If only I had mod points.. I couldn't agree more. It just seems every time there's information about a new version of IE in the works, they say "We're going to increase CSS compatibility!" and that has the geek crowd starting in with the wishful thinking, talking about how wonderful it would be if they adhered correctly to standards or fully implemented CSS. Then the thing finally comes out and we're all bitterly disappointed as we were foolish enough to hope for a proper standards implementation and all we get is excuses from apologists claiming that it's far better than it used to be... to quote Jack Black in the Pick of Destiny,
"We were so awesome!" "Yeah, it was awesome... compared to BULLSHIT!"
Sorry, the amusing contradiction in terms of "ethical" email advertising always makes me think of Bill Hicks:
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself. Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke... there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags! "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research - huge market. He's doing a good thing." God dammit, I'm not doing that, you scum-bags!
Quit putting a god damn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
"Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web! "Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar..." How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don't you?"
Mindawn seems to be more like a community site / online record company, rather than a music store in it's own right. *ANY* artists can sign up for $50 a year (or the current special deal of $50 for lifetime) and upload as many albums as they want, with 75% of the sale coming back to them if it's exclusive to Mindawn, and 55% if it isn't.
Q. So what's the catch to get in to Mindawn?
A. It costs you as an artist just $50 per year to have your account, with as many albums and tracks as you want. You don't even have to print CDs -- just put some of those new songs you're working on up for sale online. You don't even have to even work around the concept of an "album" if you don't want to. Just create your account and load your content -- you can be 'live' within 30 minutes of opening your account. UPDATE: For a limited time the $50 fee is for a lifetime account, don't miss this limited opportunity to sign up with Mindawn for a one time fee of $50 for LIFE!
Q. How much do I make from those sales?
A. We have two royalty models:
75% for electronic content exclusive to Mindawn. However, you can change at any time to the second model:
55% for non-exclusive electronic content
That means you get either 55% or 75% of the total price -- far better for artists than most record labels or iTMS.
So while they do work with record companies, a lot (most?) of their music will inevitably be from independant artists, and anyone who wants to share their work. From the Customer FAQ:
Q. What kind of content can I expect?
A. You won't likely find major label releases -- we're geared more towards supporting independent artists and small record labels. Our system is also not closed to anyone, and we are adding content at an exponential rate. You can use our sophisticated search technology to find music you will likely be interested in, as well as demo the available songs as mentioned above. You're likely to discover some hidden gems that you wouldn't have found any other way.
Not a system for everyone, since many students will be more interested in the big names which tend to get pirated in the first place, but a nice enough system, and the artists certainly aren't hard done by. They even provide software, MARS (Mindawn Audio Ripping Software), for ripping CD, WAV or AIFF to OGG or FLAC format for using with their system. That's not to say that you couldn't use flac/oggenc, especially since it isn't F/OSS, but it's nice that they've provided their own multi-platform utility with a GUI to help out in that regard... not to mention the fact that the MARS documentation says that you need oggenc/flac/cdparanoia installed on Linux in any case.
I guess in the wake of MOG getting kicked out of LinuxWorld,/. needed a good FUD article to vent some of that pent up rage and hate at;)
Seriously, fuck the guy and the horse he rode in on. He has no credibility any more in the F/OSS community (not that he ever had), and he was made out by most as a complete asshole who threw a hissy fit and took his toys home. Beyond Linus, his accusations just didn't wash with people, and he's bitter about the amount of flack he's got from the F/OSS community over his hissy fit. Of course he's gonna try and get his own back, and if he can spread a bit of FUD about OSS development in an attempt to get more people signing on to his "innovative" product, and 'prove' he was right all along, then all the better for him.
Ignore the waste of space. I'm quite sure he appreciates the value of F/OSS only too well, it just suits him to attack the community and spread some FUD.
No offense to the IE7 development team, but as usual this just seems like the standard Microsoft ploy.
They stopped all IE development and let the browser utterly stagnate because they had no real competition; there were many complaints about the insecurity of ActiveX, the refusal to follow the w3c standards, the refusal to provide proper PNG alpha support, and the amount of work involved in trying to get sites rendering the same in IE as they did in pretty much any other browser around.
Microsoft have had *years* to address these issues, and selectively chose to do absolutely nothing about them, because they couldn't care less about the customer, just about stifling competition and making money. (Granted at engineer level you may well have people taking offense at the suggestion that they don't want to make a better product for their customers, but that clearly isn't the corporate policy.)
Now all of a sudden along comes Firefox, which provides an amazing base, and doesn't have any of the IE issues. Microsoft have some competition in the first time in a while, and suddenly they're back to how trumpeting about how wonderful they are, and how they're implementing all these brilliant new features, like popup blocking, better (but still not perfect) CSS compliance, proper PNG alpha support, and all the other things that people have been complaining about for years, and the things that other browsers have had since day one.
