The problem is that the market generally only comes up with a solution when it is glaringly obvious that a solution is needed. "Glaringly obvious" meaning "a lay person can easily see (and mentally connect) the cause and effect".
Well, the thing about climate change is that a lay person cannot easily connect the cause and effect. It takes years for any change in carbon emissions to have a noticeable effect. To compound this problem, a number of scientists are saying "by the time the evidence becomes so irrefutable that even the most anti-climate change loon will have no choice but to accept it, it will be too late".
There are also a couple of minor issues which aren't mentioned:
1. If you're buying software rather than developing it yourself, the first question isn't "is the database secure?", it's "does this software solve my problem?". 2. If you are developing software yourself and you're concerned about security, you should be putting a firewall between the database server and the app server, and setting various standards in your development processes which say things like "all data will be checked before being passed to the database"; furthermore you would test for such things as part of your standard test routine.
That would explain why there are so many knockoffs available in markets in the Canary Islands. Perhaps the Far East isn't the only area where a handful of people keep the machines going for a few hours after the original order has been fulfilled?
I believe we can be very happy about that, it prevents the kernel from being sold out. History has learned us that, given enough time, such a thing is eventually bound to happen
I reckon it's a mixed blessing. If (and it's looking increasingly likely, what with the MS/Novell deal) some lawyer succeeds in couching some sort of agreement in such terms that it follows the letter of the GPLv2 but completely blows away the spirit of it, then to all intents and purposes the kernel may as well become public domain because that's what will eventually happen.
I think the strength there comes from the various other pieces of software the kernel depends on. Good luck getting anything vaguely functional out of the kernel alone - but that's not to stop someone like Novell sublicensing an old version of glibc and gcc under GPLv2 and such a GPL-killer agreement.
Perhaps this Novell/Microsoft stuff will influence people like Torvalds to really get involved in the process and get everything moved to an acceptable GPLv3 as soon as possible
Not gonna happen. Unlike many OS projects, Linus doesn't demand that anyone working on the code assigns their copyright to him (or some other neutral organisation).
Therefore, the entire kernel is a mess of copyrights all over. And some of the things in there were written by people who have sinced passed away, other bits were written by people who definitely don't want to go GPL3 etc etc etc.....
IMO, the idea is to be able to pitch this as "Microsoft Approved Linux". That way, the paranoid CIO who doesn't want to go down the Linux route for fear of patent infringement or what have you will likely be prepared to sanction Linux - as long as it's SuSE.
Maybe not, but they're not all that common in the UK because it stopped a lot of places from selling them.
You'd be amazed how many people don't hit the Internet and buy something from abroad and just hope it gets through Customs if it's banned in their home country.
If the EU mandates open standards to be used, interoperability between all parties using these standards will be ensured,
See my previous comment. If open standards were such a panacea, there would be no such thing as interoperatbility testing.
It's entirely up to Microsoft if they want to implement these standards or not.
Open standards don't actually exist for a lot of the problems that Microsoft solves. Exchange, for example - open standards for the level of integration seen with Exchange and Outlook are right now at a very embryonic stage, and there's also the issue of how they're implemented. Sure, you can say "everyone's calendar is made available as an iCal file, downloadable via HTTP", but what standard dictates the URL where that iCal file may be downloaded from? If you must go down that route, the obvious place to store such information is in something like a directory - Active Directory is just LDAP by another name, so that's the obvious place. But which standard dictates that the URL where the iCal file is stored in an LDAP directory? And where in the LDAP directory is it stored?
What about SQL? Yes, the language itself is reasonably standard, but every single database vendor out there adds their own little nuances. Tell me, how do you list all the tables in a database in Oracle? Postgres? MySQL?
Bottom line is, sooner or later there's going to have to be some things which are dreamt up from scratch because existing standards don't go far enough (or bought from someone else who's already done that, but that's another matter...). In those cases, it seems the only sane way to do this and follow your proposal is for Microsoft to publish the standards themselves - which is almost exactly what the EU is demanding.
Well, I'll say one thing for certain - you can be fairly certain that any license will be completely incompatible with any sort of open source.
I understand this position, but I am struggling to think of someone - anyone - who:
1. Competes with Microsoft 2. Does not use open source software in order to handle things like interacting with SMB or Active Directory 3. Hasnt't already licensed enough information to write their own implementation.
