Is it necessary? Wine started out life in 1993 and didn't release a stable version until 2008 - and even now requires a whacking great software compatibility list.
Domestic or business customers? You could do a lot worse than pfSense for businesses, but it's overkill for domestic. I know IPv6 support is planned for pfsense, if not actually complete.
Its BSD rather than Linux, don't know if that's a problem.
You are 100% right. That is why there was no Art, Math or Science before copyright was created a few centuries ago. Oh, wait! Err... Maybe not...
There were an awful lot of things that did not exist a few centuries ago that probably couldn't have developed without some sort of copyright. Off the top of my head:
- Pre-recorded music, particularly before it became possible to do all your editing on a computer. Though even today, studio equipment costs money, editing and distribution costs money. Maybe not as much as it used to, but it still costs money.
- You'd be surprised how many talented musicians - and I mean real musicians who play instruments and actually sing, not Nicki Minaj - started out sounding pretty terrible and only really became any good because of years of hard work put in by them and those around them. Some of the early Blondie recordings are absolutely dire. I'm not saying that could have been done without copyright protection, but while there's a lot of people in the music industry who probably would produce music for its own sake, there's also a hell of a lot of people who are doing what they do because they've got mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay. Quite often those people don't actually produce music but they are important - for every accountant running a record label who frankly we can live without, there's hundreds of people involved in production.
- Books, particularly fiction. It's not just a matter of typing a few thousand words out, there's plenty of editors out there will attest (or more accurately won't attest, at least not in a very public forum) that even some of the best writers make howling mistakes in their work which were it not for the editing process would probably prevent their work ever seeing the light of day. The editor needs to be paid just as the author does, but the editor doesn't get royalties.
- TV and film - same story. For every creative person who would do it for fun and might make just as good a living out of, say, patronage as they do out of royalties, there's a dozen people who wouldn't get patronage, wouldn't get royalties, but you still need them in order to turn an idea into something a few million people can watch on a Saturday night.
- A **lot** of medical research. A few centuries ago, some quack would develop some sort of goop that looked disgusting and tasted worse, flogged it as a cure for all maladies and that was it. Those olde-tyme style posters you see with some sort of product advertised as the cure for everything from backache to impotence? That Simpsons episode where Grampa and Homer hit the road selling their tonic as something to spice up your sex life? They were pretty close to what medicine looked like and how it was sold.
Of course these remedies seldom did the remotest bit of good; usually the only person to benefit would be the man who sold it. Today most of those quack remedies are gone, replaced with a system that is infinitely better at developing effective medicine. But that system comes at a cost: it can easily take ten years to get a drug to market and involve hundreds of people, all of whom need to be paid.
Is the system as it stands perfect? No, of course not. It has inefficiencies, it has middlemen who really do add negligible value and charge a lot of money for the privilege. But to claim you could throw out the whole lot today and the world would be a much better place tomorrow is IMV a very blinkered approach.
Doesn't surprise me. Things aren't much better with commercial software, where you may or may not be allowed to install multiple copies subject to various conditions, they provide you with a certificate of authenticity on the box but will only recognise an invoice if you get audited and while you probably throw out invoices after the statute of limitations for tax law has expired, you're a bit buggered if you do this for software you want to use longer than the statute of limitations.
But nobody told the accounts department that one.
I'm convinced the end user is being set up for failure. That may or may not be intentional, but it's certainly the upshot.
I've seen another way it gets purchased without Microsoft having to do anything.
It gets essentially forced upon the IT department by a non-technical manager who saw it in use at another company. He thought it was wonderful and demanded the purchase and configuration of Sharepoint right away when he got to his new company.
The people at his new company didn't know any better, but they did trust this chap - after all, that's why they hired him - so they went ahead.
Unfortunately, what nobody knew - not the IT department at the new company, not the management at the new company, not even the new non-technical manager who had come in and started evangelising Sharepoint like it was the second coming - was precisely what Sharepoint was.
Our friend the Evangelist was blissfully unaware that the reason it had worked so well at his last company was that they'd taken it seriously as a project - meaning they'd allocated a budget to configuration, management and development to turn what you get when you first install the full-blown version of Sharepoint (rather than the cut-down version you get for free with Windows Server) into a truly useful intranet. Yeah, it worked really well, but that was because the guys who set it up knew precisely what they were dealing with, what problems they wanted to solve with it and had a pretty good idea how they were going to solve them.
