Remember that I am reporting what the NY investment banking CTO said of his own employees. And there was a guy from ABN Amro right there, who didn't challenge him. I think the ABN Amro fellow had some Linux win to report, actually.
This (and the argument that follows it) seems to imply that most, if not all, of the money saved on software ends up paying for GPl sofware. But it doesn't.
I didn't say it did. I said that the money gets spent for your business.
If the GPL way of development costs the end-user as much as the MS way, this might indeed result in a net loss of software development. But I doubt that's the case.
soon, we'll run out of programmers who are willing to donate free time
Yes. More of them will be paid to work on GPL collaborations because they are advantageous to their employers. A good many of us do make salaries to do this. Yes, I know that more people wish they did.Bruce
I don't think you have to accept the GPL as holy grail to accept my argument. I did feel that Mundie's attack should be countered, as I'd hate to have him influence legislators, voters, CTOs, etc., without anything being heard from the other side. Not everyone knows that it's empty posturing until someone takes the trouble to point that out.
Sorry to irritate you. I'm silly enough to respond to you, too. I doubt Mundie would take the trouble.
Sheesh, that's pretty harsh of you. Please try some logical argument without the invective.
That US$1.9B is software that was released for the general public to use, and it does indeed have a lot of users. But I don't have a user count right now, all I have is the theoretical cost of production. The true benefit may be larger than I said. Given the amount of business around Linux, I doubt it's smaller.
In economic terms, the users will derive utility from the software. They will carry out some economic activity, for example operate a business, using that software, and will gain an economic benefit because of what they didn't pay for it. This benefit may well be greater than US$1.9B, since we have a lot of users these days. Again, the software didn't just go into/dev/null, it is now part of the economy. Engineers are familiar with thermodynamics, there are some parallels here, aren't there?
First, you might be propogating the broken window fallacy. Second, I maintain that if you stop paying for a, and instead pay for b, no money is lost to the economy, it just moves around. In this case, a is Microsoft software and b is anything you do for your company or household with the money you don't pay Microsoft. Maybe you use it to buy computer hardware, or advertise your business, or buy a car, or go to the movies. It still goes into the economy and to pay taxes in much the same way that it would if you used it for software, except that you have money to spend on something important to you rather than for Microsoft software. That's generally a good thing:-) It's been 20 years since I took microeconomics, but this much seems so obvious.
Regarding the US$1.9B number: that much software was released for everyone to use, and lots of people do indeed use it. They will derive utility from it, thus it is an input to the economy.
My issue regarding Liberty is control. MS tends to want to dominate and control markets, I don't trust them to have this one.
I hardly think the moral arguments are secondary. But if they were easy to win with the general public, Richard would have won them a priori before there was lots of Free Software for people to use. What actually happened is that he won those arguments with hackers, and very few others, until we could get people's self-interest involved. Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking on the abstract level that hackers occupy. About the best lever we have on the general public right now is their resentment of large corporations and multi-billionares. I think our next step is really to get a desktop that is usable by the average person and deploy it as widely as possible, so that they can say "yes, I really use this and it works".
You're infuriated! Are you sure that coffee you've been drinking isn't too strong:-)
Whether Perens and crew acknowledge it or not, what they are in actuality saying is that software development is an exceptional sector of our economy where regular rules needn't apply
Yes, I've made this explicit many times. It takes a pound of flour to "copy" a loaf of bread. In contrast, once you have amortized the cost of creating a piece of software, there is essentially no marginal cost associated with creating another copy. The result of this is that the current proprietary model drastically overvalues software. You complain of IBM and HP computers being overvalued with respect to the raw material cost. As we drive the market toward commodotized software, it becomes more competitive for hardware manufacturers. If they have high margins, isn't it because of anti-competitive factors like customer lock-in?
Can we amortise the creation cost of software without a direct revenue capture per unit sold? The answer seems to be yes for a lot of people. And why would this be important? Because decoupling the money from the process makes the mechanics of collaboration a lot simpler. Collaboration works to distribute cost, making it tolerable, and improves efficiency by avoiding redundant development. That redundancy happens all too much for "in house" software, and businesses have recently realized that they can collaborate with their competitors on non-differentiating software. This is not to discount the entire "freedom" agenda, I simply need not argue in those terms this time.
Perens and crew are basically selling out software development as a profession
This smacks of the old guild system which operated to support costs rather than allow the free market to set them. It seems anticompetitive. But yes, if you want to consider me as selling out the software development profession, I'm doing it for the customer. People seem to forget that capitalism is supposed to operate for the ultimate interest of the customer, by keeping the costs that the customer pays as low as possible.
Regarding your argument about software developers providing and everyone else consuming, most people are able to participate in a free exchange of information. In this same topic we've been carrying out a thread about how an illustrator can help.
The fact that I tailor my sell to the audience doesn't mean I discount the ideals of Free Software. I just don't expect that audience to embrace them right away - they need to be led to them.
I could say something about freedom being good for capitalism, and that's why Open Source is good for capitalism. Also, "control" is really another word for freedom here - freedom is when you control your own destiny.
