Often Mozilla is used as an example of a failed OSS project, but I don't think it is at all, both from a business and a pure 'Open Source' perspective.
From a business perspective companies such as AOL are just beginning to exploit code generated by the Mozilla project. In Spain, AOL has just launched a product called 'AOL avant', a iMac-style box allowing web browsing and email for about $15 a month, all inclusive. They are aiming to get quarter of a million of these boxes into homes. The boxes run Linux, along with a browser that I assume is based on Mozilla. When people say that Linux isn't suitable for non-techies, then this is a great example, because AOL Avant has been designed to be used by your grandma. And quarter of a million users is a lot.
It is true that the project is taking a long time, but then complex software development does take a long time. Microsoft knows this - they spend years and years refining sub-standard products until they are sweet - that's part of the reason they are in the position they are today - they don't give up. Nor should the OSS community give up on Mozilla. It is a strategicly extremely important project in the good fight against the beast from Redmond, and the team has done a great job so far.
I use it every day and it is really stable now and packed with features. For instance, it can render XML directly from XSL style sheets, something that IE 6 cannot do (or at least I cannot get it to work). Keep up the good work Mozilla crew, your work is great and your project will turn into a great success story for the OSS community!
I've just watched the whole program. I don't think it was unrepresentative of the general mood of the British public. There seemed to be a broad mix of opinions in the audience, including some who were very obviously extremely pro-USA.
I think the reaction to this program is possibly due to a cultural difference between the US and Britain. The British tend to be very open about their views when it comes to politics. The Prime Minister has to put up with demonstrations practically everywhere he goes and no matter what he does, for instance. It's just the British way.
I may be wrong, but American's may not be so used to strong criticism of themselves and their leaders. It certainly looked like Phil Lader took the audience's comments very personally, in a way which I'm sure the people in the audience never intended.
this goes against U.S. foreign policy: it doesn't actively interfere in other countries unless its vital national interests are at stake.
Isn't this exactly the problem?
Take the Gulf war for example. America drove this war effort simply because of issues related to oil - it was in no way humanitarian. Now, Iraq still has Saddam Hussein as a leader, and it's people are staving and repressed. USA won't do anything more unless "its vital national interests are at stake", in other words, we don't give a damn about the Iraqi people, just the oil.
That's what upsets us soft-headed European socialists - US foreign policy doesn't really seem to give a damn about the people of the rest of the world, just maintaining the USA's financial, political and military strength.
And I don't think the issue is ignorance. In the case of the Gulf war, for example, we all know what happened and to claim we are 'ignorant' is just an easy way to try to negate our arguments.
Remember that Bill Joy article speculating that humanity would be destoryed by a grey-slime of nanobots? Well, this is the type of work that's going to make them - imagine zillions of these things at nano-scale, each with it's own 'soft' (i.e using natural principals rather than heuristics) artificial intelligence all working together to provide a giant hive mind.
Asimov's laws of robotics seem ridiculous in this context.
RE:XML is not likely to succeed
on
XML in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 4, Informative
XML is not likely to succeed
We had dumb comments like this last time XML was discussed here.
Let's me make this clear now, before we get too many more comments like this. HTML is a formatting language for displaying information in web browsers. XML is a data storage toolkit, a configurable vehicle for any kind of information. It is completely different to HTML - the majority of uses for XML have nothing to do with displaying information in a browser.
XML is an extremely important standard and I urge everyone to learn it.
And please, don't make comments on Slashdot about technologies you don't know much about.
I said in my posting the other day "I would be really suprised if Lego (Denmark) agree with this [Business 2.0 article]". And this press release proves that they don't.
I'm afraid that you American's need to wake up to the fact that you have a very abusive corporate mentality, which is not in the interests of anyone but the company. Many of you seem to think that Europeans are a bunch of 'socialist losers' (going by the postings on Slashdot), because we generally approve of goverment intervention to prevent abusive business practices in the free market, and most of our companies are not as aggressive as yours, as this Lego case demonstrates. However, we see it not as being losers, but as being more civilized.
The new 'Intellectual Property' laws (the DMCA etc) are designed to protect the 'right' of digital content distributors to be paid for the content they distribute, even though the internet means that cost of copying and distribution is now practically zero. All fairly contrived abstract concepts - it doesn't have to be this way. But if it does, I think we as world citizens should group together and stand up for our own rights, and create our own abstract ownership concepts.
