piracy needs to proliferate! we need our software to be free!
By using pirated commercial software instead of (legally) free software, you just serve to entrench the commercial software giants like Microsoft. If you want software to become free, piracy is not the right way to go.
what the article does not say is: office software in.ro government is 80% OpenOffice (somewhat lower in academia), server software is mostly (don't have a number for this) Linux
Just remember that according to the BSA definition, OpenOffice.org and Linux are both pirate software, since they do not bring revenues to its member companies.
It's good if it entrenches a critical application or set of applications with huge numbers of people and you can somehow get future profit out of it.
But take another subset of piracy nowadays: Games. So what if tons of people play a game? You can't get money from them later on for having experienced that game. I didn't pay more for Oblivion just because I pirated Morrowind.
So piracy can be useful, and harmful.
I agree. Business software is not games. Piracy of business software, especially by home users, only serve to further entrench the software, as users may demand that software from their employers, while getting used to one game does not mean getting used to the next game too.
Even an end user at home, if he can't pirate it, it's still worth $100 bucks to be compatible with work and not have to learn something new.
I'm not that certain, but I don't know. Most home users (that run Windows) where I live pirate the applications (the OS comes with the computer), so whether most of them would buy the applications or use alternatives if piracy was not an option, is unknown.
We're not ants, we're not bees, and we're not slaves. You don't have to like it
I do though. I agree with your post. I just wanted the parent of my post to understand that a united vision isn't anything to wait for, since the F/OSS community isn't a (single) company where someone can formulate a vision and then compel everyone to follow it.
The Open Source Community rather quickly got SMB support in its file systems, and that was closed like Exchange was. The only different is that OSS Developers (Many who are in colleges) realize the demand for needed to connect to windows networking.
I don't think SMB support necessarily was created to cater to other peoples' demands. It could simply have been that the implementors had Windows computers in their families, thinking it would be great to be able interoperate with them from their *nix computers.
You aren't going to have enterprise level software on Linux until...
There is already plenty of enterprise-level software on Linux. Maybe your favourite system isn't available, but claiming that the won't be any enterprise software on Linux until "Linux does this and that" is plain and simply wrong.
Operations of linux in a network buisness environment is 100% reliant on proprietary RHEL and Novell voodoo, there's nothing freely available or open source for making huge numbers of linux machiens behave properly in a network environment.
I beg to differ, but since it is late in the day, I want you to explain what you mean before I write a long explanation about how Linux can be used in a large environment without any RHEL or Novell "voodoo". I'm especially interested in your definition of "behave properly in a network environment".
You start with./configure;make; make install. That's when you find that you need a specific compiler to get the app running. Oh, and an extra set of libraries. And a specific kernel release..
Oh come on! Even when I build software from source, I have never encountered an application that cannot use GCC (assuming it is written in C or C++). And unless your application has some sort of kernel component, applications are not dependent on specific kernel releases.
Besides, the overwhelmingly most common way to install applications in by using a package manager, not building from source. That is only needed if you want to use an application that does not exist in a repository, either because it is rarely used, or because it is so cutting edge that the repository hasn't had a chance to release the new version yet.
Unless you can get something like Wine 100% compatible, we're screwed.
Then we're screwed, since that won't happen. Wine chases a moving target, Windows, and will always be at least a few steps behind. Making Wine 100% compatible with Windows is only possible if Microsoft stopped developing it, and I really can't see that happening. Matbe when they really move to a subscription-based model and they are not forced to develop their products to rake in the cash, Wine could hit the 100% mark, or at least come close to it. But if that happens, and Linux starts taking some serious marketshare, I expect that lawsuits start flying.
This guy is trying to use Linux within the framework of the company that he works for. I'm a software developer within a large company that uses Exchange. I don't have the option of replacing Exchange with an open source alternative. So if I want to use Linux in my enterprise environment, I have no options and I will forever be a Windows user while I work here.
If running Linux is important to you, try an employer with a little more Linux-friendly computing environment. If that is not an option, well, enjoy your stay in Windows.;)
Of course wether a very disparate community could ever aquire some vision or focus or even agree on what are the most important things to do (that is without any benevolent dictatorship) is a question that is still waiting for an answer...
I'd say the answer is quite clearly No. Such a large community of people, where many work in their spare time, will have too many opinions about what's important to ever be able to establish a vision or focus on one or two "most important projects". And any attempt will utterly fail, at least among the spare time coders, because people usually want to decide what to do in their spare time themselves, not compelled to work for a certain project by some (self-proclaimed) boss.
