and Munich stops their deployment to show how stupid those laws are
That's where the politicos have miscalcuated. People generally don't remember things that didn't happen. If there is no Munich Migration, there's no positive case for either Desktop Linux or Patent Reform. There is only What Ifs and a thick cloud of FUD spread against Linux by its own supporters.
Believe it or not, most people (even in the IT industry) don't care about how something might affect Linux users. See IBM.
(Now, I understand the patent issue is open in the EU, so Munich might just be bluffing. But if they aren't, its useless martyrdom. Install Linux and invite yourself to get sued.)
I have to agree that this seems like "Suicide Bomber" politics.
1) Mix Free Software Politics with Local Politics 2) Push a Linux Migration based on Values like "openness" rather than traditional cost/ROI. 3) Publicly shoot down Steve Ballmer's sales efforts 4) Become the showpiece project for Linux desktop migration. 5) Start to solve a lot of the intractable problems with moving away from Windows
(BOOM) Kamikaze your own project with Patent FUD.
Apparently they failed to understand that hardly anyone sees Linux on the Desktop as logical and as inevitable as they do, so people were paying close attention to their progress. From an advocacy standpoint, it was critical that Munich would be a "Success Story" and not a "Martyr".
I think this gets back to the Open Source/Free Software divide in the community -- is Linux a superior platform because of its Openness, or is just part of a whole ideological ball of wax that wants to overthrow the Intellectual Property system? Once you go with the latter, you lose most of your potential IT audience who just wants solutions and not revolution.
Good point, although there's the counter-example of MS Windows/Office being "dumbed down" and "task-oriented" over the years.
The other issue is that all of the "High Value" users -- business people, students, gamers, artists, engineers, etc have been using a computer for years and most of them have settled on a a platform and a set of software.
This leaves Gnome chasing the lowest of the "Low Value" users -- grandmas, factory workers, and anyone else who somehow avoided a PC for the last 20 years and have very limited needs (web and email).
This seems like a really dubious strategy because of the burden/cost of end-user support is already higher for Linux, and now they're trying to attract the most expensive users of the bunch. Plus the fact that OEMs aren't really pushing Linux on these people, and Linux doesn't have the application the Grandmas really want anyway (AOL).
At least the "Kommon Desktop Environment" has a realistic idea of who their userbase is -- Unix geeks who like lots of knobs to tweak.
This really goes back to Andreessen 's comment about "Turning Windows into a buggy collection of Device Drivers" -- Netscape/Mozilla has always been about a platform strategy.
And Mozilla never gave up on the idea of Winning the API War, even after attracting the wrath of Microsoft and being crushed, even after missing their "next gen" ship date by several years, even after producing terrible performance on lowend systems, and even after being unceremoniously dumped by AOL. They are married to XUL/XPI/Skins/Extentions/etc, no matter how many yet-to-be-discovered hacks there might be.
Furthermore, it runs at cross-purposes to most Mozilla advocates, who want "Just a Browser" that robustly handles all kinds of sandboxed HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and really don't want any possibility of IE-like Platform Exploits. Unfortunately, Mozilla is not really that product.
Anyway, I suspect the logic behind burying this "bug" was "Developers Developers Developers!" -- they didn't want to make it difficult for people to start using XUL. (Similar to how MS shipped IIS5 with every extention enabled and on by default.)
Indeed. The scary thing was when you looked at the release notes and they would sometimes say "Upgrade to Mozilla 1.x Alpha for security fixes.", and you're wondering if are really suggesting that you roll out an Alpha-Test browser to your entire company.
Hopefully the recent 1.7/0.9 patches are an indication of a reformed patch policy that treats Mozilla like a real product and not Netscape's developer "testing only" playground.
But it is absurd that Mozilla has not been clear on exactly what their patch policy really is. Their security page is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. Especially with Microsoft is getting roasted over the lack of IE patches, the "monthly cycle", etc.
You're right that the original IE 4.00 was a horrendous piece of shit. However by the time it got to IE 4.01 SP1 (which shipped with Win98), it was clearly way above and beyond Netscape in terms of both speed and stability. This was all done in a fairly short period of time - maybe a year at most.
Meanwhile Netscape users suffered through 4.00 (also totally unusable), 4.01, 4.02, 4.03... 4.5, 4.51... 4.6... 4.7... and even after it's users had suffered a gazillion new versions for years and years, the browser never stopped leaking tons of memory and crashing all the time. Netscape just wore out its users and caused them to lose faith. Finally, when Netscape 6 shipped in a totally broken state, the last diehards gave up, and their marketshare dropped almost immediately from ~20% to 2%, where it is today.
