Slashdot is run by a drooling imbecile that doesn't know the difference between "then" and "than"; do you really want to get definitions of words here?
There are plenty of good, free reference sites out there that anyone can use to unlock the secrets of there/their/they're, affect/effect, that/which, and many other mysteries that have baffled the illiterate since the beginning of time. That very few people who read Slashdot use such resources indicates to me that the Internet has changed nothing, and humanity is still in need of extermination.
"I could care less" is clearly not sarcasm. No one who has ever said it in my presence has ever said it with any hint of sarcasm. When I have asked people why they said "I could care less", instead of the sensical "I could NOT care less", they have typically replied that they never actually thought about the literal meaning of the expression. I have never seen an instance of "I could care less" on television where the speaker was showing any "sarcastic tendencies"; I wouldn't be surprised if the scripts actually read "I couldn't care less".
I have noticed that the more intelligent someone is, the more likely they are to use the proper expression. You know, people who actually think about what they're saying. (Please note that I'm not attempting to make any claims about my intelligence.)
In one instance, someone, after a long, embarrassing silence, came up with the excuse that he was practicing "irony or, err, umm, sarcasm". No one at the table was convinced. It's a strange coincidence that there is a similar expression, a mere word (or contraction) off, that actually means what this person meant to mean.
All that said, Amazon.com lists many books by Steven Pinker; is there one that addresses this issue in particular?
This improper usage is the real symptom of the death of literacy, not the inability to spell that we see on Slashdot every day. Like the mass of people that are unaware that "I could care less" means precisely the opposite of what they're trying to say, Cliff wrote "massive strives" because it bears a phonetic resemblance to an expression he's heard before. He's a child screaming "vroom vroom" as he wiggles the steering wheel and jerks the gear shift of his mom's car. It's worse than that, because he has deluded himself into thinking that he's actually driving.
He writes "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer," predicting the death of the American software engineering establishment. His predictions don't come true, so he writes another book called -- you can guess, right? -- "The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer" explaining how disaster was narrowly averted thanks to people following his sage advice.
An isolated incident? No, it's a congenital personality flaw. He later wrote "Time Bomb 2000" and moved out to the American Southwest after withdrawing his funds from financial institutions. His prediction: near doomsday. And after nothing happened? In an interview, he had two replies: 1. I guess people listened to what I was saying and 2. the shit can still hit the fan.
What makes you think that any of these people have any interest in working on Linux of IA-64? And who are you to tell them what they should be interested in?
The GPL will become increasingly irrelevant as people change their conception of software. Increasingly, as you said, software isn't thought of as a thing but as a service. What happens when the reality that the Corel CEO describes comes to be, and you never see the code that implements the Net Present Value feature in your spreadsheet, because it's all tied together via some XML-based RPC mechanism? You'll pay a one-time fee for permanent access to the service, or a subscription for access over a given time period, or a one-time fee for a single use of the NPV feature.
You used to need the source code to use a product, because Unices aren't binary compatible. With Java, and wider binary compatibility, you can often get by with only object code today. Now -- thanks to the Internet -- and increasingly so in the future, you won't even need object code to do processing.
Anyway, the point is that the next software business model will hold users hostage just as much as the current one does, but instead of selling object code, you'll be selling access.
And there's nothing the GPL can do about it. I can use nothing but GPL'd software to create a service that I then charge for access to through the web or an XML interface or whatever.
As some of you mentioned, I'm not saying anything about the truth or falsehood of the writer's beliefs (the writer of the anti-SimCity article, not the Slashdot poster). I'm saying that sometimes a game is simply a game and it's crazy to confuse an entertaining game with ideological brainwashing.
SimCity is one of a family of games where the player assumes the role of a god-like overseer who can (within the constraints of the game) mold the world to his wishes. If SimCity is Communist (or Collectivist, to keep up with the Ayn Rand theme), then playing Civilization is Fascist and perhaps even genocidal.
So like I said, the nuts who think that SimCity is a danger to our glorious cpaitalist utopia are equivalent to the nuts who think that dressing up like a witch on October 31st is toying with the occult.
As Justice Louis D. Brandeis said, "...the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
Don't take this personally, but most of you don't have the critical reasoning skills to think your way out of a paper bag. Am I being harsh? Yes, but someone has to fight the Tyranny of the Self-Righteously Stupid.
I am constantly amazed that the morons on Slashdot moderate up posts like yours, posts that do nothing but point out the obvious caveats that go along with any non-dissertation length post.
Of course software, like (almost) every other type of asset, depreciates over time. Is writing program like having a perpetual license to print an infinite amount of money? No. Do clients' needs change over time, giving developers opportunities to do follow-on projects? Yes.
But the fact -- uncontested by you -- is that without proprietary software, programmers' compensation structures look like this:
pay = hours_worked * hourly_rate
In other words, you are a high-paid burger flipper. You may boost your hourly rate because you are a damn fast burger flipper, but there are only so many hours in a day for you to stand in front of the grill.
How does Microsoft make so much money? By capturing labor in an asset (software) and selling it to millions of people. A neutron bomb could go off in Redmond, WA, killing every Microsoft employee, and yet Microsoft would still be worth billions of dollars, because the software can still be sold, some of it perhaps for years to come.
If the staff of an advertising agency or a law firm or RedHat was wiped out, the value of the company would be zero, because revenue is proportional to services provided by employees.
