I'm sure these experts, who have provided us with such an excellent article, are correct...but I just don't understand the distinction:
Why is it so impossible to "take somebody's property no matter how bad they are", and yet "civil forfeiture" such a popular weapon in the drug war? You can lose your house and car if you grow dope in the backyard as they are "tools of the crime" or some such, and all your money that a dog claims to smell drugs on.
In this case, the Windows code is the whole of the asset of the OS monopoly that made the "crime" possible! You can take away a guy's gun (his property) if he won't stop shooting people with it....
My own question was along the lines of "how can we be hearing about any more stringent breakup than just separating out the OS intellectual property and development staff?"
The FoF only speaks of the OS having a monopoly - the trial didn't get into the massive market share of Office, or cheap deals for Office being part of the club held over PC vendors.
So I can only see a "breakup" consisting of the as-surgical-as-possible excision of the OS products from the rest of the company. Then you would have a monopoly confined in that company and could regulate it as a monopoly with no "collateral damage" to other offerings.
A big part of the trial was about selling other products using the OS monopoly as a club, and the lack of *technical* necessity for bundling other products with it. So one part of the regulation would have to be about fair, equal-to-all pricing on the OS, another about not bundling. Obviously IE would have to be left behind, and I'd wager that IIS would be a clear-cut case of "unecessary bundling" as well.
Then we get down to the tough calls:
Disk defraggers?
Backup tools?
Multimedia players?
Database engine?
I could go on a long time - all *could* be sold as add-on products, but it's very nice (and cheaper) to have them there in the standard install - but every time they do it, a couple of companies go out of business. The Norton Utilities packages have always been about generic management of the computer storage, arguably an OS function...does Symantec have a "right" to survive if "MS-OS-only Inc." decides to compete against Mac and Linux by including all those tools for free?
Just to wrench the political discussion back to Linux for a minute, folks....:)
I think the various Free Software projects and their cousins are a natural for China and any other country with a GNP-per-capita under $10K/yr.
It doesn't matter a bit to my company that BSD runs a great firewall on an old 486; to our colleague, it matters a lot.
And tight resources have a way of devaluing human time - everybody is used to thinking of labour as cheap in the Orient, and this applies to white-collar labour as well. That's a very natural fit with free software, which will probably be perenially more effort to learn and set up than packaged commerical offerings. It's one of that main things still scaring off companies from Free Software.
Then there's the language issue. Yes, MS and Apple could produce Chinese versions of their products - but can even MS compel Chinese versions of 70,000 applications? So the sense of "lock-in" is much reduced for the Chinese.
Lastly is one that touches on political, but predates communism by centuries: the Chinese in particular (I mean, more than the rest of us) are famously suspicious of foreigners (something to do with repeated invasion and abuse since 1100.) You've gotta be less suspicious of a product with open code than a closed product, whose owner licenses every copy - and might change his mind some day. Open Source is the new equivalent of Open Hands.
I think that's four good reasons. I'd happily bet on a vastly expanded presence of Linux, BSD, and other Open Source and Free Software products in China and the rest of the Orient in the next few years.
I'd be much interested to learn more about the "neo-classical economics" formulae that would have predicted $2 operating systems by now. That number does sound intuitively correct to me...you just can't sanely put more than a few thousand programmers on even the largest project staff, i.e. under $200 hundred million per year in salary and support money. And if you can move 100 million copies and upgrades per year at $2 each, you can make payroll and take in that classic 10% profit that a competitive business has to hold to, or be undercut by competitors.
One thing I haven't read anybody calling Pournelle on is his expending several paragraphs on how IBM shot OS/2 in the foot with $600 developer kits. Yes, this hurts small developers...but I don't see it hurting WordPerfect, Inc, or Lotus, or the other must-have apps that really influence corporate decisions. Not to mention that the Linux "development kit" is pretty much free and Visual Studio now costs hundreds of dollars, all with out Microsoft going into a tailspin.
The "Law Profession is Standardized on WordPerfect" post cystallizes my astonishment at the posts that claim that
Linux is popular;
MS doesn't wield the influence it did in 1995;
Linux' shot at competing has been underestimated...oh, and so on.
In 1995, my 4000-seat employer was a loyal Corel customer and still had some Macs, though the latter were in a losing struggle.
Now the Macs are gone except for perhaps 10 (out of 4000) of the most adamant desktop-publishing users. Corel has been almost entirely migrated away from, and basically *ALL* software categories that have an MS product available are to be satisfied with MS, because the contract gets cheaper the more you buy..and you of course have to buy the OS. It's hardly even an argument anymore that you must buy the Office suite, either. So in anything else - web publishing, project managment, etc, any MS competition has both feet in buckets of cement. Especially for development tools, not only because of cost but because of the obvious (to management) synergy of getting development tools from the OS supplier.
