Somebody needs to pay you for something True enough, but information is not a "thing" in any natural sense. Physical goods are finite, if I make a wooden table I consume wood that I can't then use to make a chair. Physical services are finite, if I do something for one person I consume time and energy that I cannot give to someone else. The "cost" of production is measured by what existed for use before the production but not after.
Information on the other hand, does not consume any material or service in it's production. The medium of transport may consume material (disks) or services (bandwidth), but that is not required by the duplication of the information. Giving my information to one person and making him keep it secret would cost me a set amount, lets call it "x". Giving my information to one person and letting him give it again to whomever he wants, still costs me "x", and no more. Writing a book and posting it online with DRM costs me "x". Writing that same book and posting it online under a CreativeCommons license, still costs me "x". So long as I am compensated by "x", then I am being paid for what I produced.
The issue is that in our current economy, you don't charge "x", you charge "y" for every copy "n" of your information that somebody gets, such that hopefully "y*n >= x". This only works if you can make sure that you get you "y" for every "n" out there. To that end we create copyrights, saying that every "n" has to come from you, so that you can collect your "y".
If we simply paid you "x" in the first place, then you wouldn't need to care about the size of "n", because it wouldn't change what you got paid. That is how most goods are made and sold. If I build a car, I get paid "x" for my time and materials that I lost in building it, and I don't care about who uses the car, or how many people use it, or where and how it gets used. Even with the creation of information, if I design a brochure layout for my employer, write a tech doc, or produce a training video, my employer pays me "x". I don't care how many copies of the brochure they make, who reads the tech doc, or how many people watch the training video, I have been compensated for my costs regardless.
because it's not your job to make sure they create something else. It's also not our job to make sure they can live comfortably without working for 70+ years.
It's theirs to do with as they may, and no law you made should be able to take that away from them. And no law stops them from doing whatever the like with what they create. The law stops you and I from doing whatever *we* like with our copy.
why should you get something from them for free? Nobody says we should. What people want is to be able to do whatever they want with that something *after* the artist has been compensated for it's creation.
why would you bother creating anything yourself? Because artists like to create. Most musicians and visual artists in the world today get little or no compensation for their creations, yet they continue to create. Historically, artists have almost never been given decent compensation for the act of creation, and yet history is full of some of the best art (visual and musical) ever created, certainly better than most of the crap we're getting from millionaire artists these days. Inventors will continue to invent without patents, and artists will continue to create without copyrights, because that is who they are.
Gnome is actually going the opposite direction in some respects. They are moving gnome-dependencies into GTK packages, I remember printing from a while ago, and now gnome-vfs is being deprecated in favor of a GTK equivalent. Many GTK programs from Gnome already run on non-gnome, even non-linux environments. I have several GTK applications running under Windows (Gimp, Pidgin, Dia, etc.), and hopefully this move will make others available (Evolution would make me very happy).
I don't know if KDE4 is moving things into QT libs or not, but I would think KIO and KParts (the API at least) could be moved into QT.
That hinders adoption because you cant say "Ok in Linux to change setting A, click Start->Control Panel->widget. That is why most of the help you find is along the lines of "Copy the below text into your terminal", because by and large most distros are the same at the terminal level. This has the added benefit of being a single instruction, instead of a series of "Are you there yet? ok, now..." instructions, and it doesn't rely on possibly confusing terms (i.e. "How can I click on your computer?" when you tell someone to "Click on My Computer"). And if you think you can use the same point-and-click instructions from win95/98 in 2000, 2000 in XP or XP in Vista you're sadly mistaken.
Create a distro that completely abstracts the system configuration and provides a consistant interface. We already have freedesktop.org and LSB, they're not perfect, but for the most part they provide a common configuration for all distros. With those two, you can do just about everything you need to "help" someone without caring what distro it is.
Heck call it Linux so people will finally have one OS they can call Linux and be sure that my Linux is the same as your Linux. I don't want my Linux to be the same as your Linux. I want my Linux the way I want it, regardless of how you want yours. I don't even wany my Ubuntu to be the same as someone else's Ubuntu, I want it _my_ way. Why should you have a say in how I use my OS?
