You make an interesting argument, but I disagree with your conclusion, probably because I'm not sure I agree with all your underlying assumptions. First, however...
"Open source" is a term coined by ESR (I'm pretty sure, he was at least the first person I heard pushing it) which refers to the general physical property of having access to source code in a "useful way".
OK, we're using somewhat different definitions of "open source" here. I use the term simply to mean software for which the source code is available for inspection, not necessarily with any inherent rights to modify or redistribute that code attached. The latter is certainly a popular idea, as the GPL et al demonstrate, but I prefer to distinguish between them, particularly since most of the benefits often attributed to open source are a result of the visibility, not the freedom to change.
With that noted, let's talk about a couple of your specific points.
I'm not pushing the free software "we should all just get along" party line here, just pointing out that when you deny such a value proposition, you're going to have responses like, "well, why should I hand you my wallet?!" The only appropriate answer is, "don't bother, someone else will."
This is the bit I disagree with. Sure, there are a few mass-market applications (office suites, database tools, networking tools and operating system stuff, basically) that nearly everyone uses, and a few more that are big enough to be worth putting in with them (things like basic art programs, programming tools, mathematical toolkits and other such generalised techie toys). There will always be enough interested hackers to put together a good version of these things, and every big open source success story is in this group.
However, the vast, vast majority of software written in the world is custom-made for a particular client with particular needs. No-one else cares, except possibly for the competitors of that client who'd love to see the trade secrets involved, which is a pretty good reason for the client and their developers not to disclose the source.
This market will not die, simply because it's huge and there will always be a need to do things other people don't or can't or don't know how to do. And in this market, proprietary, closed development has several major advantages, and there will always be people prepared to pay for the services of programmers in doing that development. Granted, you can (and I suspect probably would) argue that this is paying for the developers and not assigning value to the software itself, but in terms of market economics, the effect is the same: people are paying for closed source software that they get and others don't.
In that market, the "someone else will" argument simply doesn't apply. Consider one of your own examples:
The single most imortant interface between the end-user and the late-90s phenomenon that was the.com-era-Internet wasn't worth a dime, and yet it took over the market as a free product and was eventually replaced by another free product!
Yes, it's true, giving web browsers away for free was a new approach. And it's one that has nearly bankrupted Netscape and cost Microsoft a fortune as they supported their freely offered browser with the proceeds from their commercial, closed-source, expensively sold operating system and office suite products. This is not a viable business model in general -- advocates say otherwise, but show me the evidence -- and outside the mass market, no-one's going to develop every tool you ever needed just out of the kindness of their hearts.
So, you see, I don't care about the politics or the touchy-feely Stallman crusade. I don't think most of that is realistic. What I do find interesting is that there are still people in the world who can watch giant companies giving away their software and they sti
If you were making the decision for more than econimic reasons, then we could talk, but open source software development is fundamentally the denial of the idea that software is a valuable commodity (rather that programmers and support)
Aren't you confusing open source with free software?
Hey, strcpy is no buggier than anything else if you use it properly. I recently was forced to change my code as follows:
char *foo = new char[strlen(bar) + 1];
strcpy(foo,bar);
to
char *foo = new char[strlen(bar) + 1];
strncpy(foo,bar,strlen(bar));
What's the problem with this?
Your example is particularly apt to a discussion about the quality of reviewers. You comment that those reviewing your code suggested (wrongly) that the second version was safer. My immediate suggestion, had I been doing the review, would have been to use std::string (or some other string class if you're not allowed templates/standard library stuff for whatever reason) instead of low-level pointer and array manipulation.
This is the big problem with code reviews: not only do the reviewers need to be unbiased and able to speak their minds freely, they also have to be well informed and qualified to offer the opinions for which they are asked. 'Course, there aren't that many suitably qualified people around, and you then get the question of whether their peer time would be better used conducting training (for example, in general principles like how to avoid using low-level constructs in high-level code in a language like C++) than in individually reviewing single pieces of code, and probably making the same criticism of half the developers in the department in different places.
Code reviews in themselves are clearly a good thing, but if you have a scarce resource (very good programmers), you have to look at the different ways you can take advantage of their skills, and using them for code reviews may not be the most constructive use of their finite amounts of time.
There is always the danger that a company will cease to support a product which has become integral to your operation. This is one of the much touted benefits of Open Source - self and community support.
It's much touted, but is it true?
Can you name a major Open Source development that has been completely discontinued by its original developer(s), and which has been taken on by a new team who have continued to fix up the bugs and add new functionality in the same spirit as the original? Can you name five? Ten?
