Free Republic

Memo to Bill Gates: What a mess. Less than a week after a court-approved deal ends the antitrust case, Microsoft's back in the spotlight. The latest Halloween memo portrays your company as utterly obsessed with the open-source software movement but utterly confused about how best to proceed. I can only imagine the state of confusion. Microsoft has tried to persuade developers and users for the last four years that there's no there there--and to no avail. Your minions better get a handle soon. The question is whether that's at all possible, but in the meantime, here are a few items...

Apple, IBM, and Sun have opened up their software code to the public in their battle against Redmond. It just might work. While the appeals court ruling last week upholding Microsoft's (MSFT) settlement with the Justice Department was a molar or two away from being toothless, Microsoft faces a bigger potential check to its dominance today than it did at the height of the browser wars five years ago. This comes not from an ever-vigilant judiciary but (more fittingly) from an ever-adapting market. And it is taking the form of Linux and other types of open-source software being developed by...

Wednesday October 23, 2002 - [ 12:47 PM GMT ] Print this Article Topic - Government An anonymous reader writes: "Leaders of the New Democrat Coalition attempt to outlaw GPL. A call to sign off on explicit rejection of "licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption of promising cyber security technologies developed through federal R & D." has been issued by Adam Smith, Congressman for the Ninth District in the State of Washington. It's already signed off on by Rep. Tom Davis(R-Va), Chairman of Government Reform Subcomittee on Technology, and Rep. Jim Turner (D-TX) Ranking Member of the same...

For years, Bill Gates and other top executives at Microsoft railed against the economic philosophy of open-source software with Orwellian fervor, denouncing its communal licensing as a "cancer" that stifled technological innovation. Today, Microsoft claims to "love" the open-source concept, by which software code is made public to encourage improvement and development by outside programmers. Gates himself says Microsoft will gladly disclose its crown jewels--the coveted code behind the Windows operating system--to select customers. "We can be open source. We love the concept of shared source," said Bill Veghte, vice president of the Windows Server Group. "That's a super-important shift...

Hackers send Sendmail a message Online vandals hacked into the primary download server for Sendmail.org and replaced key software with a Trojan horse, a Sendmail development team member said Wednesday. The apparent attack on Sendmail didn't leave a back door in the popular open-source e-mail software package, as previously believed, but compromised the download software on the Sendmail consortium's primary server so that every tenth request for source code would receive a modified copy in reply. "The exploited code that we see is not in our (development) tree at all," said Eric Allman, chief technology officer of Sendmail Inc., which...

“While the News.com rear-end smooch session with [Apache “entrepreneur” Randy] Terbrush tries to paint a picture that companies like Covalent and Tribal that base their business on supporting open source software is a license to print money, the exact opposite is true. News.com muddies the waters by dropping names of profitable companies like Cisco and Merck into the story, but conveniently leaves out the fact that according to publicly available financial information Covalent has consistently lost millions for the past two years. For example from February 1, 2001 to January 31, 2002 Covalent’s annual sales reached $2,664,000 while their cost...

<p>The unthinkable has happened: an informal partnership between a Microsoft project called .Net and an ordinarily Microsoft-bashing camp of programmers who have set out to produce a free twin of the .Net framework, a set of programming tools.</p> <p>The effort, called Mono, is a rare bridging of the chasm between the commercial world and free software -- more commonly referred to as open-source software -- a movement in which the Linux operating system is at the forefront.</p>

People often ask me if they should trust Open Source Software (OSS). This question predates the emergence of Linux and the various Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) OSs, as popular security software for Unix systems, such as COPS (www.fish.com/cops/) and Tripwire (www.tripwire.com), began showing up in the early 1990s. Organizations accustomed to paying big bucks for any software they planned to use were understandably cautious about free software that didn't come from well-known vendors. And recent events have added a scary twist to OSS. Several sites, one with a program designed for stress-testing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs), had backdoors added to...

<p>But now Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, forced to ease up on those restrictions. The biggest beneficiaries of the New Millennium ABM Club may be proponents of Linux, the open-source operating system, long considered to be as potentially disruptive to Microsoft's dominance as a missile strike on Communist-era Moscow.</p>

The Register: Sun May Play Greater Open Source RoleSep 4, 2002, 17 :30 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (591 reads) "Its new role as a Linux evangelist could see Sun Microsystems Inc release features found in enterprise-level operating system servers to the open source community. "A senior executive at Palo Alto, California-based Sun last week didn't rule-out the company's possible donation of high-end technologies to the open source community. Technologies would be donated during development of Sun's own brand of Linux. "The announcement marks Sun's increasing participation in Linux and open source. It follows nearly two years of machinations that saw...