Setting aside your probable dislike of Microsoft (hey, as someone who bleeds six colors, I consider them Evil Incarnate), there is no disputing that their business model is far more stable and liberating than RedHats. There is no gun pointed to their head.
I most heartily disagree with this sentiment. There are many ways to make money with open source software, but it is more work because you have to ADD VALUE. If you cease to add value, no one has an incentive to come to you...
Precisely: it is more work. It also makes you a slave. With propriertary software, you can create an asset that has lasting value and generates money over an extended period of time. With "free" software, you can create no such thing. You wrote a spreadsheet yesterday? Well good for you; go out and write me a word processor today or else you're fired.
That's the thing people don't get with consulting. If you want to earn twice as much money, you need to work twice as many hours. While you can earn very impressive hourly rates, if you are at all competent, your clients will develop a tendency to run out of problems. And that leads to you running out of food to eat.
It is the Holy Grail of consultants everywhere to "productize" their services. The more that you can create software assets that can be re-used -- and re-billed -- the less you need to work for an additional dollar of revenue.
This is what the Richard M. Stallman doesn't get, and it's no suprise when you consider that he's spent his life in a cloistered academic environment: proprietary and free software have a symbiotic relationship. My ability to make lots of money creating and selling proprietary software gives me the time and the freedom to work on projects for the common good.
It's a game. Geesh! I mention Ayn Rand because she had a similar habit of taking otherwise trivial things way too seriously. She invented some sort of Objectivist board game that was Ideologically Pure. I remember some Ayn Rand nut in college explaining to me how it was played. It didn't sound like a lot of fun.
Be very afraid of people like this. They're the sort of people who want to outlaw Halloween because it trains children in Satanism. Different absurd beliefs, same absurd way of thinking.
To call the editorial well written is to ignore it's rambling incoherence. Also of note are its arguments whose conclusions are nearly identical to their premises. For example, to paraphrase: intellectual property law is evil because it is evil to deny someone access to something.
Human nature and society are not infinitely mutable. Nor are they static, of course.
Forgetting about the Dubya analogy, I find it hard to believe that any change of IP law is going to remove the gatekeeping role that is currently exercised by labels, radio stations, etc. Why? Because looking for music in a gatekeeper-less world would be like drinking from the proverbial firehose. Society needs people to make sense of, organize, present, and judge the merits of music. The people who assume this role will be able to become very influential and wealthy.
Look at Slashdot: Rob Malda is just Joe Schmuck Average who had a decent idea and a lot of good luck. He can now in a small way Controls the Fate of the Free World with his ability to focus attention on things he thinks are important. Who is better off, CmdrTaco or the web site that gets an occasional link from Slashdot? Rob doesn't really create any intellectual property, he just makes money (for VA Linux) by having a site that points other people to other sites.
Now, Slashdot is a lot more than just Mr. Malda's work, and it would violate the overdeveloped, self-righteous sense of morality of Slashdot's readers to do things like sell coverage to the highest bidder, but it works for a lot of sites out there. In fact, as I pointed out earlier, that's how a lot of mail-order and e-commerce make a lot of money.
I used to work for CDNOW, and one of the repugnant things they started doing was collecting fees from labels to feature albums in various parts of the store. Amazon does the same thing. These sites get people's attention, and they sell that attention to artists (through their labels).
I'm not being a defeatist victim of a "slave mentality" for recognizing that this is The Way Things Are. I would like to hear someone's plausible alternative scenario for organizing society.
Just because I think something is the case, I don't necessarily think that it's a good thing. Case in point: Labels control the minds of (most of) the music-buying public. You think I like this. I don't, but it's not going to go away, even if you destroy the labels. Someone else will step in. And those people will make much of the money that labels used to.
This is why I'm calling you an idiot. It's like you're accusing me of liking George W. Bush because I recognize that he's the POTUS.
To review: SOMEONE IS GOING TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT MUSIC TO LISTEN TO, AND WHOEVER THEY ARE WILL MAKE LOTS OF MONEY. Regardless of whether you like their taste in music. Regardless of whether you consider it immoral. Regardless of whether you destroy record labels.
You're taking one comment, one parenthetical comment, from my post and obsessing over it. If what you want to do is encourage the free distribution of software and the recognizing of contributors, then you should like the Berkeley license; it explicitly requires users of the code to give credit to contributors. It's much more sharing-oriented than the GPL. The GPL is a political tool to that perpetuates Richard M. Stallman's delusional, destructive, utopian vision of the world.
Regarding medical technologies, please remember why all of these drugs and technologies got developed: to make money. Arguing over whether patent protection lasts too long is completely different than arguing over whether or not patents should exist. And unless you want to create a huge, centrally-planned, government-funded research establishment, you're not going to get technological innovation without intellectual property protection.
Regarding your second rambling, incoherent "argument", no one puts a gun to an artist's head and says, "Sign this contract or else." Artists sign contracts because they want to get rich through the labels' distribution and promotion efforts.
The issue of artist compensation is completely unrelated to labels efforts to undermine fair use rights. And I fail to see how destroying the recording industry is going to make anyone's life better. I can't express my frustration with your brand of idealistic delusion. But let me try to explain why you're a complete idiot:
What does a label do? Yes, it manufactures and distributes music. Whatever. What it really does is tell people what music is important and what music they should listen to. Mass media students would call them gatekeepers. Labels shape public opinion. That's why artist sign up with labels.
