Yeah, the power supplies for a typical laptop alone cost at least $5, even in amazing bulk. The extremely flexible and robust design of the OLPC project that can be mechanically powered instead of needing power grid or batteries is a big chunk of its cost. Bulk manufacturing helps lower prices, but you still have to pay for the keyboard components and the screen and CPU and the power supplies.
Tony Blair is on his way out: unfortunately, Gordon Brown is his probable successor. And Gordon Brown is even worse in domestic security terms: if ou read international news, he's directly responsible for the expansion of public surveillance and the massive growth of prison populations by pursuing Britain's version of the War on Drugs.
I release it because it's written into the GPL, and because I make sure to distribute my software to my friends (if personally written) and my corporate partners (if it's work software). And I try to get as much as possible switched over to GPL to allow my partners and clients to get other support if I'm too busy. And I'm very busy: the pay is good when you can replace half a dozen "high-availability" and hideoously expensive servers with a few discarded hardware platforms running much more robust, documented, and maintainable open source software.
That's like wishing that all artists worked for ad companies. It's fine for them to get paid for work, but some of the best tools will continue to come from people's love of making things better or individual's frustration with a problem no one has seen fit to spend money on yet.
And "free" is not the same as "open source". Your grandma paying a few bucks with her computer to help set it up or answer her support calls is the service you're supposed to get when you buy a computer and get software with it. In her case, that cost may be inviting you over for milk and cookies: I've certainly done support for less for my family, for commercial and free operating systems.
I see your point, but SCO's usefulness to Microsoft is not yet played out. Like a tobacco lobbyist ranting about individual choice, Darl McBride's helps cast doubt on the intellectual property of Linux. It's been a *cheap* investment for Microsoft to harass Novell, IBM, RedHat, and other Linux and genuinely open source development companies this way.
You may be underestimating Microsoft's willingness to continue spreading FUD, long after intelligent technology people recognize it as malicious rumor-mongering. Inexperienced people will invest in the "known" or "safe" or "supported" vendor even when the vendor's history of customer abuse and fraud and lack of compatibility. Take a look at the BBC's decision to use Windows Media for its new Iplayer service for an example of such a policy, founded in avoiding difficulty with intellectual property or support issues.
Look for Microsoft to fund them again, but only enough to keep them alive, much as described on Slashdot in http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/11/158214.shtml. Deals like this keep SCO and its Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt campaign against open source projects like Linux alive, while shielding Microsoft from counter-suit or public exposure of their genuine motives for keeping SCO alive.
Remember, Microsoft doesn't necessarily want SCO to *win*. They want SCO weak to prevent any good products coming from that particular UNIX vendor, and to continue the demonstrably false rumors that Linux developers steal from UNIX.
It's called "Trusted Computing". Look it up: it's built into Vista, and its primary focus is DRM. It's technically built reasonably well, and it requires specific hardware features built into recent Intel and AMD cpu's, or add-on chips. But the feature is not wildly expensive in hardware terms.
I take it you don't use natural gas, heating oil, or eat corn or cheese, do you? Whether it "should" do these restrictions, they're a well-established fact of law, and not worth wasting the time debating the basic concept here.
Excuse me, but it's what they pay us for. If you don't to work during dinner, don't be a waiter. If you don't want to work on Sundays, don't be a minister. If you don't want to get the 3:00 AM call because some core server got hit by a spam wave and exceeded the number of available inodes because you switched form mbox format to MAILDIR last week and some idiot on a mailing list refuses to sort or transfer any of the 10 Gig of mail messages off the primary mail server and into their home directory in direct contravention of published email storage policy, then you don't belong in IT.
Yes, this has happened in my presence: I was at dinner with the poor engineer who got the panic call and we worked out a solution. He wound up paying for my dinner and a decent bottle of wine in thanks.
Yeah, I've issued and been issued such laptops. Then I had to evade the security on them to be able to access the remote network and my local network printer simultaneously, or to access local and remote storage at the same time.
There's a real performance hit for most of us doing tele-commuting.
