We really need to teach kids how to tell the difference between a lie and the truth. Every high school student should take at least two years of logic and rhetoric so they can intelligently parse what people are saying.
It's not enough. To unravel a lie you need information. I and presumably you have enough knowledge of computers and software to see through lies by Gates and Ballmer, but if a microbiologist lied to you, would you know? How about a geneticist, or a geophysicist?
Politicians lies are fairly simple, but most of the population have absolutely no clue about what goes on in the world, and quite frankly they don't give a shit. Knowing logic and rhetoric are probably not going to change that very much.
Why are the majority of these new anti-terrorism laws targeting American citizens?
Because for every Bin Laden, there is ten McVeighs, and they are better armed, already in the country and someone like "Tim Smith, Auto Mechanic" raises less alarm bells than "Ahmed Almud Chalabi, Student Visa".
Domestic terrorism has always been the greater threat, but the USGovLLC doesn't want Americans afraid of each other, they might stay home and not go to work. But when the enemy is external, foreign and non-white, then it's "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to kill some darkies we go"
What's wrong with this picture?
The fact that you are even asking is what's wrong with this picture.
OK, but the argument was that if God exists, he will save us from impending ecological doom, and we don't need to do anything to fix the problems ourselves. But if God doesn't exist, then nobody is going to save us. Therefore, prudence suggests that we assume God does not exist, and attempt to find our own solution.
The problem is that as long as there are some that have the silly notion that Jesus will come down and save us, then those who work on finding a solution will be working in futility.
That is, the believers will just keep having more children to absorb any advance in technology that we make. There is NO SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE WITHOUT POPULATION CONTROL. Unfortunately, the silly believers have DNA on their side. DNA just keeps replicating regardless of the long term consequences.
The quickest solution to climate change is for all scientists to stop working on technologies that benefit society. That is, improvements to agriculture, housing and clothing. As these technologies slowly disintegrate, the population will decrease naturally on it's own. And THEN we will see if Jesus comes down to save those fools.
Well, yeah, and there's the chance that it's all a crock.
There also is (unfortunately) an equal chance that it isn't a crock, because both variables are unknown. And two unknowns are always equal. ergo... Chance there is a God -> Unknown Chance there is NO god -> Unkown Therefore Chance there is a God == Chance there IS NO GOD
Of course, the advantage that atheist scientists have is that most of the things that religious people believe are just plain silly.
I never said that a lot of people wouldn't lose money. And perhaps some convenience. There are however newer payment systems that seem to have solved the problems paypal had, and one of these would (hopefully) quickly gain critical mass following paypals much-hoped-for demise.
Your model also has the benefit of deflecting "monopolist" criticism, after if YOU write the standard, then you can hardly be accussed of forcing out competing standards when you buy the company that implemented it.
There I was, the other day, peacefully walking down the road thinking about the Bible, when I was set upon by a gang of atheists with a movie projector, a gramaphone, a copy of Beethoven's 5th and eyelid forcers.
What I am saying is that there are A LOT of groups and regemes (sp?) in those areas that actively hunt and kill Christians and Jews,...
Really? Is that like a safari where everyone gets in zebra coloured jeep and drive around with binoculars and rifles looking for Jews and Christians? Are these organised safaris or does it just happen spontaneously?
Perhaps countries that don't actively hunt Christians and Jews could pick up some eco-tourism dollars from muslim backpackers that want to take pictures of real live Christians and Jews in their natural habitat before they become extinct. Hmmm....
So I would say to you and those who may be thinking along the same lines... take of the blinkers and LOOK at what is happening in the WORLD TODAY, not just your own back-yard.
I did not question OOP in PHP only for performance reasons. And I know that the web applications can maintain state on the server, including PHP applications.
Really, what's this then.... Does it make sense to define classes, create objects, restore objects from some serialized storage or database, etc. etc. in the context of a web application? That's a lot of scaffolding to build and tear down for every HTTP request.
