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South African Minister Locks Horns With Microsoft
naheiw writes "The South African minister of public service and administration on Monday addressed the opening of the Idlelo 3 free software conference in Dakar, Senegal, saying that software patents posed a considerable threat to the growth of the African software sector (video). Microsoft responded aggressively, saying that 'there is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity.'"
are they smoking micro-crack again?
The growth of Free Software in Africa could be encouraged were Stallman to visit the area. His visit to India was enormously successful. Would that we have a better and more cheaply available biography of the man and his vision (O'Reilly's Free as in Freedom is good, but could be better) that could be distributed to influential figures in the African IT world.
"Nobody develops software for charity"
Hello, my name is Nobody. You know, the one that's prefect. Same dude.
Okay, so in the strictest sense of the terms, he's probably right. Software development isn't a charity.
Free Software (GPL/LGPL) is definitely not a charity, it's a give and take trading system. You put in, and you get out, and it largely self-improves through feedback, patches, bug reports, etc.
BSD comes closer, but still required attribution in the past, and of course, the developers were (back in the day) originally producing it as part of various university projects (ie, they get status in return), and more recently, are developing it as for-profit work, but are releasing it. Again, not charity.
That said, whether the argument's been taken out of context, or is accurate in other ways is another matter.
In Microsoft's case I'm inclined to think they're being equivocal on purpose, implying "free as in beer" when the real topic "free as speech."
To fight back, I think we should be calling it "freedomware" rather than "free software."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Just you wait, those hooligans with their "Open Source" will start jacking up the price, and you'll be sorry then, but I won't help you then!
Quick, someone tell these people they don't exist!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1#Software
I couldn't believe anyone at Microsoft would actually say something like that in public, so i had to read the article to see it myself. I am no fan of Microsoft's business practices or products, but I would like to believe that that employee was misquoted somehow.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I am developing a replacement for your crap Windows "Operating System"
Go To Hell.
Sincerely,
Filipino Monkey
PS: What is the chance that the person who said that at Microsoft will be looking for a job very shortly? Having your upper management assert that they are moving toward a more open model and then having some bozo say something like this must look terrible even to the Microsoft Marketing Department (tm).
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
Umm, having developed software for charities at various points in my career, I have to say that is not the case...
Oh, wait, I am a nobody. At least so far as Microsoft is concerned. It's not that I didn't make enough money to "put food on my family", it's just that I didn't make enough to matter and I never will.
However, the feeling is mutual. If I didn't have clients who need products delivered on MS platforms, I'd happily never touch a piece of MS software again. It's not that I'm ideologically against them, but Microsoft doesn't cater to people like me; we're not a profitable market for them. In fact, we're nobody as far as they're concerned.
That's OK with me; the Gap doesn't offer a line of clothing for people like me; the local Evangelical church doesn't have special Sunday services for people like me either. I'm perfectly happy for each of these organizations to provide their services and wares for people who for whatever reason think they fulfill a need. We just move in orbits that, for the most part intersect.
I think the mutual indifference thing breaks down because Microsoft wants to be everything to everybody. They want to have the one important operating system and the one important file format "standard". Since they don't intend to cater to me, the only way for that to happen is for me to have to use products that were not designed with the things I value in mind. The file format thing is a great example. What I want out of office file formats is not at all what Microsoft is prepared to give me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Like the people in the RIAA, Microsoft just doesn't get it. The fundamental issue is not about whether software development is a charity (although sometimes I think that is a motivation), but about Economics 101 and prices in a competitive market. If they had paid attention in class, they would remember that, in a competitive market, the equilibrium price is found where price = marginal cost. The marginal cost of an additional unit of any digital work is very close to zero. So MS, the RIAA, and many others are engaged in an attempt (futile in the long run, IMO) to construct an economic perpetual motion machine by legal schemes and other rent-seeking behavior.
Microsoft in their arguement has managed to demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of the core issue.
Software is not a charity, nobody is discussing it as such.
Software is, however, a written tool, in the end. Control of that tool is the key to empowerment. South Africa, actually all of Africa was held under oppression for many centuries by corporate interests such as microsoft, who held the keys for livelihood out of the masses hands in order to force the yoke.
Microsoft cannot understand why people with such a memory would not jump at the option of putting a new yoke on their necks, to work themselves to death in order to enrich a new foreign master.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
p.s. It made me giggle a little to search for ubuntu, free software, and sourceforge on msn.com using firefox on a linux box.
Even since the days before Stallman, the reason people shared software (that is, they gave it away for free), is because it is practically cost-free to reproduce. A community of hackers use the same OS and tools. In my life, it's been DEC TOPS-10, then UNIX, then Linux, but no matter. We all run into the same bugs. Better for one of us to fix and share, than for each of us to find and fix the same bug. Better for each of us to write a tool and share with all, than for each of us to have to write the same tool, most of us doing it poorly. It seems so obvious.
Why did Bill Gates become fabulously wealthy? Because he produces a great product? I think not. Because he produces (and markets) an ok product that he can reproduce for pennies and sell for hundreds of dollars each. And he has managed to lock people into using his products.
The point is that economically speaking, there is a strong argument for sharing (and thereby dividing up) the cost of production of tools if you can reproduce the tools for no cost and with no restrictions. Microsoft may not like this, but a developing nation should understand the point.
"South African Minister Locks Horns with Microsoft
Yes but, were they long horns?
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
God must love idiots, because He made so many of them...
"There is no such thing as free software."
Slavery, anyone?
FLR
If that's Microsoft's position, than clearly this organization is just another profiteer.
I guess they only recognize their own stuff and not the UN's FOSS (free/open source software) and IOSN (International Open Source Network) programs
http://www.iosn.net/foss/foss-general-primer
Yep your right, people develop free stuff for knowledge, experience, marketing, recognition, entertainment, pride, associated-revenue streams, etc. None of those are totally 'free' in the broader sense of cost.
Of course Microsoft has to stick with its free can't cost less money than commercial development argument. And overall many of MS's business folks can't grasp doing something for pride, fun, or education (unless the company is paying money you to be happy, full of pride, and smart).
Several 501c organizations develop software for other 501c organizations simply to reduce the cost of administrative overhead...i can't name names, but I ran across a few when hunting for a job with my MPA. Since any decent charity is judged by its works _and_ its administrative overhead, it made sense to folks working with multiple non-profits to spin-off administrative systems and software. I will say that such processes are usually extremely rare, especially when involving gov't organizations or funds due to regulatory/control reasons--I was very surprised to see them.
Is it charity to develop software for free (or in this case, not for profit) to lower mgmt costs? I would say yes, because the goal of the technology is to lower the costs of work and thereby get more support to those who need it--this is back office charity. And those non-profit employees that still get paid...well they're donating their own work at less than market value (no stock/upside) with a greatly increased risk (very unstable funding).
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/open/opencharity.mspx
Oh, the irony! Or is it hypocrisy?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Just as no Chef ever creates an interpretation of a recipe for charity.
Many people spend their time and effort contributing to the development of Open Source and even "free" software. They pay the price so others don't have to reinvent the wheel. While it isn't $$$ we're talking about, time is valuable.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
the 2 things MS is terrified of having to compet on.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This is a false dichotomy. Software patents are obviously not the only alternative to developing for charity.
it's "free, as in speech," not "free, as in beer."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
We all know Microsoft has them, but I was surprised to learn that South African
ministers possess horns as well.
A good chunk of their network stack came from BSD... you that free code they insist doesn't exist.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
... if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding... Huh? I'm calling shenanigans on you. Patents are not a mechanism by which programmers get paid for coding. They are a mechanism by which legal departments of companies harass their competitors, and by which companies that produce nothing engage in extortion. Programmers get paid to build software.I hear the same argument from developing countries who wish to break all sorts of patents; on drugs, on biomedical research for example. The downside for them is that they often find themselves cut out of the distribution for the latest and greatest of these life saving tools, or, are often at the mercy of haphazard quality controls from second or third rate manufacturers.