He thought it was - and he sold it to hew new employer as - a sort of "intranet-in-a-box" that almost as soon as you install it integrates with Office, with Exchange, with AD, with more-or-less everything you can imagine and quite a few things you can't to make all your staff work together like cogs in a well-oiled machine.
Back to the new company. The IT department remembered something about Sharepoint Services - lo and behold, it's a simple tick-box to install. They tick it.
We've already seen quite a few countries are more than happy to pass legislation controlling ISPs. And ISPs tend to be large - and more to the point law abiding companies.
What exactly is the difference between, say, Uzbekistan cutting off each of their few ISPs with international links and the UK passing laws which give the government the power to demand ISPs shut down all international links on short notice? The only real difference is one of them requires some preparation.
This doesn't mean you can simply call them up and say "I think you're breaching my contract; I'm cancelling effective immediately. Kthxbye." and they'll let you out of it just like that. You can expect to be told in no uncertain terms you're in contract and if you cease payment, you'll be hounded thoroughly. Only way you'll get away from that hounding is likely to be a court appearance.
This isn't necessarily the end of the world - we have a perfectly serviceable small claims system designed specifically for such things and the whole point of it is that lawyers are kept out of it as far as possible. But there's no guarantee you'll win - in a case like this, there's a few factors I can think of at stake:
1. The major ISPs are already under court order to block the Pirate Bay. Your contract with them almost certainly states something along the lines of "this contract is not void if we have to block a part of our service because a judge tells us to" (and even if it didn't, nobody - neither BT nor their customer - can expect them to provide a service that they've been explicitly banned from providing).
2. Your ISP will no doubt say "This was a simple administrative error. Our customer here made no effort to establish what the problem was, nor did they give us an opportunity to resolve it. In actual fact, by the time his next payment was due we'd already resolved it".
This part at least is true. I think many of us who have dealt with virus cleanup have seen cases where the installed AV simply didn't catch something.
We stopped setting up firewalls that only block known attacks years ago; today we configure them to block everything and only allow known good traffic. Yet we're effectively doing just that with antivirus - blocking known attacks. It's an absurd idea - there's maybe a dozen pieces of software we know we do want; that list expands slowly, we know when it will expand usually some time in advance. There's maybe tens of thousands of pieces of software we know we don't want. That list expands all the time and we have no idea what direction it will expand in next. So why are we even trying to keep track of it?
Not really. We have a free market in the EU - Google are perfectly at liberty to set up their European offices in another EU country, which is perfectly okay from an invoicing perspective (either as a customer of or supplier to Google), but might be rather awkward for a publisher wanting to charge them.
I'm going to pretend I didn't read your offensive tone and instead you wrote it in a civil manner along the lines of "Why do you think 'push' has to mean OEM agreements, adverts and boxes in stores?".
And I would concede that's a very reasonable question. Let's be honest here, the big businesses out there aren't nipping down to their local branch of PC World and picking up a hundred copies of Office.
That doesn't mean advertising is unimportant, but it does mean you need to push the product some other way. Typically, IBM sells to you via a partner - an independent business that has a number of IBM-trained staff on hand and specialises in selling & supporting IBM products. So let's find some of their partners, see if the partner's website is pushing Symphony.
And pulling the first three partners I find, we get:
Applicable: No obvious mention of "Symphony" anywhere. Try typing "Symphony" into the search box, we find it's mentioned in passing but doesn't seem to have a product page on its own.
Anix: Anix have been taken over and are now part of the Xerox group. Nevertheless, they're still IBM Premier Partners. No mention of Symphony anywhere, punching "Symphony" into the search box gets us precisely zero results.
CSI Ltd: Computer Systems Integration. Nothing noticeable on the website, the search box shows us a link to a company called "The Symphony Group" - not quite what we're looking for.
Never mind, let's try Google. That's usually pretty reliable. Yep, Google finds Symphony. It also finds a Wikipedia article that tells us it's been discontinued.
I maintain my original stance. IBM are not pushing Lotus Symphony.
This is a new definition of "push", and not one I was previously familiar with.