Sorry Microsoft, but I find your claims insincere. You had years to implement this stuff, but you didn't bother your ass to help your customers out until you had a whiff of competition come your way. I'll stick with FireFox.
They are going to have to be extremely cautious about the things they are doing, because they're potentially in trouble from more than one source. If IBM get wind of the fact that they are violating IBM license terms (even if it *is* the GPL) then they may well act on it. The same goes for ActiveState; while not as much of a threat as IBM, Sophos I would imagine are still not someone you want to mess around with. Then on top of that, you have advocacy groups like the Free Software Foundation, the EFF, and GPL-Violations, all of whom would be very quick to condemn this action and threaten legal proceedings if the license was not followed. The FSF deal with dozens/hundreds of violations a year, this is nothing new.
At the end of the day, it wasn't your code to give. The patent might be valid if there is no prior art to the portions of code that you have created (although without knowing what the program is or does, that isn't to say that the patent is not unobvious or trivial), but stealing GPL licensed code is not. If I let you borrow my walkman for the day, and your contract said that if you bring your walkman to work, they can keep it, that doesn't mean that they have any right to take mine, nor do you have any right to give it. One way or the other, theft is theft. The only solution (if they refuse to listen to reason) is to inform the original author of the code which has been stolen, and to pass the details on to the FSF. They will be able to put legal pressure on the company, and hopefully the threat of a lawsuit will be enough to change your company's mind.
Well of course; I wasn't attempting to speak ill of RedHat, all I meant was that most of the applications which make up a GNU/Linux distribution (including the kernel) is licensed under the GPL or another free license, so they are legally obligated to release that code. That's not to say that if they weren't required to do so, they wouldn't; nor that they refuse to release their own stuff, because they do. RedHat may be the most corporate and business-oriented GNU/Linux company around, but they are *certainly* no Microsoft.
People have touched on this in other posts, but English is one of the only languages which has no distinction between free as in freedom, and free as in cost. As a fluent French and Spanish speaker, rms appreciates the concept of a seperate word for freedom, and his speeches in other languages tend to come across a bit better in terms of ambiguity.
As Stallman has also mentioned on occasion, there are Nineteen definitions for the word "Free" in the dictionary, and only one of them refers to price. The most apt is quite possibly:
14. Thrown open, or made accessible, to all; to be enjoyed without limitations; unrestricted; not obstructed, engrossed, or appropriated; open; -- said of a thing to be possessed or enjoyed; as, a free school.
So in many respects, it is not even the ambiguity of the word, it is the modern use and context of it which causes the ambiguity.
Ultimately they are extremely accurate as "clones" because there is essentially very little change between the RHEL releases and the clones. RedHat are legally required to release the source code to everything they release under the GPL (which is virtually everything). The clone distros then take the source RPMs from the RH servers, strip out all the trademarked text and graphics, and compile it for use with other distributions.
I personally have been using CentOS on around a dozen servers for 6 months or so now, serving mail, DNS and various other services to thousands of people, and have never had any issue whatsoever with it. With the exception of the logos and name, it is identical to working with RHEL, so it is no problem to work with. All updates can be done quickly and easily, either through up2date or yum, and it is rock solid.
Well firstly, it's already been said in previous Slashdot posts that it's a company responsible for this, who the former owner of Suprnova has some sort of agreement with, which gives them credibility that they don't necessarily deserve (yet.)
But in the grand scheme of things, the client isn't open source, so you really don't know what's going on in there. And what's worse, the EULA revokes your right to disassemble / reverse-engineer the software, so they may well crack down on anyone trying to distribute an open source version:
b.In addition to those prohibitions contained elsewhere herein, you agree you will not:... (iv) modify, alter, decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer or emulate the functionality, reverse compile or otherwise reduce to human readable form, or create derivative works of the Software without the prior written consent of Swarm or its licensors, as applicable
Secondly, from the privacy policy:
Personal Data Collection and Use
The collection of personally identifiable data on this site by Exeem.com is only gathered from information that has been submitted to Exeem.com freely and deliberately by site users. Exeem.com reserves the right to use this data in the following ways:
...
Third Party Advertising
The ads appearing on the Exeem.com Web site and within eXeem(TM) application are delivered by our web advertising partner, Cydoor. Information about users of eXeem(TM) and Exeem.com, such as the number of times they have viewed an ad (but not user name, address, or other personal information), is used to serve ads to users.
So the app spams you with ads, and what's worse, Wikipedia has this to say about Cydoor:
Cydoor is a spyware program that causes popup and pop-under ads to be displayed while you are browsing the Internet. It also re-routes your web requests through third-party servers for the purpose of capturing your web surfing habits.
So you're not only spammed with ads, you're installing spyware. This is confirmed by eXeem Lite's FAQ:
2. Does eXlite contain spyware? eXlite was sorely made to take out the spyware from eXeem so to make it clear eXlite does not contain spyware.
A closed source, advert spamming, spyware installing pile of crap that you are expressly forbidden from reverse engineering... sounds like a whole barrel of laughs.
