Microsoft hits new ethical low point?

[se at panix.com (Scott Ehrlich)]

Could someone please remind me of the URL for this article?

Thanks.

Scott

On Fri, 16 Feb 2001 ccb at valinux.com wrote:

>
> > 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
> ccb at valinux.com				www.valinux.com
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