True, but TFS is actually asking a slightly different question to the headline.
The full question is "Can a commercial software project continue to bring in enough money to fund itself if it goes open source?". And that is a very good question.
As regards Star/OpenOffice, Sun bought Star Division. They made StarOffice 5.2 available free (as in beer) but when they opened the source, a **lot** of the code had been licensed from third parties. Sun didn't have the rights to open source that, so they had to subsidise OpenOffice for years while the code that couldn't be opensourced was rewritten. I'd be astonished if they ever covered their costs from it.
Not necessarily wise. As soon as you respond - even with a relatively short response like the one you've drafted - you're potentially exposing yourself to risk. The risk is that a single throwaway sentence will somehow cause a problem - maybe it'll be interpreted as "your claims have merit" and waved under the nose of a judge, maybe it'll contradict something else you've said or done at some point, maybe it'll clear you of one thing while damning you of something else.
This is why it's unwise to take armchair legal advice.
This was pretty much Apple's reasoning behind the iPhone - almost every mobile phone on the planet could already play MP3's at the time, it was only a matter of time before someone put a half decent user interface on one.
Thing is, it's a very difficult, very unusual pa for a large business to take. Usually they get so entrenched in their ways that by the time it becomes apparent they recognise a need to seriously rethink what they're doing, it's too late.
There's no reason desktop computer hardware makers - especially non-Microsoft partners - couldn't push Linux if they saw it as viable, just like they do for Android on mobile.
Agreed. But all the evidence so far suggests there are no major hardware makers who see Linux on the desktop as a viable platform.
So if a minor maker does, there's a good chance they'd need to have motherboards customised, pushing prices up significantly.
Furthermore, this eliminates one of Linux's biggest selling points to new users - that you can run it on your own PC, no need to buy something new. In a hypothetical world where the majority of prospective user's x86 PCs are nailed to secure boot only, that advantage is gone.
And how exactly would one do that? You mean every motherboard manufacturer is going to build every one of their products locked to Windows 8?
They don't need to.
Linux didn't get where it is today - where more and more non-technical people are trying it every day, where lots of people are saying "actually... this is pretty good. Shame it's terrible for X (where X is something like games) or I'd switch in a heartbeat" overnight. It was a long journey consisting of thousands of baby steps.
For much of that time, very few would even contemplate trying Linux on the desktop.
If - and while it's a big "if", I don't think it's an inconceivable one - Microsoft decide that Windows 9-certified x86 hardware will be locked down to only boot Windows 9 - desktop Linux is set back for as long as it takes to find a clean, reliable, efficient way to resolve this that works on every vendor's motherboard.
The whole point of Secure Boot is that such a thing doesn't exist. Oh, you might find the odd piece of hardware here and there with a flaw in the implementation - it's these flaws that make it possible to do things like jailbreak the iPhone - but because the hardware is so fragmented, the likelihood of finding a clean, efficient way that works on every piece of hardware is slim to nil.
(It also stinks of anti-trust, but apparently that's no longer a worry).
That's right, a local Irish company building state-of-the art 14nm CPU fab facilities would have just sprung into existance, if it weren't for the Irish government favouring Intel.
Obviously not.
But a hundred local Irish companies doing something a lot less state-of-the-art have not sprung into existence. And it's a lot easier for one company to leave the area than it is for a hundred to.
It comes at a cost - the Irish government is famous for encouraging huge foreign businesses to come in and set up to bring in thousands of jobs at a time at the expense of encouraging any sort of local entrepreneur. As a result, there are quite a few towns where a disproportionate number of jobs depend not just on a specific industry, but on a specific company within that industry.
When that company leaves for even cheaper pastures, the town's in trouble.
The operating system - and, for that matter, Office - is becoming less and less important as more companies transition to web-based services for the bulk of their work and find that they don't need anything like as sophisticated as Office for the odd spreadsheet or bit of word-processing.
Sure, it's not happening anything like as quickly as a lot of us predicted five or ten years ago. But it's happening.
