Actually, we 'paid' around US$100K for the software - costs to customize a browser, to develop a standard library (GPL) and a few other things. But we leveraged a huge amount of open source software to do it. So we contributed a small amount of knowledge to the pool.
Because in this case, the major competitor has decided that vendor lock-in was the way to go. Since they have 55% of the market, it's a decision they can make. We have 4% of the market, so the only way we can compete is with a product that is open.
Our major competition could clone our product, but then they'd lose their lock-in. Lockin is a two-edged sword; in their case they're locked in to 1980s vintage technology that they cannot change without breaking their lockin. And in our view, they cannot compete with 2010 technology. Once they open up they have to compete on an even playing field and we can kill them on price - they've gotten used to fat margins off the lockin and they can't really lower their prices without a lot of corporate restructuring. If they don't open up we can kill them on features. Gotta love the open standards thing. It lets the little guys compete with the big guys.
Horsepuckey. OSS is all about protecting and creating wealth and making gobs of money.
I spent 2 years building an embedded panel. We could have bought some proprietary software and gone on from there. Instead we used linux, elinks, and some open source libs. We also used open hardware, and even sponsored the development of additional hardware. All of that allowed us to bring a full-fledged completely industry standard control panel that's ethernet enabled, has an industry standard web server built in, is easily field modifiable, and, best of all, has no license fees. Our competition uses proprietary technology. They have a 300 baud serial connection. We have wifi, 100 mbit ethernet, and web connectivity - all for about the same investment up front, with about the same hardware costs, and we pay no royalties.
Years ago I wrote a bunch of code that was sort-of a 4-D CAD system. You could draw elements composed of line segments and assemble them into wireframe objects. You could also feed it faces and have it shade them.
It supported all of the various 4-D visualization projections and you could rotate, zoom and even do perspective in 4D. You really can visualize 4D if you work with it long enough.
The code was written for an SGI workstation, but used relatively generic window ops. All of the transformations were in software (no hardware engine for 4D ops exists even today AFAIK).
I still have a printout of the code but alas no longer have the code itself. If anyone is interested, I could scan it and post it somewhere.
Huh? Never owned a business, eh? In the Good Ol' US of A, the means of production is taxed to the hilt. The chair you sit on is subject to property tax. So are the paperclips in your desk, the money in the bank account, the computer, and pretty much everything and anything that can be inventoried or counted.
If IP is so valuable, then tax it. I'm all for that.
I think you missed the point of 'standard'.... standard != identical.
I choose the best distro for the application:
OpenWRT for my APs - MIPS Angstrom for my Zaurus - ARM Debian for my desktops and laptop - Intel/AMD DSL for my ancient laptop - Intel Homebrew distro for a dev board I'm working on - ARM
And you know what? They all network, they all talk to each other, they all authenticate against the main server, and they all cooperate nicely. It's not about where some file is, or about the package manager, but about inter-operability. And they all run the same apps more-or-less in more-or-less the same way.
I used to own a business... Do you have any idea whatsoever how much small businesses are taxed already?
Once I figured out that of every $1 that we took in, $0.54 went to some government somewhere, in the form of sales taxes, income taxes, employers' contributions, business licenses, property taxes, state-mandated licenses, impact fees, you name it. Not only that, I figured that it cost us at least $10K in labor per year to keep track of all of that.
And we only worked in 3 states. There is no way in hell that a small business could keep track of all the taxes everywhere in the US. So the only option would be to subscribe to some database service and farm out your billing to a big company, which would take about 50% of your net profits. Been there.
The more burden you impose on businesses, the harder it is for small guys to compete. And it's the small guys that to this day drive the innovation and service in this country. More taxes, less smaller companies, less service.
I think you have your argument backwards. When the lead developer of a OSS project goes away, the code still remains. When a closed source company decides a project is dead, it's dead. Irretrievably, totaly dead. Over 20 years ago Quarterdeck had a functioning implementation of X on a DOS PC. It was functional. Then QD went belly up and the code was lost. About that time I used a great app called Javelin for organizing info. Then they went belly up. Again, the code was lost. They were so far ahead of their time that even now, if the code became available, we could learn something.
This happens all the time. How about the demise of the aptly named PlaysForSure?
