A. Eliminate all the IT personal with.com inflated salaries by making IT a part of developments job function.
B. Outsource IT
C. Replace IT with cheaper, less expirienced youngsters.
I've done a lot of admin work and have seen all of this as well. I've stayed with UNIX and away from MS, and never saw the admin jobs pay more than the jobs requiring equivalent development experience, so I don't see how this saves money. It's sort of like the way they take away office staff so lead engineers and managers have to do all there own faxing and photocopying.
What managers fail to understand is that you hire the experienced guys for their judgement, as well as the specific systems knowledge. I've worked with a lot of young guys who know more about the technology, and I was one of those once.
Outsourcing has its own pitfalls, and going into all of them would be offtopic, but let me suggest that it is only a good idea for tasks that are well understood and have no complexities relating to the specific business you are in (i.e. they are standard services).
We don't give the media permission to denegrate the basic goodness that is "the hacker ethic". In spite of all the crap the major media puts out about this, there is almost no connection between hacking and breaking the law. The real origin of the urge to hack is the same as they urge any artist feels to create.
I fully support the use of the alternate term "cracker" to refer to people who use hacker-like skills (or often, no skill just downloaded cracker kits) to vandalise whatever system they can manage to crack. Yes, some hackers get sucked into these activities at some point in their development, but that doesn't mean it is condoned by the hacker ethic.
How about some analogies. When you check the door of the business down the street and find it unlocked, is it legal so wander around inside and see what you find? No, but if you didn't do any damage, it shouldn't be more than a legal slap on the wrist. If when you tried the door, you triggered the alarm, or some damage was done just by trying it, you can expect someone to be pissed off, and maybe prosecute you when you try it again on another business.
If a responsible third party closely inspects and tests the security perimiter around your nuclear, chemical or biological plant, and finds vulnerabilities, what should be done? Right, first they tell you and the relevent government authorities, and if there is no real response for a reasonable period of time, tell someone else (press, other trusted third party, etc.).
What is going on now is a typical corporate response, and it is exactly the same as using SLAPP lawsuits to silence critics. It is evil and anyone getting hit by such tactics should get help from advocacy groups. Of course, staying away from controversy is one approach, but it doesn't give you good hacker-karma.
Frankly, I don't recomend trying to make this work inside of a Windows box. The current way is through wireless access points, which are the wireless equivalent of the cheap ($80 about 9 month ago) NAT/TPhub box that I use now.
The next generation needs to be both a router and an access point (a true multipoint router, not just a NAT box). The design work should be done as Free Source for both hardware and software so that producers of the hardware have to compete head to head on the merrits.
As an aside, I see no reason why free source hardware can't use pantented technology, since the actual manufacturer is in a position to properly license what they need for the feature set they want to deliver. Unless I'm confused, there is no infringement to design using patented technology, just to actually build it.
I know my army brat friend, you know... the guy that never buys a round at the bar and comes to parties empty handed, would NEVER pay for this service, but he'd sure be happy to use it!
Welcome to the gift culture. Public radio stations report that about 10% of their listeners actually pledge, but they manage to get by on relatively low suggested pledge amounts and asking those that can to give more.
Being a cheapskate at the bar can get you labled as a such by your friends, and they might even talk about you behind your back (or to slashdot;-). Even if you can be an anonymous cheapskate, you will still pay a price in karma.
What I speak isn't FUD, and they aren't just technical issues. They are technical issues arising from legal limitations. The FCC doesn't just allow anyone to broadcast in these bands at whatever power level they want, these are public bands for use by the public.
Sorry, I don't mean to attack anyone personally. What you say doesn't really remove it from the technical. Yes, the FCC could take away all the public spectrum, but short of that, the only real constraints, including the ones you mention are technical.
No, you can't just up your signal and drown everyone out, but if you're in the middle of nowhere, there is no reason for prohibiting this except for other technical limitations (such as proximity of powerful transmitters to people already mentioned). Would the FCC prevent Ham operators from doing anything that they wanted (as a community, not as individuals)? I think not.
