Not sure I grok why Miguel has such icon status in the open source world, he doesn't seem to have very good judgment.
Miguel has excellent judgement.
Persuade a bunch of open source developers to work for you for free and build a copy of.Net
Release it under a open but restrictive license like GPL to get more and more people into it
Find a big corporate who hates Microsoft and wants more rights to this MS-killer and will pay big time for acess to Mono under less restrictive license
A lot of people get way too hung up on licenses and the BSD vs GPL vs XYZ debate. It all depends on where you sit in the giant technology ecosystem.
Our own niche is that we write specialised business software and then license it to people in exchange for money. We also sometimes also sub-license it to other people, which then further license it themselves.
We use open source as much as possible since it is free, open and empowers us. We often give back along the way by contributing fixes, etc., and also by freely attributing our own success to the platform we use (e.g. Linux). However, giving back to the community is NOT our primary goal - that is making enough money to pay ourselves and feed our families.
Our particular software is not of a variety that we could open source it and then make money off the services side. It is also not of a variety that we could release it under GPL, build up a demand and a hobbyist/tinkerist user base, and then sell it under propetary license for money. These are perfectly valid - but different - ways that other people make money in the open source community.
Based on all of the factors, we have a particular view of the merits of different licenses. Thats view is quite different from someone who gets their money by consulting off some open source software which they have contributed to - and different again from someone who lives at home, who's aprents buy their food, and who is immersed ni the community with a capital C and gets purely emotional reward from that.
So in our own, selfish view:
1) GPL is quite acceptable to us as long as we don't link to it. Therefore we use linux - after all, its a great OS. Linking to any GPL code is a complete no-no, as this would force us to release our own code when we sub-license.
2) Where we don't link to something, eg web server, we don't give a rat's arse. Currently its linux/apache just because those are great products. Who cares what license they fall under - we don't link to them thus it doesn't affect our ability to sell our own code.
3) Where we do link to something, it must be either LGPL, BSD or similar. This allows us to sub-license our code - one of the ways we survive as mentioned earlier.
4) We have absolutely no intention of ever releasing our code under any form of open source license. In fact, when we sub-license it, the terms explicitly forbid the licensees to do that either. Were they to do so, this would destroy our ability to earn money off our code.
My long-winded point here is that if people on slashdot were to calm down and consider that other people have quite different viewpoints - based on how they need to earn their money - or in fact whether they need money at all - then the pseudo-religious arguments about GPL vs. BSD would be seen as what they are - academic.
Perhaps we are evil because we sell our code, and build on the back of the open source community. I don't think so, since we do give back, and frankly, the nature of our software is so specialised that an open source version would never survive.
I personally feel that other open source approaches are more "evil" - for example, getting people hooked on your stuff under the GPL and then making them pay money for a commercial license - but hey, everyone has to make a living.
But at least after a while Miss Daisy'll turn up in her cut-off hot pants and chuck the judge under the chin to distract him, while the Duke boys tie a rope around the bars in your your gaol cell window and then drive off with you in the back seat of in a squeal of tires, jumping every bridge between the gaol and their old farmhouse, and then you end up spending the rest of the night chuggin' moonshine and having a good ol' time.
Or at least that's my understanding of small town USA justice based on what we see on the TV...
Right on. The fact is, OSS environments just don't hold a candle to MS when it comes to allowing you to get things going just by opening some dialogue boxes and clicking away.
Providing a dialogue box, contrary to the view of many open source enthusiasts, is not just a matter of taking the time to wrap a GUI over some settings. If it was that easy, we'd see a heck of a lot more graphical admin tools for OSS.
Rather, its:
wrapping the dialogue over all the relevant settings.
taking the time and effort to properly label and document the settings, and organise them into some sensible structure so the user doesn't have to build their own mental model on top of a comma separated or XML file.
Most importantly, making a commitment that when the underlying engine changes, you'll handle smoothly things for the user, so that after upgrade the admin dialogue will open again with the new settings in it, and the user is ready to go again.
Microsoft products are security nightmares, inflexible as hell, overly complex, farily pricy and everything else - and if you find yourself stuck, because of a stupid bug in one of their poxy APIs, you really and truly are right up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe without a paddle. They don't even begin to compare in any way to what you can achieve by stringing together some rpms or building a few products from source.
