It's well written, but will it change any I/T manager's mind? A lot of the reason why people choose NT as their server is because they're used to windows as their desktop, so they understand "how to drive it". People who aren't familiar with Unix will find setting up a Linux box with apache to be more intimidating than simply clicking a few buttons using NT. And, of course, these folks also don't know what they're missing in terms of reliability. We can try to tell them all this, of course --- and we should continue the efforts to do so. But ultimately, they need to experience Linux/Unix's reliability before they really get it. This is why efforts to retake the desktop are so important, in the long run. We need to make sure that it's not only just the elite technologists who can set up a web server or a print server. We need to be able to make it easy even for a MSCE to do it.....
This is a very old debate, and it's been raised on the kernel list several times. The problem is that it seems pretty clear that given a buffer overrun attack which can be exploitable without the stack-exec patch, it's possible to transform that attack into an exploit which will work with the stack-exec patch present.
It may require more work to create the exploit, but it's the sort of thing which only one person needs to do and then share with 100,000 of his best friends on some cracker web site. Hence, such a patch only provides the illusion of security, and it adds crap to the kernel. (There's all sorts of kludges you have to put in there to make sure that trampoline code doesn't break, etc., etc.)
In some states, it's illegal for telemarketers to simply drop the line after someone picks up. After all, it can be quite threatening for someone's phone to ring and then to suddenly drop the connection. For all you know, it might be someone checking to see if you're in before deciding to break into your house.....
Um, why do we need a VB[A] translator? Why not just a VB[A] interpeter/compiler?
The advantage of having a VB[A] translator is that further development work of that VB program/script can be done in a native OSS language. A VB[A] interpreter/compiler is also useful as an interim measure, but given that it'll be much more likely that people will spend a lot of time focusing their efforts on optimizing interpreters, compilers, JIT's, etc. for mainline OSS languages, such as Perl, Python, PHP, guile/Scheme, etc., having a translator also will mean in the long run that we'll be able to make those VB[A] scripts run faster.... of course, they won't be written in VB[A] any more.
No, MS Office applications are still necessary for scripted integration compatbile with MS Office, though. Python's a nonstarter here.
Indeed, if what you want is to lure people away from MS Office, what is needed is a language translator which can adapt VB to some other language. I've been told by some well informed-sources that when MS was first looking at how to deal with Java, their Java team came up with an impressive set of tools, including ones which could translate VB into Java, and gave seamless integration between VB and Java. When it came time for Project Review, Gates was in the room, and midway through the review, he interrupted the meeting with the interjection "And this is the 'Screw Microsoft' strategy?!?" The Java team was told to go off and start from scratch again, this time taking MS's business needs into consideration.
Whether or not this story is true (it's from a friend of a friend who works at Microsoft and was in the room; so I know the provenance in terms of who told it to whom, and trust all of the links in the chain:-), it does bring up a very interesting point. One of the big wins of VB is the huge base of deployed code out there that uses. (Like it or not, it's true....) So if it were possible to give these people a way of transitioning away from VBA into a more open language, it could deal Microsoft a huge blow.
A useful way of doing this would be to write a front-end translator which can convert VBA into some other language. Say, as part of Guile, or as a front-end pre-processor to Perl or Python. Combine this with hooks so that you can call commercial VB components that come in.DLL (they are written in C, but designed to be called by VB programs as components) using Wine, and it might be possible to help free a large base of VB users from Microsoft's tyranny.:-)
One thing which many folks don't seem to realize is that in many ways Python has a number of the desireable features which Java has --- it has a portable bytecode which can be moved across different platforms, and you can even make a security sandbox for Python. And of course, it has the advantage that it doesn't suffer from the Sun-control-freak-mentality problem which Java has.
Python is actually a very flexible language. It's a pity most people don't see past the admittedly very strange whitespace-is-significant part of Python (which I'm not a fan of myself, but whatever). Maybe this announcement help encourage more people to take a look at the language.
I can still remember that day very clearly. It was April 1999, and I was giving a talk at the Chicago Comdex show on the Linux community. While I was there, I stopped by the trade show floor, and wandered by the VA Linux booth. There, I was stopped by Larry Augustine, CEO of VA Linux.
"Ted! You want to move to Sunnyvale, right?"
"No..... but we can talk."
So I spent some time chatting with Chris DiBona, and the rest was history.
So I still live in the Boston area, with a 416k DSL line, and I telecommute. About every 6-8 weeks or so, I pay a trip to Sunnyvale to catch up with what's going on in the home office, and to sync up with the rest of the team there. I am very glad not to be living in Silly Valley. As I tell all my friends, the Bay Area is a wonderful place to visit, but I'd hate to have to live there.
