This is not esoterica like software licences, this is basic ingredients for living, and these [insert strong epithet of choice here, my personal best candidate starts with a w] want to control it all. Makes the RIAA and fellow idiots look politely selfless by contrast.
...TL were suing developers for building products with MS SQL and TL's patented and copywritten code because MS hadn't paid Timeline to redistribute it as they were and neither had the developers. MS told the developers that they had paid for full redistribution rights.
Perhaps this is more of the same - MS is telling people that they're all paid up when IRL it may not be so ("the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away").
Either way, if you recompile stolen code and use it on your systems, you're liable. OTOH, you have a great defence in that you didn't know it was stolen, which kind of pushes the warranty back on the developers claiming ownership of the stolen code.
OTGH, for purposes of suing people into the ground and establishing precendents, a large suitor could attack (say) individual end-users of Gentoo for using the stolen code, deployers of Gentoo because they built it themselves using stolen parts, plus Gentoo as an orginisation for packaging the stolen parts in the first place, plus the authors who either did or endorsed the dirty deed of including stolen code in the original codebase. The immediate moral of the story is: don't steal.
TSG's lawsuit is like this, with one significant omission: there is no actual stolen code.
The problem is, as with TSG, the damage suffered and fear generated while the barratry is in progress. The authors responsible for the inclusion of stolen code are the only ones ultimately responsible. The people in between have no more duty-of-care than an MS developer or deployer or end user would would have.
The percieved value in what MS is offering is insulation from the pain of this barratry. The tinfoil hat brigade will, with some slight justification, go looking for evidence that MS teed TSG up for just this purpose, and in fact a number of FOSS luminaries claimed exactly that right at the start. Either way, it doesn't change the outcome.
The value MS is proposing is largely illusory, since even if the company is reimbursed after having to pay legal expenses and damages, it will still be massively inconvenienced, out of pocket for internal stuff, and have suffered damage to its reputation.
Nevertheless, MS will make as much publicity hay as they can while the legal sun shines. What we should be doing is exactly the same thing (not teeing up devious FUD plans, but asking the emperor where his clothes are and pointing out stuff like the relative impossibility of even finding most FOSS users compared with (say) subpoenaing a customer register or accounts from MS, McAfee or Adobe - a licensing yoke which doesn't appear on many TCO/ROI studies).
The GIMP is not about collating and printing photo albums, and neither is PhotoShop. They can both do it, to be sure, but you should be using something like KAlbum or FLPhoto instead. Both of these and a few others sit in Multimedia, Graphics on my Mandrake 10.1 desktop.
Is it simple enough for a PHB to understand and use?
I recently had to deal with a PHB who edited up a document on how badly his OpenOffice-on-Linux office system was working.
He wrote it up on OpenOffice on Linux, completely forgetting that this was not MS-Word running on MS-Windows. It All Just Worked. Any more irony and you could pick it up with a magnet. He was very embarrassed when he woke up to what he'd just done (he couldn't find the MS-Outlook icon to send what he'd written).
It seems fairly clear from this and other similar experiences that often the core issues have nothing to do with performance or capabilities and everything to do with perceptions.
As well as making our software better, we need to make our software seem better. The software company with the desktop lock is big on promotion. Perhaps stuff like the NYT Firefox ad are a better idea than many SlashDotters seem to think. I don't think competing head-to-head is going to be viable, but certainly some more professional promotion of FOSS as a poster-child and not an also-ran might-do-the-job afterthought is a Good Thing.
I take care to promote FireFox, ThunderBird and OpenOffice to my MS-Windows-addicted clients a being better for practically everything than the corresponding MS product. This gets them used to the idea of FOSS being higher quality and safer, which also prepares them for bigger steps later.
Each supports stuff better than the other, both of them support stuff better OOTB than the article implies. Both of them support stuff OOTB (like network-based document scanning including automated remote scanner detection) which MS-Windows simply cannot do. Can't speak to Red Hat and the others, but Fedora can't be too far behind (desktop land, remember?) and Debian-land have Xandros and the like for slick installs.
Practically all of them, even the single-CD distributions, offer a wealth of applications completely unparalleled in the MS-Windows world by even the most generous OEM. Start totting up the cost of extras to do serious office work, graphics work, virus scanning, PDF creation and display, email service, database service, file service (and pile on the "seats") and the like, and suddenly MS-Windows looks awfully expensive in comparison. Add in the cost of having to find, install and maintain all of these from disparate sources vs a single regularly updated RPM/DEB/TGZ repository and the comparable TCO/ROI figures the consultants are bandying about start looking kind of... tilted.
