The trouble is, trying to shoehorn every application under the sun into a web app format is a bad idea. The web is not designed to be an operating system or an application delivery platform. It's designed to efficiently and portably distribute content.
The longer we persist with this fad of trying to make it do more than that, the longer it will be before we switch back to building real applications with tools that are fit for purpose. JavaScript and the typical server-side scripting languages are OK (not great in most cases, but OK) for their common jobs, but they are somewhere in the dark ages when it comes to general programming power. The kind of software execution models for things security and concurrency that we have in browsers and therefore web apps today are similarly prehistoric by modern standards.
And so I respectfully disagree that building serious web apps is just now becoming possible. The state of the art in web-based applications is decades behind the state of the art in native coding, with absolutely zero exceptions to my knowledge.
The only "serious" web apps that have enjoyed wide success are those that are essentially front ends for a database with perhaps some limited interactivity. Obviously that covers a fairly wide class of software development projects. Moreover, it has certainly shown that there is a lot of value in providing simple but effective tools to manage everyday tasks, often at the expense of incumbent 800lb gorilla do-everything applications. Still, writing simple database front-ends is very far from being the whole software development industry.
Even in that field, these database UI web apps don't really do anything that a native app, a basic data transfer protocol and a sensible software install/update protocol couldn't do at least as well and often much better. (What do you think a huge proportion of mobile apps really are?) If only we could stop trying to replace that final software install/update protocol with web-hosted apps or proprietary distributions/repositories/app stores and just make the damned thing part of every major operating system the way it always should have been.
IMHO, what actually needs to happen if we're going to make real progress with this part of the software development industry is to establish a systematic, robust architecture that learns from the many successes of web apps but is built to support general applications from the start, running on a serious OS platform either natively or in a powerful and flexible VM, supporting a variety of languages and programming styles, dealing with distributed resources and security as first-class concepts, and so on. We already know how to solve most of the relevant problems, but we aren't using that knowledge. Apparently it's cleaner to write every trivial database UI using at least five different programming or mark-up languages, or something, and it will probably stay that way as long as we try to make every programming job into a web app.
The thing is, if you take a step back and look at the facts objectively, recent versions of IE actually have a pretty good track record for quality (and security, for that matter). Sure, you can go back to the IE6 era and point plenty of fingers, but then again you have to remember that some "bugs" in IE6 are really behaviours that hadn't been effectively standardised yet when IE6 was released; it predates CSS 2.1 by several years, for example. And of course, IE6 is more than a decade old. Criticising Microsoft's track record for having bugs or security vulnerabilities in IE6 is like criticising Mozilla because Netscape 6 wasn't their finest hour or condemning Apple for having weak support for the Web in MacOS 9 before Safari even existed.
Meanwhile, if we're looking at the situation today rather than historically, Firefox and Chrome both have appalling quality control. Since the six-week-release era, they've broken basic rendering and they've broken popular new CSS3 features like rounded corners and shadows. They've broken major third party integrations with Flash and Java, and they've broken the new HTML5 shinies that are supposed to replace them like the <video> and <canvas> elements. In several cases, they have compromised their design or don't even respect the basic architecture of the Internet in their never-ending quest to squeeze every last millisecond of performance out of your system, which is fine right up to the point where their caching just plain gets it wrong and what you see isn't the content you were supposed to see, or their direct integration with plug-ins allows something to block their application UI thread and the whole damn browser locks up because someone's AJAX request blocked one of the tabs.
So as surprising as it may seem to those of us who have been around for a while, looking at the issue today, based on the empirical data we have for bugs and effort spent fixing/working around them on various projects I'm involved with, I do currently use IE as my benchmark for browser quality. Moreover, I am 100% confident that for the features we're actually using, even recent trends around CSS3 and HTML5, IE clearly has superior quality to either Firefox or Chrome. Of course it's always possible that the selection of projects I'm talking about has been exceptionally unlucky and hit a huge number of corner cases, and I certainly won't presume to speak for every other project I don't work on...
Not really. This sort of madness is driven by the same fools at places like Google and Mozilla who think pushing a new update every six weeks is a good idea.
One day, they will notice that most real developers on real projects can't and don't want to keep up with that kind of unstable foundation.
One day, they will notice that most users don't like being hassled every few weeks by their browser update mechanism or their UIs forever moving around in subtle (or occasionally not-so-subtle) ways.
