Another big determiner for me, on major sites anyway, is time-to-load. I'll frequently abort a page before it's even finished if I'm not reading something else.
A long time-to-load probably means a badly configured server, or graphics heavy and often content free site. If a graphics rich site like BBC news can get it right, why can't anybody else?
Incidentally, 50ms can't be right - very few web sites take less than that to load.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available and copyable.
Don't forget: Every new law, patent and copyrighted item is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money.
"Harmonization", almost always architected by lawyers, will usually be in the direction of more money and opportunities for them and less money and opportunities for the general population. Copyleft is the opposite of that.
Real life nomic; adjust the rules and victory conditions so you win.
It's not a rumor. It's a prediction, a not unreasonable prediction.
If Google wants to stop cross-subsidising it's major competitor it could do worse than have its own PC where much of the utility of the PC is in Google's web presence.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Call it PR if you want, or networking, but without it you cannot succeed in the US as an independent scientist.
Your point is ownly partially valid. The fact is if you're doing PR you are, literally, not doing science. And the more marketing is done the more science, good and bad, is crowded out.
Mediocre scientists might not like it but good science can and does sell itself and if my tax dollars are going to be spent on marketing, not science, I would prefer they not be spent at all.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Um, explain then how the majority of innovations come from countries with high protection for IP (including patents) and countries with poor protection produce virtually none?
Standard, bogus argument from the PTO.
You're confusing correlation with causation. It could equally be that high innovation countries attract a patent mafia wanting to profit off of inventor's work. You have no evidence either way.
It could also be that patent laws and innovations develop independently but at the same time as a consequence of some other factor involving normal social progression. Again, you have no evidence.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Dell is successful because they focus on shipping PCs and not making speculative investments.
There's nothing particularly speculative about putting a tickbox on the order form that says no OS. Nor is it particularly speculative to put a tickbox on the order form that says "UbuntuLinux (warning, for experts only, only paid support available from blahblahblah)".
Look at IBM where they were bragging about the billions invested in Linux, all while taking a huge loss on each PC sold due to overhead.
IBM's investment in OSS is independent of whether they sell PC's with Linux/M$Windows/whatever. Don't conflate the two. It is to IBM's strategic advantage to invest in anything that will bring M$ down a notch or two. It is also to there advantage to not be contributing to their main competitor's revenue stream every year.
Not if it would cost them $40,000,000,000,000 to convert.
You're handwaving and the cost is incremental anyway. Organisations that have switched to Linux on the Desktop report that the training costs FUD is no big deal and that's been my personal experience as well. Switching costs are grossly exaggerated.
The Linux conversion "value proposition" has always been shaky -- you spend a ton of money upfront,
No you don't. You do it incrementally, use free downloads and use staff time that would've been taken on commercial vendor assessment anyway.
make a ton of assumptions about software features that will presumably magically appear in the future,
No you don't. You look for the features your office needs now. If all required features aren't available then you go with whatever is available. Incremental again. If you're a large organisation you pay for the features you want to be added to the packages you're using. Much cheaper than trying to do the same with a closed source app. No magic needed.
and then when you are done, you end up paying the much more expensive "RedHat Tax" in place of the "M$ Tax".
No you don't. If you're a large organisation you have your own or contracted third party IT team. Much cheaper than per-seat licensing.
(Check dell.com where the RedHat workstations only come with only one year of patch support at the same price as Windows XP Pro.)
Unlike M$ this is a free market. Red Hat is only one of many options, everything from employing the secretary's teenage son/nerd to full IBM contract support.
There's a reason there hasn't been any sort of mass-movement towards Linux despite all the optimistic predictions
What predictions? I haven't seen any. This is just a strawman that M$ proponents like to raise.
-- the numbers are bogus.
Not bogus at all. Any large organisation paying for per-seat licensing is being economically stupid. When the organisation gets to the size of China or India it becomes even more compelling. Spend a few hundred million to get whatever applications you want up to scratch rather than a few billion paying for M$ licenses. And as a bonus you get a home grown IT industry, better security from USA backdoors and assorted other insecurities, less of a subsidy for a commercially dangerous foreign competitor (M$) and more control over your own direction.
Everyone is sitting around waiting for someone else to make Linux a full-fledged, drop-in replacement for Windows.