Where are the adverts? Where are the boxes? Where are the agreements with major OEMs? Why is it that if I type "lotus" into the search engine of any major IT supplier, I get nothing back?
That's not "push". That's "do something, anything, to persuade existing customers that the product isn't dead, it's.... er.... pining for the fjords for fear they might otherwise look elsewhere".
It's not disk space that's the issue (and indeed, it's my understanding that Exchange already does this and has done so since at least the days of 5.5), it's the fact that when it's an internal email, it's not immediately obvious that it's not terribly useful until you actually open it and read it.
That's time you won't be getting back.
Sure, it's only a few seconds at a time. But when you've got people who seem to think the only reply button they should ever use is "Reply All", people who followup every tiny little conversation with an email to confirm and people who have a tendency to CC in everyone from the CEO downwards in an attempt to fashion a teflon overcoat for everything they ever do, those few seconds add up.
This comes up every time there's a Microsoft/OpenOffice discussion.
Fact is its simply not true. This fantasy of some slick salesman passing a brown envelope full of unmarked £20 notes in exchange for a big order is just that - a fantasy. It just doesn't happen in most of the Western world for two reasons:
- Retail margins are so slim that they don't allow it.
- The risks involved in being unmasked as using dishonest sales tactics are too great.
The most I've ever heard of is being taken out for lunch. Not even dinner.
You want to know how to improve F/OSS's position on the desktop? Fine. You need to learn a few things.
- Humility. If someone asks a question, there's a reason they asked and it's more likely to be "the answer is not obvious" than "they're stupid".
- QA. If you can't deliver a working feature, turn it off altogether. Don't release something where bits of the software are just fine and bits are known to be dire if you can help it.
- This doesn't necessarily mean everything has to be perfect. But some parts of open office are frankly beta quality and should never be included in a finished release.
- Setting reasonable expectations. You tell someone "it's fine for most practical uses but it does have shortcomings; if you run into any let me know because I may not know about them myself", you'll get far more positive results than if you tell them "It's all singing all dancing and will make the tea!" when it patently isn't.
- Self awareness. If you can't see any shortcomings at all in your product, how can you improve it?
- Marketing is vital, that's true. But you can't polish a turd - frankly, if any of the big boys like IBM thought it was worth marketing a free desktop with paid consultancy to set it up, they'd have done so years ago. I think it tells you all you need to know that the company that's doing most to get Linux powered devices with a user interface in front of people (Google) is avoiding all the traditional desktop commercial application clones like the plague.
It already has caught on, but usually in organisations where the end user seldom needs Office anyway because 95% of their works done with some sort of dedicated application.
That's the academic edition, the license precludes commercial use. Had you continued scrolling, you'd have found retail editions which are rather dearer.
The retail editions listed say 3 installs but IIRC that's 3 installs per user, not 3 separate users each with their own PC.
Likely to be much less of an issue on proper server hardware; most server vendors know full well a significant amount of the hardware they shift will never run Windows.
IME, bullies pick on people they're pretty certain won't even talk back, much less fight. If they get the slightest inkling that you'll square up to them, 99 times out of 100 they back down.
The problems start if you don't square up to them the minute you first meet them. At that point they're testing the water to see what they can get away with, and every inch you give will be meticulously noted. It's a hundred times easier to stop them taking that first inch than it is to stop them later on.
"Square up" doesn't have to mean "Break their arm". Simply making it clear you won't tolerate such behaviour will usually do the trick.
(This, by the way, is quite often where "problem kids" who are otherwise fine but occasionally snap come from. They keep putting up with crap until they eventually snap, and the result is usually rather a lot more violent. Let them get anywhere near firearms and you have Columbine all over again).
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Is it necessary? Wine started out life in 1993 and didn't release a stable version until 2008 - and even now requires a whacking great software compatibility list.
Domestic or business customers? You could do a lot worse than pfSense for businesses, but it's overkill for domestic. I know
IPv6 support is planned for pfsense, if not actually complete.
Its BSD rather than Linux, don't know if that's a problem.
Kind of buggers up anyone wanting to run a hosting business in the UK.
Very, very few businesses fail for a single reason. Similarly, very few businesses are successful for a single reason.