Microsoft essentially stole the MICA variant of VMS 5 to make NT (they eventually paid some trivial amount of compensation to digital(*) just before it got Compaqted) which gave them a considerable head-start (and VMS was actually secure before it became NT, behold the passion-fingered power of Microsoft). For a fair while, NT and VMS were driver-compatible and several areas "spelling-error compatible".
Microsoft probably had 20-50x as many FTE developers working on their codebase as you do on yours, and using dedicated top-of-the-wozza equipment and facilities for that.
Microsoft have a patent portfolio and lawyers to help them work around or bargain past patent-the-wheel problems, but you don't.
On the flip side, Microsoft also had Bill Gates buggering up their policy decisions for them.
No, I think ReactOS is doing all right, overall.
(*) Microsoft did a similar thing to boost MS SQL Server up to a competitive level. Don't know what they're going to do to help that unit survive in a world where at least five competent FOSS SQL databases exist, several of which eat their lunch on performance and prerequisites, to say nothing of licence entanglements.
They'll claim that their competitors will get a leg-up from it. My answer?
"Said competitors have the labs, people and equipment to do stuff like electron microscopy if they feel the urge, and probably know more about how your product actually works than you do. Competitors can't steal ideas that are patented anyway. Not that unstable drivers are such a patentable idea. Your suppliers would probably be delighted if a competitor started licencing their technology, so they also have positive motivation to publish, which conflicts with yours. The only people you're really hurting are your customers, and consequently your own sales."
They'll ignore that too, but the first one to go truly open (XGI did that, but only with their 2D stuff, ATI did too but only with limited amounts of their older stuff) will see people doing useful tricks and performance enhancements with their cards that they didn't think was possible. Once that becomes common knowledge, the people with the wallets will follow too. By that time, the damage will be done and the other manufacturers will be chasing tail-lights.
Use one for moving, glue the other one down and glue paddles to the buttons to make them easier to hit.
If you glued the "button" mouse to a shim to tilt it up a bit, friend could even use the wheel by rolling the heel of his hand on it. If that's still too hard, mount a larger wheel in contect with the mouse wheel and roll that instead. You can also wire up nice big buttons across the standard microswitches.
These mice have two wheels, one of which doesn't click, which makes it easier to roll a wheel without risk of accidental clicking (a bane of MS mice).
...said Earthling Overlords still haven't factored this entire system into their science yet, and it looks like said science is in for a fair bit of turmoil on its way there.
A development kit that helped people migrate from Pronto, DataFlex and the like to something open would be good. Likewise a more comprehensive VB-to-real-language translator that did stuff like retrieved the dialogs and forms would be most helpful.
Summary: "If we can't bleed you dry with it, we're not interested in developing it."
I think that's all you really need to know about the current state of play WRT patents and the like. Now how does a little inventor set about getting the protection that patents should have offered him, but don't?
...and in fact without good terrestrial support will self-terminate within a few years or at most decades anyway. I'm sure the military will include a few missiles marked "Moon Base" and the like in any doomsday scenario.
Then incurable instabilities creep into your biosphere because it's too simple and fragile, and then the wheels come off. You would want scores of big colonies (over 1 million people each) in widely divergent places (Mars, Venus, free orbit, asteroids) and several times enough industry kicking around to be free-standing.
Seeing that you're dealing with humans, remember that one or more dickheads will try to sieze control of the whole show if the Earth gets deep-sixed.
Burt builds light. He knows a lot about how air works and would want to use that knowledge to advantage rather than just brute-forcing through it with a massive but skinny cylinder.
I'm betting he uses a WhiteKnight-like design about the size of a 707 to do the first 30km ("launcher"), then lofts something delta-plus-cunard-ish and recoverable (as a "booster" shell) weighing less (probably much less) than 30t from that for the first rocket burn (which I'm betting will be all or primarily solid fuel), and that the final stage ("orbiter") nestled inside that weighs only a few times as much as SS1.
100% of the dry weight of the launcher should be recoverable, and the booster can probably re-enter fairly easily, glide like a brick and then pop a handful of 'chutes for the final km or two for another 100% recoverable chunk. I'm betting that the launcher will weigh about 45t empty, the first rocket stage will weigh about 12t "dry fuelled" and the final stage about 8t "dry fuelled". Even if he loses the booster he still recovers 81% of the mass which leaves the ground.