As far as I'm concerned, eXeem can go and fornicate itself with an iron stick.
Opera Software said they are doing so in an effort to meet the student and university need for security on the Internet.
Translation: Opera Software are doing so because they are already getting slated by Mozilla Firefox, and they don't have the money and ignorance of Microsoft to sit around doing nothing.
He came up with a similar phrase to differentiate GNU/Linux when he was doing his Saint IGNUcius (a saint in the "Church of Emacs") skit. As it says on the site:
Emacs was originally a text editor, but it became a way of life and a religion. To join the Church of Emacs, you need only say the Confession of the Faith three times:
There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels.
(Notably it's just a joke he does for a laugh, he's not *quite* that mad;))
Microsoft? Stealing someone else's software? Perish the thought, I'd have never imagined something like that happening...
Let's face it, it's actually *less* morally dubious than their usual practice of stealing ideas which they then pass off as their own and profit from...
(On a random aside, it's probably a tad inadvisable to put an entire screenshot up on the webpage which you then link up for slashdotting; the app window would have been more than enough.)
What many people seem to be doing is getting on the "Insightful" bandwagon by defending Windows.
It is clearly a Linux slanted piece.
Of course it is, the guy was "editorial director of LinuxWorld, executive editorial of InfoWorld Test Center, and wrote columns on InfoWorld and ComputerWorld. He is the author of the Official Fedora Companion and is co-writing Linux Desktop Hacks for O'Reilly. He is also a part-time Evans Data Analyst and a freelance writer." However, just because he is a Linux advocate doesn't automatically mean that he is spewing lies and FUD. You *can* be truthful while having an opinion on something (unless you're employed by Microsoft, and it's part of the corporate strategy, seemingly...).
He brings up attacks on Apache as being proof that Linux is attacked as much as windows, but virtually all security breeches these days are done on the desktop and Windows does get attacked here more verociously than Linux because of it's ubiquitouness(SP?).
So server-level exploits should just be ignored, because more desktop attacks occur? The internet is pretty important, you know...
If you really do pay attention to Security Focus and to the security bullitins of your favorite distro, you'd be hard pressed to say that Windows or Linux had any demonstrative lead in security patches. I get just as many securiy bullitins from Red Hat as I do from Micorosft. I mean it's nearly 1:1
He wasn't discussing volume primarily, he was discussing the amount of *critical* vulnerabilities, which is a whole different ball game. The *amount* of vulnerabilities *may* be similar, but he demonstrates public facts and figures which clearly state that there are *far* more critical vulnerabilities out there for Windows. But even with that, RedHat also have to support 3rd party applications, as is the nature of Linux. Microsoft supports Windows, and stuff tied into Windows such as IE and WMP, and that's all it has to worry about. A 3rd party app is causing a problem? 'Talk to the vendor, nothing to do with us.' (And whether they *should* support it or not is entirely irrelevant and utterly impossible, I'm simply saying that RedHat supports 3rd party apps, not that Microsoft are particularly irresponsible in not doing so.)
Case in point, RedHat have nothing to do with OpenOffice, yet they faithfully provide security updates for it. Same with Apache, CVS, X-Chat, and most of the applications you listed as security alerts. RedHat bundle them, ergo they support them; but RedHat have nothing to do with the vast majority of those projects, and technically have no real obligation beyond community responsibility to provide security patches. They could quite simply take the Microsoft attitude if they felt so inclined, and simply tell people to take it to the original vendors. So while these apps may cause security issues, it's not RedHat's fault, and not really their problem, yet they stand over a complete system and the majority of applications on it.
The guy may like Linux, but at the end of the day, this is a well-written piece which is as objective as can be expected for someone with a vested interest in the subject matter, which uses good analogies and solid facts to help to prove each point. He has no concerns whatsoever about listing *all* of his sources (including URLs) at the end of the paper, detailling exactly where his information came from, and unlike the usual Microsoft FUD, he has used public and neutral sources like CERT, rather than paying off some 'research' company to produce some nice reports with the "things he wants to hear" in them. He even explains potential anomalies, such as:
These results cannot be expected to mirror our own analysis of recent vulnerability patches. The
...that this will do absolutely nothing to alter Sun's opinion of Software Patents, irrespective of how utterly ludicrous this situation is. Sun quite happily admit to being an "Intellectual Property Company". Certainly they actually *create* IP, unlike SCO, but ultimately, they strongly believe in Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Patents. In fact, Johnathan Schwarz made a post on his Blog a couple of days ago, specifically stating his view on Intellectual Property:
I believe in intellectual property. In my view, it's the foundation of world economies, and certainly the foundation upon which Sun Microsystems was built. Copyright, trademark, patent - I believe in them all. I also believe in innovation and competition - and that these beliefs are not mutually exclusive.