Netscape intentionaly abused the standards process. They would develop something proprietary (eg layers & JSSS), email a spec to the W3C and then tell their customers that their proprietary shit was "pending W3C approval". This worked for Tables, but it didn't work for StyleSheets. They generally believed they owned the web.
Microsoft, OTOH, actually showed up at W3C meetings and was crucial in developing and implementing the specs for CSS, DOM, and HTML4. Ironically, without MS's early support for those standards, they would be irrelvant and Mozilla wouldn't have anything to beat on IE with.
obslash: I have a book around here which describes in painstaking detail how to convert 25 lines of icky business logic PL-SQL to 5,000 lines of EJB code. No wonder people outsource.
There's a simple way to prevent others from being compatible with your products -- patents.
The only reason this didn't work for the IBM PC was because they were under anti-trust restrictions. As soon as they got out from under those, they introduced Microchannel which required that people pay them to be compatible.
Apple's problem is that the iPod isn't doing anything all that unique, or if there are patents, they are held by the RIAA industry group which is promoting this sort of thing.
The statement was no doubt written by some PR person who doesn't really know the meaning of "hacker".
Actually, it sounds like it came right from the mouth of Steve Jobs -- who knows exactly what a "hacker" is, having been one. And he's long expressed his dislike for them. (Remember when he touted the original Mac as "hacker-proof"?)
Well, the EFF tried this "play dumb" tactic in court, and it didn't work. Especially since DeCSS was a mainstay in the Ripping world long before it was used in Linux player software.
DeCSS is almost exactly what the DMCA was trying to prevent. Had it appeared in a more 'restricted' guise (like the Real software), that argument might have flown.
Apple is stretching by threating to use the DMCA. Since this only works with Real's service, there's no copyright infringement going on, so copyright law should not apply. The intent of the DMCA was to protect copyright holders, not the middlemen.
This is very different than DeCSS, where there was obvious infringing uses.
Yes, but if you buy a computer with XP preinstalled, you don't need to expend any "points" on that computer in order to run XP. So therefore, at least on the OS level, it's basically for upgrades only. At least in my limited understanding.
+ Newer MS volume licenses are basically "Upgrades" and tied to a specific machine. If you order a machine with XP, you don't pay MS any more money until you upgrade that machine. Nobody pays twice.
+ Older customers may have "floating" licences that apply to any machine. These people already bought Windows 2000 and therefore would be "paying twice" if they bought a new machine with W2K preloaded. So, if they're smart, they buy a machine with DOS or Linux preloaded. Here's where you get your marketshare disparity.
+ If you're big enough, Dell will let you deal with the licencing and will install any image you request (Linux, Windows 98, OS/2, etc).
Yes, your perspective is entirely different, you've already eaten the conversion costs. But "most people" never switched to PNG to begin with, and won't until it's easy and it does solve a problem.
The average consumer can interperse the general meaning of "OpenTalk"
This is a good example of Marketing where none is really required.
Did it ever hurt Microsoft that their equivalant protocol has the ungodly name of "NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP"? No, because people know they can get an MSCE to pull some cable and, voila, they've got a network.
The point is that, while MS was doing OK, they were nowhere near the dominant power we know and loath at the time. Compared to Lotus and Borland and some of the other that snubbed Apple, they were pretty small. (1n 1983 MS was had $50M in revenue.)
At the time, Apple was a much larger and richer company that Microsoft. Apple CHOSE to licence Macintosh tech to another operating system vendor in order to get an Office suite developed for the Mac.
Considering that Microsoft Office ended up dominating the market, and is one of the key reasons that Apple is still competitive today; and considering that the Supreme Court ultimate threw out Look'n'Feel (Lotus v. Borland); Apple didn't do so poorly in with that deal.
Another reading would be "Industry giant Apple attempts to bully software upstart with frivilous lawsuit, but fails." -- but we aren't used thinking about Microsoft that way.
Also, MS was involved with X11 UIs like Motif, partially to develop an alternative, non-Apple cross-platform UI standard.
It would be nice if some members at the mozilla foundation published a lessons learned paper.... I know one of the things is user interface. They have done that very well.