Make (real)Linux or said distro completely Windows compatible, hey if can convince someone that all there apps will run on a OS cheaper then Windows, you can bother them with all the cool Linux features latter That's like saying we should make airplanes completely compatible with cars. If you want to use the same UI as everyone else, and you want it to be 100% compatible with Windows, then use Windows. That's much easier than turning Linux into Windows. People should use Linux when they don't want to use Windows, they shouldn't use Linux if they want to use Windows. Linux isn't a "cheap windows", just ask Microsoft's TCO marketing. Linux is a better OS, that is _not_ windows, that just happens to be available for little or no money (from *some* distributors).
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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Because then it wouldn't work on BSD or Solaris, which is also why X has it's own Keyboard and Mouse drivers, because not all kernels that X was designed for provided APIs for them.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Look, I know this is the standard FOSS fanboy answer to any criticisms about anything and everything, but it's gotten tiresome - it doesn't actually address the criticism at all. The implication is that if you know enough about X to be able to say it is bad, then surely you know enough to offer an improvement.
Re:My only suggestion for X
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You shouldn't need a file to say what resolution your monitor can do If you have a monitor that can tell X what it can do, then you don't need anything in your config file. I've only had to set them in my xorg.conf when I was running xvnc with no monitor attached (it defaulted to 800x600 I think, but I wanted a higher resolution).
X.Org 7.4 doesn't even seem to need a config file at all.
But wouldn't that just accelerate the demise of those journals, since then there would be little reason to subscribe? Only if the only value those journals add is distribution. They will still provide a very important role in aggregating articles of interest, so you're not digging through hundreds that you don't care about. They can also provide a forum for criticism and defense of articles.
Distribution is easy money, because you don't have to create anything to gain profit, so I'm sure many of these journals will be upset by this new way of doing things, just like the RIAA companies are upset by even legal music download. In the end, laziness is a poor business model, and if you don't add value to a product you won't survive in an internet economy.
I think their theory is that journals that don't allow this will have to change their policy, as they wouldn't want to lose out on publishing articles from Harvard profs.
No, the GPL is a distribution license. You can require copyright assignment before you include someone else's code into your codebase. For example, if you contribute to a GNU or Apache project, you have to assign them copyright of your code before they will include it in their distribution.
The problem Linux has with the GPLv3 is that Linus never required copyright assignment from people contributing to Linux, so when people gave him their code it was under the GPLv2, and that is the only license he could distribute it under, he wasn't given permission to distribute that code under GPLv3.
I don't know the legal ramifications or how the GPL stands on it but it seems to me that if it's GPLed and others contribute code the code then can't be closed, they could sell it with a commercial license but the GPL would allow anyone else to sell it commercially as well. It depends on how you accept contributions. If you require copyright assignment, then you can re-license the contribution however you see fit, because the author has given you the right to copy. This is what Apache and the FSF do.
They posit an idea, the internet declares whether or not the idea is a good one, and suggests where the flaws are if it has any. It's a bad idea, I suggest the flaw is in the genetics of the ignorant blow-hards running the RIAA.
Then they know where to focus their attention I don't think they're listening.
Who's got the computing power to run this thing? Lawrence Livermore? Sandia? Yeah, I think they've got a few more important things to spin their supercomputers on than protecting RIAA copyrights. They can use distributed computing, like SETI@Home.
They get copyright laws passed requiring every computer to have this software, which will download a portion of their copyrighted material, then they know for a fact that everybody is either infringing some copyright or breaking copyright law by not installing the RIAA@Home software. Either way, everybody can be sued, and it saves them a bundle on discovery.
They had a technical guy, then they found out he had the code to their program in on his workstation _and_ in version control, so they sued him for copyright infringement.
As if that weren't bad enough, they found out that their lawyers made _two_ copies of all their contracts, and even gave one away to the other party, so they had to sue him for copyright infringement too.
