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What 2008 May Hold In Store for FOSS
eldavojohn writes to mention that LinuxPlanet has a brief discussion on what 2008 may hold for FOSS. The list includes thoughts on KDE 4, OOXML, DRM, and 3-D desktops. What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to in 2008?
I'm thinking many would not consider DRM in FOSS to be a boon of any sort...
The end of the tyranny of copyright law. Only then will there be true progress. Otherwise, this and everything else will be buried under the dog pile of licensing, which has already begun.
What?
I'm not trying to say we should necessarily support a company that has a lot of bad practices, but they create a huge market for us to make money. When they release a new OS, they beef up the minimum requirements for it and in turn brings prices of last gen products down in price for us to use.
There is no reason that AI shouldn't be integrated into the OS, but "invisibly". Here's an example:
Joe User gets a lot of email. He tends to be organized, so he likes to sort his mail into different folders. He could use procmail or his client's filtering capabilities, but why should he have to? OSS has good solutions to the text classifying problem
If only the email client (or imap server) paid attention, he's already supplying all the input necessary for a text classifier to sort all his mail for him without any additional action on his part.
When Joe (manually) moves an email from his inbox to a new folder, this is a training event.
If Joe notices that an email is in an incorrect folder and moves it (manually) to the right one, this is a retraining event.
This concept could be expanded to other applications: how about a window manager that remembers where you tend to arrange your applications and starts putting them in the right place to begin with? The ability do manually set placement rules like with KDE doesn't count. That's just a workaround for not using the information the user is already providing.
Just reiterating what the other poster said. In the normal world, you get paid for the work you do, not the work of your work. If I hire Bob to come build me a gate, he doesn't get to charge me every time someone comes through it. He is paid to build the gate and then he gets the hell out of my life. He only gets paid again if I need him to return and do more work.
Same with the novel (or insert song, program, etc in here). You might have (and without copyright likely would have) been paid to write the story in the first place. Once you've been paid to write, you write the novel. Now, you can choose to only give it (or you could technically sell it) to the people who already gave you money, but the bottom line is you will have already been paid to write it. Once it's done your part is done and if people want to make copies of it to sell, or to give away, that's their own concern. If you want to keep raking in cash you better have written a story good enough that people are willing to pay you to write another one. And you better be willing to write a number of "sample" stories to begin with if you want anybody to start reading your stuff.
With music, it's even easier. You could in the same way be paid to write the songs, or more likely you would be paid for live performances (ie, you are actually gonna have to get out there and do work again).
With software, GPL isn't needed because if you release a closed source version of my code I'm just gonna decompile it, reimplement the changes in a high level language, and rerelease it again. If you want to be paid for software, someone will end up hiring you to do a custom program for them (ie, you must work, not live off imagined entitlement), or you can write free stuff and charge to support it (again, working).
You also have to understand that not EVERYTHING will/would be feasible with copyright gone. It's a shift of society, but for the better. I'm sure if we reinstituted slavery we could achieve some absolutely marvelous feats in construction and such, but that doesn't mean it's something that a fair society should support. I seriously doubt large scale motion pictures as they currently stand would still be realistically profitable (though live theater certainly might return to a much more profitable status). That's not something we can't live without though, and it's certainly not worth instituting insanely oppressive laws over.Copyright instills a limited supply (and source) onto something that by nature is unlimited (and not really even tangible). It's one of the most perverted corruption of economics ever seen.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain