When RMS wrote the first version of the GPL, it aroused a storm of controversy on gnu.misc.discuss. I was one of many, arguing as "johnston@me.udel.edu", that the GPL was not communistic but rather a peculiar use of the intellectual property and copyright laws of the United States. One that has proved in practice to be sufficiently "iron-clad" in its legal formulation that large corporations like IBM and government agencies like the NSA have followed the GPL to the letter. I bowed out of the Usenet debates in 1991 when Linux took off, because by then it appeared to me that the eventual successful creation of a free replacement for unix - RMS's original goal - had become a fait accompli, the Hurd project notwithstanding.
And so today we hear that the largest nation on earth is choosing Linux over Microsoft. RMS could have told you that would happen 15-odd years ago, after he finished writing the first draft of the GPL. It doesn't matter how long it takes; free software in the RMS sense of the word will eventually win out over the black-box proprietary model. RMS knew it then, and so did Per Abrahamsen, Barry Margolin, Adam Richter, Eric Raymond, HJ Lu, John Gilmore, Larry Wall, Jon "maddog" Hall, and all those who were involved in the free software movement long before Linus Torvalds picked up a copy of Andrew Tannenbaum's book on Minix and decided to try to write his own operating system. The great thing about young people is that they are too young to know that big projects are too hard to try, so they try them anyway. So we thank Linus most of all.
As a former Verizon employee, I think I can speak with some experience on this topic. While there are many hard-working and dedicated people working for Verizon who would like nothing better than to deliver first-rate service to customers, even if it means competing on an even playing field with other competition, I do not believe that these beliefs are held by upper management.
I should add that I was never a part of upper management, but at many times during my career with Bell Atlantic/Verizon I experienced the frustration of wading through their bloated and slow-moving ISO 9001 policies and procedures, hampered by continuous corporate reorgs and back-stabbing turf-mongering middle managers who wouldn't move a muscle to help get something done for a customer until one of my superiors at an equivalent managerial level made the call for help on my behalf.
The mere fact that the customer's Internet, or frame-relay service was down, or was scheduled to be installed and the installer hadn't shown up yet wasn't good enough; if I was calling a manager at the "Director" level in the chain of command, nothing happened until he got a call and a confirming email from a fellow director.
Here's a good example that I worked on personally. The District of Columbia Public School system gets its internal school-to-school network service and Internet connectivity from Bell Atlantic/Verizon at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars per months. For a period of a year and a half, none of the classrooms could access the Internet from their PCs, and all Verizon did was schedule a monthly meeting in which they marched in about 8 or 10 "suits" to apologize and say "we're working on it".
One day they invited me to join the "apology" meeting. I offered to do a network audit, and found that the schools had installed their own firewall system on an outdated and mis-configured dual pentium 200 system. After submitting the network audit, demonstrating the source of the bottleneck that was choking off Internet connectivity, I wrote up a proposal for a new dual Cisco PIX system, with a WebSense content filter system (for the kiddies), and we cut corners with the DC government's convoluted purchasing system to have it installed at cost so that the DC schools could get their Internet back. It's been working fine ever since.
So like I said, there are plenty of people at Verizon who would like to do a good job, but the system is so bureaucratic that it's almost impossible to work within. Good network engineers rarely stay very long with the company, unless they are the kind of people who value stability and like the regular hours, steady paycheck, and job security that a job with a company like Verizon offers.
Fortunately, there are a lot of people working for Verizon who fall into this category, and that's why the Verizon part of the Internet backbone is as reliable as it is, and why you almost invariably get dial-tone when you pick up the phone.
But does Verizon need the extra help of Tauzin-Dingell to "protect" itself against AT&T and "unfair competition" from the CLECs? I for one vote "NO".
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When RMS wrote the first version of the GPL, it aroused a storm of controversy on gnu.misc.discuss. I was one of many, arguing as "johnston@me.udel.edu", that the GPL was not communistic but rather a peculiar use of the intellectual property and copyright laws of the United States. One that has proved in practice to be sufficiently "iron-clad" in its legal formulation that large corporations like IBM and government agencies like the NSA have followed the GPL to the letter. I bowed out of the Usenet debates in 1991 when Linux took off, because by then it appeared to me that the eventual successful creation of a free replacement for unix - RMS's original goal - had become a fait accompli, the Hurd project notwithstanding.
And so today we hear that the largest nation on earth is choosing Linux over Microsoft. RMS could have told you that would happen 15-odd years ago, after he finished writing the first draft of the GPL. It doesn't matter how long it takes; free software in the RMS sense of the word will eventually win out over the black-box proprietary model. RMS knew it then, and so did Per Abrahamsen, Barry Margolin, Adam Richter, Eric Raymond, HJ Lu, John Gilmore, Larry Wall, Jon "maddog" Hall, and all those who were involved in the free software movement long before Linus Torvalds picked up a copy of Andrew Tannenbaum's book on Minix and decided to try to write his own operating system. The great thing about young people is that they are too young to know that big projects are too hard to try, so they try them anyway. So we thank Linus most of all.
As a former Verizon employee, I think I can speak with some experience on this topic. While there are many hard-working and dedicated people working for Verizon who would like nothing better than to deliver first-rate service to customers, even if it means competing on an even playing field with other competition, I do not believe that these beliefs are held by upper management.
I should add that I was never a part of upper management, but at many times during my career with Bell Atlantic/Verizon I experienced the frustration of wading through their bloated and slow-moving ISO 9001 policies and procedures, hampered by continuous corporate reorgs and back-stabbing turf-mongering middle managers who wouldn't move a muscle to help get something done for a customer until one of my superiors at an equivalent managerial level made the call for help on my behalf.
The mere fact that the customer's Internet, or frame-relay service was down, or was scheduled to be installed and the installer hadn't shown up yet wasn't good enough; if I was calling a manager at the "Director" level in the chain of command, nothing happened until he got a call and a confirming email from a fellow director.
Here's a good example that I worked on personally. The District of Columbia Public School system gets its internal school-to-school network service and Internet connectivity from Bell Atlantic/Verizon at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars per months. For a period of a year and a half, none of the classrooms could access the Internet from their PCs, and all Verizon did was schedule a monthly meeting in which they marched in about 8 or 10 "suits" to apologize and say "we're working on it".
One day they invited me to join the "apology" meeting. I offered to do a network audit, and found that the schools had installed their own firewall system on an outdated and mis-configured dual pentium 200 system. After submitting the network audit, demonstrating the source of the bottleneck that was choking off Internet connectivity, I wrote up a proposal for a new dual Cisco PIX system, with a WebSense content filter system (for the kiddies), and we cut corners with the DC government's convoluted purchasing system to have it installed at cost so that the DC schools could get their Internet back. It's been working fine ever since.
So like I said, there are plenty of people at Verizon who would like to do a good job, but the system is so bureaucratic that it's almost impossible to work within. Good network engineers rarely stay very long with the company, unless they are the kind of people who value stability and like the regular hours, steady paycheck, and job security that a job with a company like Verizon offers.
Fortunately, there are a lot of people working for Verizon who fall into this category, and that's why the Verizon part of the Internet backbone is as reliable as it is, and why you almost invariably get dial-tone when you pick up the phone. But does Verizon need the extra help of Tauzin-Dingell to "protect" itself against AT&T and "unfair competition" from the CLECs? I for one vote "NO".