The ideas about phased array antennas are very interesting for exactly these reasons, as well as the code division stuff. My point is that there are technical solutions to any technical problem that you can assert. Sufficient space in the right bands is important, but I suspect that there is more than enough space in existing bands to find solutions, and co-exist happily with other uses.
They could take some of it away, but do they dare?
Ok, so there are some legal and practical issues in addition to the purely technical. Actually, these are technical issues as well. If I understand what I have recently read about it, this is exactly what prompted Lawrence Lessig to write _Code_. The idea is that you can do things in the hardware and software (code) that tend to implement your legal and social agenda.
Unintentionally open WiFi access points are easy to subvert and use for nefarious purposes. The article does suggest that the WiFi internetwork will just happen, and that is false for any number of reasons, including this one. I wouldn't be against asking people to identify themselves in order to get a digital token to use on the network. I would want the mapping from token to person to be off-line so that it can't be hacked or abused. Law enforcement would be required to show cause (i.e. warrents and supenas) to get access.
The social network backs this up the same way we fight spam. Wide-open access points are just as bad as wide-open SMTP servers because you loose any real ability to track, but when ISPs start shutting down your ability to send out mail, you will start to care and fix the problem. This has happened to ISPs who didn't protect their network and it probably is already happening WRT WiFi spamming.
Technical issues have technical solutions. There is no reason you can't use more power in low density areas. If you don't want all that power concentrated next to your head, then use a local repeater (mounted on the pickup, of course).
If this takes off, it really will create a mesh so that even in rural areas, the base station on top of your house (or better yet, the silo) will be able to connect to a handful of neighbors, and provide a fully redundant connection. I will be the only one suffering if I cut the power line to the router with the backhoe, because all the neighbors won't make the same mistake all at once.
Commercial providers aren't even interested in the remote areas, because there just aren't enough dollars to extract. Those annoying "can you hear me now" commercials just confirm my long time theory about corporate image advertising. They are always trying to reverse a real or perceived problem in their public image, and typically this is instead of actually trying to fix the problem. Anyone remember AT&T's "easy to do business with" campaign?
Good points, but we don't have to design a solution on slashdot. If it is done right, they can resist it, but they cannot stop it. Don't forget that it is MS that is defending themselves from anti-trust action, and not the GNU/Linux community defending themselves from "back-assward" laws as you say.
Freely exchanging ideas is our right, although it may be threatened at times and in some places. With an active community keeping close tabs on legislative attempts to curtail this, I think we can manage to fend off the worst effects of industry bought and paid legislators. Oct. 9th will tell us a lot about whether the Supreme court can be bought.
I don't think this comment is, nor was it meant to be funny. The WiFi basestation designers/manufacturers have no interest in shutting it down, unless their customers start to ask for it. As you and many have pointed out, they don't even know, so why would they ask.
The real pushback could and probably will come from the ISPs. You don't really have a legal right to share your home connection with your neighbors. Of course, it depends on your service contract, but most home service contracts probably explicitely disallow this, and we have heard about ISPs taking steps to stop it.
What few of the businesses in the effected market segments (3G, home DSL and broadband) realize is that any control they have could be strictly temporary. As the article points out, once the density of lilly pads is high enough, you have a robust mesh of nodes, and everyone is connected.
Obviously, there are technical issues to work out. The network needs some heirachy, or you have to hop through thousands of nodes to get accross country, and the latency will kill you. As it stands now, it is a star topology, since I don't think any typical base stations will route through neighboring base stations. On the other hand, there are some really promissing technologies that could do this very well.
All it will take is a bit more advocacy, but some of the current advocacy approaches can't work in the long run because of problems mentioned above. Instead of promoting the use of security loopholes in existing basestations, we have have to develop the free/open hardware and software to implement the appropriate infrastructure. A small box with an array antenna and a smart router could provide all the local coverage and network connectivity through neighboring identical boxes, and a few high end routers with more complex tranceivers, and even hard wired connections could connect the rest to the backbone.
