For the amount of money that it's going to cost you to do this (easily $500k), you may be able to create your own version of the application. Of course, I realize that that may not always be possible, but it is worth considering.
There may be a web-based version of the application.
You may be able to outsource the application and have your users access it through rdesktop.
If you only have a few users using it at a time, then accessing a bank of Windows machines through VNC should be enough.
If it's a high-powered application that can't be ported, then you're in trouble. If you are really, really lucky, you can run it under an old version of NT on VMware on your current hardware and under Linux. If it requires a new version of Windows and/or significant resources, you need to upgrade all your hardware, no matter what you do. I'd still get a site license for VMware and run Windows under Linux--that way, at least you more easily avoid the costs of downgrading to an all Windows server infrastructure and retraining everybody, and you can more easily distribute and lock down the (virtual) Windows desktops.
Don't blame your decision of using Linux up to now for your predicament--consider yourself lucky that you have been able to save money so far. The cost of dealing with Windows now (hardware upgrades, licenses, installation, system management, etc.) is the cost you would otherwise have been paying roughly every two years as the cost of doing business.
OS X probably can be ported pretty easily to x86. But the claims for its relationship to BSD are getting a bit ridiculous:
One advantage Apple has this time: The open-source FreeBSD operating system, of which Mac OS X is a variant, already runs on x86 chips such as Intel's Pentium. And Jobs has said Mac OS X could easily run on x86 chips.
You can find an explanation of the architecture of the OS X kernel here. As you can see, it is in no way a "BSD variant", it's a Mach kernel with BSD grafted on top of it. In particular, the things that make porting hard, I/O and drivers, are Mach components, not BSD components.
Yes, but lots of non-GNU stuff in Linux distributions relies on GNU specific features; if you replaced them with BSD tools, things would break everywhere.
And as someone with more than a decade of BSD system management experience and about a decade of Linux under my belt, I can assure you: there is no way I'm ever going to go back to a BSD userland--it is just too painful.
(If it were really a FSF/GNU project there wouldn't even be TALK of using Mono or Java.)
I have no idea why you felt compelled to raise that completely unrelated point, but FWIW, you are wrong. Go check the GNU and the FSF sites for what they actually have to say about Mono, Java, and.NET.
I know that lots of smart people have probably thought about this and the landing site and all that, but the notion of sending a probe completely without the ability to move just strikes me as not a smart idea. Even the ability to move very slow would seem to greatly increase the chances that this probe will yield interesting results.
AOL users don't have to understand what open source is in order to benefit from the wider range of clients available for AOL services that will be available as a result.
PCs have the edge in terms of screen resolution, input/output devices, storage, upgradability, and location (desk vs. TV). If consoles catch up in all those areas with desktop PCs, the consoles simply cease to be consoles.
It's been done for Linux and was reported here on Slashdot. As I recall, GNU was the biggest component in terms of LOC, even bigger than the kernel.
More importantly, however, GNU is essential: without the GNU compiler and the GNU command line utilities, Linux wouldn't run; there simply are no substitutes.
People like you keep making fun of GNU for trying to get their name and contributions recognized. But companies like Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and others put billions into marketing, trademark enforcement, and other activities to make people aware of their brand.
Like it or not, having a recognizable "brand" is important even for open source projects: it helps their long-term survival and attracts contributions. People do need to remember that "Linux" really is a combination of the Linux kernel and a lot of GNU utilities and software. And the fact that "GNU" is recognized today by many people is not a consequence of huge paid-for marketing campaigns, it really is a grass-roots effort.
Actually, a bit more honesty in this regard would be nice from commercial vendors. People should remember that most of the code in OS X doesn't come from Apple, but from CMU, GNU, BSD, NeXT and Stepstone. And people should remember that Windows has significant chunks of BSD code in it, together with dozens of codebases from other companies purchased by Microsoft. If you remember where the code actually came from, claims of "innovation" by some of these companies appear in a different light.
I'm wondering: why do you need a license to implement this? Did Google patent this?
In any case, patented or not, the CC license that this falls under seems acceptable for an open standard, even if it is patented, because it is transferable and because its requirements are minimal. Contrast this with the Microsoft Office XML license, which is royalty-free (for now...), but non-transferable.
