Gator's Intranet
on
Gator Examined
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Interesting, I went to look at www.gator.com, but the first time round I typed gator.com instead. Apparently Gator has a Debian mirror, but you can't access it from the outside. (No doubt it will disappear soon after it gets Slashdotted.)
If you're just starting in web development, don't use MySQL unless you have absolutely no choice. It will hurt you in long term.
When you first start out, you're happy that you can put data in and pull it back out. Then you find that your data gets inconsistent for some reason. To stop this happening, database designers put constraints on the data, and use transactions. If the job is done properly, it shouldn't be possible to insert inconsistent data, like a company address that doesn't belong to a company.
Unfortunately, if you chose to use MySQL at the beginning, you're now stuffed because it doesn't provide these features. What's worse, its SQL is rather non-standard, so you're going to have a problem moving to anything else. I know that people will think I'm trolling for Postgres, but I'm not really. Use any database that supports this type of feature. There are two other open source databases which are worth a look: Firebird and SAP DB.
There are those who would like to see the ITU take over from ICANN. I'm not sure that the ITU is the perfect organisation to do it. It is bureaucratic and is a group of telcos rather than including wider Internet interests. However, I do agree that it would be a lot better than what we have at the moment.
Perhaps World Telecommunications Day would be a good opportunity for the ITU to put this agenda forward.
Re:reverse checking on senders address
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
Exim already does this. I have it turned on, and it does cut down on the amount of spam. The one annoyance is genuine mail that is unreplyable. It shouldn't be sent, but lots of things happen that shouldn't... Even groups.yahoo.com went through a period when it wasn't accepting bounces.
Interesting, if you look at the pipeline design of the PowerPC it is much closer to Intel than AMD. The PowerPC pipeline has sixteen stages, the Pentium 4 twenty, and the Athlon ten.
Presumably the P4 can reach higher clock speeds than the Athlon because there is less work to do at each pipeline stage. On the other hand a longer pipeline increases the probability of a stall, so the work done per clock cycle goes down.
I'd speculate that the PowerPC ought, therefore, to be able to achieve clock rates approaching but not equalling the P4, since they are both comparatively "over-pipelined". At the same time, the PowerPC ought to deliver slightly more throughput per clock cycle because the pipeline is slightly shorter.
Meanwhile, the Athlon will be running at a significantly lower clock rate, but delivering comparable throughput.
Does anyone know of a good introduction to modern PC hardware, the different processor cores and so on? I don't really know the major differences between Barton and Palomino. I'd like to know, partly for curiosity, but also because when I build PCs I may otherwise end up with something sub-optimal.
I'd also be interested in something that explains the structure of a PC system. What is the Northbridge, how is the PCI bus coupled to the processor, that sort of thing.
Does anyone know what the current situation is with SVG? I see some of the Solaris builds support it. I heard that there was some licensing problem with libart, but surely they can work something out? They're both open source projects after all.
My biggest gripe with Debian has always been its reluctance to include new software. If reliability is important, you should be conservative, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.:-) I'm pleased that there is a new Debian-based distro that doesn't force me to take this approach.
(For example, I do a lot with IPv6 because it's easier than setting up VPNs and then dealing with numbering conflicts. If I was going to be conservative, and avoid IPv6 on the grounds that it is too new, it would make my job harder.)
Debian and RedHat are important because they are free (as in liberty) distributions. I want the freedom to tinker with, and give away, the distribution, not just the software that it contains.
It makes me really sad to read this. Java is a long way behind the state of the art for expressive power. These changes are welcome but Sun are presenting them as though they are innovative. Three lines to remove the four character strings from a collection? Look at it in Python:
filter (lambda x: len(x) != 4, list)
If you object that Java is doing type checking, and Python isn't, look at it in Haskell:
This is the more interesting part of the story. Fujitsu are going to pay for some engineers to work at RedHat offices, improving "performance, stability and the ability to run on large servers with heavy processing loads."