One day, they will notice that the only people in the industry who actually like the rapid releases are people making cute demos on blogs, people at the aforementioned Google and Chrome who are comparing anatomical measurements, and people who want to be one of the above.
One day, they will acknowledge that their quality control processes are demonstrably not up to the job of supporting such rapid releases, and they do keep breaking things, and those things aren't always minor details you can get away with for another six weeks.
One day, they will acknowledge that quite a few of the minor things that break are actually their prototype implementations of whizzy new features, which means developers of real production projects can't use those whizzy new features even on browsers that support them, which entirely defeats the purpose of pushing out new features at such a breakneck pace in the first place.
Until then, most of the projects I work on will continue to recommend that our professional customers use IE, and IE will remain the only platform that we will contractually support, because unlike nonsense like "living standards", it is a reasonably stable platform that we can test against to a professional standard. And that matters a lot more to both us and our clients than supporting this week's proposal for a multi-resolution-friendly <img> tag that only works on Chrome cloud cuckoo channel.
You haven't used Mozilla Firefox in years or you've never actually tried it in a corporate environment [...] Updates with no UAC prompt landed in Firefox 12.
The current version is 13, so that means the no-UAC update landed less than three months ago.
If you're going to push an update every few weeks and not even provide a sensible major/minor version number so people know when to pay attention, it's a really cheap shot to attack someone because they haven't kept up with every little change in every new version.
You do make sure new security fixes don't introduce regressions in a staging lab, don't you? It's how competent administrators do thing.
You do realise that many small businesses don't even have a full-time dedicated sysadmin, don't you?
There are some custom builds of Firefox with GPOs added in
Well, it's Open Source, so there are probably custom builds that make a tuna sandwich while Google loads, but that's hardly a compelling proposition when other major browsers support this business-friendly feature natively.
Firefox can be used in the corporate environment, it just requires a competent administrator.
Yes, it's all the customer's fault, and the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Sorry, but your head-in-the-sand attitude is exactly why Firefox isn't getting anywhere in busineses since the rapid updates began. You can post snarky AC comments all you like, but somehow I don't think the world is going to change through the sheer force of your willpower.
Most likely EU forcing this on Canada. It would seem to be a version of Droit de suite, which is french for "right to follow", which Europe has and Canada doesn't.
Except that in the other big copyright news from Europe last week, the ECJ basically killed the whole idea that you can control resales of software, even when supplied as a download, by asserting some sort of copyright argument. The reasoning given in the judgement is remarkably clear and much of it would probably translate to other forms of content as well if the case was brought.
So, if this is the "EU", then it's probably only the European Commission, as neither the Parliament nor the Court seem to have much time for this sort of nonsense.
Also, the French have a rather different take on an artist's rights from most places, with more of an emphasis on morality rather than economic incentives. That isn't true across all of Europe, though.
Sure, but if I've understood this correctly, it's the system vendors who are going to be preinstalling the Microsoft root, it's not built into the chip itself. It seems unlikely that would ever change, because having anything embedded so deeply would cause a huge write-off of chips if the root certificate were ever compromised, and there's nothing in it for the chip manufacturers to take on that kind of risk.
There doesn't seem to be much doubt about whether you can sell a PC second-hand including any OEM software it came with, but I'm not sure there was before this ruling either.
The open question to me is whether you can resell bundled software as a separate item. That isn't nearly so obvious a decision and many of the points considered in the ruling we're discussing wouldn't necessarily go the same way in the bundling/OEM context.
I like one of the related possible implications here: if a company like Autodesk, Microsoft or Adobe is using phone-home DRM on a software product, and I own (based on this case) a legitimate copy of that product, and they break the DRM by for example denying product activation so I can't use it anyway, then it seems clear that they can no longer rely on any kind of argument based on being the copyright holder to defend their actions. I'm allowed to make copies necessary for the normal use of a legitimate copy of the product, and the ruling here affirms that the copy I paid for really is mine whatever the copyright holder might like to think.
I look forward to seeing criminal charges (e.g., under the Computer Misuse Act and related law in the UK) being brought against the individuals (not the employers -- their staff, personally) who cause damage to legitimate customers by getting their DRM-related records wrong so the software doesn't work.
If the Euro does collapse, it's probably going to pull the global economy down with it for several more years, so I wouldn't be quite so smug if I were you.