So what happens if you destroy every major label on the face of the planet? Other people are going to step forward to assume the role of gatekeeper. "But, no, there will be no gatekeepers in our beautiful new utopia. No one will tell you what to listen to!" Uh, yeah, whatever. Radio stations, MTV, Mp3.com, sites like Slashdot, and millions of others will get into the business of recommending music. And guess what? You're going to need to pay a fee or suffer through advertisements to get their opinions, and these people and organizations will become the new toll-collecting, money-making companies in the world of music.
When you page through a PC Connection or Datacom Warehouse catalog or go to Pricewatch.com, almost all of the products you see are there because of placement fees that have been paid. Why do you think the music industry will be any different? If I create a new single, I'm going to need to cough up some cash to get it featured.
Or wait, here's an idea: I'll found a company that will pay those placement fees, in return for half of your royalities. Oops! I just founded a record label!
As a writer and programmer, it's going to take a lot of explaining to convince me that I should have no control over the distribution and use of the products of my work.
One of the justifications of real -- as in real estate -- property rights argues that when an individual puts work into a piece of land by by improving it (clearing, cultivating, etc.), he acquires the right of ownership. This concept still exists in U.S. law: if I occupy a piece of land and treat it as my own and pay taxes, after many years (ten or twenty) I become the legitimate owner of the property. If the prior owner cares so little about it that he is not aware of your squatting or does nothing about it, he does not "deserve" the land.
As an aside, notice the analogy to trademark law? If others use your trademark, and you do nothing to stop it, you lose the trademark.
Anyway, I believe that it's the work and not the physicality of the property that is important. In other words, this principle of ownership doesn't disappear simply because the thing being improved -- created, actually -- is not tangible.
But just as physical property rights are limited, so should intellectual property rights. The big problem we have today is the destruction of fair use through the passage of ill-conceived laws (DMCA) and shrink- and click-wrap licenses.
Remember that without copyright law, the GPL (which I personally think is evil) could not exist, and nothing would really change, because intelligent intellectual property holders will simply move completely from using copyrights to contracts and licenses to control the distrubution and use of their work.
What we really need is a law that roughly states that "Congress shall pass no law and no individual or corportation may enforce any contract that abridges the fair use of copyrighted material."
Please explain which of the following situations constitute linking, and are allowed under the GPL. Then explain how these differ in any important way.
1. A non-GPL'd application opens a socket to a GPL'd network daemon and communicates via read()/write()
2. A non-GPL'd application opens uses a pipe via pipe() or popen() to a GPL'd program and communicates via read()/write() or fread()/fwrite().
3. A GPL'd application is written as a driver for a GPL'd library, and this application is then used to communicate with the library using one of the two above methods.
4. A non-GPL'd application symbolically links to a GPL'd library and communicates via functions, the references to which are resolved at run time by the linker/loader.
5. A non-GPL'd application statically links to a GPL'd library and communicates via functions, the references to which are resolved by the compiler/linker.
The only distinction worth making is between the final example and all of the others. Only in the final example is it diffficult if not impossible to disentangle the GPL'd and non-GPL'd code. The first four examples are functionally identical; if one of them is permissible, then there is no reason to disallow any of them.
Did it ever occur to any GPL zealots that perhaps the MPAA and RIAA got their ideas about restrictive, arbitrary licenses by learning from Richard M. Stallman?
Most of the Slashdot audience seems incapable of appreciating or even tolerating Apple-related news, so why does anyone bother, especially when the stories themselves can't transcend petty mouse button religious bigotry?
It has become clear that Slashdot is part of The Problem: its yellow journalism panders to the closed-mindedness and ignorance of the legions of Linux zealots and energizes them, creating a "movement" where there is nothing but a bunch of bored, directionless adolescents.
I think you were trying to be funny, but it would have been more clearly an attempt at humor if your syllogism had been logically valid i.e. true if the premises are true.
In this case, while all three statements are arguably true, they don't form a valid argument.
My cat is mortal.
All men are mortal.
Therefore, my cat is a man.
If anyone is emulating Microsoft's monopolistic practices, it's the FSF and its brothers-in-arms, who give away code (below the cost of developing it) in order to stifle competition from other, for-profit organizations.
The GPL ironically stifles what it attempts to create: freedom. It dangles the carrot of free (of charge) code but then beats the programmer with the stick of forced source redistribution. I don't know about you, but I don't believe that one should attach strings to the gifts one gives; it's in bad taste and does violence to the autonomy of those foolish enough to accept them. (This is why I either release code into the public domain or use a BSD-style license.)
The GPL embodies an oppressively moralistic, world domination minded ideology that seeks to convert, destroy, or render irrelevant all things inconsistent with its extreme beliefs.
Ask anyone whether Apple has any chance (or even realistic expectation) of taking over the world, and you'll get a resounding "No!" Ask them the same of the FSF and its fellow travelers, and people aren't so sure. Who is the greater threat to choice?
I made a perfectly valid point; he who lives by the exploitation of unintended holes in licenses dies by the exploitation of the same. Yet I get troll-rated because I'm exposing the intellectual dishonesty of many elements of the Slashdot audience.
Apparently, principles only matter when they serve your cause.
These companies that are marketing set top boxes, email terminals, network appliances, etc. are selling you a box only because a box is necessary to provide you a service. And that means that they're probably eating much of the cost of these boxes in the hopes that you'll like their service.
I think some of what's going on in with respect to hacking is due to the healthy "can it be done?" hacker instinct, but I think most people are more interested in taking advantage of these companies. But you say that their license agreements have flaws that allow you to do this? Wow, you are being such a decent human being by exploiting their oversight!
