The slashdot posting should be modded -1, flamebait. The actual quote from Szulik is, "I would say that for the consumer market place, Windows probably continues to be the right product line," he said. "I would argue that from the device-driver standpoint and perhaps some of the other traditional functionality, for that classic consumer purchaser, it is my view that (Linux) technology needs to mature a little bit more." You will note that the posting says nothing about "home users" while the headline of the ZDNet article clearly says "home users."
Another quote from later in the article: "We think that the enterprise desktop market place is much more strategic and has buyers whose needs we can exceed." The consumer market wants their computers to work with their digital cameras, GPSs, MP3 players, favorite games, etc. and, like it or not, Linux isn't there. Some of the lack of support is due to a "chicken and egg problem" of no one asks for such support so its not there and because its not there, no one asks for it. When some large companies tell their suppliers that they're out of the bidding because they don't support Linux, you'll see support for high-end stuff that rapidly filters down to support for "consumer" level stuff.
I would take the first sentence of the preamble of the Constitution and the debate about it to mean that "The People" is a collection of individuals; not some amorphous, collective consciousness. The "We" in "We, the People" is redundant if you assume "the People" to be the collective populace. At one point in the drafting of the Constitution the debate was whether the preamble should start with, "We, the states..." This language was discarded, in part, to emphasize that the system of government being created took its legitimacy by being instituted by the individuals being governed. "The People" as used in the constitution means individuals.
I would also guess that the group think concept of "the People" being anything other than individuals is a modern invention that would have made no sense to the people who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. To them, there was the government and the individuals who made up "the governed." This also fits with other historical documents of the time (e.g., the Declaration of Independence) and the concept of government only being legitimate if it represented the interests of the governed as individuals. This was in contrast to the justifications of a monarchy that were bandied about then (and still are now in places like Saudi Arabia) that the monarch represented their subjects.
Finally, the constitution makes *no* provision for any collective other than the nation and the states. Nothing in the constuitution creates corporations, political parties, or any sort of organization. All rights and responsibilities are clearly that of individuals and the restrictions are on what the government can and cannot do. The only crime specifically discussed in the Constitution is treason; this being the only Constitutional restriction on the activities of an individual.
Either way, what would probably be needed is a "registry" of sorts such that each contributor who sends such a letter gets "counted." I don't see anyone short of IBM, Red Hat, etc. actually getting results in court in the near term primarily because of the cost involved. On the other hand, I definitely like the idea of someone like the FSF putting out a news release that umpty-hundred kernel contributors from around the world have sent C&D letters to SCO demanding that SCO stop infringing their copyrighted work.
If this were closer to a battle of equals, what you have said would be absolutely correct. SCO seems to think (that's probably too strong of a word) that they have the resources to challenge IBM so I doubt that a C&D from an individual kernel contributor will have that much impact on them even if its written by a lawyer (instead of a Nolo Press form letter). In the media battle however, several hundred C&Ds carry a lot of impact (think SCO stock and their other financial backers).
Nolo Press includes a sample "cease and desist" letter for copyright infringement in their Copyright Handbook. A cease and desist letter crafted by a lawyer carries no more legal weight than one written by an individual so long as the one crafted by the individual contains all of the required elements for a valid cease and desist request. The same is generally true for any simple legal document. On the other hand, if things aren't simple, get a lawyer involved.
IANAL, but any individual contributor to the kernel fits into the category of having their individual work infringed upon by SCO's actions. Contributors who worked for someone else and developed the work as an employee do not fit the category; however their employer can send a cease and desist. (I wonder if Alan Cox will get Red Hat to also send a cease and desist now?)
Someone over at Groklaw that they are clearly in violation of the NET (NO Electronic Theft) Act. The post is the fifth one down in the discussion. I wonder what it takes to file a such criminal complaint?
Let's assume Bill Gates wants to challenge the GPL because Microsoft, as usual, doesn't want any competition. If Microsoft issues a product that violates the GPL and then challenges the GPL, Bill's and Microsoft's dollars are on the line if the GPL turns out to be valid.
Bill & Company come up with an alternative: find a proxy (SCO) who has an interest in taking down Linux and have them go out on a limb by arguing that the GPL is invalid. If they win they lose because this leaves SCO distributing their versions of Linux and open source add-ins to Unixware without a license and if the lose they lose because they've just gotten major egg on their face plus possibly punitive damages. Ah, but the main players (SCO senior management) can do a pump and dump with their stock while the court battle plays out so the only real losers are SCO shareholders left holding some wallpaper at the end of the game.
