Nice job Charlie! I would add a few more things to consider though.
It is very clear that the people at Microsoft, such as Jim Allchin,
can no longer see the forest for the trees when it comes to innovation.
They have become so accustomed to buying whatever it is that they want
that they can no longer conceive of the possibility of being able to
innovate without money. It is clear that Allchin's perspective assumes
that innovation must be purchased. Wow, is he ever wrong! If he were
right how would we have ever come up with the innovation of money? Hmm.
Can't buy that.
Throughout history humans have been creative. Necessity is the mother
of invention. True innovation arises out of need. This is the
foundation of Linux and the Open Source movement. It is also the foundation
of the scientific process that began in earnest a couple hundred years ago.
Imagine what life would be like if the scientists of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries had only shared the knowledge of their innovations
with a company or sponsor that paid them for their discoveries. Much of the
structure of our society would not exist. Our current level of technological
development is critically dependent on those early scientists having freely
shared information with each other. The principles of peer review,
examination
of every step of an experiment, reproducing results, and other such details
make up the scientific method. A glance will show that the Open Source
movement
is doing the same things. History has shown that this approach works and
works
very well! It has also shown that the proprietary approach used by Microsoft
benefits only a few and for a short period of time. It then ends either with
the knowledge disappearing into oblivion or else emerging into the public
domain. It is not a sustainable model.
Dan Coutu "... he who will not risk, cannot win."
Chief Technology Officer - John Paul Jones
iCOMS [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice: 603-324-2127 Fax: 603-598-1226
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave hardy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 10:31 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Microsoft hits new ethical low point?
>
>
> Email post of the week; nice work, Mr. Bennett.
>
>
> Dave Hardy
> Systems Manager/DBA
> Vermont Health Care Administration
> 89 Main Street
> Drawer 20
> Montpelier, VT 05620-3101
> 802-828-2914
> FAX: 802-828-2949
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> >>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 02/16/01 10:00AM >>>
>
> > They expect people have forgotten that they're in deep
> > with the government already for stifling competition
> > and then say with a straight face that competition
> > from Linux is stifling innovation. What innovation
> > they're referring to, I have no idea.
>
> "Innovation" is Microsoft-speak for "Planned Obsolescence".
>
> "Innovation" means that Microsoft knows the true interfaces to their
> technologies but all other application developers do not.
>
> "Innovation" means that every 9-12 months you will be forced to recode
> substantial parts of your application to keep up with the latest
> bucketload of "innovative" API's published by Microsoft or risk being
> overrun by the pseudo-technical hyper-babble of the Microsoft
> advertising machine.
>
>
> One thing that concerns be about the Microsoft comments is the
> language about Open Source undermining intellectual property.
>
> This is FALSE. FALSE FALSE FALSE.
>
> Every Open Source license I've had the pleasure to read was written in
> the language of intellectual property law. When I give you code under
> the GPL or similar OSS compliant license I am still the copyright
> holder and you are still a licensee. If you violate the terms of the
> license your forfeit the right to use the software. If you fail to
> comply I have certain rights which I will enforce in a court of law.
>
> Lest we have difficulty defending the GPL when it gets it's day in
> court, nobody working with Open Source software should hesitate to
> state this fact clearly and often. Open Source software is owned by
> its developers and they can and will enforce violations of their
> license.
>
> The most serious threat to intellectual property (speaking as a fan of
> Civil Society here) is an amazing willingness to ignore the common
> good as corporate lobbyists for large media companies secure
> increasingly egregious extensions to intellectual property "rights".
> The Sonny Bono (aka Mickey Mouse) law, the Digital Millenium Copyright
> Act and UCITA are cases in point.
>
> As these laws continue to get more and more onerous, clever people
> will continue to find ways to work within this legal context to be
> able to continue to share their property while simultaneously
> protecting themselves from being run out of business using their own
> code.
>
> But I'll say it again - the GPL and the Open Source phenomenon are not
> here to destroy intellectual property. They protect the intellectual
> property of people that want to collaborate publicly and they are
> rooted in the intellectual property traditions. They can be used by
> Capitalist Tools and Communist Dupes alike ;-).
>
> As an aside, fans of the Estate Tax might consider taxing intellectual
> property under the same terms. If you had copyright in a work with a
> term of 40 years remaining, perhaps only 45% of that term should acrue
> to heirs with no right of renewal.
>
>
>
> The attacks along the lines of "you get what you pay for" are of
> course absurd. You get a whole lot more. You get an army of highly
> skilled code ninjas willing to come to your house to make it work for
> free. See "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson
> if you haven't already.
>
> We're seeing the major downside of using the word Free to describe
> Sharable Software. It's a ready-made footfold for the Fudmeister.
>
> For the first time in a decade we have an industry that is thriving
> outside of the iron platform dictatorship set by Microsoft. For the
> first time companies are making money without having to share some of
> it with Microsoft. No wonder they've got a load in their pants!
>
> The time is coming for Microsoft to come to learn that it must lie in
> the bed that it has made. For a while in the mid-90's a new software
> company was faced with an impossible situation: you had to develop on
> a platform where the platform and development tools provider was
> large, strong and arrogant enough to enter your market at will and
> become your fiercest competitor. Once they were in your market you
> could agree to be bought for pennies on the dollar or be crushed by
> Microsoft using technology they'd appropriate from your competitor on
> a similar basis.
>
> They built a software industry where anyone who was not Microsoft
> could only survive by working with technologies that were not
> controlled by Microsoft. To me it always seemed that you've have to
> be out of your mind to attempt to build a software business on the
> Microsoft platform using the Microsoft development tools. During this
> entire period I, and you, and thousands like us held this
> contradiction up to our corporate managers and clients. For many of
> us the rewards in meaningful work on solid, useful, non-MS-centric
> projects has been great.
>
> Look, by 1997 Microsoft was holding conferences with Venture
> Capital firms and providing a spin which basically said "If you back a
> company that is not towing the line with these technologies, you will
> loose." The only way to maintain a vibrant and competitive software
> development industry was to find a way to make money using a business
> model that Microsoft would find utterly repugnant.
>
> It looks like we're well on the way to succeeding.
>
>
> Last thing I'm going to comment on is the insinuation that our
> legislators ought to do something about this "threat". We need a
> Lawmaker's Guide to Software Development Technology. Something that
> could be inexpensively reproduced and made available to all state and
> federal legislators and their staffs. It needs to call attention to
> the history and nature of the Open Source phenomenon. It needs to
> call attention to the fact that code developed under the open source
> model is the only way out of the technology obsolesence and technology
> risk traps set by companies like Microsoft. It needs to argue
> persuasively that public institutions should not be using software
> technology based on source code to which the public does not have
> access.
>
> ccb
>
>
> --- This is my opinion, not necessarily that of VA Linux
> Systems ---
>
>
>
> --
> Charles C. Bennett, Jr. VA Linux Systems
> Systems Engineer, 25 Burlington Mall Rd.,
> Suite 300
> US Northeast Region Burlington, MA 01803-4145
> +1 617 543-6513 +1 888-LINUX-4U
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.valinux.com
> vi/(emacs) NT/(Linux) qmail/(sendmail) (perl)/python (pepsi)/coke
> -
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