Interview with Tony 'Say No to Windows' Bove

Interview with Tony 'Say No to Windows' Bove


Re:the one thing you won't find in his review
(Score:5, Informative)
by brunes69 (86786) Alter Relationship on Monday October 17, @01:05PM (#13810589)
(http://www.keirstead.org/)
What's your flavour?

There's Novell-backed OpenExchange [openexchange.com]

There's Germany-backed Kolab [kolab.org]

There's RedHat-backed eGroupWare [egroupware.org]

There's all-open OpenGroupware [opengroupware.org]

And that's just the tip of it. There are also commercial products.

Seriously - if you think there are not alternatives to Exchange out there, then either you have not done your homework or are seriously misinformed, or both.

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Re:2 Problems
(Score:5, Insightful)
by stlhawkeye (868951) Alter Relationship on Monday October 17, @01:11PM (#13810645)
(http://www.themanpages.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 06, @03:45PM)
2) It assumes that it's the MS programs holding people back, when many desktops are tied because of third party software. For example, in my every-day job, I support dozens of workstations with Macromedia and Adobe software installed - neither of these run natively under Linux, and they run horribly under emulation. Yes, you can find replacement photo editors, but not really replacement video editors that are on par with After Effects, or replacements for Flash that have 95%+ installation base.

Exactly. Ever try to hire a graphics artist and tell him, "by the way, you'll be using GIMP on our Fedora Core 3 installation"? It's harder than it sounds. Yes, you can all rain down here with THOUSANDS of examples of YOU and YOUR FRIENDS and people YOU KNOW who not only can use GIMP but PREFER it to expensive alternatives. If the sample of Slashdot and its immediate social clique were the norm, we'd live in a pseudosocialist utopia in which all of us are gainfully employed and paid a hundred thousand dollars to work 30 hour weeks developing beautiful open source software that we give away and nobody buys, and all music and entertainment is produced through the honest labor of talented people upon whom we benevolently bestow voluntary payments for their work, and whose labors of love are distributed for free through the software channels that we were paid lots of money to develop. Oh, and Bush isn't president. And global warming stopped. And we all ride bikes to our jobs. And there's no McDonald's or suburbs. And soda is free. So is beer. I could go on, but I moved into the TrollZone about 5 minutes ago.

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The Man Pages [themanpages.net]. My webcomic and blog.
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A vibrant economy requires resources to be used efficiently. In theory, patents are supposed to help this process by increasing the incentive to invest in capital. Indeed, such investment can benefit both the inventor and the end user. As such, patents encourage the production of new capital, and the new capital is often more efficient at using resources than the previous capital. Thus the economy grows.

However, it appears as though America is reaching a point where patents interfere with the process so much that productivity is diminished. When an inventor has to search for patents when designing every portion of a capital work, less time is spent on developing the capital itself. Thus the creation of new capital diminishes, and resources are not used as efficiently. That can eventually cause the economy to basically rot.

This is not what the American economy needs, considering its various other problems (massive debt, inflated stock markets, a housing bubble, and so forth).

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Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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Patents on literary plots
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Christian Engstrom (633834) Alter Relationship on Monday October 17, @03:53PM (#13812000)
(http://www.glindra.org/)
At least we know who will go for the patent for acquiring patents on movie plots. It'll be these enterprising young lawyers [plotpatents.com].

This decision is quite funny. A couple of months ago, Slashdot was running a story [slashdot.org] about a piece by Richard Stallman [guardian.co.uk] where he made the analogy with the works of Victor Hugo being covered by patents on literary plots. Then there were some posters who thought Dr. Stallman was making an absurd comparison, and that patents on literature would never happen.

Well, well...

Meanwhile, in Europe, we have chosen another road. After the victory on July 6, when the European Parliament rejected the software directive, we now have a chance to get one of our activists to win the title "European of the Year" in an open Internet poll organized by a big business magazine.

Please feel free to go to NoSoftwarePatents.com [nosoftwarepatents.com] for instructions on how to vote, while you contemplate this latest madness by the US patent establishment.
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glindra.org [glindra.org]: VMS-inspired dir/copy/purge/grep for Windows

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