If the application server can maintain a client state, why would this "scaffolding" need to be torn down and rebuilt for every HTTP request?
Moore's Law (a conjecture that has more or less held so far) refers to hardware; in fact it refers to the density of transistors on integrated circuits, not to performance. It does not necessarily follow that software automatically gets faster as transistor density increases. Anyone who used computers ten or twenty years ago knows that modern applications are not thousands of times faster than they were back then, even though the hardware is.
This statement is completely disingenous. It's like saying "Everyone knows that Doom4 is not one thousand times faster than Donkey Kong, even though the hardware is.". Yes, different applications are not one thousand times faster, but the same applications are. I recently upgraded from a 500Mhz to a 2.4Ghz machine, and I use all the same development applications. I can assure you, they are 5 times faster. And the executables I build run 5 times faster than their predecessors also. So from this I conclude that if I develop my web application today using a technology whose performance is not equal to it's flexibility and power, that the performance will catch up in 18 or so months, but the flexibility and power cannot.
Application performance is not a non-issue. Give me an example where it is an issue so we have a point of reference.
Your command of buzzwords is impressive, but you didn't address my original question.
Your sarcasm is boring and I did address your original question. It's just that your original question seems to be a moving target.
Does it make sense to define classes, create objects, restore objects from some serialized storage or database, etc. etc. in the context of a web application? That's a lot of scaffolding to build and tear down for every HTTP request.
It would seem that your only objection to using the OO model for web-scripting is a performance issue. Is that correct?
If it is, then I would say that performance is the foremost non-issue of modern software development, and following Moore's law, it becomes 50% less relevant to your development approach every 18 months.
Today, nearly all successful web sites owe their success to Metcalfe's law, rather than feature set offered, as opposed to desktop applications that are defined by their feature set. However, I still believe in the "browser as a platform" model, which has not yet arrived, but I (truly) believe is only a couple of technological hops away.
At that point, web applications will be every bit as complex as desktop applications in terms of features, plus having the additional complexity of client server (or peer to peer) networking thrown in for good measure.
At THAT point, I think that the performance issue will be insignificant compared to managing and maintaining the complexity of those future networked applications.
As for the issue of "state", the http protocol is stateless, but that doesn't mean that the application server has to be. The application server can maintain the client's state (objects instantiated, databases connected to), even with non-contiguous communication, something that Apple's WebObjects server does right now.
I mean that firefox should (within reason) retain your previous plugins when you perform an upgrade..
Oh, it retained them, they just didn't work. I tried upgrading them through the extensions manager, but eventually I had to go looking for them.
Of course if you have a plugin that relies on said vulnerability, the plugin no longer runs correctly.. but I think the chances of this are relatively slim..
Right, but how would Firefox know which plug-ins were affected by the vunerablity and which were not? DO the plug-ins only call the Firefox API, or do some of them hav their own API. For example, one of the extensions I use is Image Zoom. Was this extension affected by the JPEG vunerability? And if yes, will updating Firefox fix the vunerablity in the extension too?
I've actually been holding off upgrading because I hate trying to find and install all the plugins again (especially the good version of Adblock!!)..
I'm still waiting on Moji, Basics and Bloglines toolkit.
er... need more information. Are you saying that the plugin format is already backwards compatible, and I need to adjust a setting? Or are you suggesting that the Mozilla team work on making the plugin format backwards compatible?
What if the extension is affected by the vunerability?
I did upgrade to the latest version of Firefox and lost about half of my most usefull extensions. Some I found later on the homepage sites, others are yet to be upgraded.
So heres the problem with a micro-browser that is feature enhanced by extensions that you come to love and rely on. If there is a critical vunerability, do you upgrade and be safe, but lose usefull functionality, or do you risk it and wait until the extension builders catch up?
And remind me again, why is the RIAA evil? Is it because they are protecting their intellectual property?
