This is no link... but it's a quote of the whole article:
'May 3, 2001
Microsoft Is Set to Be Top Foe of Free Code
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, May 2 -- Microsoft is preparing a broad campaign countering the movement to give away and share software code, arguing that it potentially undermines the intellectual property of countries and companies. At the same time, the company is acknowledging that it is feeling pressure from the freely shared alternatives to its commercial software.
In a speech defending Microsoft's business model, to be given on Thursday at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Craig Mundie, a senior vice president at Microsoft and one of its software strategists, will argue that the company already follows the best attributes of the open-source model by sharing the original programmer's instructions, or source code, more widely than is generally realized.
The speech is part of an effort by Microsoft to raise questions about the limits of innovation inherent in the open-source approach and to suggest that companies adopting the approach are putting their intellectual property at risk.
Advocates of the open-source movement say that making the code available permits other developers to tinker with it, find problems and improve the software. Although the movement has not yet had a significant effect on sales of Microsoft's Office and Windows products in the personal computer market, the company wants to enter the corporate software market, where open source has gained ground.
In his speech, Mr. Mundie will argue that one aspect of the open-source model, known as the General Public License, or G.P.L., is a potential trap that undercuts the commercial software business and mirrors some of the worst practices of dot- com businesses, in which goods were given away in an effort to attract visitors to Web sites. G.P.L. requires that any software using source code already covered by the licensing agreement must become available for free distribution.
"This viral aspect of the G.P.L. poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it," Mr. Mundie said in a telephone interview this week.
I.B.M. in particular has been heavily marketing the free Linux operating system.
Mr. Mundie does not identify I.B.M. by name in his speech, which was provided beforehand, but he says that large companies are naïve in adopting the open-source model.
"I would challenge you," he said, "to find a company who is a large established enterprise, who at the end of the day would throw all of its intellectual property into the open- source category."
An I.B.M. executive said that his company had considered the issues surrounding the protection of intellectual property and had decided that it was possible to follow both a proprietary and a shared business model, even one based on the G.P.L.
The executive, Irving Wladawsky- Berger, an I.B.M. vice president, said, "If we thought this was a trap, we wouldn't be doing it, and as you know, we have a lot of lawyers."
In February, Jim Allchin, a software designer at Microsoft, became a lightning rod for industry criticism when he said in an interview with Bloomberg News that freely distributed software code could stifle innovation and that legislators should be aware of the threat.
Mr. Mundie said he would elaborate on Mr. Allchin's comments while also trying to demonstrate that Microsoft already practices many of what he called the best aspects of the open-source model.
"We have been going around the industry talking to people," Mr. Mundie said, "and have been startled to find that people aren't very sophisticated about the implications of what open source means." He acknowledged that the open-source movement was making inroads.
"The news here is that Microsoft is engaging in a serious way in this discussion," he said. "The open- source movement has continued to gather momentum in a P.R. sense and a product sense."
He said Microsoft was particularly concerned about the inroads that the open-source idea was making in other countries.
"It's happening very, very broadly in a way that is troubling to us," he said. "I could highlight a dozen countries around the world who have open-source initiatives."
Mr. Mundie said that in his speech, he would break the open-source strategy into five categories: community, standards, business model, investment and licensing model. Microsoft, he said, in support of the community ideal, already has what he called a shared-source philosophy, which makes its source code available to hardware makers, software developers, scientists, researchers and government agencies.
Microsoft would expand its sharing initiatives, he said. But he added that the company's proprietary business model was a more effective way to support industry standards than the open-source approach, which he said could lead to a "forking" of the software base resulting in the development of multiple incompatible versions of standard programs.
He cited the history of Unix, which has been replete with incompatible versions. Although he acknowledged that the open-source approach had created new technologies, he said that business models using the open- source community were suspect.
"It is innovation that really drives growth," Mr. Mundie said, arguing that without the sustained investment made possible by commercial software, real innovation would not be possible.
He reserved his harshest criticism in the text of his speech for the G.P.L., a software licensing model defined by programmer Richard M. Stallman in 1984.
"This is not understood by many sophisticated people," Mr. Mundie said. "The goal of the G.P.L. is sweeping up all of the intellectual property that has been contributed. That creates many problems downstream, many of which haven't come home to roost yet."
Mr. Stallman has made a distinction between the open-source software movement and the G.P.L., which he designed as part of the free software movement that he led.