He minus well have said - we need slavery, nobody will grow cotton on the plantations for free. The point being that copyright and patent are nothing like a normal property right and are the anti-christ of freedom and free markets. Every 'value' that they have is coerced at the expense of someone else, is asserting control over things they have no right to control, is an artificial monopoly.
Especially not Bram Moolenaar.
and if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding
That's called a non sequitur.
Most people who receive money in exchange for their work do so without having monopoly rights. There is no evidence that monopoly rights are necessary for monetizing software development; in fact, there's a vast array of evidence suggesting it's not at all necessary.
That evidence ranges from open source companies on one end to the vast majority of programmers hired for coding specific purpose software which is never released and for which copyright or patents is irrelevant.
On the other side is, eh, Microsoft. Claiming that they need software to cost money or they have no business model.
No shit. Wonder what makes them say that then.
Finally, some program for free just to learn more or have fun. Not necessarilly saying that any or all of the above reasons are bad, only that there are few, if any, programmers who write free software for charity. Most expect to get some sort of benefit out of it. The thing the Africans need to realize is that most programmers prefer to get money in exchange for their coding, and if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding, you have cut off about 98% of your source of new code. You can get some people to work for ego stroking, but most have mortgages to pay and lives to live, and they need money like everyone else. In general, Microsoft is very correct that software costs money, and you aren't going to get it for free.
WHAT? 98%? Did you pull those figures out of your own ass?98% of the source of new code does not come from software patents and I can prove it:
Mac OS X
The code in Mac OS X did not come to be because of software patents, it came to be because Apple paid their programmers to code a kick butt OS so they could sell hardware, and they do, and they sell a lot of hardware. Plus a lot of the code came from NeXT, which Apple bought, and from BSD. And their market share is big. (No, I use Linux, but I bought my mom a Mac)
You must have confused Imaginary Property, Software Patents and Copyrights respectively, otherwise there is no way to get even close to your numbers. What you probably mean is; If you abolish copyright altogether you would remove 98% of the income source for new code. But that is not what this is about at all.
The Minister said software patents was a threat.
It does also sometimes serve its original intent, to protect the little guy from having his ideas stolen with zero recourse.
I agree today its not often, but id not say patents are ONLY to support the big legal departments for harassment purposes.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
While you're certainly correct that most free software isn't written for charitable reasons, there certainly is plenty of free software that is. Look at the OLPC; that's not for profit, or for ego, it's a charity, unless you want to clame that every single charity out there, from ones that fight hunger to AIDS to teaching in developing nations, is just around to "have their ego stroked." Or, to give you a particularly striking example, here is an excerpt from the SQLite source code:
Crazy Taco:
The thing the Africans need to realize is that most programmers prefer to get money in exchange for their coding, and if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding, you have cut off about 98% of your source of new code.
That's absolutely false. 99% of programmers don't make their money from software patents; in fact, most of them would have an easier time doing their jobs and making money if software patents didn't exist. Software copyrights certainly help protect their software and allow them to make money, but the vast majority of software patents are held by patent trolls who haven't written a line of useful software in their lives, or big companies that just patent everything they think they can to use defensively against other companies in case of patent lawsuits.
The problem with software patents is that pretty much every piece of software written is a novel invention, because if it wasn't, then you should have reused code that already existed since it already does what you need. If people patented every new idea they had while coding, they'd be in an out of the patent office 10 times a day, and wouldn't be able to get their work done (credit to Phil Greenspun for that argument). The only people who get patents are, as I mentioned, greedy patent trolls who just want to make an easy buck (it's pretty damn simple to come up with a new, patented idea in code, and then just sue anyone else who happens to think of that and implement it later), and companies that usually get big patent portfolios so when other big companies try to hit them up for money, they can just do a patent cross-licensing agreement and not have to actually fight it out in court.
As a professional, paid programmer, I must say that patent issues are second only to cryptographic regulation issues in terms of laws that have interfered with me actually getting my job done.
Patents and copyrights pose threats to third world countries because with them they cannot legally use the software they need or want to use to get themselves out of the "third world".
Nothing new here. Same thing in China and Russia, etc...
They want a free ride until they get on their own feet.
I've got no problems with that, but don't try to pass this off as some failure of the patent system.
I agree, that is the original intent of patents.
But has anyone heard of a little guy using a patent to stave off a large corporation from stealing his ideas in the last decade or so? It only works if the little guy has lawyers good enough to go to bat against the megacorporations likely to steal his patent. Which, of course, means he's not a little guy.
The patent game is a game played by companies with teams of lawyers on the payroll. IMHO, the little guy was bounced out of this arena sometime around 1950 or so. I know I haven't seen it be otherwise in my lifetime.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I recommend this to him.
Jump into #openbsd on freenode, and ask the guys to explain something to you.
See if you still have any trouble finding "rich" documentation for open source projects then.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
...and nobody codes for fun!
Against my nature I RTFA, and I noticed that from MS' side what this seems to be about (if you read between the lines) is the courting of local developers. The comparison with India speaks volumes.
I'm willing to speculate that if you look at market entrance for the (lower) continent SA is likely the gateway. Is Shuttleworth a large employer there? Is it a veiled threat WRT employment possibilities?
It's a tried and tested method used by corporations to get their way, use (potential and actual) employment as bargaining chips to get the government pork.
"Nobody develops software for charity.'"
I hear echoes of a letter written by a certain William Gates over 30 years ago:
http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html
"What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? "
There's another camp---indeed, the largest camp of all---the people who code because it solves a problem they have. In the absence of it being a competitive advantage for a corporation, there's no good reason not to share that with others so that it will help solve their problems, too. Lord knows I've done that quite often. Sure, I like name recognition, but I'd still do it even if nobody ever heard of me.
Similarly, when I run into a problem that prevents me from getting stuff done, I fix it and submit patches. They don't always get accepted, but at the very least, they are out there for other people who run into the same problems to use if they need them, and they make the original developer aware that people want a particular enhancement.
That said, there's still a payback. I'm getting useful functionality out of the code---functionality that I would not get without writing it. So pedantically speaking, the Microsoft rep is technically right. That said, since I had to write it anyway, from the perspective of the system as a whole, the existence of the software as a public resource is as close to "free" as you can get; if you don't consider that "free", then there's no such thing as "free" at all, and I would argue that this is a silly way to look at the world. If something occurs for no additional cost (or negligible cost) as a result of a process that you have to do anyway, that something is, by definition, free. Now the act of giving it away isn't free, mind you; there's a possible opportunity cost because perhaps you could have sold it and made money. However, this is lost potential revenue, and the effort that you would have to spend trying to obtain that income usually won't pay for itself anyway. As such, releasing it as open source often truly is free....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They get tax benefit!
Everything is give and take, no matter how you look at it. A good system keeps the wheels running, a bad system does not.
Most programmers do not work for Software Companies.
Hence, their renumeration is not tied to the "sale" of software. They are paid to create/modify software for their employer's use. A lot of the time, it makes sense to share the work on a reciprocal basis, because it lowers everyones costs and improves the quality of the software for everyone ("Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.") Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar , by Eric S. Raymond. It's online for free.
Microsoft have used software libraries that were released by the BSD community in their products for years. They "incorporated" tools written by hobbiests into DOS, back in the day, without any note to the contributors. It only proves they move blindly towards the money, never look behind, and never clean the people they step on off the bottom of their shoes.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
"98% of the source of new code does not come from software patents and I can prove it:
Mac OS X"
And MS-DOS, and Windows, and Word, and Excel, and... MS wouldn't exist in its current form if Digital Research had software patents on CP/M, or Apple had them on the original Mac and QuickTime, or Dan Bricklyn had patented the concepts in VisiCalc, or MicroPro had patented various WP concepts, or Borland had patented the IDE, or software patents had been present on any of the legion of other programs and associated software technologies that Microsoft have blatantly ripped off over the years.
To paraphrase Alastair Crowley: "Do as I say and not as I do shall be the whole of the law".