I'm sure that most people would agree that one of the most precious commodities is time, it is the only truly limited resource for any individual. All abstract concepts need an appropriate name, so lets call this our Temporal Assests. It must surely be a fundamental right of all world citizens to prevent abuse of their Temporal Assets and its theft by big corporations.
Now, every time an advert comes on the TV, phone up the company concerned and shout down the phone "You're abusing my Temporal Assets" and slam the phone down.
But the good thing about all these stupid US laws is that American is gradually screwing up their industry without realising it, so the rest of the world can over-take.
One day America will wake up and realise that all the innovation is going on in Europe and Asia, and that business innovation in the US has been killed by draconian laws which only serve the interests of large US companies. Already we are beginning to see the effects of this - the majority of the work on open source projects is being done outside of the US. Hopefully short sighted lawmakers in the US will ban the use of open source in universities and government - that would really screw things up for them in the long term.
So carry on America - it's fun for us to watch and laugh about your silly law makers over here in Europe.
That is such a weird article. I would be really suprised if anyone at Lego (Denmark) agrees with it.
Unfortunately it demonstrates so much that is wrong with the American corporate mentality these days. You've gotten moral right and wrongs confused with what's good and bad for companies' profits.
Imagine if Henry Ford started his automobile company with confused 'intellecutal property' mentality that is currently infecting the software industry. He would patent the style of threats on the nuts and bolts, so that if you set up a company producing any kind of accessory for his cars he could sue you for infringing his IP. He would add a chemical formula to petrol so that only Ford petrol would work with his cars. He would claim that it made the cars run better, keep the formula secret and sue anyone who tried to find out what it was. And if the government tried to intervene, he would claim his right to innovate and make his cars better was being infringed. And if people painted their cars a different colour but didn't use Ford paint, they would claim that the warranty had been invalidated and that Ford was no longer responsible for the car's performance or safety.
Play and using toys such as Lego is an important part of a childs intellectual development. I expect the company that produces the toys I give to my children to have a high intellectual and moral standing. And I expect a lot of people in Denmark would agree with me, fine upstanding people that they are. So Lego, please ignore any advice you get from American lawyers and business consultants, and do what you think is the right thing to do.
I've not seen this point of view expressed much on Slashdot, so here goes:
Microsoft have been very clever getting where they are today. One of the principal means they have got there is using the interfaces between different functional elements like keys, to lock customers in, and lock competing technologies out.
XML is a simple, standard way of formatting diverse information types so that it is easy to exchange data between applications, and easy to write programs for. It is brilliant in it's simplicity, and anyone who has studied it will know that it is 'not just another format', but one of the most important standards ever developed in the history of computing.
This represents a huge threat to Microsoft as it threatens one of their main strategies. I believe that everyone in the open source world should learn XML and it's associated standards, and use them as far as possible in their programming work. If, for instance, the open source community adopts DocBook, or Sun's forthcoming XML standard for documents, for all open source word processors, I don't think it will be long before there are so many useful document manipulation applications available that there will be a compelling business reason to move from Microsoft Word to an open source alternative.
Learn XML folks!!!
(There are probably a few reading this who are thinking - 'but Microsoft says that their office file formats are now XML based'. To you all I can say is that you should learn XML, and then you'll realise that what Microsoft is doing doesn't really have anything to do with what XML is all about).
I don't think this is just an American phenonemon.
I live in Barcelona, Spain, and there are six different telcos putting fibre optic cables in the ground outside my office window as I type this.
Like many countries in Europe, Spain has gone from an inefficient state-owned telecomm monopoly to hyper-competition in just a few years. I have ADSL at home at the moment - it was really easy to get installed and the monthly fees are very low. And with all this competition it should get better really quickly.
I read recently that Microsoft was claiming to have 400 million Hotmail users. Sounds impressive, but how many of those email accounts are, but how many of those accounts 'genuine'. I know many people set up hotmail accounts just for trivial/temporary use, and I am sure that even those users who use it as a proper account probably still enter rubbish when signing on. It wouldn't suprise me if less than ten percent of those accounts were actually used as proper email accounts.
Well, you're an American aren't you? We can't expect you to believe that there are civilized honest people in this world. Unfortunately all most American believe in is money. Money corrupts.
It's a shame. Your country's founders were noble, intelligent people with high ideals. What went wrong?
Do you think the linux revolution would have happened if Linus was American? No, he would have just sold out as soon as it started to get popular.
Further, the greatest fine they can impose is 10% of the revenue from Europe.
Actually, I think they can potentially impose a fine of 10% of global revenue, so it would be a really big deal for Microsoft. Not that it would ever happen.
