Josh we belong to the same church. The allure of personal computing split us
all into two camps. The Internet brought us back together, but the Unixy
folk act like they were always there. Hmmm. I don't think they get that
eventually the mystique of servers will wear off, some do get it, the Cobalt
guys understood. I wonder if they are shackled into a niche now that they're
part of Sun.

On my site I predicted that back-door DSL lines are coming to offices
everywhere soon. (Some are already there.) Someone else pointed out that
wireless will be the ultimate route-around. Another angle, yo can get around
the firewall by putting a server at home and browsing to it from the office.
Kind of backwards from what the glass palace folks imagine happening?

Even so, I say the only peaceful way to approach firewalls is to love and
respect them. Let the users tell the sysadmins what they want to do.
Remember the panic that went through IT-land at the thought of all the
VisiCalc users somehow messing up their companies because they had floppy
disks that they could take home with them.

I like the kind of hell that breaks loose when the users take control. How
do you think HTTP got through the firewalls. Users. Gotta love em.

Keep on truckin..

Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: <allenjs@...>
To: <decentralization@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2001 3:04 PM
Subject: [decentralization] Re: selfishness not considered harmful


> > >commands 80% market share (for 80 million) by making their system
> > >proprietary.
>
> James has a point about responsibility to shareholders
> that is rather important I think.
>
> > would), new entries who adopted the open system would thrive and the
> > company that decided to continue closed practices might well end up
> > less than 10%. They might even disappear. But if they do have 80%
> > to begin with, effective monopoly powers might be sufficient to
>
> Right on. The big guy never wants his stuff open, the little
> guy always does.
>
> > time as well as instantaneous market size and 'market share'. A
> > generally exclusive and proprietary business atmosphere may dampen
> > innovation and slow or even halt market expansion, thus hurting the
>
> Well, that is my point. I don't think most MBAs at successful
> companies are stupid enough to adopt a generally exclusive
> strategy. For example, do you remember when MS shipped
> a Novell file server as part of Windows95, for free? Was that
> "generally exclusive and proprietary"? It's the same big-guy/
> small-guy chess game that's always been played. Same if
> you consider MS.NET strategy. The idea of opening up to
> XML-based loosely-coupled protocols that make COM+ and EJB
> irrelevant seems counter to what Eric Raymond would have you
> believe of MS. But then consider the enterprise space that
> MS is aiming at -- IBM and Sun virtually monopolize that space,
> and MS has something like 2% market share. MS have everything
> to gain by being open, and Sun and IBM have everything to
> lose. Since 1997, MS and a few key partners have been dragging
> the rest of the industry kicking and screaming toward XML.
> Nobody can deny that XML is a huge advance for the industry,
> but it would never happen if MS didn't have the little-guy
> effect to spark openness. Openness doesn't happen for altruistic
> reasons, I am sorry to say.
>
> > company in the long run as well. Look how the 'consumer' OS
> > until competition from Apple forced MS to develop similar interface
> > functionality. If large and powerful conservative forces had
>
> Are you saying that MS was there first and sitting on a
> stale UI until Apple came along? I thought Apple were
> first to the consumer OS parade..
>
> > The choice is whether to force a vicious zero-sum game driven by
> > instant gratification or to help maintain a climate in which
>
> Nothing about capitalism is a zero-sum game.
>
> > can arise from the need to control. P2P: power to the people.
>
> This is what provoked my snippy response in the first place.
> All of the dangling chad left over from sixties protests
> were proclaiming that centralized Unix servers were the
> "manifesto of power to the people" at the same time that Microsoft
> was freaking out the whole world by putting file sharing capabilities
> on every desktop. All of the Unix nabobs ranted about how you
> had to have a thin X term and store the files on a central NFS server
> or else the world would fall apart. (And I have experience doing
> systems programming on HP/UX, SGI, Soalris, Linux, etc. so I
> feel qualified to opine). I was there on my Sun terminal
> playing with gopher when the first versions of Mosaic came
> out, and you know what? The Web would still be a backroom
> plaything of academics if there had not been MS Windows for
> it to run on. And now we have listened to the wanna-be Marxists
> rant on about how they really invented "Power to the People" for
> the last ten years, and the next big revolution comes from some
> college kid writing an app in his room -- you guessed it -- napster
> only runs on Windows! IMO, progress isn't being slowed by the
> fact that windows exists, it is being slowed because we got
> too many pundits and politicians diverting good resources
> toward quixotic inanity in search of some "people empowering
> manifesto".
>
> Anyway, I could go on for many hours on that, so maybe I
> should get back to the point. The other important point is
> that open source is not "open" at all. There is no such thing
> as a truly open system. You could say that "one system is
> more open than another", and I would agree. But I would measure
> how open a system is by how many people it benefits. Ted Nelson
> called it best by pointing out that Linux has a user-hostile ethic.
> That is, Manila/Frointier/Windows/Macintosh all have this scripting
> religion built-in. You can do anything you can dream up, and
> usually without having to touch a line of C++ code. On the other
> hand, Linux gives you a big stinking pile of C++ and says, "you
> are free to do what you want with this." This may seem like
> freedom, but in any way that is important, it is slavery. I
> could say the same about Windows -- "here is the machine code,
> you may do whatever you want with it." In fact, that is not
> unrealistic, because I have modified machine code of non-MS
> software that I did not have source for in order to make it
> do something I wanted. Richard Stallman will tell you that the
> existence of source code makes it easier for users to change things.
> (He and I argued this issue at
> http://www.xanadu.com.au/mail/zzdev/thrd16.html#00699, the discussion
> is not threaded properly). I say, if I tell my dad to "just change a
> few lines of C++ code", I might as well tell him to change machine
> code. The most "open" thing about "open source" is the mouths.
>
> Not to start a big flame thread, but there is no universal definition
> of "open" -- to say that "open" is what GNU does or what MS doesn't
> is extremely myopic. To me, "open" simply means "have you signed a
> treaty with enough of your competitors that you don't appear
> exclusionary". The standards bodies are treaty organizations, and
> that is all that they are. No W3C standard or IEEE standard has been
> implemented properly on all platforms in existence, and for example,
> the RTF spec has been around for quite awhile -- completely open and
> with reeference code.. What makes PDF more "open" than RTF? Why do
> people feel comfortable using Flash5 but not Mozilla XUL or IE
> Behaviors? (ahhh, I am wasting my time in a huge way). I could only
> say that I have the benefit of having been exposed to the Raymondism
> and other silly ideas ten years ago, and having the benefit of
> thinking them through before thinking got clouded by pundits and
> free IPO money. For most people who have discarded orthodox
> raymondism, the idea seems so childish and shallow that ther isn't
> much perceived value in convincing the people who are sold on it.
>
>
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