I don't recall using a scheme like this for the OS, pre se, but haven't there been applications that were distributed on a CD which provided basic functionality but had additional functionality code of some sorts ("module"?) on the CD that could be activated after paying a fee to the publisher, who would then send a key to unlock the added functionality?
It's called crippleware. You download a demo for free, but the demo contains all the functionality of the full application. If you buy a serial number corresponding to the full version, the demo version suddenly becomes the full version. It is quite common actually. One such well-known program is Nero Burning ROM.
There could be a module that is required for non-Microsoft applications to use system resources like disk drive access, RAM access, network access, display access, etc. Microsoft would of course make people pay for this and it would automatically add whatever the fee for this is to the cost of whatever non-MS software to the cost of running that software. (Of course, MS software will run for free on your system.)
Such an example already exists in the patent application. It mentions an add-in module that would allow third-party applications to be installed. Like "You need to pay extra money if you want to run non-Microsoft applications".
Microsoft would be free to change the price of their modules at will and if you don't pay, your computer would be locked up and completely unusable, the data on it inaccessible by any means, even yanking the HDD out and putting it in any other machine.
That Microsoft could use to lock Linux out of the technique that could secure kernels, so Linux is insecure?
Code signing as implemented now does not make the system secure, it just locks out third-party driver developers that can't afford the signing process, which is usually quite expensive. If, on the other hand, code signing was optional and in control of the user, code signing could be used to increase security in the kernel, by only allowing kernel modules signed by the user to be loaded into the kernel.
I'm very tired of having to explain over and over and over again the basics of economics to geeks that haven't bothered to read or understand anything about them
I'd like to thank you for a very clear explanation about the problems caused by monopolies. I knew most of it already, but I would probably not have been able to put it out that clearly. I'm going to keep a link to this post, to use whenever I need a good explanation why monopolies harm society.
When the only real competitor in a market is a collaborative, non-profit work designed specifically to resist classic capitalist usage, you can be pretty sure you have a very broken market indeed.
That brings me another thought that I have had before, and that is comparing marketshare with elections. A large majority seem to find no problem with a company having a 90-95% marketshare, but when a political party or a president gets 90-95% of the votes, everyone starts yelling "election fraud". In the latter case, people point out that people have different opinions about how to run the country, but in the earlier case, the same people claim that it is better if everyone use the same (software) product (different opinions regarding software seem to be absent in the eyes of those arguing that), often for compatibility reasons, as if compatibility would be impossible if people had used (software) products from several vendors. Some people have clearly never heard about (de jure) standards (de facto standards seem to be well known, since Windows is claimed to be the "standard").
I'm calling BS on that. First of all, do you have a link/reference to that number? Second of all, you are ignoring how much money businesses have made off of MS's products. I'm sure is alot more than what they lost from security flaws.
vaccinating children is possibly a net loss to the world?
The act of vaccinating children cannot be a net loss to the world in itself. But if you consider the B&MG Foundation's other investments, such as oil companies and other polluting industries, the picture becomes less clear. I have also read somewhere that they invested in companies using child labour. And then there is the donations to certain countries showing interest in F/OSS, resulting in the F/OSS alternative being silently dropped. Now, is the B&MG Foundation a net gain or a net loss to the world?
If you want to delve into me being over analytical, one could argue that it is the CONSUMERS fault that microsoft has reached the point that it has. If there wasn't such a high demand for it, companies could get by selling something other than windows while having good income levels.
If everyone demanded Windows anyway, I cannot see the reason to put those extremely anti-competitive clauses in the contracts with the OEM's. They did though, and it is now a part of the image of Microsoft in the eyes of those in the trade.
Microsoft, since the DOJ debacle, *appear* to be making an honest effort to do the Right Thing.
Yeah, sure, filing for ridiculous patents, pushing software patents in Europe, pushing for harsher copyright legislation, DRM, funding SCO, threats against Linux, pushing their own patent-encumbered platform-dependent standards instead of the already existing open cross-platform ones, etc, etc. I agree, that's surely the Right Thing.</sarcasm>
I'm wondering why the rest of the world doesn't see this.
May it be that you look upon Microsoft in a way that is more positive than they actually earn? Probably because you work there?
So to use the "bad for the environment" example, Microsoft would only be "evil" if someone were sitting in a room somewhere saying "With the release of Vista, millions of components containing toxic chemicals will be thrown away and damage the environment, MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!!" - because if that doesn't happen, any detrimental effect that happens isn't evil; it's just bad.