It's not their intellectual property, it's the artists who wrote, arranged and performed the song. Strange how that suddenly became the RIAA's property.
Working in advertising, I find it highly amusing when someone gets their undies in a bunch over mistruths in advertising.
Buy NewGlo uranium nightlight today! You won't need to buy another nightlight for 500,000 years! How many other nightlights offer that?
Yes, you may have used those short-lived and safe nightlights before, but never again! Our NewGlo uranium nightlights come with a lifetime guarantee! The more you buy, the stronger your guarantee.
But wait! There's more. Buy 3 NewGlo lights today and recieve a free carton of cigarettes!
idiotic is a bit harsh...I'm not allowed to express my opinions?
OK, it was a bit harsh, you have your opinion, let's move on.
However GPL/LGPL and the like say that whoever downloads my code has the option of freely distributing it, changing it, and making a business from it.
It's hard to comment on how you can maintain your commercial advantage under GPL when you won't say WHAT your product IS. Sometimes actual code is the smallest part of the product, and sometimes it's the largest. Take a game like Age of Empires or Medieval: Total War. There is more IP in the supporting media, like sound, video, texturemaps, pictures etc than there is in the code itself. If you look at the production team on Medieval, the coding team was about 10% of the overall investment in the product. If The Creative Assembly were to open-source the battle engine, but retain full copy rights on the media plus multiplayer network code, then they could still sell Total War so that players can game online, but the value proposition of the product has greatly increased for those who want to tweak or improve the code. Sure, other companies could take their code and release their own product, but they could do that anyway by writing their own battle engine. Doing so would only increase their investment by 10-15%. Nothing to sneeze at, but it's not like it completely removes the barrier to entry.
So, I release our product open source...it takes off, next things there's an IBM product X division, and I can't even get support contracts anymore.
Support isn't the only revenue model for open source software. If you would just give me a tiny little hint as to what your product actually is, then we could explore some other revenue models that you can shoot down.;-)
XFree, changes it's license....'yoink' now there's XOrg, run by HP...sorry XFree guys, but thanks for the code, you go away now.
I don't recall ever paying for a licence for XFree86, so I'm not sure if your example is relevant. Give me an example of a company who opensourced their commercial offering and then went bankrupt. I'm sure they exist, and I am also sure that they took a 'magic bullet' approach to OSS instead of thinking about a new revenue model, using the product as a 'loss leader'.
Open source is definitely about freedom...freedom for the biggest player in an industry to easily maintain it's market dominance at the expense of small companies and developers.
Nonsense. Open source has lowered the barrier of entry into the custom solutions market for both small companies AND developers. You should be specific when you make a statement like that. Something like, "at the expense of small companies and developers who make shrink-wrap software."
You have the right to believe that the OSS community would do a better job building XP, but you're going to have to present some evidence to convince me.
You mean you want me to present evidence of what the OSS community is capable of from the last time Microsoft opensourced one of their products?
Oh, you mean "hypothetical evidence"? Hmmm...
It would probably take years for the OSS community just to read the code, let alone understand or improve it.
Well, I disagree, but the point is moot as Microsoft have not opensourced XP. However, I thought we were discussing the potential benefits of opensourcing, not how long it would take to realize those benefits. It takes five to ten years for any major change to an operating system. Win3.1 -> Win95, 12 years. Win95 -> WinNT SP6 5 years, WinNT+ ->Longhorn 5 years. AppleII ->MacOS 5 years, MacOS1->MacOS8 5 years, MacOS8->OSX 5 years. So if you were to give the OSS community 5 years, would XP be a better platform than Longhorn (hypothetically)? I say yes.
Ah, but don't forget the other 'bite in the a$$' part of open source. That's a fantastic idea...peer review of code...I'm all for it...but GPL/LPGL says that in order to open source, microsoft would have to allow people to take over their product...to give them the right to sell years of M$ hard work as their own.
