We would have a related problem at our company too, even though its not-not-for-profit.
We provide an e-recruitment system which emails a company's jobs out to matching job seekers each night.
The number of emails that gets sent out depends on how many new jobs there are and how many job seekers match them. So this sort of tax would be a variable cost that we would have no way to predict.
Of course we could (and would) pass it on to our customers. No problem there. Except that many customers are utterly opposed to having varying bills - they want the surety of a fixed monthly charge. To do that, we'd have to wear the commercial risk of guessing how many emails would go out.
This might not seem a big deal to anyone who has not worked with the HR or billing departments of a large corporate but definitely such a tax would wreak havoc on ASP situations like ours.
Simply stated, if a client is paying cheaply (well, as close as that gets in consulting), they deserve the minimum information and just get what they ask for.
This adice is absolute cynical bullshit of the sort that gives consultants a bad name. If you decided to take on an assignment for a cheap rate, that doesn't make it right for you to give shitty advice.
You should do the best possible for your client. That way maybe you'll be able to negotiate more for your next gig.
In this case, if you know something is right, then the right thing to do is to get the client to see that too. Thats where the skill comes in - if you try to push it down their throats then maybe they'll cough it back up - a lot of people are very stubborn - so you haven't done the best thing by them.
You need to choose the right methods and pace of presenting the error of their ways to them in just such a way that they will take it on board. Thats the best service you can do them.
Therefore, rather than use some cobbled-together hack, use the standard implementations and take the performance hit.
This will be cheaper, probably 95% as efficient and, most importantly, be 195% easier to maintain or change at a later date. Consider the big picture rather than a single aspect.
Right on. Also, I know there are people out there building client-side Java apps that need blazing UI performance but I'd bet that 80% plus of the Java that gets written is server-side code that probably talks to an RDBMS.
As such, the real performance gains are to be made architecturally. For example, using some kind of caching mechanism to store reference data so it doesn't get fetched from the database every time. I can't count the number of times I've found people obsessing over the efficiency of some little algorithm when down on the next page their code is flogging the database server, where the cost of a single SQL statement can be counted in the many milliseconds and compltely overshadows any trivial gains to be had form using this type of list structure vs. that type.
We actually thought about making our source open for the benefit of non-profit organisations (it's a project-management software).
Has anybody made any experience with something like this? We are talking about enterprise-level software here.
You can always find a bunch of open source zealots who will claim that any software should be open sourced. Typically they are not the people responsible for making payroll each month.
I think determining the suitability of a given system for open source can be based on the ratio of configuration switches on the outside to genuine functionality on the inside. Call it the "fiddle factor".
Something that is complex to configure or make use of, but does not do all that much, has a high fiddle factor and is a good candidate for open source. The reasons being that a) anyone else can build it so theres not much margin in the software, and b) theres plenty of consulting money to be made fiddling with the switches.
Classic examples include web servers, application servers and operating systems.
On the other hand something that has a low "fiddle factor", ie its reasonably pre-packaged and not too complex to get going, but has a massive amount of underlying functionality, is a bad candidate for open source. The money needs to be made off the software itself.
The classic server example of this is truely high-volume and availability database systems such as Oracle (plse spare me the rants about MySQL). Or on the desktop, packages such as Visio drawing which conceal hideous complexity beneath a nice UI.
Then there is another category of stuff that could well be open source except that it is in a domain that geeks are utterly uninterested in or unknowledgable about, for example CRM systems, Healthcare systems, name virtually any fairly specialized area.
It's mostly legal, but highly unethical, since it involves cost-shifting and most of times hijacking open relays and other unsecured resources to send out that crap. And it annoys 99% of all recipients.
Actually spammers do act ethically.
Spam is never going away until there is a solution to it. You can't stop humans behaving annoyingly when there's money to be made.
That solution has not arrived yet. When it does arrive, it won't be trivial, or someone would already have thought of it. Instead it will be something that takes real behavioral changes to make it work (eg, new standards and protocols, new software, new contractural arrangements between carriers, new legislation, etc).
History shows that humans never make such significant behavioral changes until they pass some kind of pain threshold - which can be very high.
To this end, spammers help. They proactively increase the level of pain in the Internet community. This brings forward the day when some kind of solution is put in place. So they are making the world a better place (or at least they will, some time soon). So I would say they are acting ethically.
