Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 22:58:18 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Brett Glass" <brett@lariat.org>, <jgrosch@mooseriver.com> Cc: "Joey Garcia" <bear@unix.homeip.net>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Anyone going to Comdex next week? Message-ID: <003c01c16cd9$bd2e0f60$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20011112164807.0558bdd0@localhost>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Brett Glass >Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 4:02 PM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt; jgrosch@mooseriver.com >Cc: Joey Garcia; questions@FreeBSD.ORG; chat@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: RE: Anyone going to Comdex next week? > > >At 02:29 AM 11/12/2001, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > >>Interesting you would say that. I think there's a serious point >>there. At one time the industry was totally dependent on advances coming >>from commercial software and hardware companies, if you had something new >>and cool then the badge of admission was showing it at Comdex. > >It still is. Most open source is not innovative but rather copies -- and >follows the trail blazed by -- commercial software. Brett, Brett, Brett. I know your just trying to stir up trouble here. Sigh. It is true that very specialized software industries, such as very large databases, specialist software like tax software, and the like, that there is little to no Open Source, thus innovation in those software industries can only come from commercial software. The same is true for office desktop productivity software like spreadsheets, wordprocessors, etc. I would argue, though, that there is little innovation in those software industries at the current time. (except in designing new ways to get even more money for the same old stuff) But most open source software has superior implementations that are later copied by commercial software. For example, all the anti-relaying anti-spamming stuff came out in Open Source long before commercial mailservers started to pick up on it. >Now and then we see >an innovation that's made open source from the get-go, but it is rare. >Innovating is expensive, no. Innovating is cheap. Forcing those innovations down the consumer's throats is where the expense is. and people need (and deserve) to be rewarded >for it. It would actually be very bad for the industry if innovations >started as open source, since this would preclude funding for them. > Not true in fact it helps immensely because software patenting is still very difficult and is broken all the time. (see Look and Feel lawsuit between Apple and the world) The software industry is full of commercial software that copies ideas implemented in other software, both commercial and open source. When new ideas are implemented in open source the commercial companies can see which ones are successfully forced down the consumer's throat without a lot of wasted money and time on their part on dead-end software ideas. The commercial software industry has successfully argued that their stuff is "better" than Open Source simply because it a) costs money and b) is implemented on Windows and c) supposedly is supported because of a. They get money for that, not for technical prowess. > >GNU, and the FSF's "Free" software (with a capital "F"), are destructive >forces. They virtually never innovate. The purpose of the FSF is to prey >on the industry by creating no-cost knockoffs of commercial products, >preventing hard-working people from being justly rewarded for what they >do. The BSDs do not share this destructive attitude. They give back. > I don't know that GNU software developers are known for filing software patents on the ideas of their software. If a GNU piece of software is good enough to make the market get interested, the commercial houses can simply write a competing implementation from scratch. They would have to do that anyway if the GNU stuff didn't exist. I think that FSF is a lot worse for the Free software market than for the commercial software market. To restate you, I'd say: "..The purpose of the FSF is to prey on the Free Software industry by creating no-cost knockoffs of Free products..." > >Windows is still EXCEEDINGLY important (not that I like it, by the >way). So is Vomit Making System (VMS) and MVS and whatever passes for IBM's proprietary mainframe OS, and Novell Netware. Old software dinosaus take a long time to fade away. But I think that if Linux and FreeBSD didn't exist, Windows would be much more important than it is now. Sure they are still growing but at a lesser rate, and all of us are growing too. >And other commercial software -- even more than Windows -- is >vital. It's a tragedy that the FSF has had success in convincing >companies to adopt utterly infeasible business plans centered around >its business-destroying license. Then, when the companies inevitably >fail, the FSF uses the license to scavenge the corpes, like hyenas, >for code to appropriate into its hoard of software. > >>and the new cool things in software aren't being introduced by people like >>Apple, Microsoft and IBM anymore. Instead they are being introduced by >>user communities around FreeBSD and Linux. > >I strongly disagree. Again, most innovations in software do come from >commercial software companies. FreeBSD and Linux are doing some minor >innovation, but mostly they are refining what already exists. > Network Address Translation came years earlier in BSD than even in Cisco IOS and Microsoft trailed Cisco as a matter of fact. If there's a single technology that has been more critical to the growth of the Internet (or destructive to IPv6 plans) over the last 3 years I don't know what it is. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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