The greatest government in the world - the US government
What???? Are you kidding? You have Bush as a president and you are claiming to have the greatest government? Thankfully in Europe most of our heads of state don't have below average IQ's.
Also, you'll find that in many countries in Europe people have a reasonable amount of trust in their governments i.e. that they are not corrupt and will do the right thing. That doesn't seem to be the case in the USA, where a great many people distrust their government.
The type of political lobbying by large corporations that goes on in the US would be considered large scale corruption in Europe.
Re:Does business always have to be this way ?
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
·
· Score: 1
Why do lots of American's blindly believe that pure captialism will always create what's best for the consumer? Your thinking looks very crude from a European perspective. Open your eyes guys!
Companies (at least most of the really bigs ones) don't act purely in the interest of consumers. They act in the interest of profits. They will do whatever it takes to increase those profits, even if that means not acting in the interest of the consumer. That's why government intervention is sometimes necessary.
Capitalism is the crude motor of our society and economy, and as such it works very well. However, it isn't perfect, and sometimes intervention is necessary. As a European I am glad that the EU is beinging to take a hardline stance on mega-corps who don't act in the consumer's interest.
With all his billions, Bill Gates chooses to charge cash strapped schools thousands of dollars for software which effectively costs nothing to duplicate. Wouldn't any cilivilsed person in his position give away licences to schools? His company would still be one of the most profitable in the world. He and his minions may be clever, but they are not civilized people. They are selfish, interested only in themselves and their money.
Intellecutal property law protects Microsoft, and many similar organisations such as the recording industry cartel. This does not make their position morally justifiable.
Our laws are crude devices. I consider that every time I buy a CD, for instance, the record company is effectively stealing a proportion of the cost from the me, because there is no effective price competition in the CD market. According to the law, no theft is taking place. However, the law is very clear that if a school makes a copy of a piece of software, they are doing something illegal, even when from a moral viewpoint what Bill Gates does (in charging cash strapped schools) is wrong.
I welcome any initiative that makes school children question the current status quo. Let's hope future generations will be more civilized and intelligent about these things than we currently are.
Slashdot Mirror
Often Mozilla is used as an example of a failed OSS project, but I don't think it is at all, both from a business and a pure 'Open Source' perspective.
From a business perspective companies such as AOL are just beginning to exploit code generated by the Mozilla project. In Spain, AOL has just launched a product called 'AOL avant', a iMac-style box allowing web browsing and email for about $15 a month, all inclusive. They are aiming to get quarter of a million of these boxes into homes. The boxes run Linux, along with a browser that I assume is based on Mozilla. When people say that Linux isn't suitable for non-techies, then this is a great example, because AOL Avant has been designed to be used by your grandma. And quarter of a million users is a lot.
It is true that the project is taking a long time, but then complex software development does take a long time. Microsoft knows this - they spend years and years refining sub-standard products until they are sweet - that's part of the reason they are in the position they are today - they don't give up. Nor should the OSS community give up on Mozilla. It is a strategicly extremely important project in the good fight against the beast from Redmond, and the team has done a great job so far.
I use it every day and it is really stable now and packed with features. For instance, it can render XML directly from XSL style sheets, something that IE 6 cannot do (or at least I cannot get it to work). Keep up the good work Mozilla crew, your work is great and your project will turn into a great success story for the OSS community!
I've just watched the whole program. I don't think it was unrepresentative of the general mood of the British public. There seemed to be a broad mix of opinions in the audience, including some who were very obviously extremely pro-USA.
I think the reaction to this program is possibly due to a cultural difference between the US and Britain. The British tend to be very open about their views when it comes to politics. The Prime Minister has to put up with demonstrations practically everywhere he goes and no matter what he does, for instance. It's just the British way.
I may be wrong, but American's may not be so used to strong criticism of themselves and their leaders. It certainly looked like Phil Lader took the audience's comments very personally, in a way which I'm sure the people in the audience never intended.
this goes against U.S. foreign policy: it doesn't actively interfere in other countries unless its vital national interests are at stake.
Isn't this exactly the problem?
Take the Gulf war for example. America drove this war effort simply because of issues related to oil - it was in no way humanitarian. Now, Iraq still has Saddam Hussein as a leader, and it's people are staving and repressed. USA won't do anything more unless "its vital national interests are at stake", in other words, we don't give a damn about the Iraqi people, just the oil.
That's what upsets us soft-headed European socialists - US foreign policy doesn't really seem to give a damn about the people of the rest of the world, just maintaining the USA's financial, political and military strength.