On the one hand he wants to give music away - while on the other, all of the examples he gives of doing this would only work if the thing being given away is still a thing "of value".
Imagine the possibilities. Buy a new Kia? Get 1,000 albums with every car. Purchase a lifetime subscription to the Boston Symphony Orchestra? Receive an MP3 player with a library of the world's 2,000 most important classical music selections. Sign up for a new cellular contract? Get unlimited access to music from over 30,000 indie bands.
If content has no value - as it soon wouldn't if it was freely given away - then would you go for the new Kia that came with 1,000 albums ? Or the Kia that came with a $9.99 set of steak knives?
Certainly the latter since you could always just go and download the 1,000 albums from some site.
This guy's theories could only work if the content retains some kind of "value", which would require restrictions on copying it. If its hard to stop stuff being copied now, how hard would it be when it was given away freely all over the place ?
"It's not a total loss for the Free Software side, either. That Microsoft is being forced to compete is a concrete sign that we are making credible inroads -- that the software equivalent of the Republican Guard, as it were, is withdrawing into the streets of Redmond for a last stand. The outcome, however, is not in doubt.
"
This would have to be somewhat premature. And if you really insist on tortuous analogies with the war it might be more accurate to say:
Microsoft == the US army
The ragtag, motley crew that is "Free Software" == the Fedayeen Saddam resistance fighters
Of course, Germany also bans Nazi and other kinds of sites as well, practicing information control with the kind of enthusiasm and efficiency Joseph Goebbels could have only dreamed of.
Not really. Germany bans non-educational Nazi stuff (a bit too vigorously I agree). But banning is not the same as making new stuff up.
Goebbels on the other hand created an entire alternate reality that changed the thinking of tens of millions of Germans and helped make it possible for them to see Jews, Communists, Slavs and others as somehow less human than them and thus as valid targets for persecution and extermination.
If you opt in, and then later opt-out, and get an e-mail 2 days later, I don't see it as some great evil. You shouldnt have opted in in the first place.
Yep, I reckon the guy filing suit might well be a prototypical/. reader.
"Two days to process my opt-out ? WHAT GIVES !!! Why don't you just set up a real time XML opt-out data transfer so it gets processed in less than 3 seconds ! Thats what I'D DO if it was my web site cos I'm a goddanm IT genius !!!!"
For frick's sake stop moaning ! If only all the spammers making my life a misery would even process a request like this at all !
If this guy had been rescued from the Titanic he'd have sued the rescuers for not letting him bring his suitcases on the lifeboat !!!
I asked the question because I was confused by your statement that "It is possible to have a democratic communist country, just as it is possible (in fact epidemic) to have a capitalist dictatorship. You can't equate political theory with economic policy as easilly as that.
I think your own answer here shows that that ain't so. It is not possible to have a democratic communist and history proves that. Sure you might say "it is theoretically possible", in the same way that it is possible to get everyone in the world to jump in one direction at the same second and thus change the earth's rotation, but using that kind of test anything is possible.
Communism only sticks when it is forced on people. No democracy has ever kept a communist system.
I should have been clearer, I was referring to 1945, when Russia was still very much an ally. And the US was emphatically not in a race to beat the Russians anywhere - Eisenhower was very dogmatic about only going advancing up to the lines of demarcation that had been agreed between the US, Britain and Russia beforehand. In several places he ordered rapid withdrawals where the local fighting conditions against the Germans had caused them to go beyond those lines. In fact Churchill urged him to go further because he foresaw the need for leverage against the Russians in order to address the Polish problem. But Eisenhower refused, often to the chagrin of the commanders at the front.
You make a good point about the casualties caused by communism. I don't think you can include Vietnam though. Quite possibly if the US had not stepped in, communism would have imploded under its own economic burden without the massive cost in lives that actually resulted. I realise this might be a contentious viewpoint !
It would have been nice to dispatch or at least contain Stalin in 1945. Who is to say it could have been done though, without resorting to nuclear war ? The Russian war machine was massive and by far the largest and strongest force in Europe at that time. They had the benefit of not having to kowtow to public opinion and could have fought on for years, whereas probably American public opinion would not have stomached the US turning on their recent allies. When Churchill made his famous "iron curtain" speech (I think in 1947 ?) it was loudly rejected by virtually all influential voices in the US (and even in the UK).