Nothing has changed about all that. Not Linux, not the Web, not this FOF.
Meanwhile, at my brother's law firm, he tells me that a strong (and growing) minority are simply saying "We MUST switch to MS Office Suite." (because everybody sends them Word and Excel files, because they expect the same in return, because...they're just industry standard). Yes, anybody who processes legal documents knows that WordPerfect is far better (auto paragraph numbering alone is a killer feature). But even those objections are being overridden.
They might not switch to MS this year, and indeed MS' legal situation may help tip the balance. But I wouldn't give better than 50/50 odds for three years from now...even if MS is broken up. Large customers are like objects of great inertia; they move slowly at first but they keep going in a direction once they start. There's not a prayer of MS 10,000 biggest sites, representing tens of millions of seats, switching to anyMac, Be, or Linux desktops in the next five years or more.
In short, the situation has improved from "hopelessly lost, foregone conclusion", to "dire but with a speck of hope".
Don't get cocky, kids.
The one I *want* doesn't exist,but two runners-up:
on
The Do-It-All Remote?
·
· Score: 1
My specs for the remote I want include:
Programmability - pre-programming is NEVER enough;
Macros - true convenience is turning everything on/off with one button;
Ergonomic design, with key shapes and arrangements your hand can find its way around without looking. Astonishing how many are just a grid of identical buttons...)
Under $100
It doesn't exist. The $300 items violate the last spec and also the ergonomics since you can't feel them at all. (At least the one I'm aware of is just a touch display with virtual buttons".)
The odd thing is that I'm sure it could exist since there are two runners-up that come close, for under $30 US. Both are great ergonomically and for price, and each does ONE of the other two specs.
One For All 6 Universal Remote (Universal Electronics, Inc. $15-$20US) With "Powered by Motorola" logo, incidentally.
A universal, but a good one as these go - and it has a tedious key-sequence for creating macro keys of codes it already knows. The manual offers the ability to have keys custom-programmed, if you don't mind sending them back to the factory and paying an amount they wouldn't discuss by E-mail. The E-mail exchange left me cold and I dropped the matter. The Macro feature is great, but since it's a Universal, you of course are always missing a feature you use often enough - like making my VCR pop up the screen display so I can see what time-point the tape is at.
Radio Shack 7 in 1 Universal Remote Control (15-1924 in the RS catalog, $40-$50 US)
This one is programmable, but it doesn't do macros...argh. And the previous remote had spoiled me for them. Also, there's a funny limitation to the programming. If you're programming the keys when they're prefixed by, say, VCR being the current device, you often can't put in a TV or Receiver code. Sometimes, but not always. It just gives you the three-flash "error" signal when you send in the signal from the other remote. So you can rarely mix devices. Since my receiver is always the volume control device no matter what I'm getting the signal from (tape, laserdisc, airwaves), it means you're constantly jumping back and forth between devices.
I judge remotes by whether my wife, who hates them all, can use it..and the device-jumping was a showstopper for her.
It seems to me that the chip running the thing just needs to be a *little* more featureful - and they've got to include macros. And a few more buttons to program.
I'm sure they can do that much for under twice the price of the Radio Shack. It dumbfounds me that the hotly competitive consumer electronics industry hasn't already done this. What are they thinking?
Just working on intuition/common sense, it *seems* like the "fossil fuel" version should have a simple proof - there would be various samples around of progressively younger buried forests at earlier stages in the fossilization process.
It's comparable to our knowledge of stellar evolution coming from many "snapshot" examples of an (even slower) process at different stages.
That would, of course, only prove that coal/oil/gas *can* come from sedimentary burying of old forests - not that it can't *also* come from Gold's mechanism.
But again, off the top of my head, it seems to me that despite the anomalous discovery in granite in Sweden, the *vast majority* of existing discoveries are in sedimentary layers with lots of fossils from the right period nearby.
The question I *think* that's being asked is not whether Linux would not have developed as it has today without being Open Source, but whether it would be popular if it were exactly the same code, but a closed and proprietary product. If it were just a product on the shelf from a company that had written it, who would be buying?
Only a fraction as many, that's for darn sure. Don't get me wrong -- it has great merit as a product, but we all know that doesn't count for everything; maybe not even for much. Superior products that wither in niches and even die are a common story in this business.
And besides, haven't there been any number of *nix products for sale for a long time? SCO, Xenix, etc? None ever appeared on the radar. For that matter, Solaris for 386 has been available about as long as Linux has been on the mainstream-media map, and Solaris' penetration rate is tiny by comparison, despite a large existing user base on Sun's popular (for Unix) hardware.