There is certainly an issue of democratic deficit in various nations in the EU, and very obviously at EU level itself, right now. It is highly unlikely that this will last. Public sentiment is against the European political classes almost everywhere, and they are only clinging on to their power base because the populations of most countries have been denied a direct say on the matter and/or have more pressing concerns like buying books for their children and putting dinner on the table.
Even so, the powerful/unelected status of certain European politicians is becoming increasingly untenable, and their persistent failure to sort out the current economic mess, or indeed to look much more mature or capable than fighting schoolchildren, is doing them no favours in places like the UK (where the Conservative leadership has been not-so-subtly anticipating a future referendum over the past few days) and various other places that are currently in the EU but not yet the Eurozone. If the technocrats installed in governments as you mentioned also fail to clear up the mess, there is no reason to keep them around either.
Your position just got blown out of the water anywhere in the EU. The ruling here considers the licensed-not-sold argument in detail, and comes down heavily on the side that if you're taking money in return for a permanent right to use the copy, that counts as a sale. They addressed various possible attempts to weasel out of this conclusion based on things like support/updates after the sale, too.
If I'm understanding this ruling correctly, it sounds like any "non-transferrable" restriction on an otherwise permanent licence might just have become unenforceable, whether the software maker likes it or not.
That said, the ruling is about software bought separately, either as a physical package or downloaded. It doesn't mention the issue of bundled software explicitly, so we'll have to try and interpret the ruling as it might apply in the OEM case. The ruling itself seems to be written very broadly (and deliberately so) and seems to me to cover the OEM case by the same basic argument, but I'm not a lawyer etc.
Errr, you do realise that Scotland and England are the same country???
No, they aren't. They are distinct countries, each of which is part of the sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
For desktop Linux, why couldn't you put together a machine from your own hardware instead of relying on an OEM? Plenty of people already do that, not least so they can be confident they've chosen components that won't have any compatibility problems with Linux, and as long as individuals can do it, there will always be the potential for businesses to spring up as well if the demand is there.
Given the very high proportion of servers that run (a) the world's major businesses, and (b) Linux, I think we're fairly safe on that one. These servers are often administered by people who know what they're doing and who chose Linux over a Microsoft stack for a reason.
Not even Microsoft are powerful enough to change that, or they would have done so a long time ago. I think any serious attempt to take control of the hardware platform would result an expensive backlash and PR headache at best.
Yes, that's another option that is usually unambiguously better than a long-term lock-in with the phone companies -- though you do have to put up with the world's pushiest salespeople, allegedly.;-)
It's a kind of halfway house, I suppose. As you say, you get the "free" phone without the locking and other junk installed, but on the other hand you're still tied into a potentially expensive and inflexible monthly contract for 1-2 years in return.
I don't know where you are, but here in the UK it's easy to buy basically any smartphone or tablet device of any level, from the basic entry-level gear up to the latest Galaxy or iPhone model, directly and with all the usual consumer protection laws applicable. Then you can get a SIM-only package, on a rolling monthly contract without any long-term tie-in, from any of the major phone networks to get the voice and/or data connectivity.
Most people don't do this, because it would force them to confront the real cost of buying that shiny new smartphone instead of mentally writing it off as part of a monthly credit agreement^W^Wcalling plan, where both the cost and the interest rate they're effectively paying for the device are mixed in with the flate rate they're paying for the network anyway. But as with most credit-like agreements, if you have the money up-front and do the maths, it's almost always cheaper over the lifetime of the deal to buy your own device, and of course it gives you a lot more flexibility to change your connectivity package mid-term as better deals become available in a highly competitive market.
I'm always slightly surprised that the usual rules we have here for advertising credit agreements (making it clear that you're tied into paying a certain interest rate, described in a standardised way) haven't been applied to the mobile phone market. If the carriers were forced to describe how much their calling plan is really costing in an easily comparable format, and to show the price of the equivalent up-front purchase and separate connectivity, I suspect the market would shift rather sharply in the average consumer's favour.
In a world where a single natural disaster can and unfortunately sometimes does cause devastation over vast areas, as it seems anyone near Washington DC is all too aware tonight, your comment is far too close to the truth to be funny.
A tiny number of big manufacturers are now responsible for actually making the hardware for almost every major computer and mobile device manufacturer in the world. I'm not sure whether we are down to single figures yet, but if not, we're close. There is a reason you could hardly find a new hard disk to buy not so long ago unless it was part of an entire new computer. It's because there literally weren't enough stocks of those devices to satisfy market demand, after major natural disasters brought production to a halt at too many of those few key facilities for an extended period.
