Why does everything have to be bought or sold, I do not understand.
Not everything has to be bough or sold, but it has to be owned. And often, the owner gives it away.
In fact, I would argue that Free Software is about ownership. Most commercial software isn't sold, it's licensed, with a longer set of conditions than it takes to buy a car, all of which are targeted at reducing your rights as the end-user. Free Software on the other hand comes with source code, and the right to do with it as you wish.
Tietokone-olmi really pissed me off because he came across as one of the great number of "All patents are evil" types who doesn't consider the bigger picture that these things fit into. Companies shell out huge amounts of money building things like streaming protocols with the knowledge that they'll get a chance at an honest return on their investment. As for the guy who said, "But it's not illegal to do X in country Y," that's not my point. The legality of an action is a moving target, subject to the whims of jurists. But the morality of an action, I posit, is a much more definable thing. If you agree with my contention about ownership of an algorithm, then you will see why I think copying it, even if legal in a certain country, is still an act of theft, which is just wrong.
The fact that public-domain research was used is irrelevant. I paid for the research through my tax dollars, and if I go to the university library, I can make a copy of the research papers my dollars paid for. So long as I can still access that information, then the public good is being fulfilled. Besides, the main reason the government funds basic research is to help its national industries.
And yes, if someone implements an open codec based on public research, then there is nohing wrong with that. I think it's a great idea, and would help out if I could. (I can write good documentation, but I'm only a so-so coder) But tietokone-olmi was suggesting we steal the design of the good mousetrap, instead of looking for a way to build a better one.
If anything, it is people like tietokone-olmi that are responsible for the link between open source and piracy that exists in the public's mind. His post smelled strongly of the "warez are kewl d00d" mentality, and thus I lobbed an unnecessary insult. It made me feel better.
Enough. Back to work thinking of post ideas to get my karma back up...
You do not think I was serious about that offer, do you? Okay, so what was so stupid in my post?
A few rooms full of geeks put a lot of work into writing the compression algorithm that lets people like you view kiddie porn over your AOL dialup. It was not easy for them to do. It probably took more than a year, and cost a lot of money. Wages, office space, etc.
Now, if you just copy their algorithm and give away all the software to use it, and it works comparably well, the company that did all the heavy lifting goes out of business. Why would anyone *buy* their products when they can get the same thing free?
This is called theft, and it is morally wrong, whether it is legal or not.
I think free software is a wonderful thing, and support it and try to use wherever I can. I also think lots of software patents are stupid. Currently my company has 3 lawyers on a patent-finding expedition, and it makes a lot of us very uncomfortable.
But there are things which deserve protection, because the innovators have a right to demand compensation for their work. I agree that there are a lot of abuses, and those should be curbed. But if you think the fundamental idea of a patent is wrong, well, then I think you are living in a world of delusion.
Why do I respond to this crap? Ah, all that Karma must be for something...
Please email me with your job title and place of employment so I can go to your boss and volunteer to do your job for free.
I disagree with stupid patents, not the concept of patenting itself. If creating a video compression algorithm is so obvious to you then why don't you write your own instead of stealing one from someone else? On second thought, why don't you stick to 1337 h4x0r tricks, script kiddie.
I bought the domain thesnob.com a while back with intentions to create a web-zine type thing. (Haven't gotten to it yet, though...)
There is also a consignment clothing store somewhere in Florida called, you guessed it, The Snob. They are now at thesnob.net, because I got.com first.
Infinite TLDs would allow, for instance, thesnob.mag or thesnob.zine. The clothing store could get thesnob.clothes or thesnob.fashion or something like that. As it is, I get a fair number of emails every week asking for a price of some item of clothing for sale on eBay. If there were a.zine or.mag domain I would use it.
Slashdot is a media outlet, and like all other media outlets, it doesn't owe you, the reader, crap. Nor does it owe the "Linux community," which has many, many other gathering places besides Slashdot thank you, anything.
Media outlets try to get and keep the attention of an audience. If they can do this successfully they make money.
I don't care too much about Star Wars, but apparently a lot of people here do. So it becomes a story, people read it and comment, and Slashdot gets eyeballs it sels to advertisers.
If Slashdot posts crap no one cares about, readers will cease to visit and there goes your ad revenue and Rob Malda gets to stand on the unemployment line.