First, real trust has nothing to do with gambling or business. You don't have to trust in situations like that, you just have to make decisions based on previous knowledge.
That's how people with brain damage operate, and it doesn't work very well. Most decisions normal people make are based not on rational cost/benefit analyses, but on trust and social ties, and it actually works better overall. However, most normal people also don't realize what they are doing and falsely assume that they are acting based on cost/benefit analyses.
Myself, I won't trust anyone who hasnt earned it, and earning it isnt easy, takes time, effort, and a proven track record.
That's not a good strategy. You should have an intermediate level of trust by default, and then modify that upward or downward based on experience. And you probably actually do.
Re:Not very scientific if you ask me...
on
Trust in a Bottle
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· Score: 1
Don't REAL studies involve HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of samples?
Not usually in medicine or psychology. There are excellent statistical procedures to evaluate such studies.
I mean when you tell me that 6 people did this and 13 people did that, I would immediately ask if it was raining outside or if something happened in the news that day, etc.
That's why experiments like this are blinded and randomized.
Imposing costs on manufacturers wouldn't pay for the disposal of imported PCs and would make California manufacturers less competitive. Mandatory take-back programs only work if you can recycle anywhere without proof of purchase, but that has other obvious problems.
I think the California approach is the best compromise.
However, I think consumers should donate their old computer equipment to computer recyclers anyway--many of those machines are still useful to lots of people.
Since the license is non-transferable, Microsoft can also just stop issuing new royalty-free licenses whenever they choose, or add new conditions.
Consider the case where OpenOffice were to switch to these formats, and then Microsoft wants to kill OOo. What do they do? They just put another condition in their royalty-free license: "This license does not give you the right to create products or software that interoperates with OpenOffice." Even if OOo could continue to use the format (and that alone is uncertain), people couldn't write any add-ons for OOo anymore.
Nothing changed: the formats are proprietary because they are covered by the same patents and licenses as previous Office XML formats. Calling them "open" formats is a blatant lie.
For people who still don't get it: the difference between a "royalty-free license" and an "open" format is that Microsoft can stop issuing royalty-free licenses any time they choose. They can also impose onerous conditions on you as part of the "royalty-free license".
If anything you are reading INTO the article rather than just plain reading it.
I'm not "reading into" the article at all; I'm telling you an extra, well-known fact: the formats are being patented by Microsoft.
The whole point of it is to make it open not proprietary.
"Proprietary" means that the format is owned by some specific company. These formats are owned by Microsoft because Microsoft is patenting them.
You seem to think that technologies become "open" when a company publishes their specifications, but that is completely wrong. One of the strongest forms of proprietary technologies are patented technologies, and they require disclosure of the thing being patented. Microsoft has been publishing the specs because they are making the technology proprietary.
When Brian Jones claims that these formats are "open" because they are published, he either doesn't know what he is talking about, or he is deliberately misleading people.
In fact document management people will likely be ga ga over this since it will be much easier to manage, index and catalog documents that are in an open format.
They will, but they will be doing that because it's a documented format, not an open format. Microsoft has discovered that documenting their proprietary formats gives them advantages.
I still think Flash is a bad idea. FOSS developers should concentrate on making SVG happen.
In fact, the big thing about Flash isn't the format, it's the authoring tools. A Macromedia-like authoring tool for SVG would be a much better investment of time than creating a Flash player.
There are many more interesting distinctions than a simple dichotomy between commercial/noncommercial--why not list them directly?
Have a look at Clusty as one example of a search engine that categorizes your search results along more dimensions, yet seems at least as intuitive and usable as the new Yahoo! interface.
Yahoo!'s interface seems unnecessarily simplistic to me.
RTFA, it states quite specifically, that if you take the new doc extensions and rename them with a zip extension you can view the data in pkzip or any other program that can open zip files.
Yes, that is a technical feature. Technically, you can also manipulate the XML files.
The problem is that Microsoft appears to be patenting those formats, so while you can technically do all these things, it isn't clear that you can do so legally. Microsoft isn't going to go after you for doing this, but the legal risk may keep commercial competitors from implementing the format.
I hate MS, but lets not automatically assume they are evil all the time. They very well could be evil just most of the time.
The fact that they have attempted to patent the formats tells you something...
It is certainly to be welcomed that the file formats are documented.