I would say that UI is something where it's not clear that Mozilla has really learned their lesson:
They wanted a Netscape 4 Clone, but I it's pretty clear that went over like a lead balloon. What people really wanted was a IE Clone (Firefox).
(Apologies for the sig, but the numbers show that most NS4 users switched to IE rather than Mozilla, which sucks.)
All true, but there's some tech factors as well: On a small network, Windows is pretty much plug-n-play due to broadcast protocols etc. Also, if a business goes and buys an accounting application (etc), you can guess what sort of server it will require.
1) Apache is not "way more popular" than IIS, in fact it might be less popular. I know you are just mindless repeating what you've heard, but Netcraft doesn't say what you think it does. Either way, there's a hellava lot of both.
2) Apache servers do get frequently exploited, in fact some surveys say more frequently than IIS. Either way, it shouldn't be a big bragging point - this isn't qmail.
On topic: If you really want to demonstrate that Mozilla is better than IE, you'll have to do better than "arguably marginally better" like with Apache/IIS. To the end user, it's the same old patch cycle -- if Mozilla ends up having a new issue every month, people aren't going to percieve it to be any better than IE.
I think if anything, the key is that Mozilla developers are finally being very proactive about this stuff. But that has almost nothing to do with "Open Source" - MS could have listened to people and implemented a lot of these things years ago.
They're talking about both hardware & software revenue, which is why the numbers are about the same between Windows/Linux.
I don't have the report, so I can't argue the methodology (what about pirated Windows?), other than to say that these exact same numbers were treated as legitimate by the Linux community in the past.
Whatever the case, it's no longer true that *nix dominates the server market. Microsoft is doing very well.
These numbers are from IDC, so you'll have to argue methodology with them. They are based on surveys and not only raw sales figures. (A few years ago, when IDC showed massive Linux growth, nobody was arguing with them -- in fact they were quoted by every Linux advocate.) The numbers might not be perfect, but thinking they are radically incorrect is probably a delusion.
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and Munich stops their deployment to show how stupid those laws are
That's where the politicos have miscalcuated. People generally don't remember things that didn't happen. If there is no Munich Migration, there's no positive case for either Desktop Linux or Patent Reform. There is only What Ifs and a thick cloud of FUD spread against Linux by its own supporters.
Believe it or not, most people (even in the IT industry) don't care about how something might affect Linux users. See IBM.
(Now, I understand the patent issue is open in the EU, so Munich might just be bluffing. But if they aren't, its useless martyrdom. Install Linux and invite yourself to get sued.)
I have to agree that this seems like "Suicide Bomber" politics.
1) Mix Free Software Politics with Local Politics
2) Push a Linux Migration based on Values like "openness" rather than traditional cost/ROI.
3) Publicly shoot down Steve Ballmer's sales efforts
4) Become the showpiece project for Linux desktop migration.
5) Start to solve a lot of the intractable problems with moving away from Windows
(BOOM) Kamikaze your own project with Patent FUD.
Apparently they failed to understand that hardly anyone sees Linux on the Desktop as logical and as inevitable as they do, so people were paying close attention to their progress. From an advocacy standpoint, it was critical that Munich would be a "Success Story" and not a "Martyr".
I think this gets back to the Open Source/Free Software divide in the community -- is Linux a superior platform because of its Openness, or is just part of a whole ideological ball of wax that wants to overthrow the Intellectual Property system? Once you go with the latter, you lose most of your potential IT audience who just wants solutions and not revolution.
Good point, although there's the counter-example of MS Windows/Office being "dumbed down" and "task-oriented" over the years.
The other issue is that all of the "High Value" users -- business people, students, gamers, artists, engineers, etc have been using a computer for years and most of them have settled on a a platform and a set of software.
This leaves Gnome chasing the lowest of the "Low Value" users -- grandmas, factory workers, and anyone else who somehow avoided a PC for the last 20 years and have very limited needs (web and email).
This seems like a really dubious strategy because of the burden/cost of end-user support is already higher for Linux, and now they're trying to attract the most expensive users of the bunch. Plus the fact that OEMs aren't really pushing Linux on these people, and Linux doesn't have the application the Grandmas really want anyway (AOL).
At least the "Kommon Desktop Environment" has a realistic idea of who their userbase is -- Unix geeks who like lots of knobs to tweak.
This really goes back to Andreessen 's comment about "Turning Windows into a buggy collection of Device Drivers" -- Netscape/Mozilla has always been about a platform strategy.