You are 100% right. That is why there was no Art, Math or Science before copyright was created a few centuries ago. Oh, wait! Err... Maybe not...
There were an awful lot of things that did not exist a few centuries ago that probably couldn't have developed without some sort of copyright. Off the top of my head:
- Pre-recorded music, particularly before it became possible to do all your editing on a computer. Though even today, studio equipment costs money, editing and distribution costs money. Maybe not as much as it used to, but it still costs money.
- You'd be surprised how many talented musicians - and I mean real musicians who play instruments and actually sing, not Nicki Minaj - started out sounding pretty terrible and only really became any good because of years of hard work put in by them and those around them. Some of the early Blondie recordings are absolutely dire. I'm not saying that could have been done without copyright protection, but while there's a lot of people in the music industry who probably would produce music for its own sake, there's also a hell of a lot of people who are doing what they do because they've got mouths to feed and a mortgage to pay. Quite often those people don't actually produce music but they are important - for every accountant running a record label who frankly we can live without, there's hundreds of people involved in production.
- Books, particularly fiction. It's not just a matter of typing a few thousand words out, there's plenty of editors out there will attest (or more accurately won't attest, at least not in a very public forum) that even some of the best writers make howling mistakes in their work which were it not for the editing process would probably prevent their work ever seeing the light of day. The editor needs to be paid just as the author does, but the editor doesn't get royalties.
- TV and film - same story. For every creative person who would do it for fun and might make just as good a living out of, say, patronage as they do out of royalties, there's a dozen people who wouldn't get patronage, wouldn't get royalties, but you still need them in order to turn an idea into something a few million people can watch on a Saturday night.
- A **lot** of medical research. A few centuries ago, some quack would develop some sort of goop that looked disgusting and tasted worse, flogged it as a cure for all maladies and that was it. Those olde-tyme style posters you see with some sort of product advertised as the cure for everything from backache to impotence? That Simpsons episode where Grampa and Homer hit the road selling their tonic as something to spice up your sex life? They were pretty close to what medicine looked like and how it was sold.
Of course these remedies seldom did the remotest bit of good; usually the only person to benefit would be the man who sold it. Today most of those quack remedies are gone, replaced with a system that is infinitely better at developing effective medicine. But that system comes at a cost: it can easily take ten years to get a drug to market and involve hundreds of people, all of whom need to be paid.
Is the system as it stands perfect? No, of course not. It has inefficiencies, it has middlemen who really do add negligible value and charge a lot of money for the privilege. But to claim you could throw out the whole lot today and the world would be a much better place tomorrow is IMV a very blinkered approach.
Not sure how the English do it, perhaps the criminal organizations are more corporate?
There are more ways to threaten and carry out violence upon a person than to point a gun at them.
Doesn't surprise me. Things aren't much better with commercial software, where you may or may not be allowed to install multiple copies subject to various conditions, they provide you with a certificate of authenticity on the box but will only recognise an invoice if you get audited and while you probably throw out invoices after the statute of limitations for tax law has expired, you're a bit buggered if you do this for software you want to use longer than the statute of limitations.
But nobody told the accounts department that one.
I'm convinced the end user is being set up for failure. That may or may not be intentional, but it's certainly the upshot.
I've seen another way it gets purchased without Microsoft having to do anything.
It gets essentially forced upon the IT department by a non-technical manager who saw it in use at another company. He thought it was wonderful and demanded the purchase and configuration of Sharepoint right away when he got to his new company.
The people at his new company didn't know any better, but they did trust this chap - after all, that's why they hired him - so they went ahead.
Unfortunately, what nobody knew - not the IT department at the new company, not the management at the new company, not even the new non-technical manager who had come in and started evangelising Sharepoint like it was the second coming - was precisely what Sharepoint was.
Our friend the Evangelist was blissfully unaware that the reason it had worked so well at his last company was that they'd taken it seriously as a project - meaning they'd allocated a budget to configuration, management and development to turn what you get when you first install the full-blown version of Sharepoint (rather than the cut-down version you get for free with Windows Server) into a truly useful intranet. Yeah, it worked really well, but that was because the guys who set it up knew precisely what they were dealing with, what problems they wanted to solve with it and had a pretty good idea how they were going to solve them.