Open source is protection against these things. I can rattle off any number of projects that have been taken over as their original developers failed, lost interest, or just plain went nuts. Xorg, openvpn, busybox, and so on.
If a project is weak and doesn't have a following it will die. If a project is strong, then it doesn't matter if the main developer goes away.
shitcanning the VP who approved this stuff. Publicly. Then issuing a public apology.
Anyone who gets this heavy-handed in today's internet society is far out of touch with his/her customer base, and has no reason to be employed by a company that makes computer equipment.
In other words, incompetent to the point of being actively harmful to the well-being and even survival of the company itself.
Yeah, I never gave a damn either. Thus the dismal GPA.
I always took the more challenging course, even if it meant lots more work. It's fun.
Like riding a bike, 100 miles in the flats at 16 mph is painful and boring. 100 miles up a mountain in howling wind and near-freezing temps http://www.cascade.org/EandR/hpc/index.cfm is really painful and lots of fun.
At my graduation, I couldn't find my name in the roster. With my dismal GPA, I honestly thought I flunked out.
It wasn't till my parents looked through the Honors section that they found my name - my school calculated honors for engineering students separately from the liberals arts students, so a C+ average in the engineering school was enough to land me an Honors degree from an Ivy League school.
My profs never heard of grade inflation, apparently. You worked your ass off for a C; anything below a C- was enough to flunk out.
Did it suck? Yeah, it sucked. I worked for 70 hours a week for years to get a C+ average. Was it fun? At times. Did I learn a lot? Sure.
Heck, wan't there a proposal in the VHS era that would limit the number of people in a room for tape watching? Something like you could only have 8 people at a time, otherwise you would have to pay additonal royalties?
I cna see it now. Every time someone walks into the room they have to swipe their credit card in the STB or the TV will turn off.
This sounds like a DRM dream. The sad thing is that many people will think this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and will welcome this "customized user experience".
Heh! Mythtv works wonders. We record the kind of stuff we like to watch and then watch it on those really nasty days. (And since I live in the PNW there are plenty of those.)
That being said, last I checked we have something like 172 hours of unwatched shows. Most of them expire before we ever watch them. And that's a good thing.
But you know, my kids don't have the habit. So they typically will watch for a half hour or so and then get bored, and do something exciting - like play, or read, or build something.
Or better yet, turn off the f*cking thing altogether and play. Yeah, it's old-fashioned, but it's fun. Hey, and you know, you learn how to deal with other people, resolve conflicts, learn to share, develop imagination, and if you're throwing a ball you get to learn eye-hand coordination too.
People got along for a few millenia before TV, radio, and FCC. It isn't that hard.
My "share" of tuition was $15K/yr, after student loans and scholarships. Add to that $600/mo for rent, and food. Then add to that the school policy that *all* of a student's income was supposed to go for tuition, notwithstanding that I was self-supporting and had to earn money to pay for rent and food, and that the university controlled the job market and paid minimum wage for everyone who wasn't a PhD, and my "expected contribution" exceeded my pretax income by about $10K / year. Oh, and let's not forget that tuition was not tax-deductible. And that tuition aid was considered income, and I got to pay taxes on it.
So if all you're paying is £3k year tuition fees, stop your whining. Try attending a university in the States.
I think you just proved what you were arguing against.
I suspect much of the work I did when I started is probably against the law. Certainly climbing inside huge trash containers with nothing but a hose and scrub brush is against OSHA regs these days.
Anyway, there are always shitty jobs, and guess what - you get to do them when you start out. Newsflash!
Many of us older people are also severely discriminated against. Try finding a job as an older IT person. Most companies in the US have this young geek image for IT people; once you have gray hair you're pretty much a gonner unless you happen to have one of those 'plush' upper mgt jobs.
Face it - no-one gets a free ride, except for those who are born to wealth. Me, I had nothing when I started; thus the job scrubbing trash bins. Then I had college loans and a minimally paying job. Eventually I had my own company; sold it. Now I'm back in the workforce, and I make roughly the same that I made 15 years ago. Not inflation adjusted, dollar for dollar, so in real life I make about half of what I used to. Then again, I go home at 5, work little to no overtime, and don't work on weekends; so I'm not complaining.
Hmmm... It's not a choice when it's the only thing offered. Dell, etc. only offer Windows. (With few exceptions).