Boston is really nice in that there are plenty of geeks if that's who you like to socialize with, but it's also possible to find folks who aren't geeks as well to socialize with, and that's a definite feature. And while the inner suburbs of Boston are pretty built-up, it's not far at all to get to some really nice parts of Massachusetts. I live 10 minutes from downtown Boston, but I'm also a 5 minute drive or a 20 minute walk from a very large nature reservation with lots of hiking trails in the forest. (And get this! I was able to buy my own house at this location while still living on an academic's salary at MIT --- a salary which would have caused me to be homeless in the Bay Area.)
Every time I visit Sunnyvale, it's clear that companies are desperate for engineers. I was amused by the fact that just about every single slide at the Sunnyvale AMC movie theater were recruiting ads. In the long run, companies are going to have to accept more telecommuters, or open offices outside of Silly Valley. It's only a matter of time.
It's also spelt ueber (if you must) or über (if you can), but never, ever, as *uber.
While you're correct, of course, this battle has been lost; the word has been assimilated into American English, and it's been mutated/mutilated along the way. This isn't the first word for which this is the case, and I assure you it won't be the last.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- James D. Nicoll
An even harder application area than games for Open Source to get into is tax software, such as TurboTax. That's because it's not so much about the software programming, as it is about having the legions of tax accountants and lawyers who need to keep up with the huge number of changes in the tax code every year. (Voted into law by our devoted public servants, who happen to be also lawyers......:-)
So, there will always be a few areas where buying propietary software will make sense. I would much rather pay $19 for TurboTax than to spend several hours doing the taxes myself, or to pay several hundred dollars for a tax accountant to do it for me.
Err... if you actually take a look at the TechNet web page, you'll discover that there isn't nearly enough information to actually *implement* an interoperable implementation. There's a very high-level description of what goes into the Kerberos AUTH_DATA field, but not nearly enough bits-and-bytes information to actually implement anything interesting.
I have been thinking about the current marketing paradigm amongst OSS companies which is making software a commodity and then charging for support. The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel. According to Open Source main proponent, ESR, Open Source is a superior engineering model than Closed Source and hence Open Source Software should be more reliable and stable than most Closed Source Software. This means that Open Source Software should need less support than Closed Source software.
Less support != no support. Going back to the oft-used "would you buy a car with the hood welded-shut?" analogy, of course a dealer who has monopoly control over servicing a car will make more money than a garage mechanic when anyone who is able to is allowed to service cars. And indeed, people who do know how to service their own cars can do so. But that doesn't mean that you can't make a living being a car mechanic. It just means that you won't be able to become the worlds richest man like Bill Gates using that kind of strategy.
The reality is that most people still need to purchase support for their products. Whether that support is paid for honestly via a yearly contract, or via forced upgrades to the latest version of MS-Office due to incompatible file-formats, you're still paying support/maintenance fees for your software, one way or another. And for those people who can't fix their computer problems on their own, or who could fix it, but don't have the time to do it themselves, there'll always be room for support plays.
Don't forget, companies like IBM make far more money off their professional service department than they do off of selling hardware or software. This doesn't change whether you're using Linux or some propietary software. What does change is the quality of the software, the quality of the support, and the fact that it's easier to support OSS. However, "easier to support" still doesn't mean that any random liberal-arts student is going to be able to support the software. That's why garage mechanics aren't going out of business, even though anyone could (in theory) learn how to fix their own cars.
According to the press release, both sides agreed that neither had to pay any termination fees. The press release didn't say why, but apparently this must have been something wwhere Corel agreed to waive the 29.5 million termination fee.
I am a law student and do not pretend to be qualified to give legal advice, but I think that the above posts which reveal the "secret" eliminate any basis for Microsoft to call this a trade secret. Once it is in the public, it is not a trade secret.
It's not that simple. If the trade secret is publicized via an "improper" means, then it's still protected under trade secret laws. So not only is the poster liable for breaching the contract, but all copies that came from that tainted source are still considered under trade secret protection.
It's on that basis that the MPAA is claiming trade secret protections for the CSS code (at least for one of their lawsuits). Their claim is that the disassembly took place in a country that doesn't have an explicit allowance for reverse engineering for interoperability purposes, and that the person couldn't have obtained a copy of the DLL without agreeing to a clickthrough license which prohibited reverse engineering. Ergo, the source of the CSS code was tainted, and therefore CSS is still a trade secret, even though it's been posted on thousands and thousands of sites.
This may sound strange, but it's how the law works. Now, if someone could prove that they came by the information via a legitimate means that didn't involve the potentially tainted CSS source, then that would be an absolute defense. But given that the CSS code has been spread far and wide, it actually makes it harder for someone to prove that their reverse engineering was actually done "cleanly".
Now, I trust Microsfoft not as far one can comfortably spit a rat, but was there any call yet to verify if this was a lapse? "Slap on the usual license.." or such?