He thought it was - and he sold it to hew new employer as - a sort of "intranet-in-a-box" that almost as soon as you install it integrates with Office, with Exchange, with AD, with more-or-less everything you can imagine and quite a few things you can't to make all your staff work together like cogs in a well-oiled machine.
Back to the new company. The IT department remembered something about Sharepoint Services - lo and behold, it's a simple tick-box to install. They tick it.
That was easy.
We've already seen quite a few countries are more than happy to pass legislation controlling ISPs. And ISPs tend to be large - and more to the point law abiding companies.
What exactly is the difference between, say, Uzbekistan cutting off each of their few ISPs with international links and the UK passing laws which give the government the power to demand ISPs shut down all international links on short notice? The only real difference is one of them requires some preparation.
This doesn't mean you can simply call them up and say "I think you're breaching my contract; I'm cancelling effective immediately. Kthxbye." and they'll let you out of it just like that. You can expect to be told in no uncertain terms you're in contract and if you cease payment, you'll be hounded thoroughly. Only way you'll get away from that hounding is likely to be a court appearance.
This isn't necessarily the end of the world - we have a perfectly serviceable small claims system designed specifically for such things and the whole point of it is that lawyers are kept out of it as far as possible. But there's no guarantee you'll win - in a case like this, there's a few factors I can think of at stake:
1. The major ISPs are already under court order to block the Pirate Bay. Your contract with them almost certainly states something along the lines of "this contract is not void if we have to block a part of our service because a judge tells us to" (and even if it didn't, nobody - neither BT nor their customer - can expect them to provide a service that they've been explicitly banned from providing).
2. Your ISP will no doubt say "This was a simple administrative error. Our customer here made no effort to establish what the problem was, nor did they give us an opportunity to resolve it. In actual fact, by the time his next payment was due we'd already resolved it".
Rumour has it that Otis have (or at least had) a UK office in the town of Reading (for our American cousins, the town is pronounced "Redding").
Their receptionist answered the phone with "Hello, Otis Reading?"
This part at least is true. I think many of us who have dealt with virus cleanup have seen cases where the installed AV simply didn't catch something.
We stopped setting up firewalls that only block known attacks years ago; today we configure them to block everything and only allow known good traffic. Yet we're effectively doing just that with antivirus - blocking known attacks. It's an absurd idea - there's maybe a dozen pieces of software we know we do want; that list expands slowly, we know when it will expand usually some time in advance. There's maybe tens of thousands of pieces of software we know we don't want. That list expands all the time and we have no idea what direction it will expand in next. So why are we even trying to keep track of it?
Not really. We have a free market in the EU - Google are perfectly at liberty to set up their European offices in another EU country, which is perfectly okay from an invoicing perspective (either as a customer of or supplier to Google), but might be rather awkward for a publisher wanting to charge them.
There really is no need to replace the perfectly functional "back" button on mobile Safari with your own version that takes up 20% of the screen.
I'm going to pretend I didn't read your offensive tone and instead you wrote it in a civil manner along the lines of "Why do you think 'push' has to mean OEM agreements, adverts and boxes in stores?".
And I would concede that's a very reasonable question. Let's be honest here, the big businesses out there aren't nipping down to their local branch of PC World and picking up a hundred copies of Office.
That doesn't mean advertising is unimportant, but it does mean you need to push the product some other way. Typically, IBM sells to you via a partner - an independent business that has a number of IBM-trained staff on hand and specialises in selling & supporting IBM products. So let's find some of their partners, see if the partner's website is pushing Symphony.
IBM's Partner Locator for the UK is here: https://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/bplocator/search.jsp
And pulling the first three partners I find, we get:
Applicable: No obvious mention of "Symphony" anywhere. Try typing "Symphony" into the search box, we find it's mentioned in passing but doesn't seem to have a product page on its own.
Anix: Anix have been taken over and are now part of the Xerox group. Nevertheless, they're still IBM Premier Partners. No mention of Symphony anywhere, punching "Symphony" into the search box gets us precisely zero results.
CSI Ltd: Computer Systems Integration. Nothing noticeable on the website, the search box shows us a link to a company called "The Symphony Group" - not quite what we're looking for.