When I see a pulldown at every on-line retailer that has
OS:
None Linux (Ubuntu|whatever) Windows Vista
then what you say will make sense. Until then, it's arrant nonsense. MS has worked hard to make sure that it's the *only* choice people have, to the point of destroying competitive products by nearly any means, including stealing, buy-out and close, and giving away their own version.
I have to disagree somewhat... My kids and wife (who are technically savvy but not literate in the linux meaning of the word) use XFCE by choice. I tried KDE and GNOME for their desktops and got shouted down. Basically, they prefer simpler over complex, and less/no eye candy over annoying stuff.
I suspect that given the choice, most users would opt for the simplicity of something like XFCE over the ever-intrusive, incredibly annoying, and totally persistent Windows popups.
I'm still waiting for outlook to pop up with a "You got your latest installement of pr0n" email over a powerpoint presentation. I don't know how the h*ll people get anything done with the constant annoying whining that windows does about *everything* it does.
See, you got email. See, I checked for viruses. See, I'm going to upgrade your system. See, I'm gonna annoy the sh*t out of you.
You don't really understand the scale of government, do you? I work for a small (tiny, miniscule, microscopic) government agency. We have maybe 50 or 80 employees. Our budget for next 5 years is in the hundreds of millions (US$). I award contracts worth tens of millions of dollars on a routine basis.
If MS was to try and pull that, we'd contract with Red Hat, Novell, somebody, and be up and running before the licenses expired. There's only a few apps that are Windows only that don't have linux equivalents; if someone was to throw a few million at it they'd be ported to linux in no time, even if it meant running with wine in the interim.
Try a stunt like that with a real government that can throw billions at the problem, and MS would find itself in the freezer. Remember, governments can pass laws; they can easily pass a law suspending copyright until they get it sorted out.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we 'paid' around US$100K for the software - costs to customize a browser, to develop a standard library (GPL) and a few other things. But we leveraged a huge amount of open source software to do it. So we contributed a small amount of knowledge to the pool.
Because in this case, the major competitor has decided that vendor lock-in was the way to go. Since they have 55% of the market, it's a decision they can make. We have 4% of the market, so the only way we can compete is with a product that is open.
Our major competition could clone our product, but then they'd lose their lock-in. Lockin is a two-edged sword; in their case they're locked in to 1980s vintage technology that they cannot change without breaking their lockin. And in our view, they cannot compete with 2010 technology. Once they open up they have to compete on an even playing field and we can kill them on price - they've gotten used to fat margins off the lockin and they can't really lower their prices without a lot of corporate restructuring. If they don't open up we can kill them on features. Gotta love the open standards thing. It lets the little guys compete with the big guys.
Horsepuckey. OSS is all about protecting and creating wealth and making gobs of money.
I spent 2 years building an embedded panel. We could have bought some proprietary software and gone on from there. Instead we used linux, elinks, and some open source libs. We also used open hardware, and even sponsored the development of additional hardware. All of that allowed us to bring a full-fledged completely industry standard control panel that's ethernet enabled, has an industry standard web server built in, is easily field modifiable, and, best of all, has no license fees. Our competition uses proprietary technology. They have a 300 baud serial connection. We have wifi, 100 mbit ethernet, and web connectivity - all for about the same investment up front, with about the same hardware costs, and we pay no royalties.
Who has the market advantage?
Well yeah, I don't want a blowjob from some toothless redmonmd crackhead....
Well, they take your passport and your laptop, cellphone, and any other electronics. Then they deny you entry.
Now what? How do you prove you're a citizen?
And for the 'reasonable time' argument, people have been held in Guantanamo for, what, 5 years? Is that reasonable?
Years ago I wrote a bunch of code that was sort-of a 4-D CAD system. You could draw elements composed of line segments and assemble them into wireframe objects. You could also feed it faces and have it shade them.
It supported all of the various 4-D visualization projections and you could rotate, zoom and even do perspective in 4D. You really can visualize 4D if you work with it long enough.
The code was written for an SGI workstation, but used relatively generic window ops. All of the transformations were in software (no hardware engine for 4D ops exists even today AFAIK).
I still have a printout of the code but alas no longer have the code itself. If anyone is interested, I could scan it and post it somewhere.