OK. Obviously I'm posting pseudonymously so I can't give a lot of specifics, but FWIW...
I agree that this isn't a straightforward question, and I think one big problem is that people sometimes start by assuming a false dichotomy: either we're hosting in the cloud or we're kitting out a whole new server room. In reality, there is a broad scale to consider, with all kinds of managed hosting and colo options where a lot of the sysadmin overhead can be outsourced but you basically get to use real hardware with proper root access at a much more sensible cost-per-resource-unit than any cloud hosting provider is going to offer.
For a lot of small/medium sized businesses (anyone who is going to run Netflix 2 successfully doesn't need advice from me;-)) the sweet spot seems to be somewhere in the middle. If you can find a service provider with geographically diverse hosting facilities and sensible connectivity, you can either lease machines from them or buy your own and use their colo services, and basically make the hosting service into your on-site IT people. If you're just starting out and don't have dedicated IT people yet, a lot of these services will also offer basic sysadmin support for a nominal fee, to help with installing/patching your OS or standard cloned images, and setting up things like firewalls, load balancing, database replication, distributed filesystems and all that stuff that you probably don't care about if you're trying to build a new service that actually does something useful.
The key thing seems to be finding a host who will let you outsource the mundane stuff that you would do via a console in a cloud-based system -- chances are that's basically what they've set up on their own systems anyway -- but keeping the increased flexibility and lower cost-per-resource-unit of leasing/buying your own dedicated hardware with real root access. This approach seems to work pretty well up to a scale of dozens/hundreds of machines, as long as your resource needs grow reasonably predictably or you an afford a day or two to catch up in the event of an unexpected spike.
Of course if you need a global CDN then you're probably not going to beat a real CDN provider this way, but you can combine that with some sort of managed hosting/colo arrangement in various sensible ways. And if you really do need to scale up and down within a matter of minutes/hours, perhaps because your service has wildly different usage patterns at different times of day, then probably Amazon-style cloud hosting is your only viable option without spending a fortune on hardware you won't be using efficiently.
Not sure if that just repeats things you already figured out, but I hope it helps.
So your argument is: Netflix fucked up, so cloud is shit?
No, my argument is that saying this only affected one AWS data center and people elsewhere are fine is clearly not the whole story.
Cloud is usually cheaper and easier at small to medium scale
Cheaper and easier than what? Cloud technologies are basically useful for two things: outsourcing hardware and staff resources so you can adapt to very fast changes in the level of requirements, and being a glorified CDN. What proportion of small/medium businesses ever need to scale so fast that doing it in-house is impractical, or need the generalised capabilities of services like Amazon's rather than a straight-up CDN provider like Akamai?
You realise that this took out one data center? That is, all of those other AWS data centers are working still just fine?
Well, OK then, next time I'll just tell all of those people who can't use their home-grown Heroku-based apps for a few hours to go watch a movie on Netflix instead. It's probably just the little guys who got in trouble on this one, and it's their own dumb fault for not setting up more than one AZ or using different regions or something. Oh, no, wait, loads of people couldn't watch the movie either, and Netflix are HUGE AWS customers with an army of people to maintain a redundant infrastructure.
You really think hosting your own hardware in your own data centers spread across the world will save you a fortune?
False dichotomy. Most on-line businesses don't need redundant access in data centres all over the world to avoid a problem like this. Having a primary and a stand-by in different geographic locations would have done just fine, and we've been doing that since long before the marketing people invented terms like "cloud computing".
Have you even bothered to run those figures?
Several times and for multiple businesses. Have you?
Cloud computing brings availability to the "small guys". It also allows for quick scalability. You can't really accomplish similar things in-house unless you use 100s of servers
Sure, but probably 99% of small businesses don't actually need to scale that fast, or anywhere close. The cloud hosting proposition for most (not all, but most) small businesses is an appeal to wishful thinking, like the bank guy who tells you how they can give you a starter current account today, but they do have several tiers of service and once you're making over 10,000,000 in a year you'll have a dedicated account manager available to make you a coffee any time you want one.
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The trouble is, trying to shoehorn every application under the sun into a web app format is a bad idea. The web is not designed to be an operating system or an application delivery platform. It's designed to efficiently and portably distribute content.
The longer we persist with this fad of trying to make it do more than that, the longer it will be before we switch back to building real applications with tools that are fit for purpose. JavaScript and the typical server-side scripting languages are OK (not great in most cases, but OK) for their common jobs, but they are somewhere in the dark ages when it comes to general programming power. The kind of software execution models for things security and concurrency that we have in browsers and therefore web apps today are similarly prehistoric by modern standards.