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
If you're wondering, in the article:
GOD DAMN IT! People are starting to believe it's a word because people wearing suits and ties are saying it! It's worse than the likes of "ain't" because it was mostly used by rednecks and other 'uneducated' sorts. But now I have to wonder what other "noun" roots can have "-ise"/"-ize" endings added to them to make them into verbs? "Horseize"? Nope... "Dogize"? Nope... "Loveize"? Nope... "Georgeize"? Nope... "Martinize"? Yes, but that's an exception since it's a trademarked word. "Ostrichize"? Nope... but would "Ostracize" close enough? "Penalize?" YES! Oh wait, that's not a noun root... it's an adjective root!
So what I'm ranting over here is the use of "Noun"+"-ize" where as far as I can tell, it should be only "Adjective"+"-ize" only.
And while it fits in this case, every time I hear "incentivize" I think of the speaker as a frikken idiot!
Yes, there are many developers who write code for no money, but at the same time, I don't know anyone who does it entirely for selfless, charitable reasons.
Vim is explicitly produced as a way to promote a charity for Uganda.
Not a typewriter
Microsoft cannot tell the difference between Patent Encumbered Proprietary Software, Patent-Free Proprietary Software, "No such thing as software patents" Copyright Protected Software, Open Source Software, and Free Software.
There is an awful lot of Baby left in that Bathwater when you go from "Software Patents Threaten Africa's Software Sector" to "Free software, as the only available alternative to Software Patents, is non-existent charity." Hello, all of the eighties and most of the nineties are on the phone and they want the money they paid for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Microsoft Office back. Even you, Microsoft, made _billions_ of dollars (US) selling software that was not patented.
Maybe it isn't FUD, maybe Microsoft people are just stupid.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I think the minister should take a big cup of shut the fuck up. She is the minister of public works - her department is a cesspool of incompetence and corruption. Why should she take on another separate topic if she can not even do the job that she is paid for?
.NET, Visio, Office, SQL Server, etc.. Now open source Nazi's are going to rail against this. But remember, there is a market for .NET programmers (for example as outsourcing). If this is what brings in the money, then so be it.
If the government really wants to encourage free software, why not sell their share in Telkom and act against that monopoly? It is impossible for most people to get a basic internet connection in the country. If you do get ADSL, it is capped - this fucks with most internet activities (including outsourcing, call centers and back office work). In all fairness, Telkom is a much worse monopoly than Microsoft can and will ever be.
How the hell will you download a new copy of your favorite Linux distribution? (500MB costs around R189).
To me it looks like the governments "open source" policy is to gather around a bunch of incompetent programmers. They are then paid (with tax money) to write bad open-source software that no-one will use. Yipee kay jay.
Now back to "evil" Microsoft. Microsoft provides all of its software free to any educational institution in South Africa (Academic Alliance). By that I mean everything - Visual Studio
Oh, yeah. The Bill and Melinda charity provides a shitload of money for anti-AIDS programs. This is while the current president makes statements that poverty causes AIDS, and the minister of health promotes beetroot as a cure for AIDS.
Additionally, programmers have copyrights, and software should not even be patentable. And if open source software devs having a ego-inflation from their work means they are not charitable, then the freaking ego-masturbation known as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation should not be considered charitable also.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
They have everyone debating paying for software versus getting software for free. That has *nothing* to do with patents. Patents "protect" ideas. Copyright protects code. People should be free to build on the ideas of others. That's how we've made such progress to date. Imagine the kind of dark ages we might be living in now if someone had a patent on such basic ideas as fire, the wheel, the inclined plane, etc. Would we be where are now if all the basic science of the past had been patent protected? Also, why did we even have any progress at all in the pre-patent days? What was the incentive to advance science from the dawn of time without patents? Oh my, somebody's logic must be flawed somewhere, eh? ;)
Microsoft, in spite if its using the word to death, is simply too large and complex to innovate. Real innovators are far too likely to feel stifled and leave the company.
They aren't capable of admitting, or possibly even acknowledging this any more.
They came to my uni in 2002, and the main speaker, their head of whatever they call their hiring department (he did introduce himself, but I was only there for the pizza) went on what I can only describe as a polite tirade against 'hackers', meaning the proper meaning, not the criminal one. They didn't want them, they wanted people who thought like microsoft did, and were able to do things the microsoft way. A way we were assured was nothing like open source, and far superior.
Their problems quite obviously run deep, and to be frank it was obvious from that one meeting, I was not alone in coming away with that impression (note, not one person at that meeting went to work for them). They want to distance themselves from their hacker origins, but those very same people are what's driving the real innovation in the industry.
Years and years ago, around 1992'ish I think, I wrote an app for the Mac called StartupFrills. It was a toy which showed a different screen each reboot, played a different sound, movie, read something out using Speech Manager...that kind of thing. I released it as freeware, with a note in the readme saying if you liked it please donate to your local children's hospital.
You will be amazed how many emails I got saying that people had done exactly that. I had no idea at that time - the idea of putting it up on the net at all was something of a novelty for me. I remember one mail from a Freemason, who said it was his duty to donate and that he would donate to a children's hospital this time round because I'd asked people to. He then said he was actually head of the Freemasons in Texas, and he would be asking all in his...err....chapter? group?....whatever the word is to donate to their local children's hospital that time. I have no idea how much that raised, but it's not a bad start is it.
I was astounded. I have a particular interest in donating to children's hospitals - as I kid I caught polyneuritis, was paralysed, 'died', was in a wheelchair and yet actually fully recovered - there's no trace of that in me now beyond a tracheotomy scar. I expected nothing from releasing StartupFrills and asking for donations, and I was extremely surprised at what took place.
Cheers,
Ian
I disagree with you about the need for patents. I'll admit that most patents are pretty obvious. But every now and then someone works hard for something that really is unique. Without patents, the result will be predictable: most people will keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret. The result will be that academia will suffer as algorithms go from publicly disclosed patents to trade secrets. A better idea is for the patent offices to be less generous in what they are willing to grant patents for.
The rest of you are shit out of luck. "For innovation to continue, there needs to be value - and even open-source applications have some form of market model, which incentivises them to continue innovating." That's true, for those of you who have your market blinders on. because markets are the only thing that matters. Unlike your "value-added products and services", however FOSS exists beyond markets. It's undead.
Want proof? Go out of business. No one will use Windows anymore, but GNU/Linux will still be available.
So what you're saying is that no-one ever got paid for coding before software patents came along? What are you smoking and can I have some?
"It looks like you are trying to innovate! Maybe I can help you
A.) Wade through mountains of bureaucratic paperwork.
B.) Convince your technically conservative superiors of the merits of your plans.
C.) Steal someone else's idea and market it better.
You've chosen to steal someone else's idea. Good choice!"
Yes folks, it's Clippy's bigger brother, Hangy the wire coat hanger. He helps you abort innovation before it causes real problems AND put the new cover on your TPS reports!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What Microsoft says is technically true though. Yes, there are many developers who write code for no money, but at the same time, I don't know anyone who does it entirely for selfless, charitable reasons.
Perhaps this makes a good koan. Actually I doubt anyone does charity for selfless reasons. In one way or another everyone who donates, money or tyme and effort, to charity gets something out of it.
Many of the most active open source coders are poster children for being self absorbed. It's just that, instead of being self absorbed with money and material possessions, they prefer to be paid in the form of being well known, having prestige, and generally getting their ego stroked.
Ah but they don't need software patents to do so. The only reason for software patents now is what the SA minister says, as an anticompetitive measure to keep out competition. Unfortunately though TFA doesn't really have much to say, especially on what MS said about software patents. For the reasons you list people will write software without patents. On the other hand software patents are used by businesses with large patent portfolios as a bludgeon to hold over others' heads to reduce and eliminate competition.
Many others program just to stick it to the man because they have some sort of grudge against govt. or corporations, and others because they simply want lots and lots of software for free (thinking if they give theirs away, others will too). Stallman probably fits into both of these camps.
Within reason, it shouldn't matter why software is written, only that software that people find helpful, useful, or fun is written and people can afford it.
The thing the Africans need to realize is that most programmers prefer to get money in exchange for their coding, and if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding, you have cut off about 98% of your source of new code.
Not even programmers need patents to get paid. Many software businesses exist without any need for patents. Programmers get paid for the tyme they spend programming. If a business wants to protect their source code then they can issue binary code without source code. If someone copies and distributes the program to others then they are infringing on copyright.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The answer, to me, is that F/L/OSS is charity, a charity that produces information the same way the above charity donating to a library produces information, and is a charity that turns a bunch of metals and chemicals into a finely-honed computing tool, the same as the above charity created a park. What we do is indeed charitable, not because we deprive ourselves, but because we enrich others. The cost to ourselves is zero, because we would have scratched our itches anyway. You can't rationally add as a cost of sharing the cost of pleasing ourselves.
Charity obviously allows for return on investment, it just means that others also get a return on your investment. But it doesn't require that others give any kind of feedback at all. If you make a public park and only you visit, it's still public, it was still an act of charity, but it's an act of charity you get exclusive benefit from.
Microsoft's statement, then, is a dark one indeed. No charity, of any kind? It says that they gain no pleasure in the results of their labour, that they suffer with every release, that every enhancement and refinement is a source of pain. Quality must be endless torment (which would explain some things). It is a bleak future when everything is misery and there is an apparent determination to spread that misery.
If they wanted to spread even just contentment, through their freely-donated hot-fixes, patches and service packs, freely-donated Microsoft Research products and freely-donated e-mail service and instant messenger, they'd be guilty of charity. Since they have denounced the charitable and all their works, these things cannot be given for the use of others. But, if they are not usable, even in theory, what are they? Microsoft's comments deride and slander all who would offer service to others, so the only conclusion is that these things are intended to cause suffering and misery, which - to judge by Vista service pack 1 - is indeed what they cause.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What Microsoft - and the GPL-fans, for that matter - have oh-so-conveniently forgotten is the mechanism of PD software. Write it, share it, go on with your life. The more people do that, the more useful things will get created. Personally, I find the GPL just as corrosive as software patents, and for very similar reasons. I try to stay away from both. But that's just me.
Actually the only reason the GPL exists is because copyrights exist, if copyrights didn't exist the GPL wouldn't either. It it called copyleft for a reason.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Microsoft grew up in a no-patentable-software ecosystem where only copyright could be used as defense.
Moreover they owe much success to IBM clones which would not be possible in a patent-everything ecosystem.
Therefore whatever their- and your - reasons, microsoft itself proves the assertion wrong.
Also, what better way to prove patents are helpful? Let south africa stay patent free for a while and see if they innovate more than a place that adopted patents.
Without patents, the result will be predictable: most people will keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret. The result will be that academia will suffer as algorithms go from publicly disclosed patents to trade secrets.
And then a clever hacker will reverse engineer the algorithm and leak it to the world. Short of DMCA-type problems (which is an entirely different mess), there's nothing the companies can do since there are no more software patents, and if the prevalence of cracks show anything, it's that any program can be reverse-engineered.
There is no such thing as getting paid in spades for something with practically no manufacturing cost. See, Paulo, I can make completely false statements, too.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Now let the inevitable yammering begin about how anybody who takes out a patent is a either a sleazy patent troll or a corporate weasel....
How long did it take you to compile that list?
"Do as I say and not as I do shall be the whole of the law".
I don't know if he said that but it sounds like him. And this reverses the saying in Kabalism as well as Wicca, in Wicca: "An it harm none so mote it be."
FalconShould there be a Law?
I found it interesting that the minister took the recent addition of several new African countries to the ISO process with a very different spin. Many of us simply saw these new additions as evidence that Microsoft was "buying" votes to try to ram their OOXML through ISO. I still think this is the case, but the Minister saw a different outcome. Her hope was that, as these nations have become involved with the International Standards process, they will continue to be involved in the future. Rather than just seeing themselves as passive bystanders, these nations can dig in and start to be participating members. Of course, that assumes a lot in terms of developing their own experts who really have some sort of idea of what they are talking about (as opposed to parroting their Microsoft handlers), but there's nothing like jumping in with both feet to start having your voice be heard.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Bullshitizeitis - Use of words like incentivises is a key symptom of this fatal (well I can hope) disease :)
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
There's an irony in Microsoft saying there is no such thing as free software, while claiming to compete in a free market, which doesn't exist.
You're right that in a (theoretical ideal) competitive (or free) market, price = marginal cost. Actual markets are like this to greater or lesser extents. The software market is nothing like this.
Companies need to be big enough that marginal cost dominates, before they can compete. In software, marginal cost will never dominate, so fair competition can never occur.
Say, for example, the market for office suites is 90% Microsoft Office, 5% Corel WordPerfect Office, 5% other. Both Microsoft and Corel are creating 1 product, i.e. they both have to do the same amount of work, but Microsoft gets 18x as much income to do this. In order for Corel to compete, they must be 18x more efficient. The market doesn't favour efficiency, it favours market share, so the idea of fair competition is nonsense.
Contrast this to companies making pies, where company A has 90% of the market, company B has 5%, etc. Company A is getting 90% of the income, but must do 90% of the work, i.e. in order for any company to compete, they must be as efficient as their competitors. In this case, the market favours efficiency, so we have competition.
I disagree with you about the need for patents.
Ultimately, the best idea is to eliminate software patents entirely. Our software industry grew hugely profitable without them, so there is no demonstrable need for software patents (unless, of course, you have some anticompetitive ideas in mind.) Fact is, they are not helping, and so far as the United States is concerned they're not fulfilling their Constitutional mandate (admittedly, not much of anything Congress passes lately does.) However, if you must have them, give the USPTO the funding it needs to be critical about what truly is worthy of protection (I agree with you there) and shorten the term.
Without patents, the result will be predictable: most people will keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret.
So what? If it's secret, I can't use it, and if it's patented I can't use it. If I make a derivative work based upon your disclosed, patented algorithm odds are you'll still sue me. Without software patents, companies which understand that the only real way to maintain a competitive edge is to keep investing in R&D will simply be encouraged to maintain that investment. Maybe then they'll starting hiring fewer IP lawyers and more scientists, engineers and programmers. I'd say the country would be a whole lot better off if that were to happen. Hell, if you want an argument against software patents (indeed, excessive IP law in general) just look at Asia's high-tech economies. They don't have draconian Intellectual Property laws and they're doing just fine, employing a hell of a lot of people manufacturing a lot of products.
When it comes to software, the reality is this: if there's a way of doing something, there's probably a better way and sooner or later someone will figure it out. Furthermore, if something is protected by trade secret law, it's only secret until someone figures it out. And, if they figure it out independently (or do come up with a better approach) there's no patent system getting the way of that technology being commercialized. Software patents have proven to be a millstone around the U.S. software industry's neck and the Patent Office is utterly incapable of managing them effectively. Given those facts, we're better off without them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
you know, if we just take the extreme approach of microsoft representative, you can easily say 'no such thing as money'. or 'you dont exist' or 'world is in the eyes of a fish' and etc.
Read radical news here
Compiz Fusion! HTB for packet scheduling.
BTW most stuff in Linux is not UI visible.
And anyway most of developers behind FOSS projects are not hobbyists, but professionals that spend extra time on FOSS projects (Google practice for spending some time on FOSS projects)
"There is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity."
Every time I see statements like this, I smile. It is proof that Microsoft still hasn't gotten it. And most likely they never will.
Nobody cares about free-as-in-beer software. Well, some do, but that's not the point. What is important is of course free-as-in-speech software, and Microsoft repeatedly fails to understand why. It will be their doom, of course... and the smile will stay on my face when they perish.
