Of course Adobe named Illustrator using a common english word. Do you think people/companies should have to name their products using strange names that don't mean anything? Trademarks allow companies or individuals to have their product name be unique within a specific market. Why does Adobe have rights to Illustrator, and the Killustrator project doesn't? They registered it first. Adobe has spent years developing their product, and it has made a very good name for itself. Killustrator should not be able to use that name to promote their product. They can say in their documentation that they are a software package like Illustrator, but they can't use a nearly identical name.
Some people actually use Photoshop at work. He might be familiar with if in that way. I've used a legal version of Photoshop myself, though I don't onw it. My brother owns it, and I've used it on his computer. Just because you have no respect for Copyright Laws, doesn't mean that no one else does.
Hughes has satalites worth billions of dollars. Their profit margins aren't that high, if you tax their satalites, then they won't be competative with companies elsewhere which don't pay the taxes. In the short run relocation would be extremely expensive, not to mention very difficult on it's employees, but it may be less expensive than the taxes in the long run. Add to this the problems California is having with their messed up utilities industry, and Hughes may need to consider a new home.
I thought it was funny. I'm from Ohio by the way in case you were curious. I visit California for business. The weather is great, the land is some of the most beautiful that this country has to offer. However, the politics and the reasoning of many people who live there are unfathomable to me, os I'd rather live in boring old Ohio.
Massivly Multiplayer Online Gamse are becomming very popular. These games are constantly being patched to add new content as well as rebalance the game and fix bugs. Turbine, the makers or Asheron's Call (which is published by Microsoft), have already expressed interest in the XBOX. They have monthly patches to provide new content, so they will be making use of the hard drive. I'm sure Sony won't let Microsoft be the only ones with a MMOG on a console. If they're smart, you'll be seeing EverQuest for the PS2 for Christmass.
Microsoft does pretty well at making things like keyboards, optical mice, and other input devices. Maybe XBOX will follow this trend instead of that of their software business.
A lot of video cards have TV out, and this also takes care of the need for a DVD player. Of course you need a wireless input device of some kind, so we're upping the price of the PC a little bit.
Your point about proprietary extensions is a good one, but with high powered video cards becomming so affordable, you might be able to get better graphics without the extensions.
As you pointed out, the best thing about consoles is that they're all the same. This maens that games will work equally well on all of them so developers know the target system specs. It also means that a lot of the stupid driver problems that make Windows so unstable go away. Consoles still have a lot going for them
I don't own a console, so maybe I don't have the facts right, but it seems console makers make the money on the games. The $400 price tag seems great, adding a keyboard and mouse for another ~$70 still makes it a pretty good deal. The problem is that the games are likely to be more expensive than for a PC. It's also a pretty special purpose machine, why not spend a little more and get a PC. It'll run more software, you won't be using a TV for a display, unless you really want to. If you like the PS2 only games that are out there, then it still makes sense.
The government has been moving away from funding development and trying to buy off the shelf products. They are doing this because they can get comercial software cheaper than custom built software. The reason for this is that commercial software is writen for a wider customer base, and therefore the development costs are spread out over a wider number of customers. If you force all the software the government uses to be GPL (which is something Greyfox didn't necessarily propose, but other posters did). How do you pay the developers, or who pays the developers? You can say that people will pay developers to add the features that they need added. Developers are expensive, why would they pay someone to write code, when they know someone else needs the same thing, and when it gets written for them, you'll get it for free. What you end up with is a bunch of hackers writing code for the joy of it, while having to have other jobs, and the government paying for the rest of the development. That's a horrible way to fund software development, and doesn't really encourage investment in innovation. The money has to come from somewhere, and the government can't provide all of it. The govenment can't even provide much of it unless it has a tax base. For them to have a tax base, people have to be making money. Where does the money come from.
The standard answer I hear to this is that the money will be made through selling hardware and support. The problem with this is that is doesn't spread the costs out among the people who need the software very well. You'll always have those who won't pay for the software to be developed, and then undercut the prices of those who do. It's not a level playing field. It is possible for a few companies to make money selling hardware and services for GPLed software, but it's not something you can base your economy on. The system isn't self limiting. Those who chose to not pay for the innovation have the lowest costs, and can make the most money. This discourages innovation, even though the tools for innovation (the source code itself) are more available.
