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OTP provides perfect secrecy. It doesn't provide any form of authentication, or even hint at a way to provide authentication. If someone knows the message, they can figure out the key, and they can send whatever message they like in its place.

When I wanted to learn more about cryptography, I started from what I understood (OTP) and came up with some ideas for fixing its limitations. I wrote up a page describing the new method (One Time Deck), and put up links to cryptography newsgroups for comment. Sure enough, they pointed out some superior methods (my method works, it's just stupidly expensive in key data). I added links to papers on the superior methods to my page, and moved on.

All in all, time well spent in gaining a thorough understanding of theoretically perfect non-quantum cryptocgraphic methods. It may be taken for granted that all worthwhile OTP variants have been covered. In cryptography, theoretical perfection is as simple and boring as basic arithmetic, while practicality is as complex and rich as computer programming.

The inventor would be well-advised to follow my approach, and at least learn something. Unless he intends to swindle other people who understand even less than he does... that has traditionally been the most profitable use for bad ideas in cryptography.

The Johnson Keyboard Layout

Check out One Time Deck: the world's most wasteful encryption scheme. The key size (in expressible values) grows with the factorial of the message size (also in expressible values, not bits).

Basically, your key is the equivalent of a randomly shuffled deck of cards with each possible messages written on a card. Your ciphertext tells where to cut the deck to find the card with your message on it. Each deck is used for only one message, then destroyed. Hence the name.

It has the interesting property that if you don't have the deck, even if you know the plaintext exactly, any changes to the ciphertext will result in a completely random plaintext (except that it's not the same).

..is by cramming the words through your eyes into your brain

NegWeb is a "semi-literate" programming tool. Basically, it lets you define chunks of output files in any order, in any location in input files. So if you want to put the chunk of documentation for a feature in LaTeX or HTML just before the chunk containing its implementation, you are free to do so.

It differs from other literate programming tools in that it doesn't have any concept of formatting the NegWeb source as a whole. Literate programming started with Donald Knuth's WEB, which arranges Pascal in the same way that NegWeb arbitrary text files (an operation called "tangling," since the results are compilable, but not pretty), but also indexes and pretty prints the Pascal and treats the text between the code chunks as TeX (called "weaving"). Knuth later created CWEB, which does the same thing, but for C instead of Pascal.

My problem with this approach is that when you go to edit it, you deal with the ugly TeX source, or you reweave constantly. Also, unless you are such a TeX wizard that you do it without ever thinking or looking things up, you are distracted from working on your functional output by fiddling with the formatting. The NoWeb approach is to have the plain text source the most readable version of the source, on the principle that code is most often read to be edited.

The name is a play on NoWeb, which is essentially a simplified and generalized CWEB, since NegWeb is essentially a simplified (some literate programmers would say "crippled") and generalized NoWeb. NoWeb is very extensible, and supports indexing and pretty-printing for a lot of languages, as well as using several different formatting languages for weaving, such as LaTeX and HTML.

Either would work for rearranging arbitrary ASCII text chunks into files: NegWeb is simpler, NoWeb is prettier.

You might be surprised at the freedom it gives you to factor your code into short, manageable chunks. It definitely helps to set up a few macros in your text editor to treat the chunk names as hyperlinks to find the definition of the chunk, and all places it is used.

NegWeb is a "semi-literate" programming tool. Basically, it lets you define chunks of output files in any order, in any location in input files. So if you want to put the chunk of documentation for a feature in LaTeX or HTML just before the chunk containing its implementation, you are free to do so.

It differs from other literate programming tools in that it doesn't have any concept of formatting the NegWeb source as a whole. Literate programming started with Donald Knuth's WEB, which arranges Pascal in the same way that NegWeb arbitrary text files (an operation called "tangling," since the results are compilable, but not pretty), but also indexes and pretty prints the Pascal and treats the text between the code chunks as TeX (called "weaving"). Knuth later created CWEB, which does the same thing, but for C instead of Pascal.

My problem with this approach is that when you go to edit it, you deal with the ugly TeX source, or you reweave constantly. Also, unless you are such a TeX wizard that you do it without ever thinking or looking things up, you are distracted from working on your functional output by fiddling with the formatting. The NoWeb approach is to have the plain text source the most readable version of the source, on the principle that code is most often read to be edited.

The name is a play on NoWeb, which is essentially a simplified and generalized CWEB, since NegWeb is essentially a simplified (some literate programmers would say "crippled") and generalized NoWeb. NoWeb is very extensible, and supports indexing and pretty-printing for a lot of languages, as well as using several different formatting languages for weaving, such as LaTeX and HTML.