And so I respectfully disagree that building serious web apps is just now becoming possible. The state of the art in web-based applications is decades behind the state of the art in native coding, with absolutely zero exceptions to my knowledge.
The only "serious" web apps that have enjoyed wide success are those that are essentially front ends for a database with perhaps some limited interactivity. Obviously that covers a fairly wide class of software development projects. Moreover, it has certainly shown that there is a lot of value in providing simple but effective tools to manage everyday tasks, often at the expense of incumbent 800lb gorilla do-everything applications. Still, writing simple database front-ends is very far from being the whole software development industry.
Even in that field, these database UI web apps don't really do anything that a native app, a basic data transfer protocol and a sensible software install/update protocol couldn't do at least as well and often much better. (What do you think a huge proportion of mobile apps really are?) If only we could stop trying to replace that final software install/update protocol with web-hosted apps or proprietary distributions/repositories/app stores and just make the damned thing part of every major operating system the way it always should have been.
IMHO, what actually needs to happen if we're going to make real progress with this part of the software development industry is to establish a systematic, robust architecture that learns from the many successes of web apps but is built to support general applications from the start, running on a serious OS platform either natively or in a powerful and flexible VM, supporting a variety of languages and programming styles, dealing with distributed resources and security as first-class concepts, and so on. We already know how to solve most of the relevant problems, but we aren't using that knowledge. Apparently it's cleaner to write every trivial database UI using at least five different programming or mark-up languages, or something, and it will probably stay that way as long as we try to make every programming job into a web app.
We routinely test all of those projects I mentioned with all of the major browsers.
IE9 is actually the only big hitter that has never crashed on us.
YMMV, plurals and anecdotes and data, etc.
The thing is, if you take a step back and look at the facts objectively, recent versions of IE actually have a pretty good track record for quality (and security, for that matter). Sure, you can go back to the IE6 era and point plenty of fingers, but then again you have to remember that some "bugs" in IE6 are really behaviours that hadn't been effectively standardised yet when IE6 was released; it predates CSS 2.1 by several years, for example. And of course, IE6 is more than a decade old. Criticising Microsoft's track record for having bugs or security vulnerabilities in IE6 is like criticising Mozilla because Netscape 6 wasn't their finest hour or condemning Apple for having weak support for the Web in MacOS 9 before Safari even existed.
Meanwhile, if we're looking at the situation today rather than historically, Firefox and Chrome both have appalling quality control. Since the six-week-release era, they've broken basic rendering and they've broken popular new CSS3 features like rounded corners and shadows. They've broken major third party integrations with Flash and Java, and they've broken the new HTML5 shinies that are supposed to replace them like the <video> and <canvas> elements. In several cases, they have compromised their design or don't even respect the basic architecture of the Internet in their never-ending quest to squeeze every last millisecond of performance out of your system, which is fine right up to the point where their caching just plain gets it wrong and what you see isn't the content you were supposed to see, or their direct integration with plug-ins allows something to block their application UI thread and the whole damn browser locks up because someone's AJAX request blocked one of the tabs.
So as surprising as it may seem to those of us who have been around for a while, looking at the issue today, based on the empirical data we have for bugs and effort spent fixing/working around them on various projects I'm involved with, I do currently use IE as my benchmark for browser quality. Moreover, I am 100% confident that for the features we're actually using, even recent trends around CSS3 and HTML5, IE clearly has superior quality to either Firefox or Chrome. Of course it's always possible that the selection of projects I'm talking about has been exceptionally unlucky and hit a huge number of corner cases, and I certainly won't presume to speak for every other project I don't work on...
Is Microsoft, by chance, involved in WHATWG?
Not really. This sort of madness is driven by the same fools at places like Google and Mozilla who think pushing a new update every six weeks is a good idea.
One day, they will notice that most real developers on real projects can't and don't want to keep up with that kind of unstable foundation.
One day, they will notice that most users don't like being hassled every few weeks by their browser update mechanism or their UIs forever moving around in subtle (or occasionally not-so-subtle) ways.
One day, they will notice that the only people in the industry who actually like the rapid releases are people making cute demos on blogs, people at the aforementioned Google and Chrome who are comparing anatomical measurements, and people who want to be one of the above.
