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John Terpstra on Challenges to Free Software
Telex4 writes "Anyone who has read John Terpstra's article on Groklaw about Intellectual Property (IP) rights will be interested to read an interview I did recently with John at KDE's World Summit. We talked about what IP means to the free software community, how we can drive GNU/Linux adoption, and how he thinks the IT market will change in coming years. He gives us a lot to think about in terms of what more we should be doing."
He gives us a lot to think about in terms of what more we should be doing.
Are we supposed to impose change on others? Is it just me, or are the most sweeping changes just gradually accepted - especially when current ideas need to be totally re-thought (i.e. Open vs. Closed Source)?
Software that pays me to use it. Other than that, I'll stick with the free stuff.
The first person who says OSS when he means FS in this thread gets my metaphorical foot up his avatar ass.
-Peter
These days IP has spun out of control I think (in the patent office at least). You can get patents for things that are so common sense it's ridiculous. I liked on the Tonight Show when Dave Chapelle said he ran into this rich white guy, and when he asked how he got rich, the guy responded, "My family owns the patent for fire"
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
If IP law continues the way it is Free Software will be the only alternative for consumers. Businesses are treating their customers like criminals and these customers will only take it for so long. People are becoming aware of the draconian approach to IP and they are beginning to reject it in favor of more open solutions.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Terpstra's comparison of FLOSS to the Enlightenment and Reformation and of the negative reaction on the part of parts of the software and media industries to the reaction of the Church is interesting and I think well taken. We should remember that some countries in effect have still to undergo the Englightenment, that even in countries that did, many people remain who hold irrational and antiscientific views, and that in some countries the Counter-reformation was successful. The FLOSS movement is important for freedom and for technological progress, but precisely because it is important, its opponents will work hard to suppress it, and they may succeed.
Don't mod me down, I'm serious ... the warez scene is the biggest contributer making software free (in the financial sense), and it's healthy for the industry. Seriously, what percentage of the apps on your Windows machine did you pay for, inclusing the OS itself? I'm about 50%, mostly games. But more software stimulates the industry, and what we use at home is what we want to use at work - and there's where the real money is, in the corporate world. The software publishers know this too, which is why it is so easy to find keygens for MS and other popular products ... people know Windows and Photoshop because they pirated them at home, and they want to use it at work where businesses won't pirate software. That is also the reason why game software has such annoying copy protection you don't see elsewhere, a "free" copy doesn't help sell 100 corporate licenses. Unless you work someplace where they do install games at every desktop, then please tell me where to send a resume.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"The two most important strategies we must adopt are to encourage and adhere to open standards, which undermine big IP oriented business' ability to monopolise and dominate the marketplace.
I think John misses the point over what makes some companies dominate and why open source won't help small business.
John doesn't have the same defintion of domination and the definition of "fundamental reshaping" as everyone else. Open source software has been VERY successful in the building blocks of software. GNU/Linux as an operating system; Eclipse as an IDE, MySQL as a database.
However, there are niche applications where the open source investment will be slow, painful, and probably not pan out. If you think open source will unseat AutoCAD, don't hold your breath. It may happen, but it won't be this decade. And Adobe Photoshop STILL dominates in image processing, even though GIMP is rather useful.
Domination (especially due to IP) is also a relative term. Microsoft can be seen to dominate the OS and "office" market today; those are prime targets of OS software. But IBM has a huge IP portfolio - is one of the large companies 'appear[ing] to support open source' and yet has a lot less to lose (on a relative scale to Microsoft). Even if IBM's software group (DB2, Lotus Notes, et al.) took it in the teeth from open source, is that going to have a (negative) impact on IBM Global Services? Will it not be the same dominating behemoth it is today?
The "fundamental reshaping" of the market will come when technology becomes pervasive, reliable, and easy enough to use that the Fortune 500 doesn't NEED to call IBM Global Services any more. Until then, someone has to put everything together, and open source reducing the procurement cost isn't going to change that. Solve the reliability and ease of use problems for small business and you WILL win in the marketplace - whether or not you're open source.
Ideas don't pass so much like candle flames as virii. There are sometimes mutations (for better or worse) as they pass from host to host. Current IP law seems pretty messed up in that one can patent a mutation of an already patented idea in such a way that it will prohibit pretty much anyone from making use of it. I don't think that jives with the original laws' intent, but it often has a big impact on free software.
Sorry mod me down if you must, but I cannot respect anyone who
publishes in his own name, a book that is just the Samba-Unofficial-HOWTO. Did he give the royalties to the samba team that made the howto possible or pocket the cash?
I believe this man also had a long history as a SCO employee and would not be surprised if he still worked for them.