Either would work for rearranging arbitrary ASCII text chunks into files: NegWeb is simpler, NoWeb is prettier.

You might be surprised at the freedom it gives you to factor your code into short, manageable chunks. It definitely helps to set up a few macros in your text editor to treat the chunk names as hyperlinks to find the definition of the chunk, and all places it is used.

...not that the label helps anything. I mean, there's no really clear line between "addiction" and "bad habit."

Multiplayer RPGs are the worst in this way. They give you little rewards every once in a while, for staying on longer, and they tend to be open-ended. In that way, they are designed just like gambling machines: designed to give you random rewards that condition you to want to keep playing. Also, hardcore players, rather than being ridiculed, are respected for the in-game power they develop, so there's social pressure to play more, rather than to play moderately.

I experienced that sort of weirdness when I was developing Beng the Battle Engine, a chat-room RPG battle engine. I thought the sheer repetitiveness of the gameplay (and total lack of graphics, story, or setting) would make it at best a side toy for people to play with when the conversation slowed down, or while waiting for someone they wanted to talk to to show up. Imagine my surprise when a few people basically moved in and spent 8 hours per day or more.

They'd level up past the point I thought anyone would ever get to in just days. I was disturbed. I mean, I was proud they enjoyed it, but I didn't think that much play was healthy. Of course, they didn't continue like that forever. It's just not that good a game, after a hundred hours or so, you've seen everything you could ever see, and then the novelty of being the toughest guy in a game with only a couple dozen players wears off pretty quickly. Some wandered off, and some picked up the source code and started hacking on it, which gave me a lot better feeling about the whole thing.

But it makes me worry about better games. If a cheesy IRC-based micro-MUD can suck away hundreds of hours like that, how far off can the name "EverCrack" be? And there's better stuff coming out all the time!

the source is here

I'm sure lots of people have their own tiny project to show off.

I'll start the ball rolling with my Buskpledge Windows program, for collecting and managing donation pledges. It lets you make 2-click pledges from web-pages, view and edit the pledges individually or en masse, and can redirect you to direct donation pages such as Amazon Honor System or PayPal. Full install and uninstall in under 35k.

Source is available at the project page. It's a little wierd, using a custom semi-literate programming tool, and a half-assed gzip clone for internal compression.

Well, you do pay to the ISP, but where is the money for the content provider then?

I really do not think that the current situation of internet financing (ISP-charging money/content providers-ad banners/AOL-Time - big conglomerate of both) is sustainable. I do hope for the situation, where if I like some piece of work( be it a nice essay, good software, whatever) I can easily, and that means sigle, max. couple of clicks send a small amount of money directly to the author.

What I do not want is aggregated "channels" with hefty subscriptions, without my control what gets aggregated.

I think that the future is somewhere along these lines:

http://www.boswa.com/buskware/buskware.html

and not only for software, but more importantly for content sites.

I want control over whom I pay and I want to pay only after seeing the work/enjoying it.
P.

(maybe more accurately 2b, since it's part of the same issue)

You know, there's no reason we can't just pay people for making good stuff. They don't need a way to force them to pay, just a good argument that it is in the donor's own personal best interest to pay.
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The big one is cloning. Every time a really good new program idea comes out and someone tries to sell it, a thousand hackers jump on it and clone it, guaranteeing that the originator won't make a dime. Sometimes, the clone is even inferior, but at $0 it's impossible to compete against.

Don't get me wrong, proprietary software companies do this too. In particular, MS has done this many times, so the entire software industry is terrified that if they try to sell a new product based on a new idea that it'll hardly be on the shelves before MS has their own version with a giant marketing budget and a hundred tied-sales.

The important question is, does Open Source innovation outweigh the Open Source threat of cloning?

I'm not convinced that it does right now. The conflict between open and closed source models is wasting a lot of effort and discouraging many people from creating. However, when the conflict is resolved, I'm sure the situation will be much better than an all-proprietary market.

Programmers need to be paid, somehow; there are some altruists, but in general people need a reward to expend their time and energy. While there are many indirect ways for Open Source software to be paid for, there is still no way to guarantee that just because you make a good piece of software that is widely-used by people who can afford to pay for it, that you will be paid for it. This is the heart of the conflict: Open Source is kicking out the old sources of income and hasn't fully established new ones.

I think the answer is the simplest possible one: just give money both to the people who make the best implementation, and the ones came up with the idea behind the software; by rewarding them, you encourage future innovation for your benefit. It's called Mass Market Busking.

