Beware this "distributed storage" push. As the intellectual "property" "industries" gain more and more control of the world's governments, storage will be in the hands of a few large companies, and not under the control of individual users.
Your digital "rights" managed TrustedPCs will connect to a giant virtual disk array via the network, where what you store will be subject to government and corporate monitoring and removal.
Think this is nuts? Where are the 200GB drives? Why is Intuit pushing us to store tax and financial information on their site? Why does Microsoft want to give us an authentication token that's good for retrieving our information "anywhere, anytime."
Why would anyone (other than a legitimate large corporation) have a need for local storage, once the Internet storage product is fast and cheap? I can only imagine one use for local storage--copyright infringement.
That's nice that you want us to move our intellectual property into the public domain in an "orderly" manner once it's stopped making money for us.
What do you have to offer us to:
- pay us for what you want--it must have value since you want it in the public domain, and it's our duty to extract that value for our shareholders.
- protect us from liability should anyone manage to damage themselves or their own companies with the product you want us to give away.
Unfortunately, there aren't easy answers to those objections. The answer isn't some kind of volunatry feel-good way to have corporations give to the public domain, because it's not going to happen. The answer is to make copyright for a "limited time," as the framers intended. Not for 95 years when 5 years is an eternity in <cliche>Internet time<cliche>.
Google's product selling for $20,000, and being based on Linux, is a good counterweight to the FUD being spread by Microsoft et al that cries "If we write a product that so much as uses one GPL library, we have to GPL it. Waaaaa."
Unless Google reimplemented their own operating system, or <shudder> ported it to Win2K, they have a very expensive product, that runs on Linux, that is not GPL.
More power to Google--I'm glad to see them finding a way to make money without trashing their search engine, like happened with the previously good search engines that came before (e.g. Altavista, Lycos).
The outsourcing is a problem that could be addressed by legislation. But it's more effectively addressed by the fact that remote management isn't as easy as it sounds, and that large corporations are often loath to trust their data store to offshore programmers against whom suits or criminal action in the event of data theft might be difficult.
Not as a government allegedly concerned with the well being of its people. Now as a government that's a wholly owned subsidiary of corporations and the moneyed few, your statement makes perfect sense.
. . . that there are U.S. citizens being laid off, yet the H1B program is alive and well?
Don't get me wrong--I'm not a xenophobe, and see nothing nefarious about the idea of allowing people from other countries to fill positions for which there are no Americans available.
But it doesn't make sense to provide jobs for outsiders when our own can fill them.
At this point it's pretty obvious that the purpose of the H1B program has all along been to depress IT wages and skew the job market in favor of corporate employers. Employers have been making up "special skills" or listing jobs with low salaries to show an "effort" to hire a U.S. citizen, then hiring indentured H1Bs for 1/2 to 2/3 the salary. This should come as no surprise, since the same employers used the same tricks to not pay the market wage for U.S. electrical engineers in the 80s.
The program needs to be ended now. Current H1B visa holders should allowed to stay to the end of their terms, then they should return home to bring up the level of IT skill in their home nations, as the lobbyists and Congress said would happen.
Have a look at this case in U.S. District Court in California, where a judge (who was obviously one of the few sane ones with regard to technology) applied a "duck test" to the purchase of a software package. Here's a relavent quote:
The Court rejects Adobe's argument that the EULA gives to purchasers only a license to use the software. The Court finds that SoftMan has not assented to the EULA and therefore cannot be bound by its terms. Therefore, the Court finds that Adobe has not demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of its copyright infringement claim.
The decision did acknowledge that the enforceability of a shrinkwrap license isn't as certain as Adobe or Microsoft would have us believe:
These courts have refused to recognize a bargain in shrinkwrap license that is not signed by the party against whom it is enforced. In Step-Saver, the Third Circuit found that the terms of a contract were formed when the parties shipped, received and paid for the product. Therefore, the software shrinkwrap agreement constituted additional terms to the contract, and under Uniform Commercial Code 2-207 (governing commercial counter-offers), these terms were invalid without express assent by the purchasex. In contrast, other courts have determined that the shrinkwrap license is valid and enforceable. ProCD, 86 F.3d at 1453; Harmony, 846 F. Supp. at 212.