Or maybe someone'd come out with an open-source CPU--by the time that they'd be able to implement such a thing, those desktop fabrication plants would probably be capable of wrangling silicon. Somebody already mentioned Sun's new Sparc chips, but there are far more than just that:
That only works if the application is something the competitor would sell. If it's an internal support or management app, and the company sells fruit, there's little chance of you getting them on copyright infringement.
In that case, still GPL but retain copyright. Then make the code so good that your competitors incorporate it into their business processes (if your app targets an under-provided niche market, this is pretty likely to happen). Then you can close the source, and they have to either change products (painful), stay with the old GPL version (less painful at first, but gets more painful as time goes on), or purchase upgrades under your new closed-source license (ego-bruising, but usually less painful).
Everything the company does, it does to make a profit, however indirectly. That, really, is the definition of a company: a bunch of people working together to make money. That code, whatever it did, is part of a profit-making enterprise. And the people who paid him to write it believe that some such code is useful to make money.
It therefore follows that they believe that their competition needs such code also.
How are they going to feel when he suggests giving it to the competition? For free? I have witnessed this first hand in several companies, so it is true that this opinion exists. I wouldn't agree that the opinion is correct, though.
What I found amusing, however, is one company I worked for that purchased a proprietary product, then actually _paid_ for enhancements to be made, knowing full well that their competitors would get the enhancements as part of the next upgrade, which my company would also be paying for. So essentially my company was paying to help a competitor, which is actually worse than contributing to open source.
You can make the same argument about using most closed-source products, anything you tell them to improve or fix will be given to your competitors, the only way to avoid that is to use only in-house products. But then you end up spending more on developing and supporting products that are not a part of your profit stream. What rational company would develop their own in-house operating system, just to avoid helping a competitor, when they are not in the business of making and selling operating systems?
Probably the best option is to get the company to GPL the code, but to retain copyright ownership of it. That way you and others can use it outside of the company, even contribute code back to the company. If it becomes popular, the company can sell it under a commercial license as well. You win, your company wins, and you company's competitors are not likely to start using it because it would leave them vulnerable to the desires of their competitor.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but I pay that cost when I distribute information, it doesn't cost the original author anything for me to distribute it.
Information on the other hand, does not consume any material or service in it's production. The medium of transport may consume material (disks) or services (bandwidth), but that is not required by the duplication of the information. Giving my information to one person and making him keep it secret would cost me a set amount, lets call it "x". Giving my information to one person and letting him give it again to whomever he wants, still costs me "x", and no more. Writing a book and posting it online with DRM costs me "x". Writing that same book and posting it online under a CreativeCommons license, still costs me "x". So long as I am compensated by "x", then I am being paid for what I produced.
The issue is that in our current economy, you don't charge "x", you charge "y" for every copy "n" of your information that somebody gets, such that hopefully "y*n >= x". This only works if you can make sure that you get you "y" for every "n" out there. To that end we create copyrights, saying that every "n" has to come from you, so that you can collect your "y".
If we simply paid you "x" in the first place, then you wouldn't need to care about the size of "n", because it wouldn't change what you got paid. That is how most goods are made and sold. If I build a car, I get paid "x" for my time and materials that I lost in building it, and I don't care about who uses the car, or how many people use it, or where and how it gets used. Even with the creation of information, if I design a brochure layout for my employer, write a tech doc, or produce a training video, my employer pays me "x". I don't care how many copies of the brochure they make, who reads the tech doc, or how many people watch the training video, I have been compensated for my costs regardless.
If only it were possible to provide a list of other servers that somehow mirrored the data available on the central server....
Or, even better, a way to send requests to the same domain name to physically different servers...
I think I may be on to something here.
Both of those are invalidated by prior art.
You're in violation of my patent: "Means an apparatus for the use of an electronic forum to copyright the word copyright", please pay up.
