I for one don't think it's ethical of them to force others to release their source code.
The terms of the GPL could be seen as onerous for companies that make money off proprietary closed-source software, but that's a "glass is half empty" way of looking at it. Think of it this way: Cisco gets an operating system, that they can modify as much as they like for $0. All they have to do is release the source code along with any work they do that derives from it. They don't lose any money by allowing their modifications to be licensed under the GPL, so they still come out ahead. No one is forcing them to use Linux or accept the GPL but if they do then they should abide by the terms. Sounds perfectly ethical to me.
The GPL does present a threat to companies that design their software to maintain their market dominance, but I personally see that as a good thing!
While I disagree with most of the author's conclusions, I can understand how someone steeped in traditional business models would feel that way.
What's more, the author could have easily spun it the other way; this is a simple case of Cisco breaking the terms of their license, and facing legal action as a result. This argument would make perfect sense from a business perspective.
But as another poster pointed out, it would appear that it's only acceptable to enforce the terms of your license if you're a big multinational company. If you aren't acting solely in your own interest you're perceived as a threat. I wonder how you would explain the psychology behind this?
Sure, Microsoft could use.NET obfuscator, or some such, but how in the world could they expect customers to debug code that's been obfuscated?
In non-trivial cases they could patent their procedures, thereby keeping their IL intelligible while preventing anyone else from implementing it elsewhere.
Assuming that software is made more secure because access to the source code is restricted is a bad policy as it is just another form of security by obscurity. Even if the Chinese government didn't have the source code to Windows there would be nothing to stop them from reverse-engineering it. It would take them longer, but if they wanted to find holes then I'm sure they could.
In fact, you could even argue that closed-source favours the "bad guys" because only someone who stands to gain personally would want to invest their time in reverse-engineering and decompiling proprietary code. A better option is to design your software well and make the source code available to everyone, that way you're making it easier for people to find bugs and are more likely to get told about them when they do.
Proprietary operating systems are a national security risk and should be treated as such.
I can't believe that this was taken so seriously by so many people because it is so futile. Basically, the law stipulates that freely serving any content of a nature that would prevent it from being shown on free-to-air TV cannot be hosted in Australia. As anyone who has used the internet for more than a few minutes would know, it doesn't matter where in the world the server you're connecting to is located so this has had absolutely no effect whatsoever in making it harder for Australians to access stuff that their government doesn't think they should see.
Unless, of course, you were to argue that the law wasn't passed with the intention of it being useful for anything other than buttering up the conservative Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine, whose vote the government needed at the time in order to pass a law allowing them to sell off more of Telstra, in which case it was very effective... but who would be that cynical?
And, what's more, he is extremely popular with most Australians because of the the way he does his job. He was extremely successful at playing to Australian mainstream opinion which says that that refugees claiming to be fleeing from persecution are really scheming "queue-jumpers" who just want to take advantage of us.
As far as privacy goes, your average Australian seems to think that if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to be worried about, mate! No doubt Ruddock will be managing his new portfolio with these people in mind.
I don't see how this rates as "insightful". To start off with, what languages/runtimes are you comparing.NET/Mono to? Under what circumstances are you making your comparisons?
Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of areas where.NET stands out: the first is developing Windows applications - it beats the hell out of Swing (for example) for developing GUIs. Granted the cross-platform support will take a while to get there. The other area is ASP.NET, which provides, in my opinion, a much better framework than most other platforms for writing dynamic web pages because it allows you to completely separate your HTML from the code that manipulates it. And it shouldn't be too long before you can run ASP.NET web apps completely within Mono or DotGNU.
I wouldn't go that far... I think the amount of time and energy he has put into developing free software is pretty admirable. And even if I don't agree with everything he says I think that you need people who doggedly stick to their guns the way he does. I think it's good that he talks about things like ethics and fairness when other people would rather shy away from issues that are perceived as "bad for business". It's just the bitterness towards Linux that I find rather unbecoming.
RMS (and many other people here) seem so complacent about this
I get the feeling that RMS isn't just complacent about the replacement of Linux, but indeed eager to see it go.
The whole thing was going to be the FSF's revolution, but then along came some upstart Finn who actually managed to write a kernel, and was suddenly anointed by all but the afficionados as "the guy who started off the whole Free Software thing". GNU is now more popular and ubiquitous than ever but few people realise it. To add insult to injury, the Linux guys had the temerity to poplularise their own watered-down version of the FSF's Free Software philosophy, giving it the less threatening title of "Open Source", which went on to gain widespread popularity.