So the upshot will be.... 8,500 pages that nobody wants to license - not because the terms are unreasonable from a business perspective but because they're not practical in the real world. Gee thanks.
If the EU decides to mandate open standards, Microsoft is not being singled out in any way. That gives them much less reason to complain. They can either cater to the customer's demands or decline to, but they're not being wronged in any way.
What standards would you suggest Microsoft implement? Their entire business is based around taking existing standards, bastardising them so their software interacts very nicely but nobody else's does then sell the result. Even when they don't do this, standards are always open to interpretation. This is why you still have to do interoperability testing;)
If that is the case (and I really cannot see Microsoft making a mass rollout effectively impossible), I bet you anything you like the activation and keys will be handled by something server-side and the client will automatically - maybe when it joins a domain or something.
Of course, this will almost certainly force you to use the latest version of Windows Server as well, upgrading CALs at the same time - damn, that would be a shame, wouldn't it? And just as the next major version of Samba was gathering steam as well, who'd have thought it?
But it remains to be seen how it will play out in practise on corporate copies.
My money is on corporate versions integrating somehow with Windows server to handle licensing (rather than the Microsoft mothership), and rather than just shutting down never to power up again, they simply nag the admin constantly.
This has the added bonus of effectively forcing any business which wants to roll out Vista to buy at least a couple of Windows servers.
Did you buy a boxed copy of Windows or get it years back pre-installed?
If it was pre-installed, then as far as Microsoft are concerned it's tied to the motherboard in the box it shipped with. The only acceptable reason to replace the motherboard is hardware failure, and it must be replaced with the same make and model.
Not too much of a problem with a warranty repair from the likes of Dell or HP, but a PITA otherwise.
My main concern is why they need a 360 degree surveillance system, at a couple of grand a go, when they could get standard headmounted cameras (like nightclub bouncers have been using for years) at a fraction of that price.
Because the current UK government (which has been in power for 9 years now) believes that technology is the cure to all of society's ills.
Too many illegal immigrants? Roll out an ID card system. Health service ineffective and strapped for cash? Roll out a massive computer system covering every hospital, every clinic, every GP's practise in the land. Wayward fathers not paying the maintenance for their children? Roll out a new computer system for the govt. department tasked with reeling them in.
Unlike a desktop PC, any serious database installation demands a serious database and at least some professional expertise, even if it's just "sysadmin of many hats, one of which happens to be dabbling in the database".
Therefore personnel costs probably don't vary that greatly. This only leaves two costs: the application and the database itself. Generally speaking, the business will choose the application first and the database second (or they certainly should do), which means the cost (if any) of the application falls under the heading of "we've got to have it so it really doesn't much matter how much it costs, within reason".
This leaves the backend database, assuming there's a choice in the matter (not all applications support all databases, despite SQL being nominally independent). In such a project, licensing that is about the only really variable item in the list.
They still have the GPL 2 tool chain. Last time I looked it still worked.
This is true. But GNU/Linux marches on, and you can bet that the FSF will license everything they hold the copyright on under GPLv3 sooner rather than later.
Other distributions won't have the Microsoft deal and will be able to integrate upgrades to the system easily. Novell, OTOH, will either have to clean-room reimplement every single update (including security updates and new functionality), accept that they can't offer the next feature upgrade or scupper the deal. To add to this, it's not unknown for versions of some of the larger free software projects (particularly things like the Linux kernel) to be impossible to build with older compilers.
If you look at this from Microsoft's perspective, it makes a lot of sense - particularly if they make such deals with a lot of distributors. The distributors would either be torpedoed or GNU/Linux would wind up fragmenting substantially - neither of which would be good for GNU/Linux as a whole.
Myself, I find it rather disturbing that three police officers were able to continue brutalising this chap for a full 6 minutes with dozens of people looking on, and the most that happened was someone piped up "Can I have your badge number?"
That behaviour, combined with the refusal to give a badge number, would have me dialling emergency services and saying "Three men impersonating police officers are attacking a student" because quite frankly, that's what it looks like.
Most of the problems you discuss with Windows will already have been solved by any halfway-organised shop.