The OS/FS world is littered with half-done projects, but precious little ever "ships". Most of the worthwhile OS/FS things that do get properly released are big, mass-market products: Linux, obviously, plus office apps, networking tools, and a few decent development tools.
Here, the community effect works wonders, and granted, Linux is unlikely to disappear any time soon. But is this fundamentally because they're Open Source, or because they're mainstream applications that vast numbers of people will always need? I'd argue that both are necessary for the "support effect".
I don't even know where to start attacking this post, so I'll just go through it piece by piece.
You are not being treated like a criminal when the government puts up traffic cams to monitor intersections,
I drive safely and, by and large, legally. And yet, I have been flashed by speed cameras on several occasions now when I wasn't going over the limit. Maybe they were the fakes with cheap sensors, maybe they were misconfigured, who knows? It was certainly very unnerving at the time, and I spent the next two weeks wondering if someone's error is going to result in a fixed penalty notice arriving on my doorstep that I'd then have to defend -- probably unsuccessfully, because the machines are all but assumed to be infallible. "Man shall not be judged by machine" is a fundamental principle that is easily forgotten, but sound nonetheless.
Ok then, let's keep the government out of ALL your business, like maintaining roads, catching traffic offenders and criminals, providing emergency services, funding public utilties like water and phone in remote areas, etc. - yeah that'll work.
Strawman. The only one of the above where cameras can be argued to be relevant is in catching criminals, and there is precious little evidence to support even that claim, since the systems go wrong so often that frequently they aren't of any use when they should be anyway. The fact that they are widely abused is beyond dispute, however.
But seriously, you have to realize that we live in a society: a group. You are not and cannot be a lone individual unaffected by rules that arise out of necessity when living in a (rather large) group.
There is nothing necessary about the cameras invading my privacy. Mankind has survived quite happily for a very long time without such devices. We live in a society that is governed by a few in a system that fundamentally encourages them not to act in the best interests of those they represent. You have only to watch the news this week to see how much several western governments care about the views of those they claim to represent.
Also, to imply that putting up cameras in public places is equivalent to "waiving all right to privacy" is a groce exaggeration. This doesn't give anybody permission to stop and search you, interrupt you in any way, or prevent you from doing anything (unless what you are doing is illegal, in which case your argument is no longer about privacy).
Ah, but in case you hadn't noticed, there are already legal bases for stop and search, arrest on suspicion and restriction of freedoms in most western countries, particularly the US and UK. Hell, we've all been merrily introducing laws in the interests of "counter-terrorism" that have eroded our civil rights more in the past few years than in the previous several decades. Just this weekend, there was a fabulous story in the news about a guy who was arrested under recent anti-terrorism legislation in the UK because he had a Muslim-sounding name and happened to have bought a book or two from Paladin Press.
No, this is not solely due to the cameras, but the arguments you make in their favour are exactly those that are regularly used to support all the other slow-but-sure evasions of our rights to privacy and freedom that have been occurring ever faster since 911. At the risk of a terrible misquotation, for this shit to succeed, all that is necessary is for thoughtful men to stand by and do nothing.
And lastly, try not to mix the issues of surveillance, and security of the accumulated data. Of course any government database that's not protected sufficiently (by laws and security measures) is somewhat of a threat to privacy, but that is IMHO not a reason to say that surveillance in public places is bad.
Actually the pictures taken by cameras for running red lights are oftentimes so bad that you cannot tell who's driving the car.
Unfortunately, this is no longer necessarily the case. People in the UK were using the lack of personal identification as a defence to speeding charges. There are now a new breed of cameras found on our roads that face towards the driver rather than away precisely so that a clear facial image can be captured. If you think they can't clearly see you, try a web search for some of the driving sites, and check out some of the sample photos. But sit down first.:-)
OK, however you look at it, in whatever market, I just can't find a figure on the order of 40% even remotely credible. How many people out there have switched jobs in the last, say, three years? How many have moved to places that focus primarily on Linux? (I work at a place that develops for Linux, but also more than a dozen other platforms, so we're hardly a Linux shop.)
If 40% of developers were working primarily on Linux projects today, then well over 40% of recruitment over the past few years would have been for Linux-based positions. (I say "well over" because Linux dev has only really been big news for a short time compared to well over a decade of Windows being the dominant platform, and not many places train their people internally to move over to the other OS.)
I'm sorry, but that 40% figure just isn't credible on that basis. I work in a very tech-based city, I'm a developer, many of my friends work in software companies, and yet I don't know a single place here that I'd say does primarily Linux development. Quite a few do some Linux work, but also Windows and many other OSes, but that's not what the article said.