If this is done right, it can't be stopped easily by legislation. The only real difficulty would be getting enough people to install these rather than something that wouldn't play with this network. It could look very much like the Linux vs. MS competition. Many of the commercial players will at least attempt to behave like MS and use any tactic to squash it, and this will make it difficult, at least initially, to penetrate the market.
Although this certainly hasn't played out yet in the OS market, I claim that the all or nothing approach that MS has taken will ultimately destroy them. In the short run, all sorts of things can happen, but in the end it is much more powerful to share knowledge freely, and those that attempt to hoard it will lose.
You have some good points. Degrees and certifications do help if you are looking for a job, particularly when the market is tight, but you learn the important stuff by actually doing it.
And before you come down on me. I got a GED at 20, started college at 23, finished at 28. Cause even though I got pretty good jobs with my skills, as soon as I got that paper, it opened many more doors.
You have done well to take the time an do that after working a few years. My history is different, but I know it is hard to go back to school when you are working. I ended up getting my B.S. from MIT in three years out of five. I sort of dropped out after two years and started to work full time. It was very hard to go back, and if I didn't have enough credits to finish in one more, I don't know if I would have.
It is very cool that MIT is doing this, and I hope it encourages others. If you don't care about the piece of paper, this gives you access to an important part of the coursework, and there is no reason not to use your local community college or university to hook up with teachers and resources, and design your own degree with curiculum created at the best universities of the world.
In the meritocracy of the Free/Open source community, paper doesn't count for much anyway. A typical hacker career path is going to college straight from HS, then getting addicted to hacking, ignoring all classes (hard to get up for those 10AM classes after hacking 'til 3AM), then drop out and get a job. Isn't this true for Richard Stallman? The piece of paper won't ever matter for him.
That said, a degree from a top institution always gets you some instant credibility, and a PhD is still pretty much a required entrance certificate for acedemia.
The conversion to new technology isn't as fast as you think. I'm still using two 20 year old TVs (a 25" Zenith and a 13" Hitachi with a completely manual tuner). Admittedly, part of why I'm still using these is 1) I don't care that much about getting anything bigger or more modern and 2) there isn't much of a technology roadmap. I suppose that when I can get a decent sized HDTV compatible in the $500-1000 range, I could be convinced to upgrade.
As long as the technology is unsettled, at least some people will be reluctant to do anything as long as they have something that works. There will also be a lot of people who just can't afford to upgrade. Advertising driven TV is dependant on a mass audience and the lowest common denominator will dominate it for a long time, no matter what the people pushing the new stuff thing. These are powerful interests.
Yes, isn't this the real risk for the TV industry. With the Internet continuing to advance in terms of bandwidth, functions and programming, it is very easy to imaging people just switching to their computers and never replacing that TV.
Unless they turn it off (opt-out option) in a way that MS cannot turn back on (force on in the OS), then it will still be a problem for anyone running current MS systems.
Perhaps I can summarize from a number of comments before me. It's not the chips, it is the OS that will enforce this. With MS setting the policy in closed code, we can have no confidence that they won't enforce a ban on all free/open software that doesn't give at least a nod to this scheme.
I haven't reviewed much of this technology, but I can surmise. When the hardware support is enabled, I would expect it to prevent user level code from doing certain things and that system code will have to make the determination and perform as the traffic cop.
Does anyone else see a problem with circularity here? We have to just trust that MS is doing all of this correctly and fairly, and then who is the final arbiter of what code is trusted enough to be system code. Obviously, only MS trusts MS to be the arbiter. If not MS, then you have to at least open all the relevent sources to the arbiter. The implications of this will be obvious to slashdotters if not to anyone else.
One additional point, what is the ultimate response to DRM from Open/Free source. If you support the legitimate use of copyright to protect the author's rights, then you should support the idea of implementing a fair and open management scheme that allows for legally running both free and restricted programs/content according to their licenses. It could even correctly support legitimate fair use if you are creative enough.
Of course if you are a real anarchist about this, I can't see how GNU/Linux and friends can prevent you from disabling any restrictions by patching the code and recompiles. In my opinion, this is the most the law can ask for: to force someone to take explicite steps to circumvent the intent of the law (thus creating a trail of evidence in the process).
