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Section Editor: Jon Corbet


April 29, 1999

   

 

Letters to the editor


Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them.
 
   
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 15:15:23 +0100 (GMT)
From: dev@cegelecproj.co.uk
Subject: Possible RedHat IPO
To: lwn@lwn.net

Amidst talk about a possible RedHat IPO, and hints on how to get a
slice of the action, I hate to sound a note of caution, but ...

It is almost inevitable that RedHat stock would almost immediately
become seriously overvalued, as happened when Netscape floated. There
will be high tech stock dealers out there who want to get a slice of
this new market sector while it's still small, expecting massive
growth over the next few years. This is looking at a free software
based company in completely the wrong way.

Those of the older ones of us will remember that a few months ago Bob
Young's stated ambition was not for RedHat to grow to the size of
Microsoft, rather for Microsoft to shrink to the size of RedHat. This,
he asserted, was desirable so that the software business could never
again be dominated by a single corporation, and he further said that
it was a Very Good Thing for there to be multiple GNU/Linux
distributions so that all the players had to stay honest.

RedHat is not, and should never become, a high margin business. The
high margins which drive Microsoft's revenues, and whose anticipation
drove Netscape's stock to such high levels, are pure anathema to the
principle of Free Software. The whole point of using GNU/linux is that
you *don't* have to shell out further money when you add more machines
to your network. This absence of a RedHat tax, and the absence of the
possibility of a RedHat tax means that business growth for RedHat will
come from elsewhere.

RedHat will continue to grow by offering support, training,
handholding and other labour and skills intensive services to its
customers. RedHat Labs will probably also be contracted by hardware
makers to ensure that Free Software runs on their hardware. While
these are excellent business areas to be in they will generate normal
and decent profit margins rather than excessive and indecent profit
margins. Further, with the likes of HP and IBM competing in these some
of these areas there won't be a particular opportunity for RedHat to
charge much of a premium over small startup companies.

#include <disclaimer>
// The following is my personal opinion. I am not qualified to give
// advice on stocks and shares. You are entirely responsible for your
// own buying and selling decisions, etc ...

I would steer well clear of early stock offerings in companies based
in the free software business. It is likely that Men in Suits who
don't understand Free Software will go on a mad buying frenzy wanting
to get in at the ground floor of the latest new high technology
sector. There are already Internet based stocks which, IMHO, are
massively overvalued, and early offerings of Free Software based
stocks are likely to go the same way.



Dunstan Vavasour
dvavasour@iee.org

   
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 11:54:47 -0400 (EDT)
To: flux@microsoft.com, kragen-tol@kragen.dnaco.net, editor@lwn.net,
Subject: Re: Is Free Software Worth the Cost?
From: kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)

(This is in response to your article at
http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0599/flux/flux0599.htm.)

You write:
> While free distribution is a great marketing tool (think about all
> those samples you get in the mail), what does it say about the product
> itself? Frankly, it says that the product (or the effort that went into
> making the product) has no value. Is that what you software engineers
> out there want?

I suppose that means your article has no value, because I got it for
free.  And books I borrow from the library.  And movies my friends lend
me.  Right?  Maybe if my friends want me to appreciate how valuable
their movies are, they should start charging me for borrowing them.  ;)

> If, however, you gave away all software, how would you pay the
> creators of that software? You destroy the subtle motives that only
> cash can motives such as food on the table, a warm place to sleep, and
> so forth.

I'm sure this is news to the folks who work at Cygnus; they might be
surprised to discover that their lucrative support contracts for the
free software they write don't pay them anything, according to you.  ;)

> Ironically, these folks are sowing the seeds of their own
> destruction. If they actually succeed in making software free, no one
> will be willing to employ them to create a product with no value.

Most software development is bespoke, and always has been.  Bespoke
software can be free (to make copies and modifications) without
making its production more financially difficult.

> Soon, students will stop studying software development in college
> since there won't be a way to make a career out of it. All those young,
> eager students will have to turn to something less respectable, like
> studying law.

The job market for programmers might shrink, but there's nothing wrong
with that.  But professional programmers won't have to spend all their
time reinventing the wheel, only to have their work discarded in a year
or two.  (How many different word processors have been written?  How
many are in use today?)  They'll have to spend their time creating
things that are actually useful to society.  

I suspect there will be plenty of jobs to go around. Indeed, since the
large body of free software greatly enhances every programmer's
productivity, it is likely that projects that are currently
economically infeasible will become feasible, greatly expanding the job
market for programmers.

The whole shrink-wrapped software swindle has been a great thing for a
few programmers -- while it lasted.  But it's not going to last much
longer.

> A product that is copylefted is copyrighted, but can be modified by
> anyone as long as they don't charge for their contributions. The source
> code for the new changes must be made available for others to see and
> learn from.

This is factually incorrect.  You are certainly allowed to charge for
your contributions; indeed, the GNAT project is supported by doing just
that.  You are just not allowed to prohibit other people from making
and giving away copies of those contributions.

The source code for the new changes need only be made available to
those people you give the changes themselves to.  If you don't make the
changes available, you don't need to make the source code available
either.

> If intellectual property isn't property, then just what is property? 

As anyone who has taken an IP course in law school knows, intellectual
property has not been property for centuries.  The last time
intellectual property was property in England was in the 1700s, when it
was used to support publishers and censorship.

> I'm not saying that Stallman is anticapitalist, I'm saying the whole
> free software movement is.

That's absurd.  What about Cygnus, Digital, HP, Intel, Crynwr, WebTV,
Red Hat, SuSe, Sun, Cisco, and IBM?  They all give significant support
to the free software movement -- indeed, many of them are supported
entirely by free software.  Are you saying they are anticapitalist?