Bill & Company spend some portion of the $50M that SCO gets to keep the lawsuit going but they have the potential to take back the hundreds of millions that Linux is now costing them in competition. If SCO loses, the worst thing Bill & Company get out of it is a lot of companies who are currently being hesitant about deploying Linux (gee, I wonder what they'll buy instead). Chances are, Microsoft couldn't have caused this much damage to Linux growth if they'd put their $50M into an advertising campaign.
This is a win-win for Bill, a win-win for the SCO senior management team and the only big loser is anyone dumb enough to buy SCO stock now or to have bought it since the suit was filed. I don't feel too sorry for these people since they either know about the suit and are betting against Linux/Open Source or they don't know about the suit in which case they're simply stupid and invested in a company they knew nothing about. Oh yeah, Linux loses to some extent since most people don't follow the news and will just remeber that there was something fishy about Linux.
SCO seems to have quietly forgotten about #2; we haven't. As to point 3, Darl is quoted fairly recently as saying they still have people coming to Lindon on a daily basis to see the code. Check the quote database at Groklaw if you want specifics.
I always wondered why people got really tight lipped about things when a lawsuit had been filed. Now I understand. SCO's public utterances make them their own worst enemy. Right now they are telling the judge, "We can't give IBM the code they've asked for," while out of the other side of the mouth their CEO is saying, "Come to Lindon and sign an NDA and we'll show you the code." Hopefully, they'll get laughed out of court fairly soon and we can all go back to actually doing something useful.
I don't know how the hell you came up with this analysis but whatever you were smoking at the time must be really good stuff.
1) SCO filed suit against IBM for allegedly contributing "millions of lines" of proprietary SCO code to Linux. Not the other way around. 2) SCO supposedly had a team of people somehow vaguely related to MIT who supposedly ran pattern recognition analysis to identify the purportedly donated code. 3) SCO has shown the code to several hundred people (at last count) who would sign a non-disclosure agreement.
At this point SCO has accused IBM of a civil crime (breaking contractural and licensing agreements), has said they have proof. IBM has said, fine, show us the proof and SCO has come back with, "You know what you did so tell us and the court."
Last time I heard, the burden of proof is on the accuser in both civil and criminal cases. If SCO can not provide evidence of the acts they have accused IBM of doing, *there is no case*. All IBM has done is call SCO's bluff and say, show me the code that you claim violates our agreements. At this point, it is up to SCO to show that a contract or license was broken; not continue spreading FUD about how tainted Linux code is and how IBM gave away their secrets.
And yes I read both the motion from SCO and P.J.'s analysis of it on Groklaw. Did you?
Re:Don't try this at work, kids...
on
Take Back Your Time!
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, you probably threatened her value system on a number of different levels:
1) You valued personal time more than the material posessions working longer hours would bring. 2) You were content with a job that was sufficient to meet your needs instead of climbing the career ladder. 3) You organized the work you were doing to fit within the time you allocated for it instead of letting the work organize you.
And you demonstrated that it was possible to do this and be happy (probably happier than she was by doing the opposite). Bummer your old boss left.
PJ at GrokLaw is assembling a "Press Kit" of hard questions to ask of Darl & Company. I suggested the following but it is equally applicable to the folks in Redmond:
Both Microsoft and SCO tout the fact that they indemnify their customers as an advantage of their products over Linux and other Open Source Software. The American Heritage Collegiate Dictionary defines indemnify as:
1. To protect against damage, loss, or injury; insure. 2. To make compensation to for damage, loss, or injury suffered.
This definition of indemnify seems to be at odds with the Disclaimer of Waranties, Exclusion of Damages, and Limitations of Liabilities sections of your products' end user license agreement (EULA). Please explain your meaning of indemnify when you say that you "...indemnify your customers while Linux does not," or, if you are using the dictionary meaning of indemnify, when your EULAs will be changed to incorporate the generally accepted meaning of indemnify.
At 10:52 PM 10/22/2003 -0600, you wrote: >So, any chace of a CheapBytes version of Pink Tie Enterprise Linux? Or >has Red Hat figured out a way to beat the GPL?