If you think I'm wrong then let me know. I will read your posts and listen to your facts and opinions. If you flame me or just repeat some unsupported dogma, then my opinion isn't likely to change.
Re:Make companies pay for software they can't use?
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Microsoft and the GPL
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Microsoft did not pay a penny in federal income tax last year!
While this is true, it's kind of misleading. Microsoft didn't pay income tax because they were able to count the stock options they gave their employees as an expense. This just shifts the tax burden to their employees. This means that although Microsoft itself didn't pay any taxes directly, Microsoft still generated an enourmous amount of this country's tax base.
I pay taxes too. What if I want to take the code and put it in my software. The code should be released into the public domain because the public paid for it. I can then use that code and release the software under any license I choose. That could be BSD, GPL, or a closed source license.
If you limit government funded to being released under GPL, then you prohibit that software from being used in software under almost every other license.
I guess I have a different opinion on subscription based licensing of software than some people here. When I worked in computer support about 5 years ago, we were licensing MS software through Microsoft Enterprise Licensing Program. It worked very well in a large corporate environment, and was very cost effective. You bought licenses at avolume discount, and you could run whichever MS OS you felt was appropriate on the machines you had licensed it for, except server versions. That meant that you could load Win95 or NT4. When Win 98 came out, you could switch to it if you chose to do so. What made it work was that the prices for the subscription were cost effective for us opposed to buying the OS with the computers, and then upgrading the OS on some of them later. Another large benefit was that it greatly simplified keeping trace of software licenses. We were spending 10s of thousands of dollars keeping track of licenses, and we still failed every internal software audit, every time. Once you get to the point where you have hundreds of employees, just keeping track of how many computers you have is a challenge, knowing what OS and software they are running is nearly impossible. There is other software that I've purchased as a subscription, where it worked well. One example is the recently maligned MSDN. You pay around $500 for a professional level license. It includes everything you need to develop device drivers but the compiler. You still purchase Visual C++ seperately. You also get a license to load up to 5 computers with MS OSs in order to test your software. This includes Windows 9X right up to Win XP server beta 2. Advanced server and datacenter versions are not included. The software and documentation you are sent is constantly being updated, and you receive these updates as part of the subscription price.
I guess my point is that sometimes a subscription is a good way to purchase software. It depends on the software, and the price. As long as MS continues to offer the software on a non-subscription basis as well, and they don't artificially inflate the price, this my work out well for many consumers.
Microsoft isn't going to purposely violate the GPL
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Microsoft and the GPL
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Microsoft spends Millions if not Billions of dollars trying to improve their public image. I can just see it in the press now, "Microsoft violates the license used by Linux!", "Microsoft steals code from starving programmers in latest application!". These topics are becomming mainstream enough to effect Microsoft's core customers' opinion of them. They'll just wait until someone else violates the GPL, and use their lobying and PR efforts as best they can to discredit the GPL.
They don't have to find that the GPL is illegal, they just have to find that the GPL is unenforcable. That would make it pretty much useless. If would also make it very hard to relicense a lot of software which was written through the combined efforts of different developers. I don't think that this will happen, but IAMAL, so I'm mostly rambling about something I don't know much about.
I just want to clarify that you don't need to log into the Subsrciber site, just the Subscriber Downloads site. I just verified this by looking around the MSDN site on a computer I just loaded yesterday. That way I was sure there weren't any cookies floating around from my previous visits allowing me to reach places other couldn't. I could look up info in the documentation, and even look at what software is in the latest MSDN shipment. What I can't do is download software from the subscriber downloads. The subscriber downloads is where I can go if I want to download an entire copy of Windows 2000 Professional. If you're a member of MSDN, they send you the stuff that's on the subscriber downloads on a CD or DVD. The subscriber downloads is a convience in case you need it before you get the CD, or you lose that CD among the hundreds they've sent you. I have only very rarely used the subscriber downloads myself.
