Nonsense. It's called a free market. Where different products compete. Like Ford and Toyota. Something that M$ hates.
and is something that Microsoft is finding resistance on with the various versions of Vista that exist.
They are finding resistance because M$ is trying to manipulate the market by crippling Vista in various ways to segment the market and to maximize revenue at the expense of the general population. Nothing to do with not understanding what M$ is up to.
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Like trademarks, and for much the same reason, copyright should be lost if a product line becomes generic.
NOOOOOOO!!!! We NEED these people! The WWW is supported by ads,
This meme must die. Advertising pays for nothing.
Instead you pay for it in the increased price of products to support the useless advertising and marketing arms race. Who do you think pays for marketer's salaries? You do!
so as long as these people do all the clicking, no one will mind if the rest of use use AdBlock, custom/etc/hosts files, etc.
They're working around those with flash etc. It's not a high priority with other lower hanging fruit and they just haven't got around to it yet.
The majority of modern mass marketing and advertising is purely parasitic. I don't think I've seen a useful mass market ad in years; like all sensible consumers I research before buying and I don't use mass media advertising for anything.
Advertising on the web has unfortunately become a sort of poor man's micropayment system, extraordinarily inefficient and stealing millions of manhours from the general population for nothing in return. "Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Now, killing all the people who buy from spammers, I still support, though I'd rather kill the spammers themselves. Spammers are truly evil; the people who buy from them are merely stupid.
Mass market advertising and spam are different only in degree not in kind. Both are a based on the premise that it is acceptable to steal the time of an large number of people to make a small number of sales. The net value of most advertising funded mass media to the average consumer, particularly TV, is close to zero. That's no accident; the mass media keeps on ramping up the advertising load until just before they lose the potential consumer. In addition mass market advertising distorts the market by creating hidden costs (the marketing "industry") and by crowding out genuine research and objective reviews.
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Free speech is compromised by too much noise as well as too little message. Most mass market advertising is content free noise.
Well, I suspect that Microsoft has a clause in the agreement which allows resale, but does not allow opening it up to the community.
We have no idea. For all we know copyrights for the in-house developed code were assigned to a joint venture company that is now entirely owned by IBM.
Selling for zero dollars != Open-sourcing.
I probably expressed myself badly. I wanted to make the point that making general purpose pronouncements about "open sourcing is legally difficult" is much the same as saying "selling software (for zero dollars) is legally difficult". Both statements are silly.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
Geeks already think well of IBM, and will generally continue to do so regardless of what happens with OS/2.
True, but it's a matter of degree and numbers.
Now this is beyond the scope of my experience, but I can only imagine that it would take quite a few payable hours to sift through the code to see what can be released. There's probably some lawyer time involved too.
There's little money to be gained from doing this, even when counted in such ephemeral ways as 'good will'.
Good will can be worth billions, just look at the price for some web sites. e.g. IBM has revenue of ~$100B. A 1 in 1000 change in that due to more good will would be worth $100M.
You've utterly failed to answer Waffle Iron's question of "Why would IBM bother?"
He did not ask that question.
Despite your hand-waving, there would be substantial effort in untangling and sanitizing the code along with all the various legal checks to make sure the code is not encumbered by third-party licenses in any way.
No it wouldn't and I'm speaking from experience. I was involved in a major, many million line source delivered contract project dependent on more than 400 separate licenses that had to be vetted before contract delivery. This was in addition to all the code that was being written and delivered. It took a lot less than two man months; a combination of me finding all the relevant code licenses and a person in the legal department reviewing all the licenses to make sure they were compatible with our delivery contract. The most painful bit was making sure all the DRM would work on all the client's machines and in one case re-buying old software that we'd lost the license for. We left out some packages that had problematic licenses and weren't essential to the delivery.
It would take engineering time to go through all that source code and prepare it to be released.
It would've been trivial for us to deliver our own software without all the dependent licensed software. Just use source control, that's what it's for. We had to know what was under what license just for our own in-house software management. The same should apply to OS/2.
It would take a lot of legal effort to go through the myriads of interlocking legal agreements to make sure IBM wasn't breaking any laws in the process.
No it wouldn't. See above. It's possible that the entire OS/2 source code is jointly owned by IBM and M$, not solely by IBM, in which case M$ would probably block it. If that is the problem IBM should just say so and not spout general purpose legal FUD.
