Candace Hoeppner has done a lot of work to see that the registration of long-guns ends in Canada and she still is working hard to see that a couple of votes in the House of Commons approve her private member’s bill, C-391. She had a good interview about the process. As usual, keep in touch with your MP to support the bill. She says a number of NDP and possibly one Liberal are likely to vote for the bill but the Liberal leadership is asking all Liberals to oppose the bill. We shall see in September whether the bill goes to the Senate this year.
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
I was reading an article in The Register and came upon this line in a comment:”Or use the fact that Win7 is a totally alien environment to try a Linux distro and see if anyone actually notices!”
The comment was on an article about M$ continuing to permit downgrading to XP. It seems much of the world using XP is still reluctant or unable to migrate to “7″. It really is a lot of work for some outfits to migrate to “7″ and they are better off to migrate to GNU/Linux to get off the Wintel treadmill. At this rate, M$ may still be selling XP when “27″ comes out, a testimony to irrelevance and cluelessness. I wonder how long they will cling to the myth that “7″ is the world’s best selling OS when in reality XP holds that title. It sells from the grave.
I have introduced people to GNU/Linux who thought it was a new release of that other OS…
There are more signs of cracks in the monopoly these days:
- share of web stats keeps dropping (87.8%)
- mercy-killing of KIN as Android overtakes that other OS in smart-thingies
- grumbling in the ranks about KIN and leadership/openness to new ideas
Now, I don’t take web stats for gospel especially when there is clear bias in favour of that other OS and Apple, but if consistently calculated the same way each time, I find them useful indicators of trends. Clearly the share of that other OS is shrinking and much of the fall-off of XP is going to GNU/Linux and MacOS. From May to June, W3Schools shows XP down 0.7% of share and GNU/Linux up 0.3% and MacOS up 0.1%.
The cancellation of a new product weeks after release shows a real failure of market-research and marketing. The stunted feature-set shows the new ideas from Danger were not used and the grumbling reinforces that idea. I think the world would have been a better place if Vista had been cancelled but the monopoly forced a defective release on the markets. M$ does not have a monopoly on smart-thingies. They will not keep their monopoly on the PC either, if these trends continue.
In a year, according to W3Schools, that other OS has fallen from 88.6% to 87.8% in share, more than 10 million PCs, while GNU/Linux has risen from 4.2% TO 4.8%, more than 8 million PCs. What the end-point of this shift will be I cannot tell, but those XP machines are going 40% to GNU/Linux and there are hundreds of millions of those machines out there. Many will run just fine with a new GNU/Linux installation or the older ones can make great thin clients or be replaced by new thick clients running GNU/Linux. It could be that within a couple of years, when XP is killed, GNU/Linux could have 25% share or more. Around 10% share now, GNU/Linux will make sense to everyone be they OEM, retailer, business or consumer.
All of us resist change one way or another. We achieved our current status with some effort and do not want to change because it would require more effort. IT is like that. A complicated system evolves with intricate interlocking parts. If anything is changed it can mess up the whole thing unless change is carefully managed. Just as there can be “the straw that broke the camel’s back” there can be the last straw that pushes us to finally make the change.
When I adopted GNU/Linux the impetus to change was the persistent failure of that other OS to run through a single 45 minute period of class time without fail. Perhaps the latest vulnerability in that other OS will be the impetus for many more to migrate. This one is not a bug but a feature of that other OS to permit working with foreign character-sets. That other OS welcomes executable files to manipulate foreign characters and in the process allows the system to be owned by aliens. Malware is out in the wild exploiting this feature of that other OS.
This is another example where M$ uses code rather than constants to configure a system making ordinary usage fraught with danger. We’ve had enough of that. Stop using that other OS. Switch to GNU/Linux.
That’s what Mark Anderson says about M$’s IT. He says they are in trouble with respect to consumer goods except for Xbox and suggests re-organization. He suggests they should either focus on consumers or stick with IT in business.
I think they are in trouble everywhere. It’s not that they are not making money but their growth is so much less than other businesses that they will become a niche player. Their shrinking monopoly will be all they have. Eventually, they will become a patent troll or bitter failure like SCO. The only thing preventing total collapse at the moment is the loyalty of the “partners” who are solidly locked in. Consumers are not and when the consumer gives their custom to OEMs who are not partners or who break rank with M$ there will be no way to recover from a huge slide.