As another note. You used to have to log into the MSDN site and fill out a little questionaire just to access the documentation. In this respect Microsoft has gotten better at respecting thier customer's privacy.
If you're writing applications, 3rd party tools likely work great. If you're doing Windows driver development you've got to use Visual C++. I heard of people trying to use non MS compilers for drives a while ago, but don't think they were very successful. Maybe things have changed since then. I just figured the price of Visual C++ was worth not having to deal with trying to get it to work with something else. Developing drivers is screwey enough without adding using different tools than everyone else is using. Compilers have bugs, and if you're driver is really acting screwy, you'd like ask other people if they are having the same kinds of problems. To do that it helps if you are using the same tools.
THIS IS NOT THE MSDN DOCUMENTATION! IT'S THE MSDN DOWNLOADS! Sorry to shout, but I get irritated with all the FUD that gets spread on Slashdot about issues like this. I realize it's unintentional, I sincerely doubt that Taco has a MSDN subscription, so he doesn't know that the Downloads page is a seperat thing. The Downloads page is where you can get the latest updates and patches to MS products, before you get the CD in the mail. MSDN sends out quarterly CDs with all the updted documentation, and any new software that you receive under the MSDN level you signed up for (and are paying for). You also get interm shipments, often on a monthly basis, of software that MS ships between quarterly releases.
As for developing with Non-MS tools, I'm sure it works great for applications, but if you're developing device drivers, you pretty much have to use Visual C++. I've heard of people trying to use other compilers, but I haven't heard anyone say they've had a lot of success.
Since it was WFW 3.11 and then Windows 95, it was especially easy. You can make such systems stable, but it requires picking the hardware and software you use carefully, and working around the bugs in that software. At least with Windows NT the system is pretty stable unless you have buggy drivers. Everyone had to have MS Office to be compatible, so we were limited to Windows and Macs. They were strongly discouraging the use of Macs, so that left Windows.
Regardless, this is still pretty good news for StarOffice fans. I don't know much about DISA, but I did do computer support on an Air Force base once apon a time. There were departments which used a wide variety of computer systems with different OSs. They could definately benefit from having a productivity software suite that ran on many of those different systems. Specifically, there were a lot of Unix gurus who only knew enough about Windows to be dangerous. Being Engineers they felt the need to play with their Windows boxes and effectively destroy them on a regular basis. This created a tremendous amount of work for us "stupid tech support weenies", and never made anyone happy. I like the solution of giving them Star office for their Unix box, and letting them play with it. For the most part they were capable of supporting those systems on their own, or were at least too embarassed to call me and complain about the system being screwed up without thinking through what they may have done to screw it up. The ability to let them use the software they know best would have been nice in several cases. I can remember a couple times where I'd get someone's computer working, and I'd get an angry call the next day saying it was broken again and that I screwed it up. This would happen repeatibly with the same people. In a couple cases I was forced to prove that they were changing the configuration of the machine/applications while my manager and the engineer's manager watched. This was a very bad situation for everyone, and benefitted no one. The engineers were bright people whe were just out of their elements on a Windows machine, but otherwise were valuable employees. Once it was shown that the computer problems were because of things the user was "inadvertantly" doing the issue was dropped. If you're a contractor you don't point fingers and say it's all your fault. That will get you fired eventually even if you are right. The best solution would have been to give the engineer the tools he needed on the system he knew how to use, and had to use for a significant portion of his duties anyway.
Just as a note, if you can't deal with people blaming you for things that aren't your fault, and you have no control over, stay our of computer support. Having people blame you for things they screwed up is part of the job, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. If you can't deal with it, then it's time for a career change. I guess it never bothered me too much, because computer support was just a job I was doing while working on my masters degree.