If all the interlocking contracts and agreements in the SCO debacle were complex, I can imagine that the ones surrounding OS/2 are just as complex, if not more so.
SCO wasn't particularly complex, it's just that they wanted to try all sorts of speculative legal theories. In the end it amounted to little more than hot air.
That engineering time is not free to IBM. The legal costs are not free to IBM. What you are demanding is that IBM spend substantial amounts of their time and money to give you something free.
Well, IBM is not a charity and they don't owe you or anyone else a goddamn thing.
Where did I say they did?
It takes an unbelievable amount of hubris to reject any reason IBM may give for not releasing OS/2, including one as simple "we don't want to."
I've got no problem with "we don't want to". I have no particular interest in OS/2. I have a big problem with the ongoing FUD about open sourcing being legally difficult, OS/2 merely being the latest example.
IBM has spent billions on open source projects. To demand even more from them then deride them when they don't give in makes the open source community seem like a bunch of spoiled children.
I'm not objecting to IBM. I like their products and general attitude and I've got no particular problem with them keeping things closed source if they think they have a business case for doing so. I'm objecting to the FUD about open sourcing being legally difficult. OS/2 is possibly the most extreme example of any software package that might be difficult to open source because of its size and the complexity of it's genesis and history but even in this case people here are exaggerating massively. I know from personal experience, it's just not that difficult.
So, answer me this bit01 -- Why should IBM bother?
Because it doesn't cost them much (They've already made whatever money they're going to make out of OS/2) and it helps make them look good. Marketers spend millions trying to make companies look good. People choose products based on feel good. This would play particularly to technical opinion leaders.
Keeping it closed is not going to lose them a lot of business,
True but why lose any business at all?
and it would take both money and time to find out what they could open source, and do it.
True, but probably not much. That's the main thing I'm objecting to in a lot of these posts, the automatic assumption that open sourcing costs a lot of time and money. Actually no, in general, it doesn't.
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DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
No. You seem to think IBM doesn't own OS/2. The parts they own they can open source. End of story.
OS/2 may have dependencies on subroutine libraries with restrictive licenses. Those subroutine libraries probably can't be open sourced without heartache and need to be replaced by anybody wanting to use the OS/2 code. End of story.
Your "incredible amounts of abuse" is just emotive hand waving.
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Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketers' salaries? You do via higher cost products.
There's way too many people on/. who think that open source licenses are legally mystically different from the myriad of commercial licenses out there. They're not.
That's right: many open source licenses are incompatible with each other. It just happens that the license for this code is almost certainly incompatible with most any open source license.
Evidence not hand waving please.
Any dependencies on restrictively licensed subroutine libraries can be re-engineered.
Since Microsoft did half the work on the early releases of OS/2, the problem is a little more involved than that. Why would IBM bother to invest the $millions it would take to sanitize, untangle and rewrite huge chunks of an entire dead operating system?
Evidence not hand waving please.
You apparently have no idea what the licenses and copyright assignments are so stop pretending you do have an idea. To say it'd take millions to sanitize modular, probably version controlled code is silly. I said nothing about them rewriting anything; presumably the people running the existing OS/2 clone projects would be interested in doing that.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
I'll reply to you because you have the most reasonable of all the replies.
Repeating myself for the upteenth time:
I'm not objecting to IBM not wanting to open source OS/2. It'd be nice if they did but they have their reasons for not doing so that they've chosen to keep private. It could be things as simple as the not wanting to harm Serenity Systems, not wanting to cannibalize or confuse part of their linux market or not wanting to devote even minimal engineering effort to it.
I'm objecting to all the content-free mod'ed up comments saying, with no evidence at all, that IBM can't open source it for legal reasons. This is nonsense.
It all depends on the particular constituent licenses and copyright assignments. This is no different from on-selling. For pretty much any use of software, including open sourcing it, on-selling or feeding it to your dog, you have to check the constituent licenses and copyright assignments. Hand waving about how "open sourcing is impossible" is nonsense. It depends on the particular constituent licenses and copyright assignments. I really don't know how to make it any clearer.
There's way too many people on/. who think that open source licenses are legally mystically different from the myriad of commercial licenses out there. They're not.
