Slashdot Mirror

Slashback tonight with just a few small items: an update on the AOL vs. Gaim brouhaha (good news), a slight return to the NSA's recommendations on securing that legacy Windows box, and oh, by the way, the official launch of the Free Software antidote to paying fealty forever to Redmond.

Sometimes it's nice to catch a disease. A few days ago, michael posted that Ximian was about to release its Free Software answer to Microsoft's .NET. Now it's official. Miguel de Icaza adds some detail: "Hello guys, As of today, we launched Mono, a project to implement a GPL-ed Common Language Runtime, class libraries and C# compiler to be compatible with Microsoft's .NET Framework. You can look at the press release that we put out. We also have a FAQ that covers various points and tries to explain how this is not .NET."

Newsforge is carrying a piece which ties together a bit more as well to explain how the promised benefits of .NET, as amorphous as they are, can be addressed with these and other software. Miguel has seemingly been busy on the phone today.

Hornsby points as well to "a very interesting article on the implications of Microsoft's .NET technology on open source development. The article heavily quotes Miguel, who "believes that .NET is going to be the dominant development environment for the next 20 years."

They oughtta know how to secure a box. Jhereg42 writes: "The NSA has posted their W2k security guides on a new (Slash proof :-) web site. Also included are Cisco security guides and a 'Supporting Documents' section containing docs on "Defense in Depth" and I-Planet Web Server configuration."

This is what lawyers are for. Rolan writes: "Mark Spencer has sent out an update on AOL v GAIM. It seems that the request for assistance was met well beyond the goal of US$500, at US$1700! The letter and attached response. The response was converted from an attached rtf file into an html file by StarOffice 5.2."

Thanks to all who sent along a few bucks, and good luck to the Gaim folks in the Surreal Themepark World of Contested Trademarks.

Dacta writes "At last, Interbase 6.0 is available (with source) for download. The announcement is here, with dowload mirrors in Chicago, Herndon and San Jose You may also be interested in the licence - basically it is MPL with "Interbase" substituted for Mozilla/Netscape."

Dacta writes "At last, Interbase 6.0 is available (with source) for download. The announcement is here, with dowload mirrors in Chicago, Herndon and San Jose You may also be interested in the licence - basically it is MPL with "Interbase" substituted for Mozilla/Netscape."

Dacta writes "At last, Interbase 6.0 is available (with source) for download. The announcement is here, with dowload mirrors in Chicago, Herndon and San Jose You may also be interested in the licence - basically it is MPL with "Interbase" substituted for Mozilla/Netscape."

Stephen King is conducting a fiendish experiment. He - not his publisher - is putting the first installment of a novel online today, and then waiting to see how many people will pay a dollar for the download. The second part goes online next month, and then when it comes time to upload the third part, King will only release it if enough people have paid for the first two. This is the first high-profile test of a promising artistic compensation algorithm in the post-copyright world -- and when it fails, don't give up on it.

"The average writer is really more interested in writing than the transaction part of the process."
-- Jack Romanos, President/COO of Simon & Schuster, quoted in NYT

"We're confident that publishers add enough value to the process that authors are still going to want to use them."
-- Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, quoted by AP

"My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare."
-- Stephen King

"Looks like the future of publishing to me."
-- Bruce Schneier

We've had a few people submit this news item, describing it as "shareware." It's not. This is shareware with a bite attached, something else entirely. What King is doing is a real-world test of the Street Performer's Protocol.

The SPP is a proposal for artists to make money without retaining any control over their work (since, on the net, copyright is rapidly being rendered irrelevant). Here's the paper by Kelsey and Schneier if you'd like to get all the technical details.

But the bottom line is that Stephen King is never going to have to publish the end of his novel.

Readers aren't going to send in a flood of cash and money orders (!) -- that's a given -- envelopes and addresses are a hassle. Luckily for him, he's brokered a deal with Amazon to accept credit cards, which is pretty sweet considering that most places won't even look at $1 credit card charges -- too much overhead. (My guess would be that Amazon is doing this as a loss leader to get the attention and signups. That won't work forever. Amazon PR didn't return my phone call by press time.)

But the real problem is that King demands that 75% of his readers be honest. That'll never happen.