As far as I'm concerned, the minute I have to sign an actual contract with a pen, there's a license. Until then, I bought my copy, meaning that nice things like the First Sale Doctrine apply. And the day shrinkwrap licenses become actually enforcable, they'll either become a hell of a lot more reasonable or I'll stick with software to which none apply.
The one place we've had luck is getting several CS labs converted. The problem is that Linux didn't displace NT/2000/XP. Oh, no. It displaced Digital Unix. Which, since DEC was bought by Compaquard Bell, is probably not all bad.
Do you really think there's any Open Source application available right now that it's not going to be worthwhile to upgrade to the new version?
I know that there aren't any Open Source applications for which license will expire and we'd have to upgrade whether we like it or not.
And even when things are working fine, Microsoft coerces upgrades by using network effects. Files written in new versions often can't be read by previous versions. (I'll admit they've gotten better about this--only Access and PowerPoint, IIRC, broke in the last two Office releases.)
And I don't see how it's silly to compare the DOS to Win* transitions. Look at all that money that could have been saved in retraining by just using what we had! It's the same argument that's being used against Open Source, even in the face of annual license fees. I stand by the idea that there will have to be only one major retraining, which would pay for itself once the first round of MS upgrades is skipped.
And I don't believe for a minute that there won't be some compelling reason to upgrade all those perfectly working Win98/2K/Office 97/2000 boxes. Even if that compelling reason is avoiding more and more intrusive audits or some other outright extortion as MS becomes more desparate for cash. Oh, and look for the educational license discounts to go away as schools become more firmly addicted (by the TCO argument) to the programs.
I don't so much think it's a bunch of bunk as wonder where the TCO argument was with all its dire predictions of lost productivity and training costs
- in the transition from DOS to Windows 3.0/3.1
- in the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95
- in the transition from Office 4.3 to Office 95
- in the transition from Office 95 to Office 97
- in the transition from Office 97 to Office 2000
- in the transition from cc:Mail to Outlook
. . . you get the idea. Hell, at least we'd only have to retrain everyone once if we picked an open source platform and weren't forced onto the MS upgrade treadmill.
I'm on your side on this, and I work for a state university facing a budget crisis, like most of us are. I agree that we're throwing away seven figures on MS license fees.
However, Microsoft has the administrators convinced that the "total cost of ownership" for the MS products is less than it would be for a pure open source solution.
Perhaps proposing a departmental pilot of a package including Linux and Star Office for about twenty or so people, and determining how true the training deficiency theory is, might be the way to go. However, to get the full experience, someone's going to have to port the VBscript worms to Linux first.
public bodies all over the world designs their requirements in a way that rules out all Free Software and Open Source alternatives already at the drawing table
Could have something to do with the fact that vendors often supply "helpful" templates to procurement officers that are often so tightly written that only one vendor's product will meet the requirements, much less that any open source product would.
The analogy is a good one--Microsoft copied an idea, then used its monopoly power to put its competitors (for all intents and purposes) out of business.
Now, Microsoft wants to collect a toll for everything that happens on the Internet. Not mentioned all the flowery hype about.net, Passport, and seamless access to your information from anywhere, is that Microsoft will tax everything that happens, directly or indirectly. The only way to prevent this from happening is to deny Microsoft the benefit of the network effect--to have people (rightfully) mistrust Microsoft and not buy into.net.
What Icaza is doing is giving a veneer of credibility to Microsoft that it does not deserve (see--even the Linux zealots want it, and they're paranoid). That makes him the Benedict Arnold of the GPL. Let's hope he meets a similar fate, metaphorically speaking, before he has a chance to spend Cornwallis' money.
Use some foam (the kind used in upholstery works nice) around the edges of fans where they meet the case. You'd be surprised how much of that fan noise is actually due to the vibrations being transmitted to the steel itself.
. . . otherwise, there'll be a special broadcast on radio, cable, and embedded in trojan MP3s one day. It'll be Jack Valenti's voice saying "Don't play non-SDMI compliant content anymore.":).
is the road of destruction. Icaza is either a fool or a sellout for getting in bed with Microsoft.