Try finding a job now -- With 2 years' experience and a degree, I've not gotten a single interview in almost a year. I'm good at what I do. But the jobs just aren't there.
You don't say what you do, but the way I see it, one of two things must be happening.
You're good at doing the wrong thing. For example, you followed the trend into web development and got skills in a crowded market that were never going to be highly in demand for long.
You're just plain unlucky. The entire industry is down, as is the economy as a whole, right now, but your skills are still relevant and valuable to business, and your worth will increase again in time. In the meantime, everyone's suffering, not just the IT business, and it's no particular reflection on your skills and abilities.
A lot of the bitching and moaning I've seen -- though certainly not all -- comes from those who were happy to ride the web wave a few years ago. Those in this article, and the people affected by the type of ads on the cited f*ckthisjob.com site, are no exception. These are the idiots who gave up higher education to make their "easy" million, and did stupid things like the guy in the article who bought a house way beyond his means and then got screwed (as his accountant had always told him he would) when tax returns came around. These are the people who thought reading a quickie HTML book made them qualified.
The rest of the world always knew better. Anyone who stopped and thought about it could see that a market full of such people was never going to last long. Anyone who stopped and thought about it would have either planned for this while times were good, or simply pursued a more viable long-term plan in the first place. Of course, most people in this situation don't think much, which is why they're all unemployed and bitching and moaning now.
On the flip side, there are those who have genuinely worked hard to develop skills and experience, who are unfortunate enough to be caught in the storm because for whatever reason their previous job is no longer there. For those who've been in the industry for a while, savings from when times were better help to see them through until the industry gets moving again after its little cleansing exercise, and their real skills are once more in demand.
There's not a lot you can say to comfort the unfortunate people who just got in at the wrong time, right as the bubble burst, and who have no savings from those earlier good times. Clearly times are hard, and they certainly won't get the starting salaries within the first few years that they might have hoped for as they went through college in the late '90s. But just as surely as night follows day, times will improve again, and real skills will come to have value again.
All you can do in that position is struggle through -- maybe even working in a related industry, or just flipping burgers and stacking shelves for a few months to pay the rent -- but know that if your skills are real, the demand will return. These same people are also likely to be the ones who adapt better to whatever slightly different set of skills might be most useful as the market recovers, and who are prepared to read a good book and play around now and then to keep their skills as current as possible, at the same time as working wherever to pay the rent. Times are hard now, but for these people, they will improve. All you can do is keep the faith until then, or get out of the industry and retrain.
If the institution accepts the money in exchange for restricting what they do, then they have their choices restricted. There, I said it again, with exactly the same end result, and without the word force.
You are using a strawman argument about semantics, and ignoring the actual point of the discussion.
Government, business, and education are increasingly finding open source attractive, so to compete in those markets it is becoming a prerequisite to having an open source offering.
I think that statement is misleading, if technically correct.
There is an increase in the interest in open source, but the vast, vast majority of such groups still couldn't care less.
Having an open source offering is now a prerequisite if you want to be used in a small number of places. Several of the major examples are small, cash-strapped governments, for whom the bottom line is going to be the dominant factor, which have legislated that only open source solutions may be used. This has nothing to do with the superiority of such products, merely their (probably inaccurately) perceived cost.
That's not fair, even a grade school kid knows a standard keyboard can deal more damage than a standard PS1 controller. [...] Oh and that removable, throwable ball in the mouse is also an unfair advantage over your opponent.
Ah, but if you hit down, down-back, back and press twenty keys at once -- the secret move that isn't possible with a game pad -- do you get a golden mouseball?
The environment is probably like the software houses full of newly qualified code monkeys, because they had the right buzzword on their CV. The automated databases aren't smart enough to spot that a veteran with 10 years' experience shipping products using seven major languages could probably pick up VB.NET or Java if he really tried, y'know, for at least five minutes, and they give no credit to the fact that with all that extra experience, he might even do a better job afterwards.
Yeah, it sucks. I'm not supporting this practice at all; it's just silly management and bad for all concerned. But it is, sadly, the way things often work today, and in what is basically an employer's market for many industries at present, you have to be dealing with that. And so, while I don't think it's a university's job to teach things like Word or Excel to its students, one has to consider the side effects of a move away from the standard. Colleges that don't produce employable students are not going to do well.
I'm pleased to see that, around the same time I wrote the parent post, news hit of the release of Mozilla 1.3, which apparently addresses several of my concerns. Fingers crossed, then...
