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Microsoft Licensing Fee Intended To Reduce Hobbyists
BokLM writes "Microsoft's Amir Majidimehr, Corporate VP of the Windows Digital Media Division, explained at a DRM conference in London why they require a license fee from device makers." From the article: "According to Amir, the fee is not intended to recoup the expenses Microsoft incurred in developing their DRM, or to turn a profit. The intention is to reduce the number of licensees to a manageable level, to lock out 'hobbyists' and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with."
... but what if my hobby is annoying microsoft?
Considering we're talking about the oh-so-chipper WMA/V format, they should be paying people to have to work with it.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
Did you know that "Steve Ballmer" is an anagram for "Tremble, slave!". This explains a lot :)
'll paraphrase the above for you in fewer words.
Interesting. I don't see one instance of Billy G mentioning:
What I do see is a screed claiming that:
So how is that paraphrasing again?
Come on. I'm not fan of Billy G, but you can't honestly claim that the paragraph above says what you say it does.
MS certainly isn't winning over any of the open source community with that move. It really drives the wedge deeper and give more people more reason to not use Windows.
I do have to wonder how much of this is to show a strong front to the increasingly powerful media companies and their mostly oppresive DRM schemes.
Jerry
http://www.networkstrike.com/
No, what's he's saying is don't steal software just to write your own. Thanks to people like him, we now have many free tools and can write our own software without paying, and without stealing. If you truly think that a product is worth using, then pay what they are charging. If you don't think it's worth what they are asking, then don't use it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The intention is to reduce the number of licensors to a manageable level, to lock out 'hobbyists' and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with."
If it turns out that hobbyists are a bad thing, then the market will demonstrate that. There's no need to act as if your rights are being suppressed.
Sometimes hobbyists are phenomenal for a platform (the Apple II platform, Linux). Sometimes they don't seem to provide enough benefit to be essential. Game consoles are effectively closed to hobbyists and despite the degree of amateur work, Flash was never really a free platform to seriously develop for.
The only area in which I can think of that this isn't true is when monopolies exist (such as the cell phone market, where cell providers can force the platform closed by requiring that anyone that uses their services provide only a closed platform).
Anyone can sit down and provide something an an encoded audio and video format. There are a lot more MPEG-based players out there than anything else, and it's not as if hobbyists can't produce content for these. Microsoft's chosen their market (at least in the short term). Let them play with the idea and see whether it pans out.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
> Ballmer: Developers! Developers! Developers!
But they are starting the long slow trend that ends with Xbox bow. They still want developers, but only large ones. Because in the end the goal is to turn the PC into an Xbox. All applications are signed by Microsoft and they collect a piece of the action in exchange for it. It solves most of their security problems, lets them tap vast new revenue streams to show investors some growth and allows them the total freedom to screw each developer in turn by introducing their own replacement and deciding the 3rd party app no longer 'meets our strategic vision' and refusing to continue signing.
Democrat delenda est
Gates: "No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system." -- From: 'Programmers at work', Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA [c1986]:
In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who were students at Harvard University at the time, adapted BASIC to run on the popular Altair 8800 computer and sold it to the Altair's manufacturer, MITS. The Altair BASIC interpreter was the first computer language program to run on the type of computer that would later become known as the home computer or personal computer. Even though the BASIC programming language was already in the public domain by then, the interpreter that could run it on home computers wasn't. Thus Gates and Allen had created an original product; a true innovation. It would be one of their last.
Gates and Allen had initially met at Lakeside School (an exclusive private school for rich boys) where Gates became an adept at BASIC on a General Electric Mark II. Shortly thereafter they got access to a PDP-10 run by a private company in Seattle. The company offered free time to the Lakeside school kids to see if they could crash the system. Gates proved to be particularly adept at doing so. When the free time ran out Gates and Allen figured out how to get free time on the PDP-10 by logging on as the system operator. About a year later the private company running the PDP-10 went bankrupt.