RMS is basically pissed off about Linux doing as well as it has done, at the expense of the recognition of GNU. Understandable, in a way; but he doesn't seem to appreciate that a lot more people are aware of the FSF and what it stands for as a result of Linux doing so well.
While I feel for him, this endless sniping at Linux just ends up making him look like a bit of a jerk.
Your concern that the courts are not the place to decide what is a professional media outlet is strange. The law covering print media exists, and has precedents. Surely these would cover this.
Feel free to correct me if my understanding of this is a little simplistic, but "professional" essentially entails that you're making money to do whatever you're doing.
So let's say someone has a blog, where they express their personal opinions. Their primary reason for keeping it is the satisfaction that they get out of having other people read their work. Sounds pretty amateur so far. What if they happen to put banner ads on their site and, by some miracle, begin to make a small profit? You could argue that at this point the whole thing becomes a professional venture, however if the blog writer was required to give subjects of their criticism the right of reply, they would almost certainly not have the resources to do this properly (verification, legal advice, etc.)
I think you'll find that if you look into it, the distinction between professional and amateur, especially when it comes to online media, isn't clear-cut at all.
It would also make it easier for them to justify the integration of Windows and IE in the context of any anti-trust disputes.
One of the problems that Microsoft faced in the anti-trust trial was claiming that Internet Explorer was part of Windows when there was a completely standalone version available for the Macintosh. By ditching the Mac version of IE, they can do away with this annoying little fact.
I suspect that there may be more than coincidence behind the announcement of the end of Mac IE updates, along with that of future versions being integrated with Windows from now on.
"But Microsoft was allowed to charge for the protocols because servers were not part of the antitrust case."
The article then goes on to quote a Novell spokesperson, who says "There is something fundamentally wrong with requiring Novell to pay large sums of money to access information that the court determined Microsoft illegally withheld."
There was a proposal put forward by the Labor opposition last year to do something like this. The idea was similar to what the original post described, in that Telstra would be split into two corporations; but one of the would have been a government-owned monopoly which owned and maintained the telecommunications infrastructure. The other corporation was to be privately-owned and in the business of selling services.
It's a bit different to what you describe with Railtrack. When the UK Conservative government split up the rail industry, they privatised the whole thing, so the infrastructure was privately owned and run by people whose main interest was to return value to their shareholders. In the end it became a complete fiasco, as you describe. Perhaps the question is: would it have worked any better if they had kept Railtrack public and just privatised the bits that used the infrastructure, i.e. the train companies?
The problem with the situation in Australia is that there is one company, half public and half private, which has a monopoly on the infrastructure but is expected to compete and play fair with the other service providers, all of them relying on the resources that Telstra owns. And if it's a conflict of interest now, wait until Telstra becomes 100% public.
To split up Telstra in the way that Labor were suggesting would have cost Telstra billions of dollars, wiping about 20% off their share price, but I tend to think that it would be better to take the hit now, rather than pay in the long term by having a greedy monopolist in charge, that is quite happy to keep Australia's telecommunications systems lagging several years behind the rest of the world.
On the bright side--I'm quite happy with my ISP: 6 GB of peak time downloads per month and unlimited off-peak downloads over a 512/256kbps link for A$77/month.
A good deployment requires a firm understanding of what is being deployed, and that requires the same amount of work for Apache or IIS.
Plus you have a much better idea of what you've done with a config file. Try working out what's been done to an IIS server without having to click through endless dialogue boxes. If you're not prepared to invest some time in learning how to write a script that queries the metabase, that's about your only choice.
IIS's design is targeted at people who don't know what they're doing, and aren't willing to learn. The problem is that this is exactly what you don't want when you're exposing your information systems to the rest of the world.
Admittedly they've improved things in this regard with IIS 6 and its XML config file, but I haven't checked it out yet and remain to be convinced...
From Genius--Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick
Feynman explored most of [the Los Alamos perimiter fence's] length. When he discovered holes, with well-beaten paths leading through, he pointed them out in a spirit of good citizenship, annoyed only that the guards responded so lackadaisically. ("I explained it to him & the officer in charge," he wrote Arline, "but I bet they don't do anything.") He never realized that the holes had semiofficial sanction. The security staff tolerated them--with Oppenheimer's connivance, it seemed--so that people from the local tribes could come to the laboratory's twelve-cent movies.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to verify this, but chances are that any request for a new domain gets reviewed by a real person somewhere down the line before it is added into their DNS. Given that, the chances of getting www.iloveosama.mil would be substantially lower.