If you hold on to your money unless someone finds a way to pry it from your hands, you can expect that people who want your money will try to pry the money from your hands. If you give money to anyone who benefits you, you can expect that people who want your money will just do work that benefits you. It's that simple.

Just as the people who bought Wolfenstein paid for Doom, and the people who bought Doom paid for Quake, Half-Life probably wouldn't have been made if nobody had paid for Quake. It isn't just the people you're paying who are being encouraged to do work for your benefit, but anyone who is capable of similar work.
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I see plenty of direct-action "break the codes and set them free" type talk on /., talk about fighting for the digital future and our rights. Wholly absent from the debate seems to be a coherent vision of what the future should be, how corporations can survive in the digital age and still make money from their efforts.

Thank you!! An intelligent, incisive question, one worthy of conspicuous, public debate.

Speaking entirely on behalf of myself, you are correct that a cohesive vision of How Things Should Be has been absent from my rants. This is because I believe designing a successful, durable, workable, just system would require the efforts of a group of incredibly talented, wise people, the likes of which have not been gathered since the framing of the Constitution. I don't believe I possess such gifts.

I do have a few vague, disconnected ideas. To fully appreciate them, however, you need to understand the framework in which I developed them:

Axiom: When the ability to copy is ubiquitous, and when the incremental cost of copying is effectively zero, the effective value of any given copy -- including the "original" copy -- is zero. (I state this as axiomatic, but I'm willing to discuss its merits. And please note that this assertion says nothing about the effort/resources required to create the original in the first place.)

As a supporting argument, consider the universe presented in the TV show Star Trek. (This may seem silly, but Star Trek is a useful framework for comparison, as everyone's familiar with it.) In a world where everything, including physical objects, can be replicated at zero cost, what is the economic impact? I argue that the market-based economy collapses completely, since its fundamental supports (scarcity and inconvenience) have been eliminated.

I also believe that the social impact will be that casual copying will be seen as perfectly okay, and that the desire to not share copies will be seen as childish. After all, if anyone anywhere -- including artisans -- can copy anything at any time for nothing, then what, fundamentally, will be wrong with copying anything?

So, in a universe where copying everything is seen as perfectly okay, is there anything an artisan should still have control over? I contend that the most crucial aspect of creativity still needing strict controls is the artisan's reputation.

Consider: On a visit to the Enterprise, you see an object you quite like. Naturally, you ask, "Wow! Who made that?" Both you and the object's creator would like to be certain you receive an accurate answer. Note that the question of whether the object you saw was an original or a copy is irrelevant. You no longer care if an object is "genuine;" you want to know who did it. In other words, you want to know about their reputation. (After all, maybe they did other cool stuff, too.)

...Okay, so we don't live on the Enterprise (yet), and we all still have to pay the rent. However, I strongly believe the concept of reputation will be central to a re-design of economics and the concept of intellectual "property" in the digital universe. Reputation will become a chief scarce resource in the digital universe, because it is an artist's reputation that will guide you to their other scarce resource: their time. And it is their time that you will be paying for (no more doing stuff "on spec").

In terms of more immediate, concrete proposals, I've heard the following ideas floated:

• Mass-Market Buskware, or the "tipping jar" model. Many question whether such a system can work on a large scale. So far, author Stephen King seems to be doing rather well by it with his free offering, The Plant. However, it's probably worth noting the primary reason he's doing so well is largely due to -- drumroll, please -- his reputation.
• Pre-Release Mass Auction (preBay?). This is a system whereby software/music/whatever is made available for a flat price, and bidders can contribute whatever amount they wish toward that price.

  For example, let's say John Carmack creates his latest game, qDuOaOkMe, and decides that, for all his efforts and that of his company, he wants to see $50 million. So he posts it to the site: "qDuOaOkMe: $50,000,000". People the world over pledge $25, $50, $100, whatever they feel it's worth toward the final price. When the price is reached, Carmack gets the money, and the game is released free to all. The entry is also kept open on the site so people who didn't bid can continue to throw tips. If the price is not met after a pre-set time, all pledges are returned to the bidders, and the game isn't released.

• Shareware. This model has met with mixed success in the past, mostly due to the relative inconvenience of sending in the requested fees. "Impulse" buying, until recently, hasn't been easy. Fortunately, services like Kagi and PayPal may well rejuvenate this idea.
• Automatic Micropayments. This is certainly an idea worthy of exploration, but I have concerns about the implications for privacy.

Other ideas are likely out there, and worthy of attention.