But one thing MS know how to do is to put Mr. Joe Average fairly and squarely in control of the stinking, bug-ridden jalopy that is his computing vehicle.
Too many OSS zealots forget just how many man weeks, months or years it took them to get to the point where they can whip up a LAMP server config and set up a firewall in ten minutes.
OK, I haven't read the article (I'm on Slashdot, after all), so maybe I misunderstood the article post (they are often misleading). What the hell is wrong with having multiple layers of security? That's what's been preached for years now, and it makes sense,
Nothing wrong with it. However this guy's point (I think) is that human nature, and particularly that of less tech-savvy PHBs, is that "we HAVE a firewall, therefore we are secured".
I agree with this sentiment. Lots of people (most in my experience) put their faith in something like a firewall that can never fully secure your network, and neglect other things. Most of what this guy says is not innovative - having multiple levels of DMZ, etc. But ehre are plenty of idiots out there who don't do these sensible things because "its OK, we have a FIREWALL!!!!".
By forcing the mindset of "assume we don't have a perimeter firewall - now how do we secure things" he has introduced some good security practices to his organization. Of course he has then sensationalized it in order to get his article read.
The best thing would be to return, after this, and then slap the perimeter firewall back on. Of course soon people would resume their lazy ways and the problemn would recur.
I know it's a rhetorical question, but let's say some script kiddie is trying a dictionary attack on ssh. The firewall will be useful to block that IP. Of course it is just _a_ tool, not _the_ tool for the job.
This mindset doesn't work in a real, large, datacentre, which is the kind of environment this guy is talking about.
If your ssh traffic is business critical, then shutting it off to an IP is not an option just because some script kiddy is mucking with you. You can't let him degrade your business.
You should have already had a plan for dealing with this before it happens. After all, if he's serious, it won't be one IP attacking you, it will be a zombie farm.
And if your ssh access is not business critical, or is only intermittently required, then you should not have it sitting there in the open waiting to be attacked.
Yes I know we don't run our home or small business machines like this but big boys do.
1) You apparently don't live around here or you would be aware that the Pacific refers to the entire region, not just to the ocean.
2) It would appear you are unfamiliar with the facts. France has conducted many many tests in the islands over man years, as well as even planting a bomb on board a Greenpeace protest ship in Auckland harbour (a city of over a million and hardly an uninhabited sandbar) and killing a journalist who was on board ("Rainbow Warrior" ring any bells to you?)
3) You fail to understand irony - clearly a nuclear disaster should not be wished on anyone. But the fact remains that to many of inhabitants of the Pacific the French are the devil's agents, and I will happily lump you in with the devil's tools too based on your support of them in defiance of the facts.
As an inhabitant of the Pacific, which France has defiled over many years with their constant testing of nuclear weapons, I strongly support France's desires to house a nuclear fusion reactor in their own country for once. It will certainly make a change from them blasting the hell out of, and irradiating, the unlucky natives living on atolls that fall under France's colonial umbrella.
My only desire would be that the safety procedures at the new reactor are placed under the control of a third party - preferably a college frat house, its members well supplied with halucinogenic drugs, and who could control the reactor's safety computer systems (based on Windows ME) over the Internet from their own dormrooms via a non-secured link.
However, look at it from Amazon's point of view. They're trying to make their business as unique as possible, and if it takes a few of these patents for them to keep their edge over their competitors, why not?
Exactly. The patent system is an absurd one, but also, it IS the environment we live in. Expecting Amazon to do "the right thing" by not filing absurd patents when everyone else is doing so is simply not reasonable. If anything, their filing of absurd patents is a good thing - once the absudity reaches some level the system may implode.
That said, the patent for "method for swinging from a tree" was not enough to bring it down.
I believe the only workable system is to force "inventors" to post a bond of, say, $10K, along with their patent. This is put up as a bounty, available to anyone who can break the patent - eg by proving prior art. This might spawn an entire industry of people who would spend their time cleaning up the patent system.