Due to incessant marketing and branding there's also way too many people who think that a branded software package is an indivisible software blob that can't be split and merged as needed. Despite propaganda to the contrary, licenses both closed and open source are not viral and there's nothing legally stopping IBM open sourcing the majority of OS/2 that it does own outright, regardless of what the licenses and copyright assignments of the associated subsystems not developed by IBM are. Interested people/companies could then create the missing subsystems or adapt them from Linux/BSD.
The same is true for all companies that claim their software can't be open sourced for legal reasons. Nonsense. If they own it they can open source it. Any dependencies on restrictively licensed subroutine libraries can be re-engineered. It's all just legal FUD to blindside objections and cover up the possibly embarrassing real reasons.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
What if IBM's agreement with MS included additional restrictions?
What if IBM's agreement with MS didn't include additional restrictions? IBM probably got as liberal a license as they could for all OS/2 constituents; their business depended on it.
You're right but that's my point; open sourcing, just like on-selling, is dependent on the constituent licenses. To hand wave about "impossible to open source" is equivalent to hand waving about "impossible to on-sell". It's nonsense. Anyway, it's always possible to open source the in-house developed stuff while leaving out the third party controlled stuff.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
The implicit assumption that open sourcing is magically different from on-selling in general. In all cases it is necessary to review the terms of the constituent licenses to determine what's possible and what's not. IBM would've been foolish not to get very liberal licenses for anything in OS/2.
In any case, it's always possible to open source in-house developed code and leave out any associated third party restricted code.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
There are plenty of things that can be sold that cannot be open sourced. Think of all the software that is written with a legal agreement about who owns what. There is plenty out there and its being sold.
It's like talking to a broken record: I repeat; Open sourcing is the equivalent of selling the source for zero dollars. Whether you can open source and/or whether you can on-sell all depend on the wording of the parent licenses. A blanket pronouncement like "can't open source it" is nonsense equivalent to a blanket pronouncement saying "can't sell it".
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
One of the big problems with DRM is that it's a sexy technology.
Technologists and businessmen just love the idea of being able to control other people in ways that were not possible before and that's why DRM keeps resurfacing. I know, I used to like DRM myself until I grew up and realized that it was simply not in my interest to live in a supposedly free society when DRM does end-runs around everything from first sale doctrine to fair use provisions to the copyright bargain to free enterprise. This is becoming increasingly important as intellectual worlds become more important in people's lives.
DRM is guilty until proven innocent. I do not want to live in such a society.
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DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
DRM assures the rights that each group needs are all that they get. Least privilege is what they call it.
You're talking about normal operating system security. This has nothing to do with DRM. DRM is all about using technology to control an otherwise free agent when something is "sold".
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Oh for fuck's sake. OS/2 is filled with other folks' IP,
Nonsense. If IBM didn't own OS/2 they couldn't have sold it to Serenity Systems. Open sourcing is the equivalent of selling the source for zero dollars. IBM can set whatever price they like.
FUD about problems with open sourcing gets tiresome after a while. Open source source licenses are no different from closed source licenses; it all depends on the particulars of the individual licenses as to whether software can be on-sold.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
IBM cannot make OS/2 open source, as they do not own all of it.
No, this sort of FUD keeps resurfacing. If they didn't own it they couldn't have sold it to Serenity Systems.
This is no different whether closed or open source and FUD'ers who claim that something "can't be open sourced" are usually just bullshitting. It's almost the exactly the same as saying "can't be sold".
Open sourcing is the equivalent of a normal sale but for zero dollars. I hope you're not going to to try and claim that IBM can't sell OS/2, source and binary, for whatever price it likes?
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
RIAA astroturf is flying thick and fast today. A content free propaganda first post mod'ed up to +5 to try to neutralize the article and direct the debate. I wonder how that happened?
Be careful people; there's a lot of astroturf and probably sock puppets on/. these days. It's amazing how every time there's a story with a point of view that the software or media industries don't like you'll get numerous weasels popping up who "just happen" to repeat tired old propaganda we've all heard and dismissed many times before. Treat these lowlifes with the contempt they deserve.