Re:If cars had this kind of EULA...
on
Read the Fine Print
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Except Microsoft wants to do this when you buy (that's right, buy, not "license") windows. Of course, MSs wet dream is to have you have to pay for Windows like a lease. They get as close as they can by "obsoleting" versions and encouraging vendors to do the same. Didn't work with XP, thankfully.
They are so used to clicking next that anyone who has agreed to this deserves to give thier info to M$
That's because those agreements won't ever hold up, and attempts to actually give them the force of law (q.v. UCITA) aren't doing well, even with MS owning half the legislative, half the judicial, and all the executive branches.
Re:This is really just a piece of a larger issue..
on
Read the Fine Print
·
· Score: 1
Personally, I think this article was written just for the sake of sensationalism and to nit-pick at some details of a EULA.
Personally, I think MS was trying to sneak the ability to patch its digital "rights" management code, and possible to do darker things, under the radar by burying the "agreement" to this in a EULA they know hardly anyone reads. And that the media have done the right thing by throwing a flag.
Slashdot Mirror
Your digital "rights" managed TrustedPCs will connect to a giant virtual disk array via the network, where what you store will be subject to government and corporate monitoring and removal.
Think this is nuts? Where are the 200GB drives? Why is Intuit pushing us to store tax and financial information on their site? Why does Microsoft want to give us an authentication token that's good for retrieving our information "anywhere, anytime."
Why would anyone (other than a legitimate large corporation) have a need for local storage, once the Internet storage product is fast and cheap? I can only imagine one use for local storage--copyright infringement.
What do you have to offer us to:
- pay us for what you want--it must have value since you want it in the public domain, and it's our duty to extract that value for our shareholders.
- protect us from liability should anyone manage to damage themselves or their own companies with the product you want us to give away.
Unfortunately, there aren't easy answers to those objections. The answer isn't some kind of volunatry feel-good way to have corporations give to the public domain, because it's not going to happen. The answer is to make copyright for a "limited time," as the framers intended. Not for 95 years when 5 years is an eternity in <cliche>Internet time<cliche>.
this idea has the potential (get it?) to make a short in your network card a little more hazardous. This is a BOFH moment waiting to happen.
Unless Google reimplemented their own operating system, or <shudder> ported it to Win2K, they have a very expensive product, that runs on Linux, that is not GPL.
More power to Google--I'm glad to see them finding a way to make money without trashing their search engine, like happened with the previously good search engines that came before (e.g. Altavista, Lycos).
The outsourcing is a problem that could be addressed by legislation. But it's more effectively addressed by the fact that remote management isn't as easy as it sounds, and that large corporations are often loath to trust their data store to offshore programmers against whom suits or criminal action in the event of data theft might be difficult.
Not as a government allegedly concerned with the well being of its people. Now as a government that's a wholly owned subsidiary of corporations and the moneyed few, your statement makes perfect sense.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not a xenophobe, and see nothing nefarious about the idea of allowing people from other countries to fill positions for which there are no Americans available.
But it doesn't make sense to provide jobs for outsiders when our own can fill them.
At this point it's pretty obvious that the purpose of the H1B program has all along been to depress IT wages and skew the job market in favor of corporate employers. Employers have been making up "special skills" or listing jobs with low salaries to show an "effort" to hire a U.S. citizen, then hiring indentured H1Bs for 1/2 to 2/3 the salary. This should come as no surprise, since the same employers used the same tricks to not pay the market wage for U.S. electrical engineers in the 80s.
The program needs to be ended now. Current H1B visa holders should allowed to stay to the end of their terms, then they should return home to bring up the level of IT skill in their home nations, as the lobbyists and Congress said would happen.
Aw, man. That was a cheap shot. Not everyone can be an Alpha Plus, you know.
Wow. Bill's going to miss that 0.00000000000000000000000001 percent of annual sales.
Really, I agree with your sentiment, but it's better not to throw around numbers unless you have some big ones.