I am very encouraged by the number of companies prepared to take this step, bearing in mind that the GPL forces them to make the changes available for everyone.
I've long been puzzled as to why a company should pay for improvements to a system, if they then have to make these available to their competitors. I think perhaps there are two reasons. First, Linux is not Windows. Making Linux a better competitor to Windows helps Fujitsu more than they are hurt by having to give code away.
Secondly, companies focus on their own area. A company that makes, for example, 8-way AMD servers would focus on that area. Their competitors would have access to the code for running well on 8-way AMD servers, but if they don't make them it doesn't help.
It's really hard to sell to people who raise irrational objections. You know the sort of thing, you phone and tell someone about a new type of mail server you've invented. "Oh no, we've already got anti-virus," comes the reply.
That said, a lot of the objections are real. In a large company, IT systems have to outlast any one developer, and starting again is very expensive.
To answer the first point, you must show that OSS skills are available in the marketplace, that it's easy to learn, and that you can document the system you set up. Show your managers companies that offer Linux/OSS training, so they know it's easy to give other people the skills if they need to. Show how IBM is basing their business around open source, because that gives them an alternative pool of skills to draw on.
The second point raises the issue of unsupported software. I have a suspicion that a lot of companies were burned during the dot-com time, installing software from companies that then went pop. You need to show how the availability of source code makes OSS different.
Also, I think if you have the source code, the rate of bitrot is much slower. If you download a binary for libc5, it would be a real nuisance getting it to run on a modern Linux distribution. Download the source and it will probably compile with no problems.
I agree that it's difficult getting open source projects to interoperate. I think the problem is that interoperation is hard, often harder than developing a program that works in isolation. Writing a simple mail server would be easy, you could build it on top of something like Distributed Ruby and have it working in a day. Writing a mail server that interoperates properly with everything else that's out there is a totally different proposition.
Whatever the situation with open source, it's far worse with proprietary software. No open source project that I'm aware of has anything as difficult to interoperate with as.DOC.
This directive was first published in the middle of last year, I don't know why it's suddenly become newsworthy. The anti-spam campaigners have done well, though. As far as EU companies go, email will be opt-in for the whole European Economic Area (which includes the European Union). I'd like to thank the people who have put in so much effort to bring about this result.
Another interesting legal change comes with the Electronic Commerce Directive, which removes ISP's liability when they are acting as a "mere conduit" for illegal information. This is already in force, and marks the end of Godrey v Demon.
The report starts off a section by saying, "Myth: Linux Will Be Less Expensive." The author then shows one situation in which Linux is the same price. "Therefore," implies the article, "it is a myth that Linux will be less expensive." It's an obvious non-sequitur. I wonder if Gartner's clients are paying for that sort of thing, or if it just got added in the summary.
More importantly, the article misses the big difference with Linux, that it puts the customer in the driving seat. If you want to run NT 4 after it is out of support, you won't get security fixes and the like. With Linux, the source code is all out there, so you can keep patching yourself if you want to. Assuming that you aren't running loads of services, that would be a reasonably straightforward thing to do.
This is the reason why Linux is a "paradigm shift" and not just another product which happens to be 10% cheaper.
IPv6 is an essential part of our business. It's an easier option than a VPN. For example, if we needed to link two networks that both use numbers from 10.0.0.0, there could be a numbering clash.
With IPv6 we don't have the problem, and all the machines configure themselves as an added bonus. We just run a route advertising daemon somewhere on the network, load the appropriate modules on the computers, and we're away.
The services we provide to the outside world all talk IPv6 as well as IPv4, but at the moment that's not our primary motivation for supporting it.
Exim does all this. The domain mirroring would be done in a rather different way, but the effect is the same. Everything else is pretty similar to Sendmail.
Exim has some nice features of its own, too. You can tell it to verify senders by calling their MTAs and starting the process of delivering a reply. (The process is stopped before they actually get anything.) This catches a lot of spam; my log file is full of messages from Hotmail saying that hotsex123@hotmail.com has exceeded its quota...
