While I'm partly satisfied that each of these companies is now paying for their short-sighted support of software patents, any legitimacy to software patents is bad for the industry as a whole. Sadly, this example wil most likely lead these companies to shore up their own patent defenses rather than realize the error of their ways.
Socialism isn't that far off from Capitalism and it requires that people work, the biggest difference is in the compensation the workers are given for their labor.
The biggest difference is that socialism seemingly has no feedback loop to discourage free-loading and encourage hard work. That's a pretty big difference, so your assertion that they aren't fundamentally different is frankly ridiculous.
Morality is defined by consequences. If the consequences of a philosophy are exceedingly negative, then the philosophy is morally reprehensible, and hence, evil. Of course, evil is a fairly loaded word, so use sparingly.
Any physical system requires significantly more investment to create, requiring raw materials, machinery, etc. and the marginal cost of production is non-zero.
By comparison, software costs a pittance to start writing, effectively just being the cost of a computer, say around $2,000, and has a zero marginal cost of production. This is orders of magnitude lower than any material good, and why software already has a breakneck pace of innovation: because new players entering the game require little startup capital.
The only way I would support software patents is if the economics of software production are taken into account. The best compromise I've devised so far is to reduce the duration of a software patent by an order of magnitude to around 2 or 3 years. This gives innovators a chance to exploit their ideas for a short time, without shackling the rest of the industry with what quickly becomes an "obvious" idea.
...how can Mininova not be liable for any copyright infringing links, but still be ordered to remove the links? If they're not liable for that content, then they shouldn't have to remove anything.
Why is Google trying to censor its results? Presumably results are returned in page rank order, and sticking their fingers into this mess is going to open up a whole can of censorship/regulation woes.
Sure, that's why I only trade in markets where the other players are particles rather than humans.
Indeed, because unlike how we can mathematically model and explain every single other physical system we've encountered, humans are just super special. Math is hard, let's go shopping!
No formula can ever quantify that value. It's subjective.
Ridiculous. Modeling aggregate behaviour is perfectly reasonable. How do you think quantum mechanics works? We can't precisely model individual particle characteristics, but aggregate behaviour can be studied to remarkable precision. At the moment, quantum mechanics is one of the most precise scientific theories of all time.
As a programmer who has interviewed co-op students for 5 years, I can tell you the two things I immediately use to separate wheat and chaff: which programming languages they know, and which school or personal projects they found challenging. The former tells me how open-minded they are when problem solving, especially if they learned a language that isn't part of the standard curriculum, and the latter tells me whether they are actually interested in programming, or whether they're just doing it as just another a job. Candidates who pass both criteria are people I want to interview immediately.
Because slashdot residents already know how to navigate a computer quickly using keyboard shortcuts, so you're not in the 90% of the computing public that would benefit from a more memorable gesture interface.
For one, mouse is an incredibly precise input device - you can pretty easily move it along same pixel axis, or get it precisely to a specific pixel.
I think the existence of touchpads that have already replaced mice on all portable computers demonstrates that a touch surface can be almost as precise as a mouse. Certainly there are some input activities that require even more control, but there are simple solutions: a) these activities require a more precise pointing device, or b) use the zoom gesture to zoom into an area where you need to exert finer control.
There are similar solutions to you other concerns.
Is a friendlier and/or more open MS an improvement? Seems kind of obvious to me.
The little guys on the bottom are just being used to make inroads into the enemy.
Ridiculous. If being friendly starts working for them, there is no reason for them to stop being friendly. Furthermore, being non-hostile towards MS is not the same as embracing their technologies with open arms and without suspicion.
I'm surprised at how many people confuse, "don't deride people working with MS for trying for reform", with, "have no fear, adopt everything MS comes up with because they're our friends!" Just another instance of people hearing what they want to hear I suppose. Even if Miguel is one of the latter types, that's not reason to deride his work at trying to get MS to open up more.
They may be trying to win "hearts and minds" in the free software world right now, but to infer from that a change of heart on Microsoft's part - that would be truly irrational.
I am not inferring a change of heart of any sort. I think it's in MS's strategic interests to become more open, particularly to attract more developers. But if people in the developer community merely exhibit disdain at their efforts, then it clearly won't be generating the results they desire, and they may take that as a sign that becoming more open is not working.
It costs you nothing to keep your mouth shut if you have nothing good to say about people trying to reform MS's approach to developers and open source at large, but opening your mouth could end up costing us quite a lot.
I don't think Microsoft have ever cared much about breeding ill-will. [...] but so long as they have the sort of market penetration and vendor lock in that they currently possess, I doubt they'll lose much sleep over being disliked.
That's just it, the spread of Linux and other free software has started to break the vendor lock-in. This is why MS fears OSS more than anything else.