No. Microsoft would be preventing the use of their own software by refusing to license it according to the demands of the market.
The typical consumer isn't demanding open source or free software. If it were, Microsoft would not have a 90+% share of the office applications market, and a similarly high penetration of the desktop OS market.
Some people want open source. A few even have legitimate reasons for doing so, though for many it's a fad, and would convey absolutely no benefit on them whatsoever. But most people really don't care. They want a product that does the job they need it to do, and if that means paying money for a closed source solution that does the job better than a freely available open source one, so be it.
Outlook Express? Most Linux mail clients are better than that. You lost all credibility there.
Maybe they are; unfortunately, for the immediate future, I'm on Windoze.
If you read my reply to the post above, you'll note that Mozilla has trashed my whole profile, losing all of the data associated with it -- mail, address book, etc. -- some of it apparently irretrievably. OE never did that, and has better filtering facilities to boot.
Moz has potential, but I stand by my claim that for an average user, the MS solutions are currently better. The only big area where Moz and co are seriously ahead is security, and, at least for now, they lose that one back again on stability.
This is yet another example of someone who doesn't understand what the word "force" means. An offer of money is not force.
No, of course it's not. But if the institution accepts that money, then they are forced not to follow the Microsoft path, and thus have their choices restricted.
Normally they require familiarity with Office Automation Suits, or other parlance that makes clear they are computer literate, nowhere is normally there to be seen the name of the beast mentioned.
It's standard practice for many UK recruiters, when harvesting CVs through automated database systems, to search for "Word", "Excel" and "Windows". The database probably doesn't know that OpenOffice or StarOffice is a sensible alternative, because chances are whoever set it up is an incompetent office jockey with "HR Consultant" in his/her title, who actually has precious little idea about the skills they are supposed to be looking for.
You may not like it, but I know for a fact that this is how a large proportion of major UK recruiters operate.
I must admit that I'm a little intrigued about what your issues are with Mozilla.
They are few, but serious. (I'm expecting this post to be modded down as a Troll, the way three of my other entirely reasonable posts on this thread have been -- though two have since been modded back up -- but maybe someone will read it first.)
Firstly, the obvious big one: they continue to place standards compliance on a pedestal above practicality, so it continues to refuse to render a large volume of web sites. Standardisation is a good thing, but not at the price of getting useful work done.
Secondly, it's terribly vulnerable to crashes. It crashed out on me last week, and the next time I loaded it up, it had lost all of the information in my profile: all of my e-mail, my preferences, my address book, everything. After a couple of hours surfing the web -- during which time I noted that (a) this is hardly an isolated incident, and (b) Mozilla really is a mostly unsupported browser with no real help available if it goes wrong -- I managed to recover the e-mails. Two weeks later, I've given up trying to make it use my old address book file -- which is still there on disk just fine -- and just started a new one and transferred things across the hard way.
Speaking of disks, why do they insist on that damn stupid place to store all your profile stuff? Every other application installed on my system stores its data on my Windows D drive (also to be used for data from Linux apps shortly), so back-ups are as simple as writing the whole D drive out to CD. Can't do that with Moz mail, AFAICS; even the places where it ought to be customisable looking at the UI don't seem to work properly. And don't even think about trying to use Moz on both Windows and Linux on a dual boot machine and share the data, because that's obviously a silly idea.
Oh, and did I mention that the newsreader has no serious filtering capabilities, so the signal-to-noise ratio in some groups that I used to follow is so bad that I gave up?
Those are my four big beefs with Moz as it stands today (latest stable release installed on my PC). Otherwise, I like it a lot. As you say, it is better than IE in many other ways, and as I said, it has a lot of potential. But right now, today, these four problems are crippling. If you were running a business, would you trust your e-mail to a system that has known problems with losing all of the data?
In a country full of schools and colleges using MS Word, you have the gall to claim that anyone not doing so is restricting choice?!
No, he's claiming that forcing a place not to use MS is restricting choice. Can't see a problem with that argument myself.
Your argument that learning anything other than Word and Excel is harming someone is pure bullshit. There are more differences between WordXP and earlier versions than there are between WordXP and OO
You haven't applied for a typical office job recently, have you? If you haven't got MS apps experience, the automated CV scanners are going to rule you out in a heartbeat, because like it or not, that is what almost everyone uses. So yes, it does matter what you've used.
And you're wrong anyway; there are several common, everyday tasks where OpenOffice works very differently to Word/Excel. Word and Excel have both had very similar interfaces from Office 95 onwards, give or take the odd tweaks.