Gnome is actually going the opposite direction in some respects. They are moving gnome-dependencies into GTK packages, I remember printing from a while ago, and now gnome-vfs is being deprecated in favor of a GTK equivalent. Many GTK programs from Gnome already run on non-gnome, even non-linux environments. I have several GTK applications running under Windows (Gimp, Pidgin, Dia, etc.), and hopefully this move will make others available (Evolution would make me very happy).
I don't know if KDE4 is moving things into QT libs or not, but I would think KIO and KParts (the API at least) could be moved into QT.
Because then it wouldn't work on BSD or Solaris, which is also why X has it's own Keyboard and Mouse drivers, because not all kernels that X was designed for provided APIs for them.
X.Org 7.4 doesn't even seem to need a config file at all.
Distribution is easy money, because you don't have to create anything to gain profit, so I'm sure many of these journals will be upset by this new way of doing things, just like the RIAA companies are upset by even legal music download. In the end, laziness is a poor business model, and if you don't add value to a product you won't survive in an internet economy.
I think their theory is that journals that don't allow this will have to change their policy, as they wouldn't want to lose out on publishing articles from Harvard profs.
Do you know what driver it's using?
No, the GPL is a distribution license. You can require copyright assignment before you include someone else's code into your codebase. For example, if you contribute to a GNU or Apache project, you have to assign them copyright of your code before they will include it in their distribution.
The problem Linux has with the GPLv3 is that Linus never required copyright assignment from people contributing to Linux, so when people gave him their code it was under the GPLv2, and that is the only license he could distribute it under, he wasn't given permission to distribute that code under GPLv3.
Me:*Click on perfectly legal MP3 file to download*
Rhythmbox: Adds to playlist and plays.
I don't see the problem...
They get copyright laws passed requiring every computer to have this software, which will download a portion of their copyrighted material, then they know for a fact that everybody is either infringing some copyright or breaking copyright law by not installing the RIAA@Home software. Either way, everybody can be sued, and it saves them a bundle on discovery.
They had a technical guy, then they found out he had the code to their program in on his workstation _and_ in version control, so they sued him for copyright infringement.
As if that weren't bad enough, they found out that their lawyers made _two_ copies of all their contracts, and even gave one away to the other party, so they had to sue him for copyright infringement too.
It's hard being the RIAA.
http://www.opencores.org/
You don't even need to fabricate them yourself, an FPGA is all you need.
Yeah, but good luck getting it into the Debian repos.
That only works if the application is something the competitor would sell. If it's an internal support or management app, and the company sells fruit, there's little chance of you getting them on copyright infringement.
In that case, still GPL but retain copyright. Then make the code so good that your competitors incorporate it into their business processes (if your app targets an under-provided niche market, this is pretty likely to happen). Then you can close the source, and they have to either change products (painful), stay with the old GPL version (less painful at first, but gets more painful as time goes on), or purchase upgrades under your new closed-source license (ego-bruising, but usually less painful).
It therefore follows that they believe that their competition needs such code also.
How are they going to feel when he suggests giving it to the competition? For free? I have witnessed this first hand in several companies, so it is true that this opinion exists. I wouldn't agree that the opinion is correct, though.
What I found amusing, however, is one company I worked for that purchased a proprietary product, then actually _paid_ for enhancements to be made, knowing full well that their competitors would get the enhancements as part of the next upgrade, which my company would also be paying for. So essentially my company was paying to help a competitor, which is actually worse than contributing to open source.
You can make the same argument about using most closed-source products, anything you tell them to improve or fix will be given to your competitors, the only way to avoid that is to use only in-house products. But then you end up spending more on developing and supporting products that are not a part of your profit stream. What rational company would develop their own in-house operating system, just to avoid helping a competitor, when they are not in the business of making and selling operating systems?
Probably the best option is to get the company to GPL the code, but to retain copyright ownership of it. That way you and others can use it outside of the company, even contribute code back to the company. If it becomes popular, the company can sell it under a commercial license as well. You win, your company wins, and you company's competitors are not likely to start using it because it would leave them vulnerable to the desires of their competitor.