And I don't think the issue is ignorance. In the case of the Gulf war, for example, we all know what happened and to claim we are 'ignorant' is just an easy way to try to negate our arguments.
Remember that Bill Joy article speculating that humanity would be destoryed by a grey-slime of nanobots? Well, this is the type of work that's going to make them - imagine zillions of these things at nano-scale, each with it's own 'soft' (i.e using natural principals rather than heuristics) artificial intelligence all working together to provide a giant hive mind.
Asimov's laws of robotics seem ridiculous in this context.
XML is not likely to succeed
We had dumb comments like this last time XML was discussed here.
Let's me make this clear now, before we get too many more comments like this. HTML is a formatting language for displaying information in web browsers. XML is a data storage toolkit, a configurable vehicle for any kind of information. It is completely different to HTML - the majority of uses for XML have nothing to do with displaying information in a browser.
XML is an extremely important standard and I urge everyone to learn it.
And please, don't make comments on Slashdot about technologies you don't know much about.
I said in my posting the other day "I would be really suprised if Lego (Denmark) agree with this [Business 2.0 article]". And this press release proves that they don't.
I'm afraid that you American's need to wake up to the fact that you have a very abusive corporate mentality, which is not in the interests of anyone but the company. Many of you seem to think that Europeans are a bunch of 'socialist losers' (going by the postings on Slashdot), because we generally approve of goverment intervention to prevent abusive business practices in the free market, and most of our companies are not as aggressive as yours, as this Lego case demonstrates. However, we see it not as being losers, but as being more civilized.
The new 'Intellectual Property' laws (the DMCA etc) are designed to protect the 'right' of digital content distributors to be paid for the content they distribute, even though the internet means that cost of copying and distribution is now practically zero. All fairly contrived abstract concepts - it doesn't have to be this way. But if it does, I think we as world citizens should group together and stand up for our own rights, and create our own abstract ownership concepts.
I'm sure that most people would agree that one of the most precious commodities is time, it is the only truly limited resource for any individual. All abstract concepts need an appropriate name, so lets call this our Temporal Assests. It must surely be a fundamental right of all world citizens to prevent abuse of their Temporal Assets and its theft by big corporations.
Now, every time an advert comes on the TV, phone up the company concerned and shout down the phone "You're abusing my Temporal Assets" and slam the phone down.
But the good thing about all these stupid US laws is that American is gradually screwing up their industry without realising it, so the rest of the world can over-take.
One day America will wake up and realise that all the innovation is going on in Europe and Asia, and that business innovation in the US has been killed by draconian laws which only serve the interests of large US companies. Already we are beginning to see the effects of this - the majority of the work on open source projects is being done outside of the US. Hopefully short sighted lawmakers in the US will ban the use of open source in universities and government - that would really screw things up for them in the long term.
So carry on America - it's fun for us to watch and laugh about your silly law makers over here in Europe.
That is such a weird article. I would be really suprised if anyone at Lego (Denmark) agrees with it.
Unfortunately it demonstrates so much that is wrong with the American corporate mentality these days. You've gotten moral right and wrongs confused with what's good and bad for companies' profits.
Imagine if Henry Ford started his automobile company with confused 'intellecutal property' mentality that is currently infecting the software industry. He would patent the style of threats on the nuts and bolts, so that if you set up a company producing any kind of accessory for his cars he could sue you for infringing his IP. He would add a chemical formula to petrol so that only Ford petrol would work with his cars. He would claim that it made the cars run better, keep the formula secret and sue anyone who tried to find out what it was. And if the government tried to intervene, he would claim his right to innovate and make his cars better was being infringed. And if people painted their cars a different colour but didn't use Ford paint, they would claim that the warranty had been invalidated and that Ford was no longer responsible for the car's performance or safety.
Play and using toys such as Lego is an important part of a childs intellectual development. I expect the company that produces the toys I give to my children to have a high intellectual and moral standing. And I expect a lot of people in Denmark would agree with me, fine upstanding people that they are. So Lego, please ignore any advice you get from American lawyers and business consultants, and do what you think is the right thing to do.
You are so ignorant about technology you don't deserve to consider yourself part of the 'Slashdot community'.
I've not seen this point of view expressed much on Slashdot, so here goes:
Microsoft have been very clever getting where they are today. One of the principal means they have got there is using the interfaces between different functional elements like keys, to lock customers in, and lock competing technologies out.