Yeah, let's see you get a 1/144 scale airplain fly, much less drop any bombs.
Was that comment about aircraft carriers launching planes for real? Maybe you could catapult them off the deck, but to what end? Hardly realistic if they are just projectiles.
I can't disagree with this comment more. I can't immagine that you have really looked at enough of the open source project to comment. The bigger issue is finding the solution that fits your problem.
Also comparisons to commercial projects that are in use by large organizations, publishing or otherwise isn't really useful. Frankly, I far prefer sites that don't try to mix a lot of fancy formatting and inserts with the content, and I think you are more likely to find this with the generally cleaner pages from free/open projects.
It wasn't slashdotted when I got to it. My problem with many sites (particularly after following the author links with this one) is that they don't respect my settings to make the fonts bigger. As a forty-something hacker, this is becoming a really anoying problem for me.
Although the article and this comment make some good points, I still have trouble even putting any of this in context. We all know that interoperability and good open standards are a good thing, and that one of the real challenges of the Free/Open Source movement is how to get some level of long-term, whole-system coherency into the design process. Some people seem to be frustrated that this cannot be established top down and imposed on the developer communities from the outside.
I don't even see anyone saying what is and is not a CMS for this discussion, except indirectly. Certainly, slashcode is one, and CmdrTaco and friends have their everything2 site (I've just recently checked it out and still haven't decided if it is very cool, or another time sink that could soak up hours and hours (probably both)). These two systems have radically different purposes and structures, even if they share a lot in terms of technology platforms and such.
So the questions becomes, how do you want them to interoperate? Make linking easy? Support headline applets (slashapp)? Share data infrastructures? Export and import content? And the list goes on. The easy ones that are important to someone are already happening/done. What exactly is the proposal? I can't tell from the article.
To the extent that it is possible, if the developers of indepentdent CMS projects create linkages and exploit synergies by looking at other projects and cherry picking the best parts, we all win. Those of us with unrelated projects to manage would benefit the most, particularly to the extent that this work: 1) reduces mindspace burdens in using CMS, 2) makes it easier to convert to another one of similar purpose and 3) helps us create linkages and establish synergies with other projects.
My point here is that one of the most important uses of CMS (at least for me;-) is to implement collaboration web sites to support projects, and it sure would be a big help if moving between projects didn't mean learning a whole new set of tools to access the shared content that different projects generate. Also, it is not news to most slashdotters that projects share hosting resources often provided by third parties. As projects evolve and relationships change, your project might be forced to migrate because of changing partners and sponsors, and that might include the CMS system.
For the project that I am working on setting up these resources for (GNUbook, there is a URL, but I don't think it would stand up to slashdot yet. If someone wanted to mirror however...), I am looking for existing CMS projects that meet my needs. I probably can use/adapt slashcode to our needs, the voting and rating aspects of it are great for allowing the community to self-regulate to a large extent. On the other hand, I really like something more like TWiki because it allows for editing content and storing revision histories is an integral part of it.
Bottom line is that if we are going to have more interop/integration between the various projects, somebody has to take it on and make it their mission. Not everyone has to scratch their itch by developing a new project, and a lot can be done by just stating your case and promoting it to the people who matter (the developers, of course). I also suggest that the developers of CMS systems should work harder at finding the best in what is out there and integrating it with their vision (only where appropriate, of course). That's what this experiment is all about after all, sharing everything, picking the best parts and propagating the best to all the situations that apply. Re-inventing the wheel is for the other guys.
Slashdot Mirror
B. Outsource IT
C. Replace IT with cheaper, less expirienced youngsters.
I've done a lot of admin work and have seen all of this as well. I've stayed with UNIX and away from MS, and never saw the admin jobs pay more than the jobs requiring equivalent development experience, so I don't see how this saves money. It's sort of like the way they take away office staff so lead engineers and managers have to do all there own faxing and photocopying.
What managers fail to understand is that you hire the experienced guys for their judgement, as well as the specific systems knowledge. I've worked with a lot of young guys who know more about the technology, and I was one of those once.
