(sjansen) >You saw "OSDL employee tries to compete with BitMover". I saw, "BitMover >tried to force its will on a user".
as usual, thoughtful and well said. but in this case, you are wrong! (except for the part about the glasses..) ;-) what i see is "OSDL employee break the law" and imo, what you see is "OSDL employee is justified in unethical/illegal behavior because bitmover wouldn't share it's source." you state: "BitMover tried to force its will on a user". please, offer a simple justification for this statement because it to me, it seems like a silly thing to say. (ejensen) >> America's economy >> is one of, if not the, strongest economy in the world and I'm pretty >> sure it wasn't because of OSS mindsets. (torrie) >Actually it is. >... >We're always asking other countries to "open up" their markets to us. >Is this not an OSS mindset? no, it's not - and please don't confuse the issue by overloading terms incorrectly. fundamentally, "OSS mindset" is to minimize the power/value of private property wrt to software - (the justification is simply that this results in better technology.) but it's self-evident that private property is a key ingredient to the success of the US economy. now you may argue one way or another about private property is right or wrong in certain contexts or argue what 'private property' really means, but i think it's a far stretch to say that the US economic strength is due to an "OSS mindset". i think it's more likely that you mean "US economic strength is due to yankee ingenuity, finding a need and filling it, improving on the status quo, etc." and that you equate all that with "OSS mindset". Josh Coates www.jcoates.org -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael L Torrie Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 4:16 PM To: Provo Linux Users Group Mailing List Subject: Re: Slashdot feed... On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 15:53 -0600, Eric Jensen wrote: > I can understand the "repeat victim" part. We have all experienced that > plenty. But the economy part is a bit of a stretch. America's economy > is one of, if not the, strongest economy in the world and I'm pretty > sure it wasn't because of OSS mindsets. Actually it is. Witness the total domination of the IBM PC architecture (arguably now wintel). This came about because compaq had the guts to reverse engineer IBM's bios. This forced IBM to be more open with the specs and things and before you know it the industry exploded. Compare this to Apple who always has kept stuff very tightly controlled. Where have they gone? We're always asking other countries to "open up" their markets to us. Is this not an OSS mindset? Keeping things closed does not promote the economy and does not promote innovation and development. Being more open does. Two things hold back entire industries: government regulation and closed industries with high barriers to entry. Sometimes this is a good thing. I'd hate to not have government regulation on automobiles, for example. > I'm not up to speed on the OSDL employee stuff, but I've never felt like > BitMover was forcing anything on anybody. Even if it isn't open source, > I think offering a great product/service for free is very generous. > Personally, I think a lot of people are still locked in the anti > Microsoft mindset. But there is a difference. Microsoft makes horrid > products and are the worst kind of capatilist bullies. People like > BitMover, Secway, and many many others make great products and offer > them very generously to the community. BitMover never forced anything on anyone, true. But their decision has cause a problem that is inherent with all proprietary systems. Yes they were generous (sort of) but Linus made a mistake and now RMS is saying I told you so. From what I can tell Larry McVoy is anything but kind and generous. Sometimes people are more generous than they would be naturally because they have to be that way due to their market position. If he was in MS's position for example, it does not follow that he would be the same. > > With that said, I'm not sure where I stand on the reverse engineering. > Reverse engineering has been used to steal and also to great new and > better technologies. Reverse engineering is and always will be morally okay. The problem is that software traditionally has been much harder to reverse engineer than, say, a new car engine. Even in the traditional world, a product is only immune to reverse engineering as long as it is secret and not yet released. Once a car has been sold, for example, I can take the engine apart as much as I'd like to see how it works. Whether or not I can copy it and sell it for profit is another story. As far as software goes, reverse engineering isn't so much about seeing the assembly code as it is documenting the protocols and algorithms used, neither of which can and should be property. For what it is worth, I applaud this employee's work to free us from bitkeeper. As far as I know implementing the bitkeeper protocol would be just fine and the algorithms bitkeeper uses are anything but secret or McVoy's private property. An interesting thing to watch lately has been the relationship between the NoMachine.com group and the FreeNX group over the NX remote X software. Most of the NX is GPL and open source and NoMachine does depend on selling packages of NX for their bread and butter. FreeNX in many ways threatens their livelihood by providing entirely GPL glue components in easy-to-use packages. Given FreeNX's slick packages why should anyone by the commercial version? Clearly NoMachine sells value- added services surrounding NX. Through it all both groups are contribution to each other to make the NX product better all around. It is a win-win. NoMachine makes more money selling to enterprises the improved software while we continue to enjoy NX on our home machines. BitMover could move to this type of symbiosis but they have chosen not to. Fortunately history has shown that when companies try to get themselves entrenched in some way (in the Linux kernel development process, for example) and do things like this invariably it provides the impetus needed to write a completely free version that often does the same thing better. I hope this happens. Frankly the current state of revision control systems that are freely available is pretty sad. CVS sucks, Subversion sucks a little less, arch is terribly complicated, etc. Monotone sounds promising but still has a ways to go before Linus can use it. Michael > > Eric Jensen > .===================================. > | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | > | Don't Fear the Penguin. | > | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | > `===================================' -- .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `===================================' .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