In a response to Microsoft's Mr. Allchin in February, Mr. Stallman wrote:"The free software movement was founded in 1984, but its inspiration comes from the ideals of 1776: freedom, community and voluntary cooperation. This is what leads to free enterprise, to free speech, and to free software."
Today a proponent of the open- source software movement said he thought that Microsoft was taking a clever approach in its challenge.
"It's very clever of them," said Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative. "Instead of attacking the entire open-source movement they've singled out the one license that is in a sense politically controversial."'
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/technology/03S OF T.html --
No matter if it was actually copied from The Register or not... a very similar article was on The Register almost a week before this one came to Slashdot...
Conclusion... Slashdot's so called "news" are often not as new as one would like... and too much (imho) of the news are very original.
This has lead to me preferring to read for example The Register rather than Slashdot if it's just news I'm looking for. (Which is pretty bad as Slashdot wants to be "News for Nerds"!)
Am I missing something or has UT been available for Linux for quite some time? (No bundled UT for Linux, but binaries for use with the Windows version)
Would this be an updated version of the old (imo old, by that I mean from 1995 or something like that) "Useless Pages" site?
I've found it probable that the URL for the useless pages page I'm thinking of was "http://www.primus.com/staff/paulp/useless.html" but it isn't there anymore. =/
Anyone know?... anyone have any mirrors/anything of the original site?
There I was kidding around a little (not really funny though, even I can see that).. and you get all serious with me telling me that I'm missing the point?!
If you would have told me that I was offtopic when I moved the discussion completely to fruits I would have accepted that... but this... geeez...
First of all... just buying all that data to keep it to themselves doesn't sound like a very smart move for Google. And honestly... It doesn't sound like Google (even the way it is these days) to start charging people to view search results from their USENET archive. --
I can agree with you that the complete driver probably does not validate as open source...
But still I think this is a very good thing IBM has done... and I doubt that you'll get more than this out of them... at least at this stage...
--
Re:People are missing the point.
on
MySQL FS
·
· Score: 1
I have stored and retrieved data from BLOB fields... so I know that you can just "INSERT INTO sometable (blobfield) VALUES()" to insert data into a BLOB... ( can be somewhat different depending on database and interface, but this is always the (imho easiest) way to handle blob data...)
With this in mind it should be very easy to write a script that'll retrieve images from a database using just a SELECT... (db would be like "id (counter / primary key),imagedata (blob),mimetype (varchar(x)" and the script could be accessed as sumfin like getimage.pl?id=56, just making sure the correct mimetype is sent and then pumping out the image data...)...
I still don't see what is SO hard about BLOBs... they're really just as easy to handle as any other kind of field...
(please take a look at my other, fairly similar, comment at:/comments.pl?sid=01/01/16/1855253&cid=278 too)
--
Re:People are missing the point.
on
MySQL FS
·
· Score: 1
Ehm?
Well.. it should always be possible to do it using the same SQL command... (in some cases some manual fiddleing with the data may be required though)
INSERT INTO sometable (blobfield) VALUES(<sumfin>)
Where <sumfin> is somewhat database dependant, but usually the interfaces takes care of whatever difference may be...
So... if your point is to be valid you should be against accessing ANY kind of database field using one of these interfaces... not?
('Cus accessing BLOB fields is really no more different from interface to interface than accessing any other kind of field!)
--
Re:Is MySQL ready for that?
on
MySQL FS
·
· Score: 1
I just don't understand what you mean when you talk about the license problem with MySQL?...
I thought open source geeks liked the GPL?
People are always ranting about cool software not being GPLed... now MySQL is, but people still complain about the license...?!
(http://www.mysql.com/information/index.html if you want to verify that MySQL really is released under the GPL) --
And... as for the thing with "cat 'SELECT blah FROM blahtable' >/mnt/mysql/queries/testquery"... first of all I don't understand your use of the cat command... but whatever...
Here's what I've been doing now and then for a long time:
"echo 'SELECT blah FROM blahtable' | mysql blahdatabase -p >/mnt/mysql/queries/testquery"...
(Isn't that about what your thing is supposed to do?)
--
Re:People are missing the point.
on
MySQL FS
·
· Score: 1
I don't really understand what you mean when you talk about how hard it is to handle BLOB fields...
Now I have actually never done this with _MySQL_... but I have written a bunch of perl scripts (running on Linux machines) accessing Microsoft SQL Servers (using DBD::Sybase with FreeTDS libraries if you're interested) and it's really easy to insert or select data from BLOB fields (or IMAGE fields or whatever Micros~1 feels like calling them).
I can't really see why this would be any harder with MySQL (which I also work with, but on other projects, where we currently do not need to store "non-text data", or whatever the contents of a blob field should be called)...
There are a lot of high-reliability applications where the ability to run without a CPU fan is valuable. Examples include military, biomedical instrumentation, process control, etc.
Uhm? Do you really need this kind of processing power for these kinds of things?!
To me it sounds like using a 600 MHz Cyrix Samuel2 for any of these things would be a terrific way to waste both money and processor power.
On the other hand, I do think that it could be useful for laptops / webpads and similar things, as you also mentioned.
I don't really think that is a major problem (provided you have a nice monitor)...
I tried 1600x1200 for a while myself, but decided to go for 1280x1024 instead as my monitor only did 1600x1200 @75Hz... the image was still crisp though(!)...
--
Yeah... I have a Matrox G400 card myself, and it works great!
It seems that the Matrox G-series cards are also always among the first cards to be supported when hardware acceleration is added to new projects, which is nice.
Of course, if you're just looking for a 3D-frame-pumping-device there are probably other cards (Nvidia?) that'll satisfy your needs better...
I'm very happy with my G400 though... nice and crisp image, nothing to complain about it really...
Uhm... I never had any problems with any Athlon ("classic" or thunderbird) systems running Linux (Debian dist, homemade kernels of course)... but then I have not enabled the cpuid support (I don't know what I would use that for anyway).
and uhm... passing a parameter to the kernel at boot should not be THAT hard... --
'scuse me?
My SB Live! Player 5.1 has always worked PERFECTLY in Debian...
(ever tried making sure you have support for SB Live! in the kernel and the "modprobe emu10k1"?)
Debian is not behind in any way when it comes to drivers...
and if you have Debian Woody you get XFree86 4.0.1, which should make most gamers very happy.
So please, do some research before you start listening to people saying that Debian is so old, and no new things work with it etc etc etc...
Slashdot Mirror
This is no link... but it's a quote of the whole article:
S OF T.html
'May 3, 2001
Microsoft Is Set to Be Top Foe of Free Code
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, May 2 -- Microsoft is preparing a broad campaign countering the movement to give away and share software code, arguing that it potentially undermines the intellectual property of countries and companies. At the same time, the company is acknowledging that it is feeling pressure from the freely shared alternatives to its commercial software.
In a speech defending Microsoft's business model, to be given on Thursday at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Craig Mundie, a senior vice president at Microsoft and one of its software strategists, will argue that the company already follows the best attributes of the open-source model by sharing the original programmer's instructions, or source code, more widely than is generally realized.
The speech is part of an effort by Microsoft to raise questions about the limits of innovation inherent in the open-source approach and to suggest that companies adopting the approach are putting their intellectual property at risk.
Advocates of the open-source movement say that making the code available permits other developers to tinker with it, find problems and improve the software. Although the movement has not yet had a significant effect on sales of Microsoft's Office and Windows products in the personal computer market, the company wants to enter the corporate software market, where open source has gained ground.
In his speech, Mr. Mundie will argue that one aspect of the open-source model, known as the General Public License, or G.P.L., is a potential trap that undercuts the commercial software business and mirrors some of the worst practices of dot- com businesses, in which goods were given away in an effort to attract visitors to Web sites. G.P.L. requires that any software using source code already covered by the licensing agreement must become available for free distribution.
"This viral aspect of the G.P.L. poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it," Mr. Mundie said in a telephone interview this week.
I.B.M. in particular has been heavily marketing the free Linux operating system.
Mr. Mundie does not identify I.B.M. by name in his speech, which was provided beforehand, but he says that large companies are naïve in adopting the open-source model.
"I would challenge you," he said, "to find a company who is a large established enterprise, who at the end of the day would throw all of its intellectual property into the open- source category."
An I.B.M. executive said that his company had considered the issues surrounding the protection of intellectual property and had decided that it was possible to follow both a proprietary and a shared business model, even one based on the G.P.L.
The executive, Irving Wladawsky- Berger, an I.B.M. vice president, said, "If we thought this was a trap, we wouldn't be doing it, and as you know, we have a lot of lawyers."
In February, Jim Allchin, a software designer at Microsoft, became a lightning rod for industry criticism when he said in an interview with Bloomberg News that freely distributed software code could stifle innovation and that legislators should be aware of the threat.
Mr. Mundie said he would elaborate on Mr. Allchin's comments while also trying to demonstrate that Microsoft already practices many of what he called the best aspects of the open-source model.
"We have been going around the industry talking to people," Mr. Mundie said, "and have been startled to find that people aren't very sophisticated about the implications of what open source means." He acknowledged that the open-source movement was making inroads.
"The news here is that Microsoft is engaging in a serious way in this discussion," he said. "The open- source movement has continued to gather momentum in a P.R. sense and a product sense."
He said Microsoft was particularly concerned about the inroads that the open-source idea was making in other countries.
"It's happening very, very broadly in a way that is troubling to us," he said. "I could highlight a dozen countries around the world who have open-source initiatives."
Mr. Mundie said that in his speech, he would break the open-source strategy into five categories: community, standards, business model, investment and licensing model. Microsoft, he said, in support of the community ideal, already has what he called a shared-source philosophy, which makes its source code available to hardware makers, software developers, scientists, researchers and government agencies.
Microsoft would expand its sharing initiatives, he said. But he added that the company's proprietary business model was a more effective way to support industry standards than the open-source approach, which he said could lead to a "forking" of the software base resulting in the development of multiple incompatible versions of standard programs.
He cited the history of Unix, which has been replete with incompatible versions. Although he acknowledged that the open-source approach had created new technologies, he said that business models using the open- source community were suspect.
"It is innovation that really drives growth," Mr. Mundie said, arguing that without the sustained investment made possible by commercial software, real innovation would not be possible.
He reserved his harshest criticism in the text of his speech for the G.P.L., a software licensing model defined by programmer Richard M. Stallman in 1984.
"This is not understood by many sophisticated people," Mr. Mundie said. "The goal of the G.P.L. is sweeping up all of the intellectual property that has been contributed. That creates many problems downstream, many of which haven't come home to roost yet."
Mr. Stallman has made a distinction between the open-source software movement and the G.P.L., which he designed as part of the free software movement that he led.
In a response to Microsoft's Mr. Allchin in February, Mr. Stallman wrote:"The free software movement was founded in 1984, but its inspiration comes from the ideals of 1776: freedom, community and voluntary cooperation. This is what leads to free enterprise, to free speech, and to free software."
Today a proponent of the open- source software movement said he thought that Microsoft was taking a clever approach in its challenge.
"It's very clever of them," said Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative. "Instead of attacking the entire open-source movement they've singled out the one license that is in a sense politically controversial."'
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/technology/03
--
You certainly have a point!
. htm.
But how long does the actual data on a CD-ROM survive ("real CD-ROM" / CD-R / CD-RW)?
Btw, blatantly assuming you're talking about WordStar for DOS there are good utilities for conversion of WordStar to other, more common, formats here: http://www.petrie.u-net.com/wsdos/pages/downloads
--
No matter if it was actually copied from The Register or not... a very similar article was on The Register almost a week before this one came to Slashdot...
Conclusion... Slashdot's so called "news" are often not as new as one would like... and too much (imho) of the news are very original.
This has lead to me preferring to read for example The Register rather than Slashdot if it's just news I'm looking for. (Which is pretty bad as Slashdot wants to be "News for Nerds"!)
--
Am I missing something or has UT been available for Linux for quite some time?
(No bundled UT for Linux, but binaries for use with the Windows version)
UT for Linux (Loki)
--
That'd not be all that hard to accomplish AFAIK...
--
You could try "pinfo" if you dislike info...
Just an idea... maybe you already tried pinfo too..?
--
They'd obviously use it to clean Windows [tm].
--
Would this be an updated version of the old (imo old, by that I mean from 1995 or something like that) "Useless Pages" site?
I've found it probable that the URL for the useless pages page I'm thinking of was "http://www.primus.com/staff/paulp/useless.html" but it isn't there anymore. =/
Anyone know?... anyone have any mirrors/anything of the original site?
--
There I was kidding around a little (not really funny though, even I can see that).. and you get all serious with me telling me that I'm missing the point?!
If you would have told me that I was offtopic when I moved the discussion completely to fruits I would have accepted that... but this... geeez...
--
to compare apt-get to 'rpm' is like comparing apples to oranges.
Ok... which of apples and oranges are preferrable... (ie more advanced / better functionality)?
--
apt-get does _NOT_ downgrade just because there are only older versions in its sources!
Nice try though...
--
First of all... just buying all that data to keep it to themselves doesn't sound like a very smart move for Google. And honestly... It doesn't sound like Google (even the way it is these days) to start charging people to view search results from their USENET archive.
--
I can agree with you that the complete driver probably does not validate as open source...
But still I think this is a very good thing IBM has done... and I doubt that you'll get more than this out of them... at least at this stage...