Karl Marx did not invent helping your neighbor. And look at the collaboration we're seeing between blatantly capitalist enterprises! It's not a communist idea, unless you believe that capitalism must exclude all possible collaboration for common good, even when such collaboration actually works to maximize profit.
Also, the communism you are talking about concerns "hard goods" like land or a loaf of bread. They require raw materials for every "copy". Software is fundamentaly different in that once you have amortized the design cost, there is essentially no additional cost to produce a copy.
I would not mind getting invitations to speak before non-tecnical political policy venues, for example the Commonwealth Club. But note that I am a two-year-old's dad, and I don't want to be an absentee dad. I can't take every speaking invitation, they must be prioritized.
I could have added a lot to my argument about MS's having destroyed their competition, etc. It was indeed very tempting. But there is virtue in brevity, people are more likely to read and understand a short argument, and are more likely to "tune in the next time". So, I saved a lot for another essay.
You don't convert a person in a day. It seems to work better to win the Open Source arguments first, and then once somebody accepts them, it is less of a leap to get through the Free Software arguments. The fact that businesses are really embracing Linux is very good for GNU.
Can you draw/paint/illustrate, or are you more of a web presentation designer? Actually, I have a lot of need for illustration, both in "propoganda" documents, and in things like icons. If you are a web site appearance designer, there are a lot of people who can use help, maybe you aren't on the right projects. Send an email to bruce at perens dot com.
I was at a CTO roundtable the other day. A New York City investment banking CTO was talking about the difference between Linux/Unix admins and Windows admins (yes, Linux is widely employed in investment banking these days). Linux admins script a fix and don't touch it again, they just re-run the script. Windows admins don't script, for the most part. They push the same buttons on each system. This might be a big factor in increasing the Windows TCO. The bank claims they have many more Windows admins per system than Linux/Unix admins. I'll ask the CTO to write an article.
It's not necessary to feel guilty! We want users. After all, writing software that nobody else uses would just be playing with ourselves. So consider that you save us from much embarassment:-)
Have you considered being a technical writer or something? There are many ways that anyone can help.
Bruce
Re:Hmm, not sure about that one
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2
Who needs the advertising clause? You are required to preserve the copyright statement and license, and distribute those to all who get the binary version.
Bruce
Parses, but no useful information
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 5, Funny
It might be gramatical, but it's not germane. I suspect it was intended to obfuscate.
Re:People are missing the point..
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2
Are you sure you are not the one who missed the point? Under the GPL, the company could be compelled to release the unobfuscated version of their modifications.
Look around for info on the U.S. government's declassified Tempest program. That shows how you can really do this, by sampling the radio emissions of the equipment. Any rapid switching creates radio waves, if you don't shield them effectively you may indeed leak information off site. There have been demonstrations of reading a CRT by the video monitors radio emissions.
To do this with an LED would require that the LED be actually driven by the data signal. Most of them go on at the start of the packet or byte and go off at the end, they don't go on for 1 and off for 0. So, you might be able to do a little traffic analysis, but you would not be able to recover the data.
Bruce
Re:There may indeed be an oversight in the GPL
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2
50 other posts cited the GPL language regarding obfuscation. You aren't allowed to do it. What's left is whether or not you are required to write readable code. If you could prove, during the court discovery process, that you really wrote it that way and that you don't keep comments or a function-name-map in a separate document, you can get away with writing unreadable code. But then you have to maintain it:-)
Bruce
It's a GPL violation, and more
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Obligatory disclaimer: This is not legal advice, get another lawyer than the one you've already heard from to give you that.
The GPL states:
The source code of a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
That term was written to prevent exactly the sort of obfuscation the attorney is proposing. Obfuscated code is demonstrably not the preferred version for creating modifications. So, what is being proposed is a GPL violation, and your company's attorney missed that part of the license. The talk about incidental resources isn't germane, it actually seems to be intended to confuse, because what is being proposed clearly is a derivative work, and the company attorney is acknowledging that when he suggests that the obfuscated code be GPL-ed.
But there are simpler remedies than legal ones. If the free software developer community hears about a product using obfuscated code to circumvent the GPL, they will retaliate by creating a non-obfuscated version and using it to compete with your company's product. They are experienced at reverse-engineering, they have excellent tools for code reformatting and analysis, and there are a many programmers who will be angry enough to work on this.
If your employer wants to unashamedly take advantage, they are simply buying a lawsuit. The free software community does have the resources to bring one - it would probably be brought by law professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University. He wants more legal tests of the GPL, and would love to make an example of your employer. Don't go there.
The problem is that the motherboard won't allow you to turn ACPI off. It's always on. APM support is entirely removed from Windows XP, so ACPI is required. MS, no doubt, has noticed that the Open Source ACPI driver isn't finished. It doesn't yet provide a complete OSPM, so you won't have all of the power management features you expect. This effects Linux as well as BSD. Linux would not run well on this motherboard at present.
Anyone want to finish the ACPI driver? It's big and complicated.