It is a big question mark at this time. We haven't seen the latest Red Hat Enterprise yet. If we can offer something economically priced based on Red Hat Enterpise, we will do our best to offer it. We will be offering the Fedora version which is the distributable offshoot of Red Hat. Time will tell how all of this works out.
The VP for Engineering and the software director where I work both come from a Windows company. They both seem to have a hard time with something that's free being better than something you pay (and pay and pay and pay) for. At least we're on Linux for now and the salary is good. I'll bail when they say we're going to port to Windoze.
I've said it in another context but I'll say it again here, there's got to be a way to make an honest buck just telling people like this, "Don't buy the bridge."
I just zapped an e-mail to the folks at CheapBytes to see if they plan to come out with a knock off version. They have been publishing ISOs under "Pink Tie Linux" which just remove the official Red Hat logo, etc. They don't have to make it easy but someone else may be able to make it cheap.
I can guarantee you that you won't get support but it will be interesting to see how Red Hat goes about publishing updates since I somehow don't see some of their larger customers downloading and compiling source code and then rdisting the non-RPM, binary updates to their Red Hat systems. I'm guessing Red Hat won't really care since the people who would go to the trouble of figuring out how to make this work probably wouldn't cough up $1,499 or whatever it is anyway. There's always Mandrake, Debian, Slack, Red Hat's own Fedora, etc. for us cheap bastards.
You probably have no idea how right you are. I used to work for a subsidiary of Times-Mirror Corporation. At a meeting of technical leads in the mid/late '90s the discussion from the subsidiary that published college text books was how to leverage technologies such as SGML/XML to create the ability for profs to customize the content of the text book they used in class each year. The motivation for this was not to allow the prof to select the best content for the course (this was just the marketing angle) but to destroy the market for used text books.
I can just hear a prof saying something like, "Oh, by the way, don't buy a used copy of the text for this class. The content has changed significantly from last year."
Time-Mirror got bought by Tribune Corporation a couple of years ago. Tribune sold off the subsidiaries that didn't fit with their core identity of news media so I have no idea where that particular subsidiary ended up. My guess is it doesn't matter. On the other hand, I know of at least one prof who required his own text book and then refunded to the class what he made on them buying it. Some people are fair but don't count on it.
I e-mailed Scott with a late nomination of SCO as the weaseliest company and Darl McBride as thw weaseliest induhvidual but apparently nominations were closed for this year.
Oh well, there's always next year. And at the rate the various cases are dragging out, the year after that, and the year after that,...
Simple rule of thumb: exercising a right should cost no one (other than possibly the person exercising the right) anything. When someone claims a "right" that costs someone else something in order for them to exercise their "right", it usually means they are just trying to get the government to be their enforcer in an extortion scheme that they have somehow wrapped up as a "right." As an example, freedom of religion doesn't mean the government can force me to build a church for someone.
In this case, the spammers still have the right to send their spam and say anything they want. However, based on the outcome of this case, neither I nor my ISP have to provide them with the facility for doing so and we may use technical means such as spam blacklists to accomplish this.
No one has said that the spammers cannot send their advertisements. Instead, the spammers found out that they were on shaky legal grounds trying to force people to accept their advertisements and thereby incurring costs for transmission and storage. They are still free to say whatever they want; they just can't force me to pay to listen.
Its actions like this that have me wondering if there is money to be made as a freelance technical due dilligence evaluator. I'll leave the FUD and marketing evaluations to the people who can read the tea leaves but there has to be a way to make an honest buck telling people, "Don't but the bridge."
Foolish of Israel to so publicly pick a fight with MS.
I don't know. Maybe the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) can teach the folks in Redmond a thing or two about who they pick a fight with. Just ask some of the Arab countries around Israel whether they want to be on the receiving end of the IDF. The picture of the IDF taking apart Microsoftland with a few well placed tank rounds may be irrational but it sure is pleasant to imagine.
As a good Libertarian, I take great umbrance at being called a commie even if I did read the article after breakfast.
There are as many different reasons for contributing to free/open software as there are people who contribute. I contribute because its in my own selfish best interest:
Microsoft needs the competition. If you think their software and terms of use are bad now, imagine what they would be like if Linux wasn't out there as an alternative.
In spite of the above, I need better, more secure software than what come out of Redmond. How nice that its free.