You have several choices: are you willing to 1.) pay the full cost of something in order to avoid becoming a demographic asset to a company, 2.) provide information about yourself in order to get the proverbial "something for nothing", 3.) go without something because you wish to part neither with your money or privacy, or finally 4.) attempt to get something for nothing by pretending to be one of the people who are willing to part with their personal information i.e. lie?
A lot of Slashdot folks seem to think the last option is fine. Which is pathetic. When your obsess over every word in a service agreement, looking for an out, you are being as sleazy as the companies you berate here regularly. You should attempt to muster a little integrity, honor, or decency and be willing to pay for something if you want it.
Key to designing any successful software project is having strong input subject area experts. It's no suprise the developers can write good compilers and programming editors, because these things are an integral part of developers' first-hand experiences.
The problems start when developers write software for problems that are outside their personal skills or experiences. Without the structure of a conventional organization to ensure that software get designed and written in a user-centric manner, projects like this are doomed. And even with such an organization, things are probably going to get very painful for everyone involved.
Of course there are the developers who have a deep understanding of disciplines outside of the realm of programming, and these people often go on to create great software outside of the realm of developer tools. Photoshop is a great example of an application originally developed by a programmer-artist. (And maybe Gimp too, but I don't use it, because I'm willing to pay for my tools, and while my primary development and mail-reading paltform is FreeBSD, I do my design work on a Mac.)
Anyway, how many people are there out there who: 1.) are technically clueful enough to program their way out of a paper bag, 2.) have the administrative skills to get a project out of the one-person phase, 3.) are equally talented in some non-technological discipline, and 4.) have been brainwashed by Richard Stallman to such an extent that they don't reaize how successful they could be writing commercial software?
I enjoyed college, but I don't know how much of what it taught me will be relevant in my career.
This is so sad. The point of going to school is not to train you for a job. If that's what you want, go find a vocational school advertising on UHF or basic cable.
The point of school is to become a well rounded person that can appreciate the time outside of work, who can contribute to society, who knows what to do with the money you earn at work, who will be a conscientous citizen, and a long list of other things. The things you'd learn in college are how to think critically, how to make sound judgements, and all sorts of other things that are not specific to a particular field of work. The experience of leaving your parents' house and learning to live on your own is also important.
One thing I used to hear all the time is how college is so irrelevant, they're teaching my Pascal, not C; what's the point? Of course, that was back in the early '90s, so the languages have changed, but the bitching hasn't.
The thing you need to understand is that when you go off to college, you're probably too ignorant to make decisions about what's good or not good for you. I know I'm not exactly preaching to the choir here, as there seems to be a lot of (junior) high school punks who think they're hot shit and don't need anyone's help, but this is the truth.
Keep in mind that while I may sound like Mr. Higher Education Apologist, I went to school for three or four years (at Drexel) but was lured away to a start-up and dropped out before finishing. One of the reasons I dropped out was that Drexel was so obsessed to being relevant to your future job experiences, they skimped on the other, more fundamental lessons that colleges are there to teach.
Of course, I was a philosophy major for most of my stay, converting from C.S. after experiencing the extreme short-sighted materialism of most of my classmates. (Hey, you can make lots of money as a programmer, so I'm going to major in C.S.) My other great interest in life was philosophy, so I changed my major. I still took C.S. courses, and kicked the crap out of the C.S. majors, because like I said, they were focused on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, while I simply loved coding.
College is a great opportunity to expand your horizons. Don't willfully stick a potato sack over your imagination by diving right in to make big bucks. It's quite possible that what you consider big bucks really isn't that much. My first co-op job at Drexel was for $9.00 an hour or something. I thought that was the shit; I couldn't spend my salary fast enough. But of course, I had a full scholarship and free room and board. Once you go out there in the "real world", you're going to find that the skills you're missing are going to be increasingly in demand.
The typical Slashdot poster can't write grammatically correct sentences to save his life. That's going to hurt you. So's your complete lack of life experience that makes you a one dimensional keyboard pounder. The technical people who thive are those who can clearly communicate with non-technical people, who can draw on their knowledge of things un-related to coding to help solve a problem. Oh yeah, and people like talking to well-rounded people. And if that doesn't resonate with you, just think: it's probably a lot easier to get laid when you are an articulate, well-rounded person.
I'm sitting here with five moderating points, looking to use them, and I keep on wanting to moderate Mr. Malda's story into the shitter. He clearly doesn't understand why Napster's getting shut down: because it was designed and is almost exclusively used to steal other people's intellectual property.
Maybe intellectual property shouldn't exist, but that's another issue. Just keep in mind that the power of your beloved GPL rests firmly on the foundation of intellectual property rights.
As Larry Wall said, "Open source should be about giving away things voluntarily....When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking." I think Larry is referring to many of you Slashdot posters.
It's pathetic to hear the same "but stealing I.P. is not stealing because the owner still has a copy" song and dance that I used to hear on bulletin boards back in the '80s. I would have thought that we would have gotten beyond the self-serving, simple-minded assertions of BBS-ing 14 year olds by now.
Oops! I forgot that Slashdot is where today's 14 year olds make their self-serving, simple-minded assertions.
NEW HAVEN, CT - January 24, 2000 - Mirror Worlds Technologies announced today that it has been awarded patent number 6,006,227 from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its innovative Lifestreams(TM) technology, which is emerging as both an office workgroup product and as an embedded feature in a new generation of Internet devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is run by a drooling imbecile that doesn't know the difference between "then" and "than"; do you really want to get definitions of words here?