Installation: done through imaging, and only having a small number of hardware configurations. Software which goes on everyone's desktop would probably be included at the image preparation stage. Software updates: Active Directory can do this, or there are other means if you don't want to use AD. System patches: Windows Server already provides tools to manage this - and it's almost unthinkable that they don't already have at least a handful of Windows servers. Policies & Configuration: Again, this can be managed through policies (in an NT4 domain) or Group Policy Objects (in an AD domain). Support: Well, it's debateable which is better. But in Windows, you can generally click on icons and checkboxes until you hit one that does what you want - this is one thing that fails horribly when dealing with text-based config files. Viruses & Malware: Any business-oriented antivirus tool will come complete with a management mechanism to handle rollout to a number of systems.
While all of these things can be solved for Linux, chances are that the IT department has never had to do so. And with zero Linux expertise on the part of the team handling the rollout, it'll take a lot longer to solve.
Not necessarily. I'd attribute it to incompetence first.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the team tasked with this were 100% Windows folks with no Linux experience. Ask such a team to deploy Linux to several thousand PCs, and I'm not surprised it all fell over horribly.
It doesn't help that the problems you encounter when dealing with 100 or 1000 PCs bear little or no resemblance to the problems you encounter when dealing with 1 or 2.
No way would I go to jail for 10-25 years just to make $250. But, for $600 it starts to look more attractive.
So, assuming you get out in 10 years, that's an average of $60 per year. Or about 30 cents/hour.
And I'd be astonished if the US system allowed you to keep what you'd stolen, so you would have to forfeit that.
Don't think you're selling yourself a bit short, do you? If you're going to steal something, you might as well make it worthwhile and make it in the millions.
after all these years Internet Explorer is playing catchup to an open source browser.
Maybe in terms of technology, but Microsoft have always been more concerned with market share - and while that's dropped, I doubt Steve or Bill are having sleepless nights over it.
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Litvinenko did not have hordes of government officials in his pocket to do everything in their power short of declaring all-out war on Russia.
The market will come up with a good solution.
The problem is that the market generally only comes up with a solution when it is glaringly obvious that a solution is needed. "Glaringly obvious" meaning "a lay person can easily see (and mentally connect) the cause and effect".
Well, the thing about climate change is that a lay person cannot easily connect the cause and effect. It takes years for any change in carbon emissions to have a noticeable effect. To compound this problem, a number of scientists are saying "by the time the evidence becomes so irrefutable that even the most anti-climate change loon will have no choice but to accept it, it will be too late".
There are also a couple of minor issues which aren't mentioned:
1. If you're buying software rather than developing it yourself, the first question isn't "is the database secure?", it's "does this software solve my problem?".
2. If you are developing software yourself and you're concerned about security, you should be putting a firewall between the database server and the app server, and setting various standards in your development processes which say things like "all data will be checked before being passed to the database"; furthermore you would test for such things as part of your standard test routine.
That would explain why there are so many knockoffs available in markets in the Canary Islands. Perhaps the Far East isn't the only area where a handful of people keep the machines going for a few hours after the original order has been fulfilled?
I believe we can be very happy about that, it prevents the kernel from being sold out. History has learned us that, given enough time, such a thing is eventually bound to happen
I reckon it's a mixed blessing. If (and it's looking increasingly likely, what with the MS/Novell deal) some lawyer succeeds in couching some sort of agreement in such terms that it follows the letter of the GPLv2 but completely blows away the spirit of it, then to all intents and purposes the kernel may as well become public domain because that's what will eventually happen.
I think the strength there comes from the various other pieces of software the kernel depends on. Good luck getting anything vaguely functional out of the kernel alone - but that's not to stop someone like Novell sublicensing an old version of glibc and gcc under GPLv2 and such a GPL-killer agreement.
Perhaps this Novell/Microsoft stuff will influence people like Torvalds to really get involved in the process and get everything moved to an acceptable GPLv3 as soon as possible
Not gonna happen. Unlike many OS projects, Linus doesn't demand that anyone working on the code assigns their copyright to him (or some other neutral organisation).
Therefore, the entire kernel is a mess of copyrights all over. And some of the things in there were written by people who have sinced passed away, other bits were written by people who definitely don't want to go GPL3 etc etc etc.....
That's not what the idea is.