Also for immediate consideration, there should be some study into the use of digital watermarks for identifying the artist of a given work. Right now, all the discussion surrounding watermarks has been with an eye toward controlling proliferation of copies, which is unworkable. However, I believe even the most virulent opponent of copy protection would support using digital watermarks to identify the artist, thereby preserving -- wait for it -- their reputation.

Like I said, I don't think I have what it takes to completely design the new system. I've also completely avoided rather sticky issues, such Moral Rights (e.g. should an artist be able to enforce the declaration, "No, you can't use my painting in the background of a porno video"). But I do know that the current system will ultimately prove to be fundamentally unworkable, if for no other reason than the sheer numbers involved (how many copyrighted works will you need to test against to make sure you're not infringing?).

So, yes, you're right. We need to think about this, and it needs to be done rationally and publicly. Too bad the entertainment industry's using all that bandwidth to paint us all as criminals.

Schwab

Mass Market Busking: The Inevitable Economics of Software

Basically, if you give money away for anything you like, people will realize this and start trying to make stuff you like. If you don't give out money, nobody will care what you do or don't like. Being generous makes you relevant to the busking industry, much like being gullible makes you relevant to the advertising industry (and think how much better TV would be if it wasn't targeted at people dumb enough to be influenced by advertising, but rather targeted at people bright enough to understand why they should do things that don't have an immediate personal payoff like donating and voting).

It includes a bit on why shareware doesn't work. Basically, shareware screws things up by trying to set a price, and usually way too high (presumably with the thought "I have to set some price, and I know most people won't pay, so I'll have to set it high enough that the few who do pay will make it worth my while."). The fact that making small payments over the internet only recently became possible, and still isn't well-understood by the general public, probably also had something to do with it. I mean, how far are you going to go out of your way to send $20 to some guy who wrote one cheesy utility you use?

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It's been consistently shown that the freer a market, the more liable consumers are to abuse.

I think your confusing incompetent management with a free market.

Each of your examples is caused by incompetent government intervention:

Whether it's the railroad companies in the 1800s using variable pricing schemes to squeeze out every dollar they could,

Not everyone with money can lay rail. The government granted and enforced monopolies on rail-lines in certain places, which was naturally a bad thing for consumers.

In those cases where there is a natural monopoly, like rail or power lines, the government should retain ownership and rent their use to the highest bidder (they should also contract out construction and maintenance). That's the true free market solution here (and it's a better way for gov't to earn their money than taxing).

Look at Manitoba Hydro (in Canada) for a prime example of a natural monopoly owned by the government and run well. Okay, they should be renting more things out, and contracting more jobs out, but they luckily had some very sensible and competent bureaucrats so it worked anyway. Too bad such things are a crap shoot; if every gov't endeavor could be done this competently, I'd be a socialist (I was when I was younger and prone to thinking of how best to run the world if someone competent was in charge and everyone was pulling together for the common good... before I realized that those basic assumptions are totally backwards).

to Japanese electronics companies flooding the US market with below-cost goods then driving up prices once the competitors were gone,

Were they truly intentionally selling them at a loss? I doubt it. This was just the standard Jap-bashing propaganda line to justify protectionist tariffs.

America has more capital than Japan, and some of the best high-tech workers in the world. It isn't some two-bit banana republic that can't afford to ride out product dumping or build new factories to re-enter a profitable market.

Prices do fluctuate in a free market. That's the natural order of things. Low prices drive some out of business, high prices bring more into business. Any amount that stops this fluctuation does so by holding the prices high, and screwing the buyers.

to Microsoft driving competitors out of the market,

Poorly written IP laws. Copyright shouldn't grant total control over distribution in this age of instant near-free copying, only the right to set a price the holder must be paid per copy made.

IP law is an unnecessary government interference in the free market. Here is an essay that covers why I don't think IP law is necessary for software.

The ownership of copies as if they were physical objects is acceptable, but the ownership of the monopoly right of making copies, to do with as one wills, is insane. This behavior isn't analogous to any real property. All forced monopolies, like natural monopolies, should be owned by the government, and legal copies of copyrighted work (really just permission to make physical copies) should be sold by the government, with proceeds going to the copyright holder. Furthermore, copyright term should be limited to five years. If you aren't going to make your money back in five years, you won't write it for the money. These aren't the days of giant, expensive printing presses anymore.

If government's going to interfere, it should keep its interference under it's own control, not just hand over their power of violent enforcement to be wielded in whatever manner the IP "owner" sees fit.

to Savings and Loans going under because they made obviously bad loans to 3rd world dictators,

Yes, some companies are run incompetently. Some people invest poorly. Tough.