Both open source and comercial software have been around a long time. Neither has extinguished the other, because each has it's advantages. Many of the features of today's software have their roots in BSD licensed software. The GCC compiler has been ported to a tremendous number of hardware platforms and OSs. It has been a vital tool in a tremendous number of innovative projects. But all those years of open source development weren't very successful at making an OS for the masses. Of the OSs that I've used over the years, the easiest for me to learn at (at least at the time they were released) were Windows, Amiga (I don't know the name of the OS), and Apple's OS. There is a large number of people who are happy being barely computer literate. They aren't programmers, and have no interest in becomming programmers. They use a computer to accomplish a task, or simply for their own amusement. They may use open source software, but they'll never write any themselves. They may pay for a open source distribution software, but only until they learn how to get it for free. A good example of where the comercial software model works is in computer games. Today's computer games take a tremendous amount of development effort to produce. In order to get state of the art games released before new technology (new graphics cards, faster processors) makes them outdated you need a group of developers working full time, they can't be coding in their spare time around their jobs which pay the bills. You can't throw a ton of open source developers all working on it a little bit, because it's not an efficient way of getting a project done in a hurry.
The game deveolpers deserve to make a living, and relying on donations from gamers isn't going to pay the bills. Not every game is extremely successful, if you want to attract good game deveolpers a game company has to have the resources to pay developers and assume the risks. This requires a lot of the overhead of managers, accountants, and such that Bruce Perns calls waste in one of his posts. Sure there are some companies that always release profitable games. Blizzard comes to mind as an example. But even they have cancelled projects that didn't seem to be working. They still had to pay their developers. Open source doesn't address this market.
I've heard people say that the internet has changed everything, and is making closed source obsolete. It has definatly energized the open source movement, and allowed open source projects to become viable alternatives where close source products were the only real choice. The internet comming of the internet has also poured billions of dollars in to comercial software companies, and has stimulated closed source products to improve. The internet may have shifted the balance between closed and open source, but neither is going away.
To summerise this rambling post. Both open source and closed source have their respective places in the world, neither is going anywhere.
So Microsoft finds out that you've got GPL software on your computer. IANAL, but I don't think they can sue you for $, they would have to prove damages. They could revoke your license. That would really suck, and would be very stupid for Microsoft. Microsoft has gotten where they are by encouraging developers to write code for their OS. Of course that means that a lot of this license is just confusing and unnecessary. This license is for a beta sdk. I'm wondering if they've thought it through yet. I bet it changes before the final release of the SDK. Just my guess.
The GPL only covers distribution of the software in question, and explicitly grants you rights that you would not have under copyright law (namely, ability to publish and distribute the code or derivative works without compensation to the author).
The GPL is implemented through Copyright law. Most licenses do use copyright to restrict the use of the software in derivative works. Microsoft's EULAs definately restrict the end user, but so deos the GPL. It allows you to do what the author wants to allow you to do, and prohibits you from doing what the author doesn't want you to do. I was just pointing out that Segan's original post questioning if the EULA was legal was a little narrow minded considering the limitations that GPL places on developers. The GPL can be very restrictive for people developing binary software. More specifically it can be a pain when writing Linux drivers in which giving away the source would violate NDAs.
I suspect that the "tools" you aren't supposed to use are GPLed libraries. They don't want you using any libraries which might require the source to the finished app to be "open". The reason I suspect this is that requireing that you don't use an editor which is licensed under GPL doesn't make any sense. It isn't workable and isn't enforcable. How is anyone going to know what editor you used? It seems like the license isn't that clear, and those who believe Microsoft is evil incarnate are enjoying another chance to get up on their soapbox.
Isn't it just a little ironic for a open source advocate to be questioning if a restrictive software license is legal? After all GPL does require you to give away the source to your software if you use GPLed source, or staticly link to a GPLed application.
A lot of companies make really stupid decisions for marketing reasons, or because of managment's pride. I've seen really stupid business decisions that were technically unsound made just because a manager was unwilling to change course after an important, high profile decision was made. Someone made the decision to remove FreeBSD from those systems, and that person had to admit that Windows wasn't up to the task.
What else could they have done? They could have gone down the path of Microsoft doing a rush job of patching Windows to fix this problem. You would have ended up with an unstable system for a while, and Hotmail would have lost some customers. Instead, Microsoft swollowed their pride and made a good business decision.
