That's a start, just remember that for MS its not only about servers. Their cash cow is the OS(in volume, ie. workstations via OEM's like Dell) and MS Office. I don't think you buy a lot of copies of office for your servers. In the end, to really hurt MS's bottom line you're going to have to reduce their workstation count, which will in turn reduce their MS Office count. Then loss leaders in other industries(such as the xbox) will really start to take their toll.
Mozilla is already technically better than IE. Evolution is already technically better than Outlook. So why isn't the majority of the market using these products? The problem is not a technical problem, and all the new programming languages and acronyms are not going to make the average joe want to use them.
here's an idea, lets all pitch in and try to make a commercial for one of the OSS project. Lets take OpenOffice for example. We all see the MS Office commercials constantly throughout the day. Imagine if those were OpenOffice commercials instead. Maybe a snappy ad in Cosmopolitan magazine.
I really wish that there was as much marketing innovation in OSS as there is development innovation....
I am in complete agreement with what you say. I've experienced it all first hand. Not in a OSS sense, but in a commercial software sense. I can't even count the number of times I've had to add features that were technically useless. But the "user" wanted them, and they're the "customer".
This really does get us down to the core of the problem though. We're seeing the emergence of two camps. One camp is the "desktop conquerors". These people want a larger percentage of the desktop market. I put Miguel in this camp. Then in another camp you have the true OSS type of people. You seem to be one of these people. They want to do things that they find interesting and innovative regardless of what the "user" wants. Neither camp is right or wrong, they just have opposing goals.
To gain market share you must cater to the market you're after. To develop innovative and interesting software you have to cater to yourself. I mean this in general. Its not as black and white as I make it seem. But I think my point is clear.
First of all, you have to decide who you're talking about. There are server based code(ie. web development, aka think client) and client side code (ie. fat client). I develop server based code. We use Java. We use Java because our customers use so many different platforms. We've deployed on solaris, mvs, linux, windows, and many more. There is not even a remote possibility that we will be switching.NET for these types of applications in the near future. The only people who would switch their server code to.NET would be people who are currently in the VB.NET/ASP.NET world already.
The client side (desktop) is the area where all Miguels comments seem to be directed. Will your word processor of choice be written in.NET? Your photo editing software? I don't know, I can only speculate. A direct comparison between OSS and commercial/microsoft versions of a product reveal that in most cases the OSS version is more secure and has better features. So why, oh why, do people not use the OSS version? Simple, marketing!
You see, software developers work on projects. And projects ARE NOT PRODUCTS! You can have a successful project, which may not be a successful product. And as microsoft shows, you can have an unsuccessful project, which is a successful product. Projects become successful products because of good marketing. OSS has little or no marketing, and this is the fatal flaw. If only apple could help market some OSS projects we could see just how successful they could become. Think about it, if you saw an ad for the "Sexy, New, Feature Rich, Gimp project"(note that a name change would be mandatory for this project to be marketed, project vs product). Now put this ad in Cosmopolitan magazine (this is where you see ipod ads...). Put it everywhere. Make it sexy, make consumers, that's who we're really talking about here, want it.
Many of the developers on these projects are not going to like this. Nobody wants to "sell out" their project. But if you're after the client side market(aka desktop), then you're targeting consumers, not developers.
I've been a software developer for about 7 years nows. Ranging from embedded work, windows, to linux/unix. More recently I've been a java developer and oracle dba. About a year ago I purchased a dual G4 powermac. I installed oracle and jbuilder8 on it within a couple of days and was developing software as easily as on any other system. I have been very happy with my purchases(though I wish I had a G5).
Though I must admit, that I recently needed to purchase a laptop for doing some work on the road and chose not to go with a powerbook. Most notably because I felt the current offerings would not offer me the power I could get with the equivalent intel based system(where's the G5 powerbook???). Sad to admit, but possibly a more important factor to not choosing a powerbook was the single button touch pad. I use a two button w/scroll usb mouse on my powermac and I couldn't imagine using a single button touchpad on a powerbook. Yeah, yeah, I could use an external mouse, but on a plane its not so easy to do, so you must use the touchpad. I didn't want to suffer with that single button, ugh!
Actually, if you read the article on groklaw Tables C,D,E and F are all referring to infringements in the 2.6 kernel. So it would seem that the 2.6 kernel is not "safe"....
One question I would have liked to see asked is about intellectual property laws. Copyrights and things of that nature. As the interview states, many of our Indian brethren read slashdot so maybe one of them can reply to this. My question is about what kind of IP laws exist in India in comparison to US laws. Are US copyright laws valid there? What is to stop a company from outsourcing to India, and then having the company in India take that new IP and later compete with the company that originally outsourced to it?
