the research being released into the public domain.
To these hundreds of millions of people having the code GPLed has zero negative consequences and some potential positive consequences. Microsoft's objection is that they couldn't take the software then "embrace and extend". Which is something which hurts the majority whilst only benefiting Microsoft.
Some technologies lend themselves rather badly to being closed up into proprietary black boxes and I think the domain of secure software is one of these such areas.
It's quite possible that proprietary software is really best suited to highly specific applications and not as "software infrastructure". Though it is probably possible to "make do" with using proprietary software in this way.
Some things need to be maintained regularly for long periods of time. Commercial interests often fail far short of doing the job adequately.
There is a lot which falls into this catagory, most commonly in government usage, since government tends to have to keep data secure for a long period of time. However even commercial users of software often have such requirements.
I think there is value in insisting that security technologies remain open-- ensuring that critical security software continue to be properly maintained.
Security is an issue more or less fundermentaly incompatable with the ideas behind proprietary software.
If the NSA had wanted to make a secure version of FreeBSD, then the fruits of the research would have been available to everyone.
The results of would be available, to everyone, regardless of if the code was released BSD, GPL, or public domain. The only difference is that GPL code cannot be mutated into proprietary software. For most people and corporations this isn't any kind of issue at all, since they would never want to do this in the first place.
It is because they choose to use Linux, which is licensed under the GPL, that they received complaints because the fruits of the research would be available only to non-commercial entities.
This is completly untrue, it is equally available to all entities.
There are drastic differences between the BSD and GPL licenses,
These "drastic" differences mean nothing to most people. Since they involve a set of actions which few people would even consider. It is also highly questionably that any entity should be allowed to perform these actions on publicly funded material in the first place.
and it is extremely frustrating to see those issues either not addressed, or purposefully blurred. Commercial software developers are not complaining about Open Source, they are complaining about the GPL.
Proprietary software developers, a very tiny group, are the ones blurring the issue. Demmanding that the interests of the majority be subverted to protect their interests. (N.B. "commercial" is not a synonym for "proprietary".) In this case it isn't even the tiny group it's a minority of one. If a regular person had complained to the NSA, even if they had a more valid complaint, would any notice have been taken of them?
The NSA would require the source code for whatever system in deploys. It would have to component test all of the subsystems, and ensure that no new bugs are introduced with new features. This flies in the face of the Upgrade Early, Upgrade Often mentalility an M$.
You missed of the "give us money when you upgrade" bit. Can the US taxpayers really be that happy with their taxes going to a rich corporation which practices extensive tax avoidance?
(NASA users 486's in the space program, not to be cheap, but because they are a known quantity.)
They'd probably be happier with 386s, if they could get any.
From a national point of view, it makes good sense to support open source if you're not in the US. Most of money for MS-ware goes directly in MS pockets, out of the country. If you encourage and use open source, you can stimulate a services-based local industry.
It would make plenty of sense for many US businesses too. Washington State is hardly "local" for most of the US, including the most highly populated parts. Microsoft's ability at tax avoidance dosn't help here. Throwing money at a far away entity is much the same, even if they happen to be in the same country as you...
Microsoft the corporate entity doesnt pay taxes. There are plenty of tax revenues generated by MS though - property, sales, income, luxury, and whatnot.
Since they also gain tax money through selling software to government where is the net balance?
If the government takes my money and makes something really useful with it, which provides more economic benefit to the country: giving it away so everyone can build on it and be more technologically advanced; or hiding it away so no one else can use it, and someone has to waste time building it a second time?
In this case we have someone saying "you can't create something potentially useful and valuable, because it might break our business model". When it isn't the job of government to protect the business models of private commercial entities in the first place. Creating "something really useful", like an improved technology frequently bankrupts businesses who cling to old business models. Whilst at the same time improving the profitability of existing business which embraces the new and new business.
in the article, the fear was that american businesses would suffer because, if the nsa produced open-source software, it would be available on a international level, and would offer more competition to american businesses.
The false assumption in the argument is that a major part of American businesses are in the software supply business. When in truth the vast majority of businesses, in the US and elsewhere, are consumers of software. Increased competition is generally good for customers, since it tends to lead to better quality products at lower price. If US business wasn't giving Microsoft lots of money you might expect that their shareholders, employees and customers would benefit.
So Microsoft has to compete with the NSA. Tough. Please, show me where in the Constitution it says that private corporations enjoy the right not to be competed against by government.
Probably in the same section which says that business has a right to
make a profit and once a business model has proven profitable every effort must be made to ensure that it continues to be just as profitable This is probably somewhere in the CSSA (Corporate Socialist States of America) constitution.