No they're not. Linux is being incrementally improved all the time in different directions by different groups and individuals. It's becoming worthwhile for larger classes of users all the time.
And if that ever happens, Dell will be around to collect on their investment.
Yes, that's the beauty of OSS - it's win-win. Dell may do some incremental steps in the direction of Linux but they get the payback from all the other organisations doing their incremental bit. Everybody wins.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Absolutely true. The last place I worked at was willing to buy products at 10x the price, so long as they had garunteed vendor support. Never underestimate how valuable a support contract is when your last parity drive has just failed on your raid and you have no spares left in the building.
For the companies I've worked for I've been the client side coordinator of hundreds of different software support contracts of one sort or another, plus a few hardware support contracts. I've been on the vendor side of a few software support contracts also.
It's been my consistent real world experience that while hardware support contracts can be worthwhile in mission critical environments, annual software support contracts are an almost complete waste of time and money. Really. They provide no real world guarantees, nothing. I don't care how the contract is written, it's just too easy for the vendor to obey the letter but not the spirit of the contract.
For software you're much better off getting third party support on an hourly basis. Much cheaper, faster, more efficient and objective, even if you have to fly them in and pay extortionate rates. They also think more laterally and can solve problems with third party solutions more readily.
When applications require higher than necessary permissions to run, generally meaning needing to use an Administrator level account, then it is wholely and solely the application developer's fault.
Nonsense. Until M$ ships M$Windows with user access non-admin by default it's still largely their fault. The application developer is doing nothing more than targeting the default environment they've been given since the year dot.
M$ started this mess and it's largely their responsibility to fix it. Protected OS' and the reasons for them were well understood long before M$Windows came along and the fact that recent versions of M$Windows implement but don't actually use that body of knowledge says a lot about their business ethics.
M$ should be pressuring and educating application vendors much harder to lift their game. Even publishing a list of prominent applications and why they could run in user mode but don't would be a start. There's also all sorts of technical tricks they could do virtualising the environment of applications to make admin unnecessary, from popup warning messages up to and including multiple copies of \WINDOWS and the registry.
Not exclusively M$' fault though, there's plenty of blame to go around.
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I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
A clue: a lot of buzzwords, junk graphics and junk interactivity doesn't necessarily improve the browsing experience.
You sound like one of those web layout designers who thinks they know better than the user what they want and design fixed format web pages that don't work on everything from palmtops to disabled readers to the previous version of IE and/or M$windows. Those web pages also usually have security holes, glaring bugs, a non-intuitive user interface and take an unreasonable amount of time to load on a slow line. Such designers are the bane of the web.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
I'm glad not everybody is like you. Until somebody is bothered by something it doesn't get fixed.
Granted, there's a gulf between worrying about something and actually trying to fix it but it's a start and if a large enough fraction of the population are concerned about something then our elected representatives might think about it too. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and all that.
You need to improve your reading comprehension skills. You are confusing "able to order linux on all platforms as an option" with "not able to order windows on any platform". The two are not the same. You are also confusing an alliance fracturing with an alliance breaking. Worth discussing, even if the probability of a complete break is low.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
... because it's overall trustworthiness makes the people of Britain happy to pick up the tab.
And let me as a non-Britisher be the first to point out that the BBC is an absolutely brilliant (and dirt cheap per-capita) public relations move for all of Britain.
CNN and the other USA commercial networks are almost a world joke by comparison. If the USA wants to improve it's image in the world they could do worse than boost PBS. It's to fight terrorism, right?
Too true. A lot of people don't appreciate just how much M$ marketing manipulates language to achieve their aims. They don't always succeed but what they do accomplish can be saddening. Another way of framing and controlling public debate.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Nonsense. It's a tax, in the sense that if you want to interoperate with the rest of the office and the business world you have no realistic choice, despite what you might like to claim. Until the law catches up with M$ anti-trust concerns (where M$ is doing an end-run around anti-trust law by technical means) it will continue to be a tax.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
All your arguments about discounts could apply equally to Linux, except more so.
Sure, like any investment it's would be necessary to pay up-front. but a switch could pay for Dell in the long term. And the same applies to anybody in the computer industry besides M$.
Linux is already appearing in low end and specialty boxes. I expect it'll slowly move up the value chain. Particularly for large organisations, where per-seat licensing costs becomes increasingly economically stupid compared to the fixed price of software development.