In such a climate - particularly when you're still a profitable company with a lot of cash in the bank - I would think it makes more sense to diversify than it does to concentrate on the two things that have historically made you lots of money but might not continue to do so for very long.
It appears the adulteration was done in Holland, and the company that did it will get a €1050 fine.
The €1050 fine isn't going to be the painful bit. The painful bit will be when Tesco sue the living daylights out of them for supplying a bunch of burgers with "100% Beef!" in big letters on the label.
I've had wrist problems - not carpal tunnel as such but nevertheless pain.
I spent ages going from pillar to post - I eventually discovered that apparently office ergonomics are more of an art than a science. Nobody can tell you what will fix your problems, all they can do is suggest a few things you can try. It's down to you to try them and find a solution that works for you.
Four things I tried which helped:
- Replace the mouse with a trackball. There's a tendency with a mouse to move your wrist - you're not meant to do this, you're meant to use your whole arm. But I don't know anyone who does. It'll take you a few days to get used to, after which you'll never use a mouse again.
- Invest in an adjustable split keyboard (eg. Goldtouch). The adjustable aspect's important - you're meant to change it every so often so as to even out the wear on your wrists.
- Relax. Book a couple of days off - say, a Friday and a Monday - and have a long weekend away. Leave your phone, laptop, iPad and anything else technology related at home.
- Book a couple of sessions with an osteopath.
The product has to last a "reasonable time". What's reasonable depends on the product - nobody expects a bunch of bananas to last two years, for example.
In any event, "reasonable time" is there to cover defects present at time of purchase. Certainly in the UK (don't know about elsewhere) the rule is: under 6 months old, it's assumed that the product was faulty from the day it was sold and the burden of proof is on the retailer to show it wasn't. Over 6 months, the burden of proof is on the customer.
Where things become awkward is that Apple put - in big wording all over their website - "1 year warranty! Buy AppleCare to extend it to 3 years!". Which is patently untrue. They've re-done the wording so as to say "if you're in the EU, we'll do the bare minimum after 1 year. But we'll do more if you buy AppleCare".
Personally, I think they should be looking at companies like Currys. Their entire business model is built around "sell the TV with almost zero profit but push an extended warranty that's 95% profit".
This is one of those cases where the defendant can't possibly win.
If guilty: they dishonestly re-jigged a companies accounts so as to pay themselves a massive bonus. Fraudsters of the highest order.
If not guilty: Not the point. They were in charge of Nortel. If they (totally innocently) re-jigged the accounts thinking it would do the company good, gave themselves a massive bonus as a big pat on the back and then found the company collapsing around their ears, they're still responsible. Only instead of being fraudsters, they're dangerously incompetent.
If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping?
You trust two things:
1. That Mozilla didn't put the root certificate for an untrustworthy firm into their browser. (Ha! Have you seen the list of root certificates with most browsers these days? Seems everyone and his dog can send their CA certificate in to the browser vendors). 2. That the trustworthy root certificates that are in there will not subsequently be used for nefarious purposes - eg. to sign a wildcard certificate and then hand that over to your ISP.
250ml, 500ml, 1l, 2l and 4l are typical sales units for dairy products in the UK. And before you say "look, they're using powers of two, metric is all a sham", those particular sizes map quite closely to the old sizes, making it easier for uber-conservative (and ardently anti-European) Britons to accept and understand metric.
Depends on the product. Supermarkets are still selling milk in 1, 2 and 4 pint bottles, though they also print the quantity in litres; milk in smaller shops often is sold in half litre/litre/2 litre containers.
Oddly, the supermarket own-brand cream is selling in 150, 300, 600ml quantities but Elmlea (a cream substitute) is sold in 284ml containers (half a pint).
Quite a few other grocery items are sold in direct metric conversions. Ground coffee, for instance, seems to vary depending on the manufacturer. Many brands are in 227/454g packs (half / 1lb). They get around the "you must sell in metric units" laws by taking advantage of the fact that there's no law that says you need to sell a nice round number of grams/millilitres.