Re:Interesting future indeed..
on
The Future of Java?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm asking myself the same question... There are several reasons why business would still have a strong interest in Java (integration with Sun and IBM products, a mature, stable language, lots of Java programmers, and so on.)
But for more small-scale projects, writing software to run in the.NET framework seems to make a fair bit of sense, especially if you want a GUI and your target audience is only Windows users. There are still a lot of things that you can't do in Mono or DotGNU, though, most notably Windows Forms, and it remains to be seen how reliable their implementations will be.
Interesting that Microsoft doesn't rate a single mention in the timeline. Although O'Reilly has always been more in tune with the worlds of Unix and Open Source, this is still interesting. Does this reveal anything of their opinion of their own books on Microsoft software?
Nice article. Brought to my attention a few bits of UI-related cruftiness that I was unaware that I had become accustomed to. There are a few things that I would add, however:
The problem of oversimplification in Microsoft software is pervasive. Getting people to access "the Internet" through the one icon all the time might make things easier to start off with but doesn't give your average user much of an idea of what they're doing. It also means that if you're on a helpdesk you have to deal with bizzare assertions such as: "the internet's not working", or confounded silence when you ask someone what web browser they're using.
The point about the inconsistency between file manager and "open" dialogue interfaces is very apt. In my last job I did a lot of desktop support and found that a lot of people just didn't use or understand the need for something like Windows Explorer, no matter how much gentle chiding I subjected them to. So I'd keep having to explain to them why they shouldn't use the the open command in Word if they just wanted to open any old document... of course this presumes that the person you're talking to understands what a Word document is. Microsoft doesn't help here--if you're accessing files on a network then you almost have to be using shared drives. The problem is that "My Computer" isn't very good at navigating these and they now hide "Windows Explorer" deep within the Start menu, as if they're somehow ashamed of its existence.
In GUI applications that use sticky menus, (i.e. anything not made for a pre-MacOS8 Macintosh) if you want to close an open menu, you have to click outside it. In some apps if you click in the wrong place, the program does something that you didn't want it to do. One (completely arbitrary) example of this is Konqueror. If you click outside of a menu in order to close it and the mouse pointer happens to be hovering over a link, or a folder, you end up opening whatever it is you clicked on. So you get around this by having to hunt around the window for a "safe" region to click on. Mozilla, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem.
Of course, there's the classic example of UI cruftiness--in order to shut down Windows, you have to go through the Start menu.
I guess it's all a result of things becoming more complicated, as well as software companies wanting to maintain their marketshare without alienating their users. I tend to think that, as far as elegance and simplicity goes, nothing has beaten the Macintosh, circa System 6.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever modded this as flamebait might want to learn about the concept of irony...
On the other hand, it's not that far fetched! Last year the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held a hearing into International Copyright Piracy: A Growing Problem With Links To Organized Crime And Terrorism. In the 50s it was communists. These days it's people taking camcorders into cinemas who are the enemy.
Or you can stop trying to secure access to cheap energy by installing or propping up despotic regimes with appalling human rights records.
The terms of the GPL could be seen as onerous for companies that make money off proprietary closed-source software, but that's a "glass is half empty" way of looking at it. Think of it this way: Cisco gets an operating system, that they can modify as much as they like for $0. All they have to do is release the source code along with any work they do that derives from it. They don't lose any money by allowing their modifications to be licensed under the GPL, so they still come out ahead. No one is forcing them to use Linux or accept the GPL but if they do then they should abide by the terms. Sounds perfectly ethical to me.
The GPL does present a threat to companies that design their software to maintain their market dominance, but I personally see that as a good thing!
What's more, the author could have easily spun it the other way; this is a simple case of Cisco breaking the terms of their license, and facing legal action as a result. This argument would make perfect sense from a business perspective.
But as another poster pointed out, it would appear that it's only acceptable to enforce the terms of your license if you're a big multinational company. If you aren't acting solely in your own interest you're perceived as a threat. I wonder how you would explain the psychology behind this?
In non-trivial cases they could patent their procedures, thereby keeping their IL intelligible while preventing anyone else from implementing it elsewhere.
Assuming that software is made more secure because access to the source code is restricted is a bad policy as it is just another form of security by obscurity. Even if the Chinese government didn't have the source code to Windows there would be nothing to stop them from reverse-engineering it. It would take them longer, but if they wanted to find holes then I'm sure they could.
In fact, you could even argue that closed-source favours the "bad guys" because only someone who stands to gain personally would want to invest their time in reverse-engineering and decompiling proprietary code. A better option is to design your software well and make the source code available to everyone, that way you're making it easier for people to find bugs and are more likely to get told about them when they do.
