dippy article

Story: Open vs closed source software: The quest for balanceTotal Replies: 8
Author Content
tuxchick

Nov 04, 2010
11:41 AM EDT
He makes a lot of bogus assumptions, such as "consider an all-OSS world in which each company offers consumers exactly the same shared code as every other company. " That's just silly. Some will modify it, some won't, and so what? Should they make changes just because? Then he uses the loathesome concept of "balance", which usually means the person speaking has little clue about their subject, or they're obscuring the real issues and they're saying the equivalent of "We need to balance the ratio of dog doo to punch in the punch bowl!" Because they're really in favor of dog doo but won't come right out and say it.

At the least, any government-supported software project should be completely open and accessible to us peons who paid for it.
jezuch

Nov 04, 2010
3:10 PM EDT
I guess it's a "can't we all just get along?"-type argument made by a known to be oppressive, now losing side.
Scott_Ruecker

Nov 04, 2010
3:13 PM EDT
What I do not like about the article is the idea that taxes could be used to regulate the CSS and OSS market?

What!?!? Is he kidding? I personally think the MS shill machine went to work overseas..

djohnston

Nov 04, 2010
4:48 PM EDT
[sarcasm]

Quoting:More recently, however, some politicians have begun to argue that society needs a “balance” of CSS and OSS firms (CSIS 2008).
Well, politicians are surely qualified to judge the merits of different software.

Quoting:But how can policymakers recognise the right “balance”? Pro-OSS interventions make very little sense if there are too many OSS firms already.
There are too many OSS firms, peddling too many distro versions which contain too many different desktop environments, each of which has too many configuration options.

[/sarcasm]
hkwint

Nov 04, 2010
9:09 PM EDT
Quoting:I personally think the MS shill machine went to work overseas..


They're not the only ones who went to work overseas, so did I. What this thread needs is a tiny bit of 'Follow the money'; so of we go:

Let's take a closer look at the writers.

Sebastian Engelhardt is easy. His current PhD thesis is sponsored by the "Klaus Tschira foundation" (http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3981).

Very same Klaus which made €3,4billion with SAP (http://www.forbes.com/finance/lists/10/2004/LIR.jhtml?passLi...)passListType=Person&uniqueId=2UD0&datatype=Person).

Andreas Freytag is much harder. He's listed as Senior Fellow of ECIPE. ECIPE is funded by Free Enterprise Foundation in Sweden (http://www.ecipe.org/about-us - last paragraph). Beware - there's also a Free Enterprise Foundation in North Carolina, not the one we're looking for. This is their website: http://www.svensktnaringsliv.se/english/?csref=_umk_english Turns out (found via Almega) all IT&Telekomföretagen members are (automatically?) also members of the Swedish Enterprise Foundation. http://www.almega.se/web/About_us.aspx

So, we go looking for the members of IT&T; http://www.almega.se/web/Medlemmar_1.aspx And - surprise - the usual suspects (among others) show up: Microsoft, SAP, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Nokia Svenska, Symantec Nordic, AutoDesk, and last but not least Accenture (of LSE-crash fame!). If you look at more chars of the alphabet, I'm sure you find more usual suspects.

Stephen M. Maurer is left as an exercise for the reader.
hkwint

Nov 04, 2010
9:22 PM EDT
If you need help with the exercise (spoiler alert!):

http://gspp.berkeley.edu/iths/MaurerCV.htm
TxtEdMacs

Nov 05, 2010
10:29 AM EDT
Quoting:Quoted: I personally think the MS shill machine went to work overseas..
I am ready to go, all I need to do is find my passport and get funds for the trip with expenses and I will shill for anyone.

YBT

azerthoth

Nov 05, 2010
11:25 AM EDT
*humor* Maybe we could do a helios style collection and pay MBT here to shill for linux at some point too */humor*
Scott_Ruecker

Nov 05, 2010
11:39 AM EDT
If I could only afford him Az, if I could only afford him..;-)

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