...and how he recently refused to support a "CEO of one of the more popular Open Source companies" in campaigning against Software Patents:
And so I asked - "I'm not sure why you're asking my support to invalidate what Sun's stockholders have invested tens of billions of dollars to create, when you'd cringe if I told you to give away your largest asset, your copyright and brand." His answer, "You just don't understand." He was right, I didn't and don't. And we're going to agree to disagree. He and I, and I with a vocal minority of folks on the 'net who feel software should have no patent protection (leaving copyright and trademark untouched). I do not support that view, any more than I believe any other field of endeavor should be subjected to such a double standard. From drug discovery to academic work, the protection of IP is part and parcel of what incents inventors to invent, and investors to invest.
With an attitude like that, this case will not do us any favours. We're not going to get a new Anti-Software Patent ally out of this, when Sun realise the futility of patenting. They'll do their utmost to have the court's decision overturned, and possibly invalidate the patent, but at the end of the day, they'll sort out that patent and just move on to the next one.
The Register had a good story about this yesterday, basically stating that they weren't even aware of the story until Gartner sent them out a rather insistent correction to a press release they hadn't actually received. As they say:
We in the press find recalls and corrections a big help. We get a hell of a lot of junk that we assume is dull and therefore throw away without reading, often without even noticing, but the shrill words RECALL!!" or "CORRECTION!!!!" signify to us that there is something somebody has decided they'd rather not have said, or that they'd rather we didn't read. We dive straight into the trash, and although frequently the original remains very dull indeed and is immediately retrashed, sometimes it isn't.
What the correction actually said, seemed to be a rather more reserved opinion:
"More PC vendors are using Linux as an insurance policy against Microsoft license fees in many emerging markets. However, about two-fifths of these PCs will be modified to run a pirated version of the Microsoft's Windows operating system (OS) a few days before they are used. Most of these systems are targeted towards users that aim on save on OS costs, which can account for up to 15 percent of a PC's total cost."
"Until recently, Microsoft preferred users to employ a pirated version of Windows until the company was able to combat piracy in emerging markets effectively."
El Reg themselves then add:
[It] suggests that Microsoft's recent introduction of Starter Editions of XP is a sign that it intends to switch from this, which is effectively using piracy to its own advantage in order to maintain its dominant position, to trying to win the revenue for itself. Given that that as far as we can see there's no earthly reason why Starter Edition should work, the main effort for this sales drive is surely going to go into lobbying governments to crack down hard on piracy.
Well the ruling is that they have to unbundle WMP and release a "Windows Lite" version, there's nothing that says they have to charge less money for it. I think it's entirely possible they'll charge a similar if not identical amount (I'm sure they don't consider a media player's exclusion as something that should really take money away from them, especially if they're forced to do it) for the product.
Knowing Microsoft, they'll probably just throw up an "update" for WMP on Windows Update, which is similar to the style of the service pack updates; ie, it will download a small exe, consider how much of WMP you have (none) and promptly download and install the whole thing for you. Lots of people who don't have a media player will probably end up just installing it as a matter of course, rather than use adware/spyware filled clients like RealPlayer, or paying for commercial viewers like PowerDVD (yes, they could use open source clients like Media Player Classic and VLC, but outside of techies not that many people know about them). Having to unbundle it doesn't necessarily mean they can't advertise it's download from their site, put it on windows update, or roll it into the next Service Pack; there's lots of ways for them to work around this.
Now, after this annoucement, it becomes obvious that Microsoft is entering a new era in which they will be forced to lighten their products under the hostile eyes of the trade police...
To be honest, I'm not sure that's what they're doing. Nobody forced them to release XP Starter Edition. They just realised that the only way they could get people to purchase their product in poorer countries was to lower the price to a fair amount... but damned if they're going to reduce the price without reducing the quality. I suppose the justification (beyond the obvious greed) was that:
Other people (from US/Europe) could go to those countries and buy discounted copies
If people see that a legit copy of the same software is priced so cheaply in other countries, they'll wonder why it is priced so extortionately here.
So they're stupidly going to countries where the pirated software rate is in the high 90's, (partly due to the fact that many countries don't care enough about an American company to pay up, and partly because they simply can't afford retail copies) and they're trying to sell a cut down restricted pile of rubbish. Then people look at them and form the obvious conclusion: What's better; a copy of XP SE for $39, a pirated copy of XP Professional for little more than the price of the media it's printed on, or an alternative operating system such as Linux? It's obvious that (b) or (c) will be chosen in 99% of cases. When you're below the poverty line and struggling just to eat, support your family and have somewhere to live, legitimate software licenses aren't such a high priority.
I think they're probably aware just fine. This is the third "open source" project that they have released, and you'll notice that again it's pretty much just crap that's either reinventing the wheel, or crap that is of no value to the community. Additionally in this case, the fact that it's implementing a Wiki system kind of feels like the old "Embrace, Extend & Extinguish" of which they are so often accused. One way or the other, it's opening the source to utterly insignificant projects (in terms of their business plan and profits, I don't mean that the Wiki principle is in any way worthless) presumably so that when the next anti-trust case comes up, they can confidentally claim that they're a 'community player' for open sourcing some of their projects.