I am not worried. GNU/Linux can easily take up the slack in software. Consumers have many choices in ARMed gadgets. They soon will have choice in ARMed PCs at the retail level. M$’s shares are down 25% from the post-”7″ highs, about even for the year. RedHat is up 50% in the last year. M$ does not own the future.
The games market is pretty small but vigorous. One supplier of games for that other OS ported a game to GNU/Linux in six weeks and published the web-stats that resulted. They claim their investment in the port was repaid and sales/downloads continue. Their estimate is that 15-21% of their gamers use GNU/Linux and the release of the GNU/Linux port caused a spike larger than that for the MacOS and other OS versions. So much for the 1% number… I think that gaming is fairly OS-independent test of popularity. No doubt some GNU/Linux users bought the game just to wave the flag, but I doubt that. I would not, but then, I am no longer a gamer.
Nokia is moving to GNU/Linux according to Reuters.
If you read to the bottom of the link, you find interesting comments on GNU/Linux by Reuters, a mainstream medium by any measure. Ads for GNU/Linux! Great!
The bazaar approach to Free Software development is hard to understand/categorize. If you want something done, you either do it yourself or get someone else to do it. When no one is in charge, that gets interesting.
KDE was my first GNU/Linux desktop environment. I still remember the silliness of accidentally clicking on the hole in the gear and nothing would happen… It was utterly solid compared to that other OS I was using at the time. Then there were the library wars and I went with the flow to GNOME. On some older PCs I find in homes and schools, I use XFCE4 because it does what is necessary and not much more.
While I wandered in the forest looking for mushrooms, KDE evolved, or someone turned the wheel of the bus in the direction of a “new desktop paradigm” etc. Stuff I cannot imagine. I naturally clutter any flat stop with stuff so I can see what I am currently using. The old paradigm worked for me. Even the ancient MacOS of the 1970s worked better for me than some of these new ideas. I have no memory, at least not one that works in real time, so I need to see clutter. Eliminating clutter eliminates the usefulness of a desktop for me.
Others, though, are driving the bus of KDE and have chosen to “improve” the desktop. Others, who feel as I do are trying to preserve the look and feel of the 3.5 version. Whether the group doing the work can sustain an independent branch of KDE is a question. KDE is large and complex and the libraries it depends upon changed, causing some of the development of the 4 branch.
Apparently, I am not alone. The site of the developers, http://www.pearsoncomputing.net, was /.ed… Perhaps the group will get enough support to make a second KDE branch work. There are those who love change for the sake of change or for some particular features, but “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” applies to software, too.
The GNU/Linux distro with 9 lives, Mandrake, now Mandriva, has found new investors. Unlike many distros which do not attempt to make money but rely on donations of money, resources and manpower, Mandriva has tried to operate as a tech business. This is difficult because there is a lot of competition, other distros, and that other OS. They have done reasonably well in France and South America but it is difficult to be viable while keeping costs down while giving a product away… Selling licences is barely viable and drumming up support subscriptions is a lot of work. Just ask RedHat who have been at it long before Mandriva and still have a long way to go.
Mandriva has reorganized before. We shall see if they can develop a better plan this time around. The new investors likely have some ideas. Let us hope it is not a sell-out to M$ or some such silliness. Anything is possible amongst wheeler-dealers. Servers/services seems fairly doable for many businesses. They are also looking at education which loves low-cost solutions. Mandrake was my second or third distro in my years of exploring GNU/Linux and I remember the utility of lots of their packages in the day, Linneighbourhood and a graphing calculator (I have forgotten the name) were useful in the world in which I lived in those days.
C-391 Bill to Repeal Long-gun Registry in Canada May be Killed
Published by June 22nd, 2010 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments“June 9, 2010 — Mr. Holland (Ajax—Pickering) — That the Second Report of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (recommendation not to proceed further with Bill C-391, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act (repeal of long-gun registry)), presented on Wednesday, June 9, 2010, be concurred in.
To be added to the business of the House, at the expiry of the time provided for Private Members’ Business, on a day fixed by the Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 97.1(2).
Designated day — Tuesday, September 21, 2010.
Debate — limited to 1 hour, pursuant to Standing Order 97.1(2).
Voting — not later than the expiry of the time provided for debate.”
There we have it, a showdown in the House. Can the Lieberals and others whip their members into killing this bill? In a minority government, it will take a substantial number of opposition MPs to support the bill.