There are plenty of good, free reference sites out there that anyone can use to unlock the secrets of there/their/they're, affect/effect, that/which, and many other mysteries that have baffled the illiterate since the beginning of time. That very few people who read Slashdot use such resources indicates to me that the Internet has changed nothing, and humanity is still in need of extermination.
"I could care less" is clearly not sarcasm. No one who has ever said it in my presence has ever said it with any hint of sarcasm. When I have asked people why they said "I could care less", instead of the sensical "I could NOT care less", they have typically replied that they never actually thought about the literal meaning of the expression. I have never seen an instance of "I could care less" on television where the speaker was showing any "sarcastic tendencies"; I wouldn't be surprised if the scripts actually read "I couldn't care less".
I have noticed that the more intelligent someone is, the more likely they are to use the proper expression. You know, people who actually think about what they're saying. (Please note that I'm not attempting to make any claims about my intelligence.)
In one instance, someone, after a long, embarrassing silence, came up with the excuse that he was practicing "irony or, err, umm, sarcasm". No one at the table was convinced. It's a strange coincidence that there is a similar expression, a mere word (or contraction) off, that actually means what this person meant to mean.
All that said, Amazon.com lists many books by Steven Pinker; is there one that addresses this issue in particular?
This improper usage is the real symptom of the death of literacy, not the inability to spell that we see on Slashdot every day. Like the mass of people that are unaware that "I could care less" means precisely the opposite of what they're trying to say, Cliff wrote "massive strives" because it bears a phonetic resemblance to an expression he's heard before. He's a child screaming "vroom vroom" as he wiggles the steering wheel and jerks the gear shift of his mom's car. It's worse than that, because he has deluded himself into thinking that he's actually driving.
He writes "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer," predicting the death of the American software engineering establishment. His predictions don't come true, so he writes another book called -- you can guess, right? -- "The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer" explaining how disaster was narrowly averted thanks to people following his sage advice.
An isolated incident? No, it's a congenital personality flaw. He later wrote "Time Bomb 2000" and moved out to the American Southwest after withdrawing his funds from financial institutions. His prediction: near doomsday. And after nothing happened? In an interview, he had two replies: 1. I guess people listened to what I was saying and 2. the shit can still hit the fan.
Summary: Yourdon is an ego-maniacal idiot.
What makes you think that any of these people have any interest in working on Linux of IA-64? And who are you to tell them what they should be interested in?
The GPL will become increasingly irrelevant as people change their conception of software. Increasingly, as you said, software isn't thought of as a thing but as a service. What happens when the reality that the Corel CEO describes comes to be, and you never see the code that implements the Net Present Value feature in your spreadsheet, because it's all tied together via some XML-based RPC mechanism? You'll pay a one-time fee for permanent access to the service, or a subscription for access over a given time period, or a one-time fee for a single use of the NPV feature.
You used to need the source code to use a product, because Unices aren't binary compatible. With Java, and wider binary compatibility, you can often get by with only object code today. Now -- thanks to the Internet -- and increasingly so in the future, you won't even need object code to do processing.
Anyway, the point is that the next software business model will hold users hostage just as much as the current one does, but instead of selling object code, you'll be selling access.
And there's nothing the GPL can do about it. I can use nothing but GPL'd software to create a service that I then charge for access to through the web or an XML interface or whatever.
As some of you mentioned, I'm not saying anything about the truth or falsehood of the writer's beliefs (the writer of the anti-SimCity article, not the Slashdot poster). I'm saying that sometimes a game is simply a game and it's crazy to confuse an entertaining game with ideological brainwashing.
SimCity is one of a family of games where the player assumes the role of a god-like overseer who can (within the constraints of the game) mold the world to his wishes. If SimCity is Communist (or Collectivist, to keep up with the Ayn Rand theme), then playing Civilization is Fascist and perhaps even genocidal.
So like I said, the nuts who think that SimCity is a danger to our glorious cpaitalist utopia are equivalent to the nuts who think that dressing up like a witch on October 31st is toying with the occult.
As Justice Louis D. Brandeis said, "...the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
Don't take this personally, but most of you don't have the critical reasoning skills to think your way out of a paper bag. Am I being harsh? Yes, but someone has to fight the Tyranny of the Self-Righteously Stupid.
I am constantly amazed that the morons on Slashdot moderate up posts like yours, posts that do nothing but point out the obvious caveats that go along with any non-dissertation length post.
Of course software, like (almost) every other type of asset, depreciates over time. Is writing program like having a perpetual license to print an infinite amount of money? No. Do clients' needs change over time, giving developers opportunities to do follow-on projects? Yes.
But the fact -- uncontested by you -- is that without proprietary software, programmers' compensation structures look like this:
pay = hours_worked * hourly_rate
In other words, you are a high-paid burger flipper. You may boost your hourly rate because you are a damn fast burger flipper, but there are only so many hours in a day for you to stand in front of the grill.
How does Microsoft make so much money? By capturing labor in an asset (software) and selling it to millions of people. A neutron bomb could go off in Redmond, WA, killing every Microsoft employee, and yet Microsoft would still be worth billions of dollars, because the software can still be sold, some of it perhaps for years to come.
If the staff of an advertising agency or a law firm or RedHat was wiped out, the value of the company would be zero, because revenue is proportional to services provided by employees.
