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Archives for June 2003

Those Linux cavaliers

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As far as I’ve been able to tell, the SCO suit against IBM — claiming that Linux is somehow tainted by code that SCO owns the rights to — is an absurd joke, a last-ditch effort on the part of a failing company to somehow extort some money on the basis of its copyrights and patents. Farhad Manjoo wrote a definitive piece on the subject last week in Salon.

Yet listen to this “analyst”, as quoted in a Steve Lohr column in today’s New York Times:

  “It’s a real problem for the future,” said George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner. “The open-source community has been pretty cavalier about this. You’ve got to respect intellectual property.”

“Cavalier,” dictionary.com says, is defined as “(1) showing arrogant or offhand disregard; dismissive… (2) Carefree and nonchalant; jaunty.”

I can’t think of a stupider statement on this subject. If you know anything at all about the history of Linux and the open source movement, you know that it is precisely the opposite of cavalier on this issue.

What we call Linux today is an assemblage of parts — including building-block components created by Richard Stallman and cohorts at the Free Software Foundation, and the kernel first written by Linus Torvalds — put together, with great care and effort, across nearly two decades of development. Each part has been written from the ground up and protected by open-source licensing.

The GPL (GNU Public License) has its devotees and its detractors — and there are competing models within the open-source world. But that just shows how much thought and, indeed, respect these programmers pay to thinking through the complex aspects of intellectual property as they relate to ownership of software code.

Linux’s architects have been the opposite of “dismissive” or “carefree” on these issues. Their whole project is a thoughtful, careful, “slow and steady wins the race” approach to creating a new model for the intellectual-property basis of software. To call this effort “cavalier” is just stunningly wrong.

Sure, that new model may not be to the liking of many in the commercial-software world. But it “respects” traditional notions of intellectual property even as it tries to reshape them — and that’s one reason it’s proven so enduring and effective, and why Linux will continue to prosper while SCO is likely to end up as a footnote.

Cleaning up behind the bleeding edge

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“Bleeding edge” is the label for people (“early adopters”) who buy new technologies so early that they have to deal with all the bugs and problems that the technologies’ creators failed to solve in their rush to market.

I have always tried to avoid the bleeding edge, but I’m also interested enough in new technologies that I itch to toy with them. Usually, I grab semi-new technologies a generation or two after their introduction, once there’s been a little time to iron out the glitches and bring the prices down. (On the same theory, I will never buy a computer with the fastest processor — you can always save money buying one two or three notches slower than the fastest around, and you’ll never notice the difference.) I think this puts me at the trailing edge of the bleeding edge — the scabby edge, perhaps.

So it is that, a year or two after the 802.11b/WiFi revolution took all geekdom by storm, I have finally joined the bandwagon — with a little help from a book I’m happy to recommend, Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman’s “Wireless Networking Starter Kit.” (Engst’s “Internet Starter Kit” was the book I used to put my Macintosh on the Net back in 1994, so this all felt right.)

What has amazed me, as I added wireless to my existing home network with its DSL connection, is how absurdly cheap the hardware is. I got a perfectly good Netgear wireless router box for $70 with a $20 rebate (and I see that in the two weeks since I bought it its price has gone down another $10); the PC card for my laptop was even cheaper — $80 but with a $50 rebate. OK, I know all this 802.11b gear is being dumped because a new generation of faster, backwards-compatible 802.11g wireless equipment is coming on the market and the manufacturers are unloading the less desirable old stock. I don’t know how any of these companies are making money, but in the meantime, there are tons of amazing bargains out there. The wireless equipment doesn’t cost much more than the ethernet cabling and hub you’d use to build a wired equivalent.

More fast talk on taxes

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The recent Bush tax cut offered a child-credit rebate to lots of Americans, but not to millions of low-income taxpayers. Now Congress is squabbling over attempts to restore this tax break, which attempts to spread just a handful of the billions being handed out to people who actually need it.

Tom DeLay isn’t buying it. This is his explanation, in today’s N.Y. Times: “To me, it’s a little difficult to give tax relief to people that don’t pay income tax.”

DeLay would have you believe that the Democrats and moderate Republicans who are pressing this $3.5 billion tax-cut handout — and who have suggested that the Republicans goofed in leaving it out while pushing for tax cuts for investors that cost hundreds of billions of dollars — are being illogical. What? Give tax rebates to people who don’t pay taxes at all?

But note that insertion of the little word “income.” People in the bracket under discussion — roughly $10,000 to $25,000 a year wage earners — pay plenty of taxes. But they pay it in payroll taxes, which typically swipe about 8 percent of income. The Republican tax-cut architects have always done a deceptive shuffle with the language here: Payroll taxes count as taxes when these legislators want to tally up the onerousness of the tax burden on American citizens. But the same taxes magically disappear when they want to keep low-income people off the gravy train that they are loading up for their high-income constituents and campaign contributors.

All of which is a shame — not only in the broad moral sense that helping people who are struggling on low incomes is a social good in and of itself, but also in the pragmatic sense that when you put a $400 tax credit in the pockets of low-income wage earners they are more likely to spend it and help boost the economy.

FCC no evil

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If you’ve been reading Salon for the last couple of years this new FCC decision should come as no surprise. If you haven’t been, you can catch up on our coverage of the FCC here and of “the Media Borg,” as we have been calling it for two years, here.

Trent Lott says, “I want to emphasize that there is not a partisan position here,” and indeed he is criticizing the decision along with some other Republicans in Congress. Still, you can’t seriously argue that this decision — pushed through by President Bush’s FCC chairman, who happens to be the son of Bush’s Secretary of State; supported by the three Republican members of the FCC; and opposed by the two Democratic members — does not have a big GOP rubber stamp all over it.

Itunes, have you met Emusic?

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Haven’t had time to test drive the new Apple music store. I’m glad that Jobs & co. seem to have broken the logjam in getting the big labels to find a reasonable way to distribute their music online.

The one drawback of the Apple service many users have complained about is the absence of a wide selection of independent and alternative music. I can imagine the organizational explanations for why this is, and I’m sure it’s not Apple’s preference — after all, in the world of mainstream personal computing Apple has always been an “alternative.”

Still, it underscores how happy I continue to be with the Emusic service, which I’ve now had for a good year and a half. $10 a month; unlimited downloads without annoying DRM mechanisms. Since in any month I find at least a half-dozen CDs I want, that’s a bargain; plus I get to sample lots of artists without having to negotiate stupid streaming-only limitations. If your musical taste runs to obscurities anyway, this is one of the best bargains on the Net.