Secondly, there is no way that any open source initiative at Microsoft is ever going to generate revenue on the scale of Windows and MS Office. So any open source efforts are going to subordinate to MS major cash cows, and will be manipulated to serve the interests of those products. In short, I can't see MS' flirtations with open source ever bringing in enough cash to make an impact on corporate culture.
I don't think MS will ever go fully open source either. I think they're just trying to attract or keep their developers and ISV's happy, by opening up some of their sources and fostering a vibrant online community like OSS has. And that's fine too.
I'm sorry but if Microsoft were suddenly (perish the thought) become hostile towards free software, how would we distinguish this from their current behavior?
They would actually go after anyone they believe infringes on their patents instead of merely rattling sabres.
I mean I can see the benefit: I could see the benefit in rehabilitating a serial pedophile rapist. I just wouldn't think it is was "worth the try" to welcome him into the local junior school just because he'd been sounding really upbeat lately.
As I mentioned to another poster above, argument by analogy is weak and ultimately futile. The fact that you are comparing the competitive aggressiveness of a corporation to child rape and people who have physiological or psychological problems that cause them to be attracted to minors should itself be a hint that you're wasting your breath.
I'll grant you this much: the day will likely come when MS has to embrace free software or go under.
I doubt that very much. There is plenty of room for a spectrum of business requirements that free software alone cannot fill.
But this is neither here nor there; ultimately, MS was a ruthlessly proprietary and aggressive company, and deriding the efforts of people trying to reform such a company from the inside out is not helpful. No doubt MS will look after its own interests first and foremost, but unnecessarily and unfairly criticizing those are trying to convince MS that being friendly and somewhat open is in their best interests can only do harm.
Most of us simply want nothing to do with this company or its products, and we are going with their competitors, both free and commercial.
And you are free to do so. This is no justification for labelling the people who are trying to reform MS as "traitors" or otherwise deriding their efforts. There's a difference between exercising your choice, and deriding others for theirs.
It is as if your sister was advocating public [...]
Word of advice, argument by analogy is weak. Either your argument is convincing, or it is not, and analogies simply open you up to pointless squabbling over the appropriateness of an analogy. I for one simply gloss over any sentences that start with "It's as if...", or "It's like..."
As for Groklaw's analysis, I've already read it, but it's irrelevant to the point I'm making. Calling someone who has done a lot of good work for the community a shill because he is pursuing a goal that you wouldn't in his place is just disrespectful, demeaning and plain stupid.
As someone else in this thread pointed out, IBM was the proprietary giant in 80s, and now they're a pretty compelling open source advocate. Change is slow, but possible. Undermining those who are trying to make positive changes doesn't help anyone, and can in fact hinder progress.
In particular, I don't think it's safe to assume that Microsoft will suddenly start playing nice with the rest of the world, if the open source community just stops saying mean things about it.
I never said anything about not judging MS's deplorable actions harshly. But why judge MS's benign or beneficial actions equally harshly? Why ridicule the people trying to make those positive changes? That's just irrational prejudice, and it serves no one.
But just because you get a couple of dozen free software fans working at Microsoft Research, that's not going to stop Ballmer and the rest funding attacks on free software.
I agree. Corporate culture will change to the extent that their open source efforts bear fruit, and their heavy-handed totalitarian approach breeds ill-will. But they will not bear fruit if people create a hostile atmosphere to every olive branch the people working MS from the inside manage to extend.
Even if MS suddenly aborts every positive effort made toward the open source community, it was still worth the try. Is that really so hard to understand?
Microsoft's brand is "incompatible" with open source. They made their bed on that through carefully and assiduously lying and suing the shit out of people for many, many years.
The decisions of the future are made by the current employees, not past employees. It is a mistake to simply assume that MS will simply behave exactly as they have in the past without considering other factors, particularly when there are people like Miguel working to change minds from within the system.
All you do is undermine the positive changes they are trying to make and a result, are harming the community as a whole. You can be cautious and skeptical without being inflammatory. I don't see why this is such a difficult concept to grasp.
If you judge someone by their actions, then there is no need to discuss how we judge Microsoft and their relationship to free software.
But Microsoft is not a "someone", it is an aggregate of "someones", and treating MS like an individual that has already shown its true colours is a mistake, because that is not the nature of the beast. This is why Miguel called this an opportunity, because merely by inserting open source advocates into MS you can alter its aggregate behaviour to a more open source friendly stance. The evidence is already there: MS has already become more open than they used to be, with shared source licenses and CodePlex being the highest profile examples.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't be cautious, but we should not be openly hostile and accusatory either, as that simply undermines those people working to improve the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm partly satisfied that each of these companies is now paying for their short-sighted support of software patents, any legitimacy to software patents is bad for the industry as a whole. Sadly, this example wil most likely lead these companies to shore up their own patent defenses rather than realize the error of their ways.