The best way to send a message of disapproval is to stop coming, and start your own damn website. Hell, Slashdot will even give you the code.
You're no different than all the fools here complaining that Lucas "owes" them a movie on DVD. The world owesyou nothing, and if all you do is complain, then nothing is al you'll ever get.
I agree completely. The current DNS system is being asked to serve a set of needs far beyond what was anticipated when it was designed.
Is there any good reason any more to not allow the registration of infinite TLD's? This would enhance the ability to give relevant domain names, and would also bring things more in line with Trademark law, which considers as relevant the market a company's product is in as well as its name.
Large websites could be organized by TLD instead of directory. IBM could have WWW.IBM.SALES for sales, and WWW.IBM.SUPPORT for help, and WWW.IBM.NYSE for investor information.
It seems to me that all of these E-commerce companies and places like Cisco stand to benefit the most from such a system, maybe it's time for them to start pushing ICANN to do something. This is not a problem that just "happened," it is a problem that was created and is being allowed to persist.
I only rejected a guy because of his signature once. He was kind of dodgy the whole time, real fidgety when I ran the card through. The name on the card said Rubinstein, but this guy looked (and dressed) like a Puerto Rican hood. The signature looked funny, and I asked for ID, but he said he didn't have. So I told him he couldn't have his stuff, and funny thing, he just left without arguing.
I used to get a lot of unsigned cards, so I'd ask for ID. Every so often, people would complain about this. Most merchant agreements say you're not ever supposed to take an unsigned card, no matter what. Most people though said "hey, thanks."
For all the above reasons, I write "ask for ID" on my cards' signature lines. And I'd say I get asked for it maybe 33% of the time. But my store took security seriously, since it was a small shop and we didn't want to see the owners getting socked...
It is also why banks love debit cards - since they are drawn directly on your bank account, there is no limit on your liability risk.
BZZZT! Wrong....
I used to work for a small retailer who did some mail order business. About once or twice a year we'd get scammed with a credit card. The customer would complain, and guess who got stiffed for $300? My store did. Not VISA, not Mastercard. They had no control over the transaction, and thus why should they bear responsibility?
This is the reason why many mail-order outfits do not ship goods to places other than the card's billing address... The card issuer controls that address, so it is slightly secure.
Okay, I feel sorry for all the businesses out there that got hosed for thousands of dollars in this.
But seriously, who would stake thousands of dollars in inventory, advertising, time, labor, etc., on a damn cut-rate host company?
If your business is worth anything to you, you should have at least one dedicated server for it, with someone who knows how to administer it available to fix it. Rent for storefronts costs thousands of dollars a month, $500 for a high-quality basic Linux server is a bargain by comparison.
Setting up a real business with one of these places is the Internet's equivalent of setting a store up in a ghetto. So these people didn't know that? Then they have no business in e-commerce. They bet their future on something they don't really comprehend, and that's just plain foolish.
I wonder if their device has been showing up in cases of bugging like that State Department conference room incident in the news a few weeks ago.
Doubtful. That device operated used automatic frequency switching and other real fancy stuff to avoid detection. In fact, the thing which tipped the investigators off wasn't a bug sweep, but rather the regular weekly stops by a Russian agent to "pick up the groceries."
As for conspiracy theories, I've heard people say that this is due to the Clinton adminstration getting medieval on the whole tape-recording thing in the aftermath of the Linda Tripp case.
I would believe this horsecrap about Sony having so much at risk with PSX2 if we were talking about any other company.
Sony has long, well-established, profitable product lines in many different markets.
Sony's brand is among the best in the world in nearly every market it is in.
Sony is stable, with a long history of success, vision, and innovation.
If PSX2 fails, it will hurt. But there will be profits from Walkmen, camcorders, PCs, industrial products, televisions, and stereos to fill the gap.
Worst case, Sony misses an opportunity to be the first one through the door in home electronics convergence. Big f$%^@# deal. They'll have more than enough money to do it right thee second time.
If I could put money on Sony's bet, I would. Sounds pretty safe to me. Now, as to whether I want a game console as the center of my home nervous system...