In fact, UK law goes a bit beyond two years - the statute of limitations is six years, though it comes with the caveat that a product only has to last a "reasonable" time. (where "reasonable" obviously depends on what sort of item it is - a piece of fresh salmon will be useless in in six days, for instance, and you can't hold your supermarket responsible for that).
There's two important things here, though:
- The person responsible for this isn't the manufacturer, it's the retailer. The retailer can't simply shrug their shoulders and say "That's what the manufacturer does, if you don't like it then it sucks to be you"; they have to accept the return and deal with it themselves.
- Electronics might only last two years, but software (ie. the game) one might reasonably expect to last a lot longer than that.
One hopes that Sony will have the good sense to put some sort of process in place to deal with people moving their games across if their console breaks down. But knowing Sony, anything's possible.
There is a lot of case law describing consumer sales and what one is allowed to do with what one purchases, including resale of said goods. While Sony might have a legal patent, it might not be legal to impliment it.
As I said, IANAL, but maybe somebody who is could chime in.
Nor am I. But AFAICT most law is targeted towards companies taking legal measures to prevent you doing what you want with your purchases - ie. asking you to agree to a license or attempting to sue you.
There is considerably less law targeted towards companies taking technical measures to prevent you doing what you want with your purchases. I suspect that's mostly because law tends to trail behind technology - by the time the law's enacted, the technology's been around for a couple of years.
Updates don't make it out so that users have to buy new devices to get updates. Google should force the OHA members hands on this. If you want access to market and the android trademarks you must supply updates to devices for X years.
Nice idea, but as long as handset manufacturers are following a strict waterfall development model it'll never work.
Must say I'm inclined to agree with the article, for the very simple reason that I don't think the OS on a phone is a very good selling point.
The selling point is what you can do with the phone. How it somehow makes life easier/better/more fun for you. Exactly what about Ubuntu (Phone Edition) is going to give it the edge over Android, iOS or even Blackberry OS 10?
1. Bigger entities have tried going after google only to fail, google can just exclude the links, or if worse comes to worse blacklist Ireland (not likely they have tax entities there I think)
They most certainly do have tax entities in Ireland; Ireland has one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in Europe. As a result, Google (Europe) invoices their customers via an Irish company.
Of course, Google can deal with this in two ways. They can either pay NNI their licensing fee or they can remove all Irish media from search results. I can very well see Google doing the latter.
- There have also been plenty of prime-time ads for Chromebooks on TV - at least in the UK, and I imagine elsewhere.
- IME, most people don't really like Windows, they see it as a necessary evil. The advent of smartphones and tablets has very efficiently demonstrated that it's no longer necessary.
- Why don't people like Windows? There's a number of reasons, but most of them relate to incomprehensible and/or nonsensical error messages, a death-by-a-thousand-cuts of other expenses you pretty much have to incur like antivirus software, cheap hardware that's so damn nasty it doesn't look very cheap once you start trying to use it and dealing with the fallout when despite all of that you still click on the wrong thing and need to get someone in to fix it. (Yes, I know Android, iOS and ChromeOS are all hypothetically susceptible to similar issues. But the important point is they're not being actively exploited today).
- What is the recommended fix for these issues? Go out and buy the next version of Windows! (Which many people automatically assume means "buy a new PC", even if that's not true. You'd be surprised how many people honestly have no idea that you can replace Windows with a different version or even with something else entirely).
- Google has carved out an extremely strong brand. People see the word Google and associate it with finding what they want quickly and easily with a minimal amount of bullshit getting in the way. Associate Google with a laptop that doesn't do any of the things people dislike about Windows and you have a very interesting product indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but TFS is actually asking a slightly different question to the headline.
The full question is "Can a commercial software project continue to bring in enough money to fund itself if it goes open source?". And that is a very good question.
