Perhaps it is time to sell the last of my Microsoft stock

I saw an interview with Bill Gates linked from Slashdot. Yes, Gates really does compare Free Software with Communism. I suppose that some non-thinkers might swallow this bullshit. As someone pointed out on Slashdot, Free Software and Open Source software is more akin to a community bake sale at a church: people cooperating for local benefit. Gate's argument (as the same poster said on Slashdot) is like: protect the property rights of restaurants by banning church bake sales -- a great way to argue the point and refute Gates' lame argument.

I differ slightly with people like Richard Stallman at the FSF because I think that commercial, Open Source (BSD, Apache, etc. licenses), and Free Software (GPL licensed) all have a place in the IT ecosphere. Still, Stallman makes more sense to me than Gates. I need sales from my commercial software products to augment my consulting income but I am always trying to find ways to also justify Free Software projects when they make sense. I also base so much of my consulting business on Free or Open Source projects like Linux, Tomcat, Apache, etc. that I am naturally prejudiced in favor of supporting free infrastructure software.

I usually do not blame people for "voting with their wallet": owners of non-US based corporations win big with Bush by reducing their tax bills; Bill Gates sees his business slightly eroding because of projects like Linux and Open Office.org so he attacks these projects any way that he can, etc. Can't blame them. However, for small companies, consultants, etc. there are enormous benefits to using high quality free infrastructure software. Reducing overall costs for customers means getting more work in the long run: the less people have to pay for both hardware and software infrastructure, they can afford more custom software projects or simply pocket the savings.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more