Thank you for taking the trouble to support your point of view with sensible arguments; it makes a refreshing change around here.:-)
I hope you won't mind if I now attempt to blow them away with a BFG-9000, though...;-)
In an educational environment, students should not only be able to learn from source code, but they should be encouraged to play with it, modify it, and be able to give the product of their endeavors away.
I have just two simple points to make here.
The original post appeared to be talking about a whole college, not just a CS department. The availability or otherwise of source code is irrelevant to most people in such an establishment.
However useful studying the source code may be for a relatively small subset of the student population (CS majors, maybe some other science types with a side interest in programming), it is absolutely guaranteed that lack of familiarity with industry standard office software (which means Windows, Word and probably Excel) is going to seriously compromise the majority of the students' chances of getting a job.
[...] I do not think that prohibiting the teaching or usage of alternatives should be prohibited [...] Much can be learned from this software so it should not be banned completely.
Indeed.
When I built my new PC at the start of the year, I resolved to avoid Microsoft software as much as possible, because I have issues with the direction they're going in. The only MS software on my machine is a legal copy of WinXP, and the only other proprietary software on it is games. I use Mozilla for Internetty things and OpenOffice for my word processing and spreadsheet. I have been running this way for about three months now.
Based on my experiences so far, I can say without reservation that the current versions of Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Word and Excel are still far superior to their open source/free software counterparts for most practical purposes (i.e., those relevant to anyone other than a geek who dislikes MS). There are just too many useful features that are missing from the latter at the moment, and they have way too many bugs. (That's a whole 'nother debate, but if anyone really wants to know my top 10 pet peeves in either Mozilla or OpenOffice, or why I haven't done anything about them myself, I can post the gory details.)
I continue to use the open source/free software apps because I want to support their efforts and I think they have great potential, but that's a personal and mostly philosophical/ethical decision that I can afford to make. If I were running a business, I would be a 100% MS shop, and I think any educational establishment sending its people out into the business world has to bear this in mind. As you say:
The primary goal of any learning institution should be to teach its students. The instructors can not do that if their hands are tied by political or philosophical agendas.
Slashdot Mirror
And I thought it was just a random number generator...
You make an interesting argument, but I disagree with your conclusion, probably because I'm not sure I agree with all your underlying assumptions. First, however...
OK, we're using somewhat different definitions of "open source" here. I use the term simply to mean software for which the source code is available for inspection, not necessarily with any inherent rights to modify or redistribute that code attached. The latter is certainly a popular idea, as the GPL et al demonstrate, but I prefer to distinguish between them, particularly since most of the benefits often attributed to open source are a result of the visibility, not the freedom to change.
With that noted, let's talk about a couple of your specific points.
This is the bit I disagree with. Sure, there are a few mass-market applications (office suites, database tools, networking tools and operating system stuff, basically) that nearly everyone uses, and a few more that are big enough to be worth putting in with them (things like basic art programs, programming tools, mathematical toolkits and other such generalised techie toys). There will always be enough interested hackers to put together a good version of these things, and every big open source success story is in this group.
However, the vast, vast majority of software written in the world is custom-made for a particular client with particular needs. No-one else cares, except possibly for the competitors of that client who'd love to see the trade secrets involved, which is a pretty good reason for the client and their developers not to disclose the source.
This market will not die, simply because it's huge and there will always be a need to do things other people don't or can't or don't know how to do. And in this market, proprietary, closed development has several major advantages, and there will always be people prepared to pay for the services of programmers in doing that development. Granted, you can (and I suspect probably would) argue that this is paying for the developers and not assigning value to the software itself, but in terms of market economics, the effect is the same: people are paying for closed source software that they get and others don't.
In that market, the "someone else will" argument simply doesn't apply. Consider one of your own examples:
Yes, it's true, giving web browsers away for free was a new approach. And it's one that has nearly bankrupted Netscape and cost Microsoft a fortune as they supported their freely offered browser with the proceeds from their commercial, closed-source, expensively sold operating system and office suite products. This is not a viable business model in general -- advocates say otherwise, but show me the evidence -- and outside the mass market, no-one's going to develop every tool you ever needed just out of the kindness of their hearts.
Aren't you confusing open source with free software?
It depends on the usage. IIRC (but without checking my copy of the standard), the code
does not initialise the integer to which p points, but
does.