I'm also betting that the launcher has to do a gentle "vomit comet" parabola at launch to both prevent too much flex and rebound when the booster leaves and to help separate it. I reckon it'd be helpful to detach the booster just before zero gee was obtained and to adjust the parabola to a slight negative gee beyond that to permit it to separate without mechanical aid, but I don't know how feasible that would be from an airflow and stability POV. It wouldn't surprise me to see Rutan use the booster and/or orbiter's shape both to help the launch platform fly and to help separation.
I'm thinking that using four double-sized versions of the same engine that SS1 sits on with a payload weighing six times as much would get the booster out to about 120km and travelling nicely (where SS1 basically just went up then flopped back), then using three SS1-sized engines to do the kick to orbit from there would easily buy you the next 300km (essentially no air resistance and already have significant speed).
You'd need another small engine to do a deorbit burn, and in principle that could also be solid but I'd rather do it with several small motors for redundancy, or better still a solid motor that could deorbit the orbiter by itself in a pinch, plus at least one more controllable liquid motor (and never mind the complexity that involves) which could also do the deorbit by itself in a pinch. That would give you considerable room to jockey and two chances to cut the rope if you wanted down. I'm also wondering if a really big (hundreds of m across), really thin and flimsy parachute or balloon could economically replace the last solid motor.
...or that inflatable-space-hotel dude could drop a hungred megabucks into it no worries. Any two of them should be enough to fund Burt to orbit.
And almost certainly make a profit even without the prize. Scaled has already done so on SS1, Branson's essentially paid for it all with a licence deal and more ship orders so Rutan could if he wanted to give Allen his money back, keep the Ansari prize as profit and still have all the equipment he needs to build Branson's toys. I'm betting Allen wants to put more money in rather than take any out, and I don't know what Shatner's worth, but he'd give half his kingdom (a million? a few?) to even be on the roster - and how many more like him are out there?
I'd be surprised if Burt didn't already have at least concept plans for an orbiter hanging up somewhere long before SS1 flew. Presumably using something the size of a 707 to kick the payload at LEO.
Slashdot Mirror
Want to find an evil corporation?
How about a monopolist?
Or, for something a little different, the greatest threat to innovation in our world?
All straight from the horse's mouth. (-:
...in Marvin leading the concept shots? (-:
This is not esoterica like software licences, this is basic ingredients for living, and these [insert strong epithet of choice here, my personal best candidate starts with a w] want to control it all. Makes the RIAA and fellow idiots look politely selfless by contrast.
...here.
right.
Get it? Got it? Oh, never mind. (-:
...bending over far enough to do that. Do you think they'll keep my first-born if I use just a little dab of paraffin wax to ease the friction?
...TL were suing developers for building products with MS SQL and TL's patented and copywritten code because MS hadn't paid Timeline to redistribute it as they were and neither had the developers. MS told the developers that they had paid for full redistribution rights.
Perhaps this is more of the same - MS is telling people that they're all paid up when IRL it may not be so ("the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away").
Either way, if you recompile stolen code and use it on your systems, you're liable. OTOH, you have a great defence in that you didn't know it was stolen, which kind of pushes the warranty back on the developers claiming ownership of the stolen code.
OTGH, for purposes of suing people into the ground and establishing precendents, a large suitor could attack (say) individual end-users of Gentoo for using the stolen code, deployers of Gentoo because they built it themselves using stolen parts, plus Gentoo as an orginisation for packaging the stolen parts in the first place, plus the authors who either did or endorsed the dirty deed of including stolen code in the original codebase. The immediate moral of the story is: don't steal.
TSG's lawsuit is like this, with one significant omission: there is no actual stolen code.
The problem is, as with TSG, the damage suffered and fear generated while the barratry is in progress. The authors responsible for the inclusion of stolen code are the only ones ultimately responsible. The people in between have no more duty-of-care than an MS developer or deployer or end user would would have.
The percieved value in what MS is offering is insulation from the pain of this barratry. The tinfoil hat brigade will, with some slight justification, go looking for evidence that MS teed TSG up for just this purpose, and in fact a number of FOSS luminaries claimed exactly that right at the start. Either way, it doesn't change the outcome.
The value MS is proposing is largely illusory, since even if the company is reimbursed after having to pay legal expenses and damages, it will still be massively inconvenienced, out of pocket for internal stuff, and have suffered damage to its reputation.