In contrast with Microsoft who took years of other people's hard work and innovative ideas and sold them as their own?
I have a product...I would love to make it open source...I would love to give it away free and just make money off the support...I would make a really good living at that...but I can't run the risk that someone with more money than I (read: IBM) will take my code and great ideas and use them to put me out of business....yeah, hell fair that is:)
Show me how you'll protect my income, staff and company and I'll open source in a second...until then, stop ruining an industy.
If you really want me to take the time and effort (ie. free money) to think of a way your company can make more money by open sourcing your code, I would need to at least see what your product IS.
As for your great ideas, are they patented? If not, then it doesn't matter if your product is open source or closed source, Microsoft, IBM or HP can still steal your ideas. It's not like it's hard to reverse engineer software.
And please, using idiotic emotive language like "ruining an industry" does NOT lend weight to your argument. If you want discussion, or ideas that might make you rich from a complete stranger (like me), then let's keep the tone rational, OK?
Not all benefits are equal. If MS opened all their source code, do you seriously believe that would improve their competitive position?
That depends on which of their products they released the source code for. If for example, it was Windows XP, IMO there would be no downside. It's such a piece of shit, the worst MS OS I've used since 95.
If the OSS community were to get their hands on it, they could make it go much faster, plug the security holes, remove the nasty spyware shit that tracks your every menu selection, URL visited etc etc, plus create amazing customization software that gave power users total control over functionality, speed and so on, then MS XP would become THE development platform of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Where is the B-ark when you need it.
Didn't the people of Golgafrinchim die of a disease contracted from a dirty telephone?
We really need to teach kids how to tell the difference between a lie and the truth. Every high school student should take at least two years of logic and rhetoric so they can intelligently parse what people are saying.
It's not enough. To unravel a lie you need information. I and presumably you have enough knowledge of computers and software to see through lies by Gates and Ballmer, but if a microbiologist lied to you, would you know? How about a geneticist, or a geophysicist?
Politicians lies are fairly simple, but most of the population have absolutely no clue about what goes on in the world, and quite frankly they don't give a shit. Knowing logic and rhetoric are probably not going to change that very much.
Why are the majority of these new anti-terrorism laws targeting American citizens?
Because for every Bin Laden, there is ten McVeighs, and they are better armed, already in the country and someone like "Tim Smith, Auto Mechanic" raises less alarm bells than "Ahmed Almud Chalabi, Student Visa".
Domestic terrorism has always been the greater threat, but the USGovLLC doesn't want Americans afraid of each other, they might stay home and not go to work. But when the enemy is external, foreign and non-white, then it's "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to kill some darkies we go"
What's wrong with this picture?
The fact that you are even asking is what's wrong with this picture.
OK, but the argument was that if God exists, he will save us from impending ecological doom, and we don't need to do anything to fix the problems ourselves. But if God doesn't exist, then nobody is going to save us. Therefore, prudence suggests that we assume God does not exist, and attempt to find our own solution.
The problem is that as long as there are some that have the silly notion that Jesus will come down and save us, then those who work on finding a solution will be working in futility.
That is, the believers will just keep having more children to absorb any advance in technology that we make. There is NO SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE WITHOUT POPULATION CONTROL. Unfortunately, the silly believers have DNA on their side. DNA just keeps replicating regardless of the long term consequences.
The quickest solution to climate change is for all scientists to stop working on technologies that benefit society. That is, improvements to agriculture, housing and clothing. As these technologies slowly disintegrate, the population will decrease naturally on it's own. And THEN we will see if Jesus comes down to save those fools.
people like me - informed scientists
... I guess the people of Norway and New Zealand are in for a shock tomorrow then.
and
I can imagine you fruitcakes at the end of the ice age: "The glaciers will be *gone* if we don't act now!!!!"
Well, they're gone.
Er
If you are what passes for an informed scientist these days, it's no wonder that people think that scientists are full of shit.
Well, yeah, and there's the chance that it's all a crock.