Setting aside your probable dislike of Microsoft (hey, as someone who bleeds six colors, I consider them Evil Incarnate), there is no disputing that their business model is far more stable and liberating than RedHats. There is no gun pointed to their head.
I most heartily disagree with this sentiment. There are many ways to make money with open source software, but it is more work because you have to ADD VALUE. If you cease to add value, no one has an incentive to come to you...
Precisely: it is more work. It also makes you a slave. With propriertary software, you can create an asset that has lasting value and generates money over an extended period of time. With "free" software, you can create no such thing. You wrote a spreadsheet yesterday? Well good for you; go out and write me a word processor today or else you're fired.
That's the thing people don't get with consulting. If you want to earn twice as much money, you need to work twice as many hours. While you can earn very impressive hourly rates, if you are at all competent, your clients will develop a tendency to run out of problems. And that leads to you running out of food to eat.
It is the Holy Grail of consultants everywhere to "productize" their services. The more that you can create software assets that can be re-used -- and re-billed -- the less you need to work for an additional dollar of revenue.
This is what the Richard M. Stallman doesn't get, and it's no suprise when you consider that he's spent his life in a cloistered academic environment: proprietary and free software have a symbiotic relationship. My ability to make lots of money creating and selling proprietary software gives me the time and the freedom to work on projects for the common good.
It's a game. Geesh! I mention Ayn Rand because she had a similar habit of taking otherwise trivial things way too seriously. She invented some sort of Objectivist board game that was Ideologically Pure. I remember some Ayn Rand nut in college explaining to me how it was played. It didn't sound like a lot of fun.
Be very afraid of people like this. They're the sort of people who want to outlaw Halloween because it trains children in Satanism. Different absurd beliefs, same absurd way of thinking.
To call the editorial well written is to ignore it's rambling incoherence. Also of note are its arguments whose conclusions are nearly identical to their premises. For example, to paraphrase: intellectual property law is evil because it is evil to deny someone access to something.
Human nature and society are not infinitely mutable. Nor are they static, of course.
Forgetting about the Dubya analogy, I find it hard to believe that any change of IP law is going to remove the gatekeeping role that is currently exercised by labels, radio stations, etc. Why? Because looking for music in a gatekeeper-less world would be like drinking from the proverbial firehose. Society needs people to make sense of, organize, present, and judge the merits of music. The people who assume this role will be able to become very influential and wealthy.
Look at Slashdot: Rob Malda is just Joe Schmuck Average who had a decent idea and a lot of good luck. He can now in a small way Controls the Fate of the Free World with his ability to focus attention on things he thinks are important. Who is better off, CmdrTaco or the web site that gets an occasional link from Slashdot? Rob doesn't really create any intellectual property, he just makes money (for VA Linux) by having a site that points other people to other sites.
Now, Slashdot is a lot more than just Mr. Malda's work, and it would violate the overdeveloped, self-righteous sense of morality of Slashdot's readers to do things like sell coverage to the highest bidder, but it works for a lot of sites out there. In fact, as I pointed out earlier, that's how a lot of mail-order and e-commerce make a lot of money.
I used to work for CDNOW, and one of the repugnant things they started doing was collecting fees from labels to feature albums in various parts of the store. Amazon does the same thing. These sites get people's attention, and they sell that attention to artists (through their labels).
I'm not being a defeatist victim of a "slave mentality" for recognizing that this is The Way Things Are. I would like to hear someone's plausible alternative scenario for organizing society.
Just because I think something is the case, I don't necessarily think that it's a good thing. Case in point: Labels control the minds of (most of) the music-buying public. You think I like this. I don't, but it's not going to go away, even if you destroy the labels. Someone else will step in. And those people will make much of the money that labels used to.
This is why I'm calling you an idiot. It's like you're accusing me of liking George W. Bush because I recognize that he's the POTUS.
To review: SOMEONE IS GOING TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT MUSIC TO LISTEN TO, AND WHOEVER THEY ARE WILL MAKE LOTS OF MONEY. Regardless of whether you like their taste in music. Regardless of whether you consider it immoral. Regardless of whether you destroy record labels.
You're taking one comment, one parenthetical comment, from my post and obsessing over it. If what you want to do is encourage the free distribution of software and the recognizing of contributors, then you should like the Berkeley license; it explicitly requires users of the code to give credit to contributors. It's much more sharing-oriented than the GPL. The GPL is a political tool to that perpetuates Richard M. Stallman's delusional, destructive, utopian vision of the world.
Regarding medical technologies, please remember why all of these drugs and technologies got developed: to make money. Arguing over whether patent protection lasts too long is completely different than arguing over whether or not patents should exist. And unless you want to create a huge, centrally-planned, government-funded research establishment, you're not going to get technological innovation without intellectual property protection.
Regarding your second rambling, incoherent "argument", no one puts a gun to an artist's head and says, "Sign this contract or else." Artists sign contracts because they want to get rich through the labels' distribution and promotion efforts.
The issue of artist compensation is completely unrelated to labels efforts to undermine fair use rights. And I fail to see how destroying the recording industry is going to make anyone's life better. I can't express my frustration with your brand of idealistic delusion. But let me try to explain why you're a complete idiot:
What does a label do? Yes, it manufactures and distributes music. Whatever. What it really does is tell people what music is important and what music they should listen to. Mass media students would call them gatekeepers. Labels shape public opinion. That's why artist sign up with labels.
