Windows+Office cost per employee is at least $300. OEM price may be low, but you have to factor in a couple of upgrades. Linux+OpenOffice cost is 0.
Before anyone talks about support costs, consider a bootable CD that formats the local hard drive and installs an image with all the applications from the server, which also stores all your OpenOffice documents. I "supported" several hundred math students using Mathematica and WriteNow on NeXT during my $7/hour student job this way and got 0 complaints.
Not everyone needs Windows-only applications that don't run under Wine. Most office workers just use e-mail, word processor, web applications and a printer. If a company doesn't want to hire a student to whip up a simple solution, there should be a consulting agency that already has the stuff ready. The fact that it's not happening is a sign that current companies are surviving on government favors and people's stupidity rather than honest capitalist competition. If they can afford to throw away a million bucks on Microsoft software, they should just give it to me:-)
Unless your name is also "Steve Jobs", in which case the famous one may well pay you. Your name on the other hand starts with F and down arrow. What's up with that?
What was the court case that prompted such a fabulous ruling? Now I will be scared to go into a UK bookstore. Maybe they have a right to disable my "hardware" if I am making an unauthorized copy of their stuff into my "RAM". Mad cow disease perhaps?
Copyright law only prevents me from making additional copies of Windows, excluding some fair use scenarios. How I use my own authorized copy is none of Microsoft's business.
I have a right to use knowledge inside my head in any way I choose, and nobody has a right to restrict me. If you don't want me to use your invention, keep it secret from me. Any alternatives are dangerously close to slavery and will have similar results as use if information becomes more important in daily lives.
If I rip it and distribute it on the Internet to hundreds of thousands of people, costing the record company a million or more, that is not theft, that is still copyright infringement.
Such a thing never happened. People who downloaded your song already decided not to buy it. If you didn't post it, they would just keep looking, borrow friend's CD, or would just record it off the radio. That's the real reason why "thief' or "pirate" are not appropriate labels for P2P users. They are just benefitting themselves without really hurting others.
The whole thing happened because of lack of trust from the free software community. I bet BitMover wouldn't care much if there was an odd person in OSDL reverse-engineering the client to make a port to his pet OS or to learn good programming. Instead RMS kept preaching that BK is evil and must be killed and replaced, and I guess too many people listened. Would you do anything for people with such hostile intentions towards you? And so RMS created the very situation he was warning people about. Which was probably exactly what he wanted.
This is not to say that reverse-engineering is wrong. I have a right to read your source or binaries as any copyrighted book and use general ideas I learned in my future proprietary or open-source projects. I think I will go to read some Emacs code right now to get some hints for my future BSD-licensed project. Yum! What is wrong is plagiarism or fighting people who are trying to help.
Uh... Surely I have a right to do whatever I want, unless there is a law that says otherwise? And I haven't heard of any viewright, sellright or learnright intellectual property protections. I can strip DRM and ads from a movie, watch it, and then sell the altered copy to someone else, after destroying my own of course. What the law does is limit making multiple copies of the work to personal fair use cases.
Sure, an enterprise system needs stable versions of kernel, libc, apache, J2EE and PHP. But an antique GNOME version? I don't think so! Either an administrator will use command line/web/automated tools and UI doesn't come into play or, if he actually uses an interactive login, an occasional crash and restart won't impact important services or otherwise matter more than it does for an ordinary user.
Given that patches for stable kernel, libc and so on are freely available under GPL and Redhat support doesn't actually login to your box and use gdb to diagnose your problem, RHEL only sells because big corporations have tons of money and can survive even wasting $$$ when they could have just hired a student to install Gentoo.
I always thought something like this would make a good self-defense weapon that is the only one that everyone can legally get and carry concealed. Something that might kill, but probably won't. A would be rapist will not take a 10% chance of getting killed and 50% chance of a wound that will hurt and raise questions in a hospital. After all, he might miss and his victim might get lucky. And the victim is threatened anyway, and will feel that escaping or fighting back is safer than doing nothing.
On the other hand, if someone points an AK-47 at you, you will probably give up, even if you are armed yourself.