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Of course Adobe named Illustrator using a common english word. Do you think people/companies should have to name their products using strange names that don't mean anything? Trademarks allow companies or individuals to have their product name be unique within a specific market. Why does Adobe have rights to Illustrator, and the Killustrator project doesn't? They registered it first. Adobe has spent years developing their product, and it has made a very good name for itself. Killustrator should not be able to use that name to promote their product. They can say in their documentation that they are a software package like Illustrator, but they can't use a nearly identical name.
Some people actually use Photoshop at work. He might be familiar with if in that way. I've used a legal version of Photoshop myself, though I don't onw it. My brother owns it, and I've used it on his computer. Just because you have no respect for Copyright Laws, doesn't mean that no one else does.
Hughes has satalites worth billions of dollars. Their profit margins aren't that high, if you tax their satalites, then they won't be competative with companies elsewhere which don't pay the taxes. In the short run relocation would be extremely expensive, not to mention very difficult on it's employees, but it may be less expensive than the taxes in the long run. Add to this the problems California is having with their messed up utilities industry, and Hughes may need to consider a new home.
I thought it was funny. I'm from Ohio by the way in case you were curious. I visit California for business. The weather is great, the land is some of the most beautiful that this country has to offer. However, the politics and the reasoning of many people who live there are unfathomable to me, os I'd rather live in boring old Ohio.
Massivly Multiplayer Online Gamse are becomming very popular. These games are constantly being patched to add new content as well as rebalance the game and fix bugs. Turbine, the makers or Asheron's Call (which is published by Microsoft), have already expressed interest in the XBOX. They have monthly patches to provide new content, so they will be making use of the hard drive. I'm sure Sony won't let Microsoft be the only ones with a MMOG on a console. If they're smart, you'll be seeing EverQuest for the PS2 for Christmass.
Microsoft does pretty well at making things like keyboards, optical mice, and other input devices. Maybe XBOX will follow this trend instead of that of their software business.
A lot of video cards have TV out, and this also takes care of the need for a DVD player. Of course you need a wireless input device of some kind, so we're upping the price of the PC a little bit.
Your point about proprietary extensions is a good one, but with high powered video cards becomming so affordable, you might be able to get better graphics without the extensions.
As you pointed out, the best thing about consoles is that they're all the same. This maens that games will work equally well on all of them so developers know the target system specs. It also means that a lot of the stupid driver problems that make Windows so unstable go away. Consoles still have a lot going for them
I don't own a console, so maybe I don't have the facts right, but it seems console makers make the money on the games. The $400 price tag seems great, adding a keyboard and mouse for another ~$70 still makes it a pretty good deal. The problem is that the games are likely to be more expensive than for a PC. It's also a pretty special purpose machine, why not spend a little more and get a PC. It'll run more software, you won't be using a TV for a display, unless you really want to. If you like the PS2 only games that are out there, then it still makes sense.
The government has been moving away from funding development and trying to buy off the shelf products. They are doing this because they can get comercial software cheaper than custom built software. The reason for this is that commercial software is writen for a wider customer base, and therefore the development costs are spread out over a wider number of customers. If you force all the software the government uses to be GPL (which is something Greyfox didn't necessarily propose, but other posters did). How do you pay the developers, or who pays the developers? You can say that people will pay developers to add the features that they need added. Developers are expensive, why would they pay someone to write code, when they know someone else needs the same thing, and when it gets written for them, you'll get it for free. What you end up with is a bunch of hackers writing code for the joy of it, while having to have other jobs, and the government paying for the rest of the development. That's a horrible way to fund software development, and doesn't really encourage investment in innovation. The money has to come from somewhere, and the government can't provide all of it. The govenment can't even provide much of it unless it has a tax base. For them to have a tax base, people have to be making money. Where does the money come from.