So what happens if you destroy every major label on the face of the planet? Other people are going to step forward to assume the role of gatekeeper. "But, no, there will be no gatekeepers in our beautiful new utopia. No one will tell you what to listen to!" Uh, yeah, whatever. Radio stations, MTV, Mp3.com, sites like Slashdot, and millions of others will get into the business of recommending music. And guess what? You're going to need to pay a fee or suffer through advertisements to get their opinions, and these people and organizations will become the new toll-collecting, money-making companies in the world of music.
When you page through a PC Connection or Datacom Warehouse catalog or go to Pricewatch.com, almost all of the products you see are there because of placement fees that have been paid. Why do you think the music industry will be any different? If I create a new single, I'm going to need to cough up some cash to get it featured.
Or wait, here's an idea: I'll found a company that will pay those placement fees, in return for half of your royalities. Oops! I just founded a record label!
As a writer and programmer, it's going to take a lot of explaining to convince me that I should have no control over the distribution and use of the products of my work.
One of the justifications of real -- as in real estate -- property rights argues that when an individual puts work into a piece of land by by improving it (clearing, cultivating, etc.), he acquires the right of ownership. This concept still exists in U.S. law: if I occupy a piece of land and treat it as my own and pay taxes, after many years (ten or twenty) I become the legitimate owner of the property. If the prior owner cares so little about it that he is not aware of your squatting or does nothing about it, he does not "deserve" the land.
As an aside, notice the analogy to trademark law? If others use your trademark, and you do nothing to stop it, you lose the trademark.
Anyway, I believe that it's the work and not the physicality of the property that is important. In other words, this principle of ownership doesn't disappear simply because the thing being improved -- created, actually -- is not tangible.
But just as physical property rights are limited, so should intellectual property rights. The big problem we have today is the destruction of fair use through the passage of ill-conceived laws (DMCA) and shrink- and click-wrap licenses.
Remember that without copyright law, the GPL (which I personally think is evil) could not exist, and nothing would really change, because intelligent intellectual property holders will simply move completely from using copyrights to contracts and licenses to control the distrubution and use of their work.
What we really need is a law that roughly states that "Congress shall pass no law and no individual or corportation may enforce any contract that abridges the fair use of copyrighted material."
Please explain which of the following situations constitute linking, and are allowed under the GPL. Then explain how these differ in any important way.
1. A non-GPL'd application opens a socket to a GPL'd network daemon and communicates via read()/write()
2. A non-GPL'd application opens uses a pipe via pipe() or popen() to a GPL'd program and communicates via read()/write() or fread()/fwrite().
3. A GPL'd application is written as a driver for a GPL'd library, and this application is then used to communicate with the library using one of the two above methods.
4. A non-GPL'd application symbolically links to a GPL'd library and communicates via functions, the references to which are resolved at run time by the linker/loader.
5. A non-GPL'd application statically links to a GPL'd library and communicates via functions, the references to which are resolved by the compiler/linker.
The only distinction worth making is between the final example and all of the others. Only in the final example is it diffficult if not impossible to disentangle the GPL'd and non-GPL'd code. The first four examples are functionally identical; if one of them is permissible, then there is no reason to disallow any of them.
Did it ever occur to any GPL zealots that perhaps the MPAA and RIAA got their ideas about restrictive, arbitrary licenses by learning from Richard M. Stallman?
Most of the Slashdot audience seems incapable of appreciating or even tolerating Apple-related news, so why does anyone bother, especially when the stories themselves can't transcend petty mouse button religious bigotry?
It has become clear that Slashdot is part of The Problem: its yellow journalism panders to the closed-mindedness and ignorance of the legions of Linux zealots and energizes them, creating a "movement" where there is nothing but a bunch of bored, directionless adolescents.
I think you were trying to be funny, but it would have been more clearly an attempt at humor if your syllogism had been logically valid i.e. true if the premises are true.
In this case, while all three statements are arguably true, they don't form a valid argument.
My cat is mortal.
All men are mortal.
Therefore, my cat is a man.
And the Mac platform is monopolistic how?
If anyone is emulating Microsoft's monopolistic practices, it's the FSF and its brothers-in-arms, who give away code (below the cost of developing it) in order to stifle competition from other, for-profit organizations.
The GPL ironically stifles what it attempts to create: freedom. It dangles the carrot of free (of charge) code but then beats the programmer with the stick of forced source redistribution. I don't know about you, but I don't believe that one should attach strings to the gifts one gives; it's in bad taste and does violence to the autonomy of those foolish enough to accept them. (This is why I either release code into the public domain or use a BSD-style license.)
The GPL embodies an oppressively moralistic, world domination minded ideology that seeks to convert, destroy, or render irrelevant all things inconsistent with its extreme beliefs.
Ask anyone whether Apple has any chance (or even realistic expectation) of taking over the world, and you'll get a resounding "No!" Ask them the same of the FSF and its fellow travelers, and people aren't so sure. Who is the greater threat to choice?
I made a perfectly valid point; he who lives by the exploitation of unintended holes in licenses dies by the exploitation of the same. Yet I get troll-rated because I'm exposing the intellectual dishonesty of many elements of the Slashdot audience.
Apparently, principles only matter when they serve your cause.
These companies that are marketing set top boxes, email terminals, network appliances, etc. are selling you a box only because a box is necessary to provide you a service. And that means that they're probably eating much of the cost of these boxes in the hopes that you'll like their service.
I think some of what's going on in with respect to hacking is due to the healthy "can it be done?" hacker instinct, but I think most people are more interested in taking advantage of these companies. But you say that their license agreements have flaws that allow you to do this? Wow, you are being such a decent human being by exploiting their oversight!