As regards Star/OpenOffice, Sun bought Star Division. They made StarOffice 5.2 available free (as in beer) but when they opened the source, a **lot** of the code had been licensed from third parties. Sun didn't have the rights to open source that, so they had to subsidise OpenOffice for years while the code that couldn't be opensourced was rewritten. I'd be astonished if they ever covered their costs from it.
Not necessarily wise. As soon as you respond - even with a relatively short response like the one you've drafted - you're potentially exposing yourself to risk. The risk is that a single throwaway sentence will somehow cause a problem - maybe it'll be interpreted as "your claims have merit" and waved under the nose of a judge, maybe it'll contradict something else you've said or done at some point, maybe it'll clear you of one thing while damning you of something else.
This is why it's unwise to take armchair legal advice.
This was pretty much Apple's reasoning behind the iPhone - almost every mobile phone on the planet could already play MP3's at the time, it was only a matter of time before someone put a half decent user interface on one.
Thing is, it's a very difficult, very unusual pa for a large business to take. Usually they get so entrenched in their ways that by the time it becomes apparent they recognise a need to seriously rethink what they're doing, it's too late.
Yes there is. It used to be a church about five hundred years ago.
I'm not sure that 16th Century England had particularly strong planning law.
There's no reason desktop computer hardware makers - especially non-Microsoft partners - couldn't push Linux if they saw it as viable, just like they do for Android on mobile.
Agreed. But all the evidence so far suggests there are no major hardware makers who see Linux on the desktop as a viable platform.
So if a minor maker does, there's a good chance they'd need to have motherboards customised, pushing prices up significantly.
Furthermore, this eliminates one of Linux's biggest selling points to new users - that you can run it on your own PC, no need to buy something new. In a hypothetical world where the majority of prospective user's x86 PCs are nailed to secure boot only, that advantage is gone.
And how exactly would one do that? You mean every motherboard manufacturer is going to build every one of their products locked to Windows 8?
They don't need to.
Linux didn't get where it is today - where more and more non-technical people are trying it every day, where lots of people are saying "actually... this is pretty good. Shame it's terrible for X (where X is something like games) or I'd switch in a heartbeat" overnight. It was a long journey consisting of thousands of baby steps.
For much of that time, very few would even contemplate trying Linux on the desktop.
If - and while it's a big "if", I don't think it's an inconceivable one - Microsoft decide that Windows 9-certified x86 hardware will be locked down to only boot Windows 9 - desktop Linux is set back for as long as it takes to find a clean, reliable, efficient way to resolve this that works on every vendor's motherboard.
The whole point of Secure Boot is that such a thing doesn't exist. Oh, you might find the odd piece of hardware here and there with a flaw in the implementation - it's these flaws that make it possible to do things like jailbreak the iPhone - but because the hardware is so fragmented, the likelihood of finding a clean, efficient way that works on every piece of hardware is slim to nil.
(It also stinks of anti-trust, but apparently that's no longer a worry).
That's right, a local Irish company building state-of-the art 14nm CPU fab facilities would have just sprung into existance, if it weren't for the Irish government favouring Intel.
Obviously not.
But a hundred local Irish companies doing something a lot less state-of-the-art have not sprung into existence. And it's a lot easier for one company to leave the area than it is for a hundred to.
It comes at a cost - the Irish government is famous for encouraging huge foreign businesses to come in and set up to bring in thousands of jobs at a time at the expense of encouraging any sort of local entrepreneur. As a result, there are quite a few towns where a disproportionate number of jobs depend not just on a specific industry, but on a specific company within that industry.
When that company leaves for even cheaper pastures, the town's in trouble.
Fully ready for IPv6? Who's your ISP? BT have been very cagey and most FTTP providers are only reselling Openreach's wholesale product.
The operating system - and, for that matter, Office - is becoming less and less important as more companies transition to web-based services for the bulk of their work and find that they don't need anything like as sophisticated as Office for the odd spreadsheet or bit of word-processing.
Sure, it's not happening anything like as quickly as a lot of us predicted five or ten years ago. But it's happening.