Exim can also pull addresses out of SQL databases, and use Perl to control message routing. This is tremendously flexible for large sites. For example a company's main gateway could have an SQL database that is used to map joe@bigcorp.com to joe@london.england.bigcorp.com and so on. I once developed a system where users were created with a CORBA remote procedure call. The Exim end worked like a dream; providing POP to these accounts was a pain.
Some while ago, I looked at Postfix because it's bundled with RedHat. As far as I can tell, it's nothing like as flexible. I really wish RedHat would bundle Exim instead, because it's a pain to go looking for Exim RPMs.:-(
Here in Britain, we had an artist who drew pound notes. He wasn't forging them in the sense that he was going to pass them off as originals. His work is difficult to pin down; it is part parody but he is also improving the originals.
What would happen is that the artist, Boggs, would go into a shop and ask to buy something. He would try to convince the person at the checkout to accept a Boggs note rather than a normal one. So, he might offer you a £5 Boggs note in exchange for £5 worth of goods. If you felt that his art was worth £5, you would accept.
If you did accept, you were about to become very rich. He would tip off the people who collected his art that a note had been "spent", and the lucky shop assistant would be offered thousands of pounds for the note.
Of course, Boggs was charged with counterfeiting currency, because the people who govern us don't have a sense of humour. In due course Boggs appeared in court, represented by pro bono counsel. It seems that Boggs offered to paint his fee, but, not wanting to get struck off, his lawyer said that he would rather work for free!
After one of the most wacky trials I can remember, the jury voted to let Boggs off. In the process, the government made Boggs rich; thousands more people heard about his art, and the price went through the roof.
Shortly afterwards, the British currency had one of its periodic redesigns. The banknotes had changed to include a claim of copyright. Presumably the government wants to be able to get an injunction against any future Boggs, rather than taking its chance in front of a jury.
Not knowing Norwegian law, I'm shooting in the dark a bit. However, as Jon was charged with hacking a machine which he owned, it seems kind of like being charged with burgling your own house.
In democracies there are checks and balances that are supposed to derail farcical cases like this before they get to a proper court. It's quite scary that they didn't operate in this case.
I don't know the situation in Norway; in Britain we have the ability to stick the prosecution with all the defence costs when something like this happens. I really, really hope it happened to them.
Also it might be argued that it was a malicious prosecution, brought for the purposes of harassment rather than because there was a realistic chance of a conviction. This can lead to damages too. Occasionally the damages are punitive, and very large, if for example the malicious prosecution resulted from the misuse of a public office.
I'm glad to see that the Linux kernel people now have a bug tracking system, but I'm very disappointed that they couldn't find a proprietary one that was good enough. After all, they are enormously more productive now they use Visual SourceSafe for source control.;-)
A few years ago, I asked for Internet banking with them, and at that time it was at the complete opposite extreme. There was lots of IE-specific eye-candy, and it didn't work with anything Unix flavoured. To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work with a lot of versions of IE either.
I wrote to them complaining that I couldn't use the site, and asking for the £10 back that they wanted for providing the facility. My letter vanished into the ethers and my £10 never reappeared. At the same time they did fix the site, probably in response to my letter and many others like it.
You may like to have a look at TUTOS. We've just implemented this. It has some rough edges still, but it is quite a comprehensive GPL groupware package.
You basically get contact management, scheduling, task and time management, and bug tracking. The server runs with Apache and PHP, and clients use it through a web interface. This means that the clients can run on (almost) any operating system.
No, I'm nothing to do with the project, I'm just a satisfied customer.:-)
Being a salesman shouldn't be about lying. It's about drawing attention to the attractive points of your product. Think about buying a car; the salesman points out the airbags, but he doesn't draw attention to the fact that there aren't electric windows in the back.