Outsourcing has its own pitfalls, and going into all of them would be offtopic, but let me suggest that it is only a good idea for tasks that are well understood and have no complexities relating to the specific business you are in (i.e. they are standard services).
I fully support the use of the alternate term "cracker" to refer to people who use hacker-like skills (or often, no skill just downloaded cracker kits) to vandalise whatever system they can manage to crack. Yes, some hackers get sucked into these activities at some point in their development, but that doesn't mean it is condoned by the hacker ethic.
How about some analogies. When you check the door of the business down the street and find it unlocked, is it legal so wander around inside and see what you find? No, but if you didn't do any damage, it shouldn't be more than a legal slap on the wrist. If when you tried the door, you triggered the alarm, or some damage was done just by trying it, you can expect someone to be pissed off, and maybe prosecute you when you try it again on another business.
If a responsible third party closely inspects and tests the security perimiter around your nuclear, chemical or biological plant, and finds vulnerabilities, what should be done? Right, first they tell you and the relevent government authorities, and if there is no real response for a reasonable period of time, tell someone else (press, other trusted third party, etc.).
What is going on now is a typical corporate response, and it is exactly the same as using SLAPP lawsuits to silence critics. It is evil and anyone getting hit by such tactics should get help from advocacy groups. Of course, staying away from controversy is one approach, but it doesn't give you good hacker-karma.
The next generation needs to be both a router and an access point (a true multipoint router, not just a NAT box). The design work should be done as Free Source for both hardware and software so that producers of the hardware have to compete head to head on the merrits.
As an aside, I see no reason why free source hardware can't use pantented technology, since the actual manufacturer is in a position to properly license what they need for the feature set they want to deliver. Unless I'm confused, there is no infringement to design using patented technology, just to actually build it.
Welcome to the gift culture. Public radio stations report that about 10% of their listeners actually pledge, but they manage to get by on relatively low suggested pledge amounts and asking those that can to give more.
Being a cheapskate at the bar can get you labled as a such by your friends, and they might even talk about you behind your back (or to slashdot ;-). Even if you can be an anonymous cheapskate, you will still pay a price in karma.
Sorry, I don't mean to attack anyone personally. What you say doesn't really remove it from the technical. Yes, the FCC could take away all the public spectrum, but short of that, the only real constraints, including the ones you mention are technical.
No, you can't just up your signal and drown everyone out, but if you're in the middle of nowhere, there is no reason for prohibiting this except for other technical limitations (such as proximity of powerful transmitters to people already mentioned). Would the FCC prevent Ham operators from doing anything that they wanted (as a community, not as individuals)? I think not.
The ideas about phased array antennas are very interesting for exactly these reasons, as well as the code division stuff. My point is that there are technical solutions to any technical problem that you can assert. Sufficient space in the right bands is important, but I suspect that there is more than enough space in existing bands to find solutions, and co-exist happily with other uses.
They could take some of it away, but do they dare?
Unintentionally open WiFi access points are easy to subvert and use for nefarious purposes. The article does suggest that the WiFi internetwork will just happen, and that is false for any number of reasons, including this one. I wouldn't be against asking people to identify themselves in order to get a digital token to use on the network. I would want the mapping from token to person to be off-line so that it can't be hacked or abused. Law enforcement would be required to show cause (i.e. warrents and supenas) to get access.
The social network backs this up the same way we fight spam. Wide-open access points are just as bad as wide-open SMTP servers because you loose any real ability to track, but when ISPs start shutting down your ability to send out mail, you will start to care and fix the problem. This has happened to ISPs who didn't protect their network and it probably is already happening WRT WiFi spamming.
If this takes off, it really will create a mesh so that even in rural areas, the base station on top of your house (or better yet, the silo) will be able to connect to a handful of neighbors, and provide a fully redundant connection. I will be the only one suffering if I cut the power line to the router with the backhoe, because all the neighbors won't make the same mistake all at once.