One day, they will acknowledge that their quality control processes are demonstrably not up to the job of supporting such rapid releases, and they do keep breaking things, and those things aren't always minor details you can get away with for another six weeks.
One day, they will acknowledge that quite a few of the minor things that break are actually their prototype implementations of whizzy new features, which means developers of real production projects can't use those whizzy new features even on browsers that support them, which entirely defeats the purpose of pushing out new features at such a breakneck pace in the first place.
Until then, most of the projects I work on will continue to recommend that our professional customers use IE, and IE will remain the only platform that we will contractually support, because unlike nonsense like "living standards", it is a reasonably stable platform that we can test against to a professional standard. And that matters a lot more to both us and our clients than supporting this week's proposal for a multi-resolution-friendly <img> tag that only works on Chrome cloud cuckoo channel.
I'd say - hang them all as they do not understand.
Oh come on, that's just plain unreasonable.
Much of the draconian copyright regulation within Europe is advocated by the French government, so the appropriate penalty involves a guillotine.
That would be a more compelling argument if the first ESR wasn't already nearing end-of-life.
I think Mozilla and most large organisations have very different ideas of what constitutes extended support.
You haven't used Mozilla Firefox in years or you've never actually tried it in a corporate environment [...] Updates with no UAC prompt landed in Firefox 12.
The current version is 13, so that means the no-UAC update landed less than three months ago.
If you're going to push an update every few weeks and not even provide a sensible major/minor version number so people know when to pay attention, it's a really cheap shot to attack someone because they haven't kept up with every little change in every new version.
You do make sure new security fixes don't introduce regressions in a staging lab, don't you? It's how competent administrators do thing.
You do realise that many small businesses don't even have a full-time dedicated sysadmin, don't you?
There are some custom builds of Firefox with GPOs added in
Well, it's Open Source, so there are probably custom builds that make a tuna sandwich while Google loads, but that's hardly a compelling proposition when other major browsers support this business-friendly feature natively.
Firefox can be used in the corporate environment, it just requires a competent administrator.
Yes, it's all the customer's fault, and the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Sorry, but your head-in-the-sand attitude is exactly why Firefox isn't getting anywhere in busineses since the rapid updates began. You can post snarky AC comments all you like, but somehow I don't think the world is going to change through the sheer force of your willpower.
Most likely EU forcing this on Canada. It would seem to be a version of Droit de suite, which is french for "right to follow", which Europe has and Canada doesn't.
Except that in the other big copyright news from Europe last week, the ECJ basically killed the whole idea that you can control resales of software, even when supplied as a download, by asserting some sort of copyright argument. The reasoning given in the judgement is remarkably clear and much of it would probably translate to other forms of content as well if the case was brought.
So, if this is the "EU", then it's probably only the European Commission, as neither the Parliament nor the Court seem to have much time for this sort of nonsense.
Also, the French have a rather different take on an artist's rights from most places, with more of an emphasis on morality rather than economic incentives. That isn't true across all of Europe, though.
Sure, but if I've understood this correctly, it's the system vendors who are going to be preinstalling the Microsoft root, it's not built into the chip itself. It seems unlikely that would ever change, because having anything embedded so deeply would cause a huge write-off of chips if the root certificate were ever compromised, and there's nothing in it for the chip manufacturers to take on that kind of risk.
I think perhaps we are talking at cross-purposes.
There doesn't seem to be much doubt about whether you can sell a PC second-hand including any OEM software it came with, but I'm not sure there was before this ruling either.
The open question to me is whether you can resell bundled software as a separate item. That isn't nearly so obvious a decision and many of the points considered in the ruling we're discussing wouldn't necessarily go the same way in the bundling/OEM context.
I like one of the related possible implications here: if a company like Autodesk, Microsoft or Adobe is using phone-home DRM on a software product, and I own (based on this case) a legitimate copy of that product, and they break the DRM by for example denying product activation so I can't use it anyway, then it seems clear that they can no longer rely on any kind of argument based on being the copyright holder to defend their actions. I'm allowed to make copies necessary for the normal use of a legitimate copy of the product, and the ruling here affirms that the copy I paid for really is mine whatever the copyright holder might like to think.
I look forward to seeing criminal charges (e.g., under the Computer Misuse Act and related law in the UK) being brought against the individuals (not the employers -- their staff, personally) who cause damage to legitimate customers by getting their DRM-related records wrong so the software doesn't work.