I admire your charity..... but this is definitely not your usual license. Calling it a trade secret, and then adding the deliberate amplification that you're not allowed to create implementations of the specification is definitely not a stock legal license. This was something very carefully crafted to preserve a monopoly situation with respect to implementations of their propietary extensions of an Open IETF standard.
This very carefully allows Microsoft to throw sand in the arguments of people who are complain that they part of the security protocols are secret, as Bruce Schinier recently complained. But at the same time, it doesn't allow anyone else to implement a compatible implementations. Obviously, they're still pissed that you can implement things like Samba, so that windows boxes can be served by Unix boxes. Windows 2000 is a way of trying to head that off.
What can people do? Posting the pdf file on various web sites, as some people have done or threatened to do, isn't particularly helpful. In fact, to the extent that it makes it harder for people who are working on reverse engineering the protocol to prove that they weren't tainted with information that came from a trade-secret contaminated source, it actually can be doing people a real disservice.
What you can do is tell all your friends about what Microsoft is doing, especially those folks who work in I/T departments. Get them to understand why accepting a Windows 2000 deployment isn't in their company's long-term interest, since it will eventually put them under the monopoly thumb of Microsoft. We can't trust the DOJ to protect us. We have to get the word out there, and protect ourselves. Remember, if you don't use Propietary Microsoft code, then you can't get caught by Microsoft's games.
The legal problem with what they're doing is that they're deliberately making their software non-interoperable with published standards. This seems to indicate that they're trying to use their monopoly position to exclude competition, which is illegal.
Yes, that's it in a nutshell. The game here is that they're trying to use their monopoly in the desktop space to dislodge Unix in the server market. One of the ways they do this is by making the Windows 2000 PDC "look" like it embraces open standards, so that the I/T departments in Fortune 500 departments (which up until now have very often used Unix/Linux systems in their back offices) think that using Windows servers, and the Windows 2000 PDC in particular, is mostly harmless.
But the Windows 2000 clients have been architected so that you only get a bunch of cool features if you use their propietary protocol extensions. So it's clear that Microsoft is trying to create a monopoly situation with the Windows 2000 PDC, and once they control enough of the servers, they'll have an even tighter lock on the client market, and vice versa.
In my opinion, the DOJ really should have proposed splitting Microsoft's OS operations into a Client OS company and a Server OS company, in addition to splitting away the Office operations. Unfortunately, given that they've already submitted their proposal, it may be too late to fix things. Simply splitting the Office group away isn't going to stop Microsoft from playing dirty tricks in the client/server OS space, just as they've done here.
Yes, but trade secret protections apply as long as the source of the information was impoperly obtained. Arguably, the minor wouldn't be bound by the contract, but the minor then probably wouldn't be entitlted to the information, so it would be considered "improperly obtained". So Microsoft could very well go after any adult who then tried to make use of the information.
What this means is that no one who might even think about doing development work on Kerberos or Samba should look at the.pdf file without getting some serious legal advice. This is very treacherous legal ground here.... definitely Microsoft's dirty tricks at their best..
One of the disadvantages of living in a real-time world is that there's a pressure to "break" stories even before they have a chance to become real. If you actually read the story, you'll find that Apple is still evaluating the situation. It's true that Apple has pursued other "imitators" in the past, but are they going to pursue FishPC? It's not clear at this point.
The fact that the article stated that attempts to contact AMD but couldn't reach anyone because of the Easter weekend is another tipoff about how quickly such articles are getting thrown together. This isn't necessarily bad, but unfortunately not all Slashdot readers seem to understand the difference between "a developing story", where the facts are still being researched, and a more thoughtful analysis news piece which fairly tells both sides of the story, such as you might find in a quality monthly news/analysis magazine. Both have their places, but people seem to instantly jump on these developing pieces without recognizing that that all of the facts might not yet be in yet, and that in this case Apple may not have even decided what to do yet.
Unfortunately, one of the things which happened very early on is that a lot of the crazies from the black helicopter club started attacker both ICANN and Dyson on a number of public mailing lists, including the IETF list. This caused more reasoned people who had their concerns about ICANN to get lumped with the crazies, and so therefore a lot of people didn't care to speak up about potential shortcomings with the whole ICANN setup.
That's probably the reason for the reluctance of people to speak negatively about Dyson, even now that it's been two years later, which the NY Times noted. It also had the unfortunate effect of isolating the Dysan and the ICANN board from constructive criticism which have helped them out, although it's not clear they're all that willing to listen (which was and is another problem).
3) Before VA got smart and decided to purchase Andover, they were planning on building a Freshmeat clone, to compete with it for community mindshare, and ultimately push Patrick and his project out of existance by sheer force. Rather than allow or encourage Freshmeat to prosper, they wanted it to destroy it and replace it with something they had direct control over..... ColdStorage never saw the light of day.