Commercial providers aren't even interested in the remote areas, because there just aren't enough dollars to extract. Those annoying "can you hear me now" commercials just confirm my long time theory about corporate image advertising. They are always trying to reverse a real or perceived problem in their public image, and typically this is instead of actually trying to fix the problem. Anyone remember AT&T's "easy to do business with" campaign?
Freely exchanging ideas is our right, although it may be threatened at times and in some places. With an active community keeping close tabs on legislative attempts to curtail this, I think we can manage to fend off the worst effects of industry bought and paid legislators. Oct. 9th will tell us a lot about whether the Supreme court can be bought.
The real pushback could and probably will come from the ISPs. You don't really have a legal right to share your home connection with your neighbors. Of course, it depends on your service contract, but most home service contracts probably explicitely disallow this, and we have heard about ISPs taking steps to stop it.
What few of the businesses in the effected market segments (3G, home DSL and broadband) realize is that any control they have could be strictly temporary. As the article points out, once the density of lilly pads is high enough, you have a robust mesh of nodes, and everyone is connected.
Obviously, there are technical issues to work out. The network needs some heirachy, or you have to hop through thousands of nodes to get accross country, and the latency will kill you. As it stands now, it is a star topology, since I don't think any typical base stations will route through neighboring base stations. On the other hand, there are some really promissing technologies that could do this very well.
All it will take is a bit more advocacy, but some of the current advocacy approaches can't work in the long run because of problems mentioned above. Instead of promoting the use of security loopholes in existing basestations, we have have to develop the free/open hardware and software to implement the appropriate infrastructure. A small box with an array antenna and a smart router could provide all the local coverage and network connectivity through neighboring identical boxes, and a few high end routers with more complex tranceivers, and even hard wired connections could connect the rest to the backbone.
If this is done right, it can't be stopped easily by legislation. The only real difficulty would be getting enough people to install these rather than something that wouldn't play with this network. It could look very much like the Linux vs. MS competition. Many of the commercial players will at least attempt to behave like MS and use any tactic to squash it, and this will make it difficult, at least initially, to penetrate the market.
Although this certainly hasn't played out yet in the OS market, I claim that the all or nothing approach that MS has taken will ultimately destroy them. In the short run, all sorts of things can happen, but in the end it is much more powerful to share knowledge freely, and those that attempt to hoard it will lose.
And before you come down on me. I got a GED at 20, started college at 23, finished at 28. Cause even though I got pretty good jobs with my skills, as soon as I got that paper, it opened many more doors.
You have done well to take the time an do that after working a few years. My history is different, but I know it is hard to go back to school when you are working. I ended up getting my B.S. from MIT in three years out of five. I sort of dropped out after two years and started to work full time. It was very hard to go back, and if I didn't have enough credits to finish in one more, I don't know if I would have.
It is very cool that MIT is doing this, and I hope it encourages others. If you don't care about the piece of paper, this gives you access to an important part of the coursework, and there is no reason not to use your local community college or university to hook up with teachers and resources, and design your own degree with curiculum created at the best universities of the world.
In the meritocracy of the Free/Open source community, paper doesn't count for much anyway. A typical hacker career path is going to college straight from HS, then getting addicted to hacking, ignoring all classes (hard to get up for those 10AM classes after hacking 'til 3AM), then drop out and get a job. Isn't this true for Richard Stallman? The piece of paper won't ever matter for him.
That said, a degree from a top institution always gets you some instant credibility, and a PhD is still pretty much a required entrance certificate for acedemia.
As long as the technology is unsettled, at least some people will be reluctant to do anything as long as they have something that works. There will also be a lot of people who just can't afford to upgrade. Advertising driven TV is dependant on a mass audience and the lowest common denominator will dominate it for a long time, no matter what the people pushing the new stuff thing. These are powerful interests.
Yes, isn't this the real risk for the TV industry. With the Internet continuing to advance in terms of bandwidth, functions and programming, it is very easy to imaging people just switching to their computers and never replacing that TV.
Unless they turn it off (opt-out option) in a way that MS cannot turn back on (force on in the OS), then it will still be a problem for anyone running current MS systems.