I also saw mention from another poster about the use of the IBM Public License, which is listed on the GNU website as being "not inherently a bad idea", but "incompatible with the GPL". In this way, Microsoft can continue it's FUD and public declarations that the GPL is like a "Pacman" that eats up intellectual property.
They can quite happily keep releasing insignificant projects, slating the GPL and Linux at every opportunity, and claiming all the while that they're not as proprietary and hostile as everyone thinks.
It's already been done. Xandros "Open Circulation Edition" is the standard "as close to Windows as humanly possible" Xandros distro, but it has a few restrictions:
The Open Circulation Edition is strictly for non-commercial use.
CD burning speed in Xandros File Manager is limited to the minimum burning speed of your CD burner.
The Open Circulation Edition installs an ad-sponsored version of the Opera web browser and e-mail client.
You may access the Xandros user forums but you are not entitled to e-mail installation support.
The Open Circulation Edition does not include CodeWeavers CrossOver Office or Plugin so you are not able to run any Windows compatible applications on Xandros Desktop.
I think all in all this is a bit restrictive when Linux is ultimately free, but at the same time, it's far more reasonable than the restrictions imposed by WinXP SE. If you don't like the Opera ads, use a different browser. If you don't like the burning restrictions, install k3b and/or compile your own kernel (depending on exactly how that is restricted). If you want Crossover Office, buy it. At the end of the day, they simply didn't bundle the stuff they legally couldn't, and restricted cd burning in their own integrated client to give users a bigger incentive to upgrade.. and with the freedom of Linux, that's not much of a problem.
First, they announce that they aren't going to release more patches for versions of IE earlier than XP, which will hopefully precipitate a greater shift from IE to FireFox (and other 3rd party alternatives). Then they announce that they aren't going to support direct access from Outlook/OE to Hotmail, which may be the only thing in some cases holding people to them over Mozilla, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc. (More to OE than Outlook admittedly, but there are other calendar applications out there).
I know at least when I was using Outlook Express, one of the last things that kept me holding on was the convenience of checking Hotmail through OE. But after I looked around and found projects like Mr Postman, Blue HTTPMail and a dozen other projects on SourceForge, which let you access Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail from any mail client you want, I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird, and I've never looked back.
At a time when Microsoft *really* need to be consolidating and concentrating on getting people to stay with their systems, the last thing they should be doing is antagonising people time and time again, by trying to try and squeeze more money out of them. Cutting down on spammers is an utterly poor excuse for turning off that service, it's clearly just an excuse to get more people to switch to payed services. Granted they still have enough of a market share to be able to pull stunts like this time and time again, but when they spend the time and effort on FUD campaigns against Linux, while simultaneously making business decisions that could aggravate users into switching to open source apps or even right over to Linux, their business plan seems somewhat contradictory. Sure you could claim that it's really not a big deal which will create dozens of new Linux users, and that's possibly true. But with the JPEG exploit, with the SP2 problems, with the recent patch announcements... these things all add up.
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If only I had mod points.. I couldn't agree more. It just seems every time there's information about a new version of IE in the works, they say "We're going to increase CSS compatibility!" and that has the geek crowd starting in with the wishful thinking, talking about how wonderful it would be if they adhered correctly to standards or fully implemented CSS. Then the thing finally comes out and we're all bitterly disappointed as we were foolish enough to hope for a proper standards implementation and all we get is excuses from apologists claiming that it's far better than it used to be... to quote Jack Black in the Pick of Destiny,
"We were so awesome!"
"Yeah, it was awesome... compared to BULLSHIT!"
Found a copy of it on RapidShare.
Sorry, the amusing contradiction in terms of "ethical" email advertising always makes me think of Bill Hicks:
Mindawn seems to be more like a community site / online record company, rather than a music store in it's own right. *ANY* artists can sign up for $50 a year (or the current special deal of $50 for lifetime) and upload as many albums as they want, with 75% of the sale coming back to them if it's exclusive to Mindawn, and 55% if it isn't.
From the Artists FAQ:
So while they do work with record companies, a lot (most?) of their music will inevitably be from independant artists, and anyone who wants to share their work. From the Customer FAQ:
Not a system for everyone, since many students will be more interested in the big names which tend to get pirated in the first place, but a nice enough system, and the artists certainly aren't hard done by. They even provide software, MARS (Mindawn Audio Ripping Software), for ripping CD, WAV or AIFF to OGG or FLAC format for using with their system. That's not to say that you couldn't use flac/oggenc, especially since it isn't F/OSS, but it's nice that they've provided their own multi-platform utility with a GUI to help out in that regard... not to mention the fact that the MARS documentation says that you need oggenc/flac/cdparanoia installed on Linux in any case.