IP is not a problem for him - in fact he challenges the software community who reject the term IP to provide a better way of describing in cogent terms the very substance of creative thinking that is embodied in free software
I'll be happy to take a swing at this one. Actually, it might not be a swing though. I guess you could call it a duck, but it's still a fight tactic. My position would be that a replacement term is unnecessary.
This sounds a lot like the argument that without copyright law there would be no GPL. Just because that is true does not make it meaningful. It's quite a silly thing to say. Yes, it's true that without copyright law there would be no GPL, but without a copyright there would be no need for a GPL.
So, this mission to find a replacement term for intellectual property is totally unnecessary. You can call an idea, an idea. Likewise you can call software, software. There's no need to come up with a replacement for the phrase "intellectual property."
He talks a lot about supporting small and medium sized business. I think that is important too, which is why suso.org is going to be expanding to do OSS support specifically for small and medium sized business. But I think there needs to be a lot more support businesses around the world. Say, at least one for every city bigger than 50k people.
I think that a lot of businesses still want local support and get frustrated with "national based support" and are not making the switch because there is not much local support for Linux.
With the opening up our support business, I'm going to put together some information on how other businesses can get started on this. A central respository for everyone on how to get an OSS/Linux support business going would be really helpful to OSS.
Anyone else interested?
Stop it with the virii. It's virusen
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
It's interesting that what John perceives as a lack of focus I perceive as merely a more diffuse / different focus. John speaks as if the goal of FOSS is business adoption and we're not doing a very good job. I question the first premise.
One of the things that makes FOSS so good is that the only people who code it are people with a need for, and thus an understanding of, a specific solution for a specific problem. Linux is not in the business of telling businesses what they need and then providing it. We're not gunning for adoption, unless I missed the memo. We're aiming to make the best software we can think of for all the things we need to do.
I think the solution to the focus problem is a no-op...there's not a problem, per se.
This isn't to say, though, that there's not a good point here. There's a great one, but it's backwards. We don't need to make linux more attractive to business, we need to start more businesses on linux. Businesses who are willing to make significant, open contributions to the code base. Think, for example, of a company which made a database product which was open, but also sold support, training, and hosting services for that database. I think it would do very well, and that's only one example.
adam b.
I agree with Mr Terpstra that migration from closed source technology to open source technology should be simplified
How about we start with migration of Win NT domain controllers to Samba domain controllers.
For over 2 years I have held off on upgrading our NT Servers to 2000 or 2003 Servers in hopes that we could migrate to Samba.
But I have yet seen a simplification of these migration path, unless you use roaming profiles. I don't know that many places where roaming profiles are utilized.
And in a small to medium size business where there are 25 to 100 computers, transfering profiles and file permissions can be very time comsuming and expensive.
To take Mr Terpstra's example of an Access database, I would rather do that, Oh wait, I already did that, but it was actually a SQL Server to PostgreSQL.
So I'm still waiting for a reasonable migration path from NT Server to Samba.
Having value is not a requirement of something to be property. To be property, it has to have the ability to be owned, possessed, controlled. Whether or not it has any value is irrelevant to its state as property.
Just for your GEEWIZ collection. John worked at SCO while the whole IP lawsuits were going in full swing.
One thing is certain in my eyes...unless IP laws are reworked there will be no commercial software market. Too many consumers are being treated like felons, at this rate free software will be the only alternative
Requiem
...music/video. If it is of value to you, then pay for it. If they are charging too high a price (in your eyes) then don't buy it. Also don't try to obtain it for free.
The term intellectual capital has been proposed, as it conveys the fact that ideas have value while at the same time don't imply that property rights apply.
Of course, calling people who break into computers "crackers" has also been proposed, and we all know how successful that's been.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
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Every playright a Shakespeare and every poet a Dante. Not in the real world.
Yes, the Patent system has gotten way out of control. And, from the looks of things, Congress has been too well bribed to really care.
So, what's the best way for a grass-roots effort to bring this sad situation to the forefront, so that it can't be ignored? How about overwhelming the Patent Office even more?
That is, bring to Joe Sixpack's attention that he too can make big bucks via Patents - but in a way akin to the Internet Domain Name Rush of the late nineties.
Teach people the process in a simplified way. Especially in how to persist until their patent goes through. This is, in effect, a Denial-of-Service attack on the entire system. The results would be either that the Patent Office gets so overburdened that it can't keep up. or patents will exist on everything - and no business will be able to do anything without having to deal with the legal costs of defending themselves on anything that they possibly do.
If we managed to achieve the latter situation, Congress would be forced to act. If this attack was pervasive enough, they'd have few options in how to rectify the system.