Splitting increases the liquidity of your stock. In the US, stocks trade in 1/16ths of a dollar ("Teenies") and thus if a stock moves at all it has to move by at least 1/16th of a dollar. This is not a trivial issue when the numbers get large.
It is important because it may be the first case of a real security issue arising from a non-PC device.
People tend to approach PCs with a bit of concern because of a long history of viruses, while black-box items like stereos and TV's are "clean" devices.
If the future of electornics means an IP on everything, then security will need to become a much bigger issue.
DVD has been revealed as being just as much of a proprietary, closed-standard product as Windows. Either you play by the rules of a bunch of oligopolists, or you're out of luck. And yet we talk of digital distribution as the future. If we allow the distribution protocols of the future to be closed, then we lose.
We could complain, but mainstream news organizations, who drink from the same trough as the DVDCCA, will never hear us.
We could fight in court, but the opposition will always be better-funded. Now I don't believe money buys judgments, but it does buy time in front of a judge. We may win here and there, but can we afford to keep the fight up on every front? Not without a lot more organization, and money.
But the piracy issue will not just go away, and the media industry's desire for ever-more draconian controls will only grow as digital distribution grows.
The open-source community needs to do something about this. Unless a system which protects some freedoms is developed, then we will gradually lose all of our rights. I have many ideas about how this could be done, but the point is *we* need to do it, and offer it as an alternative.
perhaps, with verification and security of some sort, this could even be done remotely
Try changing "perhaps" to only with in the above statement.
Imagine the possibilities otherwise- Someone writes a Thanksgiving script that cranks your oven up and down randomly. There goes the turkey!
Or maybe it turns your refrigerator off, or turns it into a freezer.
The general public hasn't really cared about system security because it has a limited impac on them. As long as their bank accounts don't get cracked, they don't care. Home computers connected to the internet 24/7 are a start, but the minute people become sysadmins for their home they might start to take notice of these things...
While we all know security through obscurity is fundamentally flawed, it does at least raise the bar (somewhat) for compromising a system, at least the first time, anyway.
Now, just how many "little holes" do you think the Microsofties let slip into their code?
Open-source software of course eliminates all obscurity, and thus renders a flawed security model utterly useless.
Closed-source on the other hand makes security through obscurity of uncertain, limited, and flawed use. In fact, it probably encourages it more than a little.
So while I would consider that letter-writer a fool by and large, I would have to agree that opening the source would make screwing with the system a lot easier.
Okay, the science isn't too good, but here goes. Below are the "Top 10" most-trafficked sites for November, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, along with what Netcraft says they use:
1. AOL- AOLServer/Solaris 2. Yahoo!- ? on FreeBSD 3. MSN- IIS4 on NT3(!?) 4. Lycos- Netscape-Enterprise on Digital Unix 5. Go- ? on Solaris 6. Microsoft- IIS5 on NT5 Beta 7. Excite@Home- Apache on Debian GNU/Linux 8. Amazon- Stronghold/Apache on Digital Unix 9. Blue Mtn. Arts- Apache on FreeBSD 10. Time-Warner- Netscape-Enterprise on Solaris
Obviously this ignores a lot, but I find it interesting that the only sites running Microsoft are in Redmond. At least they eat their own cooking.
I've always had a problem with these raw server counts becuase they ignore the "mindshare" factor. Perhaps a methodology more like the one I used above could make some accounting for this.
Yes, Germany was conquered. And yes, Russia is a mess, but it lost the Cold War because the West had the backbone to stand up to it. We did not fight an outright war, but I would not call building thousands of nuclear weapons "non-violent opposition."
Violent, dictatorial regimes do not voluntarily withdraw from the scene. Most of the time, they must be violently overthrown.
Non-violent tactics appeal to the morality of the "oppressors," while violent tactics work on the survival instinct. (i.e. "If we don't leave their country, they will kill us all...")
Non-violence has proven effective at winning for the oppressed rights which are granted to their opporessors. "All we want are the same rights you yourself enjoy" is a very persuasive argument. And in a system which has a moral foundation (like most Western governments, at least in theory), this appeal has great power.
But where entire nations are enslaved, like the Soviet Union, appeals to the popular morality are pointless, because they are fundamentally immoral systems, where no one has any rights to speak of, and the rule of law does not exist.
