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Maybe the activity shouldn't be illegal when the half of the population is doing it and doesn't even consider it wrong.

I think the fact that half the population is doing it indicates that something is off-balance and needs to be addressed. However, Americans as a whole don't think things through very well and take the logical consequences into consideration. (Witness the current epidemics of pathological obesity and crushing credit-card debt used to purchase non-essential, well, junk.) I don't think the population at large has had a good, long meditation on the economics at work in the content-creation industries. I think that many people fail to see that you don't get something for nothing, that something's gotta give.

On the other hand, I might say: Maybe the activity shouldn't be illegal when there's no way to enforce the law without the asphyxiating our inventive and free society. If the government decides that there's nothing it can (or at least should) do, it will be up to artists, technologists and business people to route around the problem.

One possibility is some iteration of the Ransom Model: An artist creates a work, makes excerpts of it available to the public, then demands a certain, fair, one-time payment. Once the payment is made, the work will be released to the public domain. This rewards the artist, although it will mean many fewer jobs for distribution and marketing middlemen. It also feeds the public domain, currently starved by ever-expanding US copyright law, keeping our creative culture vibrant. There are kinks to be worked out, to be sure (this is not a complete business model), but it's an idea.

Sometimes, they base their whole GUI around IE.

What, you mean like RhymBox?

So WINE will not be able to run these programs.

Are you sure about that?

Sounds like a perfect job for the Ransom license: http://www.theoretic.com/Ransom

There is no decision, there is no spoon, there is no decision. Whoa.

If Linux's total victory over Microsoft meant Gnome winning over the Linux desktop with it's simplified interface, then I'd much rather a Linux with a small market share. Customizability, control, is something I love in Linux.

There are two separate issues here which you are conflating:

1) User interface.
2) Developer platform

They are separate. You can run GNOME apps in KDE and vice-versa.

GNOME has had its UI rewritten basically from the ground up to be in alignment with usability principles. That doesn't actually mean making everything non-configurable, see my desktop - I'm sure KDE can do panels like that, but I've never really seen it done. You see the line in the bottom right hand corner? That's a slide-out desktop switcher. I tweaked the timings in GConf so it pops out very fast, then there's a delay if the mouse moves out before it slides back in again, slower.

That's configurability. I had to use GConf to do it, but so what? GConf is just a generic preferences tool. Having all those timings in the GUI would have been braindead, I'm probably nearly alone in tweaking things in this way.

So, the idea that GNOME has no configurability is wrong IMO. It had a lot of garbage stripped out, and some useful features disappeared with it. If they are in fact useful, for most people, and they aren't working around brokenness, my experience is that they're accepted with minimal fuss.

In other words, I have no idea which should win the dektop, but it's a very important decision.

There is no winning, there is no war. There are only standards. If one company decides to use the KDE APIs, that's no skin off my nose, they clearly decided the cost was worth it. If they decide to use GTK/GNOME, that's just fine too. It's irrelevant to which desktop I use. They'll work fine in anything, even Waimea, Enlightenment, Window Maker, all those other desktops.

Someone help!

Reflect upon the situation. I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill ;)

this
or this

and of course my own desktop

There are a load more here.

Default gnome can have an ugly widget, but 2.2 goes quite a long way to addressing that with the metathemes system. And really, I think with only a smidgen of effort you can make it look better than anything else out there, including MacOS, which I find just to look too "fat" and stripey. GNOME2 feels clean in comparison.

Anyway - I believe this model makes open source the good solution for cases in which it has previously been thought not to be suitable. Such as cases where companies need to invest huge amounts of money just to get the "seed done" - I believe that the ransom model really for example enables co-operation between research companies to produce something that requires huge resources and capital - and get paid for doing it - and still eventually have the solution released under open source - developing it even further.

Full disclosure time, I work for Andre Durand who setup Jabber Inc and whos latest venture is PingID. We got together, along with Adam Theo (who got our server slashdotted with the ransom thingy a few weeks back) because we'd been working on open source digital identity for about a year. Andre knows the balance between commercial and open source well in our opinions, and he's been sponsoring the effort.

I've been to DIDW 2002, met the guys designing the protocols and met Justin Taylor from Novell. All those links were to say, I've been following this scene since before people were talking about "identity" and I want to shout my thoughts loud and clear.

Firstly, the idea that Microsoft have authentication tied down is laughable. Passport is in its current incarnation a piece of crap. By version 3.1 I'm sure it'll be peachy, but right now it stinks. The extent of their "integration" with Windows is having IE6 use some native dialog boxes instead of web forms and being able to automatically sign on when you login (does anybody actually use that?). It is most definately possible to do something better than this in a seamless enough way that users would go for it. In fact when I was in Denver me and Adam sketched out an idea for how to do it.

Secondly, the Alliance is a rather mixed organisation. It's made up of lots of big corps who are not in fact enormous big baddies who want to steal your privacy just for the hell of it, but they do want to enable better business relationships. The example Esther Dyson gave was that the airline company should remember whether she likes window seats or not. I'm sure some Slashdotters would find this freaky/scary but she is a smart lady and she knew that she wanted that kind of information to make her life easier.