M$ is currently taxing the world $40,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago. I think most sensible software consumers would like to save that money.
Hey man, I agree with you, but look at the rest of the snippet -- if you believe what you read at Slashdot, Dell is ten minutes away from dumping Microsoft products entirely in favour of linux. So is IBM. And HP. And probably Apple.
Nonsense. That has never been said.
You appear to have been exposed to so much M$ marketing drivel that you're having a hard time coping with alternative points of view.
Reality has no precedent around this place, or in much of the OSS community.
You're the one that's reality challenged. Alternative viewpoints do not constitute a lack of understanding of reality.
I'd suggest you get out more and expose yousrself to new viewpoints - you'll be the better for it.
Patents really *are* great if, like me, you are a researcher.
A matter of opinion. This implies your research inputs are patented as well and the free exchange of ideas that is critical to good research is stifled, despite what patent boosters like to naively claim.
Without them it would be nearly impossible for an independent inventor to get a product to market:
Depends on the product. Depends on the idea. Businesses start up all the time that aren't protected in any way by patents and they do just fine.
either everything about your product would have to be secret (giving you a credibility problem), or you would risk that your product ideas would be stolen whenever you gave a sales pitch.
False dichotomy. There are many other possibilities, everything from growing the business fast to get a jump on the competitors and the econonomic network effect working for you, to partial release of the idea, to concentrating on execution rather than idea, to using the idea inhouse to etc. Incidentally, any VC will tell you that ideas are a dime a dozen, it's execution that counts.
I firmly believe that without patent protection, very little innovation would occur at startup companies -- which is a shame, because that is where much innovation and technological risk-taking occurs today.
Well, faith based reasoning doesn't go down too well in the scientific circles I move in. My experience has been is that, with some honorable exceptions, patents are a pretty reliable indication that the research group getting them is poor anyway. Not surprising when you remember that patents are awarded by bureaucrats, not researchers or developers.
What is a startup going to do when they want to release an integrated product that has your idea as one element, that product uses dozens of others' patented ideas (easily possible, particularly if it has a software element) and, quite apart from the bureaucratic overhead, many of those ideas, that are critical to good execution, can't be licensed because a potential competitor is feeling competitive?
If anyone can come up with a solution other than patents that protects the small inventor against a big corporation, I'd like to hear it.
Your question implies a false assumption; that a patent protects a small inventor against a big corporation. See above and other posts.
See the solutions I've listed above. If you can't think of any others you're not being very creative.
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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.
Like a lot of scientifically illiterate journalists he's confusing correlation with causation. It could equally be that economic growth and riches attract the patent parasites.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Lots of stuff got invented before patents... so I see no reason why patents are or ever were needed to encourage invention.
Dear god, I hope you're joking. The rate of innovation and invention has increased exponentially over the past 150 years, and a good part of that is because now you're assured at least a shot at marketing your idea before someone sees you and copies you exactly. The incentive for full time invention is there.
There's many different incentives apart from patents, everything from being first to market to getting the kudo's to product differentiation to branding to you name it.
Incidentally, like many people you're confusing correlation and causation; just because patents increased at the same time as industrial development says nothing about whether patents helped the process. It could equally be that modern industrial development with it's riches attracts the patent mafia.
Without patents, we wouldn't have the light bulb, the telephone, the computer (transistors were a patented invention) or pretty much anything that anyone ever sunk R&D money into.
You have zero evidence for that assertion. Just because something was patented does not mean it would not exist if patents did not exist.
I'm not saying our patent system is perfect; hell, it sucks. But it's better than not having one
Where's the evidence? I've yet to see any significant evidence justifying this massive interference by the government in the citizen's business. I would actually support patents in limited areas of technology if there were evidence of long term public benefit. What we've got now though is bogus for large areas of technology for multiple reasons.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Stealing an idea is not like other kinds of competition in the marketplace.
Nonsense. Businesses steal ideas all the time, everything from advertising ideas to cafe layouts. For example, look at all the McDonalds copycats. Businesses cannot rest on their laurels, they have to continuously reinvent. As long as competitors don't attempt to pretend to be the original it's legal. It's competition, it works.
To make your Starbucks analogy precise, suppose Starbucks opened a store across the street from mine, identical in every way, but with lower prices.