The Chinese communist party has successfully throttled multiple non-violent movements (The Democracy Wall, Tian'Anmen, Falun Gong possibly) by the application of severe and unrelenting force. I doubt that anything short of a real revolt will change anything there.
The Soviets on the other hand collapsed not because of non-violent protest, but because their system was unable to compete with the West. But if the casualties were small compared to WWII, it was a war nonetheless, and nonviolence would have merely created the very opening the Soviets needed to run the tanks over Europe.
I have high respect for Ghandi, and will never be 1/100th the man he was, but we should all be glad that Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of Britain in 1940, and not Ghandi.
At least one right-to-life group that was known for blocking the entrance to abortion clinics with sit-ins was successfully prosecuted and fined for a whole lot of money (millsions?) under the RICO (Racketeering and corruptions-related, used to be used mostly on the mob) statute. That seems to me a very close parallel to this case.
If this sit-in really did damage (it doesn't seem like it has) then this might be a good vehicle for eToys to use to go after RTMark.
If prior art exists and the patent officer ignores it, then did it really ever exist?
A patent would also offer another level of force for the GPL.
...anyone may use this technique in any product, so long as that product covered by the GPL... its use in any other application will be considered a violation...
Just because Red Hat has a market cap of 18.25 Billion does not mean that they have 18.25 billion dollars cash in the bank. All it means is that based on the number of shares currently being traded, people are willing to pay ~$260 for one of them. Multiply by X shares, and you get the market cap.
Red Hat got a small portion of that 18 billion when it sold shares in the IPO, and can make more if it seels more of the shares it holds. But that would increase the supply on the open market, which pushes the price down.
All of which is not to say that there isn't a lot of Linux money out there now, only that it may not be as much as you think. As they say, paper money...
Speaking as someone who not long ago worked at the City Desk of a large daily, anonymous sources often provide the "missing link" a reporter needs to pin a story down. If an anonymous source came to you alleging corruption by some city official, you didn't necessarily print it, but you did call up that official and ask... and investigate, if called for.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everything has to be bough or sold, but it has to be owned. And often, the owner gives it away.
In fact, I would argue that Free Software is about ownership. Most commercial software isn't sold, it's licensed, with a longer set of conditions than it takes to buy a car, all of which are targeted at reducing your rights as the end-user. Free Software on the other hand comes with source code, and the right to do with it as you wish.
Tietokone-olmi really pissed me off because he came across as one of the great number of "All patents are evil" types who doesn't consider the bigger picture that these things fit into. Companies shell out huge amounts of money building things like streaming protocols with the knowledge that they'll get a chance at an honest return on their investment. As for the guy who said, "But it's not illegal to do X in country Y," that's not my point. The legality of an action is a moving target, subject to the whims of jurists. But the morality of an action, I posit, is a much more definable thing. If you agree with my contention about ownership of an algorithm, then you will see why I think copying it, even if legal in a certain country, is still an act of theft, which is just wrong.
The fact that public-domain research was used is irrelevant. I paid for the research through my tax dollars, and if I go to the university library, I can make a copy of the research papers my dollars paid for. So long as I can still access that information, then the public good is being fulfilled. Besides, the main reason the government funds basic research is to help its national industries.
And yes, if someone implements an open codec based on public research, then there is nohing wrong with that. I think it's a great idea, and would help out if I could. (I can write good documentation, but I'm only a so-so coder) But tietokone-olmi was suggesting we steal the design of the good mousetrap, instead of looking for a way to build a better one.
If anything, it is people like tietokone-olmi that are responsible for the link between open source and piracy that exists in the public's mind. His post smelled strongly of the "warez are kewl d00d" mentality, and thus I lobbed an unnecessary insult. It made me feel better.
Enough. Back to work thinking of post ideas to get my karma back up...
-cwk.
Dear Anonymous Coward:
You do not think I was serious about that offer, do you? Okay, so what was so stupid in my post?
A few rooms full of geeks put a lot of work into writing the compression algorithm that lets people like you view kiddie porn over your AOL dialup. It was not easy for them to do. It probably took more than a year, and cost a lot of money. Wages, office space, etc.
Now, if you just copy their algorithm and give away all the software to use it, and it works comparably well, the company that did all the heavy lifting goes out of business. Why would anyone *buy* their products when they can get the same thing free?