In such a climate - particularly when you're still a profitable company with a lot of cash in the bank - I would think it makes more sense to diversify than it does to concentrate on the two things that have historically made you lots of money but might not continue to do so for very long.
It appears the adulteration was done in Holland, and the company that did it will get a €1050 fine.
The €1050 fine isn't going to be the painful bit. The painful bit will be when Tesco sue the living daylights out of them for supplying a bunch of burgers with "100% Beef!" in big letters on the label.
All their users will soon get fucked off having to apply for every RBL /Hostile/spam block site on the internet.. so much so that most will move
I wonder if enough people use services like hotmail and gmail that this would be a non-issue?
I've had wrist problems - not carpal tunnel as such but nevertheless pain.
I spent ages going from pillar to post - I eventually discovered that apparently office ergonomics are more of an art than a science. Nobody can tell you what will fix your problems, all they can do is suggest a few things you can try. It's down to you to try them and find a solution that works for you.
Four things I tried which helped:
- Replace the mouse with a trackball. There's a tendency with a mouse to move your wrist - you're not meant to do this, you're meant to use your whole arm. But I don't know anyone who does. It'll take you a few days to get used to, after which you'll never use a mouse again.
- Invest in an adjustable split keyboard (eg. Goldtouch). The adjustable aspect's important - you're meant to change it every so often so as to even out the wear on your wrists.
- Relax. Book a couple of days off - say, a Friday and a Monday - and have a long weekend away. Leave your phone, laptop, iPad and anything else technology related at home.
- Book a couple of sessions with an osteopath.
Not entirely true.
The product has to last a "reasonable time". What's reasonable depends on the product - nobody expects a bunch of bananas to last two years, for example.
In any event, "reasonable time" is there to cover defects present at time of purchase. Certainly in the UK (don't know about elsewhere) the rule is: under 6 months old, it's assumed that the product was faulty from the day it was sold and the burden of proof is on the retailer to show it wasn't. Over 6 months, the burden of proof is on the customer.
Where things become awkward is that Apple put - in big wording all over their website - "1 year warranty! Buy AppleCare to extend it to 3 years!". Which is patently untrue. They've re-done the wording so as to say "if you're in the EU, we'll do the bare minimum after 1 year. But we'll do more if you buy AppleCare".
Personally, I think they should be looking at companies like Currys. Their entire business model is built around "sell the TV with almost zero profit but push an extended warranty that's 95% profit".
This is one of those cases where the defendant can't possibly win.
If guilty: they dishonestly re-jigged a companies accounts so as to pay themselves a massive bonus. Fraudsters of the highest order.
If not guilty: Not the point. They were in charge of Nortel. If they (totally innocently) re-jigged the accounts thinking it would do the company good, gave themselves a massive bonus as a big pat on the back and then found the company collapsing around their ears, they're still responsible. Only instead of being fraudsters, they're dangerously incompetent.
If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping?
You trust two things:
1. That Mozilla didn't put the root certificate for an untrustworthy firm into their browser. (Ha! Have you seen the list of root certificates with most browsers these days? Seems everyone and his dog can send their CA certificate in to the browser vendors).
2. That the trustworthy root certificates that are in there will not subsequently be used for nefarious purposes - eg. to sign a wildcard certificate and then hand that over to your ISP.
250ml, 500ml, 1l, 2l and 4l are typical sales units for dairy products in the UK. And before you say "look, they're using powers of two, metric is all a sham", those particular sizes map quite closely to the old sizes, making it easier for uber-conservative (and ardently anti-European) Britons to accept and understand metric.
Depends on the product. Supermarkets are still selling milk in 1, 2 and 4 pint bottles, though they also print the quantity in litres; milk in smaller shops often is sold in half litre/litre/2 litre containers.
Oddly, the supermarket own-brand cream is selling in 150, 300, 600ml quantities but Elmlea (a cream substitute) is sold in 284ml containers (half a pint).