The standard answer I hear to this is that the money will be made through selling hardware and support. The problem with this is that is doesn't spread the costs out among the people who need the software very well. You'll always have those who won't pay for the software to be developed, and then undercut the prices of those who do. It's not a level playing field. It is possible for a few companies to make money selling hardware and services for GPLed software, but it's not something you can base your economy on. The system isn't self limiting. Those who chose to not pay for the innovation have the lowest costs, and can make the most money. This discourages innovation, even though the tools for innovation (the source code itself) are more available.
If you think I'm wrong then let me know. I will read your posts and listen to your facts and opinions. If you flame me or just repeat some unsupported dogma, then my opinion isn't likely to change.
Microsoft did not pay a penny in federal income tax last year!
While this is true, it's kind of misleading. Microsoft didn't pay income tax because they were able to count the stock options they gave their employees as an expense. This just shifts the tax burden to their employees. This means that although Microsoft itself didn't pay any taxes directly, Microsoft still generated an enourmous amount of this country's tax base.
I pay taxes too. What if I want to take the code and put it in my software. The code should be released into the public domain because the public paid for it. I can then use that code and release the software under any license I choose. That could be BSD, GPL, or a closed source license.
If you limit government funded to being released under GPL, then you prohibit that software from being used in software under almost every other license.
I guess I have a different opinion on subscription based licensing of software than some people here. When I worked in computer support about 5 years ago, we were licensing MS software through Microsoft Enterprise Licensing Program. It worked very well in a large corporate environment, and was very cost effective. You bought licenses at avolume discount, and you could run whichever MS OS you felt was appropriate on the machines you had licensed it for, except server versions. That meant that you could load Win95 or NT4. When Win 98 came out, you could switch to it if you chose to do so. What made it work was that the prices for the subscription were cost effective for us opposed to buying the OS with the computers, and then upgrading the OS on some of them later. Another large benefit was that it greatly simplified keeping trace of software licenses. We were spending 10s of thousands of dollars keeping track of licenses, and we still failed every internal software audit, every time. Once you get to the point where you have hundreds of employees, just keeping track of how many computers you have is a challenge, knowing what OS and software they are running is nearly impossible. There is other software that I've purchased as a subscription, where it worked well. One example is the recently maligned MSDN. You pay around $500 for a professional level license. It includes everything you need to develop device drivers but the compiler. You still purchase Visual C++ seperately. You also get a license to load up to 5 computers with MS OSs in order to test your software. This includes Windows 9X right up to Win XP server beta 2. Advanced server and datacenter versions are not included. The software and documentation you are sent is constantly being updated, and you receive these updates as part of the subscription price.
I guess my point is that sometimes a subscription is a good way to purchase software. It depends on the software, and the price. As long as MS continues to offer the software on a non-subscription basis as well, and they don't artificially inflate the price, this my work out well for many consumers.
Microsoft spends Millions if not Billions of dollars trying to improve their public image. I can just see it in the press now, "Microsoft violates the license used by Linux!", "Microsoft steals code from starving programmers in latest application!". These topics are becomming mainstream enough to effect Microsoft's core customers' opinion of them. They'll just wait until someone else violates the GPL, and use their lobying and PR efforts as best they can to discredit the GPL.
They don't have to find that the GPL is illegal, they just have to find that the GPL is unenforcable. That would make it pretty much useless. If would also make it very hard to relicense a lot of software which was written through the combined efforts of different developers. I don't think that this will happen, but IAMAL, so I'm mostly rambling about something I don't know much about.
I just want to clarify that you don't need to log into the Subsrciber site, just the Subscriber Downloads site. I just verified this by looking around the MSDN site on a computer I just loaded yesterday. That way I was sure there weren't any cookies floating around from my previous visits allowing me to reach places other couldn't. I could look up info in the documentation, and even look at what software is in the latest MSDN shipment. What I can't do is download software from the subscriber downloads. The subscriber downloads is where I can go if I want to download an entire copy of Windows 2000 Professional. If you're a member of MSDN, they send you the stuff that's on the subscriber downloads on a CD or DVD. The subscriber downloads is a convience in case you need it before you get the CD, or you lose that CD among the hundreds they've sent you. I have only very rarely used the subscriber downloads myself.