Nevertheless, MS will make as much publicity hay as they can while the legal sun shines. What we should be doing is exactly the same thing (not teeing up devious FUD plans, but asking the emperor where his clothes are and pointing out stuff like the relative impossibility of even finding most FOSS users compared with (say) subpoenaing a customer register or accounts from MS, McAfee or Adobe - a licensing yoke which doesn't appear on many TCO/ROI studies).
The GIMP is not about collating and printing photo albums, and neither is PhotoShop. They can both do it, to be sure, but you should be using something like KAlbum or FLPhoto instead. Both of these and a few others sit in Multimedia, Graphics on my Mandrake 10.1 desktop.
He wrote it up on OpenOffice on Linux, completely forgetting that this was not MS-Word running on MS-Windows. It All Just Worked. Any more irony and you could pick it up with a magnet. He was very embarrassed when he woke up to what he'd just done (he couldn't find the MS-Outlook icon to send what he'd written).
It seems fairly clear from this and other similar experiences that often the core issues have nothing to do with performance or capabilities and everything to do with perceptions.
As well as making our software better, we need to make our software seem better. The software company with the desktop lock is big on promotion. Perhaps stuff like the NYT Firefox ad are a better idea than many SlashDotters seem to think. I don't think competing head-to-head is going to be viable, but certainly some more professional promotion of FOSS as a poster-child and not an also-ran might-do-the-job afterthought is a Good Thing.
I take care to promote FireFox, ThunderBird and OpenOffice to my MS-Windows-addicted clients a being better for practically everything than the corresponding MS product. This gets them used to the idea of FOSS being higher quality and safer, which also prepares them for bigger steps later.
Each supports stuff better than the other, both of them support stuff better OOTB than the article implies. Both of them support stuff OOTB (like network-based document scanning including automated remote scanner detection) which MS-Windows simply cannot do. Can't speak to Red Hat and the others, but Fedora can't be too far behind (desktop land, remember?) and Debian-land have Xandros and the like for slick installs.
Practically all of them, even the single-CD distributions, offer a wealth of applications completely unparalleled in the MS-Windows world by even the most generous OEM. Start totting up the cost of extras to do serious office work, graphics work, virus scanning, PDF creation and display, email service, database service, file service (and pile on the "seats") and the like, and suddenly MS-Windows looks awfully expensive in comparison. Add in the cost of having to find, install and maintain all of these from disparate sources vs a single regularly updated RPM/DEB/TGZ repository and the comparable TCO/ROI figures the consultants are bandying about start looking kind of... tilted.
- Microsoft essentially stole the MICA variant of VMS 5 to make NT (they eventually paid some trivial amount of compensation to digital(*) just before it got Compaqted) which gave them a considerable head-start (and VMS was actually secure before it became NT, behold the passion-fingered power of Microsoft). For a fair while, NT and VMS were driver-compatible and several areas "spelling-error compatible".
- Microsoft probably had 20-50x as many FTE developers working on their codebase as you do on yours, and using dedicated top-of-the-wozza equipment and facilities for that.
- Microsoft have a patent portfolio and lawyers to help them work around or bargain past patent-the-wheel problems, but you don't.
- On the flip side, Microsoft also had Bill Gates buggering up their policy decisions for them.
No, I think ReactOS is doing all right, overall.(*) Microsoft did a similar thing to boost MS SQL Server up to a competitive level. Don't know what they're going to do to help that unit survive in a world where at least five competent FOSS SQL databases exist, several of which eat their lunch on performance and prerequisites, to say nothing of licence entanglements.
They'll ignore that too, but the first one to go truly open (XGI did that, but only with their 2D stuff, ATI did too but only with limited amounts of their older stuff) will see people doing useful tricks and performance enhancements with their cards that they didn't think was possible. Once that becomes common knowledge, the people with the wallets will follow too. By that time, the damage will be done and the other manufacturers will be chasing tail-lights.
Use one for moving, glue the other one down and glue paddles to the buttons to make them easier to hit.
If you glued the "button" mouse to a shim to tilt it up a bit, friend could even use the wheel by rolling the heel of his hand on it. If that's still too hard, mount a larger wheel in contect with the mouse wheel and roll that instead. You can also wire up nice big buttons across the standard microswitches.
These mice have two wheels, one of which doesn't click, which makes it easier to roll a wheel without risk of accidental clicking (a bane of MS mice).