Region Encoding is a joke. In fact, about the only place these days which still "enforces" Region Coding is....the USA! The rest of the world treats it like the joke it is.
The people in the US didn't see it as a problem with movies. But now there are lots of seriously annoyed Buffy/Angel/X-Files/Futurama/Enterprise/etc fans.
The player manufacturers couldn't give a crap; why do you think all these players have a "hiden" menu in them that can disable it?
It's cheaper for the manufacturers to make one model, which can have the appropriate code put in when it is tested on the assembly line just before it goes in the box.
Region-free and region-selectable DVD players aren't that widespread in the U.S. simply because there's little incentive to do the mods here. We already get the widest selection of titles at the lowest prices. There are exceptions, of course, like Japanese anime lovers and film buffs looking for a certain, often uncut version of a film, but they're a small portion of the overall U.S. market.
What isn't a small group are fans of US produced TV series. These put people in the US in the same boat as the rest of the world.
My Daewoo dvg-4000s could be sold anywhere on the planet
with just a new box and manual. Well pretty much.
It has a built in electrical adapter so that you
could use it anywhere (with a plug adapter of course).
For the manufacturer the easiest option is to have a universal power supply in the unit, fitted with an IEC or telefuken plug. Then supply different power leads, even have the retailer supply a power lead at the point of sale.
They didn't. In the early days of DVD, the 'cheat codes' were always there because the DVD manufacturers knew it would put people off buying the disks. They only put the region coding in in the first place because it was mentioned in the license.
Also putting the region code bit into changable sortware means that they can manufacture one board, rather than 8.
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It seems to me that ALL software produced with our tax dollars would represent a threat to commercial interests and should cease and desist immediately.
-unless the development work is given to US companies.
-and ONLY to US companies. No open source licensing allowed !
At least according to Microsofts argument.
Even leaving aside the 14th ammendment issues how exactly would you define "US company"? Being incorporated in the US would include plenty of "foreign companies". Attempting to work out comany ownership is not always simple, especially when you have companies able to own parts of each other in complex ways, when all of the companies involved are traded on a public stock exchange.
Maybe if someone were to come up with a definition Microsoft wouldn't actually qualify as a "US company" anyway.
The goverment doesn't design aircraft, they pay boeing and lockheed martin to do it. So why should they program a secure OS?
Not quite the same thing, since an aircraft is a physical machine which requires complex specialist manufacturing facilities
They shouldn't! Pay someone else to.
So governments should have a policy of paying private corporations, with tax payers money, even if they could do the work more cleaply themselves? Why not just have a "corporate support tax"?
If I were Microsoft, I would attempt to buy the patents to the Mandatory Access Controls as used in SELinux,
Using patents against the government which issued them is kind of a non starter. Especially if the magic words "national security" are involved.
So let me get this right: the National Security Agency develops a port of Linux to augment, unsurprisingly, national security. Microsoft bitches that national security runs counter to their profit interests and manages to get SE Linux terminated.
Whilst the US Constitution defends Microsoft's right to bitch as much as they like it dosn't oblige anyone, including the US government, to take any notice of them at all.
But let's be sure to mention this next time Osama bin Ballmer starts foaming at the mouth about how Linux is un-American, and remind him that Linux developers have never undermined the safety of American citizens in order to line their pockets.
If anything the GPL has more in common with the US Constitution than anything Microsoft has ever come up with.
And while we're at it, let's consider what gigantic software monopoly distributes a flight simulator capable of accurately emulating passenger airliners, along with detailed scenery of American airports and major urban centers, complete with individual office towers.
At least one news media demonstrated using this software as a means of training people to crash airliners in to specific buildings.
Of course, having already crippled Naval warships, I shouldn't be surprised that Microsoft is now trying to cripple our chief intelligence agency.
It appears that the way Microsoft operates makes it difficult for them to produce software well suited for government work. By the time people get to know the software well enough to seriously consider starting using it Microsoft is likely to have stopped making it available. That for the majority of governments they are a foreign corporation is another point against them.
You can just say "you can't more then X radio stations"
An alternatibe way to regulate would be to say "you cannot transmit more than X kW." Then it's your choice if you operate a few big stations or a lot of small stations.
SO you're saying that you are OK with one company (Clearchannel) owning most of the FM space? That is the danger of tight regulation. Makes it easy for one company to gradually push everyone else out.
That is probably more a problem with bad regulation. Also IIRC this situation came about as a result to relaxation of regulation.