Also, in technology, an important sales job is to explain what the product does, and how it will fit in with the customer's business process. Somewhere along this path, engineers get involved too, but it is usually the salesman's job to start the process.
Lying, though, is bad news. It can get you sued, and it will lose customers. Salesmen do it all the time, but it's a really bad strategy.
$0.00 may be reasonable, but refusing to extend the same terms to open source software is hardly non-discriminatory.
Sounds as though Microsoft may need more than RAND terms to implement a scheme like this. They actually want to discriminate, refusing to license the patent to some of their competitors.
I don't know why there are so many posts criticising the Abiword team, or saying that open source won't work. It doesn't make sense to say that open source won't work because it already has: it is the dominant web server platform for example. Have a look at the Apache web site—there isn't a toll-free number that you can call if you get stuck.
I run a software business; we use some commercial software and some open source software. We don't really use open source software because of the price, though that is a factor. We use it because the best open source products are better than their commercial counterparts. Apache is a good case in point; our web server hasn't been 0wn3d yet.
Also if we use commercial software, it is written for the supplier's benefit. OpenOffice writes files in a (rather complicated) XML format, so if we need to do something else with the documents it's possible. Word, probably deliberately, writes files in an opaque format that keeps changing. We use Word at the moment but we would like to change, so we keep control of the business and not Microsoft. We may well make the change when the new StarOffice release ships. (Sorry Abiword; but I am downloading the latest version now so you are in with a chance.:-) )
Open source gives you flexibility. There is something I would like to do to the Mozilla composer, which would make it into a completely different tool. With open source I can do that. Even with "free beer" Internet Explorer I couldn't because the interface exported by Microsoft isn't enough to do what I want.
The biggest problem I always had was teaching people to use PGP. Most people were happy to encrypt—in principle—but couldn't figure out how to use PGP.
So I created Whisper. Whisper is password based, rather than public key based, because it's easier for people to understand. (Of course you must pick a strong password if you want it to be secure against a determined attack.)
I've not yet found anyone who can't Whisper. What I need at the moment are people to audit the crypto (it's basically PKCS-5). Also I am currently planning a new version, so please suggest any features you want on the SourceForge page.
Of course if you want to help develop it, that would be welcome too.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, I went to look at www.gator.com, but the first time round I typed gator.com instead. Apparently Gator has a Debian mirror, but you can't access it from the outside. (No doubt it will disappear soon after it gets Slashdotted.)
If you're just starting in web development, don't use MySQL unless you have absolutely no choice. It will hurt you in long term.
When you first start out, you're happy that you can put data in and pull it back out. Then you find that your data gets inconsistent for some reason. To stop this happening, database designers put constraints on the data, and use transactions. If the job is done properly, it shouldn't be possible to insert inconsistent data, like a company address that doesn't belong to a company.
Unfortunately, if you chose to use MySQL at the beginning, you're now stuffed because it doesn't provide these features. What's worse, its SQL is rather non-standard, so you're going to have a problem moving to anything else. I know that people will think I'm trolling for Postgres, but I'm not really. Use any database that supports this type of feature. There are two other open source databases which are worth a look: Firebird and SAP DB.
There are those who would like to see the ITU take over from ICANN. I'm not sure that the ITU is the perfect organisation to do it. It is bureaucratic and is a group of telcos rather than including wider Internet interests. However, I do agree that it would be a lot better than what we have at the moment.
Perhaps World Telecommunications Day would be a good opportunity for the ITU to put this agenda forward.
Exim already does this. I have it turned on, and it does cut down on the amount of spam. The one annoyance is genuine mail that is unreplyable. It shouldn't be sent, but lots of things happen that shouldn't... Even groups.yahoo.com went through a period when it wasn't accepting bounces.
Interesting, if you look at the pipeline design of the PowerPC it is much closer to Intel than AMD. The PowerPC pipeline has sixteen stages, the Pentium 4 twenty, and the Athlon ten.