We may have to suffer another winter of this stupidity.
see http://www.ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-0.6.changelog
This package is a part of many distros and will give users of GNU/Linux easy access to produce, edit, and decode video better. Use of this format on Youtube should establish it solidly. It is already decoded in a few browsers. Now GNU/Linux distros will be able to encode it as well.
John Maddog Hall has some interesting examples where FLOSS enhanced return on investment for business. It’s interesting reading.
I think ROI is an important concept in education. Since we can get everything we need from FLOSS in education one could put a value on the software similar to what non-free/commercial software would cost and divide by what it costs to implement. I can apt-get install OpenOffice.org for every GNU/Linux box in the place in a few minutes and get the value of eighty times the cost of Office, around $4000. My time for, say, 5 minutes of work is only a few dollars so the return on investment is 1000:1 and we have broken even in minutes.
The entire image we have installed on our new PCs took me a long weekend to polish, say $1000 worth of work. What would be the price of software licences for 12 PCs running that other OS and Office? Probably about the same, but we also have tons of other applications, superior performance and less maintenance. I love having APT able to manage all the apps as well as the OS on a large number of systems. If I have to re-image all the updates from M$ and other suppliers every month the lifetime investment in that other OS keeps growing while I may never have to re-image a GNU/Linux system for years. I can dist-upgrade all units through a local proxy indefinitely. So, I invest $1000 plus a few minutes per day perhaps for years with GNU/Linux and $1000 every month with that other OS. I get $60K worth of value over five years for only a few thousand dollars of effort on my part. I like that, 10:1 ROI over five years.
This weekend I did a bit of investing in our GNU/Linux system that will pay handsomly over the years. When I came here there was no router so I threw a DLINK SOHO router into the breech and it has worked well but has limited features. Today we put DHCP on a server that has proven very reliable and fast so we have now a local DNS with dynamic updates and the ability to point every client at it to cache lookups. I can access every machine by name, too. The result should save a second on every click. What is that worth? Every machine in the building using DHCP will get on-line a second or two sooner. What are all those seconds saved per-user-per-day forever compared to the few seconds it took me to implement it with FLOSS? Another 1000:1 ROI, IMHO, and we should get better performance. Fewer long pauses. Priceless.
I have measured typical DNS lookups coming from the cache at around 5 milliseconds. From the ISP, 600 milliseconds. DHCP from the DLINK router was about 3s often (it runs GNU/Linux too…).
“We have one platform,” Hayes said. “And that’s going to be the Mac.”
A school plans to do much of its work with notebook PCs purchased by students/parents rather than providing IT in the school. The school spends about $66K annually on IT and they want every student to carrry a Mac. For $66K, I could equip that school with thin clients on every desk in five years (1200 seats/($66K/$250). The school’s plan could work except that few students now own or have access to a Mac and requiring them to buy a Mac when they do not want one is silly, a tax on education at that school. If they were requiring students to own a notebook, students could buy a netbook for a few hundred dollars.
This is an example of educators not getting the tech. Because they have, use and can afford Macs does not mean the world should own one.
Providing wireless in each classroom and using open standards would get them a lot more IT for less. My thesis for many years has been that more IT is good for education and the lowest cost option does it best, GNU/Linux.
The government of Brazil is widely promoting FLOSS. For the army, reasons given include:
- 1) Cost savings in the medium and long term with proprietary software.
- 2) Major security, stability and availability offered by SL.
- 3) Elimination of mandatory changes that closed models require periodically its users, due to the discontinuity of supported versions.
- 4) Technological independence.
- 5) Development of local knowledge.
- 6) Chance of auditability of the systems.
- 7) Independence from a single supplier./li>
Amen. It is no wonder GNU/Linux is spreading rapidly in Brazil. GNU/Linux is spreading rapidly everywhere.
Neelie Kroes, EU Competition Commissioner Pushes Open
Published by June 11th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments
“Fifth, with my colleagues in the College I will seriously explore all options to ensure that significant market players cannot just choose to deny interoperability with their product. You no doubt remember that I have some experience with reticent high-tech companies: I had to fight hard and for several years until Microsoft began to license missing interoperability information. Complex anti-trust investigations followed by court proceedings are perhaps not the only way to increase interoperability. The Commission should not need to run an epic antitrust case every time software lacks interoperability. Wouldn’t it be nice to solve all such problems in one go?”