Redundancy and repetition are a strong sign that marketing parasites are involved. They don't care if they waste/steal people's time and attention as long as they achieve mind share at the expense of other points of view.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
After all, it's not really practical for organizations that rely on NTLM for multiple servers to manually configure several hundred or thousand firefox installations to accept those specific servers -- never mind if the list of servers changes. Too, it's even more unlikely that they'll be able to trust the users to properly maintain and configure those settings themselves.
If the administrator is too incompetent to add the line user_pref("network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris", "someserver.com"); to all users' prefs.js text configuration file in 10 minutes they should be fired. I researched this in less than 5 minutes for this post.
Incompetent "enterprise" administrators who can't/won't do even minimal research, analysis or basic scripting are the problem, not software missing useless "enterprise" capabilities. Most "enterprise" software is a scam.
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Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
Despite material costs being below $1.50, it's still the case that record companies make pretty thin margins on CD sales relative to margins in other industries.
All that shows is that there are a lot of pigs at the trough. The industry is incredibly inefficient. To produce a CD is a few hours studio time amortized over the number of sales. Marketing is just an arms race to get mind share where everybody loses except the marketing industry (= arms dealers). Distribution could be a cheap website.
Newspapers, a far more complex intellectual product than a CD, are delivered to millions of doors daily for a dollar or two each. Yes, it's subsidized by classified (meaning no imposition) advertising. So what? They're still orders of magnitude more efficient than the music "industry". It's way past time the music "industry", not the musicians, were put out on the street and forced to earn a real living (as in producing something of value rather than acting as rent seeking middlemen, as they have been doing for generations). They talk a storm but in reality they do very little.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
People will create, but the rate will decrease without investment.
Maybe, maybe not. In a population of billions it may well be that without the chilling effect of patents much more will be created as huge numbers of people build on freely reusable ideas to keep ahead in business. e.g. In the early days of the software industry.
So the real question becomes, does the likelihood of multiple individuals creating a similar solution to solve a particular problem diminishes the justification of the patent system? No. It simply rewards the first one who created a working solution.
Your answer is silly. Of course it reduces the justification; if for no other reason than a 1/x chance of a patent is worth less than a 1/1 chance of patent.
In addition as the population increases the trade off between restricting billions of people from using an idea versus encouraging (NOT enabling) a few to implement an idea shifts.
In any case any patent system which doesn't recognize the reality of multiple independent reinvention is badly broken; it's an unfair lottery where somebody can expend enormous time and effort and not only get nothing in return but may be forced to pay their competitor to stay in business. At least with no patents they have the first mover advantage. Business is hard enough as it is without making it even harder.
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Copyrights and patents are privileges, not rights.
and it is not up to the corporations to restrain themselves. it is their job to squeeze money out of every possible nook and cranny.
This implies that all an unethical person needs to do to be given carte blanche is to form a corporation. That's probably not what you intended.
Corporations do not have a "job". Corporations are merely groups of people cooperating and just like individual people they can act ethically and unethically, and within the law or outside the law. They are an organizational tool, nothing more.
Patents allow anybody to have an understanding on making something.
So that would be why patents are routinely made as unintelligible as possible and engineers are routinely told to avoid doing patent searches when developing products to avoid "willful infringement" penalties.
Patents are little more than a racket by the patent bureaucracy now. Not surprising when you consider that in a growing population now in the billions it's statistically likely that multiple people will invent the same thing once the prerequisites are available and the disadvantage of billions of people being blocked from using an idea can vastly outweigh the benefit of encouraging (NOT enabling) a few to discover the idea.
The patent entrenched interests love to handwave about how people won't create without patents; it just shows how out of touch with reality they are.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
That two people have a brilliant idea at the same time isn't obviousness, it's just coincidence.
Nonsense. In the vast majority of cases it's because it's an idea "whose time has come". That is, due to normal technological development all the prerequisites are now available and several experts, out of a population of billions, have come up with a similar idea using the same prerequisites. In the case of the telephone many intelligent people were working on the problem with similar prerequisites/tools available (electricity/telegraph etc.) and it's not surprising they converged on similar solutions.
The patent bureaucracy's concept of ideas, that is that they appear out of nothing, is one example of how little they understand about how normal science and technological development works. Of innovation in other words.
Slashdot Mirror
Distributions confuse the hell out of consumers.