False analogy. They couldn't because of trademark law. On the other hand they could easily open a store with their own spin on what they think the customer wants, including ideas from the original cafe if they think they might work.
Patentable ideas do not occur instantaneously. The first entrant inevitably invests time, and one year of the full-time attention of a few engineers is worth quite a bit.
Every new business requires investment. Just because you might be basing it on a supposedly new idea doesn't change that. And doesn't necessarily give you the moral right to lock out competitors with a statutory monopoly.
I should also point out that Google has a sizable portfolio of patents, which means two things: firstly, smart and successful tech businessmen appreciate the value of patents;
Nobody said a statutory monopoly was not profitable. Protection rackets are profitable too. That doesn't make them ethical or right.
and secondly, in keeping with their corporate philosophy, Google does not believe software patents are evil.
So what? This is an appeal to irrelevant authority, not an argument.
The big guys can lock you out of even entering the market using patents. Look at how Ericcson locked out Sendo using 11000 GSM patents.
So one large company restricts another large company from entering the market by patenting ideas related to an existing technology. I'm not seeing how this relates to my original point concerning small inventors.
It's obvious; if one large company can lock out another large company and succeeds what hope has a small inventor got if the large company decides to lock them out? That's one of the major reasons why large companies are going for broke with patents, to block the development of competition and the free market.
Patents are an abberration in business. There might be a reasoned justification for it. With the possible exception of drug patents (which require huge investments up front) I've never seen it though. I for one find it suspect that a patent can restrict the freedom of billions of people at the stroke of a pen without significant recompense. At the very least, until patents realistically deal with simultaneous independent invention they are ethically suspect.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Another big determiner for me, on major sites anyway, is time-to-load. I'll frequently abort a page before it's even finished if I'm not reading something else.
A long time-to-load probably means a badly configured server, or graphics heavy and often content free site. If a graphics rich site like BBC news can get it right, why can't anybody else?
Incidentally, 50ms can't be right - very few web sites take less than that to load.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available and copyable.
Don't forget: Every new law, patent and copyrighted item is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money.
"Harmonization", almost always architected by lawyers, will usually be in the direction of more money and opportunities for them and less money and opportunities for the general population. Copyleft is the opposite of that.
Real life nomic; adjust the rules and victory conditions so you win.
It is only a rumor at this point.
It's not a rumor. It's a prediction, a not unreasonable prediction.
If Google wants to stop cross-subsidising it's major competitor it could do worse than have its own PC where much of the utility of the PC is in Google's web presence.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Really, a Windows licence isn't the major part of the cost of a new PC.
The lower the cost of the PC the higher the proportion of the cost is the OS.
So just using their own OS (with all the development costs) isn't going to save a huge amount of money per unit sold.
It's not nothing either. Dollars matter in high volume products.
Plus the strategic advantage of not adding to the revenue stream of a major competitor.
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Are you thinking long term? Just because a TCO may be good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
"Claiming ownership where none exists is wrong."
Modern IP cartels sound like the royalty of the middle ages who thought they had the divine, and legal, right to rule.
Just because modern IP cartels have managed to game the legal system doesn't mean they have the moral or ethical right to control what others do.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Call it PR if you want, or networking, but without it you cannot succeed in the US as an independent scientist.
Your point is ownly partially valid. The fact is if you're doing PR you are, literally, not doing science. And the more marketing is done the more science, good and bad, is crowded out.
Mediocre scientists might not like it but good science can and does sell itself and if my tax dollars are going to be spent on marketing, not science, I would prefer they not be spent at all.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
The lawyer's are just doing their job as EMPL0YEES of the RIAA.
Getting paid for their actions doesn't affect the ethics of their actions.
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Keep your options open!
Um, explain then how the majority of innovations come from countries with high protection for IP (including patents) and countries with poor protection produce virtually none?
Standard, bogus argument from the PTO.
You're confusing correlation with causation. It could equally be that high innovation countries attract a patent mafia wanting to profit off of inventor's work. You have no evidence either way.
It could also be that patent laws and innovations develop independently but at the same time as a consequence of some other factor involving normal social progression. Again, you have no evidence.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
From here.
Dell is successful because they focus on shipping PCs and not making speculative investments.