Amen! Go get ‘em, Neelie!
Isn’t that a breath of fresh air? Instead of ten years of investigation, prosecution and appeals, the commissioner wants the EU to specify openness in tendering for IT. You cannot be locked-in by the likes of M$ if you only buy open standards implementations. I suggested Canada do this too, preferring FLOSS. It will happen sooner or later. I vote for sooner.
An article by Ellen Messmer drew a lot of flack. She quoted heavily a fan of that other OS for servers and received a lot of flack in the resulting comments. Check it out. I expect she will get the other side of the story next time she writes.
Status of the Bill to Revoke the Long-firearm Registry 2010-6-3
Published by June 10th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 6 CommentsThe committee voted 6 to 5 (chair only votes in a tie) to recommend the house to drop the bill. If you want to see the opposition parties’ shenanigans to obstruct the work of the Security committee’s study of this bill, read the minutes linked above. They agreed to let the patron of the bill, Ms Hoppner, speak for one hour to introduce the bill to committee and then prevented her from doing so on the day, for instance. Let us hope the House ignores this advice and passes the bill on third reading to end this boondoggle billion dollar waste of taxpayers’ monies.
For those unaware of the issues, the government of the day in the 1990s forced through Parliament of Canada a bill to require registration of every firearm in Canada as a measure to promote safety. The constitution give regulation of property to the provinces so this undermines the constitution and removed the rights of ordinary folks who use firearms to go about their business. The prime minister at one point publicly stated that it is not a right in Canada to own firearms. Tell that to people who live in bear country. I have taught in places where bears hunt people because they have never seen anything that moves that was not food. I have seen women and children out picking berries packing rifles for protection. I was in a camp where a grizzly came right into a camp of 30 men, women and children, on the tundra, looking for food.
This legislation drove a wedge between rural and urban folk who saw firearms as tools or weapons, between men and women who saw firearms as tools for hunting or murdering and rich and poor who saw the cost of the registration as tiny or large. Folks in the aboriginal communities saw their treaty rights eroded because many could not even pass the tests required to get licences and registrations. The police found the registry useless because half the firearms were never registered and much of the data in the registry was erroneous. Many prosecutions resulted against people caught up in bureaucratic paper-shuffling.
After more than ten years where experience demonstrated repeatedly that the registry was useless and expensive, the current bill is intended to discard the registration of firearms typically used for sporting/hunting purposes. The minority government is not strong enough to push the bill through so it requires cooperation from opposition MPs. Write your MP to let him/her know what you think of the situation.
I remember patch Tuesdays last year. A gazillion PCs running XP and it took days for them to update from WSUS, a local server. Today, billions of people are fearful their IT systems will break because M$ is updating their software and the malware artists will have a free-for-all if they do not upgrade. For fun I did an update on the software on this machine:
…
Get:75 http://debian.yorku.ca squeeze/main xfce4-appfinder 4.6.2-1 [96.3kB]
Get:76 http://debian.yorku.ca squeeze/main xfce4 4.6.2 [7,410B]
Fetched 180MB in 30s (5,898kB/s)
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages …
(Reading database … 169369 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace google-chrome-beta 5.0.375.55-r47796 (using …/google-chrome-beta_5.0.375.70-r48679_amd64.deb) …
Unpacking replacement google-chrome-beta …
…
76 packages updated in 30s of downloads with no re-re-reboots while I am still using it… HAHAHA! Get real, M$. Why do people still bother with that other OS? Use a real OS that works for you and not the malware artists, GNU/Linux.
That’s a large number of updates for my system, but I am running pre-release-candidate software from the up-coming Squeeze release of Debian GNU/Linux, expected later this year. I did have some rough spots with it a few weeks ago but it is smooth today. I run it on most of the GNU/Linux clients and one server. I did an apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade of a clone of my file server and it went smoothly so I will likely use it on the server soon. I could also wait until the official release to catch up any remaining bugs in services. It is fun to have choice.
Bill Doesn’t Get the Web Even After All These Years
Published by June 5th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 1 CommentHis foundation has a site which according to the terms of use does not allow linking to it or just about anything else. What a useless site. See the issues
I laughed so hard when I read that I hurt myself. Maybe that’s what Bill wants or he’s just a troll on the web. No wonder Bing doesn’t work. M$ believes the web is something you control. Rather, it’s like air. You use it and pass it on to the flowers and trees.
