PGP up for sale or trade?

Post #13,227 by Ashton 10/14/01 5:43:35 AM Reply	PGP up for sale or trade? [link\|http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/22186.html\|The Reg reports] Network Associates seeking ways to up the corp. bottom line by losing a couple hundred players. Gawd how original is Corp-think (it has to be because of all those neckties). Does this suggest that Ashcroft + The Flag = forget about personal privacy next; 'security' shall be government managed for us all? Sieg ____? (Just asking) A.
Post #13,271 by orion 10/15/01 1:49:59 AM 10/15/01 1:55:13 AM Reply	Guys in suits and ties know best? Never, ever, blame it on bad management, just lay off the peons and the workers that helped make the company/product great? Yes, Corp-Think is rampant. Not only that but they pick the "Whip" over the "Carrot and stick" method 99% of the time! Why? Because they know that at least 90% of the employees want to keep their jobs to keep their families going or to pay off their bills. So the peons get mistreated and then finally laid off. They think that we are a bunch of Miltons from "Office Space" and won't do anything about it. PGP should be open source and available to all. Everyone should be using it to protect their email. In the USA we have too much of the invasions of privacy on the Internet. Any dipwit with a packet scanner that your packets travel through can read your email. Better to encrypt it with PGP and have them see the encrypted messages. Just that most of the average consumers never heard of PGP, or know what it can be used for. Bah! Maybe Microsoft will buy them out and bundle PGP 8.0 with Windows 2005 or something? ;) *Picking up the pieces of my broken life.* Edited by orion Oct. 15, 2001, 01:55:13 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #13,282 by kmself 10/15/01 4:28:12 AM Reply	Can't compete w/ free product? Look for this to happen more often. PGP is essentially a desktop utility. It's not the sort of thing you can expect to get a large markup for. Moreover, a functional equivalent, [link\|http://www.gnupg.org/\|GNU Privacy Guard], is available, free of charge, with full source, as free software. In the security market (technically proficient individuals, TPIs, acronymized as G-E-E-K-S), there's no question of which option is preferred. I expect to see this happen more and more frequently as we move forward. The small utilities market is already pretty slim pickings, and frankly, I'm not familiar with most of the Windows utility market these days, but word is that Cygnus is making inroads on the platform (there's a Debian-Cygwin "port" in the works). If free software is successful enough, it could coopt much of the application space that's not already claimed by Microsoft. In particular, the networking space, and such application niches as X Terminal emulation. Does this hurt Microsoft? Possibly. One of the things MSFT has done to curry favor is to share the table scraps of application space it hasn't allocated for itself, with a small set of chosen "friends". Free software has the power to appropriate this space. Microsoft can try to break functionality in some way, but it's somewhat constrained: it's operating under threat of a DoJ settlement, as well as continued legal action from Europe and US State AGs, as well as an unspecified number of companies which may be able to saddle the company with anticompetitive claims. It's also stuck having to provide NT/2K - UNIX compatibility (and the current standard Unix is GNU/Linux). An application ported to Cygwin is very close to working under UNIX Services for Windows NT, or UWIN, or MKS. Moreover, it's not just the table scraps. Free software can compete directly with Microsoft. There are two paths to the Windows desktop. Some applications have chosen the native port approach: create a Win32 application. And several apps have done this: vim, the GIMP, AbiWord, StarOffice. However, operating under emulation or compatibility mode is another option. With a full "Linux" port to a 'Nix-on-Win package, a full suite of applications is available: the KDE desktop, GNOME, networking tools, development suite, the whole shebang. And that's competing directly with Microsoft, on the platform they "own". Interesting times. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`
Post #13,348 by orion 10/15/01 1:04:21 PM Reply	A free version of Windows? This is why I think the DOJ should force MS to open up the Windows API (including undocumented API calls) so someone else can write their own version of Windows. :) *Picking up the pieces of my broken life.*
Post #13,410 by kmself 10/15/01 3:53:34 PM Reply	WINE Frankly, I'd like to start a "remedies" thread under the MiG forum. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`

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