Indeed...You're forgetting the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999
I can't believe that this was taken so seriously by so many people because it is so futile. Basically, the law stipulates that freely serving any content of a nature that would prevent it from being shown on free-to-air TV cannot be hosted in Australia. As anyone who has used the internet for more than a few minutes would know, it doesn't matter where in the world the server you're connecting to is located so this has had absolutely no effect whatsoever in making it harder for Australians to access stuff that their government doesn't think they should see.
Unless, of course, you were to argue that the law wasn't passed with the intention of it being useful for anything other than buttering up the conservative Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine, whose vote the government needed at the time in order to pass a law allowing them to sell off more of Telstra, in which case it was very effective... but who would be that cynical?
And, what's more, he is extremely popular with most Australians because of the the way he does his job. He was extremely successful at playing to Australian mainstream opinion which says that that refugees claiming to be fleeing from persecution are really scheming "queue-jumpers" who just want to take advantage of us.
As far as privacy goes, your average Australian seems to think that if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to be worried about, mate! No doubt Ruddock will be managing his new portfolio with these people in mind.
Or point to the computer and call it the "hard drive"...
I don't see how this rates as "insightful". To start off with, what languages/runtimes are you comparing .NET/Mono to? Under what circumstances are you making your comparisons?
Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of areas where .NET stands out: the first is developing Windows applications - it beats the hell out of Swing (for example) for developing GUIs. Granted the cross-platform support will take a while to get there. The other area is ASP.NET, which provides, in my opinion, a much better framework than most other platforms for writing dynamic web pages because it allows you to completely separate your HTML from the code that manipulates it. And it shouldn't be too long before you can run ASP.NET web apps completely within Mono or DotGNU.
Why, when I go to Help -> About Mozilla, does it say:
Mozilla 1.5bMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030722
Are they calling their alphas betas now?
> Sex on your resume is ALWAYS bad. See Bill Clinton.
Monica Lewinsky OTOH...
I wouldn't go that far... I think the amount of time and energy he has put into developing free software is pretty admirable. And even if I don't agree with everything he says I think that you need people who doggedly stick to their guns the way he does. I think it's good that he talks about things like ethics and fairness when other people would rather shy away from issues that are perceived as "bad for business". It's just the bitterness towards Linux that I find rather unbecoming.
I get the feeling that RMS isn't just complacent about the replacement of Linux, but indeed eager to see it go.
The whole thing was going to be the FSF's revolution, but then along came some upstart Finn who actually managed to write a kernel, and was suddenly anointed by all but the afficionados as "the guy who started off the whole Free Software thing". GNU is now more popular and ubiquitous than ever but few people realise it. To add insult to injury, the Linux guys had the temerity to poplularise their own watered-down version of the FSF's Free Software philosophy, giving it the less threatening title of "Open Source", which went on to gain widespread popularity.
RMS is basically pissed off about Linux doing as well as it has done, at the expense of the recognition of GNU. Understandable, in a way; but he doesn't seem to appreciate that a lot more people are aware of the FSF and what it stands for as a result of Linux doing so well.
While I feel for him, this endless sniping at Linux just ends up making him look like a bit of a jerk.
Feel free to correct me if my understanding of this is a little simplistic, but "professional" essentially entails that you're making money to do whatever you're doing.
So let's say someone has a blog, where they express their personal opinions. Their primary reason for keeping it is the satisfaction that they get out of having other people read their work. Sounds pretty amateur so far. What if they happen to put banner ads on their site and, by some miracle, begin to make a small profit? You could argue that at this point the whole thing becomes a professional venture, however if the blog writer was required to give subjects of their criticism the right of reply, they would almost certainly not have the resources to do this properly (verification, legal advice, etc.)
I think you'll find that if you look into it, the distinction between professional and amateur, especially when it comes to online media, isn't clear-cut at all.
It would also make it easier for them to justify the integration of Windows and IE in the context of any anti-trust disputes.
One of the problems that Microsoft faced in the anti-trust trial was claiming that Internet Explorer was part of Windows when there was a completely standalone version available for the Macintosh. By ditching the Mac version of IE, they can do away with this annoying little fact.
I suspect that there may be more than coincidence behind the announcement of the end of Mac IE updates, along with that of future versions being integrated with Windows from now on.
As opposed to the post-Bush administration that comes before it?
The article then goes on to quote a Novell spokesperson, who says "There is something fundamentally wrong with requiring Novell to pay large sums of money to access information that the court determined Microsoft illegally withheld."