Presumably the P4 can reach higher clock speeds than the Athlon because there is less work to do at each pipeline stage. On the other hand a longer pipeline increases the probability of a stall, so the work done per clock cycle goes down.
I'd speculate that the PowerPC ought, therefore, to be able to achieve clock rates approaching but not equalling the P4, since they are both comparatively "over-pipelined". At the same time, the PowerPC ought to deliver slightly more throughput per clock cycle because the pipeline is slightly shorter.
Meanwhile, the Athlon will be running at a significantly lower clock rate, but delivering comparable throughput.
Does anyone know of a good introduction to modern PC hardware, the different processor cores and so on? I don't really know the major differences between Barton and Palomino. I'd like to know, partly for curiosity, but also because when I build PCs I may otherwise end up with something sub-optimal.
I'd also be interested in something that explains the structure of a PC system. What is the Northbridge, how is the PCI bus coupled to the processor, that sort of thing.
Does anyone know what the current situation is with SVG? I see some of the Solaris builds support it. I heard that there was some licensing problem with libart, but surely they can work something out? They're both open source projects after all.
My biggest gripe with Debian has always been its reluctance to include new software. If reliability is important, you should be conservative, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. :-) I'm pleased that there is a new Debian-based distro that doesn't force me to take this approach.
(For example, I do a lot with IPv6 because it's easier than setting up VPNs and then dealing with numbering conflicts. If I was going to be conservative, and avoid IPv6 on the grounds that it is too new, it would make my job harder.)
Debian and RedHat are important because they are free (as in liberty) distributions. I want the freedom to tinker with, and give away, the distribution, not just the software that it contains.
It makes me really sad to read this. Java is a long way behind the state of the art for expressive power. These changes are welcome but Sun are presenting them as though they are innovative. Three lines to remove the four character strings from a collection? Look at it in Python:
/= 4) list
filter (lambda x: len(x) != 4, list)
If you object that Java is doing type checking, and Python isn't, look at it in Haskell:
filter (\x -> (length x)
Time to move on I think...
This is the more interesting part of the story. Fujitsu are going to pay for some engineers to work at RedHat offices, improving "performance, stability and the ability to run on large servers with heavy processing loads."
I am very encouraged by the number of companies prepared to take this step, bearing in mind that the GPL forces them to make the changes available for everyone.
I've long been puzzled as to why a company should pay for improvements to a system, if they then have to make these available to their competitors. I think perhaps there are two reasons. First, Linux is not Windows. Making Linux a better competitor to Windows helps Fujitsu more than they are hurt by having to give code away.
Secondly, companies focus on their own area. A company that makes, for example, 8-way AMD servers would focus on that area. Their competitors would have access to the code for running well on 8-way AMD servers, but if they don't make them it doesn't help.
It's really hard to sell to people who raise irrational objections. You know the sort of thing, you phone and tell someone about a new type of mail server you've invented. "Oh no, we've already got anti-virus," comes the reply.
That said, a lot of the objections are real. In a large company, IT systems have to outlast any one developer, and starting again is very expensive.
To answer the first point, you must show that OSS skills are available in the marketplace, that it's easy to learn, and that you can document the system you set up. Show your managers companies that offer Linux/OSS training, so they know it's easy to give other people the skills if they need to. Show how IBM is basing their business around open source, because that gives them an alternative pool of skills to draw on.
The second point raises the issue of unsupported software. I have a suspicion that a lot of companies were burned during the dot-com time, installing software from companies that then went pop. You need to show how the availability of source code makes OSS different.
Also, I think if you have the source code, the rate of bitrot is much slower. If you download a binary for libc5, it would be a real nuisance getting it to run on a modern Linux distribution. Download the source and it will probably compile with no problems.
I agree that it's difficult getting open source projects to interoperate. I think the problem is that interoperation is hard, often harder than developing a program that works in isolation. Writing a simple mail server would be easy, you could build it on top of something like Distributed Ruby and have it working in a day. Writing a mail server that interoperates properly with everything else that's out there is a totally different proposition.