This left Gates and Allen without a source of free computing power. Therefore Allen went over to the University of Washington and began using a Xerox computer by pretending to be a graduate student. Gates soon followed, and this went on until they were caught and removed from the campus. They continued to break into university and privately owned computer systems until about 1975. By that time Gates was a student at Harvard University. The BASIC he sold to MITS had been developed and tested on a Harvard PDP-10 using an 8080-emulation program that Allen had adapted from earlier code. In fact, by the time Gates contacted MITS to announce their product, it had never ran on an actual 8080 CPU. The demonstration Gates and Allen put up for MITS in New Mexico was the first time the product actually ran on the system it was intended for. Gates sold it by announcing a product that didn't exist, developing it on the model of the best version available elsewhere, not testing it very seriously, demonstrating an edition that didn't fully work, and finally releasing the product in rather buggy form after a lengthy delay. From then on this modus operandi became Microsoft's trademark.
After Gates sold the new BASIC interpreter to MITS he left Harvard University, and went into business for himself with Allen as a partner. Allen was also an MITS employee at the time, which made his position rather interesting. Gates' departure from Harvard is shrouded in controversy: some say he dropped out, others say he was expelled for stealing computer time. Whatever the case may be, the fact is that Gates did most of the work on his BASIC version in a Harvard computer lab without having been authorized to use the (expensive) computer time needed for the project. Perhaps he did not really steal unauthorized computer capacity (which was a valuable commodity in those days) to develop his first commercially successful product. Yet he has never offered another explanation. He did however send his now-infamous "Open Letter To Hobbyists" to every major computer publication in February 1976, in which he decried the copying of Microsoft software by home computer hobbyists as simple theft. -- excerpt borrowed from Why I hate Microsoft
This isn't news, nor is it some grand conspiracy.
Actually, it is. A monopolist has partnered with two cartels and all three of them have been convicted of illegally abusing their market positions. They are partnering to build an artificial barrier to entry in the convergence of their markets and to leverage their existing position to gain an advantage in new markets. This is most definitely a conspiracy and it is news. Here's a hint. It is illegal to use a monopoly to gain an advantage in other markets or to build barriers to entry to those markets. MS has partnered to do just that, implementing software restrictions to provide some parties with a market advantage using their monopoly on desktop OSs.
When pricing a product, you typically want to set a minimum price specifically for the purpose of eliminating the deadbeat/hobbyist factor.
Since when is an artificial restriction on use a "product?"
If the majority of your customers are businesses, they won't blink at a couple-hundred bucks for a product.
And you think that makes it ok or something? MS has a monopoly and they are using that monopoly to collect an additional toll from developers in the separate software application market. That is illegal.
Except for the fact that Linux has acted as a testbed for new scheduling algorithms, new virtual memory algorithms, new interrupt handling routines, etc. Without Linux these projects might have been conducted in an ivory tower demo OS or something else with little impact on the real world and no feedback on how they ACTUALLY perform. Linux through its open source nature has fostered a real world petri dish that wouldn't have existed otherwise and therefore has advanced the art of computer science.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
There once was a bus system called the Microchannel. In its age, it was revolutionary. Look it up, and be stunned by the opportunities this system presented. Remember, this was the age of ISA (Not even VLB, heck, not even EISA and faaaaar from PCI) cards.
It was good. Unlike the DRM junk, this was REALLY good. It only had one single flaw:
IBM threatened to execute patent rights. And the card manufacturers were afraid they couldn't actually make a buck with MCA cards after paying royalties to IBM for the patents.
So most of them, besides a few big players, went down the conservative road and decided it would be better to stick with ISA. It's slower, yes, it's limited, yes, but at least we can actually make a buck there.
Customers split up. Those who decided to stick with ISA, to be compatible with their old hardware, hardware they needed and was not available on MCA, and those who stood true to IBM and trusted them to create new line of hardware. The first group saw that they could get cheaper hardware, not only add-on cards but even the "main machine" from 3rd party vendors that are still compatible with their old ISA cards.
The other group went after the first when IBM decided to dump the Microchannel Architecture in the early 90s, leaving their customers with big investments that led into a dead end, forcing them to buy completely new hardware altogether as well. And understandably, they did not want to sink more money into IBM...
And the MCA, which was a great design, went away before it even started to fly. And marked one of the cornerstones of IBMs decline from THE computer company to ONE computer company today.
Let's hope DRM will be the same for MS.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.