May we live long and die out
your post clearly illustrates you do not make a living writing software or creating products for that matter. if you did, i have a feeling you would cry foul after a) you run out of creative ideas or 2) someone in asia copies your product and sells it for 33% of your cost.
so how do they fail to be technological leaders ? don't get me wrong i think MS makes a lot of good products, sql server and .net are great products. And i think in many ways them being market leader has them in a damned if they do damned if they don't position - think if they REALLY altered windows vista how many compatability issues there would be?
all that aside though there needs to be a fundamental corperate culture shift at MS. they have consistantly failed to engage their customers, there is no grass roots movement on the ms platform anymore. instead of relying on people wanting to use their platform, they try to trap them into it, which hardly endears anyone to them.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
You are of course right on all counts. No one does anything that on some level they don't want to do among the options present. Do I want to go to the gym? Maybe not, but it helps my well being in the long term.
/. threads. Yes, most people who code do so for money, and those that do open source likely derive primary income from a job where they do make money for their coding expertise.
Some people do things for the pleasure or challenge, some do it for the indirect pleasure (money, prestige or good vibes from helping people), and when stuck between a rock and a hard place, you decide which decision you like most of the options present.
As for patents? I think there's little doubt there needs to be some reform, and there's been a number of interesting suggestions raised in various
One of the more interesting solutions I've found (not my own idea) was a property tax on patents, to be assessed every 5-10 years (or when challenged enough). The patent goes up for bids at this time, and although the owner has the right to refuse any offer, the property is found to be of value equal to the amount bid for tax purposes. This encourages active use of patents, discourages patent trolls, and when there isn't interest in the patent, it expires into public domain.
Obviously this lacks some details, perhaps benefits for the inventor of a patent, a higher tax rate if the owner is found to be simply sitting on the patent, but it seems to solve most of the current issues with patents. This would entail a fair bit of overhead, but with some common sense the burden of much of the work would be placed on corporations who want a given patent, and the property taxes from patents should be more than enough to pay for the workers to review the patents.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
a) people will always have new problems to overcome which will require creative solutions. b) if someone makes a cheap knock off it will only be that - a cheap knock off, and no where near the quality of the product i make. it will also lag way behind my product as i develop it and lack compatability with future features (see point a)
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
By "for charity" it seems quite clear that they mean software that
-does not come with an unconscionable EULA
-does not do its damnedest to prevent other software from working with it
-is not protected from competition by government granted monopolies
-does not have an expiration date in the form of planned obsolescence/end of support
-does not require that the user surrender hisher hardware to the control of a remote party
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Uh, Office 2007?
I can refute your argument with a single product name.
Comment of the year
...I remembered "televise" right after I clicked "Submit" and then tried to reply to my own post to amend it, but then got the "Slow down cowboy!" message and decided... "ah, to hell with it..."
When IT ministers go to a free software conference to talk about how software patents are harmful to society and that everyone should use ODF, you know Stallman has been there in spirit if not in person. Stallman does not own the ideas but he has been clearly articulating them for a long time. People are finally starting to get it and that's a great thing. The man deserves a Peace Prize.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
Microsoft "GET OF MY CODE!!"
MS is all gung ho about free software when it serves to crush the competition, but not when they get crushed by it. I wonder why?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I don't have a definition for this, but their version of "innovate" is basically "use something that someone else thought of". Seeing an idea, using it, incorporating it, and making money off of it - that's MS innovation. It's not invention.
/nvet/ Pronunciation Key - in-uh-veyt] - verb, -vated, -vating.
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
innovate
-verb (used without object)
1. to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.
-verb (used with object)
2. to introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time: to innovate a computer operating system.
3. Archaic. to alter.
[Origin: 1540-50; to renew, alter, equiv. to in- in-2 + novtus (nov(re) to renew, v. deriv. of novus new + -tus ptp. suffix)]
It is free as opposed to proprietary, not free as opposed to commercial. Canonical will gladly sell you a copy of Ubuntu, and Microsoft gives away Internet Explorer, but we still speak of the former as freer than the latter.
To make the world's greediest man seem like a giving person.
You *have* to break backwards compatibility every couple of years.
Otherwise your software becomes bogged down and very inflexible.
It occurs in open source software occasionally. Look at KDE 4.
They are taking the opportunity to break compatibility in the name of progress.
Any old dusty and hackish code can be thrown away and be replaced with shiny new code.
This is Window's primary problem. Microsoft is scared shitless at breaking compatibility.
However they will need to do so very soon to survive.
Windows Vista is already filled to the brim with hacks and really odd behaviors due to backwards compatibility.
Want to see a really good example of how it should be done? Look at Apple.
They went from PPC to x86 and it was relatively smooth.
Ah... so according to Microsoft no one is developing for GNU? What's next?
Here be signatures
Naming a product doesn't refute anything. How does it prove the GP's argument wrong? How does it innovate? How is it better than the previous version/anything else? What does it allow you to do that you couldn't do before? Innovation is supposed to be a step forward, how does this qualify?
If all you're going to do is say a few words and nothing else then so will I.
Uh, Office 2007?
Its slow, bloated, ugly, messy, difficult to use and buggy.
I will not, as a human being, go around with buckets collecting up all that fucking phlegm. I would rather be destitute.
Your sig is a nice metaphor for why I won't work with or near Microshit products.
you had me at #!
Without patents, the result will be predictable: most people will keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret.
.. of course I realize that source code is copyrighted. Most patents I've read describe a solution to a problem, but don't include the detail that turns, 'Okay, if I wanted to do that' into 'ah, thats how I do that'. In other words, they describe the first hour of thinking about the problem: "Okay, if I need to provide feature X, then I can do that if you make this part really fast, and subdivide this task across multiple computers, and optimize the processing of this subsystem of the architecture." But they never seem to say, "Using this software, or using this published algorithm (or algorithm I'm publishing)"
I would be very interested in reading a software patent that discloses algorithms
It's wierd. I went to the Game Developer Conference today and sat in 5 lectures a day for 3 days, and each lecture seemed to disclose methods and algorithms more than any software patent I'd ever read.
I generally default to assuming I just havn't seen enough, so pray tell can you point me to a patent which is very specific - one that I could take and roll my own if I was interested in paying royalties?
"Old man yells at systemd"
you have a point about the asian economies that are "booming" as Microsoft wants to say.... they don't OWN any of the work they do either in 90% of the cases, they are just cheap labor. All the ideas they might have are part of the corporate fold. From Microsoft's point of view that's great, but it's not "enabling" or "healthy" either.
Game Developer Conference today
:P Dunno where that came from. I went back in Feb.
Oops. Remove today.
"Old man yells at systemd"
You forgot one other reason people work for free -- tips. Some developers work "grants". Which are essentially tips.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
With the current specs for an affordable computer, though, now is really the time to do it. They've got Virtual PC... it shouldn't be difficult, relatively speaking, to create an emulated "compatibility mode" in the same sort of way that Apple did (earlier) with Classic under OS X.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Exactly, MS stands mostly to attempt to prove that free software can't exist, while doing that they managed to run away from where all the innovation is happening, where it has been happening for the last 20 or more years: the Homebrew/Hacker/Hobbyist scene. Apple saw this, took BSD, cleaned up the kernel a bit, took some free utilities and are now selling a very successful GUI as OS X. MS has to re-invent the wheel with every OS to make it look "new" and distance itself from the free community. This leads to failures such as Vista where it takes a *5*+ year development cycle to produce an OS that is more buggy then most alpha software in the free community. Note to Bill and Steve Ballmer, you can't run a company that ignores a large part of where all real innovation takes place, its ignorent and stupid to act that way.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
the short form for bullshitting
On a serious note:That is only true for some of the open-source applications (i.e. 99% of apps on SourceForge or google code have no market model). Those that actually aim to make money still do not rely any way on software patents (companies like Redhat & to an extent IBM obtain patents for defense) and instead rely on actually creating a worthwhile product. And usually the incentive for companies to donate to open-source apps is that it's essentially a subsidized way to get a solution to a common problem.
Apple has done even better than that. They went from 680x0 to PPC to x86, with a complete overhaul of the OS in between--and nobody got hurt.
Yes, but now you can't verify the algorithm.
"you seriously have your wires crossed thinking you can't get paid for coding without software patents. MS knows this."