Come on, GEM only ran in real mode and had no significant initial applications provided by the vendor - unlike virtual memory support and Office under Windows. Yes, you need freedom, but you also need alternative choices with a reasonable feature set, and Redhat is not "it" for casual users.
Sadly, no. People would go to court to refund "Redhat tax" in droves and buy XP for $99.95. Current Linux distributions just don't cut it in software choices and ease of use for non-professionals. Someone with serious money would need to develop a good front end UI - open source or otherwise - first as Apple did for BSD. Is IBM still holding a grudge about stolen OS/2?
How do you propose they setup fstab or grub.conf (everybody's partitions/kernel setup is different)? You mean you want them to create an installer program for you?
Why not, do "they" have some religious prohibition on writing custom code that parses output of fdisk? Even then, they can just assume boot == hda1, swap == hda2, root == hda3 and most people will be happy.
What if you dont like a particular cron deamon? what if you like a particular logger? What if you dont use dhcp (i dont)?
Then of course you can unmerge them and install components of your choice.
In my experience, there is much more learning/tweaking on redhat side than for gentoo. For example, to install kde 3.2, just type "emerge kde". With a pre-packaged Linux distribution you would have to worry about installing countless packages missing or out of date on your system. Later you get to fix everything that broke because you upgraded its dependency to an incompatible version
With that said, the install process has several steps with no apparent purpose except for being 1337. They didn't really have to make you install cron, syslog and dhcpd, or make you deal with fstab or grub.conf.
The real problem though is configuring the kernel. Building a custom kernel is a very good idea, because you don't want your notebook to autodetect drivers for several minutes when booting, or to waste CPU cycles on compiled-in SMP support or multi-homed webserver. But Linux configuration screens are insane. Do I need an "HPET timer"? Who the hell knows?
I think the solution is to make Linux kernel modular, with drivers and subsystems that can be downloaded and compiled separately. Then we can start with a minimum kernel and emerge, say, quota support in the same way as kde.
You should invest in a shoulder strap. My iPod used to skip all the time with a belt pack, but now I can jog vigorously without any problems. I guess a human body works as a shock absorber. I just hope my bones are taking it better than a portable hard drive.
He has a particular purpose in mind, which is forcing everyone to release source to their software. Personally, I have a different goal - releasing my pet projects for free while making sure any commercial users will talk to me and negotiate attribution, compensation and so on. GPL V2 seams Ok for that, but I will never put an "... or later" clause. Maybe eventually FSF will prevent me from using my own code in commercial products or something. I am not sure intellectual property laws are beneficial (at all or beyond say 5 year duration), but even if people are allowed to copy binaries, I sure shouldn't be forced to give up my source.
Given that Linus/many Linux developers seem to have somewhat different goals than RMS as well, it would indeed make sense for Linux developers to fork the license. It's time for something that follows pragmatic wishes of most free software developers rather than one person's political agenda.
They may have an open-and-shut civil breach of contract case, but not anything to put him in jail. He claims he just intended to share his stuff with several friends and it accidentally got out. How do you prove the opposite "beyond the reasonable doubt" in a criminal court?
Besides, even if the law allowed for jail time, the first time it was used would be the undoing of the industry it was supposed to benefit. People are already pissed at RIAA suing a 12-year-old girl. If they tried to put her in jail, there would be a mob carrying cannibal forks.
No matter how fast/RAM saturated is your system, launching a Windows app takes at least 5 seconds, not to mention vigorous hard drive noises. I suspect it's busy relocating dozens of DLL thats should have used -fPIC, loading out-of-process COM servers and doing millions of registry accesses.
Now make that app do something CPU bound. For example, run for(;;) putchar('a'); in a command prompt window. SMP or not, the system freezes.
Or go to a graphics/flash intensive page in IE. Oh boy!
To be fair, KDE under Linux does a decent job emulating Windows in these cases. Multitasking from a VT terminal works well, but keeping X server busy or doing dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo to saturate disk bandwidth does the trick.
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Windows+Office cost per employee is at least $300. OEM price may be low, but you have to factor in a couple of upgrades. Linux+OpenOffice cost is 0.