Because in the 1980's, we were fighting the greatest evil mankind has ever witnessed -- communism -- which took the lives of over 20 million people. Because we failed to destroy Stalin in 1945 before he got the atomic bomb.
Destroying Stalin in 1945 was hardly an option - he was America's ally at that time, and no-one of any political persuasion thought there was any chance at all of fighting Russia just as WWII finally drew to an end.
Probably the "right" thing would have been for the US to follow the British line more, and deal more harshly with the Soviets and the iron curtain. Who though can blame them for not doing so. And who's to say they were wrong anyway - somehow the world got through the next 40 years with organizations like NATO never firing a shot in anger. Sure there was a lot of tension. But maybe the outcome was the best that could be hoped for.
Look at any SMTP server log to see the munged helo/ehlo traffic a M$ client sends. Think if someone with a unix background, who actually reads RFC's and understands how the traffic is _supposed_ to look would have gotten that right...yet it's remained broken for years.
These things don't remain unbroken because MS are too lazy to fix them. They remain broke because MS prefer to make all other vendor's lives miserable, because they have to work around them. We sell a pretty complex web application, and like many other people, we have to do a vast amount of workarounds on simple things like the handling of mult-part forms just because of IE weirdness. Yet, surprise, surprise, people coding on MS's ASP platform don't need to, because MS has conveniently built the workarounds into that platform for them.
Its all part of their very effective way of locking you in. They did the same thing with the Java apis. Deliberately use every-so-slightly different signatures on just a few of the methods in AWT - so small they could claim it was accidental and trivial, yet the net effect is still that everyone can not release just a standards-based offering, but need a lot of MS-specific code in their products.
Think of MS Word document formats and the 1000 other little interfaces they provide. MS are masters in using tiny inconsistencies in APIs to get their way - from their point of view they have no real interest in standards - "the implementation is the standard".
Do your part to keep Salon alive, buy a subscription, it's only $30, or $18.50 with ads.
The best treatment for Salon now would be the short sharp shock of MARKET FORCES. They spent too much. So they're going out of business. Next, as part of the liquidation, someone will buy up everything they own which is OF VALUE - like their advertising contracts, their copyrights, and their NAME. And throw away the debt. Thats how the market works.
Then Salon II strides back out into the world, LEANER, MEANER and not carrying a gigantic albatross of debt around their neck !
Any money you give to Salon now goes straight into the pockets of the dickwads that were stupid enough to loan it to them in the first place. That makes you even stupider than them !
mcs is GPLd
the runtime is LGPLd
the classes are X11
Uh...no. It sounds like you have all the crack.
I said "GPL and GPL-like licenses". Perhaps it is not obvious, and I should have been more explicit and said that IMO, LGPL (for example) is very much a GPL-like license, and no, its not just because it has GPL in its name. Under it, no-one can take your stuff, change it, and then stick it into their own commercial product under a proprietary commercial license. If they want to do that, they need to give you (ie, Ximian) lots of money, so you'll give them the code under a different license.
comeback when you actually read my post. (But thanks for not AC-ing anyway !)
Yep, thats a good point. I don't actually have any objection to them doing just that. What I do object to, however, is them soliciting the open source community to help them.
I think most people, if they realised that a BSD-style version of Mono actually has significant commercial value (something that has escaped some of the other responders who think that having a GPL version is the be-all and end-all) would be a little hesitant about giving code to Mono or about promoting it freely. Most members of the open source community give their time and efforts based on it going back into the community, not into a corporate's pockets.
I have to declare I don't know that Ximian does intend to do this. It does seem to me though, even considering the other responses (and the troll moderations:)) that it IS an option that is open to them. And people being people, if sometime down the road they realise they can sell a proprietary license to someone for say $10M (perhaps even under an exclusive arrangement to Microsoft, thus chilling the emergence of any non-GPL'ed alternative to.Net) - why, I think they might just take it, as many have before them. And since they are obviously clever people, I can't personally imagine that they haven't considered the option.
Rant over. To summarise, I don't disagree with any plans to get rich by selling off the Mono code. I just think contributors, and particularly people who somehow think Mono is hurting Microsoft, should think a little more carefully.
One of the biggest obstacles for.Net has been acceptance. Despite all the marketing hype,.Net hasn't seen the wildly successful adoption of the.Net framework in the marketplace.