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We wouldn't have gotten this humongous amount of software had it not been economicaly viable.
:-)
I don't think this argument needs to stand upon the Wheeler metric value of US$1.9B.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
I didn't say it did. I said that the money gets spent for your business.
If the GPL way of development costs the end-user as much as the MS way, this might indeed result in a net loss of software development. But I doubt that's the case.
soon, we'll run out of programmers who are willing to donate free time
Yes. More of them will be paid to work on GPL collaborations because they are advantageous to their employers. A good many of us do make salaries to do this. Yes, I know that more people wish they did. Bruce
Sorry to irritate you. I'm silly enough to respond to you, too. I doubt Mundie would take the trouble.
Bruce
Bruce
That US$1.9B is software that was released for the general public to use, and it does indeed have a lot of users. But I don't have a user count right now, all I have is the theoretical cost of production. The true benefit may be larger than I said. Given the amount of business around Linux, I doubt it's smaller.
In economic terms, the users will derive utility from the software. They will carry out some economic activity, for example operate a business, using that software, and will gain an economic benefit because of what they didn't pay for it. This benefit may well be greater than US$1.9B, since we have a lot of users these days. Again, the software didn't just go into /dev/null, it is now part of the economy. Engineers are familiar with thermodynamics, there are some parallels here, aren't there?
Bruce
Regarding the US$1.9B number: that much software was released for everyone to use, and lots of people do indeed use it. They will derive utility from it, thus it is an input to the economy.
My issue regarding Liberty is control. MS tends to want to dominate and control markets, I don't trust them to have this one.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Yes, I've made this explicit many times. It takes a pound of flour to "copy" a loaf of bread. In contrast, once you have amortized the cost of creating a piece of software, there is essentially no marginal cost associated with creating another copy. The result of this is that the current proprietary model drastically overvalues software. You complain of IBM and HP computers being overvalued with respect to the raw material cost. As we drive the market toward commodotized software, it becomes more competitive for hardware manufacturers. If they have high margins, isn't it because of anti-competitive factors like customer lock-in?
Can we amortise the creation cost of software without a direct revenue capture per unit sold? The answer seems to be yes for a lot of people. And why would this be important? Because decoupling the money from the process makes the mechanics of collaboration a lot simpler. Collaboration works to distribute cost, making it tolerable, and improves efficiency by avoiding redundant development. That redundancy happens all too much for "in house" software, and businesses have recently realized that they can collaborate with their competitors on non-differentiating software. This is not to discount the entire "freedom" agenda, I simply need not argue in those terms this time.
This smacks of the old guild system which operated to support costs rather than allow the free market to set them. It seems anticompetitive. But yes, if you want to consider me as selling out the software development profession, I'm doing it for the customer. People seem to forget that capitalism is supposed to operate for the ultimate interest of the customer, by keeping the costs that the customer pays as low as possible.
Regarding your argument about software developers providing and everyone else consuming, most people are able to participate in a free exchange of information. In this same topic we've been carrying out a thread about how an illustrator can help.
Bruce
I could say something about freedom being good for capitalism, and that's why Open Source is good for capitalism. Also, "control" is really another word for freedom here - freedom is when you control your own destiny.
Bruce
Also, the communism you are talking about concerns "hard goods" like land or a loaf of bread. They require raw materials for every "copy". Software is fundamentaly different in that once you have amortized the design cost, there is essentially no additional cost to produce a copy.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Have you considered being a technical writer or something? There are many ways that anyone can help.
Bruce
Bruce
It might be gramatical, but it's not germane. I suspect it was intended to obfuscate.
Are you sure you are not the one who missed the point? Under the GPL, the company could be compelled to release the unobfuscated version of their modifications.
To do this with an LED would require that the LED be actually driven by the data signal. Most of them go on at the start of the packet or byte and go off at the end, they don't go on for 1 and off for 0. So, you might be able to do a little traffic analysis, but you would not be able to recover the data.
Bruce
Bruce
The GPL states:
That term was written to prevent exactly the sort of obfuscation the attorney is proposing. Obfuscated code is demonstrably not the preferred version for creating modifications. So, what is being proposed is a GPL violation, and your company's attorney missed that part of the license. The talk about incidental resources isn't germane, it actually seems to be intended to confuse, because what is being proposed clearly is a derivative work, and the company attorney is acknowledging that when he suggests that the obfuscated code be GPL-ed.But there are simpler remedies than legal ones. If the free software developer community hears about a product using obfuscated code to circumvent the GPL, they will retaliate by creating a non-obfuscated version and using it to compete with your company's product. They are experienced at reverse-engineering, they have excellent tools for code reformatting and analysis, and there are a many programmers who will be angry enough to work on this.
If your employer wants to unashamedly take advantage, they are simply buying a lawsuit. The free software community does have the resources to bring one - it would probably be brought by law professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University. He wants more legal tests of the GPL, and would love to make an example of your employer. Don't go there.
Bruce
Anyone want to finish the ACPI driver? It's big and complicated.
Bruce