"The constant security-related problems associated with Microsoft's products are due to its fundamental platform architecture. Java technology, in contrast, enjoys exceptional immunity to viruses because of its sandbag architecture."
Just imagine the volume of calls that come through AT&T every day. Heck, just imagine one hour! Every one of these calls has to be linked to an account, measured in minutes, rated against your plan, etc, etc. This is some heavy duty processing going on. And the machines that are doing this are huge mainframes. This is all legacy code. Right now some cobol jockeys are trying to retrofit some archaic cobol routine to give you number portability. Give them a break! They have had a career in cobol, that's enough suffering.
I doubt they will ever port to intel. But to answer your other question, yes a huge number of gnu/OS apps run under OSX. Checkout this site: http://fink.sourceforge.net/
At one point I was just like you. Trying out all the distro's and having various problems here and there. I tried BeOS as well. Never really being happy with any of them. Then I switched over to OSX and I've never looked back. I use OSX exclusively now and love it. I suggest you give it a try. It may be just what you're looking for..
Wouldn't it be more like, you purchase a window at home depot(analogous to the purchase/download of AOL software). You install the window in your home(analogous to installing the AOL software). Home depot decides that the window doesn't lock correctly so they go around to every customers house who bought the window, they go in the house via the window, fix the window, and leave. Not telling the homeowner of the fix.
And the comment by Russ Cooper would be analogous to you home security system, ADT or whatever, endorsing this type of activity.
The comment at the end of the article attributed to Russ Cooper is unbelievable coming from a "security expert". For those who do not RTFA here it is
"Russ Cooper, a security expert with TruSecure Corp., said anyone who needs the Windows messaging function that AOL disabled ought to be smart enough to know how to reactivate it."
This type of forced security by AOL is not welcome in any form. As an analogy, what if there were a few burglaries in your town. The criminals decided that most people in your town keep their back doors unlocked so they have easy entry. How would you like it if the police or some other person decided to go to every house in your town and go in your house and lock your back door for you? Don't worry they won't steal anything, they're "protecting" you.
CTO: We would like to remove all linux machines from our corporate network, please do this now. Me: But SCO has shown no proof that any code exists within the linux kernel CTO: After talking to the CEO, we would like you to put up any money that may be required if SCO were to win the case and name us in a lawsuit, are you willing to do this? Me: um, no... CTO: OK then, when you find someone willing to defend us legally for our technical decisions, remove linux from all corporate machines.
at least they didn't decide to just purchase an SCO license. Which is better?
First off, I am just a lowly coder I have little or no power at this level of the company. The way it went down was that one of our customers(just one at this time, but a BIG one) sent our company a legal agreement stating that either we agreed to not ship them products with "free software" or they would find another supplier. The only reason I found out it was a customer that was requiring these changes was because I was talking to one of the lawyers about product naming for one of my products and this came up. Needless to say, I was surprised, and quickly responded with the "they run unix, they are already running free software", at that point the lawyer clammed up and realized he probably shouldn't have told me what he just did. This was about a month ago, and now the impact of that is hitting and we're doing rewrites of portions of our products.
This customer buys millions of dollars worth of our products and I can't go barging into the CEO or CTO's office telling him one of our huge customers is an idiot(BTW, most of this work is done in the mainframe world). If the CEO has to decide between losing millions of dollars of recurring revenue, and paying a handful of programmers to rewrite code for a month, I think the decision is pretty obvious.
But back to the point I was trying to make in my parent post. This whole SCO thing is affecting companies. The legal murkiness they are spewing is having its intended effect. This is just one example of how a company is trying to avoid the whole mess.
I work at a software vendor who produces software for numerous large commercial instituations such as banks, telco's, etc. We have recently had a number of these companies request that we sign an agreement stating that software we have provided them DOES NOT contain any "Free Software". This has been a headache as of late, especially for my team. We work in Java and have used numerous LGPL libraries from various locations in our product to save time during development. We now have to get rid of all of these and rewrite it ourselves. Not fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Even simpler, no break, continue or goto...
....
boolean done = false;
for(int i=0; !done && i < n; i++)
{
for(int j=0; !done && j < m; j++)
{
if (blah[i][j] == 1) done = true;
}
}
That's a start, just remember that for MS its not only about servers. Their cash cow is the OS(in volume, ie. workstations via OEM's like Dell) and MS Office. I don't think you buy a lot of copies of office for your servers. In the end, to really hurt MS's bottom line you're going to have to reduce their workstation count, which will in turn reduce their MS Office count. Then loss leaders in other industries(such as the xbox) will really start to take their toll.