Thats why Ximian is misguided. They actually help MS in their.Net marketing initiatives. Because of them, MS can point to an open source alternative and claim that.Net is kind of open. On the other hand, Ximian only release their code under GPL and GPL-like licenses, not under more permissive BSD license. My belief is that Ximian's business plan involves keeping this right to themselves, probably for sale later on - perhaps in a couple of years - when (if).Net ever achieves dominance. If that happens, IT mega-companies (IBM and the like) would pay large sums for unrestricted access to a.Net lookalike, and only Ximian will have it. Ximian could dispel this by releasing their code under a BSD license. After all, the normal argument that applies to BSD does not matter here - MS already have their own.Net platform and have nothing to gain from Ximian's code.
Don't support.Net. And don't support Mono. They are Microsoft's whores.
This sounds like just the same old corporate craziness regarding patents. Of course in this case its MS at the wheel, and as well-balanced and thoughtful/.ers we all know that Microsoft really is the devil incarnate.
But many corporates are forced into the same position, and pretty much have to patent things just to prevent someone else from doing it to them. Patent warfare is reminiscent of the cold war and mutually assured destruction. Thats bad for the world and particularly for those of us who only have access to bows and arrows.
I live in New Zealand, love open source and in particular would welcome the idea that my tax $$ don't get thrown down the gaping jaws of MS. But I hardly think a book is the way to "communicate with the decision makers - such as politicians, heads of departments, CIO's and CEO's.".
As anyone who has ever sold anything to government (or anyone) knows, such people do not read books (well, certainly not a book like this). They would hardly even be likely to read a brochure.
The thing that persuades these people is other people. "OK, the Microsoft salesman just left. What a great guy !! He says that their stuff will save us a fortune and he's got real case studies to prove it. So now, send in the open source salesman. Whats that ? They don't even have a salesman ? Are these guys serious ?"
IT procurement decisions in government in New Zealand are made exactly the same as in any other government (and many companies) in the world. Typically all that the buyer is looking for is a way to tick off the task with as little risk as possible to his job. Who cares if he can save $M using open source - after all, its not like he'll see any of it in his pay check. The safest course is just to use whatever the Victorian state government, or the state of Minnesota used. Even if that costs $M. And even if the open source alternative is free. All he's looking for is, in IBM's jargon, a "meets expectations".
The only exception to this is when a individualist champion emerges inside government as has happened inother countries. No such individual has stood up in New Zealand, where sadly, the individuals charged with IT policy resemble all too closely the country's majority population - sheep.
I can see why these guys are steamed about writing this book, and more power to them. But at best, its use will be in fleshing in some of the details as to "how" - perhaps for consumption by a few low level managers - once someone else has already taken the brave decisions. It will not influence any of the key people.
The two camps are ideologically different. That doesn't make one more right then the other. Misusing the GPL like this is akin to me taking your BSD project and forcing you to GPL it. I don't think you'd be happy.
Interesting point but only hypothetical and not relevant in this case. The very nature of the BSD license is that if you issue your code under it, you more or less grant anyone else the right to do whatever the hell they want with it (as long as they keep your name on it).
On the other hand, If you choose GPL, you are aiming to restrict people's rights, so you need to be ready to be a policeman if people try and operate outside those restrictions.
To stretch a historical point, the BSD license is somewhat like Gandhi's passive resistance and refusal to fight, a strategy that eventually overturned the aggressor (ie Britain) more effectively than fighting ever could have done.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post has the authentic ring of the true fanatic about it
We provide an e-recruitment system which emails a company's jobs out to matching job seekers each night.
The number of emails that gets sent out depends on how many new jobs there are and how many job seekers match them. So this sort of tax would be a variable cost that we would have no way to predict.
Of course we could (and would) pass it on to our customers. No problem there. Except that many customers are utterly opposed to having varying bills - they want the surety of a fixed monthly charge. To do that, we'd have to wear the commercial risk of guessing how many emails would go out.
This might not seem a big deal to anyone who has not worked with the HR or billing departments of a large corporate but definitely such a tax would wreak havoc on ASP situations like ours.
This adice is absolute cynical bullshit of the sort that gives consultants a bad name. If you decided to take on an assignment for a cheap rate, that doesn't make it right for you to give shitty advice.
You should do the best possible for your client. That way maybe you'll be able to negotiate more for your next gig.
In this case, if you know something is right, then the right thing to do is to get the client to see that too. Thats where the skill comes in - if you try to push it down their throats then maybe they'll cough it back up - a lot of people are very stubborn - so you haven't done the best thing by them.