I learned that denying people an inherently sharable commodity was hoarding and selfish. So when I brought something to school, I had to bring enough to share. Later when I learned about computers, I learned that it's unusual to "take" data; typically data is copied, not moved, from one computer to another. Still later, when I read more about the history of various media businesses, I learned that they got started doing what today they call "piracy" (even though, ironically, that term in the illicit copying sense was once used by authors to describe what publishers sometimes did).
I think all of these lessons and many others have made me increasingly appreciate free software over the years.
Digital Citizen
While I tend to agree with you, getting rid of intellectual property laws isn't going to solve the problem. Companies want to keep their ideas and implementations secret, and without copyright and patent laws, will still find ways to keep their stuff secret.
If you think this is nonsense, then consider that EULAs are *not* based on copyright law, but on contract law. Copyright law could be abolished tomorrow and every EULA in the land would still be valid.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Only when they afflict VMS systems...
It is not called the "Samba-Unofficial-HOWTO". Its name is "The Official Samba-3 HOWTO Collection and Reference Guide".
John didnt "publish" it. It was Prentice-Hall PTR who published it (ISBN: 0-13-145355-6) as a printed book at first.
John didnt do this "in his own name". He acted, alongside Jelmer R. Vernooij as one of two editors. And both their role as editors is clearly named on the envolope and inside the printed book.
John and Jelmer acted with the consent of the Samba Team when doing this work.
John wrote large parts of the HOWTO Collection from scratch, or heavily re-wrote them, putting in several months of full-time work.
How to spread the incoming royalties was agreed to by the Samba Team and is not your business. Oh, BTW, have you bought a copy? Are 5 Dollars from the royalty stock of gold actually coming from your pockets, Mister? Thank you very much then.
The HOWTO Collection actually is now released under a Free license and became part of the Samba source code. So you havent bought a copy of the book? Fine, you can take it as a PDF for free and print/read it without paying any royalty to someone. Enjoy.
The HOWTO Collection is partly based on previously existing documentation. For each chapter are listed the related authors, including ones who have contributed years ago. The attribution list is 5 printed pages long.
I should know that all, because I am the principal author of the 2 chapters of the book that deal with printing (one of them being a major re-write of a previously existing chapter).
John stopped working for an SCO-related company long ago, and long before their lawsuite against IBM and Free Software started..
The dork are you, Mister.
Kurt Pfeifle,
(Linuxprinting.org)
KDE vs Gnome isn't relevant to the subject of the interview. Too much puffery for the environment that Terpstra happens to favor.
Test 1 2 3 4
Some good points
So I'm still waiting for a reasonable migration path from NT Server to Samba.
I've done a few of these. Migrating ACL's and file data is easy -- NT Server does have support for POSIX ACL's, and MS-based ACL's can be converted to POSIX by both Samba and NT.
The only difficulty is cloning user data, which is incredibly simple if your PDC handles all user/group info. Samba can authenticate (and replicate) LDAP or even native NT directory information. If you move to Samba as a PDC, you replicate userdata by LDAP before shutting off your NT PDC and dropping your Samba box in PDC mode.
It's somewhat timeconsuming, as the data is best copied from old->new devices (though just buying one "temp" machine to hold the data from each old machine as the machine is converted is certainly do-able). However, it is relatively painless, especially since Samba3 has gone production.
I actually do this work on a consulting basis, and I've never had a major issue. I'm happy to answer basic questions if you send me a private msg (no e-mail here).
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Copyright law could be abolished tomorrow and every EULA in the land would still be valid.
Also, copyrighted materials would be unaffected if the courts ruled tomorrow that non-negotiated, unread, unsigned contracts were invalid.
EULAs are based entirely on legal handwaving and wishful thinking. The fact that an EULA gives you no consideration at all, just a subset of rights you already have as the owner of a shiny plastic disc, is enough to prove that. Never mind the many ways they blatantly defy the Fair Use, First Sale, and Idea/Expression doctrines of copyright law.
Think about it. If you, as the owner of a CD, have no right to load and execute the contents of that CD on your computer, then how could you ever legally run setup.exe and see the EULA in the first place?
I thought that was just a question of enough bananas, dude!
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I know this, you know this, and even they know this -- but the fact is that those with the most money & power, or aspirations for such, want to treat information as an artificially scarce 'thing' because there's more profit to be had in controlling an infinite "supply" of VERY OLD WORK.
Assume for a moment that everyone on earth had EVERY need and want in their lives taken care of (by nanotech, AI, robots, spacehab, virtual realestate, whatever) ... do you think there would be that many fewer greedy assholes with a closed-mindset in the population? Not really. It's an evolutionary psyche thing to want to have MORE than the next chump, of any tangible/intangible, in order have MORE power (and get more chicks).
--
Power to the Peaceful
Let me see if I understand: IP shouldn't have the same protections as physical property because it cannot be made scarce? OK? Did I understand what you meant?