IMO, the idea is to be able to pitch this as "Microsoft Approved Linux". That way, the paranoid CIO who doesn't want to go down the Linux route for fear of patent infringement or what have you will likely be prepared to sanction Linux - as long as it's SuSE.
Why don't you just buy a Dension Icelink?
Because I have a finite supply of money. Besides which, my car stereo doesn't have a CD multichanger port so I'd still have to replace it.
Maybe not, but they're not all that common in the UK because it stopped a lot of places from selling them.
You'd be amazed how many people don't hit the Internet and buy something from abroad and just hope it gets through Customs if it's banned in their home country.
If the EU mandates open standards to be used, interoperability between all parties using these standards will be ensured,
See my previous comment. If open standards were such a panacea, there would be no such thing as interoperatbility testing.
It's entirely up to Microsoft if they want to implement these standards or not.
Open standards don't actually exist for a lot of the problems that Microsoft solves. Exchange, for example - open standards for the level of integration seen with Exchange and Outlook are right now at a very embryonic stage, and there's also the issue of how they're implemented. Sure, you can say "everyone's calendar is made available as an iCal file, downloadable via HTTP", but what standard dictates the URL where that iCal file may be downloaded from? If you must go down that route, the obvious place to store such information is in something like a directory - Active Directory is just LDAP by another name, so that's the obvious place. But which standard dictates that the URL where the iCal file is stored in an LDAP directory? And where in the LDAP directory is it stored?
What about SQL? Yes, the language itself is reasonably standard, but every single database vendor out there adds their own little nuances. Tell me, how do you list all the tables in a database in Oracle? Postgres? MySQL?
Bottom line is, sooner or later there's going to have to be some things which are dreamt up from scratch because existing standards don't go far enough (or bought from someone else who's already done that, but that's another matter...). In those cases, it seems the only sane way to do this and follow your proposal is for Microsoft to publish the standards themselves - which is almost exactly what the EU is demanding.
Well, I'll say one thing for certain - you can be fairly certain that any license will be completely incompatible with any sort of open source.
I understand this position, but I am struggling to think of someone - anyone - who:
1. Competes with Microsoft
2. Does not use open source software in order to handle things like interacting with SMB or Active Directory
3. Hasnt't already licensed enough information to write their own implementation.
So the upshot will be.... 8,500 pages that nobody wants to license - not because the terms are unreasonable from a business perspective but because they're not practical in the real world. Gee thanks.
If the EU decides to mandate open standards, Microsoft is not being singled out in any way. That gives them much less reason to complain. They can either cater to the customer's demands or decline to, but they're not being wronged in any way.
;)
What standards would you suggest Microsoft implement? Their entire business is based around taking existing standards, bastardising them so their software interacts very nicely but nobody else's does then sell the result. Even when they don't do this, standards are always open to interpretation. This is why you still have to do interoperability testing
Will be hard for them as software isn't patentable in the EU (yet)
Except the UK (and, I understand, a number of other countries) are awarding patents on software regardless.
If that is the case (and I really cannot see Microsoft making a mass rollout effectively impossible), I bet you anything you like the activation and keys will be handled by something server-side and the client will automatically - maybe when it joins a domain or something.
Of course, this will almost certainly force you to use the latest version of Windows Server as well, upgrading CALs at the same time - damn, that would be a shame, wouldn't it? And just as the next major version of Samba was gathering steam as well, who'd have thought it?
But it remains to be seen how it will play out in practise on corporate copies.
My money is on corporate versions integrating somehow with Windows server to handle licensing (rather than the Microsoft mothership), and rather than just shutting down never to power up again, they simply nag the admin constantly.
This has the added bonus of effectively forcing any business which wants to roll out Vista to buy at least a couple of Windows servers.
Did you buy a boxed copy of Windows or get it years back pre-installed?
If it was pre-installed, then as far as Microsoft are concerned it's tied to the motherboard in the box it shipped with. The only acceptable reason to replace the motherboard is hardware failure, and it must be replaced with the same make and model.
Not too much of a problem with a warranty repair from the likes of Dell or HP, but a PITA otherwise.
My main concern is why they need a 360 degree surveillance system, at a couple of grand a go, when they could get standard headmounted cameras (like nightclub bouncers have been using for years) at a fraction of that price.