I need something to keep my programming skills sharp. I've been running development kernels on one of my boxes since about 2.5.25. I'm running 2.6.0-test7 now.
With Linux, I can delve into any part of the OS as training for either my next task at my current job or my next job without paying an arm and a leg for some software that I may never otherwise use.
I could go on. The clown from Forbes who wrote this trash needs to take a look at the real technical community in the 21st century before making it sound like the open source community is strictly a bunch of commies.
It generally takes management a round or two of outsourcing to find out what it can and what it cannot do. My employer outsourced some development to India and we ended up re-writing it after it was initially released.
Don't get me wrong. The software the Indian company developed did *EXACTLY* what we asked them to develop. Unfortunately, it had all the earmarks of code developed by a bunch of amatures. That is, the code was not easily modified and was not flexible and extensible. Like it or not, a lot of "software engineering expertise" comes from developing an understanding of how to manage a bunch of people developing something that is initially strictly an idea and that only is expressed as a bunch of source code in the end. This ability is not trivial and generally only comes the hard way: learning from your mistakes.
The lesson we learned is that outsourcing critical development is a short term fix but not a long tern strategy. We also heard that the price of new development is going up as the company we contracted with has gotten more experience (translation has learned from their past efforts).
Put these trends together:
1) As external developers gain experience, their price goes up.
2) Any time you outsource you face an inflexible development process since the contractor has to contain their costs which means they develop exactly what you (the client) asked for or the contractor charges the client for any requirements changes.
3) Any time there is a language barrier, the risk of misunderstandings goes up. As language differences becomes less of an issue, item one kicks in.
Based on these observations, outsourcing overseas will initially trend toward a way to develop extremely well defined applications. Management will *slowly* learn that anything else will be such a crap shoot that only someone desperate (SCO comes to mind) will run the risks associated with outsourcing anything innovative. As the overseas outsouring companies gain experience and expertise they will raise their rates *because they can*.
Equilbrium will be reached at some point as long as the market is allowed to operate. In the mean time, PHBs will continue to outsource critical development tasks until they get fired for the failures If you don't like the insecurity, go to work for a defense contractor who can only hire U.S. citizens becuase they need people who can get a security clearance.
I'll be nice... this time. Disabling autorun circumvents the SunnComm copy protection. SunnComm relies on autorun to install their protection program. By publishing how to disable autorun, Microsoft has published a DMCA circumvention technique. The key point here is SunnComm needs to also sue Microsoft.
Microsoft's how to for disabling autorun. This how-to is also quoted as a link in the original publication and holding down the shift key is probably easier for most people but its fun to make sure that all those who would circumvent the DMCA are known to the appropriate authorities. (Bill should call his lawyer)
Slashdot Mirror
The slashdot posting should be modded -1, flamebait. The actual quote from Szulik is, "I would say that for the consumer market place, Windows probably continues to be the right product line," he said. "I would argue that from the device-driver standpoint and perhaps some of the other traditional functionality, for that classic consumer purchaser, it is my view that (Linux) technology needs to mature a little bit more." You will note that the posting says nothing about "home users" while the headline of the ZDNet article clearly says "home users."
Another quote from later in the article: "We think that the enterprise desktop market place is much more strategic and has buyers whose needs we can exceed." The consumer market wants their computers to work with their digital cameras, GPSs, MP3 players, favorite games, etc. and, like it or not, Linux isn't there. Some of the lack of support is due to a "chicken and egg problem" of no one asks for such support so its not there and because its not there, no one asks for it. When some large companies tell their suppliers that they're out of the bidding because they don't support Linux, you'll see support for high-end stuff that rapidly filters down to support for "consumer" level stuff.
I would take the first sentence of the preamble of the Constitution and the debate about it to mean that "The People" is a collection of individuals; not some amorphous, collective consciousness. The "We" in "We, the People" is redundant if you assume "the People" to be the collective populace. At one point in the drafting of the Constitution the debate was whether the preamble should start with, "We, the states..." This language was discarded, in part, to emphasize that the system of government being created took its legitimacy by being instituted by the individuals being governed. "The People" as used in the constitution means individuals.
I would also guess that the group think concept of "the People" being anything other than individuals is a modern invention that would have made no sense to the people who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. To them, there was the government and the individuals who made up "the governed." This also fits with other historical documents of the time (e.g., the Declaration of Independence) and the concept of government only being legitimate if it represented the interests of the governed as individuals. This was in contrast to the justifications of a monarchy that were bandied about then (and still are now in places like Saudi Arabia) that the monarch represented their subjects.