BUT - the LA is attempting to tackle a slightly different problem to the one that interests me and Adam. What we want to do is simple: we want to be able to run a server on theoretic.com that lets me sign in to Slashdot with my network address, lets me sign up for mailman mailing lists without inventing passwords each time, links my Jabber account with my email account with my personal profiles so people can locate me based on interest, so I can sign in to Linux GDM with my network address and get my roaming desktop and so on. We have LOTS of ideas! :)

What the LA are doing is linking currently existing identities together. They gave a demo of the technology in Denver. In fact, it was Justin Taylor who did this demo. It was entirely corporate focussed, they started from an intranet and were automatically signed in to some flight reservation service. That sort of tech has its place, and they're being realistic in that linking identities is a good way to start until people start getting their own identities hosted for them like email addresses.

The LA has some good points to it, don't mindlessly bash it. However, it also has some bad points. One is the stupid requirements for membership, which they admitted to me privately are basically to keep the little guys out. Another is the hideous complexity of their protocols. The ones we've developed sacrifice a small amount of flexibility for a huge increase (imho) in implementability and understandability.

Well having plugged it now (i seem to be plugging a lot of my projects today), I guess I'd better point out that what we're doing actually consists of two parts. The first is the protocol. This is (currently) called the Genio Protocol, and will be getting its own website soon (look for an announcement here when it does). It's simple, open and as far as we know free of IP claims. The second is the SourceID reference server, which is under a pseudo open source license.

We have user profiles working, and I was coding up basic tickets functionality (authentication/authorization tokens) last weekend. Hopefully genioprotocol.org will be up soon and then it'll make more sense.

Believe me, this is totally scratching an itch on my part (though I do get paid for it now too [grin]) because I think a good set of solid open digital identity protocols will make my life easier, and totally kick ass into the bargain.

I agree that it is meaningless -- so I have an alternative idea...

Ransom It For Peace!

#1. Develop a good piece of software.
#2. Put a ransom on it.
#3. Once enough money has been donated to set your software free -- you open-source it!
#4. You give all the money from the ransom to the peace corps.

The nice thing about this system is I could pay for a piece of software I like, while donating to a cause I feel strongly about, and still get the source! It is a win, win, win setup!

If you think about it, it's almost the system iD has been using with the older Quake games (in releasing Q1 and Q2 source). After they got thier money back from people enjoying thier binaries, they release the source code for people to tinker with after a period of time.

But back to the point, think about the effect this could have on the abandonware if this was applied to commercial license. You could finally fix that one bug that annoyed you in your fav program, or if you were really up for a challange, you could fix the bugs in Windows 95 ;)

yes, it certainly does beat nagware. If you are even mildly interested, sign up for the Ransom mailing list, even if it is just to watch (although I hope to draw in most subscribers. This model needs feedback).

Ah ha! This is the crux of the problem, the thing it all revolves around.

[puts on his economists hat]. What we are witnessing here is perhaps the first time in which something that was previously scarce (music) is becoming non scarce through technology.

Let's assume that one day the RIAA decide to stop hounding the P2P networks. They'd improve dramatically right, because you don't need any of that distributed encryption stuff. So it'd become possible to get virtually any music you wanted, for free, quickly and easily. The key word there is for free. It costs nothing effectively (yes yes, I know everything has a cost, but the perception is that it costs nothing), and as such music has now become a non scarce resource.

Why is this so important? Because capitalism really sucks at managing non scarce resources. Scarce stuff it does great, as supply and demand/competition/best product for the best price kicks in and everything is very efficient. Tins of beans capitalism does well. Information it does not do well.

Most of the stress and strain we're seeing here today, with patents, copyrights, and music distribution is down to the fact that people are attempting to force capitalism onto markets that it cannot handle. The only way of making capitalism work in these cases is to try and make things scarce once more. So you have patents (ownership of ideas), copyright (ownership of intellectual works), royalties (payment for that "product") and so on. The problem is, these mechanisms are at best horrible hacks. We've all seen the abuses of the system they allow.

So what is the solution? The solution is simple - new economic system must be created that is designed (yes, designed) for lack of scarcity. The gift economy is a good starting point, but it's far from the only possibility. Right now, there is big inertia behind the status quo. There are vested interests in seeing things remain the same - somebody needs to change that. I don't know how it would start, I'd imagine by somebody setting up a distribution network (possibly p2p, possibly just a series of permenant servers) with tipping built in. Espra tried this, but the project died. The problem we face right now is that micropayments are hard, I should think that can be worked around for now, but a real solution is needed.

And then? Who knows. The only way to see is by trying it. There's more info on my thoughts here about this topic, it's got some ideas for how this new market could work.

Is it possible to one day replace the current system with a new one, better optimized for information? Yes. Linux is showing that the little people can, if they try hard enough, push against massive inertia and alter the status quo, Linux is itself an economic revolution of sorts. All it takes is enough people with a shared vision.