However, being documented is not the same as being non-proprietary. Microsoft has applied for patents that may apply to the ZIP file format, as well as patents on the XML formats themselves. As long as those patents exist, the formats are proprietary, at least in principle.
There is a good chance that the patents are worthless, but they still cast uncertainty and doubt over non-Microsoft implementations that work to Microsoft's advantage.
Both the public sector and the open source community should insist that Microsoft dedicate all applicable patents to the public domain, or at the very least make a legally binding commitment to providing free and fully transferable licenses with no weird side-conditions (which amounts to the same thing). So far, all Microsoft seems to have offered is free non-transferable licenses, and that is not acceptable if Microsoft wants to claim that these formats are "open".
So if you live near a lot of traffic, not only do you have to put up with drivers that can't keep their hands off their horns, now these people will also generate lots of interference. And why? Aren't AM, FM, and a few hundred stations on satellite radio enough?
"No one has ever tried to build a big supercomputer with these chips before," Parsons says.
Like a serious flu season, this sort of thing happens again every few years, when a new generation of grad students and faculty think it's a really neat idea. The thing is, when all is said and done, these things probably still are not cost effective right now. Sufficiently powerful FPGAs are expensive, and custom hardware is expensive. Furthermore, they are a pain to program, and even if they work perfectly they are good only for a limited set of problems. In the end, you are better off with COTS processors, high-speed links, and clustering.
If we are ever going to move away from Pentium-like processor designs (and I sure hope we will), it's probably via more conservative designs like Itanium and Cell. But even with those designs, it's going to be an uphill battle.
People get paid by someone to develop open source software to solve a problem, and then the software is available to everybody. Subcontracting from companies like IBM to open source development houses is probably the best business model for open source. There is nothing wrong with that--it's the way it's supposed to work.
Another common arrangement is where a company like IBM employs the open source developers directly.
Companies that independently develop open source "products" generally are the weakest from the point of view of business.
I think Villasante's problem is neatly summed up in this statement:
Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today," Villasante said.
Villasante seems to think of "open source" as a kind of industry sector or group of companies. But it is just a way of licensing software, and open source will continue to be a "complete mess" in the sense of not having a single business model. But among business models, subcontracting is one of the best for open source firms.
In different words, the people who are confused is the EU politicians and administrators. But what else is new?
Slashdot Mirror
For the amount of money that it's going to cost you to do this (easily $500k), you may be able to create your own version of the application. Of course, I realize that that may not always be possible, but it is worth considering.
There may be a web-based version of the application.
You may be able to outsource the application and have your users access it through rdesktop.
If you only have a few users using it at a time, then accessing a bank of Windows machines through VNC should be enough.
If it's a high-powered application that can't be ported, then you're in trouble. If you are really, really lucky, you can run it under an old version of NT on VMware on your current hardware and under Linux. If it requires a new version of Windows and/or significant resources, you need to upgrade all your hardware, no matter what you do. I'd still get a site license for VMware and run Windows under Linux--that way, at least you more easily avoid the costs of downgrading to an all Windows server infrastructure and retraining everybody, and you can more easily distribute and lock down the (virtual) Windows desktops.
Don't blame your decision of using Linux up to now for your predicament--consider yourself lucky that you have been able to save money so far. The cost of dealing with Windows now (hardware upgrades, licenses, installation, system management, etc.) is the cost you would otherwise have been paying roughly every two years as the cost of doing business.
You can find an explanation of the architecture of the OS X kernel here. As you can see, it is in no way a "BSD variant", it's a Mach kernel with BSD grafted on top of it. In particular, the things that make porting hard, I/O and drivers, are Mach components, not BSD components.
BSD has a fully functioning userland.
.NET.
Yes, but lots of non-GNU stuff in Linux distributions relies on GNU specific features; if you replaced them with BSD tools, things would break everywhere.
And as someone with more than a decade of BSD system management experience and about a decade of Linux under my belt, I can assure you: there is no way I'm ever going to go back to a BSD userland--it is just too painful.
(If it were really a FSF/GNU project there wouldn't even be TALK of using Mono or Java.)