.DOC.
Whatever the situation with open source, it's far worse with proprietary software. No open source project that I'm aware of has anything as difficult to interoperate with as
This directive was first published in the middle of last year, I don't know why it's suddenly become newsworthy. The anti-spam campaigners have done well, though. As far as EU companies go, email will be opt-in for the whole European Economic Area (which includes the European Union). I'd like to thank the people who have put in so much effort to bring about this result.
Another interesting legal change comes with the Electronic Commerce Directive, which removes ISP's liability when they are acting as a "mere conduit" for illegal information. This is already in force, and marks the end of Godrey v Demon.
The report starts off a section by saying, "Myth: Linux Will Be Less Expensive." The author then shows one situation in which Linux is the same price. "Therefore," implies the article, "it is a myth that Linux will be less expensive." It's an obvious non-sequitur. I wonder if Gartner's clients are paying for that sort of thing, or if it just got added in the summary.
More importantly, the article misses the big difference with Linux, that it puts the customer in the driving seat. If you want to run NT 4 after it is out of support, you won't get security fixes and the like. With Linux, the source code is all out there, so you can keep patching yourself if you want to. Assuming that you aren't running loads of services, that would be a reasonably straightforward thing to do.
This is the reason why Linux is a "paradigm shift" and not just another product which happens to be 10% cheaper.
IPv6 is an essential part of our business. It's an easier option than a VPN. For example, if we needed to link two networks that both use numbers from 10.0.0.0, there could be a numbering clash.
With IPv6 we don't have the problem, and all the machines configure themselves as an added bonus. We just run a route advertising daemon somewhere on the network, load the appropriate modules on the computers, and we're away.
The services we provide to the outside world all talk IPv6 as well as IPv4, but at the moment that's not our primary motivation for supporting it.
Exim does all this. The domain mirroring would be done in a rather different way, but the effect is the same. Everything else is pretty similar to Sendmail.
:-(
Exim has some nice features of its own, too. You can tell it to verify senders by calling their MTAs and starting the process of delivering a reply. (The process is stopped before they actually get anything.) This catches a lot of spam; my log file is full of messages from Hotmail saying that hotsex123@hotmail.com has exceeded its quota...
Exim can also pull addresses out of SQL databases, and use Perl to control message routing. This is tremendously flexible for large sites. For example a company's main gateway could have an SQL database that is used to map joe@bigcorp.com to joe@london.england.bigcorp.com and so on. I once developed a system where users were created with a CORBA remote procedure call. The Exim end worked like a dream; providing POP to these accounts was a pain.
Some while ago, I looked at Postfix because it's bundled with RedHat. As far as I can tell, it's nothing like as flexible. I really wish RedHat would bundle Exim instead, because it's a pain to go looking for Exim RPMs.
What would happen is that the artist, Boggs, would go into a shop and ask to buy something. He would try to convince the person at the checkout to accept a Boggs note rather than a normal one. So, he might offer you a £5 Boggs note in exchange for £5 worth of goods. If you felt that his art was worth £5, you would accept.
If you did accept, you were about to become very rich. He would tip off the people who collected his art that a note had been "spent", and the lucky shop assistant would be offered thousands of pounds for the note.
Of course, Boggs was charged with counterfeiting currency, because the people who govern us don't have a sense of humour. In due course Boggs appeared in court, represented by pro bono counsel. It seems that Boggs offered to paint his fee, but, not wanting to get struck off, his lawyer said that he would rather work for free!
After one of the most wacky trials I can remember, the jury voted to let Boggs off. In the process, the government made Boggs rich; thousands more people heard about his art, and the price went through the roof.
Shortly afterwards, the British currency had one of its periodic redesigns. The banknotes had changed to include a claim of copyright. Presumably the government wants to be able to get an injunction against any future Boggs, rather than taking its chance in front of a jury.