If the Euro does collapse, it's probably going to pull the global economy down with it for several more years, so I wouldn't be quite so smug if I were you.
There is certainly an issue of democratic deficit in various nations in the EU, and very obviously at EU level itself, right now. It is highly unlikely that this will last. Public sentiment is against the European political classes almost everywhere, and they are only clinging on to their power base because the populations of most countries have been denied a direct say on the matter and/or have more pressing concerns like buying books for their children and putting dinner on the table.
Even so, the powerful/unelected status of certain European politicians is becoming increasingly untenable, and their persistent failure to sort out the current economic mess, or indeed to look much more mature or capable than fighting schoolchildren, is doing them no favours in places like the UK (where the Conservative leadership has been not-so-subtly anticipating a future referendum over the past few days) and various other places that are currently in the EU but not yet the Eurozone. If the technocrats installed in governments as you mentioned also fail to clear up the mess, there is no reason to keep them around either.
Your position just got blown out of the water anywhere in the EU. The ruling here considers the licensed-not-sold argument in detail, and comes down heavily on the side that if you're taking money in return for a permanent right to use the copy, that counts as a sale. They addressed various possible attempts to weasel out of this conclusion based on things like support/updates after the sale, too.
If I'm understanding this ruling correctly, it sounds like any "non-transferrable" restriction on an otherwise permanent licence might just have become unenforceable, whether the software maker likes it or not.
That said, the ruling is about software bought separately, either as a physical package or downloaded. It doesn't mention the issue of bundled software explicitly, so we'll have to try and interpret the ruling as it might apply in the OEM case. The ruling itself seems to be written very broadly (and deliberately so) and seems to me to cover the OEM case by the same basic argument, but I'm not a lawyer etc.
Errr, you do realise that Scotland and England are the same country???
No, they aren't. They are distinct countries, each of which is part of the sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
For desktop Linux, why couldn't you put together a machine from your own hardware instead of relying on an OEM? Plenty of people already do that, not least so they can be confident they've chosen components that won't have any compatibility problems with Linux, and as long as individuals can do it, there will always be the potential for businesses to spring up as well if the demand is there.
Is Red Hat really so dominant in the server market today?
Also, how could Microsoft withdraw their approval arbitrarily without being on the wrong end of a massive lawsuit?
Given the very high proportion of servers that run (a) the world's major businesses, and (b) Linux, I think we're fairly safe on that one. These servers are often administered by people who know what they're doing and who chose Linux over a Microsoft stack for a reason.
Not even Microsoft are powerful enough to change that, or they would have done so a long time ago. I think any serious attempt to take control of the hardware platform would result an expensive backlash and PR headache at best.
Yes, that's another option that is usually unambiguously better than a long-term lock-in with the phone companies -- though you do have to put up with the world's pushiest salespeople, allegedly. ;-)
It's a kind of halfway house, I suppose. As you say, you get the "free" phone without the locking and other junk installed, but on the other hand you're still tied into a potentially expensive and inflexible monthly contract for 1-2 years in return.
I don't know where you are, but here in the UK it's easy to buy basically any smartphone or tablet device of any level, from the basic entry-level gear up to the latest Galaxy or iPhone model, directly and with all the usual consumer protection laws applicable. Then you can get a SIM-only package, on a rolling monthly contract without any long-term tie-in, from any of the major phone networks to get the voice and/or data connectivity.
Most people don't do this, because it would force them to confront the real cost of buying that shiny new smartphone instead of mentally writing it off as part of a monthly credit agreement^W^Wcalling plan, where both the cost and the interest rate they're effectively paying for the device are mixed in with the flate rate they're paying for the network anyway. But as with most credit-like agreements, if you have the money up-front and do the maths, it's almost always cheaper over the lifetime of the deal to buy your own device, and of course it gives you a lot more flexibility to change your connectivity package mid-term as better deals become available in a highly competitive market.
I'm always slightly surprised that the usual rules we have here for advertising credit agreements (making it clear that you're tied into paying a certain interest rate, described in a standardised way) haven't been applied to the mobile phone market. If the carriers were forced to describe how much their calling plan is really costing in an easily comparable format, and to show the price of the equivalent up-front purchase and separate connectivity, I suspect the market would shift rather sharply in the average consumer's favour.
In a world where a single natural disaster can and unfortunately sometimes does cause devastation over vast areas, as it seems anyone near Washington DC is all too aware tonight, your comment is far too close to the truth to be funny.