I disagree. There is a lot of concern for energy usage, global warming, etc, around the world today. When Microsoft completely ignores all those sentiments and produce an operating system that require much more computing power, i.e. energy, to run, that could surely be seen as evil. Completely ignoring environmental concerns to just make the most money is evil. Almost as bad as those that dump toxic waste into the ocean.
But when you propose that Microsoft was being "evil" and made its email client free because it wanted to ruin everybody else's business, I get a little skeptical.
It's not the fact that Microsoft does not charge for their email client that is evil, it is the bundling with the operating system that is considered evil. Since an email client is bundled with the operating system, most people do not even care to investigate other email clients. The evil part is in using your current monopoly (operating systems for desktop computers) to create a new one (email clients).
there is a considerable userbase that isn't counted because they're not buying the OS [e.g. a free distro].
And those are labeled pirates in BSA statistics, regardless if they are pirating Windows or using a free operating system. In the eyes of the BSA, they are pirates anyway, since they don't use an operating system from one of their member companies.
One thing I haven't noticed being mentioned much is that this only counts the Fedora 6 installs.
Which brings up another question: How many installs are there of all Red Hat and derivatives, including Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, ScientificLinux, etc, etc? That would be interesting to know. And then that's still only Red Hat and derivatives, there is also xUbuntu, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Mandriva, you name it. I'd certainly guess that there are at the very least tens of millions of Linux installations across the world.
Slashdot Mirror
By using pirated commercial software instead of (legally) free software, you just serve to entrench the commercial software giants like Microsoft. If you want software to become free, piracy is not the right way to go.
Just remember that according to the BSA definition, OpenOffice.org and Linux are both pirate software, since they do not bring revenues to its member companies.
But take another subset of piracy nowadays: Games. So what if tons of people play a game? You can't get money from them later on for having experienced that game. I didn't pay more for Oblivion just because I pirated Morrowind.
So piracy can be useful, and harmful.
I agree. Business software is not games. Piracy of business software, especially by home users, only serve to further entrench the software, as users may demand that software from their employers, while getting used to one game does not mean getting used to the next game too.
I'm not that certain, but I don't know. Most home users (that run Windows) where I live pirate the applications (the OS comes with the computer), so whether most of them would buy the applications or use alternatives if piracy was not an option, is unknown.
I do though. I agree with your post. I just wanted the parent of my post to understand that a united vision isn't anything to wait for, since the F/OSS community isn't a (single) company where someone can formulate a vision and then compel everyone to follow it.
I have a Civ2 quote for you: You do as you like, but don't come howling to me when some upstirred nation puts your palace to the torch.
I don't think SMB support necessarily was created to cater to other peoples' demands. It could simply have been that the implementors had Windows computers in their families, thinking it would be great to be able interoperate with them from their *nix computers.
Well, Mr CTO, meet Mr You aren't going to have enterprise level software on Linux until..., that claims that Linux has to do this and that "before Linux is going to be taken seriously by enterprise". You might have an interesting discussion. :)
There is already plenty of enterprise-level software on Linux. Maybe your favourite system isn't available, but claiming that the won't be any enterprise software on Linux until "Linux does this and that" is plain and simply wrong.
I beg to differ, but since it is late in the day, I want you to explain what you mean before I write a long explanation about how Linux can be used in a large environment without any RHEL or Novell "voodoo". I'm especially interested in your definition of "behave properly in a network environment".
Oh come on! Even when I build software from source, I have never encountered an application that cannot use GCC (assuming it is written in C or C++). And unless your application has some sort of kernel component, applications are not dependent on specific kernel releases.
Besides, the overwhelmingly most common way to install applications in by using a package manager, not building from source. That is only needed if you want to use an application that does not exist in a repository, either because it is rarely used, or because it is so cutting edge that the repository hasn't had a chance to release the new version yet.
Then we're screwed, since that won't happen. Wine chases a moving target, Windows, and will always be at least a few steps behind. Making Wine 100% compatible with Windows is only possible if Microsoft stopped developing it, and I really can't see that happening. Matbe when they really move to a subscription-based model and they are not forced to develop their products to rake in the cash, Wine could hit the 100% mark, or at least come close to it. But if that happens, and Linux starts taking some serious marketshare, I expect that lawsuits start flying.
