[debian-knoppix] So, Mr Knopper, are you or aren't you anti-Microsoft? (Was: Software patent?)

[Gilles Pelletier <gilpel@altern.org>]

On August 28, 2003 01:48 pm, Klaus Knopper wrote:

> (...)Even if they would not be voting about this
> draft, it would not make things much better, since there could always be
> the next draft, which is more obfuscated and confusing, and thus could
> pass through unnoticed, creating facts. What we need is a definitive
> "no!"- voting about software patents, in general, from the parliament,
> to keep Europe as innovator in software technology.

(...)

> Kai, are you aware that MS is one of the largest software patent
> holders, and as part of BSA lobby, one of the originators of the current
> pro-softwarepatent draft?
>
> Regards
> -Klaus

Hey, beware Mr Knopper! Pretty soon you're going to sound anti-Microsoft... 
whereas you're not, right? Do you remember this PCtechtalk interview where 
you said "I'm not anti-Microsoft"? : ) (The article, formerly 
http://www.pctechtalk.com/view.php?id=3D123 , now seems unavailable at 
PCTechTalk.)

Matbe it's time people who sustain... and sometimes maintain Linux ask 
themselves where they stand exactly. Are there or aren't there reasons to be 
anti-Microsoft?

Microsoft has boomed with the spirit of an era. Computers made running 
businesses -- machines, robots, communications, databases, whatever -- so 
much more efficienty! Investors concluded, without thinking for a minute 
about how much effort and knowledge it took to produce such tremendous 
effects, that the company that produced such a commodity would soon be worth 
gazillions. 

They bought and bought and bought at ever higher prices until 3 years ago. It 
was a bit like the Red Hat craze, but it lasted years instead of months... 
and the model was not GLPed.

The history behind the two competing OS was at odds from the beginning. 
Whereas Linux Torvalds put this work on the internet saying "People, please 
take it all, 'steal' it from me, and bring it back when it's better", Bill 
Gates went to computer clubs explaining that this OS was his and the kids in 
the clubs were stealing his work. He had his team and he didn't need the 
kids. And it worked... for some 20 years. People decided to pay and not 
"bother" to participate.

But computers were there long before Microsoft. All over the place, servers 
where run by experts that knew as much as MS "certified engineers". When they 
saw this thingy on the net, they thought they'd give it a try.  Just for fun, 
of course. And it did produce some results.

When some companies -- say, Hollywood's special effects studios -- and 
government agencies -- the NASA, for instance -- found out they could have 
the code of an OS before their very eyes so they could pursue their 
specialized goals in all liberty, they weren't interested. They were 
completely enthralled. It just blew their heads! This was what they needed.

So they put their efforts to make this little acorn -- shall we say kernel? -- 
grow. Not only did the GPL model work, it was very badly needed. A NASA 
engineer apparently provided many drivers for video cards. Whereas such so 
common cards as an ATI Mach 32 weren't recognized by Linux 5 years ago, 
nowadays -- unless you bought equipment from an MS infeodated company -- 
pretty much everything runs well.

Debian's developpers  extended Linux's capacities to many platforms other than 
the typical IBM PC and designed a package system that made upgrading software 
much easier. 

Then came an electrical engineer - IT-consultant who just wanted to know right 
off the bat if this or that equipment would boot with Linux. Unfortunately 
for his little personal project, people liked it and it became the most 
popular Live-CD on the planet. You just boot from the CD, and it configures 
the whole system -- video card, monitor, audio card, ethi cards, everything! 
-- in about 15 seconds while booting. If you don't use cable, you'll have to 
answer a few easy questions such as your username and pasword to connect to 
the net, and that's it!

This is the turning point for Linux: Microsoft just can't do that. And it 
doesn't succeed so well on the server market either: it used to rely on BSD 
for hosting its sites, now it's falling back on Akamai, who uses Linux, to 
prevent DDoS attacks. 

People who have religiously relied on MS as if it was God in person are 
beginning to wonder what's going on. And that's bad. 

That's bad because if Enron's and Worldcom's discomfiture brought quite a lot 
of turmoil on the Stock Exchange, the fall of Microsoft could send it 
spiraling down to its end in no time at all: at 285 bn $ MS is the second 
market capitalisation, right after... GE (296 bn$) !!!

(MS was first as the beginning of 2000, but its shares, for the first time of 
its history took a beating. They're now at about have the price they were 
then. But GE's shares dwindled too.)

This only goes to show how ridiculous MS capitalisation is. Whereas MS has 
equipment to produce bits and bytes, GE produces jet and train engines, water 
and nuclear power plants, medical imaging equipment, etc. When Steven Ballmer 
said tech stocks were overevaluated, he knew what he was talking about.

But the fact remains that those stocks are what many pension plans in America 
-- and also, but to a lesser degree, in Europe too, I suppose -- are still 
holding on to. Those investments were, they believed, the road to a bright 
future as most indistries in America faced the harsh competition, mainly from 
defeated asian countries.

There's barely any consumer electronics industry left today in America. In the 
car industry, Mercedes-Benz has bought Chrysler and is not doing so bad in 
the context. Ford has problems. As the 2004 models are coming out, GM makes a 
Great Clearance Inventory Sale of 100,000 cars: 0% financing for 5 years and 
$1,000 (CAN) off the price tag. In other words, their cars don't sell. I'd 
say that more than half the cars in the steets of Montreal are now foreign 
made, though the foreign compagnies are sometines wholy or partly owned by 
the american companies: e.g., Mazda (Ford), Suzuki (GM). Even IBM finds its 
cheaper to manufacture the latest generation of its HD heads in China!