> Giving away software is a great marketing tool. It's hard to compete
> if your competition is free. That's something that a number of
> companies have discovered. Now it's Microsoft's turn with Windows NT
> versus Linux.

Microsoft has been losing to Linux with Windows NT for years.  Now it's
Microsoft's turn with Windows 98 versus Linux and KDE, and Office
versus KOffice and friends.

> I just want the folks who write that software to be and paid for
> writing it. That is the proper model for the industry.  So the next
> time you think about using some free software, consider its cost to the
> software industry.

If the software industry can be outcompeted by students in their spare
time, what good is it?  Let it die.  People will keep writing software
for sure.

I suspect that a new software industry will be created, though -- one
that actually performs useful work and innovation instead of rehashing
the same 1960s OS architecture and networked hypertext, 1970s
user-interface work and word processor, and 1980s spreadsheet over and
over again.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
TurboLinux is outselling NT in Japan's retail software market 10 to 1,
so I hear. 
-- http://www.performancecomputing.com/opinions/unixriot/981218.shtml

   
From: Brian Hurt <brianh@bit3.com>
To: "'editor@lwn.net'" <editor@lwn.net>
Subject: In defense of the benchmark people
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 10:04:09 -0500

The MindCraft survey is a wonderful argument as to _why_ Oracle and
TPC set up the rules as they did.  Even a legitimate, known benchmark,
like TPC-D or SpecMark, can be skewed in favor of one or the other
participant.  Oracle want's to make sure that if it's DB is benchmarked,
that you don't "pull a MindCraft".  TPC wants to make sure that it's
benchmarks are done fairly, allowing people to have some confidence
in TPC numbers when they're seen.

I don't speak for Bit 3.

   
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 11:50:50 -0400
From: "Ambrose Li [EDP]" <acli@mingpaoxpress.com>
To: editor@lwn.net
Subject: smbfs idle timeout

Hello,

this weeks' news reported a "new" smbfs idle timeout problem that
has "cropped up recently". This is not true.

This idle timeout problem has existed since 2.0, but under 2.2,
the kernel's behaviour w.r.t. idle timeouts has changed.

Under 2.0, after the idle timeout has happened, the mounted share
dies, and we can use smbumount to unmount the share, use smbmount
to remount it, and all is A-OK. Most of the time, at least, anyway.
Sometimes that doesn't work and we eventually hang the kernel,
requiring a reboot.

Under 2.2, after the idle timeout has happened, the mounted share
dies, and smbumount generates an I/O error when one attempts to
unmount. The umount fails, and we are stuck because we can't
remount the thing. Even though the kernel didn't hang, we have to
reboot the machine.

The moral is, never use smbfs on a live, production server :)

(I remember working on a problem two years ago involving the use
of both smbfs and ncpfs, around the time when 2.0 comes out. Both
smbfs and ncpfs were not very stable; they still aren't.)

Regards,
-- 
Ambrose C. Li / +1 416 321 0088 / Ming Pao Newspapers (Canada) Ltd.
EDP department / All views expressed here are my own; they may or
may not represent the views of my employer or my colleagues.
   
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 13:24:05 -0700
From: Kirk Petersen <kirk@speakeasy.org>
To: pr@rational.com
Subject: booch's comments on free software/opensource
X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i

Hi,

I just read an article
(http://www.it.fairfax.com.au/990427/software/software1.html) with
some comments by Grady Booch regarding free and opensource software.
I was hoping that someone with as much knowledge about designing
software as he has would be able to talk more effectively about free
software.

In the article, he is quoted as saying that Red Hat adds nothing to
Linux and that they are essentially using "slave labor."  This
indicates that he doesn't know how much work Red Hat is paying for in
the areas of desktop environments (both GNOME and KDE), installation,
and high-end kernel development (David S. Miller, Alan Cox, Stephen
Tweedie, Ingo Molnar - essentially all the big name kernel programmers
outside Linus Torvalds - are all working for Red Hat).

It also indicates that he doesn't understand that Red Hat charges
nothing for the software they ship - they charge for the media (both
CDs and books) and technical support.  When I used Red Hat, I
generally bought it from a place called CheapBytes, who charges $1.99
for the CD.  This is the flexibility of the free software world -
manuals, media, support, etc. are all separate and custom ordered.

He also asks "Where are the tools?"  If he means that Linux doesn't
have a visual modelling software package, then the best people to fix
that problem is Grady Booch and Rational Software.  As far as I'm
concerned (I currently do Java GUI and database programming, moving to
a Linux programming job) Linux development tools are generally
superior to Windows development tools.

Finally, I have an issue with the statement that he has "yet to see
any Fortune 1000 company bet a major part of their strategy on Linux."
I'd just like to ask what should be considered major?

Since I couldn't find Grady Booch's email address, I'm sending this to
the PR department, hoping that it will reach him or that the PR
department will realize that he doesn't help Rational Software by
speaking incorrectly of essentially non-competitive products.

-- 
Kirk Petersen
www.speakeasy.org/~kirk/

----- End forwarded message -----


-- 
Kirk Petersen
www.speakeasy.org/~kirk/
   
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 07:46:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bill Bond <wmbond@yahoo.com>
Subject: Cool Idea!
To: lwn@lwn.net

Given the recent flak surrounding linux.de's
"Where Do You Want To Go Tommorrow" I request
you post the following idea for use within
the Linux community (royalty free of course):

"No gates, no windows ... it open!"

Bill Bond
elusive@adisfwb.com


 

 

 
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