And Mozilla never gave up on the idea of Winning the API War, even after attracting the wrath of Microsoft and being crushed, even after missing their "next gen" ship date by several years, even after producing terrible performance on lowend systems, and even after being unceremoniously dumped by AOL. They are married to XUL/XPI/Skins/Extentions/etc, no matter how many yet-to-be-discovered hacks there might be.
Furthermore, it runs at cross-purposes to most Mozilla advocates, who want "Just a Browser" that robustly handles all kinds of sandboxed HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and really don't want any possibility of IE-like Platform Exploits. Unfortunately, Mozilla is not really that product.
Anyway, I suspect the logic behind burying this "bug" was "Developers Developers Developers!" -- they didn't want to make it difficult for people to start using XUL. (Similar to how MS shipped IIS5 with every extention enabled and on by default.)
Indeed. The scary thing was when you looked at the release notes and they would sometimes say "Upgrade to Mozilla 1.x Alpha for security fixes.", and you're wondering if are really suggesting that you roll out an Alpha-Test browser to your entire company.
Hopefully the recent 1.7/0.9 patches are an indication of a reformed patch policy that treats Mozilla like a real product and not Netscape's developer "testing only" playground.
But it is absurd that Mozilla has not been clear on exactly what their patch policy really is. Their security page is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. Especially with Microsoft is getting roasted over the lack of IE patches, the "monthly cycle", etc.
That bothers me too. Why can't there be an array datatype? (MS-SQL has a Table type, but there's no way to use it as an input param that I know of.)
You're right that the original IE 4.00 was a horrendous piece of shit. However by the time it got to IE 4.01 SP1 (which shipped with Win98), it was clearly way above and beyond Netscape in terms of both speed and stability. This was all done in a fairly short period of time - maybe a year at most.
... 4.5, 4.51... 4.6 ... 4.7 ... and even after it's users had suffered a gazillion new versions for years and years, the browser never stopped leaking tons of memory and crashing all the time. Netscape just wore out its users and caused them to lose faith. Finally, when Netscape 6 shipped in a totally broken state, the last diehards gave up, and their marketshare dropped almost immediately from ~20% to 2%, where it is today.
Meanwhile Netscape users suffered through 4.00 (also totally unusable), 4.01, 4.02, 4.03
Netscape intentionaly abused the standards process. They would develop something proprietary (eg layers & JSSS), email a spec to the W3C and then tell their customers that their proprietary shit was "pending W3C approval". This worked for Tables, but it didn't work for StyleSheets. They generally believed they owned the web.
Microsoft, OTOH, actually showed up at W3C meetings and was crucial in developing and implementing the specs for CSS, DOM, and HTML4. Ironically, without MS's early support for those standards, they would be irrelvant and Mozilla wouldn't have anything to beat on IE with.
That's why you add a SOAP layer. :)
obslash: I have a book around here which describes in painstaking detail how to convert 25 lines of icky business logic PL-SQL to 5,000 lines of EJB code. No wonder people outsource.
There's a simple way to prevent others from being compatible with your products -- patents.
The only reason this didn't work for the IBM PC was because they were under anti-trust restrictions. As soon as they got out from under those, they introduced Microchannel which required that people pay them to be compatible.
Apple's problem is that the iPod isn't doing anything all that unique, or if there are patents, they are held by the RIAA industry group which is promoting this sort of thing.
That's a much better way of putting it -- it is the iPod that is being "circumvented", not the access control on the song itself.
The statement was no doubt written by some PR person who doesn't really know the meaning of "hacker".
Actually, it sounds like it came right from the mouth of Steve Jobs -- who knows exactly what a "hacker" is, having been one. And he's long expressed his dislike for them. (Remember when he touted the original Mac as "hacker-proof"?)
> What infringing uses?
Well, the EFF tried this "play dumb" tactic in court, and it didn't work. Especially since DeCSS was a mainstay in the Ripping world long before it was used in Linux player software.
DeCSS is almost exactly what the DMCA was trying to prevent. Had it appeared in a more 'restricted' guise (like the Real software), that argument might have flown.
Apple is stretching by threating to use the DMCA. Since this only works with Real's service, there's no copyright infringement going on, so copyright law should not apply. The intent of the DMCA was to protect copyright holders, not the middlemen.
This is very different than DeCSS, where there was obvious infringing uses.