There also is (unfortunately) an equal chance that it isn't a crock, because both variables are unknown. And two unknowns are always equal. ergo...
Chance there is a God -> Unknown
Chance there is NO god -> Unkown
Therefore
Chance there is a God == Chance there IS NO GOD
Of course, the advantage that atheist scientists have is that most of the things that religious people believe are just plain silly.
I never said that a lot of people wouldn't lose money. And perhaps some convenience. There are however newer payment systems that seem to have solved the problems paypal had, and one of these would (hopefully) quickly gain critical mass following paypals much-hoped-for demise.
G..G..G..Good.
With any luck this is a permanent crash.
I would mod that insightfull post up.
Your model also has the benefit of deflecting "monopolist" criticism, after if YOU write the standard, then you can hardly be accussed of forcing out competing standards when you buy the company that implemented it.
Brilliant!
There I was, the other day, peacefully walking down the road thinking about the Bible, when I was set upon by a gang of atheists with a movie projector, a gramaphone, a copy of Beethoven's 5th and eyelid forcers.
Not the lovely, lovely Ludwig Van!
What I am saying is that there are A LOT of groups and regemes (sp?) in those areas that actively hunt and kill Christians and Jews,
Really? Is that like a safari where everyone gets in zebra coloured jeep and drive around with binoculars and rifles looking for Jews and Christians? Are these organised safaris or does it just happen spontaneously?
Perhaps countries that don't actively hunt Christians and Jews could pick up some eco-tourism dollars from muslim backpackers that want to take pictures of real live Christians and Jews in their natural habitat before they become extinct. Hmmm....
So I would say to you and those who may be thinking along the same lines... take of the blinkers and LOOK at what is happening in the WORLD TODAY, not just your own back-yard.
Wow! Are we having a mind-meld?
Oh, for your reference, it's "regime".
Thanks for answering your own questions.
....
Are you talking to me?
I did not question OOP in PHP only for performance reasons. And I know that the web applications can maintain state on the server, including PHP applications.
Really, what's this then
Does it make sense to define classes, create objects, restore objects from some serialized storage or database, etc. etc. in the context of a web application? That's a lot of scaffolding to build and tear down for every HTTP request.
If the application server can maintain a client state, why would this "scaffolding" need to be torn down and rebuilt for every HTTP request?
Moore's Law (a conjecture that has more or less held so far) refers to hardware; in fact it refers to the density of transistors on integrated circuits, not to performance. It does not necessarily follow that software automatically gets faster as transistor density increases. Anyone who used computers ten or twenty years ago knows that modern applications are not thousands of times faster than they were back then, even though the hardware is.
This statement is completely disingenous. It's like saying "Everyone knows that Doom4 is not one thousand times faster than Donkey Kong, even though the hardware is.". Yes, different applications are not one thousand times faster, but the same applications are. I recently upgraded from a 500Mhz to a 2.4Ghz machine, and I use all the same development applications. I can assure you, they are 5 times faster. And the executables I build run 5 times faster than their predecessors also.
So from this I conclude that if I develop my web application today using a technology whose performance is not equal to it's flexibility and power, that the performance will catch up in 18 or so months, but the flexibility and power cannot.
Application performance is not a non-issue.
Give me an example where it is an issue so we have a point of reference.
Your command of buzzwords is impressive, but you didn't address my original question.
Your sarcasm is boring and I did address your original question. It's just that your original question seems to be a moving target.
Does it make sense to define classes, create objects, restore objects from some serialized storage or database, etc. etc. in the context of a web application? That's a lot of scaffolding to build and tear down for every HTTP request.
It would seem that your only objection to using the OO model for web-scripting is a performance issue. Is that correct?
If it is, then I would say that performance is the foremost non-issue of modern software development, and following Moore's law, it becomes 50% less relevant to your development approach every 18 months.