You need to choose the right methods and pace of presenting the error of their ways to them in just such a way that they will take it on board. Thats the best service you can do them.
This will be cheaper, probably 95% as efficient and, most importantly, be 195% easier to maintain or change at a later date. Consider the big picture rather than a single aspect.
Right on. Also, I know there are people out there building client-side Java apps that need blazing UI performance but I'd bet that 80% plus of the Java that gets written is server-side code that probably talks to an RDBMS.
As such, the real performance gains are to be made architecturally. For example, using some kind of caching mechanism to store reference data so it doesn't get fetched from the database every time. I can't count the number of times I've found people obsessing over the efficiency of some little algorithm when down on the next page their code is flogging the database server, where the cost of a single SQL statement can be counted in the many milliseconds and compltely overshadows any trivial gains to be had form using this type of list structure vs. that type.
You can always find a bunch of open source zealots who will claim that any software should be open sourced. Typically they are not the people responsible for making payroll each month.
I think determining the suitability of a given system for open source can be based on the ratio of configuration switches on the outside to genuine functionality on the inside. Call it the "fiddle factor".
Something that is complex to configure or make use of, but does not do all that much, has a high fiddle factor and is a good candidate for open source. The reasons being that a) anyone else can build it so theres not much margin in the software, and b) theres plenty of consulting money to be made fiddling with the switches.
Classic examples include web servers, application servers and operating systems.
On the other hand something that has a low "fiddle factor", ie its reasonably pre-packaged and not too complex to get going, but has a massive amount of underlying functionality, is a bad candidate for open source. The money needs to be made off the software itself.
The classic server example of this is truely high-volume and availability database systems such as Oracle (plse spare me the rants about MySQL). Or on the desktop, packages such as Visio drawing which conceal hideous complexity beneath a nice UI.
Then there is another category of stuff that could well be open source except that it is in a domain that geeks are utterly uninterested in or unknowledgable about, for example CRM systems, Healthcare systems, name virtually any fairly specialized area.
It all depends on your software and market.
It's mostly legal, but highly unethical, since it involves cost-shifting and most of times hijacking open relays and other unsecured resources to send out that crap. And it annoys 99% of all recipients.
Actually spammers do act ethically.
Spam is never going away until there is a solution to it. You can't stop humans behaving annoyingly when there's money to be made.
That solution has not arrived yet. When it does arrive, it won't be trivial, or someone would already have thought of it. Instead it will be something that takes real behavioral changes to make it work (eg, new standards and protocols, new software, new contractural arrangements between carriers, new legislation, etc).
History shows that humans never make such significant behavioral changes until they pass some kind of pain threshold - which can be very high.
To this end, spammers help. They proactively increase the level of pain in the Internet community. This brings forward the day when some kind of solution is put in place. So they are making the world a better place (or at least they will, some time soon). So I would say they are acting ethically.
On the one hand he wants to give music away - while on the other, all of the examples he gives of doing this would only work if the thing being given away is still a thing "of value".
Imagine the possibilities. Buy a new Kia? Get 1,000 albums with every car. Purchase a lifetime subscription to the Boston Symphony Orchestra? Receive an MP3 player with a library of the world's 2,000 most important classical music selections. Sign up for a new cellular contract? Get unlimited access to music from over 30,000 indie bands.
If content has no value - as it soon wouldn't if it was freely given away - then would you go for the new Kia that came with 1,000 albums ? Or the Kia that came with a $9.99 set of steak knives?
Certainly the latter since you could always just go and download the 1,000 albums from some site.
This guy's theories could only work if the content retains some kind of "value", which would require restrictions on copying it. If its hard to stop stuff being copied now, how hard would it be when it was given away freely all over the place ?
This would have to be somewhat premature. And if you really insist on tortuous analogies with the war it might be more accurate to say:
Microsoft == the US army
The ragtag, motley crew that is "Free Software" == the Fedayeen Saddam resistance fighters
Not really. Germany bans non-educational Nazi stuff (a bit too vigorously I agree). But banning is not the same as making new stuff up.
Goebbels on the other hand created an entire alternate reality that changed the thinking of tens of millions of Germans and helped make it possible for them to see Jews, Communists, Slavs and others as somehow less human than them and thus as valid targets for persecution and extermination.