As another note. You used to have to log into the MSDN site and fill out a little questionaire just to access the documentation. In this respect Microsoft has gotten better at respecting thier customer's privacy.
If you're writing applications, 3rd party tools likely work great. If you're doing Windows driver development you've got to use Visual C++. I heard of people trying to use non MS compilers for drives a while ago, but don't think they were very successful. Maybe things have changed since then. I just figured the price of Visual C++ was worth not having to deal with trying to get it to work with something else. Developing drivers is screwey enough without adding using different tools than everyone else is using. Compilers have bugs, and if you're driver is really acting screwy, you'd like ask other people if they are having the same kinds of problems. To do that it helps if you are using the same tools.
THIS IS NOT THE MSDN DOCUMENTATION! IT'S THE MSDN DOWNLOADS! Sorry to shout, but I get irritated with all the FUD that gets spread on Slashdot about issues like this. I realize it's unintentional, I sincerely doubt that Taco has a MSDN subscription, so he doesn't know that the Downloads page is a seperat thing. The Downloads page is where you can get the latest updates and patches to MS products, before you get the CD in the mail. MSDN sends out quarterly CDs with all the updted documentation, and any new software that you receive under the MSDN level you signed up for (and are paying for). You also get interm shipments, often on a monthly basis, of software that MS ships between quarterly releases.
As for developing with Non-MS tools, I'm sure it works great for applications, but if you're developing device drivers, you pretty much have to use Visual C++. I've heard of people trying to use other compilers, but I haven't heard anyone say they've had a lot of success.
Since it was WFW 3.11 and then Windows 95, it was especially easy. You can make such systems stable, but it requires picking the hardware and software you use carefully, and working around the bugs in that software. At least with Windows NT the system is pretty stable unless you have buggy drivers. Everyone had to have MS Office to be compatible, so we were limited to Windows and Macs. They were strongly discouraging the use of Macs, so that left Windows.
Regardless, this is still pretty good news for StarOffice fans. I don't know much about DISA, but I did do computer support on an Air Force base once apon a time. There were departments which used a wide variety of computer systems with different OSs. They could definately benefit from having a productivity software suite that ran on many of those different systems. Specifically, there were a lot of Unix gurus who only knew enough about Windows to be dangerous. Being Engineers they felt the need to play with their Windows boxes and effectively destroy them on a regular basis. This created a tremendous amount of work for us "stupid tech support weenies", and never made anyone happy. I like the solution of giving them Star office for their Unix box, and letting them play with it. For the most part they were capable of supporting those systems on their own, or were at least too embarassed to call me and complain about the system being screwed up without thinking through what they may have done to screw it up. The ability to let them use the software they know best would have been nice in several cases. I can remember a couple times where I'd get someone's computer working, and I'd get an angry call the next day saying it was broken again and that I screwed it up. This would happen repeatibly with the same people. In a couple cases I was forced to prove that they were changing the configuration of the machine/applications while my manager and the engineer's manager watched. This was a very bad situation for everyone, and benefitted no one. The engineers were bright people whe were just out of their elements on a Windows machine, but otherwise were valuable employees. Once it was shown that the computer problems were because of things the user was "inadvertantly" doing the issue was dropped. If you're a contractor you don't point fingers and say it's all your fault. That will get you fired eventually even if you are right. The best solution would have been to give the engineer the tools he needed on the system he knew how to use, and had to use for a significant portion of his duties anyway.
Just as a note, if you can't deal with people blaming you for things that aren't your fault, and you have no control over, stay our of computer support. Having people blame you for things they screwed up is part of the job, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. If you can't deal with it, then it's time for a career change. I guess it never bothered me too much, because computer support was just a job I was doing while working on my masters degree.