I'm confused. Can someone please enlighten us?
There was a proposal put forward by the Labor opposition last year to do something like this. The idea was similar to what the original post described, in that Telstra would be split into two corporations; but one of the would have been a government-owned monopoly which owned and maintained the telecommunications infrastructure. The other corporation was to be privately-owned and in the business of selling services.
It's a bit different to what you describe with Railtrack. When the UK Conservative government split up the rail industry, they privatised the whole thing, so the infrastructure was privately owned and run by people whose main interest was to return value to their shareholders. In the end it became a complete fiasco, as you describe. Perhaps the question is: would it have worked any better if they had kept Railtrack public and just privatised the bits that used the infrastructure, i.e. the train companies?
The problem with the situation in Australia is that there is one company, half public and half private, which has a monopoly on the infrastructure but is expected to compete and play fair with the other service providers, all of them relying on the resources that Telstra owns. And if it's a conflict of interest now, wait until Telstra becomes 100% public.
To split up Telstra in the way that Labor were suggesting would have cost Telstra billions of dollars, wiping about 20% off their share price, but I tend to think that it would be better to take the hit now, rather than pay in the long term by having a greedy monopolist in charge, that is quite happy to keep Australia's telecommunications systems lagging several years behind the rest of the world.
On the bright side--I'm quite happy with my ISP: 6 GB of peak time downloads per month and unlimited off-peak downloads over a 512/256kbps link for A$77/month.
Plus you have a much better idea of what you've done with a config file. Try working out what's been done to an IIS server without having to click through endless dialogue boxes. If you're not prepared to invest some time in learning how to write a script that queries the metabase, that's about your only choice.
IIS's design is targeted at people who don't know what they're doing, and aren't willing to learn. The problem is that this is exactly what you don't want when you're exposing your information systems to the rest of the world.
Admittedly they've improved things in this regard with IIS 6 and its XML config file, but I haven't checked it out yet and remain to be convinced...
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to verify this, but chances are that any request for a new domain gets reviewed by a real person somewhere down the line before it is added into their DNS. Given that, the chances of getting www.iloveosama.mil would be substantially lower.
I'm asking myself the same question... There are several reasons why business would still have a strong interest in Java (integration with Sun and IBM products, a mature, stable language, lots of Java programmers, and so on.)
.NET framework seems to make a fair bit of sense, especially if you want a GUI and your target audience is only Windows users. There are still a lot of things that you can't do in Mono or DotGNU, though, most notably Windows Forms, and it remains to be seen how reliable their implementations will be.
But for more small-scale projects, writing software to run in the
Interesting that Microsoft doesn't rate a single mention in the timeline. Although O'Reilly has always been more in tune with the worlds of Unix and Open Source, this is still interesting. Does this reveal anything of their opinion of their own books on Microsoft software?
-
The problem of oversimplification in Microsoft software is pervasive. Getting people to access "the Internet" through the one icon all the time might make things easier to start off with but doesn't give your average user much of an idea of what they're doing. It also means that if you're on a helpdesk you have to deal with bizzare assertions such as: "the internet's not working", or confounded silence when you ask someone what web browser they're using.
-
The point about the inconsistency between file manager and "open" dialogue interfaces is very apt. In my last job I did a lot of desktop support and found that a lot of people just didn't use or understand the need for something like Windows Explorer, no matter how much gentle chiding I subjected them to. So I'd keep having to explain to them why they shouldn't use the the open command in Word if they just wanted to open any old document... of course this presumes that the person you're talking to understands what a Word document is. Microsoft doesn't help here--if you're accessing files on a network then you almost have to be using shared drives. The problem is that "My Computer" isn't very good at navigating these and they now hide "Windows Explorer" deep within the Start menu, as if they're somehow ashamed of its existence.
-
In GUI applications that use sticky menus, (i.e. anything not made for a pre-MacOS8 Macintosh) if you want to close an open menu, you have to click outside it. In some apps if you click in the wrong place, the program does something that you didn't want it to do. One (completely arbitrary) example of this is Konqueror. If you click outside of a menu in order to close it and the mouse pointer happens to be hovering over a link, or a folder, you end up opening whatever it is you clicked on. So you get around this by having to hunt around the window for a "safe" region to click on. Mozilla, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem.
-
Of course, there's the classic example of UI cruftiness--in order to shut down Windows, you have to go through the Start menu.
I guess it's all a result of things becoming more complicated, as well as software companies wanting to maintain their marketshare without alienating their users. I tend to think that, as far as elegance and simplicity goes, nothing has beaten the Macintosh, circa System 6.