I guess in the wake of MOG getting kicked out of LinuxWorld, /. needed a good FUD article to vent some of that pent up rage and hate at ;)
Seriously, fuck the guy and the horse he rode in on. He has no credibility any more in the F/OSS community (not that he ever had), and he was made out by most as a complete asshole who threw a hissy fit and took his toys home. Beyond Linus, his accusations just didn't wash with people, and he's bitter about the amount of flack he's got from the F/OSS community over his hissy fit. Of course he's gonna try and get his own back, and if he can spread a bit of FUD about OSS development in an attempt to get more people signing on to his "innovative" product, and 'prove' he was right all along, then all the better for him.
Ignore the waste of space. I'm quite sure he appreciates the value of F/OSS only too well, it just suits him to attack the community and spread some FUD.
It looks like a damn blender, it would be more at home in the kitchen beside the microwave oven than anywhere else :P
No offense to the IE7 development team, but as usual this just seems like the standard Microsoft ploy.
They stopped all IE development and let the browser utterly stagnate because they had no real competition; there were many complaints about the insecurity of ActiveX, the refusal to follow the w3c standards, the refusal to provide proper PNG alpha support, and the amount of work involved in trying to get sites rendering the same in IE as they did in pretty much any other browser around.
Microsoft have had *years* to address these issues, and selectively chose to do absolutely nothing about them, because they couldn't care less about the customer, just about stifling competition and making money. (Granted at engineer level you may well have people taking offense at the suggestion that they don't want to make a better product for their customers, but that clearly isn't the corporate policy.)
Now all of a sudden along comes Firefox, which provides an amazing base, and doesn't have any of the IE issues. Microsoft have some competition in the first time in a while, and suddenly they're back to how trumpeting about how wonderful they are, and how they're implementing all these brilliant new features, like popup blocking, better (but still not perfect) CSS compliance, proper PNG alpha support, and all the other things that people have been complaining about for years, and the things that other browsers have had since day one.
Sorry Microsoft, but I find your claims insincere. You had years to implement this stuff, but you didn't bother your ass to help your customers out until you had a whiff of competition come your way. I'll stick with FireFox.
They are going to have to be extremely cautious about the things they are doing, because they're potentially in trouble from more than one source. If IBM get wind of the fact that they are violating IBM license terms (even if it *is* the GPL) then they may well act on it. The same goes for ActiveState; while not as much of a threat as IBM, Sophos I would imagine are still not someone you want to mess around with. Then on top of that, you have advocacy groups like the Free Software Foundation, the EFF, and GPL-Violations, all of whom would be very quick to condemn this action and threaten legal proceedings if the license was not followed. The FSF deal with dozens/hundreds of violations a year, this is nothing new.
At the end of the day, it wasn't your code to give. The patent might be valid if there is no prior art to the portions of code that you have created (although without knowing what the program is or does, that isn't to say that the patent is not unobvious or trivial), but stealing GPL licensed code is not. If I let you borrow my walkman for the day, and your contract said that if you bring your walkman to work, they can keep it, that doesn't mean that they have any right to take mine, nor do you have any right to give it. One way or the other, theft is theft. The only solution (if they refuse to listen to reason) is to inform the original author of the code which has been stolen, and to pass the details on to the FSF. They will be able to put legal pressure on the company, and hopefully the threat of a lawsuit will be enough to change your company's mind.
Well of course; I wasn't attempting to speak ill of RedHat, all I meant was that most of the applications which make up a GNU/Linux distribution (including the kernel) is licensed under the GPL or another free license, so they are legally obligated to release that code. That's not to say that if they weren't required to do so, they wouldn't; nor that they refuse to release their own stuff, because they do. RedHat may be the most corporate and business-oriented GNU/Linux company around, but they are *certainly* no Microsoft.
People have touched on this in other posts, but English is one of the only languages which has no distinction between free as in freedom, and free as in cost. As a fluent French and Spanish speaker, rms appreciates the concept of a seperate word for freedom, and his speeches in other languages tend to come across a bit better in terms of ambiguity.
As Stallman has also mentioned on occasion, there are Nineteen definitions for the word "Free" in the dictionary, and only one of them refers to price. The most apt is quite possibly:
So in many respects, it is not even the ambiguity of the word, it is the modern use and context of it which causes the ambiguity.
Ultimately they are extremely accurate as "clones" because there is essentially very little change between the RHEL releases and the clones. RedHat are legally required to release the source code to everything they release under the GPL (which is virtually everything). The clone distros then take the source RPMs from the RH servers, strip out all the trademarked text and graphics, and compile it for use with other distributions.
I personally have been using CentOS on around a dozen servers for 6 months or so now, serving mail, DNS and various other services to thousands of people, and have never had any issue whatsoever with it. With the exception of the logos and name, it is identical to working with RHEL, so it is no problem to work with. All updates can be done quickly and easily, either through up2date or yum, and it is rock solid.
Well firstly, it's already been said in previous Slashdot posts that it's a company responsible for this, who the former owner of Suprnova has some sort of agreement with, which gives them credibility that they don't necessarily deserve (yet.)