Yep, I reckon the guy filing suit might well be a prototypical /. reader.
"Two days to process my opt-out ? WHAT GIVES !!! Why don't you just set up a real time XML opt-out data transfer so it gets processed in less than 3 seconds ! Thats what I'D DO if it was my web site cos I'm a goddanm IT genius !!!!"
For frick's sake stop moaning ! If only all the spammers making my life a misery would even process a request like this at all !
If this guy had been rescued from the Titanic he'd have sued the rescuers for not letting him bring his suitcases on the lifeboat !!!
I think your own answer here shows that that ain't so. It is not possible to have a democratic communist and history proves that. Sure you might say "it is theoretically possible", in the same way that it is possible to get everyone in the world to jump in one direction at the same second and thus change the earth's rotation, but using that kind of test anything is possible.
Communism only sticks when it is forced on people. No democracy has ever kept a communist system.
Really ? What would be an actual working example of a democratic communist country ?
You make a good point about the casualties caused by communism. I don't think you can include Vietnam though. Quite possibly if the US had not stepped in, communism would have imploded under its own economic burden without the massive cost in lives that actually resulted. I realise this might be a contentious viewpoint !
It would have been nice to dispatch or at least contain Stalin in 1945. Who is to say it could have been done though, without resorting to nuclear war ? The Russian war machine was massive and by far the largest and strongest force in Europe at that time. They had the benefit of not having to kowtow to public opinion and could have fought on for years, whereas probably American public opinion would not have stomached the US turning on their recent allies. When Churchill made his famous "iron curtain" speech (I think in 1947 ?) it was loudly rejected by virtually all influential voices in the US (and even in the UK).
Destroying Stalin in 1945 was hardly an option - he was America's ally at that time, and no-one of any political persuasion thought there was any chance at all of fighting Russia just as WWII finally drew to an end.
Probably the "right" thing would have been for the US to follow the British line more, and deal more harshly with the Soviets and the iron curtain. Who though can blame them for not doing so. And who's to say they were wrong anyway - somehow the world got through the next 40 years with organizations like NATO never firing a shot in anger. Sure there was a lot of tension. But maybe the outcome was the best that could be hoped for.
These things don't remain unbroken because MS are too lazy to fix them. They remain broke because MS prefer to make all other vendor's lives miserable, because they have to work around them. We sell a pretty complex web application, and like many other people, we have to do a vast amount of workarounds on simple things like the handling of mult-part forms just because of IE weirdness. Yet, surprise, surprise, people coding on MS's ASP platform don't need to, because MS has conveniently built the workarounds into that platform for them.
Its all part of their very effective way of locking you in. They did the same thing with the Java apis. Deliberately use every-so-slightly different signatures on just a few of the methods in AWT - so small they could claim it was accidental and trivial, yet the net effect is still that everyone can not release just a standards-based offering, but need a lot of MS-specific code in their products.
Think of MS Word document formats and the 1000 other little interfaces they provide. MS are masters in using tiny inconsistencies in APIs to get their way - from their point of view they have no real interest in standards - "the implementation is the standard".
The best treatment for Salon now would be the short sharp shock of MARKET FORCES. They spent too much. So they're going out of business. Next, as part of the liquidation, someone will buy up everything they own which is OF VALUE - like their advertising contracts, their copyrights, and their NAME. And throw away the debt. Thats how the market works.
Then Salon II strides back out into the world, LEANER, MEANER and not carrying a gigantic albatross of debt around their neck !
Any money you give to Salon now goes straight into the pockets of the dickwads that were stupid enough to loan it to them in the first place. That makes you even stupider than them !
Are you smoking crack ?
mcs is GPLd
the runtime is LGPLd
the classes are X11
Uh...no. It sounds like you have all the crack.
I said "GPL and GPL-like licenses". Perhaps it is not obvious, and I should have been more explicit and said that IMO, LGPL (for example) is very much a GPL-like license, and no, its not just because it has GPL in its name. Under it, no-one can take your stuff, change it, and then stick it into their own commercial product under a proprietary commercial license. If they want to do that, they need to give you (ie, Ximian) lots of money, so you'll give them the code under a different license.
comeback when you actually read my post. (But thanks for not AC-ing anyway !)