The government of the province of Quebec in Canada was taken to task by a judge in court for not following required tendering procedures when “upgrading” that other OS. A local supplier of GNU/Linux challenged the legality of the purchases of Vista and Office for $720K without tenders. Supposedly, from now on, they will follow the procedure and M$ will have to compete on price/performance with GNU/Linux. It’s about time. It used to be said you could never be fired for buying IBM or M$’s stuff but now that no longer holds.
A government likely has a steady flow of procurements in IT so this could benefit local industry this year.
I wonder how EDGI will fly with a proper tendering process?
Ballmer Still Thinks it is OK to Kill Competition
Published by June 4th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 22 CommentsAfter years of scrutiny by anti-competition police, Ballmer still doesn’t get it:
“When Mossberg asked why Microsoft had drastically lowered its price of Windows XP in reaction to netbook vendors having initially shipped units with Linux, Ballmer retreated by asking, “Why should I give someone else an opportunity?”.”
It’s the law, Steve. Monopolies are required to give competitors opportunities.
This exchange also answers the question why GNU/Linux has not taken a larger share of the desktop OS market. If M$ thinks, in the 21st century, that a monopoly is permitted to kill competition, then what dirty tricks have they pulled with the OEMs and retailers to prevent the entry of GNU/Linux into the food-chain? Exclusive dealing? Kickbacks? Bribes? What? Tell us, Steve!
It turns out that some businesses are hoping M$ will extend the life of XP indefinitely because they just do not want to migrate to “7″ unless they must. There simply is no benefit to business of doing a lot of work and throwing a lot of money at M$. Since XP’s life has been extended multiple times, some hope that it will happen again. There are hundreds of millions of XP machines. Companies that find little value in migrating to “7″ may find it less costly to migrate to GNU/Linux, especially if they can keep running the old hardware. That is what my school is doing, essentially. “7″ excites no one but me and I would be outraged if “7″ were somehow forced upon us. Our old machines make excellent GNU/Linux thin clients and our new machines make excellent terminal servers. We have no need of M$’s stuff at either end. Folks who have tried GNU/Linux here find it far faster than XP on our existing hardware and I just tested XP on our new machines. It takes a full minute to go from power-on to a usable desktop. GNU/Linux can do it half the time and not have to worry about malware, complicated firewalls and we have all the applications we need.
M$ is in a crisis with these folks. If M$ does pull the rug out from under them they will be forced to migrate to something and it could well be GNU/Linux. The death date is years away which gives them lots of time to study GNU/Linux.
Intel has figured out that discrete graphics cards are becoming a bit silly since Moore’s Law has ramped up CPUs. They are looking to fill those empty graphics slots on our motherboards with cards designed to be general-purpose computing elements. They have a design that looks like a network of multi-core CPUs, a super-computer on a card. Note the lack of memory bottleneck. I like that. Depending on the sizes of caches this could be a dandy tool for high performance computing.
Google is a business. M$ and its loyal followers claim that other OS is essential for business, but Google is dumping that other OS on the desktop. Security and eating their own dog-food are given as reasons. The fact that many employees are going to MacOS is puzzling. I think it is a made-in-the-USA thing. They could well use GNU/Linux or even Google’s Chrome OS. Nowhere in the quoted article is availability of apps or ease of use mentioned. They just want out of the black hole.
65 years after the close of WW2 and 93 years after the “Balfour Declaration“, Israel and its neighbours are still squabbling. This time, Israel boarded a ship delivering aid to Gaza and 10 people were killed. 500 were aboard, apparently, unlike routine aid-missions. The group organizing the mission apparently sought confrontation and Israel gave them what they wanted. According to the Law of the Sea, Israel was probably justified in boarding the vessel in order to regulate immigration but that is questionable since Gaza is blockaded but not nominally Israeli territory.
It is high time the Middle East sorted out its problems. They have to live with each other indefinitely and although they do not have to like each other they should end this stupid waste of life, energy and resources over territory and power. If they cannot settle matters by negotiation, peace should be imposed. Neither Israel nor the other countries of the Middle East are powerful enough to defy intervention. Aid, bulldozers and enough military power to make use of force futile should be dispatched ASAP. Humanity needs to police itself sometimes in order that the whole world can share peace and prosperity.