I have no idea why you felt compelled to raise that completely unrelated point, but FWIW, you are wrong. Go check the GNU and the FSF sites for what they actually have to say about Mono, Java, and
I know that lots of smart people have probably thought about this and the landing site and all that, but the notion of sending a probe completely without the ability to move just strikes me as not a smart idea. Even the ability to move very slow would seem to greatly increase the chances that this probe will yield interesting results.
AOL users don't have to understand what open source is in order to benefit from the wider range of clients available for AOL services that will be available as a result.
PCs have the edge in terms of screen resolution, input/output devices, storage, upgradability, and location (desk vs. TV). If consoles catch up in all those areas with desktop PCs, the consoles simply cease to be consoles.
It's been done for Linux and was reported here on Slashdot. As I recall, GNU was the biggest component in terms of LOC, even bigger than the kernel.
More importantly, however, GNU is essential: without the GNU compiler and the GNU command line utilities, Linux wouldn't run; there simply are no substitutes.
People like you keep making fun of GNU for trying to get their name and contributions recognized. But companies like Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and others put billions into marketing, trademark enforcement, and other activities to make people aware of their brand.
Like it or not, having a recognizable "brand" is important even for open source projects: it helps their long-term survival and attracts contributions. People do need to remember that "Linux" really is a combination of the Linux kernel and a lot of GNU utilities and software. And the fact that "GNU" is recognized today by many people is not a consequence of huge paid-for marketing campaigns, it really is a grass-roots effort.
Actually, a bit more honesty in this regard would be nice from commercial vendors. People should remember that most of the code in OS X doesn't come from Apple, but from CMU, GNU, BSD, NeXT and Stepstone. And people should remember that Windows has significant chunks of BSD code in it, together with dozens of codebases from other companies purchased by Microsoft. If you remember where the code actually came from, claims of "innovation" by some of these companies appear in a different light.
I'm wondering: why do you need a license to implement this? Did Google patent this?
In any case, patented or not, the CC license that this falls under seems acceptable for an open standard, even if it is patented, because it is transferable and because its requirements are minimal. Contrast this with the Microsoft Office XML license, which is royalty-free (for now...), but non-transferable.
First, real trust has nothing to do with gambling or business. You don't have to trust in situations like that, you just have to make decisions based on previous knowledge.
That's how people with brain damage operate, and it doesn't work very well. Most decisions normal people make are based not on rational cost/benefit analyses, but on trust and social ties, and it actually works better overall. However, most normal people also don't realize what they are doing and falsely assume that they are acting based on cost/benefit analyses.
Myself, I won't trust anyone who hasnt earned it, and earning it isnt easy, takes time, effort, and a proven track record.
That's not a good strategy. You should have an intermediate level of trust by default, and then modify that upward or downward based on experience. And you probably actually do.
Don't REAL studies involve HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of samples?
Not usually in medicine or psychology. There are excellent statistical procedures to evaluate such studies.
I mean when you tell me that 6 people did this and 13 people did that, I would immediately ask if it was raining outside or if something happened in the news that day, etc.
That's why experiments like this are blinded and randomized.
Imposing costs on manufacturers wouldn't pay for the disposal of imported PCs and would make California manufacturers less competitive. Mandatory take-back programs only work if you can recycle anywhere without proof of purchase, but that has other obvious problems.
I think the California approach is the best compromise.
However, I think consumers should donate their old computer equipment to computer recyclers anyway--many of those machines are still useful to lots of people.
Clean-room reverse engineering doesn't help if the format is patented, and this format is patented.
Since the license is non-transferable, Microsoft can also just stop issuing new royalty-free licenses whenever they choose, or add new conditions.
Consider the case where OpenOffice were to switch to these formats, and then Microsoft wants to kill OOo. What do they do? They just put another condition in their royalty-free license: "This license does not give you the right to create products or software that interoperates with OpenOffice." Even if OOo could continue to use the format (and that alone is uncertain), people couldn't write any add-ons for OOo anymore.
Nothing changed: the formats are proprietary because they are covered by the same patents and licenses as previous Office XML formats. Calling them "open" formats is a blatant lie.
For people who still don't get it: the difference between a "royalty-free license" and an "open" format is that Microsoft can stop issuing royalty-free licenses any time they choose. They can also impose onerous conditions on you as part of the "royalty-free license".
If anything you are reading INTO the article rather than just plain reading it.