Venezuela eliminates govt. software piracy By Thomas C Greene in Washington Posted: 09/03/2002 at 06:54 EST Venezuela has announced an official policy of preferring open source software products to proprietary ones in the public sector, according to an article by Linux Today's Brian Proffit. Apparently, from now on all software developed for the government must be licensed under the GPL. Even software used for Internet access to e-government must run GPL'd apps on a GPL'd operating system. For new purchases, free software is to be preferred to proprietary wherever practical. Reasons for the switch include a desire to promote the...

COMMENTARY--No other market is quite like software. General Motors isn't forced to contend with a "free car" movement, which has a goal of undermining sales-based automakers. Dell isn't faced with a grass roots PC hardware movement, which says PCs should be free--and then hands out samples at no cost. Of course, software is unique as its production relies purely on the mind. Even if a renegade group wanted to offer free cars, it would not be feasible as long as raw materials carry a cost. In software, all it takes to challenge established proprietary software vendors is to convince enough...

Most software is poorly designed and built. This statement comes as no surprise to anyone in the software industry and is elucidated well by Charles Mann in his popular article "Why Software Is So Bad". I have proposed a framework for better software architectures in my article "Most Software Stinks", which served as one of the sources for Mann's piece. But even if everyone accepted my proposal for improving software design (which they don't), there is still a problem. How do we get software designers and programmers to raise the quality of their work? Because few people ever see their...

On the Internet, software wants to be free. But as the Free Software Foundation and many others point out, the word "free" here is not about price; it is about liberty. "Free" is used as in the phrase "free speech" (a right we covet), rather than the phrase "free beer" (always too good to be true) or "free kitten" (which sounds good, but has a high overhead). Confusion arises because free software mostly has a zero price tag as a natural consequence of the original license, the GPL, that enforces the liberty of developers to use code created by their...

The Linux world is growing up fast. Just look at who are the keynote speakers for LinuxWorld: executives from Sun, Oracle, IBM and Google. What happened to the real penguins who started this revolution? Are they not worthy of the main stage? Has the penguin gotten too cozy with the establishment for its own good? Or is it simply learning to live in a world in which revenue and customer lists are critical factors for success? We are entering a new phase in the evolution of Linux and open source, in which the stakes are higher, capitalism rules, and holding...

Microsoft is worried about Peruvian Congressman Edgar Villanueva's proposal for his nation's government agencies to standardize on Free Software for their own internal use. But Villanueva makes an important point: everybody has to deal with the government. If a government uses proprietary software, its citizens will probably have to use the same software to communicate with it. A government web site that only supports Internet Explorer would lock citizens into that Microsoft product. In contrast, a government site using open standards and avoiding patented software would allow citizens to choose between many different kinds of software to access the site....

Open-source software advocates will unfurl a legislative proposal next week to prohibit the state of California from buying software from Microsoft or any other company that doesn't open its source code and licensing policies. Named the "Digital Software Security Act," the proposal essentially would make California the "Live Free or Die" state when it comes to software. If enacted as written, state agencies would be able to buy software only from companies that do not place restrictions on use or access to source code. The agencies would also be given the freedom to "make and distribute copies of the software."...

"From the day of its first draft was released in 1999, the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) has come under attack by open source software makers and their lobbyists. Bowing to pressure from these companies and their lobbyists, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) has revised the UCITA to exempt open source software makers from offering warranties, but only if the open source software makers are non-profit organizations. The NCCUSL’s new changes to the UCITA also broaden state’s rights by allowing for a state’s specific consumer protection laws to override the UCITA."

WHEN the hordes of volunteer programmers who make up the open-source movement met this week for their annual convention in San Diego, one constituency was conspicuously absent: entrepreneurs. Many start-ups that tried to make money from open-source software have already gone bust, and many of those that have survived are in a sorry state.This is not all that is worrying open-source advocates. Microsoft is leading an increasingly nasty campaign against programs such as Linux, the free operating system, and has even been putting it about that such programs make it easier for terrorists to hack into computers. Worse, Linus Torvalds,...

Don't dump MS for free software, ambassador begs Peru By John Lettice Posted: 07/29/2002 at 09:19 EST The prospect of Peru's legislators mandating free software for government departments continues to move mountains. First we had Bill Gates' shock donation to the Peruvian president, and now the US ambassador to Peru has written a letter to the president of the Peruvian congress opposing the move, according to Wired. The text of the letter has fallen into Wired's clutches, apparently, but the ambassador should not be particularly surprised at it being leaked, considering the approximate direction he sent it in. There is...