Indeed, you don't even need copyrights, but with them, you can do without patents. Patents are a play to get paid for software that other people write.
"saying that 'there is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity"
So, what exactly is the reason they give for "giving away" IE back in the early days? Let's see, they gave it away. But it couldn't have been free as there is no such thing as free software.
Well, there may or may not be any such thing as free software, but lucky for us, there certainly is such a thing as Free Software. And somehow, I think it is the latter they are more concerned with. I don't remember seeing them kick up such a fuss over tucows and nonags back when I was a windows puppy. Or even earlier. Freeware and Shareware never seemed to bother them too much. Free Software on the other hand...
all the best,
drew
http://packet-in.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
Packet In - net band - libre music, sometimes gratis
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
I've seen some very well obfuscated software cracked in days or hours by very skilled persons with good tools and experience.
Code is code. It runs on a known hardware and has a fixed set of rules for execution. Binary or not, the logic is crackable.
Now of course, the genius in the reasoning behind a piece of code may lay hidden forever (like who figured out the algorithm Carmack made famous for calculating normals with a floating point division or something), but cracking the code itself is not as hard as you've been lead to believe.
Please, go find one of these uncracked software packages that someone has actually cared to crack. Think video game systems and their software if you want, they put a LOT of effort into this.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
While I disagree with the statement that no one develops software for charity; I feel like I have to point out that free doesn't necessarily mean charity. There is tons of free software out there. Only a fraction was built with charity in mind.
Its slow
Faster than all its competition.
bloated
Nope.
ugly
Matter of opinion, I guess. I think you're thinking of Office 2003, which was most certainly ugly.
difficult to use
Nope, Office 2007 has a new interface that's easier to use than any Office version before it. Thus the innovation.
and buggy
Nope.
Comment of the year
I suppose with proper tools and 15 years of experience, you can figure out how to decompile stripped code. Although, I can't quite think of how it would do it... maybe by having a tool that runs the code and decompiles it as it runs? Otherwise, you can't tell the different between data and instructions, so... well, I don't know. I'll take your word for it. Although games are not a good example. All you need from them is small snippets of data that allow you to change their crucial behavior (more resources, faster movement, etc.). It's not quite the same as figuring out an algorithm.
Like you said,
took a while to figure out even after the code was available. So truly innovative stuff (the kind that's worth patenting) is probably outside of the reach of most disassembly and analysis. I am thinking more like routing algorithms. And (**d forbid!) some navigational systems... anything in which the math is harder than the rest of the code. But even sidestepping that, there algorithms to do things which are faily complicated in themselves, so...
Btw, the code is crucial because, as you pointed, out it lets calculate <x,y>/|y| with simple multiplication... thus avoiding both square root (fairly expensive) and division.
Aaah... The good old days. When slashdot had posts like this http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159570&cid=13367261 and not like this http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=497518&cid=22852348#
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If charity had to be selfless, it would not be so popular...
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
So? "Less" ideas is not the same as "no" ideas. And no one argues that the current patent system is not broken (and is, therefore, often sidestepped).
Roughly translated your argument sounds like this: "In other news, someone got shot today while a man caught a bank robber all on his own (without help from the police). So the criminal justice system doesn't prevent violent crime. Let's get rid of it." Just because a solution exists which provides some (even large) benefit, doesn't mean that it is an optimal solution. The argument is what would make the system better or worse -- not whether the current system is perfect.
I generally default to assuming I just havn't seen enough, so pray tell can you point me to a patent which is very specific - one that I could take and roll my own if I was interested in paying royalties? Well, the funny part is that you are probably right. They are a very small fraction of the patents granted on software -- most are too trivial. I insist that it is because we have business-method patents and no math patents. But it's a whole other argument, and I've gone through it on slashdot enough times. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:slashdot.org+math+patents should do it.Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Of course, 'whites' are able to blend their mistakes into the background... (If you can't see it, it never happened
Not saying that those are bad, except for their reliance on Windows, but they're not that innovative.
To bring this more on topic, though, Microsoft's good is obscured by their cartoonish bad, what with their greed and deceit and backstabbing.
Have a nice time.
Some charitable individual or organization out there might even sponsor your download.
I suppose if, however, you were willing to go absolutely any distance necessary to explicate FOSS from the umbrella of charity, one could make the same foolish argument you've made, but they'd have to follow that argument to its logical conclusion, and in doing so, reveal just how shallow and self-serving any argument that attempts to redefine charity really is. To paraphrase:
I been living a lie then, Open source is a huge lie according to Microsoft. All my money goes in to the flag ship of capitalism, "Steve Ballmer for president of Iraq 2009".
"Microsoft responded aggressively, saying that 'there is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity.'" Well... I do. Besides, software is basically only something that makes your hardware work. It's no suprise that hardware companies like IBM use open source software to support their sales. We're entering an age where computer- and hardware manufacturerers no longer really need Redmond to make their products attractive to the public. As this trend continues, we will see more hardware vendors switching to open source, simply because it makes more economic sense. I think the phrase 'open source doesn't mean fee of charge' is way overused, because for the most part, it is.
I can only assume you're trolling, and I *know* I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I have a personal beef against Office 2007 thanks to one "just ride the gravy train and do / know jack" schmuck of an IT guy...
Maybe, on high-end hardware. My wife's school has a bunch of old Dells, and Office 2003 was sluggish, but acceptable on them. The school's IT guy decided in the middle of the school year to install Office 2007 school-wide, without telling anyone. Nice. So the software is slower than a dying dog, and now the UI's so different that all the teachers who had only finally figured out where everything was under the old Office paradigm are crippled in their productivity by this weird "ribbon" garbage. Which, incidentally, is quite the hog in terms of screen real estate when you've only got 1024x768 or less to play with.
Based on what? If it's slower to load, and includes things you don't need, that would seem to be bloat...?
No more so than Office 2000, which, while no winner of any beauty awards, at least we were used to. And see my comment above about the unusability of the ribbon interface on smaller monitors.
This New! Improved! And Innovative! interface resulted in numerous half-bald teachers at my wife's school. Due to tearing their hair out trying to get things done, I mean.
I hesitate to even get into this one much, but the troubles with MSO 2007 file incompatibility with older installations, or the problems with "compatibility" mode using older file formats within MSO 2007, has been documented to some length elsewhere on the web.
So there. Food for the troll, maybe, but at least I've gotten some things off my chest. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
What makes it even more amazing is that one of the most successful FOSS projects out there originated in his own back yard.
siener's youtube channel
But they can't afford to break backward compatibility in a big way, this would prevent them to force upgrades onto their customers. Imagine auto-update disabling ALL your applications?
Now they can keep their revenue going by forcing their customers on a smooth, not so steep but continuous upgrade cycle.
And there are different people. While America is a democracy (yet) M$ and such should lay low and look out for people's opinions. In Africa there are mostly corrupt autocracies and corpotations may do whatever they please. I'm much surprised, really, that Microsoft answered so politely. Heck, even in Russia we have a number of court rulings against M$. They just ignore them outright! What could you say about Africa then?
I took the trouble to see the video, and she knows what she's talking about.
Sometimes I think we'll win this one, despite all the billions that MS is stuffing into continuing its corruption. I really thank P.J. and the likes of her that keep dragging MS and related scum from under their rocks into the light. I think that is what's eventually going to finish off MS type business practices.
Bart
Without patents, the result will be predictable: most people will keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret.
You can't keep an algorithm secret since it's so simple to disassemble code.
In the same way that patents don't help in pharmaceuticals these days either since mass spectroscopy makes it (relatively) simple to work out what a drug is composed of.
The idea that patents protect us against those who would keep recipes secret belongs in the age of the alchemist.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
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http://www.vim.org/iccf/
http://www.iccf.nl/ Just in case anyone is interested (and can't use vim).
"Charityware" - can you imagine them mooks in Seattle trying to pronounce that.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
It isn't that hard to go from a stripped executable to an algorithm.