This is called theft, and it is morally wrong, whether it is legal or not.
I think free software is a wonderful thing, and support it and try to use wherever I can. I also think lots of software patents are stupid. Currently my company has 3 lawyers on a patent-finding expedition, and it makes a lot of us very uncomfortable.
But there are things which deserve protection, because the innovators have a right to demand compensation for their work. I agree that there are a lot of abuses, and those should be curbed. But if you think the fundamental idea of a patent is wrong, well, then I think you are living in a world of delusion.
Why do I respond to this crap? Ah, all that Karma must be for something...
-cwk.
Dear tietokne-olme:
Please email me with your job title and place of employment so I can go to your boss and volunteer to do your job for free.
I disagree with stupid patents, not the concept of patenting itself. If creating a video compression algorithm is so obvious to you then why don't you write your own instead of stealing one from someone else? On second thought, why don't you stick to 1337 h4x0r tricks, script kiddie.
-cwk.
You misunderstand.
An example of why you are wrong and I am right :-)
I bought the domain thesnob.com a while back with intentions to create a web-zine type thing. (Haven't gotten to it yet, though...)
There is also a consignment clothing store somewhere in Florida called, you guessed it, The Snob. They are now at thesnob.net, because I got .com first.
Infinite TLDs would allow, for instance, thesnob.mag or thesnob.zine. The clothing store could get thesnob.clothes or thesnob.fashion or something like that. As it is, I get a fair number of emails every week asking for a price of some item of clothing for sale on eBay. If there were a .zine or .mag domain I would use it.
-cwk
Slashdot is a media outlet, and like all other media outlets, it doesn't owe you, the reader, crap. Nor does it owe the "Linux community," which has many, many other gathering places besides Slashdot thank you, anything.
Media outlets try to get and keep the attention of an audience. If they can do this successfully they make money.
I don't care too much about Star Wars, but apparently a lot of people here do. So it becomes a story, people read it and comment, and Slashdot gets eyeballs it sels to advertisers.
If Slashdot posts crap no one cares about, readers will cease to visit and there goes your ad revenue and Rob Malda gets to stand on the unemployment line.
The best way to send a message of disapproval is to stop coming, and start your own damn website. Hell, Slashdot will even give you the code.
You're no different than all the fools here complaining that Lucas "owes" them a movie on DVD. The world owesyou nothing, and if all you do is complain, then nothing is al you'll ever get.
-cwk
I agree completely. The current DNS system is being asked to serve a set of needs far beyond what was anticipated when it was designed.
Is there any good reason any more to not allow the registration of infinite TLD's? This would enhance the ability to give relevant domain names, and would also bring things more in line with Trademark law, which considers as relevant the market a company's product is in as well as its name.
Large websites could be organized by TLD instead of directory. IBM could have WWW.IBM.SALES for sales, and WWW.IBM.SUPPORT for help, and WWW.IBM.NYSE for investor information.
It seems to me that all of these E-commerce companies and places like Cisco stand to benefit the most from such a system, maybe it's time for them to start pushing ICANN to do something. This is not a problem that just "happened," it is a problem that was created and is being allowed to persist.
-cwk.
I only rejected a guy because of his signature once. He was kind of dodgy the whole time, real fidgety when I ran the card through. The name on the card said Rubinstein, but this guy looked (and dressed) like a Puerto Rican hood. The signature looked funny, and I asked for ID, but he said he didn't have. So I told him he couldn't have his stuff, and funny thing, he just left without arguing.
I used to get a lot of unsigned cards, so I'd ask for ID. Every so often, people would complain about this. Most merchant agreements say you're not ever supposed to take an unsigned card, no matter what. Most people though said "hey, thanks."
For all the above reasons, I write "ask for ID" on my cards' signature lines. And I'd say I get asked for it maybe 33% of the time. But my store took security seriously, since it was a small shop and we didn't want to see the owners getting socked...
-cwk.
It is also why banks love debit cards - since they are drawn directly on your bank account, there is no limit on your liability risk.
BZZZT! Wrong....
I used to work for a small retailer who did some mail order business. About once or twice a year we'd get scammed with a credit card. The customer would complain, and guess who got stiffed for $300? My store did. Not VISA, not Mastercard. They had no control over the transaction, and thus why should they bear responsibility?