Your example is particularly apt to a discussion about the quality of reviewers. You comment that those reviewing your code suggested (wrongly) that the second version was safer. My immediate suggestion, had I been doing the review, would have been to use std::string (or some other string class if you're not allowed templates/standard library stuff for whatever reason) instead of low-level pointer and array manipulation.
This is the big problem with code reviews: not only do the reviewers need to be unbiased and able to speak their minds freely, they also have to be well informed and qualified to offer the opinions for which they are asked. 'Course, there aren't that many suitably qualified people around, and you then get the question of whether their peer time would be better used conducting training (for example, in general principles like how to avoid using low-level constructs in high-level code in a language like C++) than in individually reviewing single pieces of code, and probably making the same criticism of half the developers in the department in different places.
Code reviews in themselves are clearly a good thing, but if you have a scarce resource (very good programmers), you have to look at the different ways you can take advantage of their skills, and using them for code reviews may not be the most constructive use of their finite amounts of time.
It's much touted, but is it true?
Can you name a major Open Source development that has been completely discontinued by its original developer(s), and which has been taken on by a new team who have continued to fix up the bugs and add new functionality in the same spirit as the original? Can you name five? Ten?
The OS/FS world is littered with half-done projects, but precious little ever "ships". Most of the worthwhile OS/FS things that do get properly released are big, mass-market products: Linux, obviously, plus office apps, networking tools, and a few decent development tools.
Here, the community effect works wonders, and granted, Linux is unlikely to disappear any time soon. But is this fundamentally because they're Open Source, or because they're mainstream applications that vast numbers of people will always need? I'd argue that both are necessary for the "support effect".
I don't even know where to start attacking this post, so I'll just go through it piece by piece.
I drive safely and, by and large, legally. And yet, I have been flashed by speed cameras on several occasions now when I wasn't going over the limit. Maybe they were the fakes with cheap sensors, maybe they were misconfigured, who knows? It was certainly very unnerving at the time, and I spent the next two weeks wondering if someone's error is going to result in a fixed penalty notice arriving on my doorstep that I'd then have to defend -- probably unsuccessfully, because the machines are all but assumed to be infallible. "Man shall not be judged by machine" is a fundamental principle that is easily forgotten, but sound nonetheless.
Strawman. The only one of the above where cameras can be argued to be relevant is in catching criminals, and there is precious little evidence to support even that claim, since the systems go wrong so often that frequently they aren't of any use when they should be anyway. The fact that they are widely abused is beyond dispute, however.
There is nothing necessary about the cameras invading my privacy. Mankind has survived quite happily for a very long time without such devices. We live in a society that is governed by a few in a system that fundamentally encourages them not to act in the best interests of those they represent. You have only to watch the news this week to see how much several western governments care about the views of those they claim to represent.
Ah, but in case you hadn't noticed, there are already legal bases for stop and search, arrest on suspicion and restriction of freedoms in most western countries, particularly the US and UK. Hell, we've all been merrily introducing laws in the interests of "counter-terrorism" that have eroded our civil rights more in the past few years than in the previous several decades. Just this weekend, there was a fabulous story in the news about a guy who was arrested under recent anti-terrorism legislation in the UK because he had a Muslim-sounding name and happened to have bought a book or two from Paladin Press.
No, this is not solely due to the cameras, but the arguments you make in their favour are exactly those that are regularly used to support all the other slow-but-sure evasions of our rights to privacy and freedom that have been occurring ever faster since 911. At the risk of a terrible misquotation, for this shit to succeed, all that is necessary is for thoughtful men to stand by and do nothing.
Governments have no secure databas
Unfortunately, this is no longer necessarily the case. People in the UK were using the lack of personal identification as a defence to speeding charges. There are now a new breed of cameras found on our roads that face towards the driver rather than away precisely so that a clear facial image can be captured. If you think they can't clearly see you, try a web search for some of the driving sites, and check out some of the sample photos. But sit down first. :-)
OK, however you look at it, in whatever market, I just can't find a figure on the order of 40% even remotely credible. How many people out there have switched jobs in the last, say, three years? How many have moved to places that focus primarily on Linux? (I work at a place that develops for Linux, but also more than a dozen other platforms, so we're hardly a Linux shop.)
If 40% of developers were working primarily on Linux projects today, then well over 40% of recruitment over the past few years would have been for Linux-based positions. (I say "well over" because Linux dev has only really been big news for a short time compared to well over a decade of Windows being the dominant platform, and not many places train their people internally to move over to the other OS.)
I'm sorry, but that 40% figure just isn't credible on that basis. I work in a very tech-based city, I'm a developer, many of my friends work in software companies, and yet I don't know a single place here that I'd say does primarily Linux development. Quite a few do some Linux work, but also Windows and many other OSes, but that's not what the article said.