Quite a few other grocery items are sold in direct metric conversions. Ground coffee, for instance, seems to vary depending on the manufacturer. Many brands are in 227/454g packs (half / 1lb). They get around the "you must sell in metric units" laws by taking advantage of the fact that there's no law that says you need to sell a nice round number of grams/millilitres.
That's a very good point.
In fact, UK law goes a bit beyond two years - the statute of limitations is six years, though it comes with the caveat that a product only has to last a "reasonable" time. (where "reasonable" obviously depends on what sort of item it is - a piece of fresh salmon will be useless in in six days, for instance, and you can't hold your supermarket responsible for that).
There's two important things here, though:
- The person responsible for this isn't the manufacturer, it's the retailer. The retailer can't simply shrug their shoulders and say "That's what the manufacturer does, if you don't like it then it sucks to be you"; they have to accept the return and deal with it themselves.
- Electronics might only last two years, but software (ie. the game) one might reasonably expect to last a lot longer than that.
One hopes that Sony will have the good sense to put some sort of process in place to deal with people moving their games across if their console breaks down. But knowing Sony, anything's possible.
There is a lot of case law describing consumer sales and what one is allowed to do with what one purchases, including resale of said goods. While Sony might have a legal patent, it might not be legal to impliment it.
As I said, IANAL, but maybe somebody who is could chime in.
Nor am I. But AFAICT most law is targeted towards companies taking legal measures to prevent you doing what you want with your purchases - ie. asking you to agree to a license or attempting to sue you.
There is considerably less law targeted towards companies taking technical measures to prevent you doing what you want with your purchases. I suspect that's mostly because law tends to trail behind technology - by the time the law's enacted, the technology's been around for a couple of years.
Updates don't make it out so that users have to buy new devices to get updates. Google should force the OHA members hands on this. If you want access to market and the android trademarks you must supply updates to devices for X years.
Nice idea, but as long as handset manufacturers are following a strict waterfall development model it'll never work.
Must say I'm inclined to agree with the article, for the very simple reason that I don't think the OS on a phone is a very good selling point.
The selling point is what you can do with the phone. How it somehow makes life easier/better/more fun for you. Exactly what about Ubuntu (Phone Edition) is going to give it the edge over Android, iOS or even Blackberry OS 10?
1. Bigger entities have tried going after google only to fail, google can just exclude the links, or if worse comes to worse blacklist Ireland (not likely they have tax entities there I think)
They most certainly do have tax entities in Ireland; Ireland has one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in Europe. As a result, Google (Europe) invoices their customers via an Irish company.
Of course, Google can deal with this in two ways. They can either pay NNI their licensing fee or they can remove all Irish media from search results. I can very well see Google doing the latter.
That's a very good point - you also have to beware of bandits and wolves once you head south of the river.
This doesn't surprise me for a number of reasons:
- There have also been plenty of prime-time ads for Chromebooks on TV - at least in the UK, and I imagine elsewhere.
- IME, most people don't really like Windows, they see it as a necessary evil. The advent of smartphones and tablets has very efficiently demonstrated that it's no longer necessary.
- Why don't people like Windows? There's a number of reasons, but most of them relate to incomprehensible and/or nonsensical error messages, a death-by-a-thousand-cuts of other expenses you pretty much have to incur like antivirus software, cheap hardware that's so damn nasty it doesn't look very cheap once you start trying to use it and dealing with the fallout when despite all of that you still click on the wrong thing and need to get someone in to fix it. (Yes, I know Android, iOS and ChromeOS are all hypothetically susceptible to similar issues. But the important point is they're not being actively exploited today).
- What is the recommended fix for these issues? Go out and buy the next version of Windows! (Which many people automatically assume means "buy a new PC", even if that's not true. You'd be surprised how many people honestly have no idea that you can replace Windows with a different version or even with something else entirely).
- Google has carved out an extremely strong brand. People see the word Google and associate it with finding what they want quickly and easily with a minimal amount of bullshit getting in the way. Associate Google with a laptop that doesn't do any of the things people dislike about Windows and you have a very interesting product indeed.