Actually that's not true. ColdStorage was the original idea.... and it turned into SourceForge. When a developer uploads a new release into SourceForge, it doesn't overwrite the old release's tarballs; those are archived for all eternity, so people can always download older versions: for historical purposes, in case they want to prove prior art in some patent dispute, or any other reason.
The argument that Cold Storage was created to compete with Fresh Meat is somewhat laughable. ColdStorage, as originally envisioned, was completely different from FreshMeat. Freshmeat was (and is) a place where you can find out where you can find the latest stuff. Coldstorage was going to be an archival mechanism. So it was totally different, and wasn't about trying to force out Freshmeat at all.
It's just that while ColdStorage was being developed, it turned out that it was just a small piece of what could be much more useful to developers. And so the CVS tree, and the bug tracking, and all of the rest was added. And so SourceForge was born.
As for the accusations of greed, I'll point out that the disk space and network bandwidth needed to support something like SourceForge (or the original ColdStorage idea) is non-trivial. And VA Linux is making this service available to Open Source developers for *free*, as a public service. Sure, it helps VA in that it's an Open Source company, and to the extent that there's better Open Source out there, the more likely it is that people will want to use OSS, and so we expand the market for our hardware boxes and our professional services. But why would VA want to compete with someone else to provide the same (free) service? And if you think having direct control helps, look at how responsibly (IMO) VA has handled sites like www.linux.com. If you think VA hasn't behaved responsibly to the community, do please say how. From what I can see, VA has been one of the more responsible companies in terms of remembering its responsibilities to the community, and making sure that it gives back to the community. SourceForge is one of those ways.
A few months back, RHAT announced that they were going to have a secondary public offering of 4M shares. If I recall correctly, that is how Slashdot reported it. Upon digging deeper, I noticed that the company was selling 2 2/3 M shares, and the insiders were selling 1 1/3 M. They assumed that investors were to stupid to notice. ..
This is pretty (at least somewhat) common, actually. The basic idea is that it's better for the stock price (and therefore, for the underwriter's reputation:-), if the insiders sell their stock in a controlled fashion, via a secondary offering, rather than just simply dumping them on the market. For this reason, it's actually encouraged, and the underwriters had to have given the insiders permission to sell before the lockout period had expired, so they could sell it as part of the secondary offering.
As far as whether or not the insiders should have sold, well, that's always a hard call. Even if you think that a particular company, whether it be IBM, Coke, Disney, AOL, or Red Hat, is the greatest thing since sliced bread --- holding all of your investing dollars in a single stock is rather risky, and diversifying is a good thing to do. So just because some of the employees are diversifying doesn't mean that they don't have faith in the company. They could just simply be trying to make some product investment decisions for themselves --- always a personal matter, and one for which I don't think we should give them too much grief about.
I was never in love with VA in terms of their customer-defined configurations. I tried several times to buy systems from them, but I did need to specify the motherboard I wanted used (I'm a system builder as well but I needed a totally built and warranteed system so that I could expense it at a previous job). they refused to even try to obtain that board (an asus mboard - which is hardly a step down!).
Sure, you can ask a local screwdriver shop to install whatever motherboard you specify. But are they going to support it afterwards? Will they do thermal studies on the motherboard to make sure it's being adequately cooled in that specific chasis? Will they have done enough testing to be sure that there aren't any BIOS upgrades necessary for Linux to work as smoothly as possible? Can you call them on the phone afterwards when something fails to work, and expect them to service it appropriately? Or will they just say, "if it boots Windows, it's OK; now go away!"?
It's awfully hard to do all of these things if you allow the customer to specify what motherboard to use, what disk to use, etc. If you want that kind of flexibility, and are prepared to go it alone when things don't work, then it may very well be that a local screwdriver shop is a better fit for the kind service that you're looking for.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but this never works. The theory always sounds good, "Hey! get them while they're young!", but the strategy has always been a failure. Look at Apple: They gave tons of subsidies to the schools, but how much did this affect their market share?
It might not work well at the elementry and high school level, but it certainly works well at the college/university level. Digital had huge advantage for a long time because people graduated from Universities used to DEC systems, and so when they became engineers, guess what kind of system they spec'ed? Sun also gives huge educational discounts, for similar reasons.
And it's not an accident that Microsoft is spending huge amounts of money trying to get Universities to adopt more Microsoft systems; one of the reasons why Unix has been holding out as long as it has in the face of the MS-Onslught has been because lots of university graduates came out with Unix experience.
Sourceforge is a long-term investment in Open Source. You can call it "giving back to the community", and it is that, but it's also about trying to encourage the development of more cool software. Hopefully, with better infrastructure, the Open Source coders of the world can put out better software more quickly. This is good for all Linux companies, including VA Linux.