Finally, the constitution makes *no* provision for any collective other than the nation and the states. Nothing in the constuitution creates corporations, political parties, or any sort of organization. All rights and responsibilities are clearly that of individuals and the restrictions are on what the government can and cannot do. The only crime specifically discussed in the Constitution is treason; this being the only Constitutional restriction on the activities of an individual.
Either way, what would probably be needed is a "registry" of sorts such that each contributor who sends such a letter gets "counted." I don't see anyone short of IBM, Red Hat, etc. actually getting results in court in the near term primarily because of the cost involved. On the other hand, I definitely like the idea of someone like the FSF putting out a news release that umpty-hundred kernel contributors from around the world have sent C&D letters to SCO demanding that SCO stop infringing their copyrighted work.
If this were closer to a battle of equals, what you have said would be absolutely correct. SCO seems to think (that's probably too strong of a word) that they have the resources to challenge IBM so I doubt that a C&D from an individual kernel contributor will have that much impact on them even if its written by a lawyer (instead of a Nolo Press form letter). In the media battle however, several hundred C&Ds carry a lot of impact (think SCO stock and their other financial backers).
IANAL, but any individual contributor to the kernel fits into the category of having their individual work infringed upon by SCO's actions. Contributors who worked for someone else and developed the work as an employee do not fit the category; however their employer can send a cease and desist. (I wonder if Alan Cox will get Red Hat to also send a cease and desist now?)
Someone over at Groklaw that they are clearly in violation of the NET (NO Electronic Theft) Act. The post is the fifth one down in the discussion. I wonder what it takes to file a such criminal complaint?
The article in the Salt Lake Tribune was actually ballanced and, if anything, a little anti-SCO. Darl must not have renewed his subscription.
Something tells me this isn't in its vocabulary either though.
Let's assume Bill Gates wants to challenge the GPL because Microsoft, as usual, doesn't want any competition. If Microsoft issues a product that violates the GPL and then challenges the GPL, Bill's and Microsoft's dollars are on the line if the GPL turns out to be valid.
Bill & Company come up with an alternative: find a proxy (SCO) who has an interest in taking down Linux and have them go out on a limb by arguing that the GPL is invalid. If they win they lose because this leaves SCO distributing their versions of Linux and open source add-ins to Unixware without a license and if the lose they lose because they've just gotten major egg on their face plus possibly punitive damages. Ah, but the main players (SCO senior management) can do a pump and dump with their stock while the court battle plays out so the only real losers are SCO shareholders left holding some wallpaper at the end of the game.
Bill & Company spend some portion of the $50M that SCO gets to keep the lawsuit going but they have the potential to take back the hundreds of millions that Linux is now costing them in competition. If SCO loses, the worst thing Bill & Company get out of it is a lot of companies who are currently being hesitant about deploying Linux (gee, I wonder what they'll buy instead). Chances are, Microsoft couldn't have caused this much damage to Linux growth if they'd put their $50M into an advertising campaign.
This is a win-win for Bill, a win-win for the SCO senior management team and the only big loser is anyone dumb enough to buy SCO stock now or to have bought it since the suit was filed. I don't feel too sorry for these people since they either know about the suit and are betting against Linux/Open Source or they don't know about the suit in which case they're simply stupid and invested in a company they knew nothing about. Oh yeah, Linux loses to some extent since most people don't follow the news and will just remeber that there was something fishy about Linux.
SCO seems to have quietly forgotten about #2; we haven't. As to point 3, Darl is quoted fairly recently as saying they still have people coming to Lindon on a daily basis to see the code. Check the quote database at Groklaw if you want specifics.
I always wondered why people got really tight lipped about things when a lawsuit had been filed. Now I understand. SCO's public utterances make them their own worst enemy. Right now they are telling the judge, "We can't give IBM the code they've asked for," while out of the other side of the mouth their CEO is saying, "Come to Lindon and sign an NDA and we'll show you the code." Hopefully, they'll get laughed out of court fairly soon and we can all go back to actually doing something useful.
I don't know how the hell you came up with this analysis but whatever you were smoking at the time must be really good stuff.
1) SCO filed suit against IBM for allegedly contributing "millions of lines" of proprietary SCO code to Linux. Not the other way around.