Regulation hasn't, and never will, guarantee any return on (or of) your investment.

business without oversight has been consistently shown to end in harm.

I don't see that at all. Regulation without foresight consistently causes harm.

Other evil government interference in the free market:

corporations- corporations are not natural, they are creatures of the government that have greater power than individuals in many ways and are used for securing individual profit without individual responsibility. You should not be able to buy voting stock in a company without being personally responsible for all actions of that company.

public schooling- Incompetent government bureaucracy given an important task combined with the government indoctrination of our children. How much worse can a deal get? I remember grade school as the greatest waste of time in my life, and I believe that the chosen course material forms most of the political opinions of the masses.

income tax- The more you earn, the more you pay, in fact, the higher a portion of your earnings you pay! An insane disincentive to profit and productivity.

With gaping holes like these in the boat, adding other regulations atop them to fix the problems they cause is akin to drilling holes in the other side of the boat so it sinks evenly instead of overturning.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

People will learn to pay for it.

It is in their own best interests.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

Services like google have to be paid for. Who do you want to do it?

Your initial answer might be "someone, anyone else!" which makes sense, in a way. I'd rather have the dollars come out of someone else's pocket, too. But then whose interests will google be serving? If they're being paid by advertisers, they're working for them, and they will strike the most profitable balance between flooding you with ads and keeping you coming back. It's happened to every other search engine, and it will happen to google.

However, divided amongst all us users, the cost of google is next to nothing. If everyone who uses it sends them a few bucks per year, they'll have plenty of money to keep things exactly the way we want.

But isn't there an advantage to being a freeloader and being the only one who isn't paying among a group of millions? Don't you get all the service with none of the cost? Perhaps not.

If only some of the people are paying, and this money is their sole revenue source, then google should ignore the wishes of all the people who don't pay. So payment buys you a privileged position as a relevant person.

This is the logic behind mass market busking. Take control by paying your fair share.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

The problem here is that the free software producers are not producing a net benefit to the end user by copying every advance as quickly as they can.

They blatantly copy good ideas as soon as they appear, producing nothing new of value, just spending their own effort to keep people from having to pay the people who had the good ideas. This is mostly what free software developers do, they duplicate effort to get around IP restrictions (yes, of course, there are exceptions, but the high-profile stuff is all duplication).

Knowing that this will happen, people don't bother developing their software ideas, because they know they can't get paid. Instead, they end up making a living doing system administration or some such thing, and creative talent gets wasted on unoriginal work.

There's a way out, though. In mass market busking, the users decide who and how much to pay, and are therefore free to pay whoever has the good idea first, and not bother paying people who just duplicate effort or slap a new interface on public domain code. This actually gives people a profit motive to write innovative free software for the general public. Integrators of all the good ideas can also get paid without usurping the income of the originators of the ideas, because it is in the best interests of the people who are paying to and they have control of their payments.

This also deals with the problem of 800-pound gorillas like MS screwing original people even worse than the free software community does.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

...but only listed it among hypocritical ideological movements.

I find their use of the term "free" offensive and misleading.

While I have a moderate dislike for the GPL, and release my own "free" software into the public domain, I do like freely distributable software, especially distributed in source form.

I like gratis software, I like the debugging benefits, and I like reading source. There are many benefits to "free software" without having to apply moralistic nonsense to engineering and economic decisions.

It doesn't rule out making a profit.

I am well aware of that.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

I've got a million of these moderately good ideas. If I spent my time trying to patent them, I wouldn't have any to develop my truly brilliant ideas, like safemode, Kiddie Script, and Kill All Humans. Not to mention such important things as posting on /.

<g>

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

Mass market busking

"Here, free software! Give me money, and other people will give you free software because they see I got money, so they think you might give them some." It's that simple.

Acting civilized pays off in the long term.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

Think about *who* you really support (I'm guessing you are pro-[your favorite band] not pro-[free music, gimme!]). While it tastes great, Naptster's free beer (music for free) is blocking Metallica's free speech (self-determination on what and how they express themselves to fans). I think the artists know just a little bit what they're talking about. Get behind them.

I don't care about these "artists" (I'm talking about all popular musicians here). They are absurdly rich because they entered into deals with the promoter/distributors to play their music for free into the ears of youth over the only convenient distribution systems that existed (radio, TV), until they got used to the music and felt a need to hear more. Their fame and riches stem from this deal more than from special musical ability. They are part of the machine, not victims of it.

Yes, good musicians deserve some compensation, but control is not part of the bargain! Any musician who wants to tell me how much I have to pay him to hear his music is never getting a cent from me. There are plenty of other musicians out there, and I've got money for them, when I like their music and when they don't try to attack me legally.

Compensation does not require control! Getting enormously rich from your mediocre talent plus a large promotion budget does, though. That's what Metallica did, and that's what they're trying to protect.

To hell with them. I have no special love for the tiny wealthy minority of musicians in bed with the record companies (who then bitch that they aren't getting a big enough slice of the absurdly large revenue). I have a lot more sympathy for the other 99% of musicians who are working second jobs to support their hobby. Without control, maybe we'd see fewer rich whiners and more decent musicians making a living.

You're damned right I'm selfish. That's the way you're supposed to be in commercial transactions. Not stupidly selfish, but putting your own interests first. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to pick your pocket with his tongue.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

Donating not only supports the producers things you like, enabling them to produce more, it encourages others to produce things you like in the hopes of getting your future donations.

the cost of music IS real world cost. Tape costs money, studio time costs money, rehearsal space costs money, FOOD costs money.

These are fixed investments producing unlimited copies of music. It is a fundamentally different situation than an investment producing transient performed music which can only be heard by a limited audience. It demands a fundamentally different income model.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

Maybe a name more like "Ransom Protocol" would be more appropriate, or "Communal Purchase Protocol".

The Street Performer Protocol has little relation to the operating procedure of street performers (a.k.a. buskers): a price is set and must be matched. Have you ever seen a busker with a sign, "I'm only playing the first half of this song, if there isn't $10 in my hat by the end of the first half, I won't play the second half."? It doesn't fit the analogy at all.

I think it is a badly flawed variant of mass market busking (not to suggest that the idea was derived from it, just that MMB is the more general term).

The flaws?

Well, how do you set the price? You know donations are going to drop right off once one the price is reached; when you explain it in terms of influencing this one single producer, people will think of it in those terms and look for the minimum donation they can get away with (and who knows what price you'll set for the next piece? better to hold some back against future increase). So when you set a target, you also set a limit.

What if you're a runaway success? You can't raise your price and not expect your customers to feel betrayed.

What if your sequel isn't as well-received as the first book, even though it pays well enough that you'd like to keep going? You can't lower the price when you see it's not going to be met, or people won't take you seriously at all.

IMHO, it's far better to just let people pay what they will. If you want to make noises about giving up on the project because you're making too little money, fine, but don't try to set a price target/limit before release. Only someone like Stephen King, who has such a loyal following that he can predict demand, can get away with this kind of thing.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

I wrote an essay on why I think this is a viable economic model for all IP based on the self-interest of the donor. Personally, I like to call the general concept "mass-market busking" and any such freely-redistributable product "buskware".

In short, the reason you donate is that it sends a message to the world that there is money to be had in making something you like. You aren't donating primarily to support one specific producer, but to reward, and thus encourage, the behavior of making such products and releasing them for free distribution.

The key to making it work is for each buskware producer to give full public disclosure of how much money they receive, with as much information about which product it was for as is available. This is the payoff for the donor, as other people can look at this and think "Hey! He's making money at it, I should try, too!" (conversely, they are discouraged from following the example of people who don't make an adequate profit).

Music is something of a special case, as most music isn't tailored to a particular audience, and people generally don't seem to prefer that it is, but at the very least you are encouraging musicians to believe that they can distribute their music freely, without signing on with a big label.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

I always use hard tabs. In fact, I require them in cugar. Indenting one space further than the previous line means a continuation of a previous line. Indenting more than one space is an error, because it could be misinterpreted as a tab. This forces consistent indentation on all cugar users.

Different people prefer indentations between 2 and 6 spaces (I like 3), why not let them choose? You can always change the tab stops in your editor.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

What do people cling to C's hideous syntax when they write a new language? Not only is it, IMHO, a bad syntax choice, but it messes you up when you go to learn it and you expect things to work like they did in C.

I wrote a C/C++ preprocessor that lets you use Python-style whitespace-significant code, called Cugar to escape the ugliness of C. I just don't understand why people keep pushing back toward it.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

They just had to pick that ugly C syntax.

I just finished dealing with that! I wrote Cugar to make C and C++ look clean and graceful, like Python. Now I suppose I'm going to have to write #ugar.

(ladies and gentlemen, please keep the barrage of rotten fruit to a bare minimum. I like Python syntax)

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

There's a major learning curve involved in using Linux, and until the public at large is ready and willing to take that step, no amount of GUifying or desktop building will remove the underlying need for Linux users to understand how Linux works.