Never mind, let's try Google. That's usually pretty reliable. Yep, Google finds Symphony. It also finds a Wikipedia article that tells us it's been discontinued.
I maintain my original stance. IBM are not pushing Lotus Symphony.
I said "Retail margins".
I didn't say anything about the margins Microsoft themselves enjoy.
This is a new definition of "push", and not one I was previously familiar with.
Where are the adverts? Where are the boxes? Where are the agreements with major OEMs? Why is it that if I type "lotus" into the search engine of any major IT supplier, I get nothing back?
That's not "push". That's "do something, anything, to persuade existing customers that the product isn't dead, it's.... er.... pining for the fjords for fear they might otherwise look elsewhere".
This is precisely the sort of thing I'm talking about.
Instead of asking "why didn't it work?", the first assumption is "it's the user's fault".
LibreOffice is a lot better, granted. But it's still lipstick on a pig.
It's not disk space that's the issue (and indeed, it's my understanding that Exchange already does this and has done so since at least the days of 5.5), it's the fact that when it's an internal email, it's not immediately obvious that it's not terribly useful until you actually open it and read it.
That's time you won't be getting back.
Sure, it's only a few seconds at a time. But when you've got people who seem to think the only reply button they should ever use is "Reply All", people who followup every tiny little conversation with an email to confirm and people who have a tendency to CC in everyone from the CEO downwards in an attempt to fashion a teflon overcoat for everything they ever do, those few seconds add up.
This comes up every time there's a Microsoft/OpenOffice discussion.
Fact is its simply not true. This fantasy of some slick salesman passing a brown envelope full of unmarked £20 notes in exchange for a big order is just that - a fantasy. It just doesn't happen in most of the Western world for two reasons:
- Retail margins are so slim that they don't allow it.
- The risks involved in being unmasked as using dishonest sales tactics are too great.
The most I've ever heard of is being taken out for lunch. Not even dinner.
You want to know how to improve F/OSS's position on the desktop? Fine. You need to learn a few things.
- Humility. If someone asks a question, there's a reason they asked and it's more likely to be "the answer is not obvious" than "they're stupid".
- QA. If you can't deliver a working feature, turn it off altogether. Don't release something where bits of the software are just fine and bits are known to be dire if you can help it.
- This doesn't necessarily mean everything has to be perfect. But some parts of open office are frankly beta quality and should never be included in a finished release.
- Setting reasonable expectations. You tell someone "it's fine for most practical uses but it does have shortcomings; if you run into any let me know because I may not know about them myself", you'll get far more positive results than if you tell them "It's all singing all dancing and will make the tea!" when it patently isn't.
- Self awareness. If you can't see any shortcomings at all in your product, how can you improve it?
- Marketing is vital, that's true. But you can't polish a turd - frankly, if any of the big boys like IBM thought it was worth marketing a free desktop with paid consultancy to set it up, they'd have done so years ago. I think it tells you all you need to know that the company that's doing most to get Linux powered devices with a user interface in front of people (Google) is avoiding all the traditional desktop commercial application clones like the plague.
It already has caught on, but usually in organisations where the end user seldom needs Office anyway because 95% of their works done with some sort of dedicated application.
That's the academic edition, the license precludes commercial use. Had you continued scrolling, you'd have found retail editions which are rather dearer.
The retail editions listed say 3 installs but IIRC that's 3 installs per user, not 3 separate users each with their own PC.
Likely to be much less of an issue on proper server hardware; most server vendors know full well a significant amount of the hardware they shift will never run Windows.
It's seldom necessary to go this far.
IME, bullies pick on people they're pretty certain won't even talk back, much less fight. If they get the slightest inkling that you'll square up to them, 99 times out of 100 they back down.
The problems start if you don't square up to them the minute you first meet them. At that point they're testing the water to see what they can get away with, and every inch you give will be meticulously noted. It's a hundred times easier to stop them taking that first inch than it is to stop them later on.
"Square up" doesn't have to mean "Break their arm". Simply making it clear you won't tolerate such behaviour will usually do the trick.
(This, by the way, is quite often where "problem kids" who are otherwise fine but occasionally snap come from. They keep putting up with crap until they eventually snap, and the result is usually rather a lot more violent. Let them get anywhere near firearms and you have Columbine all over again).