Nonsense. It's called a free market. Where different products compete. Like Ford and Toyota. Something that M$ hates.
and is something that Microsoft is finding resistance on with the various versions of Vista that exist.
They are finding resistance because M$ is trying to manipulate the market by crippling Vista in various ways to segment the market and to maximize revenue at the expense of the general population. Nothing to do with not understanding what M$ is up to.
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Like trademarks, and for much the same reason, copyright should be lost if a product line becomes generic.
NOOOOOOO!!!! We NEED these people! The WWW is supported by ads,
This meme must die. Advertising pays for nothing.
Instead you pay for it in the increased price of products to support the useless advertising and marketing arms race. Who do you think pays for marketer's salaries? You do!
so as long as these people do all the clicking, no one will mind if the rest of use use AdBlock, custom /etc/hosts files, etc.
They're working around those with flash etc. It's not a high priority with other lower hanging fruit and they just haven't got around to it yet.
The majority of modern mass marketing and advertising is purely parasitic. I don't think I've seen a useful mass market ad in years; like all sensible consumers I research before buying and I don't use mass media advertising for anything.
Advertising on the web has unfortunately become a sort of poor man's micropayment system, extraordinarily inefficient and stealing millions of manhours from the general population for nothing in return. "Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Now, killing all the people who buy from spammers, I still support, though I'd rather kill the spammers themselves. Spammers are truly evil; the people who buy from them are merely stupid.
Mass market advertising and spam are different only in degree not in kind. Both are a based on the premise that it is acceptable to steal the time of an large number of people to make a small number of sales. The net value of most advertising funded mass media to the average consumer, particularly TV, is close to zero. That's no accident; the mass media keeps on ramping up the advertising load until just before they lose the potential consumer. In addition mass market advertising distorts the market by creating hidden costs (the marketing "industry") and by crowding out genuine research and objective reviews.
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Free speech is compromised by too much noise as well as too little message. Most mass market advertising is content free noise.
Well, I suspect that Microsoft has a clause in the agreement which allows resale, but does not allow opening it up to the community.
We have no idea. For all we know copyrights for the in-house developed code were assigned to a joint venture company that is now entirely owned by IBM.
Selling for zero dollars != Open-sourcing.
I probably expressed myself badly. I wanted to make the point that making general purpose pronouncements about "open sourcing is legally difficult" is much the same as saying "selling software (for zero dollars) is legally difficult". Both statements are silly.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
Geeks already think well of IBM, and will generally continue to do so regardless of what happens with OS/2.
True, but it's a matter of degree and numbers.
Now this is beyond the scope of my experience, but I can only imagine that it would take quite a few payable hours to sift through the code to see what can be released. There's probably some lawyer time involved too.
I've had personal experience of something like this.
There's little money to be gained from doing this, even when counted in such ephemeral ways as 'good will'.
Good will can be worth billions, just look at the price for some web sites. e.g. IBM has revenue of ~$100B. A 1 in 1000 change in that due to more good will would be worth $100M.
See this and this.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
You've utterly failed to answer Waffle Iron's question of "Why would IBM bother?"
He did not ask that question.
Despite your hand-waving, there would be substantial effort in untangling and sanitizing the code along with all the various legal checks to make sure the code is not encumbered by third-party licenses in any way.
No it wouldn't and I'm speaking from experience. I was involved in a major, many million line source delivered contract project dependent on more than 400 separate licenses that had to be vetted before contract delivery. This was in addition to all the code that was being written and delivered. It took a lot less than two man months; a combination of me finding all the relevant code licenses and a person in the legal department reviewing all the licenses to make sure they were compatible with our delivery contract. The most painful bit was making sure all the DRM would work on all the client's machines and in one case re-buying old software that we'd lost the license for. We left out some packages that had problematic licenses and weren't essential to the delivery.
It would take engineering time to go through all that source code and prepare it to be released.
It would've been trivial for us to deliver our own software without all the dependent licensed software. Just use source control, that's what it's for. We had to know what was under what license just for our own in-house software management. The same should apply to OS/2.
It would take a lot of legal effort to go through the myriads of interlocking legal agreements to make sure IBM wasn't breaking any laws in the process.
No it wouldn't. See above. It's possible that the entire OS/2 source code is jointly owned by IBM and M$, not solely by IBM, in which case M$ would probably block it. If that is the problem IBM should just say so and not spout general purpose legal FUD.