That's OK. Then we can just fight the bad guys with gorgeous, genetically enhanced super-soldiers instead...
Are you sure about that?
You don't say what you do, but the way I see it, one of two things must be happening.
A lot of the bitching and moaning I've seen -- though certainly not all -- comes from those who were happy to ride the web wave a few years ago. Those in this article, and the people affected by the type of ads on the cited f*ckthisjob.com site, are no exception. These are the idiots who gave up higher education to make their "easy" million, and did stupid things like the guy in the article who bought a house way beyond his means and then got screwed (as his accountant had always told him he would) when tax returns came around. These are the people who thought reading a quickie HTML book made them qualified.
The rest of the world always knew better. Anyone who stopped and thought about it could see that a market full of such people was never going to last long. Anyone who stopped and thought about it would have either planned for this while times were good, or simply pursued a more viable long-term plan in the first place. Of course, most people in this situation don't think much, which is why they're all unemployed and bitching and moaning now.
On the flip side, there are those who have genuinely worked hard to develop skills and experience, who are unfortunate enough to be caught in the storm because for whatever reason their previous job is no longer there. For those who've been in the industry for a while, savings from when times were better help to see them through until the industry gets moving again after its little cleansing exercise, and their real skills are once more in demand.
There's not a lot you can say to comfort the unfortunate people who just got in at the wrong time, right as the bubble burst, and who have no savings from those earlier good times. Clearly times are hard, and they certainly won't get the starting salaries within the first few years that they might have hoped for as they went through college in the late '90s. But just as surely as night follows day, times will improve again, and real skills will come to have value again.
All you can do in that position is struggle through -- maybe even working in a related industry, or just flipping burgers and stacking shelves for a few months to pay the rent -- but know that if your skills are real, the demand will return. These same people are also likely to be the ones who adapt better to whatever slightly different set of skills might be most useful as the market recovers, and who are prepared to read a good book and play around now and then to keep their skills as current as possible, at the same time as working wherever to pay the rent. Times are hard now, but for these people, they will improve. All you can do is keep the faith until then, or get out of the industry and retrain.
If the institution accepts the money in exchange for restricting what they do, then they have their choices restricted. There, I said it again, with exactly the same end result, and without the word force.
You are using a strawman argument about semantics, and ignoring the actual point of the discussion.
I think that statement is misleading, if technically correct.
There is an increase in the interest in open source, but the vast, vast majority of such groups still couldn't care less.
Having an open source offering is now a prerequisite if you want to be used in a small number of places. Several of the major examples are small, cash-strapped governments, for whom the bottom line is going to be the dominant factor, which have legislated that only open source solutions may be used. This has nothing to do with the superiority of such products, merely their (probably inaccurately) perceived cost.
Ah, but if you hit down, down-back, back and press twenty keys at once -- the secret move that isn't possible with a game pad -- do you get a golden mouseball?
The environment is probably like the software houses full of newly qualified code monkeys, because they had the right buzzword on their CV. The automated databases aren't smart enough to spot that a veteran with 10 years' experience shipping products using seven major languages could probably pick up VB.NET or Java if he really tried, y'know, for at least five minutes, and they give no credit to the fact that with all that extra experience, he might even do a better job afterwards.
Yeah, it sucks. I'm not supporting this practice at all; it's just silly management and bad for all concerned. But it is, sadly, the way things often work today, and in what is basically an employer's market for many industries at present, you have to be dealing with that. And so, while I don't think it's a university's job to teach things like Word or Excel to its students, one has to consider the side effects of a move away from the standard. Colleges that don't produce employable students are not going to do well.
I'm pleased to see that, around the same time I wrote the parent post, news hit of the release of Mozilla 1.3, which apparently addresses several of my concerns. Fingers crossed, then...
The typical consumer isn't demanding open source or free software. If it were, Microsoft would not have a 90+% share of the office applications market, and a similarly high penetration of the desktop OS market.
Some people want open source. A few even have legitimate reasons for doing so, though for many it's a fad, and would convey absolutely no benefit on them whatsoever. But most people really don't care. They want a product that does the job they need it to do, and if that means paying money for a closed source solution that does the job better than a freely available open source one, so be it.
Maybe they are; unfortunately, for the immediate future, I'm on Windoze.
If you read my reply to the post above, you'll note that Mozilla has trashed my whole profile, losing all of the data associated with it -- mail, address book, etc. -- some of it apparently irretrievably. OE never did that, and has better filtering facilities to boot.