I haven't reviewed much of this technology, but I can surmise. When the hardware support is enabled, I would expect it to prevent user level code from doing certain things and that system code will have to make the determination and perform as the traffic cop.
Does anyone else see a problem with circularity here? We have to just trust that MS is doing all of this correctly and fairly, and then who is the final arbiter of what code is trusted enough to be system code. Obviously, only MS trusts MS to be the arbiter. If not MS, then you have to at least open all the relevent sources to the arbiter. The implications of this will be obvious to slashdotters if not to anyone else.
One additional point, what is the ultimate response to DRM from Open/Free source. If you support the legitimate use of copyright to protect the author's rights, then you should support the idea of implementing a fair and open management scheme that allows for legally running both free and restricted programs/content according to their licenses. It could even correctly support legitimate fair use if you are creative enough.
Of course if you are a real anarchist about this, I can't see how GNU/Linux and friends can prevent you from disabling any restrictions by patching the code and recompiles. In my opinion, this is the most the law can ask for: to force someone to take explicite steps to circumvent the intent of the law (thus creating a trail of evidence in the process).
Was that comment about aircraft carriers launching planes for real? Maybe you could catapult them off the deck, but to what end? Hardly realistic if they are just projectiles.
Also comparisons to commercial projects that are in use by large organizations, publishing or otherwise isn't really useful. Frankly, I far prefer sites that don't try to mix a lot of fancy formatting and inserts with the content, and I think you are more likely to find this with the generally cleaner pages from free/open projects.
Although the article and this comment make some good points, I still have trouble even putting any of this in context. We all know that interoperability and good open standards are a good thing, and that one of the real challenges of the Free/Open Source movement is how to get some level of long-term, whole-system coherency into the design process. Some people seem to be frustrated that this cannot be established top down and imposed on the developer communities from the outside.
I don't even see anyone saying what is and is not a CMS for this discussion, except indirectly. Certainly, slashcode is one, and CmdrTaco and friends have their everything2 site (I've just recently checked it out and still haven't decided if it is very cool, or another time sink that could soak up hours and hours (probably both)). These two systems have radically different purposes and structures, even if they share a lot in terms of technology platforms and such.
So the questions becomes, how do you want them to interoperate? Make linking easy? Support headline applets (slashapp)? Share data infrastructures? Export and import content? And the list goes on. The easy ones that are important to someone are already happening/done. What exactly is the proposal? I can't tell from the article.
To the extent that it is possible, if the developers of indepentdent CMS projects create linkages and exploit synergies by looking at other projects and cherry picking the best parts, we all win. Those of us with unrelated projects to manage would benefit the most, particularly to the extent that this work: 1) reduces mindspace burdens in using CMS, 2) makes it easier to convert to another one of similar purpose and 3) helps us create linkages and establish synergies with other projects.
My point here is that one of the most important uses of CMS (at least for me ;-) is to implement collaboration web sites to support projects, and it sure would be a big help if moving between projects didn't mean learning a whole new set of tools to access the shared content that different projects generate. Also, it is not news to most slashdotters that projects share hosting resources often provided by third parties. As projects evolve and relationships change, your project might be forced to migrate because of changing partners and sponsors, and that might include the CMS system.
For the project that I am working on setting up these resources for (GNUbook, there is a URL, but I don't think it would stand up to slashdot yet. If someone wanted to mirror however ...), I am looking for existing CMS projects that meet my needs. I probably can use/adapt slashcode to our needs, the voting and rating aspects of it are great for allowing the community to self-regulate to a large extent. On the other hand, I really like something more like TWiki because it allows for editing content and storing revision histories is an integral part of it.
Bottom line is that if we are going to have more interop/integration between the various projects, somebody has to take it on and make it their mission. Not everyone has to scratch their itch by developing a new project, and a lot can be done by just stating your case and promoting it to the people who matter (the developers, of course). I also suggest that the developers of CMS systems should work harder at finding the best in what is out there and integrating it with their vision (only where appropriate, of course). That's what this experiment is all about after all, sharing everything, picking the best parts and propagating the best to all the situations that apply. Re-inventing the wheel is for the other guys.