And before we start weeping for the poor, penniless inventors who would be disadvantaged by having to stump up some money for their patent - consider whether the current system works for these people anyway, or whether it really only serves the mega-corporates. The little man/gal with a genuine patent these days has no hope against a rapacious corporate who can trump then with 20 stupid patents.
Also, it reflects quite poorly on all the databases (Oracle, DB2, and Ingres itself) that you *need* tools like this. If they could only have figured out how to stick to standards (or *jointly* come up with new, open standards) none of this would be necessary..
You seem to be confused about the motivating factors that drive these large corporations. Their goal is to maximise their own profits. It is in no way in Oracle's interests to encourage migration off of Oracle onto an open source alternative. Why would they?
You really are truly barking mad, almost as mad as the people who marked you insightful (eitehr that or a Machiavellianly clever troll). You really think this guy is basically a murderer because he puts links offensive to the Chinese government up in his post, thus risking the life of an unwary chinese citizen who clicks on them?
I guess you better set off on your magic sled around the planet making sure that no-one ever puts anything offensive to anyone up on the Internet, since by your reasoning that makes them the guilty one if the offended party decides to take action.
The Chinese government is a reactionary, dictatorial bunch of non-democratic fascists.
The way to deal with that is not to pander to it but to challenge it with every opportunity.
By your reasoning, anyone writing anything uncomplimentatory about Hitler back in 1933 was evil, since they risked the lives if anyone who read the real story.
I wouldn't get out the champagne just yet. Selling to Government is a science all of its own, and one which many companies simply don't attempt as it is so expensive and frustrating. You will still find that the elaborate procurement steps government typically goes through will place far more emphasis on, say, how many other government clients you may have than, say, what computer operating system is used. And your proposal will still be reviewed by a bunch of dreary civil servants who, at worst, will be out and out corrupt and will go for the vendor who flies them to the Gold Coast for a "workshop", and at best, will often go for the MS solution because they have WIndows on their PC at home, use it for doing their genealogy research in the evenings and like it.
I've been reporting several bugs in Windows XP for literally years, and they haven't been fixed. If you work with both Linux and Windows XP, do you notice that Linux has a powerful, bug-free Command Line Interface, and the CLI in Windows XP is weak and buggy? (Yes, I know they are working on replacing it.)
I don't normally buy into the conspiracy theories about Microsoft, but I am absolutely 100% certain that the steady degradation of the dos box is a classic case of MS trying to herd people away from the dark side. The dos box used to work, and work well. MS have steadily - through 95, 98, and on and on in the rolecall of fucked up apologies for operating systems - made it more and more fucked.
It is absurdly obvious that to them the dos box is an abhorrent reminder of an earlier day, a trojan horse through which command line devil worshippers can work their evil, avoiding the safe, closeted world of Microsoft's GUIs.
They would absolutely love to get rid of the dos box forever, but even they need it - for example, when I was foolish enough to update the definitions in my Microsoft Spyware beta, it trashed my Microsoft firewall! MOTHER FUCKERS!! What the FUCK are you thinking! The good old dos box was the only way to recover (if you call running Microsoft's firewall "recovery"), allowing me to type in some cryptic MS bullshit "netsh Winsock reset" that rebuilds my tcp stack (or something like that). I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IT DOES!!! Why the FUCK don't you just leave the FUCKING firewall ALONE!!!!!!
Its been a bad day dealing with MS bullshite today. No more posting tonight I feel.
Right on. A bloody good, plain language posting that talks common sense - and is thus guaranteed to get all the slashhead open source zealots crawling out of the woodwork and throwing little hissy fits.
When will they release that open really does (or should) mean open. Open for others to profit from, open for the military industrial complex to build weapons from, open for porn sites to build server farms from and then sell that technology on for a profit. All disgusting uses (apart from the first), but unavoidable consequences of being open.
Random results are terrible because they are random. The scientific method [rochester.edu] depends upon experiments that can be repeated by other researchers. You can't base a theory on results that don't correlate with the inputs. You can repeat the experiment to obtain a probablistic model but not certainty.
Most of the posts are from the traditional algorithmic view of the world. e.g., How well can we survive if our multiply instruction gives us back the wrong answer?