A tiny number of big manufacturers are now responsible for actually making the hardware for almost every major computer and mobile device manufacturer in the world. I'm not sure whether we are down to single figures yet, but if not, we're close. There is a reason you could hardly find a new hard disk to buy not so long ago unless it was part of an entire new computer. It's because there literally weren't enough stocks of those devices to satisfy market demand, after major natural disasters brought production to a halt at too many of those few key facilities for an extended period.
OK. Obviously I'm posting pseudonymously so I can't give a lot of specifics, but FWIW...
I agree that this isn't a straightforward question, and I think one big problem is that people sometimes start by assuming a false dichotomy: either we're hosting in the cloud or we're kitting out a whole new server room. In reality, there is a broad scale to consider, with all kinds of managed hosting and colo options where a lot of the sysadmin overhead can be outsourced but you basically get to use real hardware with proper root access at a much more sensible cost-per-resource-unit than any cloud hosting provider is going to offer.
For a lot of small/medium sized businesses (anyone who is going to run Netflix 2 successfully doesn't need advice from me ;-)) the sweet spot seems to be somewhere in the middle. If you can find a service provider with geographically diverse hosting facilities and sensible connectivity, you can either lease machines from them or buy your own and use their colo services, and basically make the hosting service into your on-site IT people. If you're just starting out and don't have dedicated IT people yet, a lot of these services will also offer basic sysadmin support for a nominal fee, to help with installing/patching your OS or standard cloned images, and setting up things like firewalls, load balancing, database replication, distributed filesystems and all that stuff that you probably don't care about if you're trying to build a new service that actually does something useful.
The key thing seems to be finding a host who will let you outsource the mundane stuff that you would do via a console in a cloud-based system -- chances are that's basically what they've set up on their own systems anyway -- but keeping the increased flexibility and lower cost-per-resource-unit of leasing/buying your own dedicated hardware with real root access. This approach seems to work pretty well up to a scale of dozens/hundreds of machines, as long as your resource needs grow reasonably predictably or you an afford a day or two to catch up in the event of an unexpected spike.
Of course if you need a global CDN then you're probably not going to beat a real CDN provider this way, but you can combine that with some sort of managed hosting/colo arrangement in various sensible ways. And if you really do need to scale up and down within a matter of minutes/hours, perhaps because your service has wildly different usage patterns at different times of day, then probably Amazon-style cloud hosting is your only viable option without spending a fortune on hardware you won't be using efficiently.
Not sure if that just repeats things you already figured out, but I hope it helps.
So your argument is: Netflix fucked up, so cloud is shit?
No, my argument is that saying this only affected one AWS data center and people elsewhere are fine is clearly not the whole story.
Cloud is usually cheaper and easier at small to medium scale
Cheaper and easier than what? Cloud technologies are basically useful for two things: outsourcing hardware and staff resources so you can adapt to very fast changes in the level of requirements, and being a glorified CDN. What proportion of small/medium businesses ever need to scale so fast that doing it in-house is impractical, or need the generalised capabilities of services like Amazon's rather than a straight-up CDN provider like Akamai?
You realise that this took out one data center? That is, all of those other AWS data centers are working still just fine?
Well, OK then, next time I'll just tell all of those people who can't use their home-grown Heroku-based apps for a few hours to go watch a movie on Netflix instead. It's probably just the little guys who got in trouble on this one, and it's their own dumb fault for not setting up more than one AZ or using different regions or something. Oh, no, wait, loads of people couldn't watch the movie either, and Netflix are HUGE AWS customers with an army of people to maintain a redundant infrastructure.
You really think hosting your own hardware in your own data centers spread across the world will save you a fortune?
False dichotomy. Most on-line businesses don't need redundant access in data centres all over the world to avoid a problem like this. Having a primary and a stand-by in different geographic locations would have done just fine, and we've been doing that since long before the marketing people invented terms like "cloud computing".
Have you even bothered to run those figures?
Several times and for multiple businesses. Have you?
Cloud computing brings availability to the "small guys". It also allows for quick scalability. You can't really accomplish similar things in-house unless you use 100s of servers
Sure, but probably 99% of small businesses don't actually need to scale that fast, or anywhere close. The cloud hosting proposition for most (not all, but most) small businesses is an appeal to wishful thinking, like the bank guy who tells you how they can give you a starter current account today, but they do have several tiers of service and once you're making over 10,000,000 in a year you'll have a dedicated account manager available to make you a coffee any time you want one.