MS isn't just the person with the deep pockets. They're known for discussing "projects" under non-disclosure and non-compete agreements, then abonding the "project" and creating their own new product that directly violates the old agreement. It's why you don't start such a "project" discussion with Microsoft unless you're absolutely sure they're not interested in trying to do it themselves, or have really compelling prior art to slap them in the head with when they try this stunt.
Summing up a bunch of comments: the current insanity of software patents, and the risks of this kind of nuttiness, could be extremely nasty to lots of open source projects. Microsoft and other big companies develop big patent portfoloes to protect themselves, and to use against competitors with even vaguely similar projects.
Open source developers have no such protection. It's exactly why Sendmail rejected using Microsoft's patented "SenderID", as described by Eric Allman here . And it's exactly why GPLv3 has all this complex and oddly writtten patent material (at ), as mentioned in other old Slashdot stories. Even if you think it's silly, or think that software patents are a burden to the market that should be thrown the heck out. it's a necessary licensing step to protect us from this sort of whackiness.
I hope the Mono project can be re-licensed under GPLv3 to avoid repercussions from this sort of suit.
Perhaps they hope to make their money on the servers and on the business and home systems they will buy later, because they already know Windows? This has worked before with other software and tools.
The other catch is DRM. Remember, Vista is designed from the ground up to enforce DRM well beyond simple copyright protection: XP makes some attempts at this, but Vista's ingrained use of "Trusted Computing" makes it much easier to provide, and tougher to break.
With a full-blown web browser, anti-virus software, a full-blown text editork, and a full-blown email client? It's pretty painful. I've done that successfully with a modest Linux system, and have for years.
The $100 laptop is pretty low-end to manage a modern Windows environment. The amazingly bloated browser, mail clients, and security software alone will bring it to its knees, and the patches every week will eat the remaining bandwidth.
True. But watch out for the national policies that are embodied by new Internet policies. Taxation and censorship are especially sensitive to odd local policies being spotwelded on top of international infrastructure: take a look at the Spamhaus lawsuit in the US for examples of such oddness, and Chinese censorship of Google results with Google cooperation, and AT&T's cooperation in tapping of the very backbones of US Internet traffic without warrants.
But keep in mind that Vista, and other MS operating systems, are very much designed to "phone home". This is especially true with their "Unwanted License Testing", also known as "Windows Genuine Advantage", that keeps trying to update and install itself at every update cycle.
The result is that Microsoft can, and probably will, start detecting the virtualization environments and "informing" users of their license violations. How they do this is probably a matter of negotiation among their sales managers and lawyers at a weekly meeting.
They don't have to. Take a look at a typical Acceptable Use Policy. They don't have to provie it in court, they simply have to find that you're doing something against their policies. The same policy that some of us beg to be used against spammers and phishers and virus-laden zombie machines is similar to what RIAA wants used against pirating downloaders, and it does *not* require a trial.
Try Beowulf clusters and render farms and corporate wide desktop distributions where the key management for RedHat registration actually costs more than the OS itself and adds nothing effective? I've certainly seen this, in at least one major render farm.
Security is a real concern: it's not clear that the CentOS build servers are as secure as the RedHat servers. And if they turn out not to be, whom are you going to sue when you get hacked?
Especially since RedHat themselves have basically thrown out "up2date", and switched to yum based package management for RedHat 5. Yum was one of the few packages CentOS stapled on top of RedHat based releases, and it's worked quite well.
There's also RedHat support: while their user-grade support is fairly sad compared to Google and the CentOS community, it's handy if you're running big iron with 99.9999% service level agreements and you need someone to blame when things fail. Notice I didn't say someone to fix it: I said someone to blame. In turn, installing third-party software such as libdvdcss from off-shore repositories in order to view DVD's is something that RedHat can say "we don't support that", and you're thrown back on your own.
Notice that RedHat support is also not permanent: it's an annual license fee. Your right to updates evaporates after that, at which point some folks switch to using CentOS for updates.