If running Linux is important to you, try an employer with a little more Linux-friendly computing environment. If that is not an option, well, enjoy your stay in Windows. ;)
I'd say the answer is quite clearly No. Such a large community of people, where many work in their spare time, will have too many opinions about what's important to ever be able to establish a vision or focus on one or two "most important projects". And any attempt will utterly fail, at least among the spare time coders, because people usually want to decide what to do in their spare time themselves, not compelled to work for a certain project by some (self-proclaimed) boss.
It's called crippleware. You download a demo for free, but the demo contains all the functionality of the full application. If you buy a serial number corresponding to the full version, the demo version suddenly becomes the full version. It is quite common actually. One such well-known program is Nero Burning ROM.
Such an example already exists in the patent application. It mentions an add-in module that would allow third-party applications to be installed. Like "You need to pay extra money if you want to run non-Microsoft applications".
Microsoft would be free to change the price of their modules at will and if you don't pay, your computer would be locked up and completely unusable, the data on it inaccessible by any means, even yanking the HDD out and putting it in any other machine.Good point! I didn't think of that.
Code signing as implemented now does not make the system secure, it just locks out third-party driver developers that can't afford the signing process, which is usually quite expensive. If, on the other hand, code signing was optional and in control of the user, code signing could be used to increase security in the kernel, by only allowing kernel modules signed by the user to be loaded into the kernel.
I'd like to thank you for a very clear explanation about the problems caused by monopolies. I knew most of it already, but I would probably not have been able to put it out that clearly. I'm going to keep a link to this post, to use whenever I need a good explanation why monopolies harm society.
When the only real competitor in a market is a collaborative, non-profit work designed specifically to resist classic capitalist usage, you can be pretty sure you have a very broken market indeed.That brings me another thought that I have had before, and that is comparing marketshare with elections. A large majority seem to find no problem with a company having a 90-95% marketshare, but when a political party or a president gets 90-95% of the votes, everyone starts yelling "election fraud". In the latter case, people point out that people have different opinions about how to run the country, but in the earlier case, the same people claim that it is better if everyone use the same (software) product (different opinions regarding software seem to be absent in the eyes of those arguing that), often for compatibility reasons, as if compatibility would be impossible if people had used (software) products from several vendors. Some people have clearly never heard about (de jure) standards (de facto standards seem to be well known, since Windows is claimed to be the "standard").
And I'm calling BS on that.
The act of vaccinating children cannot be a net loss to the world in itself. But if you consider the B&MG Foundation's other investments, such as oil companies and other polluting industries, the picture becomes less clear. I have also read somewhere that they invested in companies using child labour. And then there is the donations to certain countries showing interest in F/OSS, resulting in the F/OSS alternative being silently dropped. Now, is the B&MG Foundation a net gain or a net loss to the world?
If everyone demanded Windows anyway, I cannot see the reason to put those extremely anti-competitive clauses in the contracts with the OEM's. They did though, and it is now a part of the image of Microsoft in the eyes of those in the trade.
Yeah, sure, filing for ridiculous patents, pushing software patents in Europe, pushing for harsher copyright legislation, DRM, funding SCO, threats against Linux, pushing their own patent-encumbered platform-dependent standards instead of the already existing open cross-platform ones, etc, etc. I agree, that's surely the Right Thing.</sarcasm>
I'm wondering why the rest of the world doesn't see this.May it be that you look upon Microsoft in a way that is more positive than they actually earn? Probably because you work there?
I disagree. There is a lot of concern for energy usage, global warming, etc, around the world today. When Microsoft completely ignores all those sentiments and produce an operating system that require much more computing power, i.e. energy, to run, that could surely be seen as evil. Completely ignoring environmental concerns to just make the most money is evil. Almost as bad as those that dump toxic waste into the ocean.
But when you propose that Microsoft was being "evil" and made its email client free because it wanted to ruin everybody else's business, I get a little skeptical.It's not the fact that Microsoft does not charge for their email client that is evil, it is the bundling with the operating system that is considered evil. Since an email client is bundled with the operating system, most people do not even care to investigate other email clients. The evil part is in using your current monopoly (operating systems for desktop computers) to create a new one (email clients).
And those are labeled pirates in BSA statistics, regardless if they are pirating Windows or using a free operating system. In the eyes of the BSA, they are pirates anyway, since they don't use an operating system from one of their member companies.
Which brings up another question: How many installs are there of all Red Hat and derivatives, including Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, ScientificLinux, etc, etc? That would be interesting to know. And then that's still only Red Hat and derivatives, there is also xUbuntu, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Mandriva, you name it. I'd certainly guess that there are at the very least tens of millions of Linux installations across the world.