Wow, 8 servers. Now if you could just get your 500 workstations to switch from windows to linux, ballmer just might listen to you.....
Mozilla is already technically better than IE. Evolution is already technically better than Outlook. So why isn't the majority of the market using these products? The problem is not a technical problem, and all the new programming languages and acronyms are not going to make the average joe want to use them.
here's an idea, lets all pitch in and try to make a commercial for one of the OSS project. Lets take OpenOffice for example. We all see the MS Office commercials constantly throughout the day. Imagine if those were OpenOffice commercials instead. Maybe a snappy ad in Cosmopolitan magazine.
I really wish that there was as much marketing innovation in OSS as there is development innovation....
I am in complete agreement with what you say. I've experienced it all first hand. Not in a OSS sense, but in a commercial software sense. I can't even count the number of times I've had to add features that were technically useless. But the "user" wanted them, and they're the "customer".
This really does get us down to the core of the problem though. We're seeing the emergence of two camps. One camp is the "desktop conquerors". These people want a larger percentage of the desktop market. I put Miguel in this camp. Then in another camp you have the true OSS type of people. You seem to be one of these people. They want to do things that they find interesting and innovative regardless of what the "user" wants. Neither camp is right or wrong, they just have opposing goals.
To gain market share you must cater to the market you're after. To develop innovative and interesting software you have to cater to yourself. I mean this in general. Its not as black and white as I make it seem. But I think my point is clear.
First of all, you have to decide who you're talking about. There are server based code(ie. web development, aka think client) and client side code (ie. fat client). I develop server based code. We use Java. We use Java because our customers use so many different platforms. We've deployed on solaris, mvs, linux, windows, and many more. There is not even a remote possibility that we will be switching .NET for these types of applications in the near future. The only people who would switch their server code to .NET would be people who are currently in the VB.NET/ASP.NET world already.
.NET? Your photo editing software? I don't know, I can only speculate. A direct comparison between OSS and commercial/microsoft versions of a product reveal that in most cases the OSS version is more secure and has better features. So why, oh why, do people not use the OSS version? Simple, marketing!
The client side (desktop) is the area where all Miguels comments seem to be directed. Will your word processor of choice be written in
You see, software developers work on projects. And projects ARE NOT PRODUCTS! You can have a successful project, which may not be a successful product. And as microsoft shows, you can have an unsuccessful project, which is a successful product. Projects become successful products because of good marketing. OSS has little or no marketing, and this is the fatal flaw. If only apple could help market some OSS projects we could see just how successful they could become. Think about it, if you saw an ad for the "Sexy, New, Feature Rich, Gimp project"(note that a name change would be mandatory for this project to be marketed, project vs product). Now put this ad in Cosmopolitan magazine (this is where you see ipod ads...). Put it everywhere. Make it sexy, make consumers, that's who we're really talking about here, want it.
Many of the developers on these projects are not going to like this. Nobody wants to "sell out" their project. But if you're after the client side market(aka desktop), then you're targeting consumers, not developers.
I've been a software developer for about 7 years nows. Ranging from embedded work, windows, to linux/unix. More recently I've been a java developer and oracle dba. About a year ago I purchased a dual G4 powermac. I installed oracle and jbuilder8 on it within a couple of days and was developing software as easily as on any other system. I have been very happy with my purchases(though I wish I had a G5).
Though I must admit, that I recently needed to purchase a laptop for doing some work on the road and chose not to go with a powerbook. Most notably because I felt the current offerings would not offer me the power I could get with the equivalent intel based system(where's the G5 powerbook???). Sad to admit, but possibly a more important factor to not choosing a powerbook was the single button touch pad. I use a two button w/scroll usb mouse on my powermac and I couldn't imagine using a single button touchpad on a powerbook. Yeah, yeah, I could use an external mouse, but on a plane its not so easy to do, so you must use the touchpad. I didn't want to suffer with that single button, ugh!
An alternate site for thebroken.org is now http://theslashdotted.org
Actually, if you read the article on groklaw Tables C,D,E and F are all referring to infringements in the 2.6 kernel. So it would seem that the 2.6 kernel is not "safe"....
Actually, if you read the article on groklaw Tables C,D,E and F are all referring to infringements in the 2.6 kernel.
One question I would have liked to see asked is about intellectual property laws. Copyrights and things of that nature. As the interview states, many of our Indian brethren read slashdot so maybe one of them can reply to this. My question is about what kind of IP laws exist in India in comparison to US laws. Are US copyright laws valid there? What is to stop a company from outsourcing to India, and then having the company in India take that new IP and later compete with the company that originally outsourced to it?