You have several choices: are you willing to 1.) pay the full cost of something in order to avoid becoming a demographic asset to a company, 2.) provide information about yourself in order to get the proverbial "something for nothing", 3.) go without something because you wish to part neither with your money or privacy, or finally 4.) attempt to get something for nothing by pretending to be one of the people who are willing to part with their personal information i.e. lie?
A lot of Slashdot folks seem to think the last option is fine. Which is pathetic. When your obsess over every word in a service agreement, looking for an out, you are being as sleazy as the companies you berate here regularly. You should attempt to muster a little integrity, honor, or decency and be willing to pay for something if you want it.
Key to designing any successful software project is having strong input subject area experts. It's no suprise the developers can write good compilers and programming editors, because these things are an integral part of developers' first-hand experiences.
The problems start when developers write software for problems that are outside their personal skills or experiences. Without the structure of a conventional organization to ensure that software get designed and written in a user-centric manner, projects like this are doomed. And even with such an organization, things are probably going to get very painful for everyone involved.
Of course there are the developers who have a deep understanding of disciplines outside of the realm of programming, and these people often go on to create great software outside of the realm of developer tools. Photoshop is a great example of an application originally developed by a programmer-artist. (And maybe Gimp too, but I don't use it, because I'm willing to pay for my tools, and while my primary development and mail-reading paltform is FreeBSD, I do my design work on a Mac.)
Anyway, how many people are there out there who: 1.) are technically clueful enough to program their way out of a paper bag, 2.) have the administrative skills to get a project out of the one-person phase, 3.) are equally talented in some non-technological discipline, and 4.) have been brainwashed by Richard Stallman to such an extent that they don't reaize how successful they could be writing commercial software?
I don't think such people are very common.
This is so sad. The point of going to school is not to train you for a job. If that's what you want, go find a vocational school advertising on UHF or basic cable.
The point of school is to become a well rounded person that can appreciate the time outside of work, who can contribute to society, who knows what to do with the money you earn at work, who will be a conscientous citizen, and a long list of other things. The things you'd learn in college are how to think critically, how to make sound judgements, and all sorts of other things that are not specific to a particular field of work. The experience of leaving your parents' house and learning to live on your own is also important.
One thing I used to hear all the time is how college is so irrelevant, they're teaching my Pascal, not C; what's the point? Of course, that was back in the early '90s, so the languages have changed, but the bitching hasn't.
The thing you need to understand is that when you go off to college, you're probably too ignorant to make decisions about what's good or not good for you. I know I'm not exactly preaching to the choir here, as there seems to be a lot of (junior) high school punks who think they're hot shit and don't need anyone's help, but this is the truth.
Keep in mind that while I may sound like Mr. Higher Education Apologist, I went to school for three or four years (at Drexel) but was lured away to a start-up and dropped out before finishing. One of the reasons I dropped out was that Drexel was so obsessed to being relevant to your future job experiences, they skimped on the other, more fundamental lessons that colleges are there to teach.
Of course, I was a philosophy major for most of my stay, converting from C.S. after experiencing the extreme short-sighted materialism of most of my classmates. (Hey, you can make lots of money as a programmer, so I'm going to major in C.S.) My other great interest in life was philosophy, so I changed my major. I still took C.S. courses, and kicked the crap out of the C.S. majors, because like I said, they were focused on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, while I simply loved coding.
College is a great opportunity to expand your horizons. Don't willfully stick a potato sack over your imagination by diving right in to make big bucks. It's quite possible that what you consider big bucks really isn't that much. My first co-op job at Drexel was for $9.00 an hour or something. I thought that was the shit; I couldn't spend my salary fast enough. But of course, I had a full scholarship and free room and board. Once you go out there in the "real world", you're going to find that the skills you're missing are going to be increasingly in demand.
The typical Slashdot poster can't write grammatically correct sentences to save his life. That's going to hurt you. So's your complete lack of life experience that makes you a one dimensional keyboard pounder. The technical people who thive are those who can clearly communicate with non-technical people, who can draw on their knowledge of things un-related to coding to help solve a problem. Oh yeah, and people like talking to well-rounded people. And if that doesn't resonate with you, just think: it's probably a lot easier to get laid when you are an articulate, well-rounded person.
I'm sitting here with five moderating points, looking to use them, and I keep on wanting to moderate Mr. Malda's story into the shitter. He clearly doesn't understand why Napster's getting shut down: because it was designed and is almost exclusively used to steal other people's intellectual property.
Maybe intellectual property shouldn't exist, but that's another issue. Just keep in mind that the power of your beloved GPL rests firmly on the foundation of intellectual property rights.
As Larry Wall said, "Open source should be about giving away things voluntarily....When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking." I think Larry is referring to many of you Slashdot posters.
It's pathetic to hear the same "but stealing I.P. is not stealing because the owner still has a copy" song and dance that I used to hear on bulletin boards back in the '80s. I would have thought that we would have gotten beyond the self-serving, simple-minded assertions of BBS-ing 14 year olds by now.
Oops! I forgot that Slashdot is where today's 14 year olds make their self-serving, simple-minded assertions.
From the company's press release
NEW HAVEN, CT - January 24, 2000 - Mirror Worlds Technologies announced today that it has been awarded patent number 6,006,227 from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its innovative Lifestreams(TM) technology, which is emerging as both an office workgroup product and as an embedded feature in a new generation of Internet devices.