Huh? Never owned a business, eh? In the Good Ol' US of A, the means of production is taxed to the hilt. The chair you sit on is subject to property tax. So are the paperclips in your desk, the money in the bank account, the computer, and pretty much everything and anything that can be inventoried or counted.
If IP is so valuable, then tax it. I'm all for that.
I think you missed the point of 'standard'.... standard != identical.
I choose the best distro for the application:
OpenWRT for my APs - MIPS
Angstrom for my Zaurus - ARM
Debian for my desktops and laptop - Intel/AMD
DSL for my ancient laptop - Intel
Homebrew distro for a dev board I'm working on - ARM
And you know what? They all network, they all talk to each other, they all authenticate against the main server, and they all cooperate nicely. It's not about where some file is, or about the package manager, but about inter-operability. And they all run the same apps more-or-less in more-or-less the same way.
I used to own a business... Do you have any idea whatsoever how much small businesses are taxed already?
Once I figured out that of every $1 that we took in, $0.54 went to some government somewhere, in the form of sales taxes, income taxes, employers' contributions, business licenses, property taxes, state-mandated licenses, impact fees, you name it. Not only that, I figured that it cost us at least $10K in labor per year to keep track of all of that.
And we only worked in 3 states. There is no way in hell that a small business could keep track of all the taxes everywhere in the US. So the only option would be to subscribe to some database service and farm out your billing to a big company, which would take about 50% of your net profits. Been there.
The more burden you impose on businesses, the harder it is for small guys to compete. And it's the small guys that to this day drive the innovation and service in this country. More taxes, less smaller companies, less service.
I think you have your argument backwards. When the lead developer of a OSS project goes away, the code still remains. When a closed source company decides a project is dead, it's dead. Irretrievably, totaly dead. Over 20 years ago Quarterdeck had a functioning implementation of X on a DOS PC. It was functional. Then QD went belly up and the code was lost. About that time I used a great app called Javelin for organizing info. Then they went belly up. Again, the code was lost. They were so far ahead of their time that even now, if the code became available, we could learn something.
This happens all the time. How about the demise of the aptly named PlaysForSure?
Open source is protection against these things. I can rattle off any number of projects that have been taken over as their original developers failed, lost interest, or just plain went nuts. Xorg, openvpn, busybox, and so on.
If a project is weak and doesn't have a following it will die. If a project is strong, then it doesn't matter if the main developer goes away.
shitcanning the VP who approved this stuff. Publicly. Then issuing a public apology.
Anyone who gets this heavy-handed in today's internet society is far out of touch with his/her customer base, and has no reason to be employed by a company that makes computer equipment.
In other words, incompetent to the point of being actively harmful to the well-being and even survival of the company itself.
get free wifi gear from Sebastopol?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/26/0118237
Yeah, I never gave a damn either. Thus the dismal GPA.
I always took the more challenging course, even if it meant lots more work. It's fun.
Like riding a bike, 100 miles in the flats at 16 mph is painful and boring. 100 miles up a mountain in howling wind and near-freezing temps http://www.cascade.org/EandR/hpc/index.cfm is really painful and lots of fun.
So it was with finite analysis.
Heh....
At my graduation, I couldn't find my name in the roster. With my dismal GPA, I honestly thought I flunked out.
It wasn't till my parents looked through the Honors section that they found my name - my school calculated honors for engineering students separately from the liberals arts students, so a C+ average in the engineering school was enough to land me an Honors degree from an Ivy League school.
My profs never heard of grade inflation, apparently. You worked your ass off for a C; anything below a C- was enough to flunk out.
Did it suck? Yeah, it sucked. I worked for 70 hours a week for years to get a C+ average. Was it fun? At times. Did I learn a lot? Sure.
And the point is?
Heck, wan't there a proposal in the VHS era that would limit the number of people in a room for tape watching? Something like you could only have 8 people at a time, otherwise you would have to pay additonal royalties?
I cna see it now. Every time someone walks into the room they have to swipe their credit card in the STB or the TV will turn off.
This sounds like a DRM dream. The sad thing is that many people will think this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and will welcome this "customized user experience".
Arghhh.....
Heh! Mythtv works wonders. We record the kind of stuff we like to watch and then watch it on those really nasty days. (And since I live in the PNW there are plenty of those.)
That being said, last I checked we have something like 172 hours of unwatched shows. Most of them expire before we ever watch them. And that's a good thing.