Where this stuff is really useful is in more ambitious, random-by-nature endeavours that we don't even really achieve in yet. Like trying to seed, and drive, a cellular automaton network which could genuinely take on/develop intelligence.
For such chaotic projects, gates that may or may not work and may have random race conditions might be extremely useful.
Of course the outcome would be something irreproducible. The thing to do would be to trap it's state so we could harness it and avoid it skeynetting us.
Personally I am with the guy from Sun and would have great trepidation at someone building an immense machine from this kind of out-of-control logic. It might just wake up and kick our arses. Our own primordial soup was not so deterministic, after all.
Bit of an open question really. But are you doing any software development? Sometimes the big drain on the department's budget turns out to be some piece of ambitious development that would be better handled by buying outside.
Parent post is so insightful I wish he hadn't made it - one of the few secrets of business is what a pain in the arse it is dealing with the small fry and how grateful a huge corporate that pays you $10,000 per month is when you send them a bottle of wine at Xmas time. Doooh, I let the cat out of the bag even further!
The need for a messaging system is hard to understand if you aren't used to working with/in hideously large, heterogeneous networks and groups of affiliated companies.
What does it do? Virtually nothing. Just takes a few buytes of data and sends it from here to there. Thats the easy part - the hard part is that it does so with absolutely guaranteed results - if you send it, you know they will get it. Imagine chains of more or less reliable machines, software stacks and networks all linking together sender and receiver, and the horrendous business impact of failure of even a single message, and the non-negotiable need for auditing, and you start to see why there might just be a little tiny bit of complexity in there.
Some systems throw a few extra dyanmics in on top, such as a publish/subscribe model which takes you beyond just sender and receiver, but the essence of these things is not functionality but utter, total reliability.
Which seems to me why an open source model is not, in itself, an obvious way to produce such a piece of software. More than anything else - except perhaps database systems - people look to the vendors of these things to guarantee 100% reliability. Such a project, if open source, would require a big name behind it before any corporate would use it - and large corporates by their nature are the normal customers for these things.
At a time when hundreds of thousands of human pixels have been wiped from the global screen, we slashdotters devote our efforts to discussing the significance of buying a computer monitor with a defect so small it is virtually invisible to the human eye.
I am not complaining - this is human nature. Our attention to the detail is what drives the worl of technology.
But anyone who has not given at least a few second's thought to contributing some aid to the stricken - even if that thought resulted in a decision not to - should reexamine their priorities in life.
Truly it is said...
on
Gone Phishing?
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· Score: 4, Funny
Give a man a fish; and you have fed him for today.
Teach a man to phish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.
As for the free market, you seem to be arguing on general principle that there is no such thing as an abusive employer unless you are physically chained to your desk. That's a rather facile argument. It costs people time and suffering, one at a time, to find out they should leave their shitty job. People at EA are just trying to warn others BEFORE they waste a few years of their lives. If you're such a free marketer, you must be big on free speech too.
Hey, guess what - ALL jobs are shit to some extent, and every employer is abusive to some degree. Every corporation is ultimately in business solely to enrich its shareholders, though most have worked out that an essential prerequisite is treating their people well (or at least, somewhere up in the normal curve of employee treatment).
If someone is actually chaining you to a desk then you'll find all the help you need just a phone call away.
But if you feel like your employer is wasting your time, or causing you suffering then for fucks sake, stand up and be a homo sapien and do something about it. I personally hope this whole EA shitstorm results in a whole lot of potential employees veering right away from EA - thanks to Free Speech - and those gradgrindian mofos then incurring big costs because they have to be a whole lot nicer to their employees. Thats the way the world works, outside a few enlightened socialist paradises such as North Korea, where you might prefer to live.
I don't know much about the games industry, but on the face of it it does not seem the place to be if you want to be earning the big bucks and living life the way it used to be before the dot com crash:
Highly parallizable tasks requiring a low level of real world knowledge - wire frame modelling of chairs, swords, nubile breasts and the like - and thus open to the masses.
Resulting massive competition for what is basically a pretty cool job for a geek with lack of real world knowledge - alternatives being repeating "would you like fries with that" 200 times per day.