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Yeah, the power supplies for a typical laptop alone cost at least $5, even in amazing bulk. The extremely flexible and robust design of the OLPC project that can be mechanically powered instead of needing power grid or batteries is a big chunk of its cost. Bulk manufacturing helps lower prices, but you still have to pay for the keyboard components and the screen and CPU and the power supplies.
They could buy licenses for all those pirated copies of Windows and Office, then use the rebates to pay for the royalties on the Britney Spears CD's.
Tony Blair is on his way out: unfortunately, Gordon Brown is his probable successor. And Gordon Brown is even worse in domestic security terms: if ou read international news, he's directly responsible for the expansion of public surveillance and the massive growth of prison populations by pursuing Britain's version of the War on Drugs.
I release it because it's written into the GPL, and because I make sure to distribute my software to my friends (if personally written) and my corporate partners (if it's work software). And I try to get as much as possible switched over to GPL to allow my partners and clients to get other support if I'm too busy. And I'm very busy: the pay is good when you can replace half a dozen "high-availability" and hideoously expensive servers with a few discarded hardware platforms running much more robust, documented, and maintainable open source software.
That's like wishing that all artists worked for ad companies. It's fine for them to get paid for work, but some of the best tools will continue to come from people's love of making things better or individual's frustration with a problem no one has seen fit to spend money on yet.
And "free" is not the same as "open source". Your grandma paying a few bucks with her computer to help set it up or answer her support calls is the service you're supposed to get when you buy a computer and get software with it. In her case, that cost may be inviting you over for milk and cookies: I've certainly done support for less for my family, for commercial and free operating systems.
I see your point, but SCO's usefulness to Microsoft is not yet played out. Like a tobacco lobbyist ranting about individual choice, Darl McBride's helps cast doubt on the intellectual property of Linux. It's been a *cheap* investment for Microsoft to harass Novell, IBM, RedHat, and other Linux and genuinely open source development companies this way.
You may be underestimating Microsoft's willingness to continue spreading FUD, long after intelligent technology people recognize it as malicious rumor-mongering. Inexperienced people will invest in the "known" or "safe" or "supported" vendor even when the vendor's history of customer abuse and fraud and lack of compatibility. Take a look at the BBC's decision to use Windows Media for its new Iplayer service for an example of such a policy, founded in avoiding difficulty with intellectual property or support issues.
It's both, of course.
Look for Microsoft to fund them again, but only enough to keep them alive, much as described on Slashdot in http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/11/158214.shtml . Deals like this keep SCO and its Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt campaign against open source projects like Linux alive, while shielding Microsoft from counter-suit or public exposure of their genuine motives for keeping SCO alive.
Remember, Microsoft doesn't necessarily want SCO to *win*. They want SCO weak to prevent any good products coming from that particular UNIX vendor, and to continue the demonstrably false rumors that Linux developers steal from UNIX.
It's called "Trusted Computing". Look it up: it's built into Vista, and its primary focus is DRM. It's technically built reasonably well, and it requires specific hardware features built into recent Intel and AMD cpu's, or add-on chips. But the feature is not wildly expensive in hardware terms.
I take it you don't use natural gas, heating oil, or eat corn or cheese, do you? Whether it "should" do these restrictions, they're a well-established fact of law, and not worth wasting the time debating the basic concept here.
Excuse me, but it's what they pay us for. If you don't to work during dinner, don't be a waiter. If you don't want to work on Sundays, don't be a minister. If you don't want to get the 3:00 AM call because some core server got hit by a spam wave and exceeded the number of available inodes because you switched form mbox format to MAILDIR last week and some idiot on a mailing list refuses to sort or transfer any of the 10 Gig of mail messages off the primary mail server and into their home directory in direct contravention of published email storage policy, then you don't belong in IT.
Yes, this has happened in my presence: I was at dinner with the poor engineer who got the panic call and we worked out a solution. He wound up paying for my dinner and a decent bottle of wine in thanks.
Yeah, I've issued and been issued such laptops. Then I had to evade the security on them to be able to access the remote network and my local network printer simultaneously, or to access local and remote storage at the same time.
There's a real performance hit for most of us doing tele-commuting.