But you know, my kids don't have the habit. So they typically will watch for a half hour or so and then get bored, and do something exciting - like play, or read, or build something.
Or better yet, turn off the f*cking thing altogether and play. Yeah, it's old-fashioned, but it's fun. Hey, and you know, you learn how to deal with other people, resolve conflicts, learn to share, develop imagination, and if you're throwing a ball you get to learn eye-hand coordination too.
People got along for a few millenia before TV, radio, and FCC. It isn't that hard.
Is that all you're whining about?????
Holy mother of god!
My "share" of tuition was $15K/yr, after student loans and scholarships. Add to that $600/mo for rent, and food. Then add to that the school policy that *all* of a student's income was supposed to go for tuition, notwithstanding that I was self-supporting and had to earn money to pay for rent and food, and that the university controlled the job market and paid minimum wage for everyone who wasn't a PhD, and my "expected contribution" exceeded my pretax income by about $10K / year. Oh, and let's not forget that tuition was not tax-deductible. And that tuition aid was considered income, and I got to pay taxes on it.
So if all you're paying is £3k year tuition fees, stop your whining. Try attending a university in the States.
LOL!
:-)
I did. Made me look younger. Didn't get me a plush job, though.
I think you just proved what you were arguing against.
I suspect much of the work I did when I started is probably against the law. Certainly climbing inside huge trash containers with nothing but a hose and scrub brush is against OSHA regs these days.
Anyway, there are always shitty jobs, and guess what - you get to do them when you start out. Newsflash!
Many of us older people are also severely discriminated against. Try finding a job as an older IT person. Most companies in the US have this young geek image for IT people; once you have gray hair you're pretty much a gonner unless you happen to have one of those 'plush' upper mgt jobs.
Face it - no-one gets a free ride, except for those who are born to wealth. Me, I had nothing when I started; thus the job scrubbing trash bins. Then I had college loans and a minimally paying job. Eventually I had my own company; sold it. Now I'm back in the workforce, and I make roughly the same that I made 15 years ago. Not inflation adjusted, dollar for dollar, so in real life I make about half of what I used to. Then again, I go home at 5, work little to no overtime, and don't work on weekends; so I'm not complaining.
Hmmm... It's not a choice when it's the only thing offered. Dell, etc. only offer Windows. (With few exceptions).
When I see a pulldown at every on-line retailer that has
OS:
None
Linux (Ubuntu|whatever)
Windows Vista
then what you say will make sense. Until then, it's arrant nonsense. MS has worked hard to make sure that it's the *only* choice people have, to the point of destroying competitive products by nearly any means, including stealing, buy-out and close, and giving away their own version.
I have to disagree somewhat... My kids and wife (who are technically savvy but not literate in the linux meaning of the word) use XFCE by choice. I tried KDE and GNOME for their desktops and got shouted down. Basically, they prefer simpler over complex, and less/no eye candy over annoying stuff.
I suspect that given the choice, most users would opt for the simplicity of something like XFCE over the ever-intrusive, incredibly annoying, and totally persistent Windows popups.
I'm still waiting for outlook to pop up with a "You got your latest installement of pr0n" email over a powerpoint presentation. I don't know how the h*ll people get anything done with the constant annoying whining that windows does about *everything* it does.
See, you got email.
See, I checked for viruses.
See, I'm going to upgrade your system.
See, I'm gonna annoy the sh*t out of you.
You don't really understand the scale of government, do you? I work for a small (tiny, miniscule, microscopic) government agency. We have maybe 50 or 80 employees. Our budget for next 5 years is in the hundreds of millions (US$). I award contracts worth tens of millions of dollars on a routine basis.
If MS was to try and pull that, we'd contract with Red Hat, Novell, somebody, and be up and running before the licenses expired. There's only a few apps that are Windows only that don't have linux equivalents; if someone was to throw a few million at it they'd be ported to linux in no time, even if it meant running with wine in the interim.
Try a stunt like that with a real government that can throw billions at the problem, and MS would find itself in the freezer. Remember, governments can pass laws; they can easily pass a law suspending copyright until they get it sorted out.
Gah. Maybe in your jurisdiction.
I've paid taxes on cars. boats, chairs, even wastebaskets and paper in the printer.
So when you're old and your kids are taking care of you, should they beat you when you don something they don't like?