So, even with interest rates at 1%, try as you might to make the services 
economy run -- Americans selling hot-dogs to Americans, as Lee Iacocca once 
put it -- there's just so much american buyers can do, because they don't 
have a job. 

As this was not enough, because the "REAL power that be" allowed G. W. Bush to 
steal his elections in Florida, this stupid oil jerk decided to get both 
feets in the irakian quagmire and to give tax breaks to the rich who mostly 
buy imported products. Accordingly, the US deficit will be 400 bn $ this year 
and is predicted at 500 bn $ next year. This is when most countries try to 
reduce their deficit. Canada, for instance, now has a surplus of a few bn $

But the big banks don't want the dollar to crash because, even though they now 
also have yens and deutschmarks in stock -- currencies that aren't doing that 
well either --, the dollar remains the currency that replaced the gold 
standard. If it crashed the whole economic system would crash. And, compared 
to this krash, the 1929 one would look like a garden party.

That's why we hear so much about the global economy. While the ice is growing 
thinner, the great financiers strive to mesh the economies so that, if ever 
anyone falls, everybody falls. What this means exactly is making the third 
world countries do the job for next to nothing and making a huge profit by 
selling the product.

Call it the maquilladoras system, if you will. It's saying Third World 
countries: "Want to get jobs? Keep unions under controls, just don't talk 
about ecology, and we'll be there."  It's VW making its Golfs and Chrysler 
making its PT Cruiser in Mexico. It's IBM making its HD heads in China. And 
Japan very slowly recovering from its financial crisis by opening plants in 
China... and unemployment appearing in the homeland.

Replace transistors, cars and HD heads by wheat, olives, gold, silver and 
pottery, this is VERY EXACTLY the system that brought Rome down. The 
decadence of Rome took five centuries, ours will have taken five decades.

But Microsoft's case is special. Since it creates money out of nothingness, 
its monopolistic situation could prevent it from shifting its operations 
to... India, for exemple. Because of the leverage computer science has on the 
industry, it could manage to bring more money to America and keep most of the 
jobs in America at the same time. (Of course, there are resellers and 
as-long-as-they-last affiliations to companies all over the world, but...) 
It's the last buoy to hold on to. And the devil asks for so little to keep 
you afloat...

He just wants a little bit ofyour soul. He wants you to forget how you could 
do things yourself, he's going to do it for you, for next to a billion times 
no money at all. He just wants to check where you usually buy so he can 
provide ads that are revelant to you. He wants to provide you with a book 
that will automatically disappear in a few months, so that neither you or 
your children can read it in a few years. He wants to cather the movies he's 
interested you in. He wants to be the unique provider of the Vatican's holy 
pictures. He just wants to make a few bucks by taking a little grip on your 
soul. Why should you object?

You still do? It's just too bad he couldn't be here in prehistoric times to 
put a patent on the first algorithms, a mere addition. Nowadays, you'd 
understand better. You could do 1 + 1 = 2 with an infinitely low premium and 
you just wouldn't ever have noticed the increment as the algorithms got 
incrementally more complicated.

I'm sorry Mr Knopper. I know you never wanted to get involved in politics. You 
just wanted to know if this hardware would boot Linux or not. And since you 
haven't put out a new version of Knoppix for more than a month now, I suppose 
you have pretty much succeeded. (My german teacher used to say that whereas 
most nations work to make a living, Germans live to work. So, despite all 
beaches in Greece, Madeira and the Canaries being filled with Germans, I take 
for granted you're not taking vacations :) 

Unfortunately, this has put you right in the eye of the hurricane. Your 
contribution did help, I suppose, to make many distros easier to install, but 
making Knoppix installable or contributing to making Debian easier to install 
would certainly turn the Windows invasion tide.

This is the next step and it's for you to decide whether you're going to take 
it or not. If you do, it's going to wreck a hell of a havoc. You'll be 
qualified as THE enemy of free enterprise, the last sting of the dying 
communist system. (Maybe, just as I, you thought that those people were just 
waving scarecrows. I for one now think they were dead serious in this 
stupidity.)

Just as people say you 'invented" automatic installation whereas a lot of work 
had been done before you (Kudzu!) because you were the first to cross the 
finish line, the first OS that gets to the finish line will be the winner 
even though the other one is a split second behind.

It's a race against the clock. No "ready when it's ready". And, as I believe 
I've already said, in this second in a row year of Linux on the Desktop, less 
than 1% of Google's visits are paid with Linux.

And the reason for this is very simple: there is no distro yet of which you 
can say" "Go for this one! It's not a company trying to subvert to its own 
advantage the work of Linux developpers, it's easy to install and administer 
and the software that has been selected for every need really works fine.'

So, it's for you to decide, Mr Knopper, are you or aren't you starkly and 
openly against Microsoft? If nothing gets done while whining about software 
patents, the game will be lost anyway.

As for myself, since I don't have yet an easily installable version of Debian 
to work on and I pretty much got the hang of Slackware, I'll try to put my 
notes together on the net so that it will be much easier to install and 
use. The equivalent of 40 pages should constitute a pretty good intro.

Here are 2 links to understand better what Microsoft stands for:

2003 and Beyond:
http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit029.html

The following pages by Nathan Newman are out of date, but Newman was the first 
to provide me with the figures to get a global pictures and his study is 
still a valid reference:

http://www.netaction.org/msoft/world/

GP
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