At some level, this is no different from the developer support programs that Apple and Microsoft have. Those programs also cost Apple/Microsoft money; they're hardly profit centers! But given that with Open Source you don't have to tease developers with special programs so they can get the API's, we don't need standard developer support programs. But we can offer web sites like Source Forge which at some level is even more powerful. The goal is the same in both cases, though: to encourge 3rd party developers to write more cool software, thus enchancing the value of the platform. This strategy works for Windows and MacOS ---- why shouldn't we try to do something similar and support Open Source developers?
Slashdot Mirror
It's well written, but will it change any I/T manager's mind? A lot of the reason why people choose NT as their server is because they're used to windows as their desktop, so they understand "how to drive it". People who aren't familiar with Unix will find setting up a Linux box with apache to be more intimidating than simply clicking a few buttons using NT. And, of course, these folks also don't know what they're missing in terms of reliability. We can try to tell them all this, of course --- and we should continue the efforts to do so. But ultimately, they need to experience Linux/Unix's reliability before they really get it. This is why efforts to retake the desktop are so important, in the long run. We need to make sure that it's not only just the elite technologists who can set up a web server or a print server. We need to be able to make it easy even for a MSCE to do it.....
This is a very old debate, and it's been raised on the kernel list several times. The problem is that it seems pretty clear that given a buffer overrun attack which can be exploitable without the stack-exec patch, it's possible to transform that attack into an exploit which will work with the stack-exec patch present.
It may require more work to create the exploit, but it's the sort of thing which only one person needs to do and then share with 100,000 of his best friends on some cracker web site. Hence, such a patch only provides the illusion of security, and it adds crap to the kernel. (There's all sorts of kludges you have to put in there to make sure that trampoline code doesn't break, etc., etc.)
In some states, it's illegal for telemarketers to simply drop the line after someone picks up. After all, it can be quite threatening for someone's phone to ring and then to suddenly drop the connection. For all you know, it might be someone checking to see if you're in before deciding to break into your house.....
The advantage of having a VB[A] translator is that further development work of that VB program/script can be done in a native OSS language. A VB[A] interpreter/compiler is also useful as an interim measure, but given that it'll be much more likely that people will spend a lot of time focusing their efforts on optimizing interpreters, compilers, JIT's, etc. for mainline OSS languages, such as Perl, Python, PHP, guile/Scheme, etc., having a translator also will mean in the long run that we'll be able to make those VB[A] scripts run faster.... of course, they won't be written in VB[A] any more.
Indeed, if what you want is to lure people away from MS Office, what is needed is a language translator which can adapt VB to some other language. I've been told by some well informed-sources that when MS was first looking at how to deal with Java, their Java team came up with an impressive set of tools, including ones which could translate VB into Java, and gave seamless integration between VB and Java. When it came time for Project Review, Gates was in the room, and midway through the review, he interrupted the meeting with the interjection "And this is the 'Screw Microsoft' strategy?!?" The Java team was told to go off and start from scratch again, this time taking MS's business needs into consideration.
Whether or not this story is true (it's from a friend of a friend who works at Microsoft and was in the room; so I know the provenance in terms of who told it to whom, and trust all of the links in the chain :-), it does bring up a very interesting point. One of the big wins of VB is the huge base of deployed code out there that uses. (Like it or not, it's true....) So if it were possible to give these people a way of transitioning away from VBA into a more open language, it could deal Microsoft a huge blow.
A useful way of doing this would be to write a front-end translator which can convert VBA into some other language. Say, as part of Guile, or as a front-end pre-processor to Perl or Python. Combine this with hooks so that you can call commercial VB components that come in .DLL (they are written in C, but designed to be called by VB programs as components) using Wine, and it might be possible to help free a large base of VB users from Microsoft's tyranny. :-)
One thing which many folks don't seem to realize is that in many ways Python has a number of the desireable features which Java has --- it has a portable bytecode which can be moved across different platforms, and you can even make a security sandbox for Python. And of course, it has the advantage that it doesn't suffer from the Sun-control-freak-mentality problem which Java has.
Python is actually a very flexible language. It's a pity most people don't see past the admittedly very strange whitespace-is-significant part of Python (which I'm not a fan of myself, but whatever). Maybe this announcement help encourage more people to take a look at the language.
I can still remember that day very clearly. It was April 1999, and I was giving a talk at the Chicago Comdex show on the Linux community. While I was there, I stopped by the trade show floor, and wandered by the VA Linux booth. There, I was stopped by Larry Augustine, CEO of VA Linux.
"Ted! You want to move to Sunnyvale, right?"
" No..... but we can talk."
So I spent some time chatting with Chris DiBona, and the rest was history.
So I still live in the Boston area, with a 416k DSL line, and I telecommute. About every 6-8 weeks or so, I pay a trip to Sunnyvale to catch up with what's going on in the home office, and to sync up with the rest of the team there. I am very glad not to be living in Silly Valley. As I tell all my friends, the Bay Area is a wonderful place to visit, but I'd hate to have to live there.