There's nothing particularly speculative about putting a tickbox on the order form that says no OS. Nor is it particularly speculative to put a tickbox on the order form that says "UbuntuLinux (warning, for experts only, only paid support available from blahblahblah)".
Look at IBM where they were bragging about the billions invested in Linux, all while taking a huge loss on each PC sold due to overhead.
IBM's investment in OSS is independent of whether they sell PC's with Linux/M$Windows/whatever. Don't conflate the two. It is to IBM's strategic advantage to invest in anything that will bring M$ down a notch or two. It is also to there advantage to not be contributing to their main competitor's revenue stream every year.
Not if it would cost them $40,000,000,000,000 to convert.
You're handwaving and the cost is incremental anyway. Organisations that have switched to Linux on the Desktop report that the training costs FUD is no big deal and that's been my personal experience as well. Switching costs are grossly exaggerated.
The Linux conversion "value proposition" has always been shaky -- you spend a ton of money upfront,
No you don't. You do it incrementally, use free downloads and use staff time that would've been taken on commercial vendor assessment anyway.
make a ton of assumptions about software features that will presumably magically appear in the future,
No you don't. You look for the features your office needs now. If all required features aren't available then you go with whatever is available. Incremental again. If you're a large organisation you pay for the features you want to be added to the packages you're using. Much cheaper than trying to do the same with a closed source app. No magic needed.
and then when you are done, you end up paying the much more expensive "RedHat Tax" in place of the "M$ Tax".
No you don't. If you're a large organisation you have your own or contracted third party IT team. Much cheaper than per-seat licensing.
(Check dell.com where the RedHat workstations only come with only one year of patch support at the same price as Windows XP Pro.)
Unlike M$ this is a free market. Red Hat is only one of many options, everything from employing the secretary's teenage son/nerd to full IBM contract support.
There's a reason there hasn't been any sort of mass-movement towards Linux despite all the optimistic predictions
What predictions? I haven't seen any. This is just a strawman that M$ proponents like to raise.
-- the numbers are bogus.
Not bogus at all. Any large organisation paying for per-seat licensing is being economically stupid. When the organisation gets to the size of China or India it becomes even more compelling. Spend a few hundred million to get whatever applications you want up to scratch rather than a few billion paying for M$ licenses. And as a bonus you get a home grown IT industry, better security from USA backdoors and assorted other insecurities, less of a subsidy for a commercially dangerous foreign competitor (M$) and more control over your own direction.
Everyone is sitting around waiting for someone else to make Linux a full-fledged, drop-in replacement for Windows.
No they're not. Linux is being incrementally improved all the time in different directions by different groups and individuals. It's becoming worthwhile for larger classes of users all the time.
And if that ever happens, Dell will be around to collect on their investment.
Yes, that's the beauty of OSS - it's win-win. Dell may do some incremental steps in the direction of Linux but they get the payback from all the other organisations doing their incremental bit. Everybody wins.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Absolutely true. The last place I worked at was willing to buy products at 10x the price, so long as they had garunteed vendor support. Never underestimate how valuable a support contract is when your last parity drive has just failed on your raid and you have no spares left in the building.
For the companies I've worked for I've been the client side coordinator of hundreds of different software support contracts of one sort or another, plus a few hardware support contracts. I've been on the vendor side of a few software support contracts also.
It's been my consistent real world experience that while hardware support contracts can be worthwhile in mission critical environments, annual software support contracts are an almost complete waste of time and money. Really. They provide no real world guarantees, nothing. I don't care how the contract is written, it's just too easy for the vendor to obey the letter but not the spirit of the contract.
For software you're much better off getting third party support on an hourly basis. Much cheaper, faster, more efficient and objective, even if you have to fly them in and pay extortionate rates. They also think more laterally and can solve problems with third party solutions more readily.
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Keep your options open!
When applications require higher than necessary permissions to run, generally meaning needing to use an Administrator level account, then it is wholely and solely the application developer's fault.
Nonsense. Until M$ ships M$Windows with user access non-admin by default it's still largely their fault. The application developer is doing nothing more than targeting the default environment they've been given since the year dot.
M$ started this mess and it's largely their responsibility to fix it. Protected OS' and the reasons for them were well understood long before M$Windows came along and the fact that recent versions of M$Windows implement but don't actually use that body of knowledge says a lot about their business ethics.