Anybody up for it? Janis?

The Gift Economy

(and yes, I know it looks odd in Konqueror ..... )

Indeed, I can imagine that. These were my ideas

I got quite a long way with it - on that page are ideas for how such a musical marketplace could work, how quality would be ensured (ie how do you sort the wheat from the chaff without record companies A&R depts) and answers to questions musicians would commonly have.

I can so see this happening. Music is, in a way, a parallel of the software world. Music is effectively information and can be replicated and copied for zero cost. It's dominated by a rich and powerful entity (the RIAA vs MS), and the world is crying out for something better. It's ripe for the gift economy to be established here.

The situation MUST become the same for Linux. There must come to be some "blessed" slick GUI installer that can also run "headless" from a command line.

Check. Autopackage is (currently) written largely in bash, but has a clean split between the backend and front end for exactly this reason. The BE and FE are actually two separate processes which communicate via a simple protocol based on unix named pipes. Right now, there is only a terminal front end, but when it's released as an OSS project (soon) I'll be looking for people to help me write KDE and GTK based installers.

It should implement a state transition engine and run from a state machine which goes from an initial state "not-installed", through paths for the distros, dependencies to a terminal state of "software registered."

Check. Autopackage deals with dependancies differently to other package managers, as it doesn't have a huge central database of everything that's on the system (it keeps enough information around to uninstall packages though obviously). Instead, it probes the system for everything the package needs - for instance it currently checks for libraries using ldconfig. If it's in the Linux Linker cache, the check is passed. This means you can install stuff from the source, or even just copy files from a friends computer without worrying about your package manager database getting out of synch.

To make the situation complete, it must detect the distro (and therefore the install paths, dependencies and destination directories,) the GUI in use, if any, and be able to completely install AND UNINSTALL by walking backwards through the installer log undoing what was done and cleaning up all debris.

Check. An autopackage is actually a program that you run (don't worry, the overhead is tiny). If you have autopackage installed, the scripts are processed and the user is greeted with a friendly GUI installer (if run from X) or if run from the command line you get the tty front end. If you don't have autopackage installed, it'll offer to automatically fetch everything the user needs from the net including a distro profile.

The profile contains all the information needed to slot files into the correct places, and perform the correct actions for adding menu items etc. If there is no profile for the users distro, I intend to have a way of letting the user easily create one (though this will probably not be an operation that can be performed by a total newbie) and then optionally upload the resultant profile for checking and inclusion. This deals with cases where people have built their own systems, or have customised them a lot.

The installer "experience" is standard for the user because everybody is using the same packages or near clones of these packages to install any and every ol' thing.

That isn't going to happen soon, which is why autopackage will integrate (at least to some extent) with RPM and perhaps Debian too. However, I intend to eventually create something similar to the apt repositories, except decentralised so it acts more like DNS rather than having huge libraries of packages that must be manually updated. I hope, dream, that one day Linux software authors will provide an autopackage as standard as well as the source tarball (they are pretty easy to make), which will plug into the autopackage network and allow you to install and update them using an apt type system.

Umm, what else? Oh yes, it's pretty flexible about asking the user stuff. The user can be asked questions during the install like which prefix to use (defaults chosen from the profile), or for commecial software they can be asked for license keys, to read EULAs and so on (commercial software is coming to linux like it or not, so i thought I might as well add these features). However, I had a bad experience once where I spent a whole week installed IE5 on each and every machine in a company by hand, so rest assured, being able to do automatic remote installs is high on my list of priorities.

I still have some basic foundation and design work to do on it, but I'm hoping it'll be out on freshmeat and ready for hacking by the end of the summer. If you're interested, then please email me. This should go a long way to solving the software management mess that Linux has somehow got itself into.

So you don't like the RIAA? Then try thinking about an alternative. There are a lot of smart people here, we can make a new system that works better than the old one. It's surely worth a try!

I was thinking about this only 3 or 4 days ago.....

hehe. Ah well, I'm glad somebody else is doing it really, I have more than enough on my plate right now. Perhaps they should check out the Creative Commons?

It's been set up by the guy who started Jabber Inc, who have successfully balanced open standards and code with commercial success. The stuff they're developing is completely open source, with one caveat, they can sell it if you want more than 5000 users connected to one server (ie for large ID carriers).

I've been personally involved since the beginning, as we rolled the Genio project into it. Before we did so, we tried talking to the Liberty Alliance, but didn't get too far. They were a bit busy sorting out all their internal politics methinks....

However, their technology is deeply flawed, not just in an engineering sense but also a legal one: it is tied down by patents and IP disputes, and their system is essentially centralised.

They also have almost nobody on board at all, you can get an XNS "agent" but not use it anywhere. The technology is ludicrously complicated, hidden behind masses of white papers that don't really tell you what to do in order to make an implementation.

Anyway, I got involved through my earlier work with Genio, which was a complete open source system not just for personal data storage but also single-sign-on, a la Passport.