Boston is really nice in that there are plenty of geeks if that's who you like to socialize with, but it's also possible to find folks who aren't geeks as well to socialize with, and that's a definite feature. And while the inner suburbs of Boston are pretty built-up, it's not far at all to get to some really nice parts of Massachusetts. I live 10 minutes from downtown Boston, but I'm also a 5 minute drive or a 20 minute walk from a very large nature reservation with lots of hiking trails in the forest. (And get this! I was able to buy my own house at this location while still living on an academic's salary at MIT --- a salary which would have caused me to be homeless in the Bay Area.)
Every time I visit Sunnyvale, it's clear that companies are desperate for engineers. I was amused by the fact that just about every single slide at the Sunnyvale AMC movie theater were recruiting ads. In the long run, companies are going to have to accept more telecommuters, or open offices outside of Silly Valley. It's only a matter of time.
While you're correct, of course, this battle has been lost; the word has been assimilated into American English, and it's been mutated/mutilated along the way. This isn't the first word for which this is the case, and I assure you it won't be the last.
An even harder application area than games for Open Source to get into is tax software, such as TurboTax. That's because it's not so much about the software programming, as it is about having the legions of tax accountants and lawyers who need to keep up with the huge number of changes in the tax code every year. (Voted into law by our devoted public servants, who happen to be also lawyers...... :-)
So, there will always be a few areas where buying propietary software will make sense. I would much rather pay $19 for TurboTax than to spend several hours doing the taxes myself, or to pay several hundred dollars for a tax accountant to do it for me.
Err... if you actually take a look at the TechNet web page, you'll discover that there isn't nearly enough information to actually *implement* an interoperable implementation. There's a very high-level description of what goes into the Kerberos AUTH_DATA field, but not nearly enough bits-and-bytes information to actually implement anything interesting.
The funny thing is that the other slashdot article doesn't appear on the mainpage of slashdot, even though it's new enough that it really should.
Perhaps this is a bug in slashdot? That would explain why the other article has only four posts in it....
Less support != no support. Going back to the oft-used "would you buy a car with the hood welded-shut?" analogy, of course a dealer who has monopoly control over servicing a car will make more money than a garage mechanic when anyone who is able to is allowed to service cars. And indeed, people who do know how to service their own cars can do so. But that doesn't mean that you can't make a living being a car mechanic. It just means that you won't be able to become the worlds richest man like Bill Gates using that kind of strategy.
The reality is that most people still need to purchase support for their products. Whether that support is paid for honestly via a yearly contract, or via forced upgrades to the latest version of MS-Office due to incompatible file-formats, you're still paying support/maintenance fees for your software, one way or another. And for those people who can't fix their computer problems on their own, or who could fix it, but don't have the time to do it themselves, there'll always be room for support plays.
Don't forget, companies like IBM make far more money off their professional service department than they do off of selling hardware or software. This doesn't change whether you're using Linux or some propietary software. What does change is the quality of the software, the quality of the support, and the fact that it's easier to support OSS. However, "easier to support" still doesn't mean that any random liberal-arts student is going to be able to support the software. That's why garage mechanics aren't going out of business, even though anyone could (in theory) learn how to fix their own cars.
According to the press release, both sides agreed that neither had to pay any termination fees. The press release didn't say why, but apparently this must have been something wwhere Corel agreed to waive the 29.5 million termination fee.
I am a law student and do not pretend to be qualified to give legal advice, but I think that the above posts which reveal the "secret" eliminate any basis for Microsoft to call this a trade secret. Once it is in the public, it is not a trade secret.
It's not that simple. If the trade secret is publicized via an "improper" means, then it's still protected under trade secret laws. So not only is the poster liable for breaching the contract, but all copies that came from that tainted source are still considered under trade secret protection.
It's on that basis that the MPAA is claiming trade secret protections for the CSS code (at least for one of their lawsuits). Their claim is that the disassembly took place in a country that doesn't have an explicit allowance for reverse engineering for interoperability purposes, and that the person couldn't have obtained a copy of the DLL without agreeing to a clickthrough license which prohibited reverse engineering. Ergo, the source of the CSS code was tainted, and therefore CSS is still a trade secret, even though it's been posted on thousands and thousands of sites.
This may sound strange, but it's how the law works. Now, if someone could prove that they came by the information via a legitimate means that didn't involve the potentially tainted CSS source, then that would be an absolute defense. But given that the CSS code has been spread far and wide, it actually makes it harder for someone to prove that their reverse engineering was actually done "cleanly".
Now, I trust Microsfoft not as far one can comfortably spit a rat, but was there any call yet to verify if this was a lapse? "Slap on the usual license.." or such?