But to take the extreme opposite stance that no regulation at all would lead to free use of the spectrum by "the people" is hogwash. He with the biggest transmitter would win.
Isn't this the sort if thing Starbucks are up to. Even if they don't have the "biggest transmitter" in terms of RF power they are trying for this in terms of publicity.
In fact, I have a friend who is trying to set up a similar friendly wifi network in my town, and when he approached the local University network administrator he was told flat out that if he "interfered" in "University network space" that he would be speaking to the University lawyers.
It says a lot for some people's attitudes that they would make threats rather than work out ways to coexist. Especially since it would probably cost the university far more money to pay lawyers, for a case which would probably get laughed out of court, than to have the university's techies work out solutions.
According to the article, Starbucks didn't even know there was a conflict.
You'd think the installers would check when they did the install. The other possibility is to have a system designed with tranciever stations which attempt to avoid frequency conflicts automatically.
SE Linux does not compete with private industry. Any corporation can take the techniques used to enhance linux (hence SE) and implement them in their own software. Any corporation can just grab the code and stick it in, provided they keep it separated from their proprietary code.
To the vast majority of corporations this is no issue at all. Since only a minority are in the business of making proprietary software and selling it to third parties. Even quite a few entities supplying software to third parties do so with the software bundled with a product or service and only go proprietary because that's what everyone else does.
Any corporation can benefit from this by using it within their infrastructure.
To the vast majority, software is part of their infrastructure. To these these people being able to modify/have modified any part of the software to suit their needs and a lack of a complex licencing model is likely to mean lower costs to them.
MS' claims are absurd. The US government has the responsibility to do what is best for all of its citizens (while respecting the constitution and the amendments), not just what is best for corporate America.
Corporate America does not equate to The Microsoft Corporation or even the proprietary software industry
Granted, corporate America is a part of the picture, but its not all of it. SE Linux is a great benefit to the public as a whole.
The vast bulk of corporate America is part of the public who stand to benefit in this case anyway...
Hmm, so let's get this straight, using tax-payers money to do useful research and then giving the results of the research out to the tax-payers, hurts companies, so instead the research should be handed over to a commercial company who will sell the IP at a huge profit ?
Actually it may hurt a few companies and the one whineing the most dosn't pay much in the way of taxes in the first place.
Effectivly Microsoft is asking for a subsidy from the US government.
There is something wrong in American society where the needs of a few (or one) companies, outweighs the need of all the citizens, and the other 99.99% of companies, who would all benefit from the research being released into the public domain.
To these hundreds of millions of people having the code GPLed has zero negative consequences and some potential positive consequences. Microsoft's objection is that they couldn't take the software then "embrace and extend". Which is something which hurts the majority whilst only benefiting Microsoft.
Some technologies lend themselves rather badly to being closed up into proprietary black boxes and I think the domain of secure software is one of these such areas.
It's quite possible that proprietary software is really best suited to highly specific applications and not as "software infrastructure". Though it is probably possible to "make do" with using proprietary software in this way.
Some things need to be maintained regularly for long periods of time. Commercial interests often fail far short of doing the job adequately.
There is a lot which falls into this catagory, most commonly in government usage, since government tends to have to keep data secure for a long period of time. However even commercial users of software often have such requirements.
I think there is value in insisting that security technologies remain open-- ensuring that critical security software continue to be properly maintained.
Security is an issue more or less fundermentaly incompatable with the ideas behind proprietary software.
If the NSA had wanted to make a secure version of FreeBSD, then the fruits of the research would have been available to everyone.
The results of would be available, to everyone, regardless of if the code was released BSD, GPL, or public domain. The only difference is that GPL code cannot be mutated into proprietary software. For most people and corporations this isn't any kind of issue at all, since they would never want to do this in the first place.
It is because they choose to use Linux, which is licensed under the GPL, that they received complaints because the fruits of the research would be available only to non-commercial entities.
This is completly untrue, it is equally available to all entities.
There are drastic differences between the BSD and GPL licenses,
These "drastic" differences mean nothing to most people. Since they involve a set of actions which few people would even consider. It is also highly questionably that any entity should be allowed to perform these actions on publicly funded material in the first place.
and it is extremely frustrating to see those issues either not addressed, or purposefully blurred. Commercial software developers are not complaining about Open Source, they are complaining about the GPL.
Proprietary software developers, a very tiny group, are the ones blurring the issue. Demmanding that the interests of the majority be subverted to protect their interests. (N.B. "commercial" is not a synonym for "proprietary".) In this case it isn't even the tiny group it's a minority of one. If a regular person had complained to the NSA, even if they had a more valid complaint, would any notice have been taken of them?