First, most debuggers support anti-anti-debugging tricks, to be able to watch even 'protected' software execute, like game copy protection, etc. This means there usually are no technical hurdles in your way.
Then it's simply a matter of finding the last time before the algorithm is called and the first time after it is. That'll be a finite amount of program and you 'merely' have to go through it. You know what data it needs (the raw data) and the output. Put a watch on the data, and on where it'll store the result.
If a computer can do it, a computer can watch it being done. Any number of times, identically, which helps.
Your argument is fallacious. There is a well know contract to allow other companies to use commercial secrets: it's called non-disclosure agreement (NDA). So, it is possible to use the secret code if you really want to. What software patents really do is to prevent the independent discovery.
You don't need patents to make money... Many companies make a lot of money and pay large numbers of staff without having any patents.
Patents grant an artificial monopoly in a small area, which causes companies to sit back and rest on their laurels, they hire less programmers because there is less need to improve their products as there are no competitors. And since there are no competitors, then there won't be any programmers being hired to write competing applications either.
Patents benefit a single company (the patent holder) at the expense of the rest of the industry and consumers.
As for getting software for "free", there are plenty of other ways to make money, and a lot of them require (or are made more efficient by) software... For instance, companies that produce hardware (which cannot be given away free, as it has an ongoing unit cost) need software to make their hardware useful, and are more than willing to employ programmers to write it. Similarly consultancy companies will hire programmers to implement custom applications for their clients, and provide bugfixes to existing applications if they have the source. There are plenty of examples of successful companies using both these business models.
Software is a logical component to be given away for free, it only has up front costs, no ongoing costs of continued distribution. Also with open source the up front costs become considerably lower as a large amount of code is already available, so even new applications can reuse some parts and don't need to be written entirely from scratch.
It's a lot cheaper for a company to give away software than it is to give away physical goods, and yet many companies give away costly physical goods as a method of drumming up business. Obviously the goods given away must be worth considerably less than the goods sold, but this is the case with software.
Programmers don't need to rely on sales of shrinkwrap software, you're clinging to a very shaky business model that is almost certain to get relegated to small niche markets eventually.
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That's not what software patents do.
Software patents cover an idea, not a piece of code. Here's an idea: "write information to a digital medium over a network." See how broad this is? If you code something that does what my patent describes, you'll have to license with me. The idea itself is out there anyhow, because it's part of the problem your product is solving. The customer knows the problem and can see your idea and thus your product solving it, so that's not secret in any meaningful way.
Now for the implementation. How exactly is it solved? This should be part of the patent, but often it's not or in such broad terms that anything falls under it. The actual code is copyrighted. You cannot use or distribute code or the applications built with it if you're not licensed by the creator.
Without software patents, you can make different code that solves that same problem in a different (better?) way. The code is protected and can be licensed either way.
Another example is Amazon's infamous single click to buy shopping cart. Besides the blatant obviousness of this idea, there's another problem: if this patent holds, no-one can create a shopping cart that has one click buying, without licensing with Amazon. So, my small time basement startup cannot have a decent online shop without paying up. This does stifle innovation.
Idea: "compress files to a smaller size using compression algorithms." Let's say the Zip people hold this one (I know there aren't any "zip people" but let's assume for the sake of argument.) Would there be Rar? Would there be bz? Or 7z? Or arj? Or mp3?
In short, we don't need software patents to cover code because it's already protected by copyright, and you can make people pay for using it. We don't want it for software ideas either, because that stifles innovation, keeping me from implementing something in a better way.
>>>"Microsoft responded aggressively, saying that 'there is no such thing as free software">>"a polite tirade against 'hackers', meaning the proper meaning, not the criminal one. They didn't want them"
Had I been at that event, I probably would have yelled out, "That's okay! We hackers don't want you either!" and left the auditorium with a box of free pizza.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
>>>"Microsoft responded aggressively, saying that 'there is no such thing as free software"
He forgot to add: "no such thing as free software... unless you steal it."
. MS-DOS (from a young programmer)
. MS-BASIC (from a local club)
. Windows NT (from IBM)
. Windows 95 (from Mac's Finder OS, trashcan and all)
. Internet Explorer (thus killing Netscape & spinning-off antitrust court hearings)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Faster than all its competition. Wordperfect is faster, older versions of msoffice are faster, openoffice is faster, koffice is faster... Some of these things are subjective (ie openoffice gets very slow with huge documents, but word crashes with the same files on the same system)... bloated
Nope. When 95% of users use 5% of features that's bloat. The vast majority of users could get along just fine with a much smaller application. ugly
Matter of opinion, I guess. I think you're thinking of Office 2003, which was most certainly ugly. True, matter of opinion... functionality is more important than appearance. difficult to use
Nope, Office 2007 has a new interface that's easier to use than any Office version before it. Thus the innovation. Ease of use is subjective...
To a new user who has never used such applications before, 2007 would be easier to pick up...
To a new user KDE or OSX are also much easier to pick up than windows...
However most people already have experience with windows and office 2003 and earlier and are familiar with it. People hate change, anything different is perceived as hard and will meet resistance. This is a significant factor helping keep microsoft in business. and buggy
Nope. How can you dismiss this? It is undeniable that all software has bugs, and especially something as large as msoffice is absolutely full of them. Ask anyone who uses it on a daily basis, and they will have stories of strange behavior and weird things they need to do to make supposedly simple things work. Most people seem to accept such things as normal, they think it's normal for a computer to crash and need to be rebooted on a regular basis, or to have to do strange things to get round problems.
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FUCK YOU MICROSOFT!!!
When Shuttleworth started Ubuntu, it was to not the South African people deal with your bullshit anymore. Take your shit, and get the fuck out of my country. You attention-starved, bi-polar, ex-convict!
"Instead of relying on people wanting to use their platform, they try to trap them into it..."
As a MS Vista/Linux user I know what you mean, but in a larger perspective, one in which the Minister is operating this is beside the point, since it will always be the business of business to make money.
The Minister is spot on in that a country like South Africa is burdened by widespread poverty, lack of educational opportunities for technical advancement and must largely rely software that delivers the greatest efficiency for the least cost. They clearly have no choice but to seek to promote a software-creation playing field that lowers the cost of participation. They can hardly fund their own pension systems, much less that of Bill Gates, not that Mr. Gates has not donated significant personal funds to fight AIDS in South Africa.
While it might be said that the US and hence its corporations like MS would benefit from continuing to pursue a stranglehold on patents and insisting increased prominence in patents in international trade deals, this approach actually overlooks a fundamental vulnerability the US has in that to pursue this approach tends to increase poverty and hopelessness in countries such as South Africa and consequently, slowly but surely adds to political instability and political realignments. Yes, some would argue that we should get our profits out first at all costs before we concern ourselves with such issues. However, in the long haul we actually have more to gain in seeing a prosperous South Africa that is disposed toward good relations with American corporations than one that is resentful of it. The sad truth is that it is precisely this kind of neglect that is increasing the role of the People's Republic of China and Europe as South Africa's business partners to the detriment of longterm US interests.
When MS declines to accept an open standard only to create a "standard of their own" in an attempt to continue their control over the process of business to business, business to government/government to business, and government to government computerized communication of data, it only serves to further destabilize a country that can not afford to pay for the use of such "standards". This undermines the broader interests of the United States, which is more than just making sure its corporations make extra money whenever possible (Although, admittedly it would be hard to tell by only looking at so many of our politicans eagerly accepting kickbacks and perks for doing so).
No doubt the current adminisration or its extension (vis a vis McCain or Clinton) will fail to recognize this, just as they see staying in Iraq, because it benefits our defence contractors and corporate oil titans, as somehow good for America. I suspect this will be just another step in the long steady march toward America shrinking into the sunset. By failing to take a more open stance toward software development, Microsoft is only setting itself up for ultimamte failure. You can already see this in other countries such as India, who have rejected MS's "standard". Soon, only the US will use such "standards" and "patents" and we will be the ones paying more than everyone else for the privilege these types of inter-institutional kinds of data "regulated/standardized" kinds of exchange and software. At that point innovation and leadership will have migrated elsewhere.