The actual "galley slave" analogy being not really accurate, sweaty and smelly co-workers with their armpits just centimeteres away notwithstanding - quite likely opportunities for recreational drug taking in the evenings with like-minded galley slaves.
In summary, lots of qualified people, few other employment opportunities for those people == low wages and exploitation by the man. Thats the way of the worls, always has been and always will be. If you want to earn the bucks, try some job that actually requires a higher level of skills - such as being the person who has to coordinate, motivate and manage a bunch of galley slaves - and watch you remuneration rise correspondingly.
Those are neolithic tools that were used for voting. Early Americans used them to punch out the chads on the stone tablets used in elections to select their leaders. Of course things have moved on somewhat since then...
One can only marvel at the irony - someone stealing the source code for "a firewall application providing security, intrusion protection, network monitoring and other services for business and carrier networks"!!!
I agree. When I worked at CellularOne every user was issued a W2K workstation that was locked down squeaky tight. You had to make a very good case to get access to the web and, even then, there was a hellish long list of sites that were blocked. I didn't see any spyware/malware ever. Users were not allowed to install software nor even printers. You go the application suite that your job required and you were mapped to a printer or two. It worked well and nobody was being deprived with the possible exception of folks that like to use their computer to screw off all day.
I hear completely where you're coming from, but you're only talking about the side that you see.
Locking people down, while it may well be a desirable solution because of the shite that is MS, very often leads directly to lost productivity that affects many more than just "folks that like to use their computer to screw off all day". In many cases, the problem is made worse by unresponsive IT departments who have an inbuilt superiority complex and think all users are jerks. Well, many users are jerks, but guess what - if they can't do their jobs, they cost their employer money, normally in a way that IS is utterly unaware of (and probably couldn't give a shit anyway).
Recent examples at our clients (we provide our system as an ASP, not least to avoid the claws of those freaking MS bastards, but as you can see we are still the victims):
Customer A needs to scan and OCR hard copy documents to upload them into our system. Of course they are not allowed to go down and buy a $200 HP scanner with this ability - instead they must wait for IS. IS has set up a $20,000 multi-fucntion scanner, but of course it does not do OCR. Of course there is an OCR program, but of course it is not certified for the current system image. 6 months on, over $30,000 in additional costs incurred - because IS can't provide OCR capability and won't allow a "renegade" install of a $200 HP scanner.
Customer B wants to use our system - its an ASP after all, no software to install - but their procedures for gaining web access are so cumbersome that it is simply impractical to give wide access throughout the business. More lost $$$, to us and them.
Customer C has their image locked down to Office 97 because of various (no doubt valid) MS problems. Users are unable to handle incoming documents written in later versions of Word. IS has no solution apart from waiting until 2006 for a company-wide upgrade. (Yet, strangely enough, the IT dude has Office 2003 on his OWN desktop)
Slashdot Mirror
Miguel has excellent judgement.
A lot of people get way too hung up on licenses and the BSD vs GPL vs XYZ debate. It all depends on where you sit in the giant technology ecosystem.
Our own niche is that we write specialised business software and then license it to people in exchange for money. We also sometimes also sub-license it to other people, which then further license it themselves.
We use open source as much as possible since it is free, open and empowers us. We often give back along the way by contributing fixes, etc., and also by freely attributing our own success to the platform we use (e.g. Linux). However, giving back to the community is NOT our primary goal - that is making enough money to pay ourselves and feed our families.
Our particular software is not of a variety that we could open source it and then make money off the services side. It is also not of a variety that we could release it under GPL, build up a demand and a hobbyist/tinkerist user base, and then sell it under propetary license for money. These are perfectly valid - but different - ways that other people make money in the open source community.
Based on all of the factors, we have a particular view of the merits of different licenses. Thats view is quite different from someone who gets their money by consulting off some open source software which they have contributed to - and different again from someone who lives at home, who's aprents buy their food, and who is immersed ni the community with a capital C and gets purely emotional reward from that.
So in our own, selfish view:
1) GPL is quite acceptable to us as long as we don't link to it. Therefore we use linux - after all, its a great OS. Linking to any GPL code is a complete no-no, as this would force us to release our own code when we sub-license.