But in the grand scheme of things, the client isn't open source, so you really don't know what's going on in there. And what's worse, the EULA revokes your right to disassemble / reverse-engineer the software, so they may well crack down on anyone trying to distribute an open source version:
Secondly, from the privacy policy:
So the app spams you with ads, and what's worse, Wikipedia has this to say about Cydoor:
So you're not only spammed with ads, you're installing spyware. This is confirmed by eXeem Lite's FAQ:
A closed source, advert spamming, spyware installing pile of crap that you are expressly forbidden from reverse engineering... sounds like a whole barrel of laughs.
As far as I'm concerned, eXeem can go and fornicate itself with an iron stick.
He came up with a similar phrase to differentiate GNU/Linux when he was doing his Saint IGNUcius (a saint in the "Church of Emacs") skit. As it says on the site:
(Notably it's just a joke he does for a laugh, he's not *quite* that mad ;))
May also have something to do with this. ;)
Microsoft? Stealing someone else's software? Perish the thought, I'd have never imagined something like that happening...
Let's face it, it's actually *less* morally dubious than their usual practice of stealing ideas which they then pass off as their own and profit from...
(On a random aside, it's probably a tad inadvisable to put an entire screenshot up on the webpage which you then link up for slashdotting; the app window would have been more than enough.)
Short answer, no.
What many people seem to be doing is getting on the "Insightful" bandwagon by defending Windows.
Of course it is, the guy was "editorial director of LinuxWorld, executive editorial of InfoWorld Test Center, and wrote columns on InfoWorld and ComputerWorld. He is the author of the Official Fedora Companion and is co-writing Linux Desktop Hacks for O'Reilly. He is also a part-time Evans Data Analyst and a freelance writer." However, just because he is a Linux advocate doesn't automatically mean that he is spewing lies and FUD. You *can* be truthful while having an opinion on something (unless you're employed by Microsoft, and it's part of the corporate strategy, seemingly...).
So server-level exploits should just be ignored, because more desktop attacks occur? The internet is pretty important, you know...
He wasn't discussing volume primarily, he was discussing the amount of *critical* vulnerabilities, which is a whole different ball game. The *amount* of vulnerabilities *may* be similar, but he demonstrates public facts and figures which clearly state that there are *far* more critical vulnerabilities out there for Windows. But even with that, RedHat also have to support 3rd party applications, as is the nature of Linux. Microsoft supports Windows, and stuff tied into Windows such as IE and WMP, and that's all it has to worry about. A 3rd party app is causing a problem? 'Talk to the vendor, nothing to do with us.' (And whether they *should* support it or not is entirely irrelevant and utterly impossible, I'm simply saying that RedHat supports 3rd party apps, not that Microsoft are particularly irresponsible in not doing so.)
Case in point, RedHat have nothing to do with OpenOffice, yet they faithfully provide security updates for it. Same with Apache, CVS, X-Chat, and most of the applications you listed as security alerts. RedHat bundle them, ergo they support them; but RedHat have nothing to do with the vast majority of those projects, and technically have no real obligation beyond community responsibility to provide security patches. They could quite simply take the Microsoft attitude if they felt so inclined, and simply tell people to take it to the original vendors. So while these apps may cause security issues, it's not RedHat's fault, and not really their problem, yet they stand over a complete system and the majority of applications on it.
The guy may like Linux, but at the end of the day, this is a well-written piece which is as objective as can be expected for someone with a vested interest in the subject matter, which uses good analogies and solid facts to help to prove each point. He has no concerns whatsoever about listing *all* of his sources (including URLs) at the end of the paper, detailling exactly where his information came from, and unlike the usual Microsoft FUD, he has used public and neutral sources like CERT, rather than paying off some 'research' company to produce some nice reports with the "things he wants to hear" in them. He even explains potential anomalies, such as:
...that this will do absolutely nothing to alter Sun's opinion of Software Patents, irrespective of how utterly ludicrous this situation is. Sun quite happily admit to being an "Intellectual Property Company". Certainly they actually *create* IP, unlike SCO, but ultimately, they strongly believe in Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Patents. In fact, Johnathan Schwarz made a post on his Blog a couple of days ago, specifically stating his view on Intellectual Property:
...and how he recently refused to support a "CEO of one of the more popular Open Source companies" in campaigning against Software Patents:
With an attitude like that, this case will not do us any favours. We're not going to get a new Anti-Software Patent ally out of this, when Sun realise the futility of patenting. They'll do their utmost to have the court's decision overturned, and possibly invalidate the patent, but at the end of the day, they'll sort out that patent and just move on to the next one.
No jokes, no clever comment, just condolences.