I'm a South African living in Europe. I did a long hard look at the SA IT market last year as I was considering moving back to SA. Having just read the speech, which is much the same as many other politicians in other countries have made, as well as having read the responses written by various South Africans on the forum of mybroadband.co.za, I kind of feel depressed. It just never ceases to simply amaze me what a bunch of clueless morons my countrymen are, no matter what their skin colour (in case someone was going to mention race). There are a few that notice that, on the face of it, the idea that software patents are highly damaging and restrictive to the software market (they might not be if there laws governing licensing but in general, patents are mostly used to restrict competition, isn't that so, Bill Gates?), but for the most part, white South Africans, in spite of being the home country of Mark Shuttleworth, will mindlessly criticize anything that anyone from the government says.
White South Africans are terribly bitter about the fact that legal employment quotas mean that it's very difficult for a white to get a job. The problem with white South Africans is that, as a corollary, will see: Microsoft good, Government bad. This, despite the fact that there are almost guaranteed to be almost no South Africans that could actually afford a retail version of Windows, much less a retail version of Office (South Africans are dumb enough to think that the cracked Windows and Office on their low quality packard bell computers are free.), given that the South African currency lost even more against the Euro this last year than the Dollar did.
The sad thing is that they are, to a tiny point, right. The South African government is so corrupt and so occupied with internal power struggles that the no national Linux system will ever be installed and the education system is so poor (10 year Delphi, of all things, as a standard), that no real development will ever get done.
It breaks my heart to see my country being ruined by its goverment and its population.
Picking nits...
Windows NT (from DEC) - they even grabbed the VMS team
- chrish
People also keep patents secret, in the hope that someone will implement them without realizing and open themselves up to a lawsuit, or they demand ridiculous levels of royalties for it effectively burying the tech and preventing all but the richest players from even considering it. Quite often they won't... Look at Microsoft, they rarely try anything new, they just move aggressively into an already established market.
Holding a patent closed can stifle a technology, such that only large companies could afford to license it, and they are too conservative to take that risk on something new.
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Well said...
You have to keep innovating to stay ahead, once a product become a commodity the cheap knockoffs can catch up.
The problem is that companies want to maintain a monopoly on areas that long ago should have been commoditized, without doing any new innovation, and they have the money and power to force this to happen.
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At this point their best bet is, as you say, a clean break. I'm not convinced it would have to be all that painful though.
They COULD just mark the existing API as depricated and make the new API available in a transitional version (or 2). The depricated API could be handled by anything from a virtualized copy of XP to a thin shim layer. After all, Wine more or less manages it when shimming up with an entirely different OS and doesn't even have the advantage of being able to incorporate or even look at the emulated OS's code.
We know at one time they managed to thunk the old stuff together with 32 bit code with no more pain that the XP to Vista transition is already causing. Given that, an API transition now wouldn't even be a first for them.
That leaves us with either paralysis at the architecture level or that they're too busy making sure the OS does NOT do what the user wants to take time out to write a shim.
You have pretty much the same philosophy I do on the subject (especially the bits about SQL and .net) Microsoft shouldn't be considered evil for being the market leader, but they deserve the lumps they get for not focusing as much on innovating and simply re-packaging other people's software. I've always sort of had a problem with people thinking 'big' means 'bad' but microsoft will lose the advantages of being 'big' if they continue to be 'bad' in the innovation department.
On the Vista front, they had a few good ideas, but they should be a little more sensitive to who their customers are. Big businesses, who replace hardware on a cycle cannot follow microsoft through a 'we don't support that brand new hardware' cycle if said hardware (like NVidia mobile devices) is part of the latest batch of shipping high-middle-end laptops and desktops off the shelf at the OEMs. I can definitely condone breaking BACKWARD compatibility, but drivers for stuff that just came off the assembly line, considered industry standard at the time the software ships, should be most certainly supported. I think this is where microsoft went wrong on vista
Speak for yourself.
I will have to aggree with the this point in the fact that Mac OS X isn't entirely new. it melds some pretty old ideas. NeXt, Mach, and BSD . but this doens't mean that you shouldn't start forsaking compatibilities (emphasis on the plural) for increased security (and potentials there of ) and functionality as well (EG: the below QT/KDE example). Note how most of these examples started working ont the new stuff long before they released it (like PY3k)
Good question.
There, you have answered it yourself.
NDA is not as effective it only protects against 2nd party disclosure. If the 2nd party discloses to a 3rd party (or publishes in the open), there is no recourse against 3rd parties. So information ends up getting guarded very carefullly against any but the most necessary disclosure. Patents are supposed to make flow of information free (as in speech).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
What about the parts of the code that only get called to handle freaky coincidences? Code that processes structured data is one thing. Code that handles real-world data (mm games) are quite another.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Yeah that could be a problem for Microsoft. ;)
After all their Vista code has no bugs, security flaws and memory leaks.
Its been debugged completely.
When you get to the stage where Vista is at the moment, its best to just break compatibility.
I shudder to think about the age of massive amounts of code and how much extra code is there just for compatibility.
The Windows API has plenty of wierd and bizarre quirks. Just ask the Wine guys.
Everyone is very very smart and yet they fail to be technological leaders. Hmmmmmmmm. The Peter Principle maybe; In such a huge organization there is a spot for everyone to be incompetent in no matter how smart you are.
Honestly. I am curious.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's sort of like the QA process, identifying edge cases. You follow the routine through enough to get a rough idea of what it does with standard input.
Then you vary the inputs looking to trigger new code paths, usually by reverse engineering from the branches that aren't taken.
We're talking about an algorithm here. Not the specific code, but the process the program takes to do something. When you can see the data at every stage it's pretty easy to understand what's going on. Nothing on your computer (short of Palladium and such) is really hidden.
For online games or such, you'd play the game while snapshotting memory every so often, waiting to trigger the algorithm you were interested in. Just record whatever external things are going on then that the program could want to check (watch and see, record again with more info) and feed them back like a testing mock.
There is a limited supply of electricity in RSA. Regularly power is switched off for entire cities for up to 3 hours at a time, on for 2 hours and then off again. In 1998 as a kid I said the government can not plan for the long-term and they would not be able to uphold the infrastructure as they would not invest in it as that requires seeking long-term rewards rather than short-term rewards. Eskom is the national supplier of power, that is holding not only software companies back but the whole economy. If there is no power, there is no business at all. Furthermore, anti-white policies is prevalent, it is so bad that most white engineers have left the country and after 13 years of so called democracy (where people vote based on the colour of their skin for the corrupt ANC) there are not enough qualified engineers to fix the problems. Viva ANC. .. (let's * this country up good)
This is my sig.
Bloat is absolutely and completely subjective. I like programs to be as powerful as necessary to perform, and if they manage to keep those extra features hidden, they're not bloat to me. Do you consider Ubuntu bloated for including an executable named libpng12-config (example of questionable quality. Replace with a largely unused command) which 99% of all users may never run? I don't. It's 2.3k and it probably won't get in my way.
In my book, the same goes for Office 12/2007. Most users probably won't require half of it's functionality. You don't usually need to work with references when writing a letter and you may not need all that mailing functions to write a book. Those functions don't get in your way, though. In terms of screen real estate we're talking about some 20-25 pixels height to switch between 8 function sets - space you could hardly save by removing a few features. The new interface may not be what most people are used to, but it does a hugely better job hiding unneeded extra features than Office's old layout.
> So? "Less" ideas is not the same as "no" ideas. And no one argues that the current patent system is not broken (and is, therefore, often sidestepped).
Theres a point at which it does such a lousy job that one makes a valid point that it costs more than it benefits society. I'm a firm believer in the patent system, AND the copyright system, yet both seem to me to be so broken as to create more negative effects on invention and creativity than they do contribute to them.
Thats why I asked to be pointed to a software patent that actually contains the tenet of patents: reproducibility. If it doesn't actually explain how to reproduce the claimed invention, of what use is it when it expired and is free to the public?
"Old man yells at systemd"