Moz has potential, but I stand by my claim that for an average user, the MS solutions are currently better. The only big area where Moz and co are seriously ahead is security, and, at least for now, they lose that one back again on stability.
No, of course it's not. But if the institution accepts that money, then they are forced not to follow the Microsoft path, and thus have their choices restricted.
It's standard practice for many UK recruiters, when harvesting CVs through automated database systems, to search for "Word", "Excel" and "Windows". The database probably doesn't know that OpenOffice or StarOffice is a sensible alternative, because chances are whoever set it up is an incompetent office jockey with "HR Consultant" in his/her title, who actually has precious little idea about the skills they are supposed to be looking for.
You may not like it, but I know for a fact that this is how a large proportion of major UK recruiters operate.
They are few, but serious. (I'm expecting this post to be modded down as a Troll, the way three of my other entirely reasonable posts on this thread have been -- though two have since been modded back up -- but maybe someone will read it first.)
Firstly, the obvious big one: they continue to place standards compliance on a pedestal above practicality, so it continues to refuse to render a large volume of web sites. Standardisation is a good thing, but not at the price of getting useful work done.
Secondly, it's terribly vulnerable to crashes. It crashed out on me last week, and the next time I loaded it up, it had lost all of the information in my profile: all of my e-mail, my preferences, my address book, everything. After a couple of hours surfing the web -- during which time I noted that (a) this is hardly an isolated incident, and (b) Mozilla really is a mostly unsupported browser with no real help available if it goes wrong -- I managed to recover the e-mails. Two weeks later, I've given up trying to make it use my old address book file -- which is still there on disk just fine -- and just started a new one and transferred things across the hard way.
Speaking of disks, why do they insist on that damn stupid place to store all your profile stuff? Every other application installed on my system stores its data on my Windows D drive (also to be used for data from Linux apps shortly), so back-ups are as simple as writing the whole D drive out to CD. Can't do that with Moz mail, AFAICS; even the places where it ought to be customisable looking at the UI don't seem to work properly. And don't even think about trying to use Moz on both Windows and Linux on a dual boot machine and share the data, because that's obviously a silly idea.
Oh, and did I mention that the newsreader has no serious filtering capabilities, so the signal-to-noise ratio in some groups that I used to follow is so bad that I gave up?
Those are my four big beefs with Moz as it stands today (latest stable release installed on my PC). Otherwise, I like it a lot. As you say, it is better than IE in many other ways, and as I said, it has a lot of potential. But right now, today, these four problems are crippling. If you were running a business, would you trust your e-mail to a system that has known problems with losing all of the data?
No, he's claiming that forcing a place not to use MS is restricting choice. Can't see a problem with that argument myself.
You haven't applied for a typical office job recently, have you? If you haven't got MS apps experience, the automated CV scanners are going to rule you out in a heartbeat, because like it or not, that is what almost everyone uses. So yes, it does matter what you've used.
And you're wrong anyway; there are several common, everyday tasks where OpenOffice works very differently to Word/Excel. Word and Excel have both had very similar interfaces from Office 95 onwards, give or take the odd tweaks.
I'm sorry, but what do democracy and totalitarianism have to do with my post?
Thank you for taking the trouble to support your point of view with sensible arguments; it makes a refreshing change around here. :-)
I hope you won't mind if I now attempt to blow them away with a BFG-9000, though... ;-)
I have just two simple points to make here.
Indeed.
When I built my new PC at the start of the year, I resolved to avoid Microsoft software as much as possible, because I have issues with the direction they're going in. The only MS software on my machine is a legal copy of WinXP, and the only other proprietary software on it is games. I use Mozilla for Internetty things and OpenOffice for my word processing and spreadsheet. I have been running this way for about three months now.
Based on my experiences so far, I can say without reservation that the current versions of Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Word and Excel are still far superior to their open source/free software counterparts for most practical purposes (i.e., those relevant to anyone other than a geek who dislikes MS). There are just too many useful features that are missing from the latter at the moment, and they have way too many bugs. (That's a whole 'nother debate, but if anyone really wants to know my top 10 pet peeves in either Mozilla or OpenOffice, or why I haven't done anything about them myself, I can post the gory details.)
I continue to use the open source/free software apps because I want to support their efforts and I think they have great potential, but that's a personal and mostly philosophical/ethical decision that I can afford to make. If I were running a business, I would be a 100% MS shop, and I think any educational establishment sending its people out into the business world has to bear this in mind. As you say: