Yes, they can "dump" their support pricing. With their cash reserves, it would be all too easy to do.
But they're still going to get nibbled away at on the edges. You're not going to buy support for that print server down the hall, or a workgroup's internal website.
I've noticed at my work that the most support contracts are there merely to make the certain people sleep better at night. For five years we paid Cygnus $50K a year and never once called them.
Most of the people I know who are Windows users have no idea that alternatives even exist.
They've never heard of the Mac? After almost twenty years you would think they would have heard of the Mac! I can think of dozens of reasons why people don't want to switch to Mac, but not knowing about it isn't one what would make the list. Fewer people know of Linux, but I suspect that a very large percentage do. They just don't have a clear idea of what it actually is.
Monopoly = Stagnation = Lack of Innovation.
And people are starting to notice it. They see people running Macs with all these neat innovations (innovative to Windows users at least). I was at a training session where the trainer was using Keynote on a Powerbook. After the meeting everyone wanted to play with it. Merely the dual displays for presentations was jaw dropping.
Just using FreeBSD on my workstation has caused several coworkers to sit up and take notice. The most awesome "innovation" to them is X11's network transparency.
Why aren't they worried about their Windows product?
Oh but they are! Or haven't you noticed their spin machine kicking into high gear touting how secure Windows is, while simultaneously deriding Linux at every turn? They're also making a heck of a lot of noise about Longhorn.
As I stated in a reply to a sibling post, I was in error about the CO2. I meant total pollutant gases. For that, I apologize.
However, your assumptions on coal are suspect. It assumes that the total amount of carbon in coal is converted to CO2 during combustion. Is none of it converted to other chemicals? Is there no "soot"?
While I easily confirmed your Pinatubo emissions in several places, I could find no references on the amount of industrial CO2 emitted per year. The closest I got was to a percentage change of CO2 ppm, and it included non-industrial sources.
As for sources, I have to confess, that while I have some, I did mistate them. Pinatubo didn't emit more CO2 than all of industry, but total pollutants, greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting chemicals. A gross error on my part. For my mistake, I apologize. But it still demonstrates that nature affects nature more than man affects nature.
Some quick refs I found on google:
"Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines spewed forth more than a thousand times the amount of ozone-depleting chemicals in one eruption than all the fluorocarbons manufactured by corporations in history." [http://showcase.netins.net/web/the-f-files/Global Warming.html]
"When Mt. Pinatubo in the Philipines erupted it spued out in one day more that 500 times the amount that man has produced since the production of man-made CFCs" [http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/1286/envp.htm l]
"For example, when the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, within just a few hours it had thrown into the atmosphere 30 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide - almost twice as much as all the factories, power plants and cars in the United States do in a whole year. Oceans emit 90 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, every year. Decaying plants throw up another 90 billion tonnes, compared to just six billion tonnes a year from humans." [http://www.users.bigpond.com/smartboard/aginatur/ prog1.htm]
p.s. The paper you cite shows, as you say, a "zero net effect". It doesn't say that no C02 was released by Pinatubo, only that it had no effect.
In economic terms, the issue is whether a company has "monopoly power" which means that it controls so much of the market that they can artificially control the market (i.e. inflate prices, suppress competition, etc.).
But if you read the very next chapter in your "Economics for Dummies" book, you'll find that monopolies are very fragile entities. Inflate prices too much and people stop upgrading or start switching to alternitives. And of course, to suppress the competition, you have to lower your prices to below market level, which takes you back to square one. So it all balances out.
That's assuming it's not a government chartered monopoly, like the power industry, where police come with guns and arrest you for competing. But Microsoft isn't a government chartered monopoly. They still have to obey the whims of the marketplace.
Microsoft is certainly trying to inflate its prices. WinXP is three times more expensive than Win98. The new EULAs have some bizarre service clauses designed to extract more revenue. But all it's doing is moving corporations away from Microsoft. Companies are choosing not to upgrade. Win2K works just fine, why move to WS2003 or WinXP? Linux and BSD are exploding onto the small server market. Macs are finally being considered viable workstations in the office.
Their next move is to start dumping their product. Remember, like the did with Internet Explorer? Unfortunately for them, this time around there's free beer software in all the market segments they're in. They can't price MSOffice cheaper than OpenOffice, and they can't price Windows cheaper than Linux.
Ever notice that 95% of people bitching about the Microsoft monopoly aren't running Windows? It's scary how those numbers correlate so closely with the 95% of people running Windows who don't bitch about the monopoly.
And the nearly equivalent amount they paid the Gore campaign...
It's nice and all to bitch about the devil we do know, because he's in office, but it's a mistake to think that the devil we don't would do any better.
I was standing in line to see a movie next to the line for "Titanic." I bunch of giggling teenage girls were there to see Leo. So me and my friend loudly announced "what a horrible movie, the ship sinks at the end!"
The girls just screamed at us in genuine anguish that we had given it away. Sheesh.
p.s. I'm telling everyone at work who hasn't read LOTR, that Gollum is the title character in "Return of the King." Some are actually falling for it.
Pinatubo expelled more CO2 into the atmosphere than the entire history of industrialized civilization.
I'm not saying that humans should just keep on polluting, I'm only saying that the extremist scaremongering is wrong. We can solve our problems with logic and reason, without having to resort to panicked emotionalism.
Well in California at least, it would make ballot rigging much harder. The people in charge here, whether Republican or Democrat, wouldn't stand for it. It's our dirty little secret. The only reason the recent governor's election came out smelling pretty was because the whole world was watching closely.
There's no chance for electronic ballots to be found floating in San Fransisco Bay or locked in a trunk, so of course our political masters love the idea!
I voted yesterday in Santa Clara County, California. They're testing these new touch screen machines. The papers this morning said everyone was happy with them. Good for them, but I had a problem with them.
First, while they were easy for ME to use, I could easily imagine someone with palsy pointing to the wrong circle and voting for someone else. Of course, this problem existing in the prior system, but it would have been nice if they made the circles a bit bigger.
But I'm just nitpicking above. My second problem is that I didn't get a reciept or stub. Although the machine said it recorded my vote, I have no proof of it. With a paper ballot (punch, optical, other) at least I can physically drop it into the ballot box, while keeping the top stub as a receipt.
A paper stub from a paper ballot doesn't mean too terribly much. But a printed stub from an electronic voting machine could. I've heard various proposals, but they all boil down to an anonymous cryptographic hash on the stub, that can be used to verify the count and accuracy of the vote.
Even my ATM machine gives me a reciept! If there are voting irregularities (and in some California counties, they occur with clocklike regularity) how the heck can anyone demonstrate it? At least with a paper ballot you have something to recount. With electronic voting what do they do? Push "recalc" in Excel?
Cougaar might not be listed by the FSF or OSI, but it still meets their requirements and definitions. Morality isn't defined by Papal Bulls any more than software freedom is defined by the pronouncements of RMS. The reason Cougaar isn't listed is because it's new and the FSF and OSI haven't gotten around to stamping it with their imprimaturs.
Free Software isn't defined by lists of licenses. Open Source Software isn't defined by lists of licenses.
We're not "consumers" in the typical sense of the word. We are geeks and developers.
I'll make sure I don't buy any Redhat products then. I wouldn't want to spend my consuming dollars with them. What a faux pas that would be!
You're implying that a product is only a consumer product when it meets the needs of the "lowest common denominator". This is absurd. I'm a consumer by buying a shrink-wrap Redhat every bit as much as the guy next to me buying a shrink-wrap Windows XP. Different products for different people.
Most people can't drive an automobile with a stick shift. Yet they're still sold. Even fewer can drive a motorcycle. Yet they're still sold.
Secondly, MacOS X is not a "part of the family", not even close.
I suggested that Redhat recommend Lycoris, Xandros or Lindows for their "consumer" inquiries, not OSX. Go back and reread my post.
Desktop Linux isn't ready for the desktop
You might be right. I wouldn't know, because I'm using FreeBSD on my desktop at work and at home. It may not be suitable for everyone. Heck, it's probably not suitable for most people. But it's still on my desktop working like a champ.
I'm not arguing that Redhat should be claiming that Linux is suitable for everyone. It's not. But they at least need to stop giving Microsoft juicy soundbites for their next anti-Linux campaign.
Whether it's MSN compatability, dodgy sound mixing, mounting disks or whatever, there are still a lot of details to take care of yet.
MSN compatibility has nothing to do with desktop-readiness. Give me a break! The readiness of a system for the desktop has zilch to do with compatibility with a proprietary system owned by the competitor.
Sound mixing under a stock Win2K is pretty dodgy as well. Heck, it's impossible! But you can get sound mixing applications for it. Just as you can for Linux. Besides which, considering the few people who actually use such applications, this hardly qualifies as a requirement for desktop readiness.
Finally, mounting disks. What the heck does this have to do with anything? It's merely a different paradigm of usage. Neither better nor worse than the Windows automounting way of things. Heck, you can even run amd under Linux if you want. Some distros even set this up for you automatically! Sure, you need to umount your USB storage before removing it, but you have to do the same thing under Windows by "stopping" the same device.
Minor annoyances and incompatibilities are not evidence that a system is unready for the desktop. A while ago my friend tried SuSE, and was so annoyed that he needed a login account, that he went back to Windows 98. Now he's using Windows XP and is thrilled that he can have separate accounts for each member of his family. What the difference? Beats me!
Not quite. Before you get your panties in a bunch, look closer.
It's quite explicit that you can "sell or give away the Cougaar Software or any Derivative Work". Case solved. You can sell it.
The second term is a bit puzzling. "If Licensee sublicenses the Cougaar Software or Derivative Works...Licensee does not charge for the Cougaar Software or Derivative Work". The key word here is "sublicenses".
You can sell the software or its derivatives all you want. Only if you sublicense it are you forbidded to charge for the software itself (though you may certainly charge for the media, bandwidth, support, manuals, etc). When you sublicense, the recipient is getting the license from YOU, not from the original author. This is a subtle distinction, and one few ever make in the Free Software World. What does it mean?
Not being a lawyer, I suspect it's primarily to mollify the legal types. Note that sublicensing is required to offer indemnity or liability (even if it weren't explicitly stated in the license). I suspect that this means if you create a business off of the software, you cannot sell the software itself, but only the warranty and support.
The license is Free as in FSF. Don't worry about it.
And that's the kicker, isn't it? What do you tell the user who just bought a $500 video card that doesn't support it? Making hardware requirements for the use of XFree86 is a slippery slope to start down on. It's bad enough now that some people have to settle for VESA because there are no drivers for their hardware, but requiring 100% OpenGL support in hardware is going to be a bitch.
While it is true that many software problems can be solved by throwing hardware at them, one should not arbitrarily exclude users. The strength of free Unix like operating systems have been that they could run just fine on old hardware. Just last friday I set up a FreeBSD X client workstation on a i486.
You might want to take a look at Enlightenment. They're approaching this problem from a sensible direction. E17 will use your hardware if you have it, but default to software if you don't. They're not excluding anyone, and they didn't have to rewrite XFree86. The best part is, even without the OpenGL hardware, E17 is snappy and responsive.
You shouldn't feel obliged to defend every single design decision of Unix and OSS, just because M$ is evil.
I brought up Windows for one reason. Virtually everyone who complains about cut-n-paste in X compares it to Windows.
In fact, you were doing so indirectly, if you read the grandparent post. In it the poster posited that the UNIX model was better than the Windows model, whereupon you replied that objective tests should be used to compare the models.
Damned straight! The lack of alpha blended window managers and network transparent audio is the number one reason corporations aren't choosing Linux for the desktop productivity needs!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they can "dump" their support pricing. With their cash reserves, it would be all too easy to do.
But they're still going to get nibbled away at on the edges. You're not going to buy support for that print server down the hall, or a workgroup's internal website.
I've noticed at my work that the most support contracts are there merely to make the certain people sleep better at night. For five years we paid Cygnus $50K a year and never once called them.
Bad formatting dude! Anyway...
Most of the people I know who are Windows users have no idea that alternatives even exist.
They've never heard of the Mac? After almost twenty years you would think they would have heard of the Mac! I can think of dozens of reasons why people don't want to switch to Mac, but not knowing about it isn't one what would make the list. Fewer people know of Linux, but I suspect that a very large percentage do. They just don't have a clear idea of what it actually is.
Monopoly = Stagnation = Lack of Innovation.
And people are starting to notice it. They see people running Macs with all these neat innovations (innovative to Windows users at least). I was at a training session where the trainer was using Keynote on a Powerbook. After the meeting everyone wanted to play with it. Merely the dual displays for presentations was jaw dropping.
Just using FreeBSD on my workstation has caused several coworkers to sit up and take notice. The most awesome "innovation" to them is X11's network transparency.
Why aren't they worried about their Windows product?
Oh but they are! Or haven't you noticed their spin machine kicking into high gear touting how secure Windows is, while simultaneously deriding Linux at every turn? They're also making a heck of a lot of noise about Longhorn.
As I stated in a reply to a sibling post, I was in error about the CO2. I meant total pollutant gases. For that, I apologize.
However, your assumptions on coal are suspect. It assumes that the total amount of carbon in coal is converted to CO2 during combustion. Is none of it converted to other chemicals? Is there no "soot"?
While I easily confirmed your Pinatubo emissions in several places, I could find no references on the amount of industrial CO2 emitted per year. The closest I got was to a percentage change of CO2 ppm, and it included non-industrial sources.
As for sources, I have to confess, that while I have some, I did mistate them. Pinatubo didn't emit more CO2 than all of industry, but total pollutants, greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting chemicals. A gross error on my part. For my mistake, I apologize. But it still demonstrates that nature affects nature more than man affects nature.
l Warming.html]
m l]
/ prog1.htm]
Some quick refs I found on google:
"Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines spewed forth more than a thousand times the amount of ozone-depleting chemicals in one eruption than all the fluorocarbons manufactured by corporations in history." [http://showcase.netins.net/web/the-f-files/Globa
"When Mt. Pinatubo in the Philipines erupted it spued out in one day more that 500 times the amount that man has produced since the production of man-made CFCs" [http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/1286/envp.ht
"For example, when the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, within just a few hours it had thrown into the atmosphere 30 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide - almost twice as much as all the factories, power plants and cars in the United States do in a whole year. Oceans emit 90 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, every year. Decaying plants throw up another 90 billion tonnes, compared to just six billion tonnes a year from humans." [http://www.users.bigpond.com/smartboard/aginatur
p.s. The paper you cite shows, as you say, a "zero net effect". It doesn't say that no C02 was released by Pinatubo, only that it had no effect.
Based on the fact he doesn't believe the settlement goes far enough, I can't imagine it is the same guy!
Why? I mean seriously, why do you think that?
In economic terms, the issue is whether a company has "monopoly power" which means that it controls so much of the market that they can artificially control the market (i.e. inflate prices, suppress competition, etc.).
But if you read the very next chapter in your "Economics for Dummies" book, you'll find that monopolies are very fragile entities. Inflate prices too much and people stop upgrading or start switching to alternitives. And of course, to suppress the competition, you have to lower your prices to below market level, which takes you back to square one. So it all balances out.
That's assuming it's not a government chartered monopoly, like the power industry, where police come with guns and arrest you for competing. But Microsoft isn't a government chartered monopoly. They still have to obey the whims of the marketplace.
Microsoft is certainly trying to inflate its prices. WinXP is three times more expensive than Win98. The new EULAs have some bizarre service clauses designed to extract more revenue. But all it's doing is moving corporations away from Microsoft. Companies are choosing not to upgrade. Win2K works just fine, why move to WS2003 or WinXP? Linux and BSD are exploding onto the small server market. Macs are finally being considered viable workstations in the office.
Their next move is to start dumping their product. Remember, like the did with Internet Explorer? Unfortunately for them, this time around there's free beer software in all the market segments they're in. They can't price MSOffice cheaper than OpenOffice, and they can't price Windows cheaper than Linux.
Ever notice that 95% of people bitching about the Microsoft monopoly aren't running Windows? It's scary how those numbers correlate so closely with the 95% of people running Windows who don't bitch about the monopoly.
They paid how much for the Bush compaign?
And the nearly equivalent amount they paid the Gore campaign...
It's nice and all to bitch about the devil we do know, because he's in office, but it's a mistake to think that the devil we don't would do any better.
I was standing in line to see a movie next to the line for "Titanic." I bunch of giggling teenage girls were there to see Leo. So me and my friend loudly announced "what a horrible movie, the ship sinks at the end!"
The girls just screamed at us in genuine anguish that we had given it away. Sheesh.
p.s. I'm telling everyone at work who hasn't read LOTR, that Gollum is the title character in "Return of the King." Some are actually falling for it.
No, it's England. So shut your trap before they hear you!
Pinatubo expelled more CO2 into the atmosphere than the entire history of industrialized civilization.
I'm not saying that humans should just keep on polluting, I'm only saying that the extremist scaremongering is wrong. We can solve our problems with logic and reason, without having to resort to panicked emotionalism.
I run GNU on my machines. I'm not picky about kernels.
I drive Dodge automobiles. I'm not picky about the engines.
Well in California at least, it would make ballot rigging much harder. The people in charge here, whether Republican or Democrat, wouldn't stand for it. It's our dirty little secret. The only reason the recent governor's election came out smelling pretty was because the whole world was watching closely.
There's no chance for electronic ballots to be found floating in San Fransisco Bay or locked in a trunk, so of course our political masters love the idea!
I voted yesterday in Santa Clara County, California. They're testing these new touch screen machines. The papers this morning said everyone was happy with them. Good for them, but I had a problem with them.
First, while they were easy for ME to use, I could easily imagine someone with palsy pointing to the wrong circle and voting for someone else. Of course, this problem existing in the prior system, but it would have been nice if they made the circles a bit bigger.
But I'm just nitpicking above. My second problem is that I didn't get a reciept or stub. Although the machine said it recorded my vote, I have no proof of it. With a paper ballot (punch, optical, other) at least I can physically drop it into the ballot box, while keeping the top stub as a receipt.
A paper stub from a paper ballot doesn't mean too terribly much. But a printed stub from an electronic voting machine could. I've heard various proposals, but they all boil down to an anonymous cryptographic hash on the stub, that can be used to verify the count and accuracy of the vote.
Even my ATM machine gives me a reciept! If there are voting irregularities (and in some California counties, they occur with clocklike regularity) how the heck can anyone demonstrate it? At least with a paper ballot you have something to recount. With electronic voting what do they do? Push "recalc" in Excel?
Cougaar might not be listed by the FSF or OSI, but it still meets their requirements and definitions. Morality isn't defined by Papal Bulls any more than software freedom is defined by the pronouncements of RMS. The reason Cougaar isn't listed is because it's new and the FSF and OSI haven't gotten around to stamping it with their imprimaturs.
Free Software isn't defined by lists of licenses. Open Source Software isn't defined by lists of licenses.
We're not "consumers" in the typical sense of the word. We are geeks and developers.
I'll make sure I don't buy any Redhat products then. I wouldn't want to spend my consuming dollars with them. What a faux pas that would be!
You're implying that a product is only a consumer product when it meets the needs of the "lowest common denominator". This is absurd. I'm a consumer by buying a shrink-wrap Redhat every bit as much as the guy next to me buying a shrink-wrap Windows XP. Different products for different people.
Most people can't drive an automobile with a stick shift. Yet they're still sold. Even fewer can drive a motorcycle. Yet they're still sold.
Secondly, MacOS X is not a "part of the family", not even close.
I suggested that Redhat recommend Lycoris, Xandros or Lindows for their "consumer" inquiries, not OSX. Go back and reread my post.
Desktop Linux isn't ready for the desktop
You might be right. I wouldn't know, because I'm using FreeBSD on my desktop at work and at home. It may not be suitable for everyone. Heck, it's probably not suitable for most people. But it's still on my desktop working like a champ.
I'm not arguing that Redhat should be claiming that Linux is suitable for everyone. It's not. But they at least need to stop giving Microsoft juicy soundbites for their next anti-Linux campaign.
Whether it's MSN compatability, dodgy sound mixing, mounting disks or whatever, there are still a lot of details to take care of yet.