--
I have stored and retrieved data from BLOB fields... so I know that you can just "INSERT INTO sometable (blobfield) VALUES()" to insert data into a BLOB... ( can be somewhat different depending on database and interface, but this is always the (imho easiest) way to handle blob data...)
/comments.pl?sid=01/01/16/1855253&cid=278 too)
With this in mind it should be very easy to write a script that'll retrieve images from a database using just a SELECT... (db would be like "id (counter / primary key),imagedata (blob),mimetype (varchar(x)" and the script could be accessed as sumfin like getimage.pl?id=56, just making sure the correct mimetype is sent and then pumping out the image data...)...
I still don't see what is SO hard about BLOBs... they're really just as easy to handle as any other kind of field...
(please take a look at my other, fairly similar, comment at:
--
Ehm?
Well.. it should always be possible to do it using the same SQL command... (in some cases some manual fiddleing with the data may be required though)
INSERT INTO sometable (blobfield) VALUES(<sumfin>)
Where <sumfin> is somewhat database dependant, but usually the interfaces takes care of whatever difference may be...
So... if your point is to be valid you should be against accessing ANY kind of database field using one of these interfaces... not?
('Cus accessing BLOB fields is really no more different from interface to interface than accessing any other kind of field!)
--
I just don't understand what you mean when you talk about the license problem with MySQL?...
I thought open source geeks liked the GPL?
People are always ranting about cool software not being GPLed... now MySQL is, but people still complain about the license...?!
(http://www.mysql.com/information/index.html if you want to verify that MySQL really is released under the GPL)
--
And... as for the thing with "cat 'SELECT blah FROM blahtable' >/mnt/mysql/queries/testquery"... first of all I don't understand your use of the cat command... but whatever...
Here's what I've been doing now and then for a long time:
"echo 'SELECT blah FROM blahtable' | mysql blahdatabase -p >/mnt/mysql/queries/testquery"...
(Isn't that about what your thing is supposed to do?)
--
I don't really understand what you mean when you talk about how hard it is to handle BLOB fields...
Now I have actually never done this with _MySQL_... but I have written a bunch of perl scripts (running on Linux machines) accessing Microsoft SQL Servers (using DBD::Sybase with FreeTDS libraries if you're interested) and it's really easy to insert or select data from BLOB fields (or IMAGE fields or whatever Micros~1 feels like calling them).
I can't really see why this would be any harder with MySQL (which I also work with, but on other projects, where we currently do not need to store "non-text data", or whatever the contents of a blob field should be called)...
--
Well.... I guess we will know for sure pretty soon...
Q: When will the Beta be released?
A: The beta is scheduled for Spring 2001.
--
There are a lot of high-reliability applications where the ability to run without a CPU fan is valuable. Examples include military, biomedical instrumentation, process control, etc.
Uhm? Do you really need this kind of processing power for these kinds of things?!
To me it sounds like using a 600 MHz Cyrix Samuel2 for any of these things would be a terrific way to waste both money and processor power.
On the other hand, I do think that it could be useful for laptops / webpads and similar things, as you also mentioned.
--
I don't really think that is a major problem (provided you have a nice monitor)... I tried 1600x1200 for a while myself, but decided to go for 1280x1024 instead as my monitor only did 1600x1200 @75Hz... the image was still crisp though(!)...
--
Yeah... I have a Matrox G400 card myself, and it works great!
It seems that the Matrox G-series cards are also always among the first cards to be supported when hardware acceleration is added to new projects, which is nice.
Of course, if you're just looking for a 3D-frame-pumping-device there are probably other cards (Nvidia?) that'll satisfy your needs better...
I'm very happy with my G400 though... nice and crisp image, nothing to complain about it really...
--
Exactly!
Isn't justice wonderful...?
--
Uhm... I never had any problems with any Athlon ("classic" or thunderbird) systems running Linux (Debian dist, homemade kernels of course)... but then I have not enabled the cpuid support (I don't know what I would use that for anyway).
and uhm... passing a parameter to the kernel at boot should not be THAT hard...
--
'scuse me?
My SB Live! Player 5.1 has always worked PERFECTLY in Debian...
(ever tried making sure you have support for SB Live! in the kernel and the "modprobe emu10k1"?)
Debian is not behind in any way when it comes to drivers...
and if you have Debian Woody you get XFree86 4.0.1, which should make most gamers very happy.
So please, do some research before you start listening to people saying that Debian is so old, and no new things work with it etc etc etc...
--