Not knowing Norwegian law, I'm shooting in the dark a bit. However, as Jon was charged with hacking a machine which he owned, it seems kind of like being charged with burgling your own house.
In democracies there are checks and balances that are supposed to derail farcical cases like this before they get to a proper court. It's quite scary that they didn't operate in this case.
I don't know the situation in Norway; in Britain we have the ability to stick the prosecution with all the defence costs when something like this happens. I really, really hope it happened to them.
Also it might be argued that it was a malicious prosecution, brought for the purposes of harassment rather than because there was a realistic chance of a conviction. This can lead to damages too. Occasionally the damages are punitive, and very large, if for example the malicious prosecution resulted from the misuse of a public office.
I'm glad to see that the Linux kernel people now have a bug tracking system, but I'm very disappointed that they couldn't find a proprietary one that was good enough. After all, they are enormously more productive now they use Visual SourceSafe for source control. ;-)
Yes, Barclays have a good site, I use them too.
A few years ago, I asked for Internet banking with them, and at that time it was at the complete opposite extreme. There was lots of IE-specific eye-candy, and it didn't work with anything Unix flavoured. To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work with a lot of versions of IE either.
I wrote to them complaining that I couldn't use the site, and asking for the £10 back that they wanted for providing the facility. My letter vanished into the ethers and my £10 never reappeared. At the same time they did fix the site, probably in response to my letter and many others like it.
You basically get contact management, scheduling, task and time management, and bug tracking. The server runs with Apache and PHP, and clients use it through a web interface. This means that the clients can run on (almost) any operating system.
No, I'm nothing to do with the project, I'm just a satisfied customer. :-)
Being a salesman shouldn't be about lying. It's about drawing attention to the attractive points of your product. Think about buying a car; the salesman points out the airbags, but he doesn't draw attention to the fact that there aren't electric windows in the back.
Also, in technology, an important sales job is to explain what the product does, and how it will fit in with the customer's business process. Somewhere along this path, engineers get involved too, but it is usually the salesman's job to start the process.
Lying, though, is bad news. It can get you sued, and it will lose customers. Salesmen do it all the time, but it's a really bad strategy.
$0.00 may be reasonable, but refusing to extend the same terms to open source software is hardly non-discriminatory.
Sounds as though Microsoft may need more than RAND terms to implement a scheme like this. They actually want to discriminate, refusing to license the patent to some of their competitors.
I don't know why there are so many posts criticising the Abiword team, or saying that open source won't work. It doesn't make sense to say that open source won't work because it already has: it is the dominant web server platform for example. Have a look at the Apache web site—there isn't a toll-free number that you can call if you get stuck.
:-) )
I run a software business; we use some commercial software and some open source software. We don't really use open source software because of the price, though that is a factor. We use it because the best open source products are better than their commercial counterparts. Apache is a good case in point; our web server hasn't been 0wn3d yet.
Also if we use commercial software, it is written for the supplier's benefit. OpenOffice writes files in a (rather complicated) XML format, so if we need to do something else with the documents it's possible. Word, probably deliberately, writes files in an opaque format that keeps changing. We use Word at the moment but we would like to change, so we keep control of the business and not Microsoft. We may well make the change when the new StarOffice release ships. (Sorry Abiword; but I am downloading the latest version now so you are in with a chance.
Open source gives you flexibility. There is something I would like to do to the Mozilla composer, which would make it into a completely different tool. With open source I can do that. Even with "free beer" Internet Explorer I couldn't because the interface exported by Microsoft isn't enough to do what I want.
So I created Whisper. Whisper is password based, rather than public key based, because it's easier for people to understand. (Of course you must pick a strong password if you want it to be secure against a determined attack.)
I've not yet found anyone who can't Whisper. What I need at the moment are people to audit the crypto (it's basically PKCS-5). Also I am currently planning a new version, so please suggest any features you want on the SourceForge page.
Of course if you want to help develop it, that would be welcome too.