I admire your charity..... but this is definitely not your usual license. Calling it a trade secret, and then adding the deliberate amplification that you're not allowed to create implementations of the specification is definitely not a stock legal license. This was something very carefully crafted to preserve a monopoly situation with respect to implementations of their propietary extensions of an Open IETF standard.
This very carefully allows Microsoft to throw sand in the arguments of people who are complain that they part of the security protocols are secret, as Bruce Schinier recently complained. But at the same time, it doesn't allow anyone else to implement a compatible implementations. Obviously, they're still pissed that you can implement things like Samba, so that windows boxes can be served by Unix boxes. Windows 2000 is a way of trying to head that off.
What can people do? Posting the pdf file on various web sites, as some people have done or threatened to do, isn't particularly helpful. In fact, to the extent that it makes it harder for people who are working on reverse engineering the protocol to prove that they weren't tainted with information that came from a trade-secret contaminated source, it actually can be doing people a real disservice.
What you can do is tell all your friends about what Microsoft is doing, especially those folks who work in I/T departments. Get them to understand why accepting a Windows 2000 deployment isn't in their company's long-term interest, since it will eventually put them under the monopoly thumb of Microsoft. We can't trust the DOJ to protect us. We have to get the word out there, and protect ourselves. Remember, if you don't use Propietary Microsoft code, then you can't get caught by Microsoft's games.
The legal problem with what they're doing is that they're deliberately making their software non-interoperable with published standards. This seems to indicate that they're trying to use their monopoly position to exclude competition, which is illegal.
Yes, that's it in a nutshell. The game here is that they're trying to use their monopoly in the desktop space to dislodge Unix in the server market. One of the ways they do this is by making the Windows 2000 PDC "look" like it embraces open standards, so that the I/T departments in Fortune 500 departments (which up until now have very often used Unix/Linux systems in their back offices) think that using Windows servers, and the Windows 2000 PDC in particular, is mostly harmless.
But the Windows 2000 clients have been architected so that you only get a bunch of cool features if you use their propietary protocol extensions. So it's clear that Microsoft is trying to create a monopoly situation with the Windows 2000 PDC, and once they control enough of the servers, they'll have an even tighter lock on the client market, and vice versa.
In my opinion, the DOJ really should have proposed splitting Microsoft's OS operations into a Client OS company and a Server OS company, in addition to splitting away the Office operations. Unfortunately, given that they've already submitted their proposal, it may be too late to fix things. Simply splitting the Office group away isn't going to stop Microsoft from playing dirty tricks in the client/server OS space, just as they've done here.
What this means is that no one who might even think about doing development work on Kerberos or Samba should look at the .pdf file without getting some serious legal advice. This is very treacherous legal ground here.... definitely Microsoft's dirty tricks at their best..
This reminds me of the old joke about creating a /vmunix.el, waiting six months, and then finding all of the people where using it, and killing them.
One of the disadvantages of living in a real-time world is that there's a pressure to "break" stories even before they have a chance to become real. If you actually read the story, you'll find that Apple is still evaluating the situation. It's true that Apple has pursued other "imitators" in the past, but are they going to pursue FishPC? It's not clear at this point.
The fact that the article stated that attempts to contact AMD but couldn't reach anyone because of the Easter weekend is another tipoff about how quickly such articles are getting thrown together. This isn't necessarily bad, but unfortunately not all Slashdot readers seem to understand the difference between "a developing story", where the facts are still being researched, and a more thoughtful analysis news piece which fairly tells both sides of the story, such as you might find in a quality monthly news/analysis magazine. Both have their places, but people seem to instantly jump on these developing pieces without recognizing that that all of the facts might not yet be in yet, and that in this case Apple may not have even decided what to do yet.
Unfortunately, one of the things which happened very early on is that a lot of the crazies from the black helicopter club started attacker both ICANN and Dyson on a number of public mailing lists, including the IETF list. This caused more reasoned people who had their concerns about ICANN to get lumped with the crazies, and so therefore a lot of people didn't care to speak up about potential shortcomings with the whole ICANN setup.
That's probably the reason for the reluctance of people to speak negatively about Dyson, even now that it's been two years later, which the NY Times noted. It also had the unfortunate effect of isolating the Dysan and the ICANN board from constructive criticism which have helped them out, although it's not clear they're all that willing to listen (which was and is another problem).
3) Before VA got smart and decided to purchase Andover, they were planning on building a Freshmeat clone, to compete with it for community mindshare, and ultimately push Patrick and his project out of existance by sheer force. Rather than allow or encourage Freshmeat to prosper, they wanted it to destroy it and replace it with something they had direct control over..... ColdStorage never saw the light of day.
Actually that's not true. ColdStorage was the original idea.... and it turned into SourceForge. When a developer uploads a new release into SourceForge, it doesn't overwrite the old release's tarballs; those are archived for all eternity, so people can always download older versions: for historical purposes, in case they want to prove prior art in some patent dispute, or any other reason.