That's nearly too easy to click, and with one of the plastic covers to return it to normal size, easy enough to handle as well.
...said Earthling Overlords still haven't factored this entire system into their science yet, and it looks like said science is in for a fair bit of turmoil on its way there.
...by its parent planet chasing after it with a nappy wipe.
A development kit that helped people migrate from Pronto, DataFlex and the like to something open would be good. Likewise a more comprehensive VB-to-real-language translator that did stuff like retrieved the dialogs and forms would be most helpful.
Summary: "If we can't bleed you dry with it, we're not interested in developing it."
I think that's all you really need to know about the current state of play WRT patents and the like. Now how does a little inventor set about getting the protection that patents should have offered him, but don't?
...and in fact without good terrestrial support will self-terminate within a few years or at most decades anyway. I'm sure the military will include a few missiles marked "Moon Base" and the like in any doomsday scenario.
The Vomit Comit was retired recently. Quite a few sites mentioned that about a week ago.
Then incurable instabilities creep into your biosphere because it's too simple and fragile, and then the wheels come off. You would want scores of big colonies (over 1 million people each) in widely divergent places (Mars, Venus, free orbit, asteroids) and several times enough industry kicking around to be free-standing.
Seeing that you're dealing with humans, remember that one or more dickheads will try to sieze control of the whole show if the Earth gets deep-sixed.
Burt builds light. He knows a lot about how air works and would want to use that knowledge to advantage rather than just brute-forcing through it with a massive but skinny cylinder.
I'm betting he uses a WhiteKnight-like design about the size of a 707 to do the first 30km ("launcher"), then lofts something delta-plus-cunard-ish and recoverable (as a "booster" shell) weighing less (probably much less) than 30t from that for the first rocket burn (which I'm betting will be all or primarily solid fuel), and that the final stage ("orbiter") nestled inside that weighs only a few times as much as SS1.
100% of the dry weight of the launcher should be recoverable, and the booster can probably re-enter fairly easily, glide like a brick and then pop a handful of 'chutes for the final km or two for another 100% recoverable chunk. I'm betting that the launcher will weigh about 45t empty, the first rocket stage will weigh about 12t "dry fuelled" and the final stage about 8t "dry fuelled". Even if he loses the booster he still recovers 81% of the mass which leaves the ground.
I'm also betting that the launcher has to do a gentle "vomit comet" parabola at launch to both prevent too much flex and rebound when the booster leaves and to help separate it. I reckon it'd be helpful to detach the booster just before zero gee was obtained and to adjust the parabola to a slight negative gee beyond that to permit it to separate without mechanical aid, but I don't know how feasible that would be from an airflow and stability POV. It wouldn't surprise me to see Rutan use the booster and/or orbiter's shape both to help the launch platform fly and to help separation.
I'm thinking that using four double-sized versions of the same engine that SS1 sits on with a payload weighing six times as much would get the booster out to about 120km and travelling nicely (where SS1 basically just went up then flopped back), then using three SS1-sized engines to do the kick to orbit from there would easily buy you the next 300km (essentially no air resistance and already have significant speed).
You'd need another small engine to do a deorbit burn, and in principle that could also be solid but I'd rather do it with several small motors for redundancy, or better still a solid motor that could deorbit the orbiter by itself in a pinch, plus at least one more controllable liquid motor (and never mind the complexity that involves) which could also do the deorbit by itself in a pinch. That would give you considerable room to jockey and two chances to cut the rope if you wanted down. I'm also wondering if a really big (hundreds of m across), really thin and flimsy parachute or balloon could economically replace the last solid motor.
...when we get any defuelled from the local (Bullsbrook) AFB. Apparently it's the official alternate military fuel for diesel.
...or that inflatable-space-hotel dude could drop a hungred megabucks into it no worries. Any two of them should be enough to fund Burt to orbit.
And almost certainly make a profit even without the prize. Scaled has already done so on SS1, Branson's essentially paid for it all with a licence deal and more ship orders so Rutan could if he wanted to give Allen his money back, keep the Ansari prize as profit and still have all the equipment he needs to build Branson's toys. I'm betting Allen wants to put more money in rather than take any out, and I don't know what Shatner's worth, but he'd give half his kingdom (a million? a few?) to even be on the roster - and how many more like him are out there?
I'd be surprised if Burt didn't already have at least concept plans for an orbiter hanging up somewhere long before SS1 flew. Presumably using something the size of a 707 to kick the payload at LEO.