Today, nearly all successful web sites owe their success to Metcalfe's law, rather than feature set offered, as opposed to desktop applications that are defined by their feature set. However, I still believe in the "browser as a platform" model, which has not yet arrived, but I (truly) believe is only a couple of technological hops away.
At that point, web applications will be every bit as complex as desktop applications in terms of features, plus having the additional complexity of client server (or peer to peer) networking thrown in for good measure.
At THAT point, I think that the performance issue will be insignificant compared to managing and maintaining the complexity of those future networked applications.
As for the issue of "state", the http protocol is stateless, but that doesn't mean that the application server has to be. The application server can maintain the client's state (objects instantiated, databases connected to), even with non-contiguous communication, something that Apple's WebObjects server does right now.
I mean that firefox should (within reason) retain your previous plugins when you perform an upgrade..
Oh, it retained them, they just didn't work. I tried upgrading them through the extensions manager, but eventually I had to go looking for them.
Of course if you have a plugin that relies on said vulnerability, the plugin no longer runs correctly.. but I think the chances of this are relatively slim..
Right, but how would Firefox know which plug-ins were affected by the vunerablity and which were not? DO the plug-ins only call the Firefox API, or do some of them hav their own API.
For example, one of the extensions I use is Image Zoom. Was this extension affected by the JPEG vunerability? And if yes, will updating Firefox fix the vunerablity in the extension too?
I've actually been holding off upgrading because I hate trying to find and install all the plugins again (especially the good version of Adblock!!)..
I'm still waiting on Moji, Basics and Bloglines toolkit.
er... need more information. Are you saying that the plugin format is already backwards compatible, and I need to adjust a setting? Or are you suggesting that the Mozilla team work on making the plugin format backwards compatible?
What if the extension is affected by the vunerability?
Please learn to use
I did upgrade to the latest version of Firefox and lost about half of my most usefull extensions. Some I found later on the homepage sites, others are yet to be upgraded.
So heres the problem with a micro-browser that is feature enhanced by extensions that you come to love and rely on. If there is a critical vunerability, do you upgrade and be safe, but lose usefull functionality, or do you risk it and wait until the extension builders catch up?
But how do you define "wartime?" IIRC, we haven't declared a war since 1941.
The wartime powers act was never revoked, so technically, the US has been at war since 1941.
And remind me again, why is the RIAA evil? Is it because they are protecting their intellectual property?
It's not their intellectual property, it's the artists who wrote, arranged and performed the song. Strange how that suddenly became the RIAA's property.
Working in advertising, I find it highly amusing when someone gets their undies in a bunch over mistruths in advertising.
Buy NewGlo uranium nightlight today! You won't need to buy another nightlight for 500,000 years! How many other nightlights offer that?
Yes, you may have used those short-lived and safe nightlights before, but never again! Our NewGlo uranium nightlights come with a lifetime guarantee! The more you buy, the stronger your guarantee.
But wait! There's more. Buy 3 NewGlo lights today and recieve a free carton of cigarettes!
Very, very, cool. .. with ice cream on top mmmmmm
idiotic is a bit harsh...I'm not allowed to express my opinions?
OK, it was a bit harsh, you have your opinion, let's move on.
However GPL/LGPL and the like say that whoever downloads my code has the option of freely distributing it, changing it, and making a business from it.
It's hard to comment on how you can maintain your commercial advantage under GPL when you won't say WHAT your product IS.
Sometimes actual code is the smallest part of the product, and sometimes it's the largest. Take a game like Age of Empires or Medieval: Total War. There is more IP in the supporting media, like sound, video, texturemaps, pictures etc than there is in the code itself. If you look at the production team on Medieval, the coding team was about 10% of the overall investment in the product.
If The Creative Assembly were to open-source the battle engine, but retain full copy rights on the media plus multiplayer network code, then they could still sell Total War so that players can game online, but the value proposition of the product has greatly increased for those who want to tweak or improve the code.