:-)
Before anyone talks about support costs, consider a bootable CD that formats the local hard drive and installs an image with all the applications from the server, which also stores all your OpenOffice documents. I "supported" several hundred math students using Mathematica and WriteNow on NeXT during my $7/hour student job this way and got 0 complaints.
Not everyone needs Windows-only applications that don't run under Wine. Most office workers just use e-mail, word processor, web applications and a printer. If a company doesn't want to hire a student to whip up a simple solution, there should be a consulting agency that already has the stuff ready. The fact that it's not happening is a sign that current companies are surviving on government favors and people's stupidity rather than honest capitalist competition. If they can afford to throw away a million bucks on Microsoft software, they should just give it to me
Unless your name is also "Steve Jobs", in which case the famous one may well pay you. Your name on the other hand starts with F and down arrow. What's up with that?
No, this is a TLD you visit after your imagination is fired up with .xxx
What was the court case that prompted such a fabulous ruling? Now I will be scared to go into a UK bookstore. Maybe they have a right to disable my "hardware" if I am making an unauthorized copy of their stuff into my "RAM". Mad cow disease perhaps?
Copyright law only prevents me from making additional copies of Windows, excluding some fair use scenarios. How I use my own authorized copy is none of Microsoft's business.
I have a right to use knowledge inside my head in any way I choose, and nobody has a right to restrict me. If you don't want me to use your invention, keep it secret from me. Any alternatives are dangerously close to slavery and will have similar results as use if information becomes more important in daily lives.
If I rip it and distribute it on the Internet to hundreds of thousands of people, costing the record company a million or more, that is not theft, that is still copyright infringement.
Such a thing never happened. People who downloaded your song already decided not to buy it. If you didn't post it, they would just keep looking, borrow friend's CD, or would just record it off the radio. That's the real reason why "thief' or "pirate" are not appropriate labels for P2P users. They are just benefitting themselves without really hurting others.
The whole thing happened because of lack of trust from the free software community. I bet BitMover wouldn't care much if there was an odd person in OSDL reverse-engineering the client to make a port to his pet OS or to learn good programming. Instead RMS kept preaching that BK is evil and must be killed and replaced, and I guess too many people listened. Would you do anything for people with such hostile intentions towards you? And so RMS created the very situation he was warning people about. Which was probably exactly what he wanted.
This is not to say that reverse-engineering is wrong. I have a right to read your source or binaries as any copyrighted book and use general ideas I learned in my future proprietary or open-source projects. I think I will go to read some Emacs code right now to get some hints for my future BSD-licensed project. Yum! What is wrong is plagiarism or fighting people who are trying to help.
Uh... Surely I have a right to do whatever I want, unless there is a law that says otherwise? And I haven't heard of any viewright, sellright or learnright intellectual property protections. I can strip DRM and ads from a movie, watch it, and then sell the altered copy to someone else, after destroying my own of course. What the law does is limit making multiple copies of the work to personal fair use cases.
Coke recipe?Enjoy!
Sure, an enterprise system needs stable versions of kernel, libc, apache, J2EE and PHP. But an antique GNOME version? I don't think so! Either an administrator will use command line/web/automated tools and UI doesn't come into play or, if he actually uses an interactive login, an occasional crash and restart won't impact important services or otherwise matter more than it does for an ordinary user.
Given that patches for stable kernel, libc and so on are freely available under GPL and Redhat support doesn't actually login to your box and use gdb to diagnose your problem, RHEL only sells because big corporations have tons of money and can survive even wasting $$$ when they could have just hired a student to install Gentoo.
I always thought something like this would make a good self-defense weapon that is the only one that everyone can legally get and carry concealed. Something that might kill, but probably won't. A would be rapist will not take a 10% chance of getting killed and 50% chance of a wound that will hurt and raise questions in a hospital. After all, he might miss and his victim might get lucky. And the victim is threatened anyway, and will feel that escaping or fighting back is safer than doing nothing.
On the other hand, if someone points an AK-47 at you, you will probably give up, even if you are armed yourself.
No problem - just say o (over) every time you finish talking and oo (over and out) before hanging up.
How are you going to see stars through a huge solar sail right in front of your lens?