There is a decent article at eWeek: “10 Things Microsoft Can Do To Redefine Itself”
Mostly, I agree with them:
- Security
- Innovate
- Search
- FLOSS
- Games and Video
- Go Social Networking
- Ignore Apple
- Hardware, Hardware, Hardware
- Out with Ballmer
- More eye candy
Yes, a company with the money and manpower of M$ could do all of these things and be flying in about three years but it will not happen. They are too busy being spiteful and trying to deny success to others. Most of the things on that list are about sharing and M$ does not do that well. Perhaps changes at the top could change the whole spirit of the company to make this all possible but there are forces set up to make change impossible. Even Gates still has a seat at the table. He made his billions but still will not let it go. It will probably take ten years and a few heart-attacks to bring this kind of change. Ballmer says he is all in favour of some of these but there is no movement at all.
M$ has done a few things well to diversify: server software and games but they are nowhere to be seen in search and social networking. Hotmail and MSN are sad things. There are millions who believe the web starts with the blue “e” and those but they often find out they are being throttled. A company who likes WGdisA and UAC and “wait, please wait” just cannot do social. They have all the resources to do everything well but because they cannot let go of monopoly and take a chance on competing on price and performance they are doomed to the tar pits.
Security is a joke with that other OS. You cannot entangle infinite features linking everything to everything, including backwards-compatibility of defects and have security. They have too many customers comfortable with bloat and insecurity to be able to change without a major effort, apologies, re-education and a complete rewrite.
No. M$ is not about to change. They may be motivated in a few years when the market share has sagged to 50% but not before. They can keep paying people to support their monopoly until about that point. Then it will be futile. In the meantime the world continues to advance and leave them behind.
I stumbled upon an article giving solutions to problems that mostly were made by M$. A better solution the writer missed is to use GNU/Linux and be done with most of those things. No pesky EULA. No malware. No slowing down and few re-re-reboots.
Some folks like the Media Centre version of that other OS. Check out MythTV or XBMC and a bunch of others. There is choice. I saw XBMC running this year and it is great. You can get a single remote to run the TV, the PC and the software.
The CEO of Acer has a Christmas present for M$, a tablet PC running Android GNU/Linux. TFA does not give much technical information but this is the kind of product that Acer has been selling to banks, ISPs, cellular networks and so on as bonus or inducements for customers.
- 2007 – netbooks
- 2008 – smartphones
- 2009 – recession
- 2010 – tablets + ARM
M$ has had a lot of coal in its stockings the last few years. They must feel unloved.
The search has been unsuccessful. Since this latest effort was based on pings received by a submarine last summer, we expected success. The largest pieces of wreckage found floating, the tail fin and a cabinet, are of a size sonar would have detected on a flat bottom. I expect there are larger pieces on the bottom, wings, engines, spars, etc. so either the terrain is very rough and everything found a fox-hole in which to hide or there is some systematic error between the coordinate systems of the submarine and searchers. I expect those details to be worked out and a subsequent search will be successful. I cannot see France, Air France, AirBus or the BEA dropping this when they must be very close. There is some possibility that the recorders have no useful information but the fact that AirBus seems to have a problem, so far unidentified, and the closure wanted by the victims, airlines and humanity should be sufficient reasons to continue after some reflection on what might have gone wrong with the search.
Beside the possibility of a systematic error in coordinates, it may be that the pinger died too soon after detection to narrow the location sufficiently. In that case, a wider search in the vicinity would be required. There is not sufficient public data to know. One strategy may be to open the data to the view of the world and use the best ideas that result. Another may be to offer a reward and issue copies of the data to entrepreneurs. Movie rights alone, on this search, should be sufficient incentive to gather the right people to do the job. However the search goes forward, it will eventually succeed to bring closure. The wreckage may be sufficiently informative even if the recorders tell nothing.
In an interview with Fortune Magazine, Steve Ballmer stated “There’s nothing free about Android.” Wrong, Steve. Android is Free:
- anyone can run the software,
- anyone can examine the source code,
- anyone can modify the source code, and
- anyone can distribute the code unmodified or modified under the same licence that comes with the code.
Of course, Steve claims M$ owns some/all of the technology on which Android is based. They have not made public what that technology is. They will not make public what that technology is because it’s vapourware (software patents). The mists under which they hide could be dissipated today, within a couple of hours, thanks to SCOTUS.