Nonsense! Linux could very easily be converted into very simple system.

A distro designed to come pre-installed and configured (or be installed and configured by a technician), go directly from the logon screen into a non-user-configurable GUI, install only new software packaged in a certain way from a central server, and never let the user see a shell, would be perhaps even simpler and easier to use than a Mac.

Why doesn't one exist already? Two reasons: you can't sell support for a system that just works (no commercial motive), and nobody who programs computers cares about a system like that (no "I'll write it to use it myself" motive). Currently, free software development optimizes for: minimal effort of development, stability, power, and "coolness". Ease of use for the new user is barely a consideration, except in distro installation programs.

Can you really see a bunch of Linux hackers sitting around trying to write a "toaster" distro in their spare time?

Mass market busking might provide the solution to this kind of problem, but it'll be tough to make people understand why giving their money away is in their best interests.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

1.The money is worth more to us in the hands of an artist than it is in our pockets. We'd much rather have famous artist X proclaim they got a $100, than for us to have an extra $100 with which to go buy some more pizza.

You'd rather that the Backstreet Boys quietly stuff another $10,000 into their pockets (chump change to them; certainly no reason to call a press conference) than pay off your student loans.

Yeah, right.

You might send it along because you had to, as a matter of ethical and legal obligation, but really given the free choice (someone gave you the money without requiring you to send it someone), I don't believe for a second that you'd donate that large amount of money to a band you don't like. Hence, it is not more valuable to you in their wallets than in yours.

I believe you're probably honest, but you haven't even faced the real temptation of handling that money yet. If you start handling the kind of money that makes pop music superstars take notice, you might find it a lot harder to not skim off a few bucks (or a few tens of thousands) for yourself when nobody's looking.

I see no reason for people to trust you unless you have some competent and trusted auditor looking over your shoulder.

2.If we were stealing your money then why would why charge you a service fee?? Wouldn't we get more money without a service fee?

To make it look as if you're breaking even on donations, rather than the totally unbelievable idea that a couple of university kids are paying 5% of what everybody else does.

If you were running a scam, you would certainly do things like that to make it look like you're honest.

Speak up if you have suggestions on the trust issue.

Fine. Require the musicians in the directory to have a PayPal or e-gold account, and just be a directory to these accounts, never touch the money yourself, or send along real paper checks that you can't cash yourself. That would make you 100% trustworthy.

As for paying for your servers, you have two major choices: advertising, and mass-market busking. Either would work, though I think people would appreciate you choosing the second option (and you are in a uniquely appropriate situation of having a customer base that understands the benefits of paying without being forced).

Actually, I'm planning to do something similar to this (kind of a cross between this and freshmeat.net) at buskware.com (nothing there yet, nor at buskware.org, which will be an advocacy/discussion site for buskware and mass-market busking). However, it will be aimed primarily at computer programs, and more specialized sites for other things (like music) will serve the donors' needs better than one centralized solution.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

While there is a trust issue with Fairtunes (I'm not accusing, but there's no reason to trust strangers who say they'll pass along money honestly when nobody can check whether they did), the point was that there are cheaper ways to transfer money even though this is a non-profit service.

I'm in on the same side, philosophically, as you guys (don't believe me? read this!), I just see it as a poor execution of a good idea.

BTW, I'm also Canadian. That's why I offer to take donations on my site with e-gold but not PayPals.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

In the future...we hope

That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.

Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?

With e-gold's old system, anyone was permitted to go see it. With their new system, they are audited by a very well-respected 3rd party. Furthermore, you can have them send you a check for the amount in your account, and you'll usually be communicating with the person you're sending the money to, so you immediately know whether or not the money was transferred. They can only screw you once before you realize it (this is the basis of most trust: if they screw you once, you can sick the cops on them, if that doesn't work, they lose all the future profit from your business anyway).

These fairtunes guys, OTOH, are asking you to trust that they'll send your money through, with no way for you to confirm that they sent it, and no 3rd party observers of any kind.

They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.

So why should we trust them?

Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.

If the musicians were interested in doing this, the best source for their music would be their homepage.

A directory of musician's home pages with free music and e-gold payment forms would be fairly easy to set up and more convenient to use than a Napster/Fairtunes combination. It would also be more trustworthy and provide better MP3 downloads. Filling out the transfer forms would be something to do while you download the files (whether the ones you're donating for, or new ones while you donate for ones you've downloaded in the past).

At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.

This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission!

Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it. They certainly aren't helping the distribution process, by distributing well-made MP3s. I would rather pay people who don't try to hold a legal stick over my head and who help the free distribution process, to encourage others to do the same.