XML is a simple, standard way of formatting diverse information types so that it is easy to exchange data between applications, and easy to write programs for. It is brilliant in it's simplicity, and anyone who has studied it will know that it is 'not just another format', but one of the most important standards ever developed in the history of computing.
This represents a huge threat to Microsoft as it threatens one of their main strategies. I believe that everyone in the open source world should learn XML and it's associated standards, and use them as far as possible in their programming work. If, for instance, the open source community adopts DocBook, or Sun's forthcoming XML standard for documents, for all open source word processors, I don't think it will be long before there are so many useful document manipulation applications available that there will be a compelling business reason to move from Microsoft Word to an open source alternative.
Learn XML folks!!!
(There are probably a few reading this who are thinking - 'but Microsoft says that their office file formats are now XML based'. To you all I can say is that you should learn XML, and then you'll realise that what Microsoft is doing doesn't really have anything to do with what XML is all about).
I don't think this is just an American phenonemon.
I live in Barcelona, Spain, and there are six different telcos putting fibre optic cables in the ground outside my office window as I type this.
Like many countries in Europe, Spain has gone from an inefficient state-owned telecomm monopoly to hyper-competition in just a few years. I have ADSL at home at the moment - it was really easy to get installed and the monthly fees are very low. And with all this competition it should get better really quickly.
I read recently that Microsoft was claiming to have 400 million Hotmail users. Sounds impressive, but how many of those email accounts are, but how many of those accounts 'genuine'. I know many people set up hotmail accounts just for trivial/temporary use, and I am sure that even those users who use it as a proper account probably still enter rubbish when signing on. It wouldn't suprise me if less than ten percent of those accounts were actually used as proper email accounts.
Yes, you're right. Turkey would go way down the list.
he he he, that's so cute!
Well, you're an American aren't you? We can't expect you to believe that there are civilized honest people in this world. Unfortunately all most American believe in is money. Money corrupts.
It's a shame. Your country's founders were noble, intelligent people with high ideals. What went wrong?
Do you think the linux revolution would have happened if Linus was American? No, he would have just sold out as soon as it started to get popular.
Probably by some American upset that not everyone thinks his government is great.
The Danish government is certainly a more sensible proposition for contender to the title 'greatest government in the world' than the US.
I think the US would probably come about 20th on the list, somewhere below Italy and Spain but a bit above Greece and Turkey.
;-) only joking folks
Further, the greatest fine they can impose is 10% of the revenue from Europe.
Actually, I think they can potentially impose a fine of 10% of global revenue, so it would be a really big deal for Microsoft. Not that it would ever happen.
The greatest government in the world - the US government
What???? Are you kidding? You have Bush as a president and you are claiming to have the greatest government? Thankfully in Europe most of our heads of state don't have below average IQ's.
Also, you'll find that in many countries in Europe people have a reasonable amount of trust in their governments i.e. that they are not corrupt and will do the right thing. That doesn't seem to be the case in the USA, where a great many people distrust their government.
The type of political lobbying by large corporations that goes on in the US would be considered large scale corruption in Europe.
Why do lots of American's blindly believe that pure captialism will always create what's best for the consumer? Your thinking looks very crude from a European perspective. Open your eyes guys!
Companies (at least most of the really bigs ones) don't act purely in the interest of consumers. They act in the interest of profits. They will do whatever it takes to increase those profits, even if that means not acting in the interest of the consumer. That's why government intervention is sometimes necessary.
Capitalism is the crude motor of our society and economy, and as such it works very well. However, it isn't perfect, and sometimes intervention is necessary. As a European I am glad that the EU is beinging to take a hardline stance on mega-corps who don't act in the consumer's interest.
With all his billions, Bill Gates chooses to charge cash strapped schools thousands of dollars for software which effectively costs nothing to duplicate. Wouldn't any cilivilsed person in his position give away licences to schools? His company would still be one of the most profitable in the world. He and his minions may be clever, but they are not civilized people. They are selfish, interested only in themselves and their money.
Intellecutal property law protects Microsoft, and many similar organisations such as the recording industry cartel. This does not make their position morally justifiable.
Our laws are crude devices. I consider that every time I buy a CD, for instance, the record company is effectively stealing a proportion of the cost from the me, because there is no effective price competition in the CD market. According to the law, no theft is taking place. However, the law is very clear that if a school makes a copy of a piece of software, they are doing something illegal, even when from a moral viewpoint what Bill Gates does (in charging cash strapped schools) is wrong.
I welcome any initiative that makes school children question the current status quo. Let's hope future generations will be more civilized and intelligent about these things than we currently are.