So, nope, not even if it were the exact product we have today, sold very cheaply by a company that ran its venture capitalists near-broke by being as responsive as possible to customer feature requests, it would still be a fraction the user base.
The emotional prejudice that its users feel for it as a community, shared project -even those that don't code- should not be underestimated.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure these experts, who have provided us with such an excellent article, are correct...but I just don't understand the distinction:
Why is it so impossible to "take somebody's property no matter how bad they are", and yet "civil forfeiture" such a popular weapon in the drug war? You can lose your house and car if you grow dope in the backyard as they are "tools of the crime" or some such, and all your money that a dog claims to smell drugs on.
In this case, the Windows code is the whole of the asset of the OS monopoly that made the "crime" possible! You can take away a guy's gun (his property) if he won't stop shooting people with it....
The FoF only speaks of the OS having a monopoly - the trial didn't get into the massive market share of Office, or cheap deals for Office being part of the club held over PC vendors.
So I can only see a "breakup" consisting of the as-surgical-as-possible excision of the OS products from the rest of the company. Then you would have a monopoly confined in that company and could regulate it as a monopoly with no "collateral damage" to other offerings.
A big part of the trial was about selling other products using the OS monopoly as a club, and the lack of *technical* necessity for bundling other products with it. So one part of the regulation would have to be about fair, equal-to-all pricing on the OS, another about not bundling. Obviously IE would have to be left behind, and I'd wager that IIS would be a clear-cut case of "unecessary bundling" as well.
Then we get down to the tough calls:
- Disk defraggers?
- Backup tools?
- Multimedia players?
- Database engine?
I could go on a long time - all *could* be sold as add-on products, but it's very nice (and cheaper) to have them there in the standard install - but every time they do it, a couple of companies go out of business. The Norton Utilities packages have always been about generic management of the computer storage, arguably an OS function...does Symantec have a "right" to survive if "MS-OS-only Inc." decides to compete against Mac and Linux by including all those tools for free?I think the various Free Software projects and their cousins are a natural for China and any other country with a GNP-per-capita under $10K/yr.
It doesn't matter a bit to my company that BSD runs a great firewall on an old 486; to our colleague, it matters a lot.
And tight resources have a way of devaluing human time - everybody is used to thinking of labour as cheap in the Orient, and this applies to white-collar labour as well. That's a very natural fit with free software, which will probably be perenially more effort to learn and set up than packaged commerical offerings. It's one of that main things still scaring off companies from Free Software.
Then there's the language issue. Yes, MS and Apple could produce Chinese versions of their products - but can even MS compel Chinese versions of 70,000 applications? So the sense of "lock-in" is much reduced for the Chinese.
Lastly is one that touches on political, but predates communism by centuries: the Chinese in particular (I mean, more than the rest of us) are famously suspicious of foreigners (something to do with repeated invasion and abuse since 1100.) You've gotta be less suspicious of a product with open code than a closed product, whose owner licenses every copy - and might change his mind some day. Open Source is the new equivalent of Open Hands.
I think that's four good reasons. I'd happily bet on a vastly expanded presence of Linux, BSD, and other Open Source and Free Software products in China and the rest of the Orient in the next few years.
A good post!
I'd be much interested to learn more about the "neo-classical economics" formulae that would have predicted $2 operating systems by now. That number does sound intuitively correct to me...you just can't sanely put more than a few thousand programmers on even the largest project staff, i.e. under $200 hundred million per year in salary and support money. And if you can move 100 million copies and upgrades per year at $2 each, you can make payroll and take in that classic 10% profit that a competitive business has to hold to, or be undercut by competitors.
One thing I haven't read anybody calling Pournelle on is his expending several paragraphs on how IBM shot OS/2 in the foot with $600 developer kits. Yes, this hurts small developers...but I don't see it hurting WordPerfect, Inc, or Lotus, or the other must-have apps that really influence corporate decisions. Not to mention that the Linux "development kit" is pretty much free and Visual Studio now costs hundreds of dollars, all with out Microsoft going into a tailspin.
In 1995, my 4000-seat employer was a loyal Corel customer and still had some Macs, though the latter were in a losing struggle.
Now the Macs are gone except for perhaps 10 (out of 4000) of the most adamant desktop-publishing users. Corel has been almost entirely migrated away from, and basically *ALL* software categories that have an MS product available are to be satisfied with MS, because the contract gets cheaper the more you buy..and you of course have to buy the OS. It's hardly even an argument anymore that you must buy the Office suite, either. So in anything else - web publishing, project managment, etc, any MS competition has both feet in buckets of cement. Especially for development tools, not only because of cost but because of the obvious (to management) synergy of getting development tools from the OS supplier.