If you want to know where my sympathies lie, read my essay on the economics of giving products away and asking for donations. I think it is important to reserve your donation money for people who ask for it. It is also important for them to disclose how much they are getting in this manner, so others can see that what they are doing is profitable and follow their lead.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

Of course, you could always write a more detailed explanation (the way shareware authors used to back in the days when the term "shareware" was still new and many people hadn't heard of it yet), or you could point people back to http://www.boswa.com/buskware/buskware. html.

I would suggest adding a second essay to your page: a "What is buskware?" essay written for users rather than developers -- the "more detailed" explanation I mention in the paragraph above.

Urgh, I feel like I'm not being very clear here. Hopefully you'll understand what I'm trying to say.
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The real meaning of the GNU GPL:

I certainly think that IP law needs a lot of rewriting (for example, why should copyrights last longer than patents? why aren't patent terms tweaked from year to year?), but I don't think it should be completely abolished.

Remember, the main purpose of patent law is to get people to disclose their designs, similar to opening your source code. Without any patent law, manufacturers will keep a lot more things secret.

I think we can move toward a system where IP is not necessary, such as Mass Market Busking, but we should let people demonstrate that the system works without it before we dump it.

If we demonstrate that we can support the efforts of producers without them using IP to force us to pay them, we shouldn't have any trouble getting rid of IP. If we can't demonstrate it, then maybe it's not such a good idea to drop IP.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

I wrote an essay called, "Mass-Market Busking: The Inevitable Economics of Software", about this whole class of economic activity.

I think it is relevant to this discussion.

E-gold is adequate for micropayments, especially for a busking model (note: I don't use a referrer link when I advocate e-gold, I do this to remain un-biased in case another usable system comes along).

My reasoning is here.

Hell, I'm trying to make a go of it myself, as an entertainment/education software producer (I haven't made any money at it yet, but that's to be expected; I'm still working on the stuff I expect people will like enough to pay for, though I'd appreciate getting a few bucks for the little utilities and learning projects I've been released so far).

E-gold is adequate for micropayments, especially for a busking model (note: I don't use a referrer link when I advocate e-gold, I do this to remain un-biased in case another usable system comes along).

My reasoning is here.

Hell, I'm trying to make a go of it myself, as an entertainment/education software producer (I haven't made any money at it yet, but that's to be expected; I'm still working on the stuff I expect people will like enough to pay for, though I'd appreciate getting a few bucks for the little utilities and learning projects I've been released so far).

The first serious learning experience I had with programming was in assembly language, and I can't imagine a better start.

First of all, it teaches you how memory really works. Many people who start off with BASIC or some other learning language have a lot of trouble with things like C pointers. After learning assembly, C makes perfect sense.

It's simpler than you might think. One of the things that catches people in most languages is the way that you have to define the machine you're working on: you make names for everything. In assembly, the names are optional. You have a machine, with registers and addresses, and you can know exactly what it does with those.

The syntax is also simpler. Instead of fiddling with blocks and declarations and definitions, you just have tags and instructions.

You don't jump in and start throwing strings around without understanding what the computer is doing with them, instead you start right at the ground floor, doing simple arithmetic.

It is immensely satisfying to manage even simple arithmetic when you're first starting out in assembly language, and rightly so. To do a simple thing like A=12+B/4-D in assembly requires that you learn to order your instructions in a sensible manner and manage the temporary results.

It is rewarding precisely because it is difficult. Once you've managed to do any simple task, you are drawn back by the challenge. Best of all, after a brief intro, you're ready to jump into Knuth's TAoCP, which lays a solid foundation for any future programming task.

(I wrote a utility for learning assembly language, called easynasm)

Sure, it'd be great if authors were paid for the service of writing a book, rather than for the book itself, but who will do the paying?

Readers. It hasn't taken off yet, but people are working on it. Street Performer Protocol is one attempt to work out a way of doing it. Buskware is another. Popular mainstream author Stephen King attempted a variation on this a few months ago, but it failed (although there is quite a bit of debate over the reason it didn't work.)

The point is, people are working on this problem and trying out ideas. It's still young. There are definately plans being drawn up for getting the bell onto the cat, and even a few abortive attempts. It'll get better with time.

Have you experienced the horrors of the Johnson Keyboard? The idea is that you never have to leave the home row. Unfortunately, due to a really lame implementation using xmodmap, you type the space with your little finger, which rapidly becomes painful. If it ever gets done right (like with an X patch, or something like that) it might be worth taking a look at.