2) SCO supposedly had a team of people somehow vaguely related to MIT who supposedly ran pattern recognition analysis to identify the purportedly donated code.
3) SCO has shown the code to several hundred people (at last count) who would sign a non-disclosure agreement.
At this point SCO has accused IBM of a civil crime (breaking contractural and licensing agreements), has said they have proof. IBM has said, fine, show us the proof and SCO has come back with, "You know what you did so tell us and the court."
Last time I heard, the burden of proof is on the accuser in both civil and criminal cases. If SCO can not provide evidence of the acts they have accused IBM of doing, *there is no case*. All IBM has done is call SCO's bluff and say, show me the code that you claim violates our agreements. At this point, it is up to SCO to show that a contract or license was broken; not continue spreading FUD about how tainted Linux code is and how IBM gave away their secrets.
And yes I read both the motion from SCO and P.J.'s analysis of it on Groklaw. Did you?
Actually, you probably threatened her value system on a number of different levels:
1) You valued personal time more than the material posessions working longer hours would bring.
2) You were content with a job that was sufficient to meet your needs instead of climbing the career ladder.
3) You organized the work you were doing to fit within the time you allocated for it instead of letting the work organize you.
And you demonstrated that it was possible to do this and be happy (probably happier than she was by doing the opposite). Bummer your old boss left.
PJ at GrokLaw is assembling a "Press Kit" of hard questions to ask of Darl & Company. I suggested the following but it is equally applicable to the folks in Redmond:
Both Microsoft and SCO tout the fact that they indemnify their customers as an advantage of their products over Linux and other Open Source Software. The American Heritage Collegiate Dictionary defines indemnify as:
1. To protect against damage, loss, or injury; insure.
2. To make compensation to for damage, loss, or injury suffered.
This definition of indemnify seems to be at odds with the Disclaimer of Waranties, Exclusion of Damages, and Limitations of Liabilities sections of your products' end user license agreement (EULA). Please explain your meaning of indemnify when you say that you "...indemnify your customers while Linux does not," or, if you are using the dictionary meaning of indemnify, when your EULAs will be changed to incorporate the generally accepted meaning of indemnify.
At 10:52 PM 10/22/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>So, any chace of a CheapBytes version of Pink Tie Enterprise Linux? Or
>has Red Hat figured out a way to beat the GPL?
It is a big question mark at this time. We haven't seen the latest Red Hat Enterprise yet. If we can offer something economically priced based on Red Hat Enterpise, we will do our best to offer it. We will be offering the Fedora version which is the distributable offshoot of Red Hat. Time will tell how all of this works out.
The VP for Engineering and the software director where I work both come from a Windows company. They both seem to have a hard time with something that's free being better than something you pay (and pay and pay and pay) for. At least we're on Linux for now and the salary is good. I'll bail when they say we're going to port to Windoze.
I've said it in another context but I'll say it again here, there's got to be a way to make an honest buck just telling people like this, "Don't buy the bridge."
S I G H
I can guarantee you that you won't get support but it will be interesting to see how Red Hat goes about publishing updates since I somehow don't see some of their larger customers downloading and compiling source code and then rdisting the non-RPM, binary updates to their Red Hat systems. I'm guessing Red Hat won't really care since the people who would go to the trouble of figuring out how to make this work probably wouldn't cough up $1,499 or whatever it is anyway. There's always Mandrake, Debian, Slack, Red Hat's own Fedora, etc. for us cheap bastards.
I can just hear a prof saying something like, "Oh, by the way, don't buy a used copy of the text for this class. The content has changed significantly from last year."
Time-Mirror got bought by Tribune Corporation a couple of years ago. Tribune sold off the subsidiaries that didn't fit with their core identity of news media so I have no idea where that particular subsidiary ended up. My guess is it doesn't matter. On the other hand, I know of at least one prof who required his own text book and then refunded to the class what he made on them buying it. Some people are fair but don't count on it.
I e-mailed Scott with a late nomination of SCO as the weaseliest company and Darl McBride as thw weaseliest induhvidual but apparently nominations were closed for this year.
...