Nothing has changed about all that. Not Linux, not the Web, not this FOF.
Meanwhile, at my brother's law firm, he tells me that a strong (and growing) minority are simply saying "We MUST switch to MS Office Suite." (because everybody sends them Word and Excel files, because they expect the same in return, because...they're just industry standard). Yes, anybody who processes legal documents knows that WordPerfect is far better (auto paragraph numbering alone is a killer feature). But even those objections are being overridden.
They might not switch to MS this year, and indeed MS' legal situation may help tip the balance. But I wouldn't give better than 50/50 odds for three years from now...even if MS is broken up. Large customers are like objects of great inertia; they move slowly at first but they keep going in a direction once they start. There's not a prayer of MS 10,000 biggest sites, representing tens of millions of seats, switching to anyMac, Be, or Linux desktops in the next five years or more.
In short, the situation has improved from "hopelessly lost, foregone conclusion", to "dire but with a speck of hope".
Don't get cocky, kids.
- Programmability - pre-programming is NEVER enough;
- Macros - true convenience is turning everything on/off with one button;
- Ergonomic design, with key shapes and arrangements your hand can find its way around without looking. Astonishing how many are just a grid of identical buttons...)
- Under $100
It doesn't exist. The $300 items violate the last spec and also the ergonomics since you can't feel them at all. (At least the one I'm aware of is just a touch display with virtual buttons".)The odd thing is that I'm sure it could exist since there are two runners-up that come close, for under $30 US. Both are great ergonomically and for price, and each does ONE of the other two specs.
One For All 6 Universal Remote
(Universal Electronics, Inc. $15-$20US) With "Powered by Motorola" logo, incidentally.
A universal, but a good one as these go - and it has a tedious key-sequence for creating macro keys of codes it already knows. The manual offers the ability to have keys custom-programmed, if you don't mind sending them back to the factory and paying an amount they wouldn't discuss by E-mail. The E-mail exchange left me cold and I dropped the matter. The Macro feature is great, but since it's a Universal, you of course are always missing a feature you use often enough - like making my VCR pop up the screen display so I can see what time-point the tape is at.
Radio Shack 7 in 1 Universal Remote Control
(15-1924 in the RS catalog, $40-$50 US)
This one is programmable, but it doesn't do macros...argh. And the previous remote had spoiled me for them.
Also, there's a funny limitation to the programming. If you're programming the keys when they're prefixed by, say, VCR being the current device, you often can't put in a TV or Receiver code. Sometimes, but not always. It just gives you the three-flash "error" signal when you send in the signal from the other remote. So you can rarely mix devices. Since my receiver is always the volume control device no matter what I'm getting the signal from (tape, laserdisc, airwaves), it means you're constantly jumping back and forth between devices.
I judge remotes by whether my wife, who hates them all, can use it..and the device-jumping was a showstopper for her.
It seems to me that the chip running the thing just needs to be a *little* more featureful - and they've got to include macros. And a few more buttons to program.
I'm sure they can do that much for under twice the price of the Radio Shack. It dumbfounds me that the hotly competitive consumer electronics industry hasn't already done this. What are they thinking?
It's comparable to our knowledge of stellar evolution coming from many "snapshot" examples of an (even slower) process at different stages.
That would, of course, only prove that coal/oil/gas *can* come from sedimentary burying of old forests - not that it can't *also* come from Gold's mechanism.
But again, off the top of my head, it seems to me that despite the anomalous discovery in granite in Sweden, the *vast majority* of existing discoveries are in sedimentary layers with lots of fossils from the right period nearby.
The question I *think* that's being asked is not whether Linux would not have developed as it has today without being Open Source, but whether it would be popular if it were exactly the same code, but a closed and proprietary product. If it were just a product on the shelf from a company that had written it, who would be buying?
Only a fraction as many, that's for darn sure. Don't get me wrong -- it has great merit as a product, but we all know that doesn't count for everything; maybe not even for much. Superior products that wither in niches and even die are a common story in this business.
And besides, haven't there been any number of *nix products for sale for a long time? SCO, Xenix, etc? None ever appeared on the radar. For that matter, Solaris for 386 has been available about as long as Linux has been on the mainstream-media map, and Solaris' penetration rate is tiny by comparison, despite a large existing user base on Sun's popular (for Unix) hardware.
So, nope, not even if it were the exact product we have today, sold very cheaply by a company that ran its venture capitalists near-broke by being as responsive as possible to customer feature requests, it would still be a fraction the user base.
The emotional prejudice that its users feel for it as a community, shared project -even those that don't code- should not be underestimated.