I think most people, if they realised that a BSD-style version of Mono actually has significant commercial value (something that has escaped some of the other responders who think that having a GPL version is the be-all and end-all) would be a little hesitant about giving code to Mono or about promoting it freely. Most members of the open source community give their time and efforts based on it going back into the community, not into a corporate's pockets.
I have to declare I don't know that Ximian does intend to do this. It does seem to me though, even considering the other responses (and the troll moderations :)) that it IS an option that is open to them. And people being people, if sometime down the road they realise they can sell a proprietary license to someone for say $10M (perhaps even under an exclusive arrangement to Microsoft, thus chilling the emergence of any non-GPL'ed alternative to .Net) - why, I think they might just take it, as many have before them. And since they are obviously clever people, I can't personally imagine that they haven't considered the option.
Rant over. To summarise, I don't disagree with any plans to get rich by selling off the Mono code. I just think contributors, and particularly people who somehow think Mono is hurting Microsoft, should think a little more carefully.
Thats why Ximian is misguided. They actually help MS in their .Net marketing initiatives. Because of them, MS can point to an open source alternative and claim that .Net is kind of open. On the other hand, Ximian only release their code under GPL and GPL-like licenses, not under more permissive BSD license. My belief is that Ximian's business plan involves keeping this right to themselves, probably for sale later on - perhaps in a couple of years - when (if) .Net ever achieves dominance. If that happens, IT mega-companies (IBM and the like) would pay large sums for unrestricted access to a .Net lookalike, and only Ximian will have it. Ximian could dispel this by releasing their code under a BSD license. After all, the normal argument that applies to BSD does not matter here - MS already have their own .Net platform and have nothing to gain from Ximian's code.
Don't support .Net. And don't support Mono. They are Microsoft's whores.
But many corporates are forced into the same position, and pretty much have to patent things just to prevent someone else from doing it to them. Patent warfare is reminiscent of the cold war and mutually assured destruction. Thats bad for the world and particularly for those of us who only have access to bows and arrows.
.. would be just MORE of everything. Like:
- increased timewasting at the office due to faster, clearer, saucier porn downloads
- even greater levels of theft and destruction of the capitalist system as we know it by illegal music sharing
- yet more time spent deleting bucketloads of crap from our inboxes as spam increases to unprecedented levels
Yeah, its pretty revolutionary stuff all right.
As anyone who has ever sold anything to government (or anyone) knows, such people do not read books (well, certainly not a book like this). They would hardly even be likely to read a brochure.
The thing that persuades these people is other people. "OK, the Microsoft salesman just left. What a great guy !! He says that their stuff will save us a fortune and he's got real case studies to prove it. So now, send in the open source salesman. Whats that ? They don't even have a salesman ? Are these guys serious ?"
IT procurement decisions in government in New Zealand are made exactly the same as in any other government (and many companies) in the world. Typically all that the buyer is looking for is a way to tick off the task with as little risk as possible to his job. Who cares if he can save $M using open source - after all, its not like he'll see any of it in his pay check. The safest course is just to use whatever the Victorian state government, or the state of Minnesota used. Even if that costs $M. And even if the open source alternative is free. All he's looking for is, in IBM's jargon, a "meets expectations".
The only exception to this is when a individualist champion emerges inside government as has happened inother countries. No such individual has stood up in New Zealand, where sadly, the individuals charged with IT policy resemble all too closely the country's majority population - sheep.
I can see why these guys are steamed about writing this book, and more power to them. But at best, its use will be in fleshing in some of the details as to "how" - perhaps for consumption by a few low level managers - once someone else has already taken the brave decisions. It will not influence any of the key people.
now look where linux is.
There are lies and then there are damned lies, and then there are statistics.
You could just as well say "Look at apache (BSD)...and then look at the GPL web servers (OK, none come to mind, but thats my point)."
Interesting point but only hypothetical and not relevant in this case. The very nature of the BSD license is that if you issue your code under it, you more or less grant anyone else the right to do whatever the hell they want with it (as long as they keep your name on it).
On the other hand, If you choose GPL, you are aiming to restrict people's rights, so you need to be ready to be a policeman if people try and operate outside those restrictions.
To stretch a historical point, the BSD license is somewhat like Gandhi's passive resistance and refusal to fight, a strategy that eventually overturned the aggressor (ie Britain) more effectively than fighting ever could have done.
I guess those "I'd like to mount your hard drive baby, hyuk, hyuk" lines got you nowhere with the booth babes, huh ?