I'm not "reading into" the article at all; I'm telling you an extra, well-known fact: the formats are being patented by Microsoft.
The whole point of it is to make it open not proprietary.
"Proprietary" means that the format is owned by some specific company. These formats are owned by Microsoft because Microsoft is patenting them.
You seem to think that technologies become "open" when a company publishes their specifications, but that is completely wrong. One of the strongest forms of proprietary technologies are patented technologies, and they require disclosure of the thing being patented. Microsoft has been publishing the specs because they are making the technology proprietary.
When Brian Jones claims that these formats are "open" because they are published, he either doesn't know what he is talking about, or he is deliberately misleading people.
In fact document management people will likely be ga ga over this since it will be much easier to manage, index and catalog documents that are in an open format.
They will, but they will be doing that because it's a documented format, not an open format. Microsoft has discovered that documenting their proprietary formats gives them advantages.
I still think Flash is a bad idea. FOSS developers should concentrate on making SVG happen.
In fact, the big thing about Flash isn't the format, it's the authoring tools. A Macromedia-like authoring tool for SVG would be a much better investment of time than creating a Flash player.
There are many more interesting distinctions than a simple dichotomy between commercial/noncommercial--why not list them directly?
Have a look at Clusty as one example of a search engine that categorizes your search results along more dimensions, yet seems at least as intuitive and usable as the new Yahoo! interface.
Yahoo!'s interface seems unnecessarily simplistic to me.
RTFA, it states quite specifically, that if you take the new doc extensions and rename them with a zip extension you can view the data in pkzip or any other program that can open zip files.
Yes, that is a technical feature. Technically, you can also manipulate the XML files.
The problem is that Microsoft appears to be patenting those formats, so while you can technically do all these things, it isn't clear that you can do so legally. Microsoft isn't going to go after you for doing this, but the legal risk may keep commercial competitors from implementing the format.
I hate MS, but lets not automatically assume they are evil all the time. They very well could be evil just most of the time.
The fact that they have attempted to patent the formats tells you something...
It is certainly to be welcomed that the file formats are documented.
However, being documented is not the same as being non-proprietary. Microsoft has applied for patents that may apply to the ZIP file format, as well as patents on the XML formats themselves. As long as those patents exist, the formats are proprietary, at least in principle.
There is a good chance that the patents are worthless, but they still cast uncertainty and doubt over non-Microsoft implementations that work to Microsoft's advantage.
Both the public sector and the open source community should insist that Microsoft dedicate all applicable patents to the public domain, or at the very least make a legally binding commitment to providing free and fully transferable licenses with no weird side-conditions (which amounts to the same thing). So far, all Microsoft seems to have offered is free non-transferable licenses, and that is not acceptable if Microsoft wants to claim that these formats are "open".
That's what I say, too. Oh, wait, you were talking about checking your email.
So if you live near a lot of traffic, not only do you have to put up with drivers that can't keep their hands off their horns, now these people will also generate lots of interference. And why? Aren't AM, FM, and a few hundred stations on satellite radio enough?
I think we basically agree. Note, however, that they do claim to present in vivo results, they are just even weaker than their in vitro results.
"No one has ever tried to build a big supercomputer with these chips before," Parsons says.
Like a serious flu season, this sort of thing happens again every few years, when a new generation of grad students and faculty think it's a really neat idea. The thing is, when all is said and done, these things probably still are not cost effective right now. Sufficiently powerful FPGAs are expensive, and custom hardware is expensive. Furthermore, they are a pain to program, and even if they work perfectly they are good only for a limited set of problems. In the end, you are better off with COTS processors, high-speed links, and clustering.
If we are ever going to move away from Pentium-like processor designs (and I sure hope we will), it's probably via more conservative designs like Itanium and Cell. But even with those designs, it's going to be an uphill battle.
Another common arrangement is where a company like IBM employs the open source developers directly.
Companies that independently develop open source "products" generally are the weakest from the point of view of business.
I think Villasante's problem is neatly summed up in this statement:
Villasante seems to think of "open source" as a kind of industry sector or group of companies. But it is just a way of licensing software, and open source will continue to be a "complete mess" in the sense of not having a single business model. But among business models, subcontracting is one of the best for open source firms.
In different words, the people who are confused is the EU politicians and administrators. But what else is new?