~~~
The decision did acknowledge that the enforceability of a shrinkwrap license isn't as certain as Adobe or Microsoft would have us believe:
As far as I'm concerned, the minute I have to sign an actual contract with a pen, there's a license. Until then, I bought my copy, meaning that nice things like the First Sale Doctrine apply. And the day shrinkwrap licenses become actually enforcable, they'll either become a hell of a lot more reasonable or I'll stick with software to which none apply.The one place we've had luck is getting several CS labs converted. The problem is that Linux didn't displace NT/2000/XP. Oh, no. It displaced Digital Unix. Which, since DEC was bought by Compaquard Bell, is probably not all bad.
I know that there aren't any Open Source applications for which license will expire and we'd have to upgrade whether we like it or not.
And even when things are working fine, Microsoft coerces upgrades by using network effects. Files written in new versions often can't be read by previous versions. (I'll admit they've gotten better about this--only Access and PowerPoint, IIRC, broke in the last two Office releases.)
And I don't see how it's silly to compare the DOS to Win* transitions. Look at all that money that could have been saved in retraining by just using what we had! It's the same argument that's being used against Open Source, even in the face of annual license fees. I stand by the idea that there will have to be only one major retraining, which would pay for itself once the first round of MS upgrades is skipped.
And I don't believe for a minute that there won't be some compelling reason to upgrade all those perfectly working Win98/2K/Office 97/2000 boxes. Even if that compelling reason is avoiding more and more intrusive audits or some other outright extortion as MS becomes more desparate for cash. Oh, and look for the educational license discounts to go away as schools become more firmly addicted (by the TCO argument) to the programs.
- in the transition from DOS to Windows 3.0/3.1
- in the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95
- in the transition from Office 4.3 to Office 95
- in the transition from Office 95 to Office 97
- in the transition from Office 97 to Office 2000
- in the transition from cc:Mail to Outlook
. . . you get the idea. Hell, at least we'd only have to retrain everyone once if we picked an open source platform and weren't forced onto the MS upgrade treadmill.
However, Microsoft has the administrators convinced that the "total cost of ownership" for the MS products is less than it would be for a pure open source solution.
Perhaps proposing a departmental pilot of a package including Linux and Star Office for about twenty or so people, and determining how true the training deficiency theory is, might be the way to go. However, to get the full experience, someone's going to have to port the VBscript worms to Linux first.
Could have something to do with the fact that vendors often supply "helpful" templates to procurement officers that are often so tightly written that only one vendor's product will meet the requirements, much less that any open source product would.
One more big difference. Richard Stallman is a genius. Richard Morrell is just a dick.
Now, Microsoft wants to collect a toll for everything that happens on the Internet. Not mentioned all the flowery hype about .net, Passport, and seamless access to your information from anywhere, is that Microsoft will tax everything that happens, directly or indirectly. The only way to prevent this from happening is to deny Microsoft the benefit of the network effect--to have people (rightfully) mistrust Microsoft and not buy into .net.
What Icaza is doing is giving a veneer of credibility to Microsoft that it does not deserve (see--even the Linux zealots want it, and they're paranoid). That makes him the Benedict Arnold of the GPL. Let's hope he meets a similar fate, metaphorically speaking, before he has a chance to spend Cornwallis' money.
Use some foam (the kind used in upholstery works nice) around the edges of fans where they meet the case. You'd be surprised how much of that fan noise is actually due to the vibrations being transmitted to the steel itself.
~~~
. . . otherwise, there'll be a special broadcast on radio, cable, and embedded in trojan MP3s one day. It'll be Jack Valenti's voice saying "Don't play non-SDMI compliant content anymore." :).
is the road of destruction. Icaza is either a fool or a sellout for getting in bed with Microsoft.
Except Microsoft wants to do this when you buy (that's right, buy, not "license") windows. Of course, MSs wet dream is to have you have to pay for Windows like a lease. They get as close as they can by "obsoleting" versions and encouraging vendors to do the same. Didn't work with XP, thankfully.
Along with Borland, because its glory days are long past.
That's because those agreements won't ever hold up, and attempts to actually give them the force of law (q.v. UCITA) aren't doing well, even with MS owning half the legislative, half the judicial, and all the executive branches.
Personally, I think MS was trying to sneak the ability to patch its digital "rights" management code, and possible to do darker things, under the radar by burying the "agreement" to this in a EULA they know hardly anyone reads. And that the media have done the right thing by throwing a flag.