Come on, GEM only ran in real mode and had no significant initial applications provided by the vendor - unlike virtual memory support and Office under Windows. Yes, you need freedom, but you also need alternative choices with a reasonable feature set, and Redhat is not "it" for casual users.
Sadly, no. People would go to court to refund "Redhat tax" in droves and buy XP for $99.95. Current Linux distributions just don't cut it in software choices and ease of use for non-professionals. Someone with serious money would need to develop a good front end UI - open source or otherwise - first as Apple did for BSD. Is IBM still holding a grudge about stolen OS/2?
You are really going to install Windows on both vintage and modern Macs? Sacrilege!!
Actually it's more like a sign of antitrust coming
How do you propose they setup fstab or grub.conf (everybody's partitions/kernel setup is different)? You mean you want them to create an installer program for you?
Why not, do "they" have some religious prohibition on writing custom code that parses output of fdisk? Even then, they can just assume boot == hda1, swap == hda2, root == hda3 and most people will be happy.
What if you dont like a particular cron deamon? what if you like a particular logger? What if you dont use dhcp (i dont)?
Then of course you can unmerge them and install components of your choice.
In my experience, there is much more learning/tweaking on redhat side than for gentoo. For example, to install kde 3.2, just type "emerge kde". With a pre-packaged Linux distribution you would have to worry about installing countless packages missing or out of date on your system. Later you get to fix everything that broke because you upgraded its dependency to an incompatible version
With that said, the install process has several steps with no apparent purpose except for being 1337. They didn't really have to make you install cron, syslog and dhcpd, or make you deal with fstab or grub.conf.
The real problem though is configuring the kernel. Building a custom kernel is a very good idea, because you don't want your notebook to autodetect drivers for several minutes when booting, or to waste CPU cycles on compiled-in SMP support or multi-homed webserver. But Linux configuration screens are insane. Do I need an "HPET timer"? Who the hell knows?
I think the solution is to make Linux kernel modular, with drivers and subsystems that can be downloaded and compiled separately. Then we can start with a minimum kernel and emerge, say, quota support in the same way as kde.
You should invest in a shoulder strap. My iPod used to skip all the time with a belt pack, but now I can jog vigorously without any problems. I guess a human body works as a shock absorber. I just hope my bones are taking it better than a portable hard drive.
He has a particular purpose in mind, which is forcing everyone to release source to their software. Personally, I have a different goal - releasing my pet projects for free while making sure any commercial users will talk to me and negotiate attribution, compensation and so on. GPL V2 seams Ok for that, but I will never put an "... or later" clause. Maybe eventually FSF will prevent me from using my own code in commercial products or something. I am not sure intellectual property laws are beneficial (at all or beyond say 5 year duration), but even if people are allowed to copy binaries, I sure shouldn't be forced to give up my source.
Given that Linus/many Linux developers seem to have somewhat different goals than RMS as well, it would indeed make sense for Linux developers to fork the license. It's time for something that follows pragmatic wishes of most free software developers rather than one person's political agenda.
They may have an open-and-shut civil breach of contract case, but not anything to put him in jail. He claims he just intended to share his stuff with several friends and it accidentally got out. How do you prove the opposite "beyond the reasonable doubt" in a criminal court?
Besides, even if the law allowed for jail time, the first time it was used would be the undoing of the industry it was supposed to benefit. People are already pissed at RIAA suing a 12-year-old girl. If they tried to put her in jail, there would be a mob carrying cannibal forks.
No matter how fast/RAM saturated is your system, launching a Windows app takes at least 5 seconds, not to mention vigorous hard drive noises. I suspect it's busy relocating dozens of DLL thats should have used -fPIC, loading out-of-process COM servers and doing millions of registry accesses.
Now make that app do something CPU bound. For example, run for(;;) putchar('a'); in a command prompt window. SMP or not, the system freezes.
Or go to a graphics/flash intensive page in IE. Oh boy!
To be fair, KDE under Linux does a decent job emulating Windows in these cases. Multitasking from a VT terminal works well, but keeping X server busy or doing dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo to saturate disk bandwidth does the trick.
I would, if only MS didn't claim EMBED tags are their OS.