MSN compatibility has nothing to do with desktop-readiness. Give me a break! The readiness of a system for the desktop has zilch to do with compatibility with a proprietary system owned by the competitor.
Sound mixing under a stock Win2K is pretty dodgy as well. Heck, it's impossible! But you can get sound mixing applications for it. Just as you can for Linux. Besides which, considering the few people who actually use such applications, this hardly qualifies as a requirement for desktop readiness.
Finally, mounting disks. What the heck does this have to do with anything? It's merely a different paradigm of usage. Neither better nor worse than the Windows automounting way of things. Heck, you can even run amd under Linux if you want. Some distros even set this up for you automatically! Sure, you need to umount your USB storage before removing it, but you have to do the same thing under Windows by "stopping" the same device.
Minor annoyances and incompatibilities are not evidence that a system is unready for the desktop. A while ago my friend tried SuSE, and was so annoyed that he needed a login account, that he went back to Windows 98. Now he's using Windows XP and is thrilled that he can have separate accounts for each member of his family. What the difference? Beats me!
Not quite. Before you get your panties in a bunch, look closer.
It's quite explicit that you can "sell or give away the Cougaar Software or any Derivative Work". Case solved. You can sell it.
The second term is a bit puzzling. "If Licensee sublicenses the Cougaar Software or Derivative Works...Licensee does not charge for the Cougaar Software or Derivative Work". The key word here is "sublicenses".
You can sell the software or its derivatives all you want. Only if you sublicense it are you forbidded to charge for the software itself (though you may certainly charge for the media, bandwidth, support, manuals, etc). When you sublicense, the recipient is getting the license from YOU, not from the original author. This is a subtle distinction, and one few ever make in the Free Software World. What does it mean?
Not being a lawyer, I suspect it's primarily to mollify the legal types. Note that sublicensing is required to offer indemnity or liability (even if it weren't explicitly stated in the license). I suspect that this means if you create a business off of the software, you cannot sell the software itself, but only the warranty and support.
The license is Free as in FSF. Don't worry about it.
You missed the key point in that quote! How come everybody missed it?
His dad bought "a computer with Linux", and he's having problems installing it? The Linux was preinstalled! Szulik's making up this story.
Precisely. If I were Szulik, and wanted to abandon my entire consumer market, I would at least abandon it to someone in the family.
"Redhat isn't ready for the average consumer's desktop. In the meantime, you might want to try Lycoris or Xandros..."
My mom reads Slashdot at the dinner table. Now watch your language before I wipe that mouth off your face!
The restrictions are, that you are not allowed sell(!) your modified program
That's not Open Source or Free Software, so Yast must still be closed proprietary software. (actually, the term the FSF would use it "semi-free")
(implemented in supported hardware)
And that's the kicker, isn't it? What do you tell the user who just bought a $500 video card that doesn't support it? Making hardware requirements for the use of XFree86 is a slippery slope to start down on. It's bad enough now that some people have to settle for VESA because there are no drivers for their hardware, but requiring 100% OpenGL support in hardware is going to be a bitch.
While it is true that many software problems can be solved by throwing hardware at them, one should not arbitrarily exclude users. The strength of free Unix like operating systems have been that they could run just fine on old hardware. Just last friday I set up a FreeBSD X client workstation on a i486.
You might want to take a look at Enlightenment. They're approaching this problem from a sensible direction. E17 will use your hardware if you have it, but default to software if you don't. They're not excluding anyone, and they didn't have to rewrite XFree86. The best part is, even without the OpenGL hardware, E17 is snappy and responsive.
You shouldn't feel obliged to defend every single design decision of Unix and OSS, just because M$ is evil.
I brought up Windows for one reason. Virtually everyone who complains about cut-n-paste in X compares it to Windows.
In fact, you were doing so indirectly, if you read the grandparent post. In it the poster posited that the UNIX model was better than the Windows model, whereupon you replied that objective tests should be used to compare the models.
Damned straight! The lack of alpha blended window managers and network transparent audio is the number one reason corporations aren't choosing Linux for the desktop productivity needs!
Because OpenGL is optimized for 3D in both the implementation and the API, whereas the average desktop is 98-100% 2D.