If all the interlocking contracts and agreements in the SCO debacle were complex, I can imagine that the ones surrounding OS/2 are just as complex, if not more so.
SCO wasn't particularly complex, it's just that they wanted to try all sorts of speculative legal theories. In the end it amounted to little more than hot air.
That engineering time is not free to IBM. The legal costs are not free to IBM. What you are demanding is that IBM spend substantial amounts of their time and money to give you something free.
Please re-read this comment.
Well, IBM is not a charity and they don't owe you or anyone else a goddamn thing.
Where did I say they did?
It takes an unbelievable amount of hubris to reject any reason IBM may give for not releasing OS/2, including one as simple "we don't want to."
I've got no problem with "we don't want to". I have no particular interest in OS/2. I have a big problem with the ongoing FUD about open sourcing being legally difficult, OS/2 merely being the latest example.
IBM has spent billions on open source projects. To demand even more from them then deride them when they don't give in makes the open source community seem like a bunch of spoiled children.
I'm not objecting to IBM. I like their products and general attitude and I've got no particular problem with them keeping things closed source if they think they have a business case for doing so. I'm objecting to the FUD about open sourcing being legally difficult. OS/2 is possibly the most extreme example of any software package that might be difficult to open source because of its size and the complexity of it's genesis and history but even in this case people here are exaggerating massively. I know from personal experience, it's just not that difficult.
So, answer me this bit01 -- Why should IBM bother?
Waffle Iron never
Why should IBM open source anything?
Because it doesn't cost them much (They've already made whatever money they're going to make out of OS/2) and it helps make them look good. Marketers spend millions trying to make companies look good. People choose products based on feel good. This would play particularly to technical opinion leaders.
Keeping it closed is not going to lose them a lot of business,
True but why lose any business at all?
and it would take both money and time to find out what they could open source, and do it.
True, but probably not much. That's the main thing I'm objecting to in a lot of these posts, the automatic assumption that open sourcing costs a lot of time and money. Actually no, in general, it doesn't.
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DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
Is that better?
No. You seem to think IBM doesn't own OS/2. The parts they own they can open source. End of story.
OS/2 may have dependencies on subroutine libraries with restrictive licenses. Those subroutine libraries probably can't be open sourced without heartache and need to be replaced by anybody wanting to use the OS/2 code. End of story.
Your "incredible amounts of abuse" is just emotive hand waving.
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Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketers' salaries? You do via higher cost products.
That's right: many open source licenses are incompatible with each other. It just happens that the license for this code is almost certainly incompatible with most any open source license.
Evidence not hand waving please.
Any dependencies on restrictively licensed subroutine libraries can be re-engineered.Since Microsoft did half the work on the early releases of OS/2, the problem is a little more involved than that. Why would IBM bother to invest the $millions it would take to sanitize, untangle and rewrite huge chunks of an entire dead operating system?
Evidence not hand waving please.
You apparently have no idea what the licenses and copyright assignments are so stop pretending you do have an idea. To say it'd take millions to sanitize modular, probably version controlled code is silly. I said nothing about them rewriting anything; presumably the people running the existing OS/2 clone projects would be interested in doing that.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
I'll reply to you because you have the most reasonable of all the replies.
Repeating myself for the upteenth time:
I'm not objecting to IBM not wanting to open source OS/2. It'd be nice if they did but they have their reasons for not doing so that they've chosen to keep private. It could be things as simple as the not wanting to harm Serenity Systems, not wanting to cannibalize or confuse part of their linux market or not wanting to devote even minimal engineering effort to it.
I'm objecting to all the content-free mod'ed up comments saying, with no evidence at all, that IBM can't open source it for legal reasons. This is nonsense.
It all depends on the particular constituent licenses and copyright assignments. This is no different from on-selling. For pretty much any use of software, including open sourcing it, on-selling or feeding it to your dog, you have to check the constituent licenses and copyright assignments. Hand waving about how "open sourcing is impossible" is nonsense. It depends on the particular constituent licenses and copyright assignments. I really don't know how to make it any clearer.
There's way too many people on /. who think that open source licenses are legally mystically different from the myriad of commercial licenses out there. They're not.