Oh well, there's always next year. And at the rate the various cases are dragging out, the year after that, and the year after that,
Simple rule of thumb: exercising a right should cost no one (other than possibly the person exercising the right) anything. When someone claims a "right" that costs someone else something in order for them to exercise their "right", it usually means they are just trying to get the government to be their enforcer in an extortion scheme that they have somehow wrapped up as a "right." As an example, freedom of religion doesn't mean the government can force me to build a church for someone.
In this case, the spammers still have the right to send their spam and say anything they want. However, based on the outcome of this case, neither I nor my ISP have to provide them with the facility for doing so and we may use technical means such as spam blacklists to accomplish this.
No one has said that the spammers cannot send their advertisements. Instead, the spammers found out that they were on shaky legal grounds trying to force people to accept their advertisements and thereby incurring costs for transmission and storage. They are still free to say whatever they want; they just can't force me to pay to listen.
Its actions like this that have me wondering if there is money to be made as a freelance technical due dilligence evaluator. I'll leave the FUD and marketing evaluations to the people who can read the tea leaves but there has to be a way to make an honest buck telling people, "Don't but the bridge."
I don't know. Maybe the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) can teach the folks in Redmond a thing or two about who they pick a fight with. Just ask some of the Arab countries around Israel whether they want to be on the receiving end of the IDF. The picture of the IDF taking apart Microsoftland with a few well placed tank rounds may be irrational but it sure is pleasant to imagine.
As a good Libertarian, I take great umbrance at being called a commie even if I did read the article after breakfast.
There are as many different reasons for contributing to free/open software as there are people who contribute. I contribute because its in my own selfish best interest:
- Microsoft needs the competition. If you think their software and terms of use are bad now, imagine what they would be like if Linux wasn't out there as an alternative.
- In spite of the above, I need better, more secure software than what come out of Redmond. How nice that its free.
- I need something to keep my programming skills sharp. I've been running development kernels on one of my boxes since about 2.5.25. I'm running 2.6.0-test7 now.
- With Linux, I can delve into any part of the OS as training for either my next task at my current job or my next job without paying an arm and a leg for some software that I may never otherwise use.
I could go on. The clown from Forbes who wrote this trash needs to take a look at the real technical community in the 21st century before making it sound like the open source community is strictly a bunch of commies.It generally takes management a round or two of outsourcing to find out what it can and what it cannot do. My employer outsourced some development to India and we ended up re-writing it after it was initially released.
Don't get me wrong. The software the Indian company developed did *EXACTLY* what we asked them to develop. Unfortunately, it had all the earmarks of code developed by a bunch of amatures. That is, the code was not easily modified and was not flexible and extensible. Like it or not, a lot of "software engineering expertise" comes from developing an understanding of how to manage a bunch of people developing something that is initially strictly an idea and that only is expressed as a bunch of source code in the end. This ability is not trivial and generally only comes the hard way: learning from your mistakes.
The lesson we learned is that outsourcing critical development is a short term fix but not a long tern strategy. We also heard that the price of new development is going up as the company we contracted with has gotten more experience (translation has learned from their past efforts).
Put these trends together:
1) As external developers gain experience, their price goes up.
2) Any time you outsource you face an inflexible development process since the contractor has to contain their costs which means they develop exactly what you (the client) asked for or the contractor charges the client for any requirements changes.
3) Any time there is a language barrier, the risk of misunderstandings goes up. As language differences becomes less of an issue, item one kicks in.
Based on these observations, outsourcing overseas will initially trend toward a way to develop extremely well defined applications. Management will *slowly* learn that anything else will be such a crap shoot that only someone desperate (SCO comes to mind) will run the risks associated with outsourcing anything innovative. As the overseas outsouring companies gain experience and expertise they will raise their rates *because they can*.
Equilbrium will be reached at some point as long as the market is allowed to operate. In the mean time, PHBs will continue to outsource critical development tasks until they get fired for the failures If you don't like the insecurity, go to work for a defense contractor who can only hire U.S. citizens becuase they need people who can get a security clearance.
I'll be nice... this time. Disabling autorun circumvents the SunnComm copy protection. SunnComm relies on autorun to install their protection program. By publishing how to disable autorun, Microsoft has published a DMCA circumvention technique. The key point here is SunnComm needs to also sue Microsoft.
Microsoft's how to for disabling autorun. This how-to is also quoted as a link in the original publication and holding down the shift key is probably easier for most people but its fun to make sure that all those who would circumvent the DMCA are known to the appropriate authorities. (Bill should call his lawyer)