The problem is that in many respects what is good for Microsoft is not good for consumers. This does not happen in most healthy industries, where firms want to delight consumers. In this case, Microsoft can coerce all us in order to make a profit. Let me point to some examples, it would be nice if we all together could collect a longer list:
Word functionality stalled. 10 years ago Word was very much the same as today. We continue to have a horrendous equation editor, no support for bibliographies, poor support for long structured documents, poor support for including figures, etc... At the same time we continue to have to pay hundreds of dollars for this product. OpenOffice, which is superior in many respects, is not widely adopted because it cannot read the.doc proprietary format flawlessly.
Microsoft giving money to firms like SCO and Novell and casting a massive shadow of legal doubts over open source. This is grave: Microsoft is threatening developers, large consumers (think CIOs), and at the end of the day diminishing the number of innovations we can all enjoy. Note that even if SCO loses the case, Microsoft already delayed the adoption of many open source projects, hence innovation is being pushed back.
Microsoft coercing hardware makers to include Windows. This lowers the number of alternatives the average people can access, and unnecessarily increase the price of computers by adding a software tax.
Imposing on us a non-modular architecture. The Windows architecture is the opposite of Unix: in Windows it is very difficult to combine small, specialized programs to act together. This was done on purpose by Microsoft, so they own the whole solution and can charge a higher price for it. The problem with this is that limits the number of innovations that creative, lone programmers can make, by unnecessarily increasing the entry fee to the industry.
Microsoft "bribing" hundreds of opinion leaders. Big gifts like travels to Microsoft headquarters, Zune players, tablet PCs, flights to international conferences, give aways of software for countries, etc... is done in a large scale by Microsoft. The idea is to co-opt, or at least neutralize, opinion leaders like bloggers, professors, institutional CIOs, etc. This turns the IT industry, which has conventionally been dominated by engineers into a political arena. This kind of behavior is not did Silicon Valley flourish. We want faster, cheaper, better solutions.
But Microsoft is not evil, it does what companies do: maximize shareholder value. The problem is that their profit maximization, imposes a tremendous social cost on the rest of us. It is difficult to put a value to the social cost of Microsoft because it means speculating about innovations that have not happened, but could have occurred without a player like Microsoft out there. My gut feeling is that all the money that the Gates foundation can donate will not match the cost that Microsoft will have imposed on society.
We are the technology leaders of this world, we can stop Microsoft if we want.
Create a basic hierarchy of topics and courses, create basic templates for typical courses, and allow teachers (and students, and everyone) from all over the world to upload their content. I imagine people sharing their slides, videos, quizzes, experiments, teaching tips, etc... This could potentially benefit billions of children.
JSTOR has back issues of several hundred well known journals, dating back to 1665. The bulk of scientific knowledge is in there. Web of Science is an index of basically every scientific paper that has ever been published. I belive that puting these resources in the public domain would accelerate the creation of scientific knowledge. Imagine the millions of intelligent people that today can't access these sources because they are expensive. Also, making scientific knowledge available for public scrutiny would make scientists more accountable for their work.
Once the parser is ready, many developers and colaborators should start a porting
projects. If the parser API is good, porting would be straigtforward.
Every program should have a configuration file in/etc/conf, and the format
for each parameter should be something like this:
<parameter>
<name>TimeToWait</name>
<type>smallint</type>
<value>10</value>
<unit>minutes</unit>
<description>Time in minutues 'till screensaver starts working</description>
<comment> JSmith 2002-01-01: changed to 10</comment>
<comment>Tom: 2002-02-05: prefer to use 15</comment>
</parameter>
Some notes:
"comments" are optional.
A GUI is straigthfoward to do.
The XML parser it's done.
The only thing missing is to package it to make it appealing to the developers.
I agree with almost everyone: this is something very important and useful
to do. It should be an Open Source project!
I have lectured several times an eBusiness course for MBAs. One of the goals of
the course is to present Open Source, so I spend two hours of the course on it
and give a bunch of readings.
To streamline the readings I have put together a compilation of the key Open
Source writings. I call this 80-page book The Open Source Reader (OSR). The
OSR is important because it puts into one point the entire key concepts and
views. This is good material that is currently disperse across the net. The
OSR has been a success for the students and has been downloaded thousands of
times from people all around the world.
Regarding the contents of the Open Source class for managers, I put:
OS definition
History (Unix community, FSF, OSI)
Adoption of OS around the world (cases, statistics)
Why OS (benefits)
Examples: Linux, Apache, StarOffice, etc, etc.
The GPL and other licences
Business Models based on OS
I have also taught the course in a Master of Computer Science; there the students
develop an eBusiness project that must use only Open Source software. As an
additional research project, every student must present Open Source software
that may be useful for the rest of the class.
The feedback of teaching OS in the university has been excellent. Every future
manager that crosses this class ends knowing that they can:
Save money
Use higher quality software
Access better security
That not everything is Microsoft
That there's a whole community of people behind the Open Source
That there are several new methods of making money with software
I am sure that the classrooms (schools, technical institutes, universities)
are a key place to plant the seed of the Open Source.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look to http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNiftyTricks.
The problem is that in many respects what is good for Microsoft is not good for consumers. This does not happen in most healthy industries, where firms want to delight consumers. In this case, Microsoft can coerce all us in order to make a profit. Let me point to some examples, it would be nice if we all together could collect a longer list:
But Microsoft is not evil, it does what companies do: maximize shareholder value. The problem is that their profit maximization, imposes a tremendous social cost on the rest of us. It is difficult to put a value to the social cost of Microsoft because it means speculating about innovations that have not happened, but could have occurred without a player like Microsoft out there. My gut feeling is that all the money that the Gates foundation can donate will not match the cost that Microsoft will have imposed on society.
We are the technology leaders of this world, we can stop Microsoft if we want.
Create a basic hierarchy of topics and courses, create basic templates for typical courses, and allow teachers (and students, and everyone) from all over the world to upload their content. I imagine people sharing their slides, videos, quizzes, experiments, teaching tips, etc... This could potentially benefit billions of children.
JSTOR has back issues of several hundred well known journals, dating back to 1665. The bulk of scientific knowledge is in there. Web of Science is an index of basically every scientific paper that has ever been published. I belive that puting these resources in the public domain would accelerate the creation of scientific knowledge. Imagine the millions of intelligent people that today can't access these sources because they are expensive. Also, making scientific knowledge available for public scrutiny would make scientists more accountable for their work.
Once the parser is ready, many developers and colaborators should start a porting projects. If the parser API is good, porting would be straigtforward.
Every program should have a configuration file in /etc/conf, and the format
for each parameter should be something like this:
<parameter>
</parameter>
Some notes:
I agree with almost everyone: this is something very important and useful to do. It should be an Open Source project!
To streamline the readings I have put together a compilation of the key Open Source writings. I call this 80-page book The Open Source Reader (OSR). The OSR is important because it puts into one point the entire key concepts and views. This is good material that is currently disperse across the net. The OSR has been a success for the students and has been downloaded thousands of times from people all around the world.
Regarding the contents of the Open Source class for managers, I put:
I have also taught the course in a Master of Computer Science; there the students develop an eBusiness project that must use only Open Source software. As an additional research project, every student must present Open Source software that may be useful for the rest of the class.
The feedback of teaching OS in the university has been excellent. Every future manager that crosses this class ends knowing that they can:
I am sure that the classrooms (schools, technical institutes, universities) are a key place to plant the seed of the Open Source.