The argument that Cold Storage was created to compete with Fresh Meat is somewhat laughable. ColdStorage, as originally envisioned, was completely different from FreshMeat. Freshmeat was (and is) a place where you can find out where you can find the latest stuff. Coldstorage was going to be an archival mechanism. So it was totally different, and wasn't about trying to force out Freshmeat at all.
It's just that while ColdStorage was being developed, it turned out that it was just a small piece of what could be much more useful to developers. And so the CVS tree, and the bug tracking, and all of the rest was added. And so SourceForge was born.
As for the accusations of greed, I'll point out that the disk space and network bandwidth needed to support something like SourceForge (or the original ColdStorage idea) is non-trivial. And VA Linux is making this service available to Open Source developers for *free*, as a public service. Sure, it helps VA in that it's an Open Source company, and to the extent that there's better Open Source out there, the more likely it is that people will want to use OSS, and so we expand the market for our hardware boxes and our professional services. But why would VA want to compete with someone else to provide the same (free) service? And if you think having direct control helps, look at how responsibly (IMO) VA has handled sites like www.linux.com. If you think VA hasn't behaved responsibly to the community, do please say how. From what I can see, VA has been one of the more responsible companies in terms of remembering its responsibilities to the community, and making sure that it gives back to the community. SourceForge is one of those ways.
A few months back, RHAT announced that they were going to have a secondary public offering of 4M shares. If I recall correctly, that is how Slashdot reported it. Upon digging deeper, I noticed that the company was selling 2 2/3 M shares, and the insiders were selling 1 1/3 M. They assumed that investors were to stupid to notice. . .
This is pretty (at least somewhat) common, actually. The basic idea is that it's better for the stock price (and therefore, for the underwriter's reputation :-), if the insiders sell their stock in a controlled fashion, via a secondary offering, rather than just simply dumping them on the market. For this reason, it's actually encouraged, and the underwriters had to have given the insiders permission to sell before the lockout period had expired, so they could sell it as part of the secondary offering.
As far as whether or not the insiders should have sold, well, that's always a hard call. Even if you think that a particular company, whether it be IBM, Coke, Disney, AOL, or Red Hat, is the greatest thing since sliced bread --- holding all of your investing dollars in a single stock is rather risky, and diversifying is a good thing to do. So just because some of the employees are diversifying doesn't mean that they don't have faith in the company. They could just simply be trying to make some product investment decisions for themselves --- always a personal matter, and one for which I don't think we should give them too much grief about.
Sure, you can ask a local screwdriver shop to install whatever motherboard you specify. But are they going to support it afterwards? Will they do thermal studies on the motherboard to make sure it's being adequately cooled in that specific chasis? Will they have done enough testing to be sure that there aren't any BIOS upgrades necessary for Linux to work as smoothly as possible? Can you call them on the phone afterwards when something fails to work, and expect them to service it appropriately? Or will they just say, "if it boots Windows, it's OK; now go away!"?
It's awfully hard to do all of these things if you allow the customer to specify what motherboard to use, what disk to use, etc. If you want that kind of flexibility, and are prepared to go it alone when things don't work, then it may very well be that a local screwdriver shop is a better fit for the kind service that you're looking for.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but this never works. The theory always sounds good, "Hey! get them while they're young!", but the strategy has always been a failure. Look at Apple: They gave tons of subsidies to the schools, but how much did this affect their market share?
It might not work well at the elementry and high school level, but it certainly works well at the college/university level. Digital had huge advantage for a long time because people graduated from Universities used to DEC systems, and so when they became engineers, guess what kind of system they spec'ed? Sun also gives huge educational discounts, for similar reasons.
And it's not an accident that Microsoft is spending huge amounts of money trying to get Universities to adopt more Microsoft systems; one of the reasons why Unix has been holding out as long as it has in the face of the MS-Onslught has been because lots of university graduates came out with Unix experience.
Sourceforge is a long-term investment in Open Source. You can call it "giving back to the community", and it is that, but it's also about trying to encourage the development of more cool software. Hopefully, with better infrastructure, the Open Source coders of the world can put out better software more quickly. This is good for all Linux companies, including VA Linux.
At some level, this is no different from the developer support programs that Apple and Microsoft have. Those programs also cost Apple/Microsoft money; they're hardly profit centers! But given that with Open Source you don't have to tease developers with special programs so they can get the API's, we don't need standard developer support programs. But we can offer web sites like Source Forge which at some level is even more powerful. The goal is the same in both cases, though: to encourge 3rd party developers to write more cool software, thus enchancing the value of the platform. This strategy works for Windows and MacOS ---- why shouldn't we try to do something similar and support Open Source developers?