MS isn't just the person with the deep pockets. They're known for discussing "projects" under non-disclosure and non-compete agreements, then abonding the "project" and creating their own new product that directly violates the old agreement. It's why you don't start such a "project" discussion with Microsoft unless you're absolutely sure they're not interested in trying to do it themselves, or have really compelling prior art to slap them in the head with when they try this stunt.
Summing up a bunch of comments: the current insanity of software patents, and the risks of this kind of nuttiness, could be extremely nasty to lots of open source projects. Microsoft and other big companies develop big patent portfoloes to protect themselves, and to use against competitors with even vaguely similar projects.
Open source developers have no such protection. It's exactly why Sendmail rejected using Microsoft's patented "SenderID", as described by Eric Allman here . And it's exactly why GPLv3 has all this complex and oddly writtten patent material (at ), as mentioned in other old Slashdot stories. Even if you think it's silly, or think that software patents are a burden to the market that should be thrown the heck out. it's a necessary licensing step to protect us from this sort of whackiness.
I hope the Mono project can be re-licensed under GPLv3 to avoid repercussions from this sort of suit.
Perhaps they hope to make their money on the servers and on the business and home systems they will buy later, because they already know Windows? This has worked before with other software and tools.
The other catch is DRM. Remember, Vista is designed from the ground up to enforce DRM well beyond simple copyright protection: XP makes some attempts at this, but Vista's ingrained use of "Trusted Computing" makes it much easier to provide, and tougher to break.
With a full-blown web browser, anti-virus software, a full-blown text editork, and a full-blown email client? It's pretty painful. I've done that successfully with a modest Linux system, and have for years.
The $100 laptop is pretty low-end to manage a modern Windows environment. The amazingly bloated browser, mail clients, and security software alone will bring it to its knees, and the patches every week will eat the remaining bandwidth.
It's like mounting a snow plow on a bicycle.
True. But watch out for the national policies that are embodied by new Internet policies. Taxation and censorship are especially sensitive to odd local policies being spotwelded on top of international infrastructure: take a look at the Spamhaus lawsuit in the US for examples of such oddness, and Chinese censorship of Google results with Google cooperation, and AT&T's cooperation in tapping of the very backbones of US Internet traffic without warrants.
But keep in mind that Vista, and other MS operating systems, are very much designed to "phone home". This is especially true with their "Unwanted License Testing", also known as "Windows Genuine Advantage", that keeps trying to update and install itself at every update cycle.
The result is that Microsoft can, and probably will, start detecting the virtualization environments and "informing" users of their license violations. How they do this is probably a matter of negotiation among their sales managers and lawyers at a weekly meeting.
They don't have to. Take a look at a typical Acceptable Use Policy. They don't have to provie it in court, they simply have to find that you're doing something against their policies. The same policy that some of us beg to be used against spammers and phishers and virus-laden zombie machines is similar to what RIAA wants used against pirating downloaders, and it does *not* require a trial.
Try Beowulf clusters and render farms and corporate wide desktop distributions where the key management for RedHat registration actually costs more than the OS itself and adds nothing effective? I've certainly seen this, in at least one major render farm.
Security is a real concern: it's not clear that the CentOS build servers are as secure as the RedHat servers. And if they turn out not to be, whom are you going to sue when you get hacked?
Especially since RedHat themselves have basically thrown out "up2date", and switched to yum based package management for RedHat 5. Yum was one of the few packages CentOS stapled on top of RedHat based releases, and it's worked quite well.
There's also RedHat support: while their user-grade support is fairly sad compared to Google and the CentOS community, it's handy if you're running big iron with 99.9999% service level agreements and you need someone to blame when things fail. Notice I didn't say someone to fix it: I said someone to blame. In turn, installing third-party software such as libdvdcss from off-shore repositories in order to view DVD's is something that RedHat can say "we don't support that", and you're thrown back on your own.
Notice that RedHat support is also not permanent: it's an annual license fee. Your right to updates evaporates after that, at which point some folks switch to using CentOS for updates.