The Register had a good story about this yesterday, basically stating that they weren't even aware of the story until Gartner sent them out a rather insistent correction to a press release they hadn't actually received. As they say:
What the correction actually said, seemed to be a rather more reserved opinion:
El Reg themselves then add:
Well the ruling is that they have to unbundle WMP and release a "Windows Lite" version, there's nothing that says they have to charge less money for it. I think it's entirely possible they'll charge a similar if not identical amount (I'm sure they don't consider a media player's exclusion as something that should really take money away from them, especially if they're forced to do it) for the product.
Knowing Microsoft, they'll probably just throw up an "update" for WMP on Windows Update, which is similar to the style of the service pack updates; ie, it will download a small exe, consider how much of WMP you have (none) and promptly download and install the whole thing for you. Lots of people who don't have a media player will probably end up just installing it as a matter of course, rather than use adware/spyware filled clients like RealPlayer, or paying for commercial viewers like PowerDVD (yes, they could use open source clients like Media Player Classic and VLC, but outside of techies not that many people know about them). Having to unbundle it doesn't necessarily mean they can't advertise it's download from their site, put it on windows update, or roll it into the next Service Pack; there's lots of ways for them to work around this.
To be honest, I'm not sure that's what they're doing. Nobody forced them to release XP Starter Edition. They just realised that the only way they could get people to purchase their product in poorer countries was to lower the price to a fair amount... but damned if they're going to reduce the price without reducing the quality. I suppose the justification (beyond the obvious greed) was that:
So they're stupidly going to countries where the pirated software rate is in the high 90's, (partly due to the fact that many countries don't care enough about an American company to pay up, and partly because they simply can't afford retail copies) and they're trying to sell a cut down restricted pile of rubbish. Then people look at them and form the obvious conclusion: What's better; a copy of XP SE for $39, a pirated copy of XP Professional for little more than the price of the media it's printed on, or an alternative operating system such as Linux? It's obvious that (b) or (c) will be chosen in 99% of cases. When you're below the poverty line and struggling just to eat, support your family and have somewhere to live, legitimate software licenses aren't such a high priority.
I think they're probably aware just fine. This is the third "open source" project that they have released, and you'll notice that again it's pretty much just crap that's either reinventing the wheel, or crap that is of no value to the community. Additionally in this case, the fact that it's implementing a Wiki system kind of feels like the old "Embrace, Extend & Extinguish" of which they are so often accused. One way or the other, it's opening the source to utterly insignificant projects (in terms of their business plan and profits, I don't mean that the Wiki principle is in any way worthless) presumably so that when the next anti-trust case comes up, they can confidentally claim that they're a 'community player' for open sourcing some of their projects.
I also saw mention from another poster about the use of the IBM Public License, which is listed on the GNU website as being "not inherently a bad idea", but "incompatible with the GPL". In this way, Microsoft can continue it's FUD and public declarations that the GPL is like a "Pacman" that eats up intellectual property.
They can quite happily keep releasing insignificant projects, slating the GPL and Linux at every opportunity, and claiming all the while that they're not as proprietary and hostile as everyone thinks.
It's already been done. Xandros "Open Circulation Edition" is the standard "as close to Windows as humanly possible" Xandros distro, but it has a few restrictions:
I think all in all this is a bit restrictive when Linux is ultimately free, but at the same time, it's far more reasonable than the restrictions imposed by WinXP SE. If you don't like the Opera ads, use a different browser. If you don't like the burning restrictions, install k3b and/or compile your own kernel (depending on exactly how that is restricted). If you want Crossover Office, buy it. At the end of the day, they simply didn't bundle the stuff they legally couldn't, and restricted cd burning in their own integrated client to give users a bigger incentive to upgrade.. and with the freedom of Linux, that's not much of a problem.
First, they announce that they aren't going to release more patches for versions of IE earlier than XP, which will hopefully precipitate a greater shift from IE to FireFox (and other 3rd party alternatives). Then they announce that they aren't going to support direct access from Outlook/OE to Hotmail, which may be the only thing in some cases holding people to them over Mozilla, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc. (More to OE than Outlook admittedly, but there are other calendar applications out there).
I know at least when I was using Outlook Express, one of the last things that kept me holding on was the convenience of checking Hotmail through OE. But after I looked around and found projects like Mr Postman, Blue HTTPMail and a dozen other projects on SourceForge, which let you access Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail from any mail client you want, I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird, and I've never looked back.
At a time when Microsoft *really* need to be consolidating and concentrating on getting people to stay with their systems, the last thing they should be doing is antagonising people time and time again, by trying to try and squeeze more money out of them. Cutting down on spammers is an utterly poor excuse for turning off that service, it's clearly just an excuse to get more people to switch to payed services. Granted they still have enough of a market share to be able to pull stunts like this time and time again, but when they spend the time and effort on FUD campaigns against Linux, while simultaneously making business decisions that could aggravate users into switching to open source apps or even right over to Linux, their business plan seems somewhat contradictory. Sure you could claim that it's really not a big deal which will create dozens of new Linux users, and that's possibly true. But with the JPEG exploit, with the SP2 problems, with the recent patch announcements... these things all add up.