If NSA work is released under the GPL, then non-American businesses can benefit equally from the NSA's work,
This is different from if they used BSD or made it public domain exactly how?
even though the NSA receives no tax money from said businesses.
This argument also applies against Microsoft and quite a few other US corporations.
So proprietary software vendors (like Microsoft) DON'T get to use the improvements - at least not verbatim.
This is Microsoft's choice.
The improvements carry the Gnu Public Virus
No they carry an antibody against the proprietary software virus. The likes of Microsoft can't simply appropriate the code.
The NSA would require the source code for whatever system in deploys. It would have to component test all of the subsystems, and ensure that no new bugs are introduced with new features. This flies in the face of the Upgrade Early, Upgrade Often mentalility an M$.
You missed of the "give us money when you upgrade" bit. Can the US taxpayers really be that happy with their taxes going to a rich corporation which practices extensive tax avoidance?
(NASA users 486's in the space program, not to be cheap, but because they are a known quantity.)
They'd probably be happier with 386s, if they could get any.
From a national point of view, it makes good sense to support open source if you're not in the US. Most of money for MS-ware goes directly in MS pockets, out of the country. If you encourage and use open source, you can stimulate a services-based local industry.
It would make plenty of sense for many US businesses too. Washington State is hardly "local" for most of the US, including the most highly populated parts. Microsoft's ability at tax avoidance dosn't help here.
Throwing money at a far away entity is much the same, even if they happen to be in the same country as you...
Microsoft the corporate entity doesnt pay taxes. There are plenty of tax revenues generated by MS though - property, sales, income, luxury, and whatnot.
Since they also gain tax money through selling software to government where is the net balance?
If the government takes my money and makes something really useful with it, which provides more economic benefit to the country: giving it away so everyone can build on it and be more technologically advanced; or hiding it away so no one else can use it, and someone has to waste time building it a second time?
In this case we have someone saying "you can't create something potentially useful and valuable, because it might break our business model". When it isn't the job of government to protect the business models of private commercial entities in the first place.
Creating "something really useful", like an improved technology frequently bankrupts businesses who cling to old business models. Whilst at the same time improving the profitability of existing business which embraces the new and new business.
in the article, the fear was that american businesses would suffer because, if the nsa produced open-source software, it would be available on a international level, and would offer more competition to american businesses.
The false assumption in the argument is that a major part of American businesses are in the software supply business. When in truth the vast majority of businesses, in the US and elsewhere, are consumers of software.
Increased competition is generally good for customers, since it tends to lead to better quality products at lower price. If US business wasn't giving Microsoft lots of money you might expect that their shareholders, employees and customers would benefit.
So Microsoft has to compete with the NSA. Tough. Please, show me where in the Constitution it says that private corporations enjoy the right not to be competed against by government.
Probably in the same section which says that business has a right to make a profit and once a business model has proven profitable every effort must be made to ensure that it continues to be just as profitable
This is probably somewhere in the CSSA (Corporate Socialist States of America) constitution.
Region Encoding is a joke. In fact, about the only place these days which still "enforces" Region Coding is....the USA! The rest of the world treats it like the joke it is.
The people in the US didn't see it as a problem with movies. But now there are lots of seriously annoyed Buffy/Angel/X-Files/Futurama/Enterprise/etc fans.
The player manufacturers couldn't give a crap; why do you think all these players have a "hiden" menu in them that can disable it?
It's cheaper for the manufacturers to make one model, which can have the appropriate code put in when it is tested on the assembly line just before it goes in the box.
Region-free and region-selectable DVD players aren't that widespread in the U.S. simply because there's little incentive to do the mods here. We already get the widest selection of titles at the lowest prices. There are exceptions, of course, like Japanese anime lovers and film buffs looking for a certain, often uncut version of a film, but they're a small portion of the overall U.S. market.
What isn't a small group are fans of US produced TV series. These put people in the US in the same boat as the rest of the world.
My Daewoo dvg-4000s could be sold anywhere on the planet with just a new box and manual. Well pretty much. It has a built in electrical adapter so that you could use it anywhere (with a plug adapter of course).
For the manufacturer the easiest option is to have a universal power supply in the unit, fitted with an IEC or telefuken plug. Then supply different power leads, even have the retailer supply a power lead at the point of sale.
They didn't. In the early days of DVD, the 'cheat codes' were always there because the DVD manufacturers knew it would put people off buying the disks. They only put the region coding in in the first place because it was mentioned in the license.
Also putting the region code bit into changable sortware means that they can manufacture one board, rather than 8.