I have a ranch which sits on top of easily extractable oil. I have a small, portable refinery that I built which produces gasoline/diesel etc from that oil for my own use. I have no intention of selling the oil on the open market (lets say I make my money selling those portable refineries) and the oil is sufficient for many lifetimes. So as far as I am concerned, there is an infinite supply of oil.
Are you then justified in coming onto my land to take oil for free as long as you don't reduce it below the amount I would use in my lifetime? After all it really won't make any difference to me, and if I didn't see you do it, I'd probably never notice.
And yes, I really would like an answer.
Copying and taking are not the same thing...
:-)
All my life I have learned that copying is very useful and mostly good. I don't think copying should require permission, and therefore I don't wait for it
If you had chosen to release your program as Free Software, under the GPL, then you would be far more likely to get donations and contributions from many people as well as job offerings and other goods.
If you had millions of users, then you could easily sell ad-space for your download site, and make some decent money as well, just from a few thousands hits per day.
In conclusion, if you had chosen to release your software with the public's good in mind (GPL) instead of only your own, you would end up better yourself.
Tangible: By chance, you happen to have discovered (and bought the additional mineral rights to) a high concentration of STILL PHYSICALLY SCARCE energy in the form of HydroCarbons under your government-protected 3D wedge of the Earth. Putting aside the fairness of dogeatdog "finders, keepers!" hoarding, you have the right to own it ALL in a capitalist society.
Intangible: The molecular structure of "your" hydrocarbons. You can't claim to own C3H8 for example. You can't even claim to own "special secret blend" like C12H24UUP42.
Get it?
--
Power to the Peaceful
Yes. In economic parlance, it's not an excludable good.
No, that analogy is flawed, for two reasons:
The analogy would be applicable if:
These two "magic" points, necessary to preserve the analogy, illustrate the difference between ideas and physical goods.
Note that these properties do only hold for specific ideas. Obviously it cannot and should not be construed as applicable to e.g. labor.
That is, the oil reserve should be understood as representing a single specific idea, not one's brain nor one's body of unpublished ideas -- which are limited and are best represented in the analogy by the land.
DNA just wants to be free...
You're conflating terms: When the grandparent said "Creativity is not a finite resource," he meant that information is not a finite resource: it can be duplicated at a cost too small to measure. He did not mean that all people are infinitely creative nor capable of producing equal quality of work.
But I'm sure there's no way you could have figured that out on your own.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I'm not speaking hypothetically. I've put a fair amount of non-trivial ideas in the public domain so far and it has not done me a bit of good.
Funny how when someone doesn't say what they really mean, people missunderstand them. Information != Creativity.
As for the cost of information duplication, it's depends on your definiton of cost. Billions of dollars have been spent on the infrastructure that makes duplication possible.
"wishful thinking"
If you believe you can ignore EULAs, you're the one with Fairly Odd Parents.
IP law is accepted by the public, because a) in many cases, they aren't/can't be fully enforced (example: warez/MP3), or b) the net effect is perceived as small, non-significant (like in the media player/music/movie content business).
Free/Open Source remains largely 'under the radar' because consumers still don't feel they are hurt much by non-free infrastructure (like closed-source operating systems or patent-encumbered file formats/protocols), or Digital Rights Management (like DVD region coding/CSS). For the average consumer, this provides little incentive to adopt products that support open technology.
But when IP law is more aggresively pursued & enforced, alternatives automatically become more visible, and attractive. DRM may be accepted as long as it stays a minor inconvenience, a small annoyance. But as soon as it actually prevents people from doing things, it makes non-DRM encumbered products more interesting.
I'm not too worried if M$ decides to put more DRM features into Longhorn. That just makes Open Source software a more attractive alternative to consumers. Like I'm not bothered much by high oil prices. That will just make fuel-efficient cars and environment-friendly energy sources more interesting. A small economic crisis can help there too.
So in the long run, IP laws will largely act to shoot themselves in the foot. It's just sad how much hassle they cause in the meanwhile.
If you believe you can ignore EULAs, you're the one with Fairly Odd Parents.
It's not a matter of belief, I ignore EULAs all the time.
I don't even read them.
I think you would have a hard time enforcing a contract that I haven't read, haven't signed, and that gives me nothing in return.
My view is that my use of the software is governed by the terms of the sale, as agreed in advance of the sale, and the current law of the land.
When they start presenting a EULA and demanding you READ and SIGN it before they will sell the software, then maybe they will have a case that the EULA is enforceable. Even then, a civil contract is always trumped by the law.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
To be property, it has to have the ability to be owned, possessed, controlled.
Well then, since ideas can no longer be "controlled" because of the web, then I guess by your own definition that there is no such thing as "intellectual Property".
:)