2) Where we don't link to something, eg web server, we don't give a rat's arse. Currently its linux/apache just because those are great products. Who cares what license they fall under - we don't link to them thus it doesn't affect our ability to sell our own code.
3) Where we do link to something, it must be either LGPL, BSD or similar. This allows us to sub-license our code - one of the ways we survive as mentioned earlier.
4) We have absolutely no intention of ever releasing our code under any form of open source license. In fact, when we sub-license it, the terms explicitly forbid the licensees to do that either. Were they to do so, this would destroy our ability to earn money off our code.
My long-winded point here is that if people on slashdot were to calm down and consider that other people have quite different viewpoints - based on how they need to earn their money - or in fact whether they need money at all - then the pseudo-religious arguments about GPL vs. BSD would be seen as what they are - academic.
Perhaps we are evil because we sell our code, and build on the back of the open source community. I don't think so, since we do give back, and frankly, the nature of our software is so specialised that an open source version would never survive.
I personally feel that other open source approaches are more "evil" - for example, getting people hooked on your stuff under the GPL and then making them pay money for a commercial license - but hey, everyone has to make a living.
Or at least that's my understanding of small town USA justice based on what we see on the TV...
Providing a dialogue box, contrary to the view of many open source enthusiasts, is not just a matter of taking the time to wrap a GUI over some settings. If it was that easy, we'd see a heck of a lot more graphical admin tools for OSS.
Rather, its:
Microsoft products are security nightmares, inflexible as hell, overly complex, farily pricy and everything else - and if you find yourself stuck, because of a stupid bug in one of their poxy APIs, you really and truly are right up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe without a paddle. They don't even begin to compare in any way to what you can achieve by stringing together some rpms or building a few products from source.
But one thing MS know how to do is to put Mr. Joe Average fairly and squarely in control of the stinking, bug-ridden jalopy that is his computing vehicle.
Too many OSS zealots forget just how many man weeks, months or years it took them to get to the point where they can whip up a LAMP server config and set up a firewall in ten minutes.
Nothing wrong with it. However this guy's point (I think) is that human nature, and particularly that of less tech-savvy PHBs, is that "we HAVE a firewall, therefore we are secured".
I agree with this sentiment. Lots of people (most in my experience) put their faith in something like a firewall that can never fully secure your network, and neglect other things. Most of what this guy says is not innovative - having multiple levels of DMZ, etc. But ehre are plenty of idiots out there who don't do these sensible things because "its OK, we have a FIREWALL!!!!".
By forcing the mindset of "assume we don't have a perimeter firewall - now how do we secure things" he has introduced some good security practices to his organization. Of course he has then sensationalized it in order to get his article read.
The best thing would be to return, after this, and then slap the perimeter firewall back on. Of course soon people would resume their lazy ways and the problemn would recur.
This mindset doesn't work in a real, large, datacentre, which is the kind of environment this guy is talking about.
If your ssh traffic is business critical, then shutting it off to an IP is not an option just because some script kiddy is mucking with you. You can't let him degrade your business.
You should have already had a plan for dealing with this before it happens. After all, if he's serious, it won't be one IP attacking you, it will be a zombie farm.
And if your ssh access is not business critical, or is only intermittently required, then you should not have it sitting there in the open waiting to be attacked.
Yes I know we don't run our home or small business machines like this but big boys do.
2) It would appear you are unfamiliar with the facts. France has conducted many many tests in the islands over man years, as well as even planting a bomb on board a Greenpeace protest ship in Auckland harbour (a city of over a million and hardly an uninhabited sandbar) and killing a journalist who was on board ("Rainbow Warrior" ring any bells to you?)
3) You fail to understand irony - clearly a nuclear disaster should not be wished on anyone. But the fact remains that to many of inhabitants of the Pacific the French are the devil's agents, and I will happily lump you in with the devil's tools too based on your support of them in defiance of the facts.
My only desire would be that the safety procedures at the new reactor are placed under the control of a third party - preferably a college frat house, its members well supplied with halucinogenic drugs, and who could control the reactor's safety computer systems (based on Windows ME) over the Internet from their own dormrooms via a non-secured link.