Due to incessant marketing and branding there's also way too many people who think that a branded software package is an indivisible software blob that can't be split and merged as needed. Despite propaganda to the contrary, licenses both closed and open source are not viral and there's nothing legally stopping IBM open sourcing the majority of OS/2 that it does own outright, regardless of what the licenses and copyright assignments of the associated subsystems not developed by IBM are. Interested people/companies could then create the missing subsystems or adapt them from Linux/BSD.
The same is true for all companies that claim their software can't be open sourced for legal reasons. Nonsense. If they own it they can open source it. Any dependencies on restrictively licensed subroutine libraries can be re-engineered. It's all just legal FUD to blindside objections and cover up the possibly embarrassing real reasons.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
What if IBM's agreement with MS included additional restrictions?
What if IBM's agreement with MS didn't include additional restrictions? IBM probably got as liberal a license as they could for all OS/2 constituents; their business depended on it.
You're right but that's my point; open sourcing, just like on-selling, is dependent on the constituent licenses. To hand wave about "impossible to open source" is equivalent to hand waving about "impossible to on-sell". It's nonsense. Anyway, it's always possible to open source the in-house developed stuff while leaving out the third party controlled stuff.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
What FUD?
The implicit assumption that open sourcing is magically different from on-selling in general. In all cases it is necessary to review the terms of the constituent licenses to determine what's possible and what's not. IBM would've been foolish not to get very liberal licenses for anything in OS/2.
In any case, it's always possible to open source in-house developed code and leave out any associated third party restricted code.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
There are plenty of things that can be sold that cannot be open sourced. Think of all the software that is written with a legal agreement about who owns what. There is plenty out there and its being sold.
It's like talking to a broken record: I repeat; Open sourcing is the equivalent of selling the source for zero dollars. Whether you can open source and/or whether you can on-sell all depend on the wording of the parent licenses. A blanket pronouncement like "can't open source it" is nonsense equivalent to a blanket pronouncement saying "can't sell it".
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
One of the big problems with DRM is that it's a sexy technology.
Technologists and businessmen just love the idea of being able to control other people in ways that were not possible before and that's why DRM keeps resurfacing. I know, I used to like DRM myself until I grew up and realized that it was simply not in my interest to live in a supposedly free society when DRM does end-runs around everything from first sale doctrine to fair use provisions to the copyright bargain to free enterprise. This is becoming increasingly important as intellectual worlds become more important in people's lives.
DRM is guilty until proven innocent. I do not want to live in such a society.
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DRM - Have you got big-corp-of-your-choice's permission to go to the toilet today?
DRM assures the rights that each group needs are all that they get. Least privilege is what they call it.
You're talking about normal operating system security. This has nothing to do with DRM. DRM is all about using technology to control an otherwise free agent when something is "sold".
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
Oh for fuck's sake. OS/2 is filled with other folks' IP,
Nonsense. If IBM didn't own OS/2 they couldn't have sold it to Serenity Systems. Open sourcing is the equivalent of selling the source for zero dollars. IBM can set whatever price they like.
FUD about problems with open sourcing gets tiresome after a while. Open source source licenses are no different from closed source licenses; it all depends on the particulars of the individual licenses as to whether software can be on-sold.
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Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
IBM cannot make OS/2 open source, as they do not own all of it.
No, this sort of FUD keeps resurfacing. If they didn't own it they couldn't have sold it to Serenity Systems.
This is no different whether closed or open source and FUD'ers who claim that something "can't be open sourced" are usually just bullshitting. It's almost the exactly the same as saying "can't be sold".
Open sourcing is the equivalent of a normal sale but for zero dollars. I hope you're not going to to try and claim that IBM can't sell OS/2, source and binary, for whatever price it likes?
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
RIAA astroturf is flying thick and fast today. A content free propaganda first post mod'ed up to +5 to try to neutralize the article and direct the debate. I wonder how that happened?
Be careful people; there's a lot of astroturf and probably sock puppets on /. these days. It's amazing how every time there's a story with a point of view that the software or media industries don't like you'll get numerous weasels popping up who "just happen" to repeat tired old propaganda we've all heard and dismissed many times before. Treat these lowlifes with the contempt they deserve.