Yes, but if you buy a computer with XP preinstalled, you don't need to expend any "points" on that computer in order to run XP. So therefore, at least on the OS level, it's basically for upgrades only. At least in my limited understanding.
Here's how I understand it:
+ Newer MS volume licenses are basically "Upgrades" and tied to a specific machine. If you order a machine with XP, you don't pay MS any more money until you upgrade that machine. Nobody pays twice.
+ Older customers may have "floating" licences that apply to any machine. These people already bought Windows 2000 and therefore would be "paying twice" if they bought a new machine with W2K preloaded. So, if they're smart, they buy a machine with DOS or Linux preloaded. Here's where you get your marketshare disparity.
+ If you're big enough, Dell will let you deal with the licencing and will install any image you request (Linux, Windows 98, OS/2, etc).
I'm not returning to GIF now that they're gone
Yes, your perspective is entirely different, you've already eaten the conversion costs. But "most people" never switched to PNG to begin with, and won't until it's easy and it does solve a problem.
The average consumer can interperse the general meaning of "OpenTalk"
This is a good example of Marketing where none is really required.
Did it ever hurt Microsoft that their equivalant protocol has the ungodly name of "NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP"? No, because people know they can get an MSCE to pull some cable and, voila, they've got a network.
The point is that, while MS was doing OK, they were nowhere near the dominant power we know and loath at the time. Compared to Lotus and Borland and some of the other that snubbed Apple, they were pretty small. (1n 1983 MS was had $50M in revenue.)
Apple wasn't the Good Guy in that fight.
At the time, Apple was a much larger and richer company that Microsoft. Apple CHOSE to licence Macintosh tech to another operating system vendor in order to get an Office suite developed for the Mac.
Considering that Microsoft Office ended up dominating the market, and is one of the key reasons that Apple is still competitive today; and considering that the Supreme Court ultimate threw out Look'n'Feel (Lotus v. Borland); Apple didn't do so poorly in with that deal.
Another reading would be "Industry giant Apple attempts to bully software upstart with frivilous lawsuit, but fails." -- but we aren't used thinking about Microsoft that way.
Also, MS was involved with X11 UIs like Motif, partially to develop an alternative, non-Apple cross-platform UI standard.
It would be nice if some members at the mozilla foundation published a lessons learned paper. ... I know one of the things is user interface. They have done that very well.
I would say that UI is something where it's not clear that Mozilla has really learned their lesson:
They wanted a Netscape 4 Clone, but I it's pretty clear that went over like a lead balloon. What people really wanted was a IE Clone (Firefox).
(Apologies for the sig, but the numbers show that most NS4 users switched to IE rather than Mozilla, which sucks.)
All true, but there's some tech factors as well: On a small network, Windows is pretty much plug-n-play due to broadcast protocols etc. Also, if a business goes and buys an accounting application (etc), you can guess what sort of server it will require.
Two points about Apache/IIS:
1) Apache is not "way more popular" than IIS, in fact it might be less popular. I know you are just mindless repeating what you've heard, but Netcraft doesn't say what you think it does. Either way, there's a hellava lot of both.
2) Apache servers do get frequently exploited, in fact some surveys say more frequently than IIS. Either way, it shouldn't be a big bragging point - this isn't qmail.
On topic: If you really want to demonstrate that Mozilla is better than IE, you'll have to do better than "arguably marginally better" like with Apache/IIS. To the end user, it's the same old patch cycle -- if Mozilla ends up having a new issue every month, people aren't going to percieve it to be any better than IE.
I think if anything, the key is that Mozilla developers are finally being very proactive about this stuff. But that has almost nothing to do with "Open Source" - MS could have listened to people and implemented a lot of these things years ago.
They're talking about both hardware & software revenue, which is why the numbers are about the same between Windows/Linux.
I don't have the report, so I can't argue the methodology (what about pirated Windows?), other than to say that these exact same numbers were treated as legitimate by the Linux community in the past.
Whatever the case, it's no longer true that *nix dominates the server market. Microsoft is doing very well.
These numbers are from IDC, so you'll have to argue methodology with them. They are based on surveys and not only raw sales figures. (A few years ago, when IDC showed massive Linux growth, nobody was arguing with them -- in fact they were quoted by every Linux advocate.) The numbers might not be perfect, but thinking they are radically incorrect is probably a delusion.
y Reader$56
2004 Boo! - http://www.wininsider.com/news/?7124
2001 Yeh! - http://www.oreillynet.com/manila/tim/stories/stor