Exactly. The patent system is an absurd one, but also, it IS the environment we live in. Expecting Amazon to do "the right thing" by not filing absurd patents when everyone else is doing so is simply not reasonable. If anything, their filing of absurd patents is a good thing - once the absudity reaches some level the system may implode.
That said, the patent for "method for swinging from a tree" was not enough to bring it down.
I believe the only workable system is to force "inventors" to post a bond of, say, $10K, along with their patent. This is put up as a bounty, available to anyone who can break the patent - eg by proving prior art. This might spawn an entire industry of people who would spend their time cleaning up the patent system.
And before we start weeping for the poor, penniless inventors who would be disadvantaged by having to stump up some money for their patent - consider whether the current system works for these people anyway, or whether it really only serves the mega-corporates. The little man/gal with a genuine patent these days has no hope against a rapacious corporate who can trump then with 20 stupid patents.
You seem to be confused about the motivating factors that drive these large corporations. Their goal is to maximise their own profits. It is in no way in Oracle's interests to encourage migration off of Oracle onto an open source alternative. Why would they?
I guess you better set off on your magic sled around the planet making sure that no-one ever puts anything offensive to anyone up on the Internet, since by your reasoning that makes them the guilty one if the offended party decides to take action.
The Chinese government is a reactionary, dictatorial bunch of non-democratic fascists.
The way to deal with that is not to pander to it but to challenge it with every opportunity.
By your reasoning, anyone writing anything uncomplimentatory about Hitler back in 1933 was evil, since they risked the lives if anyone who read the real story.
I wouldn't get out the champagne just yet. Selling to Government is a science all of its own, and one which many companies simply don't attempt as it is so expensive and frustrating. You will still find that the elaborate procurement steps government typically goes through will place far more emphasis on, say, how many other government clients you may have than, say, what computer operating system is used. And your proposal will still be reviewed by a bunch of dreary civil servants who, at worst, will be out and out corrupt and will go for the vendor who flies them to the Gold Coast for a "workshop", and at best, will often go for the MS solution because they have WIndows on their PC at home, use it for doing their genealogy research in the evenings and like it.
I don't normally buy into the conspiracy theories about Microsoft, but I am absolutely 100% certain that the steady degradation of the dos box is a classic case of MS trying to herd people away from the dark side. The dos box used to work, and work well. MS have steadily - through 95, 98, and on and on in the rolecall of fucked up apologies for operating systems - made it more and more fucked.
It is absurdly obvious that to them the dos box is an abhorrent reminder of an earlier day, a trojan horse through which command line devil worshippers can work their evil, avoiding the safe, closeted world of Microsoft's GUIs.
They would absolutely love to get rid of the dos box forever, but even they need it - for example, when I was foolish enough to update the definitions in my Microsoft Spyware beta, it trashed my Microsoft firewall! MOTHER FUCKERS!! What the FUCK are you thinking! The good old dos box was the only way to recover (if you call running Microsoft's firewall "recovery"), allowing me to type in some cryptic MS bullshit "netsh Winsock reset" that rebuilds my tcp stack (or something like that). I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IT DOES!!! Why the FUCK don't you just leave the FUCKING firewall ALONE!!!!!!
Its been a bad day dealing with MS bullshite today. No more posting tonight I feel.
When will they release that open really does (or should) mean open. Open for others to profit from, open for the military industrial complex to build weapons from, open for porn sites to build server farms from and then sell that technology on for a profit. All disgusting uses (apart from the first), but unavoidable consequences of being open.
One day all software will be BSD.
Most of the posts are from the traditional algorithmic view of the world. e.g., How well can we survive if our multiply instruction gives us back the wrong answer?
Where this stuff is really useful is in more ambitious, random-by-nature endeavours that we don't even really achieve in yet. Like trying to seed, and drive, a cellular automaton network which could genuinely take on/develop intelligence.
For such chaotic projects, gates that may or may not work and may have random race conditions might be extremely useful.
Of course the outcome would be something irreproducible. The thing to do would be to trap it's state so we could harness it and avoid it skeynetting us.
Personally I am with the guy from Sun and would have great trepidation at someone building an immense machine from this kind of out-of-control logic. It might just wake up and kick our arses. Our own primordial soup was not so deterministic, after all.
Bit of an open question really. But are you doing any software development? Sometimes the big drain on the department's budget turns out to be some piece of ambitious development that would be better handled by buying outside.
Parent post is so insightful I wish he hadn't made it - one of the few secrets of business is what a pain in the arse it is dealing with the small fry and how grateful a huge corporate that pays you $10,000 per month is when you send them a bottle of wine at Xmas time. Doooh, I let the cat out of the bag even further!
What does it do? Virtually nothing. Just takes a few buytes of data and sends it from here to there. Thats the easy part - the hard part is that it does so with absolutely guaranteed results - if you send it, you know they will get it. Imagine chains of more or less reliable machines, software stacks and networks all linking together sender and receiver, and the horrendous business impact of failure of even a single message, and the non-negotiable need for auditing, and you start to see why there might just be a little tiny bit of complexity in there.
Some systems throw a few extra dyanmics in on top, such as a publish/subscribe model which takes you beyond just sender and receiver, but the essence of these things is not functionality but utter, total reliability.
Which seems to me why an open source model is not, in itself, an obvious way to produce such a piece of software. More than anything else - except perhaps database systems - people look to the vendors of these things to guarantee 100% reliability. Such a project, if open source, would require a big name behind it before any corporate would use it - and large corporates by their nature are the normal customers for these things.
I am not complaining - this is human nature. Our attention to the detail is what drives the worl of technology.
But anyone who has not given at least a few second's thought to contributing some aid to the stricken - even if that thought resulted in a decision not to - should reexamine their priorities in life.
Give a man a fish; and you have fed him for today.
Teach a man to phish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.
Hey, guess what - ALL jobs are shit to some extent, and every employer is abusive to some degree. Every corporation is ultimately in business solely to enrich its shareholders, though most have worked out that an essential prerequisite is treating their people well (or at least, somewhere up in the normal curve of employee treatment).
If someone is actually chaining you to a desk then you'll find all the help you need just a phone call away.
But if you feel like your employer is wasting your time, or causing you suffering then for fucks sake, stand up and be a homo sapien and do something about it. I personally hope this whole EA shitstorm results in a whole lot of potential employees veering right away from EA - thanks to Free Speech - and those gradgrindian mofos then incurring big costs because they have to be a whole lot nicer to their employees. Thats the way the world works, outside a few enlightened socialist paradises such as North Korea, where you might prefer to live.
- Highly parallizable tasks requiring a low level of real world knowledge - wire frame modelling of chairs, swords, nubile breasts and the like - and thus open to the masses.
- Resulting massive competition for what is basically a pretty cool job for a geek with lack of real world knowledge - alternatives being repeating "would you like fries with that" 200 times per day.
- The actual "galley slave" analogy being not really accurate, sweaty and smelly co-workers with their armpits just centimeteres away notwithstanding - quite likely opportunities for recreational drug taking in the evenings with like-minded galley slaves.
In summary, lots of qualified people, few other employment opportunities for those people == low wages and exploitation by the man. Thats the way of the worls, always has been and always will be. If you want to earn the bucks, try some job that actually requires a higher level of skills - such as being the person who has to coordinate, motivate and manage a bunch of galley slaves - and watch you remuneration rise correspondingly.Those are neolithic tools that were used for voting. Early Americans used them to punch out the chads on the stone tablets used in elections to select their leaders. Of course things have moved on somewhat since then...
One can only marvel at the irony - someone stealing the source code for "a firewall application providing security, intrusion protection, network monitoring and other services for business and carrier networks"!!!
I hear completely where you're coming from, but you're only talking about the side that you see.
Locking people down, while it may well be a desirable solution because of the shite that is MS, very often leads directly to lost productivity that affects many more than just "folks that like to use their computer to screw off all day". In many cases, the problem is made worse by unresponsive IT departments who have an inbuilt superiority complex and think all users are jerks. Well, many users are jerks, but guess what - if they can't do their jobs, they cost their employer money, normally in a way that IS is utterly unaware of (and probably couldn't give a shit anyway).
Recent examples at our clients (we provide our system as an ASP, not least to avoid the claws of those freaking MS bastards, but as you can see we are still the victims):