Redundancy and repetition are a strong sign that marketing parasites are involved. They don't care if they waste/steal people's time and attention as long as they achieve mind share at the expense of other points of view.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
After all, it's not really practical for organizations that rely on NTLM for multiple servers to manually configure several hundred or thousand firefox installations to accept those specific servers -- never mind if the list of servers changes. Too, it's even more unlikely that they'll be able to trust the users to properly maintain and configure those settings themselves.
If the administrator is too incompetent to add the line user_pref("network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris", "someserver.com"); to all users' prefs.js text configuration file in 10 minutes they should be fired. I researched this in less than 5 minutes for this post.
Incompetent "enterprise" administrators who can't/won't do even minimal research, analysis or basic scripting are the problem, not software missing useless "enterprise" capabilities. Most "enterprise" software is a scam.
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Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
Despite material costs being below $1.50, it's still the case that record companies make pretty thin margins on CD sales relative to margins in other industries.
All that shows is that there are a lot of pigs at the trough. The industry is incredibly inefficient. To produce a CD is a few hours studio time amortized over the number of sales. Marketing is just an arms race to get mind share where everybody loses except the marketing industry (= arms dealers). Distribution could be a cheap website.
Newspapers, a far more complex intellectual product than a CD, are delivered to millions of doors daily for a dollar or two each. Yes, it's subsidized by classified (meaning no imposition) advertising. So what? They're still orders of magnitude more efficient than the music "industry". It's way past time the music "industry", not the musicians, were put out on the street and forced to earn a real living (as in producing something of value rather than acting as rent seeking middlemen, as they have been doing for generations). They talk a storm but in reality they do very little.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
People will create, but the rate will decrease without investment.
Maybe, maybe not. In a population of billions it may well be that without the chilling effect of patents much more will be created as huge numbers of people build on freely reusable ideas to keep ahead in business. e.g. In the early days of the software industry.
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Has your software been deliberately crippled?
So the real question becomes, does the likelihood of multiple individuals creating a similar solution to solve a particular problem diminishes the justification of the patent system? No. It simply rewards the first one who created a working solution.
Your answer is silly. Of course it reduces the justification; if for no other reason than a 1/x chance of a patent is worth less than a 1/1 chance of patent.
In addition as the population increases the trade off between restricting billions of people from using an idea versus encouraging (NOT enabling) a few to implement an idea shifts.
In any case any patent system which doesn't recognize the reality of multiple independent reinvention is badly broken; it's an unfair lottery where somebody can expend enormous time and effort and not only get nothing in return but may be forced to pay their competitor to stay in business. At least with no patents they have the first mover advantage. Business is hard enough as it is without making it even harder.
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Copyrights and patents are privileges, not rights.
and it is not up to the corporations to restrain themselves. it is their job to squeeze money out of every possible nook and cranny.
This implies that all an unethical person needs to do to be given carte blanche is to form a corporation. That's probably not what you intended.
Corporations do not have a "job". Corporations are merely groups of people cooperating and just like individual people they can act ethically and unethically, and within the law or outside the law. They are an organizational tool, nothing more.
Agree with your other points.
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
Patents allow anybody to have an understanding on making something.
So that would be why patents are routinely made as unintelligible as possible and engineers are routinely told to avoid doing patent searches when developing products to avoid "willful infringement" penalties.
Patents are little more than a racket by the patent bureaucracy now. Not surprising when you consider that in a growing population now in the billions it's statistically likely that multiple people will invent the same thing once the prerequisites are available and the disadvantage of billions of people being blocked from using an idea can vastly outweigh the benefit of encouraging (NOT enabling) a few to discover the idea.
The patent entrenched interests love to handwave about how people won't create without patents; it just shows how out of touch with reality they are.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
That two people have a brilliant idea at the same time isn't obviousness, it's just coincidence.
Nonsense. In the vast majority of cases it's because it's an idea "whose time has come". That is, due to normal technological development all the prerequisites are now available and several experts, out of a population of billions, have come up with a similar idea using the same prerequisites. In the case of the telephone many intelligent people were working on the problem with similar prerequisites/tools available (electricity/telegraph etc.) and it's not surprising they converged on similar solutions.
The patent bureaucracy's concept of ideas, that is that they appear out of nothing, is one example of how little they understand about how normal science and technological development works. Of innovation in other words.
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Are you a creator or a consumer?