Socialism isn't that far off from Capitalism and it requires that people work, the biggest difference is in the compensation the workers are given for their labor.
The biggest difference is that socialism seemingly has no feedback loop to discourage free-loading and encourage hard work. That's a pretty big difference, so your assertion that they aren't fundamentally different is frankly ridiculous.
Morality is defined by consequences. If the consequences of a philosophy are exceedingly negative, then the philosophy is morally reprehensible, and hence, evil. Of course, evil is a fairly loaded word, so use sparingly.
Ubiquity is the hallmark of success.
Isn't that more indicative of the quality of the BIND code, more than the complexity of DNS itself? Contrast it with the number of djbdns releases.
Copyrights and patents are to encourage expansion of the public domain. Secret knowledge is not public, and so can't be cited as prior art.
RSA encryption algorithm. One of the very rare legit software patents IMO.
Any physical system requires significantly more investment to create, requiring raw materials, machinery, etc. and the marginal cost of production is non-zero.
By comparison, software costs a pittance to start writing, effectively just being the cost of a computer, say around $2,000, and has a zero marginal cost of production. This is orders of magnitude lower than any material good, and why software already has a breakneck pace of innovation: because new players entering the game require little startup capital.
The only way I would support software patents is if the economics of software production are taken into account. The best compromise I've devised so far is to reduce the duration of a software patent by an order of magnitude to around 2 or 3 years. This gives innovators a chance to exploit their ideas for a short time, without shackling the rest of the industry with what quickly becomes an "obvious" idea.
...how can Mininova not be liable for any copyright infringing links, but still be ordered to remove the links? If they're not liable for that content, then they shouldn't have to remove anything.
Why is Google trying to censor its results? Presumably results are returned in page rank order, and sticking their fingers into this mess is going to open up a whole can of censorship/regulation woes.
The customer is not *always* right...
To be fair, you don't really have to "look" to find bugs in MS products...
Oh, are we mystical then?
Actually, you were napping the day they explained how science works.
Sure, that's why I only trade in markets where the other players are particles rather than humans.
Indeed, because unlike how we can mathematically model and explain every single other physical system we've encountered, humans are just super special. Math is hard, let's go shopping!
No formula can ever quantify that value. It's subjective.
Ridiculous. Modeling aggregate behaviour is perfectly reasonable. How do you think quantum mechanics works? We can't precisely model individual particle characteristics, but aggregate behaviour can be studied to remarkable precision. At the moment, quantum mechanics is one of the most precise scientific theories of all time.
As a programmer who has interviewed co-op students for 5 years, I can tell you the two things I immediately use to separate wheat and chaff: which programming languages they know, and which school or personal projects they found challenging. The former tells me how open-minded they are when problem solving, especially if they learned a language that isn't part of the standard curriculum, and the latter tells me whether they are actually interested in programming, or whether they're just doing it as just another a job. Candidates who pass both criteria are people I want to interview immediately.
Because slashdot residents already know how to navigate a computer quickly using keyboard shortcuts, so you're not in the 90% of the computing public that would benefit from a more memorable gesture interface.
For one, mouse is an incredibly precise input device - you can pretty easily move it along same pixel axis, or get it precisely to a specific pixel.
I think the existence of touchpads that have already replaced mice on all portable computers demonstrates that a touch surface can be almost as precise as a mouse. Certainly there are some input activities that require even more control, but there are simple solutions: a) these activities require a more precise pointing device, or b) use the zoom gesture to zoom into an area where you need to exert finer control.
There are similar solutions to you other concerns.
Are they really improving it?
Is a friendlier and/or more open MS an improvement? Seems kind of obvious to me.
The little guys on the bottom are just being used to make inroads into the enemy.
Ridiculous. If being friendly starts working for them, there is no reason for them to stop being friendly. Furthermore, being non-hostile towards MS is not the same as embracing their technologies with open arms and without suspicion.
I'm surprised at how many people confuse, "don't deride people working with MS for trying for reform", with, "have no fear, adopt everything MS comes up with because they're our friends!" Just another instance of people hearing what they want to hear I suppose. Even if Miguel is one of the latter types, that's not reason to deride his work at trying to get MS to open up more.
They may be trying to win "hearts and minds" in the free software world right now, but to infer from that a change of heart on Microsoft's part - that would be truly irrational.
I am not inferring a change of heart of any sort. I think it's in MS's strategic interests to become more open, particularly to attract more developers. But if people in the developer community merely exhibit disdain at their efforts, then it clearly won't be generating the results they desire, and they may take that as a sign that becoming more open is not working.
It costs you nothing to keep your mouth shut if you have nothing good to say about people trying to reform MS's approach to developers and open source at large, but opening your mouth could end up costing us quite a lot.
I don't think Microsoft have ever cared much about breeding ill-will. [...] but so long as they have the sort of market penetration and vendor lock in that they currently possess, I doubt they'll lose much sleep over being disliked.