M$ should be pressuring and educating application vendors much harder to lift their game. Even publishing a list of prominent applications and why they could run in user mode but don't would be a start. There's also all sorts of technical tricks they could do virtualising the environment of applications to make admin unnecessary, from popup warning messages up to and including multiple copies of \WINDOWS and the registry.
Not exclusively M$' fault though, there's plenty of blame to go around.
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I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
A clue: a lot of buzzwords, junk graphics and junk interactivity doesn't necessarily improve the browsing experience.
You sound like one of those web layout designers who thinks they know better than the user what they want and design fixed format web pages that don't work on everything from palmtops to disabled readers to the previous version of IE and/or M$windows. Those web pages also usually have security holes, glaring bugs, a non-intuitive user interface and take an unreasonable amount of time to load on a slow line. Such designers are the bane of the web.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Don't let it bother you ever.
I'm glad not everybody is like you. Until somebody is bothered by something it doesn't get fixed.
Granted, there's a gulf between worrying about something and actually trying to fix it but it's a start and if a large enough fraction of the population are concerned about something then our elected representatives might think about it too. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and all that.
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Are you a creator or a consumer?
Don't worry, somebody's sure to have patented paper popups.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
You need to improve your reading comprehension skills. You are confusing "able to order linux on all platforms as an option" with "not able to order windows on any platform". The two are not the same. You are also confusing an alliance fracturing with an alliance breaking. Worth discussing, even if the probability of a complete break is low.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
And let me as a non-Britisher be the first to point out that the BBC is an absolutely brilliant (and dirt cheap per-capita) public relations move for all of Britain.
CNN and the other USA commercial networks are almost a world joke by comparison. If the USA wants to improve it's image in the world they could do worse than boost PBS. It's to fight terrorism, right?
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Keep your options open!
Too true. A lot of people don't appreciate just how much M$ marketing manipulates language to achieve their aims. They don't always succeed but what they do accomplish can be saddening. Another way of framing and controlling public debate.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Nonsense. It's a tax, in the sense that if you want to interoperate with the rest of the office and the business world you have no realistic choice, despite what you might like to claim. Until the law catches up with M$ anti-trust concerns (where M$ is doing an end-run around anti-trust law by technical means) it will continue to be a tax.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
All your arguments about discounts could apply equally to Linux, except more so.
Sure, like any investment it's would be necessary to pay up-front. but a switch could pay for Dell in the long term. And the same applies to anybody in the computer industry besides M$.
Linux is already appearing in low end and specialty boxes. I expect it'll slowly move up the value chain. Particularly for large organisations, where per-seat licensing costs becomes increasingly economically stupid compared to the fixed price of software development.
M$ is currently taxing the world $40,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago. I think most sensible software consumers would like to save that money.
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Keep your options open!
Hey man, I agree with you, but look at the rest of the snippet -- if you believe what you read at Slashdot, Dell is ten minutes away from dumping Microsoft products entirely in favour of linux. So is IBM. And HP. And probably Apple.
Nonsense. That has never been said.
You appear to have been exposed to so much M$ marketing drivel that you're having a hard time coping with alternative points of view.
Reality has no precedent around this place, or in much of the OSS community.
You're the one that's reality challenged. Alternative viewpoints do not constitute a lack of understanding of reality.
I'd suggest you get out more and expose yousrself to new viewpoints - you'll be the better for it.
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zealotry n : excessive intolerance of opposing views.
Patents really *are* great if, like me, you are a researcher.
A matter of opinion. This implies your research inputs are patented as well and the free exchange of ideas that is critical to good research is stifled, despite what patent boosters like to naively claim.
Without them it would be nearly impossible for an independent inventor to get a product to market:
Depends on the product. Depends on the idea. Businesses start up all the time that aren't protected in any way by patents and they do just fine.
either everything about your product would have to be secret (giving you a credibility problem), or you would risk that your product ideas would be stolen whenever you gave a sales pitch.
False dichotomy. There are many other possibilities, everything from growing the business fast to get a jump on the competitors and the econonomic network effect working for you, to partial release of the idea, to concentrating on execution rather than idea, to using the idea inhouse to etc. Incidentally, any VC will tell you that ideas are a dime a dozen, it's execution that counts.
I firmly believe that without patent protection, very little innovation would occur at startup companies -- which is a shame, because that is where much innovation and technological risk-taking occurs today.