Kelsey and Schneier's original SPP proposed thoughtfully that authors ask for a flat fee: say, $100,000 for a novel. If the majority of an author's readers never pay, that's fine: as long as the remaining minority is large enough (or rich enough) to collectively make the payment. (If not enough pay, the money stays in escrow and then reverts to its owners.)

King's terms make the question one of relative loyalty, not absolute popularity. He's not offering a transaction with his readers -- he's testing them. And the test is guaranteed to fail.

What he's proposing is a Prisoner's Dilemma played between thousands of people. Because of the large nature of the game, the actual statistical "profit" returned by sending in your dollar is a tiny fraction of the enjoyment you'd get from reading the third installment that King would post. Your payoff matrix looks like:

Novel Released Novel Not Released Cooperate
(pay $1) Get $10 reading enjoyment for $1, profit: $9 $-1 Defect
(pay $0) Get $10 reading enjoyment for free, profit: $10 $0

No matter what happens, you do better by not sending in your dollar. (It's fair to ignore the infinitesimal chance that your single dollar will be the one to hit the 75% mark.)

Of course there are other considerations (can you sleep at night knowing you cheated Stephen King out of a dollar?) but for the most part, people will weigh these options and decide they're not going to pay.

And once you start thinking that you're not going to pay, you realize that many others won't either, and it starts to look even more like throwing money down a drain. Vicious cycle.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is only interesting if the same players play together over and over. What we have here is a "one-shot" game, and in such a game the only rational strategy is to defect. Unfortunately, if everyone behaves rationally, we all merely break even (and the novel never comes out); if only we were a little more irrational we'd all make a profit of nine dollars - or however much King's story was worth to us.

Douglas Hofstadter ran an experiment for Scientific American in June 1983, asking twenty friends to play a similar one-shot Dilemma. Even though Hofstadter's was profit-only, no chance of losing money, and even though participants knew their choices would be reported in a national magazine, his cooperation rate was only 30%.

I predict King's return rate will be something like 15%. Maybe it will go as much as twice as high, thanks to his deal with Amazon to let people use credit cards -- much more convenient.

The disappointing thing is that two months from now he's going to announce that the experiment has failed and then either drop the novel, or keep writing it out of the kindness of his heart. Either way, the press is going to report that this new distribution method is a crock. Which is a shame because it only needs to be done right.

First of all, the percentage thing needs to go. King doesn't write for the satisfaction of knowing that he has honest readers. He writes to make money.

I suspect King is too used to thinking in terms of royalties, hoping for a good-sized slice of those unpredictably large pies he bakes. He might not know which novel will be the runaway best-seller that will make ten times the money he'd hoped for.

My advice to him would be to relax; don't try to look for the gravy train. You're on the internet now, that won't work. Set a price for your time -- an obscenely high price, to be sure, you're one of the world's most popular writers -- and be content with what you get. When contributions hit that number, release the book.

Second, invite readers to contribute as much as they like toward the novel. For some, a dollar; for real fans, ten dollars or more. Let us decide how much it's worth to us.

Third, hold contributions in escrow until the novel is released, and if the limit is not reached by a certain time, give us our money back. As a contributor, this makes my cost negligible, and changes my payoff matrix to, let's say...

Price Reached Price Not Reached Cooperate
(pay $3) Get $10 reading enjoyment for $3, profit: $7 Get my $3 back: $0 Defect
(pay $0) Get $10 reading enjoyment for free, profit: $10 $0

This way, there's no risk; the worst-case scenario is that I lose some time and energy at the mailbox. It's a win-win situation, and I'm much more likely to play.

If Stephen King wants to craft a real nightmare for Big Publishing, that's the plot he needs to use.

(P.S. If you're interested in reading more about the Prisoner's Dilemma, I've assembled a few references -- and thoughts -- at thedilemma.org. See in particular Hofstadter, pp. 740ff., re the one-shot PD.)

(P.P.S. Updated 90 minutes later. I had this link to "the download" up in the top paragraph, but took it out because some people didn't realize it led straight to the pay-me-a-dollar PDF file. Sorry; that's why the link is down here now. If you read it and want to pay your dollar, you can probably figure out to visit stephenking.com, eh?)