Doubt's Log

Bruce Perens has released a peice called stand together that dave has responded to.

There is such a amazing amount of crap in this doc that it stinks.

The first paragraph contains this "Equality, however, isn't what Microsoft is looking for. Thus, they have announced Shared Source, a system that could be summarized as Look but don't touch - and we control everything." Yup, this is completly correct, but it's part of the market. People pay for software not so they can tinker with it, but so that they can use it and often build ontop of it. They give feedback and the product can possible improve. The phrase "we control everything" is a really a lame monopoly tie in. The reallity is that people have choices for any given task, and the end user or developer has the choice in the market. The easiest way to see through the rhetoric is to see how well it applies back to the camp saying it. In the worst case of closed source, you get a binary that you can't do anything but run. In the worst case of free software you get the GPL, which means that you can't ever reap the benifits of your own work except for the first payment, or something like the ticketmaster "convienence" charge in distribution, that's freedom for you. Also on a related note if you make money on the support or setting up the installation, you have a financial inscentive to make the software so that the user is dependant on you to help them.

Second paragraph. "The dot-coms gave away goods and services as loss-leaders, in unsuccessful efforts to build their market share. In contrast, the business model of Open Source is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators." Hold up here... I thought the suggested buissness model for free software was to have the software be a loss leader for service? The second point really only makes sense for big companies that have more people and money then they know what to do with. How often does your buissness need that level of control, how often does spending man hours contributing to the open source pool more cost effective then simply buying/leasing software. I guess we will find out in a few more years on that front.

"...they hope to get the benefits of Free Software without sharing those benefits with those who participate in creating them. We urge Microsoft to go the rest of the way in embracing the Open Source software development paradigm." Shared source is specifically to benifit the person who uses it. The primary utility of the program is for a developer looks at the code and make thier own code work. If they find something broken by looking at the source, they can get it fixed by ms, but the reality is that it may not happen till the next release (and in many cases this is the right way). [Scripting News]

Slashdot discovers that linux has a higher cost then windows when Linux Grabs World Record For TPC-H Benchmark [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

I can't read christensen and the innevator's dillemna without thinking about certain internal projects. *sigh*

The difference between male and female orgasms [via GeekPress] [Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]

A link for pam. I got to wonder what would be a healthy relationship with marketers. Ultimatly, I have problems or my work can be made more efficient with some product out there that mabye I don't know about. But how do we keep it fair and non annoying. It's reached a point where I immediatly hang up if I pick up the phone during certain hours, say "hello" and not get an almost imediate response. Even worse is the crap we get in the mail. There is one day a week that a large number of ads come for everyone. The trash can, by the time I check mail on that day, is full of the ads that every last person looked at and immediatly threw away. There has got to be a better way....

Business 2.0: Is Microsoft Smart- or Just Successful? An article discussing msr's relationship with the company.

The thing to realize about The Horowitz Case and Other Forms of Censorship by the Radical Left is that it just matches what the right was and still is doing. When do you support free speech and when is speech just a form of hate without value? Each newspaper has the right to publish what they want to, what disturbs me is some of the student reaction to when the papers were published.

/* I would like to think that this would give the NSA a real headache
* but I am not THAT native
*/

Craig Mundie: The Commercial Software Model. Dave talks about what he thought of the piece. Cox replies poking fun. But the thing is if you want to write code and make money open software is not the way to go.

What I don't like about the model cox is proposing is that it makes a really poor platform. Imagine that every little thing you want to add to your computer you have to get someone to write you some custom code to do. Nobody can really sell you software because everyone has different expectations of what's on a box. You end up choosing between have every version of every library, or effectively paying a consultant to install everything and anything on your box. When someone writes for you a feature, they only have to care about making it work on your one system, instead of how it would work everywhere. Nothing too complex can be built, because no one would have the money for that type of investment. This is just taking cox's model to it's end extream, but it illustrates the problems in his model.