"The constant security-related problems associated with Microsoft's products are due to its fundamental platform architecture. Java technology, in contrast, enjoys exceptional immunity to viruses because of its sandbag architecture."
I think she means sandbox architecture
I'm reminded of the scene in Simple Life where prada shopper Paris Hilton proclaims, "Walmart? Do they sell walls there?"
ntop is also a good resource for doing this.
A decent technical overview of the FAT filesystem can be found here:
http://home.freeuk.net/foxy2k/disk/disk1.htm
How about changing the name to \/\/indows?(note, that's backslash, forward slash, backslash, forward slash)
Just imagine the volume of calls that come through AT&T every day. Heck, just imagine one hour! Every one of these calls has to be linked to an account, measured in minutes, rated against your plan, etc, etc. This is some heavy duty processing going on. And the machines that are doing this are huge mainframes. This is all legacy code. Right now some cobol jockeys are trying to retrofit some archaic cobol routine to give you number portability. Give them a break! They have had a career in cobol, that's enough suffering.
I doubt they will ever port to intel. But to answer your other question, yes a huge number of gnu/OS apps run under OSX. Checkout this site:
http://fink.sourceforge.net/
At one point I was just like you. Trying out all the distro's and having various problems here and there. I tried BeOS as well. Never really being happy with any of them. Then I switched over to OSX and I've never looked back. I use OSX exclusively now and love it. I suggest you give it a try. It may be just what you're looking for..
Wouldn't it be more like, you purchase a window at home depot(analogous to the purchase/download of AOL software). You install the window in your home(analogous to installing the AOL software). Home depot decides that the window doesn't lock correctly so they go around to every customers house who bought the window, they go in the house via the window, fix the window, and leave. Not telling the homeowner of the fix.
And the comment by Russ Cooper would be analogous to you home security system, ADT or whatever, endorsing this type of activity.
The comment at the end of the article attributed to Russ Cooper is unbelievable coming from a "security expert". For those who do not RTFA here it is
"Russ Cooper, a security expert with TruSecure Corp., said anyone who needs the Windows messaging function that AOL disabled ought to be smart enough to know how to reactivate it."
This type of forced security by AOL is not welcome in any form. As an analogy, what if there were a few burglaries in your town. The criminals decided that most people in your town keep their back doors unlocked so they have easy entry. How would you like it if the police or some other person decided to go to every house in your town and go in your house and lock your back door for you? Don't worry they won't steal anything, they're "protecting" you.
Russ should be ashamed.
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/sto ry/0,10801,66204,00.html
t p://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q 266/0/80.ASP&NoWebContent=1
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=ht
CTO: We would like to remove all linux machines from our corporate network, please do this now.
Me: But SCO has shown no proof that any code exists within the linux kernel
CTO: After talking to the CEO, we would like you to put up any money that may be required if SCO were to win the case and name us in a lawsuit, are you willing to do this?
Me: um, no...
CTO: OK then, when you find someone willing to defend us legally for our technical decisions, remove linux from all corporate machines.
at least they didn't decide to just purchase an SCO license. Which is better?
First off, I am just a lowly coder I have little or no power at this level of the company. The way it went down was that one of our customers(just one at this time, but a BIG one) sent our company a legal agreement stating that either we agreed to not ship them products with "free software" or they would find another supplier. The only reason I found out it was a customer that was requiring these changes was because I was talking to one of the lawyers about product naming for one of my products and this came up. Needless to say, I was surprised, and quickly responded with the "they run unix, they are already running free software", at that point the lawyer clammed up and realized he probably shouldn't have told me what he just did. This was about a month ago, and now the impact of that is hitting and we're doing rewrites of portions of our products.
This customer buys millions of dollars worth of our products and I can't go barging into the CEO or CTO's office telling him one of our huge customers is an idiot(BTW, most of this work is done in the mainframe world). If the CEO has to decide between losing millions of dollars of recurring revenue, and paying a handful of programmers to rewrite code for a month, I think the decision is pretty obvious.
But back to the point I was trying to make in my parent post. This whole SCO thing is affecting companies. The legal murkiness they are spewing is having its intended effect. This is just one example of how a company is trying to avoid the whole mess.
I work at a software vendor who produces software for numerous large commercial instituations such as banks, telco's, etc. We have recently had a number of these companies request that we sign an agreement stating that software we have provided them DOES NOT contain any "Free Software". This has been a headache as of late, especially for my team. We work in Java and have used numerous LGPL libraries from various locations in our product to save time during development. We now have to get rid of all of these and rewrite it ourselves. Not fun.