This is the reason why many mail-order outfits do not ship goods to places other than the card's billing address... The card issuer controls that address, so it is slightly secure.
-cwk.
Okay, I feel sorry for all the businesses out there that got hosed for thousands of dollars in this.
But seriously, who would stake thousands of dollars in inventory, advertising, time, labor, etc., on a damn cut-rate host company?
If your business is worth anything to you, you should have at least one dedicated server for it, with someone who knows how to administer it available to fix it. Rent for storefronts costs thousands of dollars a month, $500 for a high-quality basic Linux server is a bargain by comparison.
Setting up a real business with one of these places is the Internet's equivalent of setting a store up in a ghetto. So these people didn't know that? Then they have no business in e-commerce. They bet their future on something they don't really comprehend, and that's just plain foolish.
-cwk.
Ditto on Jumpline. Inexpensive, PHP/MySQL, pages come up pretty quick, I'm happy.
Doubtful. That device operated used automatic frequency switching and other real fancy stuff to avoid detection. In fact, the thing which tipped the investigators off wasn't a bug sweep, but rather the regular weekly stops by a Russian agent to "pick up the groceries."
As for conspiracy theories, I've heard people say that this is due to the Clinton adminstration getting medieval on the whole tape-recording thing in the aftermath of the Linda Tripp case.
-cwk.
I would believe this horsecrap about Sony having so much at risk with PSX2 if we were talking about any other company.
Sony has long, well-established, profitable product lines in many different markets.
Sony's brand is among the best in the world in nearly every market it is in.
Sony is stable, with a long history of success, vision, and innovation.
If PSX2 fails, it will hurt. But there will be profits from Walkmen, camcorders, PCs, industrial products, televisions, and stereos to fill the gap.
Worst case, Sony misses an opportunity to be the first one through the door in home electronics convergence. Big f$%^@# deal. They'll have more than enough money to do it right thee second time.
If I could put money on Sony's bet, I would. Sounds pretty safe to me. Now, as to whether I want a game console as the center of my home nervous system...
-cwk.
Splitting increases the liquidity of your stock. In the US, stocks trade in 1/16ths of a dollar ("Teenies") and thus if a stock moves at all it has to move by at least 1/16th of a dollar. This is not a trivial issue when the numbers get large.
-cwk.
It is important because it may be the first case of a real security issue arising from a non-PC device.
People tend to approach PCs with a bit of concern because of a long history of viruses, while black-box items like stereos and TV's are "clean" devices.
If the future of electornics means an IP on everything, then security will need to become a much bigger issue.
-cwk.
DVD has been revealed as being just as much of a proprietary, closed-standard product as Windows. Either you play by the rules of a bunch of oligopolists, or you're out of luck. And yet we talk of digital distribution as the future. If we allow the distribution protocols of the future to be closed, then we lose.
We could complain, but mainstream news organizations, who drink from the same trough as the DVDCCA, will never hear us.
We could fight in court, but the opposition will always be better-funded. Now I don't believe money buys judgments, but it does buy time in front of a judge. We may win here and there, but can we afford to keep the fight up on every front? Not without a lot more organization, and money.
But the piracy issue will not just go away, and the media industry's desire for ever-more draconian controls will only grow as digital distribution grows.
The open-source community needs to do something about this. Unless a system which protects some freedoms is developed, then we will gradually lose all of our rights. I have many ideas about how this could be done, but the point is *we* need to do it, and offer it as an alternative.
Anyone interested, email cwkingsbury@hotmail.com
-cwk.
When was the last time two guys who ran a bicycle repair shop achieved something that man had dreamed of doing since the beginning of time?
Sure, Otto Lilienthal laid a lot of the groundwork, and Benz developed the engine, but it took Orville and Wilbur to pull it all together.
-cwk.
And what about Lady Ada Byron?
Try changing "perhaps" to only with in the above statement.
Imagine the possibilities otherwise- Someone writes a Thanksgiving script that cranks your oven up and down randomly. There goes the turkey!
Or maybe it turns your refrigerator off, or turns it into a freezer.
The general public hasn't really cared about system security because it has a limited impac on them. As long as their bank accounts don't get cracked, they don't care. Home computers connected to the internet 24/7 are a start, but the minute people become sysadmins for their home they might start to take notice of these things...
-cwk.
While we all know security through obscurity is fundamentally flawed, it does at least raise the bar (somewhat) for compromising a system, at least the first time, anyway.
Now, just how many "little holes" do you think the Microsofties let slip into their code?
Open-source software of course eliminates all obscurity, and thus renders a flawed security model utterly useless.
Closed-source on the other hand makes security through obscurity of uncertain, limited, and flawed use. In fact, it probably encourages it more than a little.
So while I would consider that letter-writer a fool by and large, I would have to agree that opening the source would make screwing with the system a lot easier.
-cwk.
Okay, the science isn't too good, but here goes. Below are the "Top 10" most-trafficked sites for November, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, along with what Netcraft says they use:
1. AOL- AOLServer/Solaris
2. Yahoo!- ? on FreeBSD
3. MSN- IIS4 on NT3(!?)
4. Lycos- Netscape-Enterprise on Digital Unix
5. Go- ? on Solaris
6. Microsoft- IIS5 on NT5 Beta
7. Excite@Home- Apache on Debian GNU/Linux
8. Amazon- Stronghold/Apache on Digital Unix
9. Blue Mtn. Arts- Apache on FreeBSD
10. Time-Warner- Netscape-Enterprise on Solaris
Obviously this ignores a lot, but I find it interesting that the only sites running Microsoft are in Redmond. At least they eat their own cooking.
I've always had a problem with these raw server counts becuase they ignore the "mindshare" factor. Perhaps a methodology more like the one I used above could make some accounting for this.
-cwk.
Yes, Germany was conquered. And yes, Russia is a mess, but it lost the Cold War because the West had the backbone to stand up to it. We did not fight an outright war, but I would not call building thousands of nuclear weapons "non-violent opposition."
Violent, dictatorial regimes do not voluntarily withdraw from the scene. Most of the time, they must be violently overthrown.
-cwk.
Non-violent tactics appeal to the morality of the "oppressors," while violent tactics work on the survival instinct. (i.e. "If we don't leave their country, they will kill us all...")
Non-violence has proven effective at winning for the oppressed rights which are granted to their opporessors. "All we want are the same rights you yourself enjoy" is a very persuasive argument. And in a system which has a moral foundation (like most Western governments, at least in theory), this appeal has great power.
But where entire nations are enslaved, like the Soviet Union, appeals to the popular morality are pointless, because they are fundamentally immoral systems, where no one has any rights to speak of, and the rule of law does not exist.
The Chinese communist party has successfully throttled multiple non-violent movements (The Democracy Wall, Tian'Anmen, Falun Gong possibly) by the application of severe and unrelenting force. I doubt that anything short of a real revolt will change anything there.
The Soviets on the other hand collapsed not because of non-violent protest, but because their system was unable to compete with the West. But if the casualties were small compared to WWII, it was a war nonetheless, and nonviolence would have merely created the very opening the Soviets needed to run the tanks over Europe.
I have high respect for Ghandi, and will never be 1/100th the man he was, but we should all be glad that Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of Britain in 1940, and not Ghandi.
-cwk.
Some fodder for the conspiracy theorists here:
At least one right-to-life group that was known for blocking the entrance to abortion clinics with sit-ins was successfully prosecuted and fined for a whole lot of money (millsions?) under the RICO (Racketeering and corruptions-related, used to be used mostly on the mob) statute. That seems to me a very close parallel to this case.
If this sit-in really did damage (it doesn't seem like it has) then this might be a good vehicle for eToys to use to go after RTMark.
-cwk.
A patent would also offer another level of force for the GPL.
-cwk.
Just because Red Hat has a market cap of 18.25 Billion does not mean that they have 18.25 billion dollars cash in the bank. All it means is that based on the number of shares currently being traded, people are willing to pay ~$260 for one of them. Multiply by X shares, and you get the market cap.
Red Hat got a small portion of that 18 billion when it sold shares in the IPO, and can make more if it seels more of the shares it holds. But that would increase the supply on the open market, which pushes the price down.
All of which is not to say that there isn't a lot of Linux money out there now, only that it may not be as much as you think. As they say, paper money...
-cwk.
-cwk.