Sure, other companies could take their code and release their own product, but they could do that anyway by writing their own battle engine. Doing so would only increase their investment by 10-15%. Nothing to sneeze at, but it's not like it completely removes the barrier to entry.
So, I release our product open source...it takes off, next things there's an IBM product X division, and I can't even get support contracts anymore.
Support isn't the only revenue model for open source software. If you would just give me a tiny little hint as to what your product actually is, then we could explore some other revenue models that you can shoot down.
XFree, changes it's license....'yoink' now there's XOrg, run by HP...sorry XFree guys, but thanks for the code, you go away now.
I don't recall ever paying for a licence for XFree86, so I'm not sure if your example is relevant. Give me an example of a company who opensourced their commercial offering and then went bankrupt. I'm sure they exist, and I am also sure that they took a 'magic bullet' approach to OSS instead of thinking about a new revenue model, using the product as a 'loss leader'.
Open source is definitely about freedom...freedom for the biggest player in an industry to easily maintain it's market dominance at the expense of small companies and developers.
Nonsense. Open source has lowered the barrier of entry into the custom solutions market for both small companies AND developers. You should be specific when you make a statement like that. Something like, "at the expense of small companies and developers who make shrink-wrap software."
You have the right to believe that the OSS community would do a better job building XP, but you're going to have to present some evidence to convince me.
You mean you want me to present evidence of what the OSS community is capable of from the last time Microsoft opensourced one of their products?
Oh, you mean "hypothetical evidence"? Hmmm
It would probably take years for the OSS community just to read the code, let alone understand or improve it.
Well, I disagree, but the point is moot as Microsoft have not opensourced XP. However, I thought we were discussing the potential benefits of opensourcing, not how long it would take to realize those benefits.
It takes five to ten years for any major change to an operating system. Win3.1 -> Win95, 12 years. Win95 -> WinNT SP6 5 years, WinNT+ ->Longhorn 5 years. AppleII ->MacOS 5 years, MacOS1->MacOS8 5 years, MacOS8->OSX 5 years.
So if you were to give the OSS community 5 years, would XP be a better platform than Longhorn (hypothetically)? I say yes.
Ah, but don't forget the other 'bite in the a$$' part of open source. That's a fantastic idea...peer review of code...I'm all for it...but GPL/LPGL says that in order to open source, microsoft would have to allow people to take over their product...to give them the right to sell years of M$ hard work as their own.
:)
In contrast with Microsoft who took years of other people's hard work and innovative ideas and sold them as their own?
I have a product...I would love to make it open source...I would love to give it away free and just make money off the support...I would make a really good living at that...but I can't run the risk that someone with more money than I (read: IBM) will take my code and great ideas and use them to put me out of business....yeah, hell fair that is
Show me how you'll protect my income, staff and company and I'll open source in a second...until then, stop ruining an industy.
If you really want me to take the time and effort (ie. free money) to think of a way your company can make more money by open sourcing your code, I would need to at least see what your product IS.
As for your great ideas, are they patented? If not, then it doesn't matter if your product is open source or closed source, Microsoft, IBM or HP can still steal your ideas. It's not like it's hard to reverse engineer software.
And please, using idiotic emotive language like "ruining an industry" does NOT lend weight to your argument. If you want discussion, or ideas that might make you rich from a complete stranger (like me), then let's keep the tone rational, OK?
Not all benefits are equal. If MS opened all their source code, do you seriously believe that would improve their competitive position?
That depends on which of their products they released the source code for. If for example, it was Windows XP, IMO there would be no downside. It's such a piece of shit, the worst MS OS I've used since 95.
If the OSS community were to get their hands on it, they could make it go much faster, plug the security holes, remove the nasty spyware shit that tracks your every menu selection, URL visited etc etc, plus create amazing customization software that gave power users total control over functionality, speed and so on, then MS XP would become THE development platform of choice.
But hey, that's just one guy talking.