Both open source and comercial software have been around a long time. Neither has extinguished the other, because each has it's advantages. Many of the features of today's software have their roots in BSD licensed software. The GCC compiler has been ported to a tremendous number of hardware platforms and OSs. It has been a vital tool in a tremendous number of innovative projects. But all those years of open source development weren't very successful at making an OS for the masses. Of the OSs that I've used over the years, the easiest for me to learn at (at least at the time they were released) were Windows, Amiga (I don't know the name of the OS), and Apple's OS. There is a large number of people who are happy being barely computer literate. They aren't programmers, and have no interest in becomming programmers. They use a computer to accomplish a task, or simply for their own amusement. They may use open source software, but they'll never write any themselves. They may pay for a open source distribution software, but only until they learn how to get it for free. A good example of where the comercial software model works is in computer games. Today's computer games take a tremendous amount of development effort to produce. In order to get state of the art games released before new technology (new graphics cards, faster processors) makes them outdated you need a group of developers working full time, they can't be coding in their spare time around their jobs which pay the bills. You can't throw a ton of open source developers all working on it a little bit, because it's not an efficient way of getting a project done in a hurry.
The game deveolpers deserve to make a living, and relying on donations from gamers isn't going to pay the bills. Not every game is extremely successful, if you want to attract good game deveolpers a game company has to have the resources to pay developers and assume the risks. This requires a lot of the overhead of managers, accountants, and such that Bruce Perns calls waste in one of his posts. Sure there are some companies that always release profitable games. Blizzard comes to mind as an example. But even they have cancelled projects that didn't seem to be working. They still had to pay their developers. Open source doesn't address this market.
I've heard people say that the internet has changed everything, and is making closed source obsolete. It has definatly energized the open source movement, and allowed open source projects to become viable alternatives where close source products were the only real choice. The internet comming of the internet has also poured billions of dollars in to comercial software companies, and has stimulated closed source products to improve. The internet may have shifted the balance between closed and open source, but neither is going away.
To summerise this rambling post. Both open source and closed source have their respective places in the world, neither is going anywhere.
So Microsoft finds out that you've got GPL software on your computer. IANAL, but I don't think they can sue you for $, they would have to prove damages. They could revoke your license. That would really suck, and would be very stupid for Microsoft. Microsoft has gotten where they are by encouraging developers to write code for their OS. Of course that means that a lot of this license is just confusing and unnecessary. This license is for a beta sdk. I'm wondering if they've thought it through yet. I bet it changes before the final release of the SDK. Just my guess.
The GPL only covers distribution of the software in question, and explicitly grants you rights that you would not have under copyright law (namely, ability to publish and distribute the code or derivative works without compensation to the author).
The GPL is implemented through Copyright law. Most licenses do use copyright to restrict the use of the software in derivative works. Microsoft's EULAs definately restrict the end user, but so deos the GPL. It allows you to do what the author wants to allow you to do, and prohibits you from doing what the author doesn't want you to do. I was just pointing out that Segan's original post questioning if the EULA was legal was a little narrow minded considering the limitations that GPL places on developers. The GPL can be very restrictive for people developing binary software. More specifically it can be a pain when writing Linux drivers in which giving away the source would violate NDAs.
I suspect that the "tools" you aren't supposed to use are GPLed libraries. They don't want you using any libraries which might require the source to the finished app to be "open". The reason I suspect this is that requireing that you don't use an editor which is licensed under GPL doesn't make any sense. It isn't workable and isn't enforcable. How is anyone going to know what editor you used? It seems like the license isn't that clear, and those who believe Microsoft is evil incarnate are enjoying another chance to get up on their soapbox.
Isn't it just a little ironic for a open source advocate to be questioning if a restrictive software license is legal? After all GPL does require you to give away the source to your software if you use GPLed source, or staticly link to a GPLed application.
A lot of companies make really stupid decisions for marketing reasons, or because of managment's pride. I've seen really stupid business decisions that were technically unsound made just because a manager was unwilling to change course after an important, high profile decision was made. Someone made the decision to remove FreeBSD from those systems, and that person had to admit that Windows wasn't up to the task.
What else could they have done? They could have gone down the path of Microsoft doing a rush job of patching Windows to fix this problem. You would have ended up with an unstable system for a while, and Hotmail would have lost some customers. Instead, Microsoft swollowed their pride and made a good business decision.