That's just it, the spread of Linux and other free software has started to break the vendor lock-in. This is why MS fears OSS more than anything else.
Secondly, there is no way that any open source initiative at Microsoft is ever going to generate revenue on the scale of Windows and MS Office. So any open source efforts are going to subordinate to MS major cash cows, and will be manipulated to serve the interests of those products. In short, I can't see MS' flirtations with open source ever bringing in enough cash to make an impact on corporate culture.
I don't think MS will ever go fully open source either. I think they're just trying to attract or keep their developers and ISV's happy, by opening up some of their sources and fostering a vibrant online community like OSS has. And that's fine too.
I'm sorry but if Microsoft were suddenly (perish the thought) become hostile towards free software, how would we distinguish this from their current behavior?
They would actually go after anyone they believe infringes on their patents instead of merely rattling sabres.
I mean I can see the benefit: I could see the benefit in rehabilitating a serial pedophile rapist. I just wouldn't think it is was "worth the try" to welcome him into the local junior school just because he'd been sounding really upbeat lately.
As I mentioned to another poster above, argument by analogy is weak and ultimately futile. The fact that you are comparing the competitive aggressiveness of a corporation to child rape and people who have physiological or psychological problems that cause them to be attracted to minors should itself be a hint that you're wasting your breath.
I'll grant you this much: the day will likely come when MS has to embrace free software or go under.
I doubt that very much. There is plenty of room for a spectrum of business requirements that free software alone cannot fill.
But this is neither here nor there; ultimately, MS was a ruthlessly proprietary and aggressive company, and deriding the efforts of people trying to reform such a company from the inside out is not helpful. No doubt MS will look after its own interests first and foremost, but unnecessarily and unfairly criticizing those are trying to convince MS that being friendly and somewhat open is in their best interests can only do harm.
Most of us simply want nothing to do with this company or its products, and we are going with their competitors, both free and commercial.
And you are free to do so. This is no justification for labelling the people who are trying to reform MS as "traitors" or otherwise deriding their efforts. There's a difference between exercising your choice, and deriding others for theirs.
It is as if your sister was advocating public [...]
Word of advice, argument by analogy is weak. Either your argument is convincing, or it is not, and analogies simply open you up to pointless squabbling over the appropriateness of an analogy. I for one simply gloss over any sentences that start with "It's as if...", or "It's like..."
As for Groklaw's analysis, I've already read it, but it's irrelevant to the point I'm making. Calling someone who has done a lot of good work for the community a shill because he is pursuing a goal that you wouldn't in his place is just disrespectful, demeaning and plain stupid.
As someone else in this thread pointed out, IBM was the proprietary giant in 80s, and now they're a pretty compelling open source advocate. Change is slow, but possible. Undermining those who are trying to make positive changes doesn't help anyone, and can in fact hinder progress.
In particular, I don't think it's safe to assume that Microsoft will suddenly start playing nice with the rest of the world, if the open source community just stops saying mean things about it.
I never said anything about not judging MS's deplorable actions harshly. But why judge MS's benign or beneficial actions equally harshly? Why ridicule the people trying to make those positive changes? That's just irrational prejudice, and it serves no one.
But just because you get a couple of dozen free software fans working at Microsoft Research, that's not going to stop Ballmer and the rest funding attacks on free software.
I agree. Corporate culture will change to the extent that their open source efforts bear fruit, and their heavy-handed totalitarian approach breeds ill-will. But they will not bear fruit if people create a hostile atmosphere to every olive branch the people working MS from the inside manage to extend.
Even if MS suddenly aborts every positive effort made toward the open source community, it was still worth the try. Is that really so hard to understand?
Microsoft's brand is "incompatible" with open source. They made their bed on that through carefully and assiduously lying and suing the shit out of people for many, many years.
The decisions of the future are made by the current employees, not past employees. It is a mistake to simply assume that MS will simply behave exactly as they have in the past without considering other factors, particularly when there are people like Miguel working to change minds from within the system.
All you do is undermine the positive changes they are trying to make and a result, are harming the community as a whole. You can be cautious and skeptical without being inflammatory. I don't see why this is such a difficult concept to grasp.
If you judge someone by their actions, then there is no need to discuss how we judge Microsoft and their relationship to free software.
But Microsoft is not a "someone", it is an aggregate of "someones", and treating MS like an individual that has already shown its true colours is a mistake, because that is not the nature of the beast. This is why Miguel called this an opportunity, because merely by inserting open source advocates into MS you can alter its aggregate behaviour to a more open source friendly stance. The evidence is already there: MS has already become more open than they used to be, with shared source licenses and CodePlex being the highest profile examples.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't be cautious, but we should not be openly hostile and accusatory either, as that simply undermines those people working to improve the situation.