Well, faith based reasoning doesn't go down too well in the scientific circles I move in. My experience has been is that, with some honorable exceptions, patents are a pretty reliable indication that the research group getting them is poor anyway. Not surprising when you remember that patents are awarded by bureaucrats, not researchers or developers.
What is a startup going to do when they want to release an integrated product that has your idea as one element, that product uses dozens of others' patented ideas (easily possible, particularly if it has a software element) and, quite apart from the bureaucratic overhead, many of those ideas, that are critical to good execution, can't be licensed because a potential competitor is feeling competitive?
If anyone can come up with a solution other than patents that protects the small inventor against a big corporation, I'd like to hear it.
Your question implies a false assumption; that a patent protects a small inventor against a big corporation. See above and other posts.
See the solutions I've listed above. If you can't think of any others you're not being very creative.
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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.
Like a lot of scientifically illiterate journalists he's confusing correlation with causation. It could equally be that economic growth and riches attract the patent parasites.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Lots of stuff got invented before patents ... so I see no reason why patents are or ever were needed to encourage invention.
Dear god, I hope you're joking. The rate of innovation and invention has increased exponentially over the past 150 years, and a good part of that is because now you're assured at least a shot at marketing your idea before someone sees you and copies you exactly. The incentive for full time invention is there.
There's many different incentives apart from patents, everything from being first to market to getting the kudo's to product differentiation to branding to you name it.
Incidentally, like many people you're confusing correlation and causation; just because patents increased at the same time as industrial development says nothing about whether patents helped the process. It could equally be that modern industrial development with it's riches attracts the patent mafia.
Without patents, we wouldn't have the light bulb, the telephone, the computer (transistors were a patented invention) or pretty much anything that anyone ever sunk R&D money into.
You have zero evidence for that assertion. Just because something was patented does not mean it would not exist if patents did not exist.
I'm not saying our patent system is perfect; hell, it sucks. But it's better than not having one
Where's the evidence? I've yet to see any significant evidence justifying this massive interference by the government in the citizen's business. I would actually support patents in limited areas of technology if there were evidence of long term public benefit. What we've got now though is bogus for large areas of technology for multiple reasons.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Stealing an idea is not like other kinds of competition in the marketplace.
Nonsense. Businesses steal ideas all the time, everything from advertising ideas to cafe layouts. For example, look at all the McDonalds copycats. Businesses cannot rest on their laurels, they have to continuously reinvent. As long as competitors don't attempt to pretend to be the original it's legal. It's competition, it works.
To make your Starbucks analogy precise, suppose Starbucks opened a store across the street from mine, identical in every way, but with lower prices.
False analogy. They couldn't because of trademark law. On the other hand they could easily open a store with their own spin on what they think the customer wants, including ideas from the original cafe if they think they might work.
Patentable ideas do not occur instantaneously. The first entrant inevitably invests time, and one year of the full-time attention of a few engineers is worth quite a bit.
Every new business requires investment. Just because you might be basing it on a supposedly new idea doesn't change that. And doesn't necessarily give you the moral right to lock out competitors with a statutory monopoly.
I should also point out that Google has a sizable portfolio of patents, which means two things: firstly, smart and successful tech businessmen appreciate the value of patents;
Nobody said a statutory monopoly was not profitable. Protection rackets are profitable too. That doesn't make them ethical or right.
and secondly, in keeping with their corporate philosophy, Google does not believe software patents are evil.
So what? This is an appeal to irrelevant authority, not an argument.
The big guys can lock you out of even entering the market using patents. Look at how Ericcson locked out Sendo using 11000 GSM patents.
So one large company restricts another large company from entering the market by patenting ideas related to an existing technology. I'm not seeing how this relates to my original point concerning small inventors.
It's obvious; if one large company can lock out another large company and succeeds what hope has a small inventor got if the large company decides to lock them out? That's one of the major reasons why large companies are going for broke with patents, to block the development of competition and the free market.
Patents are an abberration in business. There might be a reasoned justification for it. With the possible exception of drug patents (which require huge investments up front) I've never seen it though. I for one find it suspect that a patent can restrict the freedom of billions of people at the stroke of a pen without significant recompense. At the very least, until patents realistically deal with simultaneous independent invention they are ethically suspect.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.