Because the current UK government (which has been in power for 9 years now) believes that technology is the cure to all of society's ills.
Too many illegal immigrants? Roll out an ID card system.
Health service ineffective and strapped for cash? Roll out a massive computer system covering every hospital, every clinic, every GP's practise in the land.
Wayward fathers not paying the maintenance for their children? Roll out a new computer system for the govt. department tasked with reeling them in.
Unlike a desktop PC, any serious database installation demands a serious database and at least some professional expertise, even if it's just "sysadmin of many hats, one of which happens to be dabbling in the database".
Therefore personnel costs probably don't vary that greatly. This only leaves two costs: the application and the database itself. Generally speaking, the business will choose the application first and the database second (or they certainly should do), which means the cost (if any) of the application falls under the heading of "we've got to have it so it really doesn't much matter how much it costs, within reason".
This leaves the backend database, assuming there's a choice in the matter (not all applications support all databases, despite SQL being nominally independent). In such a project, licensing that is about the only really variable item in the list.
They still have the GPL 2 tool chain. Last time I looked it still worked.
This is true. But GNU/Linux marches on, and you can bet that the FSF will license everything they hold the copyright on under GPLv3 sooner rather than later.
Other distributions won't have the Microsoft deal and will be able to integrate upgrades to the system easily. Novell, OTOH, will either have to clean-room reimplement every single update (including security updates and new functionality), accept that they can't offer the next feature upgrade or scupper the deal. To add to this, it's not unknown for versions of some of the larger free software projects (particularly things like the Linux kernel) to be impossible to build with older compilers.
If you look at this from Microsoft's perspective, it makes a lot of sense - particularly if they make such deals with a lot of distributors. The distributors would either be torpedoed or GNU/Linux would wind up fragmenting substantially - neither of which would be good for GNU/Linux as a whole.
Novell are paying - though it's a proportion of their profits for the next few years, not a lump sum now.
Myself, I find it rather disturbing that three police officers were able to continue brutalising this chap for a full 6 minutes with dozens of people looking on, and the most that happened was someone piped up "Can I have your badge number?"
That behaviour, combined with the refusal to give a badge number, would have me dialling emergency services and saying "Three men impersonating police officers are attacking a student" because quite frankly, that's what it looks like.
Most of the problems you discuss with Windows will already have been solved by any halfway-organised shop.
Installation: done through imaging, and only having a small number of hardware configurations. Software which goes on everyone's desktop would probably be included at the image preparation stage.
Software updates: Active Directory can do this, or there are other means if you don't want to use AD.
System patches: Windows Server already provides tools to manage this - and it's almost unthinkable that they don't already have at least a handful of Windows servers.
Policies & Configuration: Again, this can be managed through policies (in an NT4 domain) or Group Policy Objects (in an AD domain).
Support: Well, it's debateable which is better. But in Windows, you can generally click on icons and checkboxes until you hit one that does what you want - this is one thing that fails horribly when dealing with text-based config files.
Viruses & Malware: Any business-oriented antivirus tool will come complete with a management mechanism to handle rollout to a number of systems.
While all of these things can be solved for Linux, chances are that the IT department has never had to do so. And with zero Linux expertise on the part of the team handling the rollout, it'll take a lot longer to solve.
Not necessarily. I'd attribute it to incompetence first.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the team tasked with this were 100% Windows folks with no Linux experience. Ask such a team to deploy Linux to several thousand PCs, and I'm not surprised it all fell over horribly.
It doesn't help that the problems you encounter when dealing with 100 or 1000 PCs bear little or no resemblance to the problems you encounter when dealing with 1 or 2.
No way would I go to jail for 10-25 years just to make $250. But, for $600 it starts to look more attractive.
So, assuming you get out in 10 years, that's an average of $60 per year. Or about 30 cents/hour.
And I'd be astonished if the US system allowed you to keep what you'd stolen, so you would have to forfeit that.
Don't think you're selling yourself a bit short, do you? If you're going to steal something, you might as well make it worthwhile and make it in the millions.
after all these years Internet Explorer is playing catchup to an open source browser.
Maybe in terms of technology, but Microsoft have always been more concerned with market share - and while that's dropped, I doubt Steve or Bill are having sleepless nights over it.