What? Whitewashing? What post did you read? Not mine clearly. I hate this guy, I hate his policy, I hate the effects it had on Europe where I'm from. I hate what he's done to the state of the globalized world in general. You can clearly tell that despite whatever motives (Oil, power, dominance in the middle east) were behind the wars, they were clearly set off by an initial wave of overprotectiveness. He went all out and when nobody stopped him he started enjoying himself and it got worse from there. What's whitewashing about that? This guy is a douchebag and a war criminal and it's the fault of the US government and legal system if he doesn't go to trial. THAT's whitewashing -and it will happen.
If by "experience" you mean being molested by someone and/or having sexually explicit photos taken of them for distribution to other molesters for wanking purposes, then yeah, I'm pretty intent on protecting them from that type of experience.
So you don't want your daughter in Playboy. That's OK.
--
But seriously, I can see your point and I support it. The likelihood of child abuse on the other hand is much much lower than all the beautiful things your kids don't get to experience under constant supervision. I know it's a thin line to walk on but that's life. Risk everything, get everything. Risk nothing, get nothing. Would you rather know that your child can't be molested whatsoever (most cases happen in and around families) and doesn't get to play freely and run around for your fear of abduction until they're so old that they can't but hate you for all the interference with their lives. Or would you rather have your kid experience the world and try to live with the sub-percent chance that someone might do something to them? I don't have any kids so I can't say about myself, I'm just asking. Don't forget, your kid is way more likely to be hit by a car, struck by lightning or die of self-induced lung cancer than being molested or even abused.
I know that my parents treated me way too carefully and that I had a really tough time learning all the stuff that I missed (and that's when I met the bad people, trying to catch up quickly). Bad things happen. The only thing that's worse than bad things happening is someone overdoing his job of protecting you. Look at Ex-president Bush... he had hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and was willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives just to protect you from something that never happened (again). Sure 9/11 was horrible but he didn't have to go all batshit crazy like that. Now the USA have country a huge image problem (even worse than before) despite Obama and why? All because that crazy old man wanted to protect his child America from being molested by foreigners. There you have it.
Well you're right. English is not my primary language and even though my vocabulary is pretty good (I even knew extortion) sometimes I mix stuff up. So cut me some slack please?
"Mr. Oppenheim then became active as one of the lead litigators representing the record industry in the landmark "file-sharing" cases against peer-to-peer networks, including against Napster, Aimster, AudioGalaxy, Morpheus, Grokster and Kazaa." http://www.spoke.com/info/p6QsSD8/MatthewOppenheim
See, he doesn't even agree with himself. What the RIAA does is not legal, ethical or cool since they copy the artists CDs for their own use. Bad Bad RIAA;)
And this may seem a bit tangent but I'd argue that we really need to use our progress to push our frontiers, IE space. Without any real frontiers to remind us all that life can be dangerous it's far too easy for people to slip into a very 'safe at any cost' mentality.
Tell that to the hysteria-drenched housewives whose horizon reaches just above the kitchen sink and the television set with celebrity news on them. We have entire generations of moms (and dads) that never did anything, let alone anything dangerous or adventurous. To them every kid should live in a cushioned cell full of cotton candy and rainbows and god help us if anything ever happens. Hysteria!!! PANIC! We need to teach these people how to deal with life or they'll forever ruin it for the curious rest of us (that don't mind a little risk here and there to spice things up).
Or does "won't somebody think of the children" throw a mental blanket over common sense ?
Yes, it does.
Absolutely, what are you going to answer to that?
"Fuck the children" will get you dirty looks and probably a visit by the coppers. Any answer other than that starting with "But wait a minute..." is immediately dismissed and ignored after the first three syllables. People that live on these "we have to protect our children from any type of experience" are so ignorant it doesn't even matter if you speak their language or not.
Apparently they don't because many people don't even know there's alternatives so they can't "want" Windows but they pay for it anyway. So not everybody seems to understand "pay for what you want" (and only what you want).
People understand "free" as in some one else paid for what they wanted and are giving away freebies that we may not want/need.
That's exactly the problem, since when has cooperation become "ach if you give it to me it must be worthless", certainly didn't come from the people it came from the business thinking.
People can't wrap their heads around its free/open, but you still want me to pay for it,
These are the same people that don't get it when you try to explain to them why their tax money is helping homeless and addicted people. We currently live in a society where paying is forced and has become a habit for us. I want back to the place where you pay because you're happy and you appreciate what someone has done for you not because it always had a price. I tend to give my money only to those I want to support. I don't feel comfortable having to buy stuff just because I have to for some weird reason.
and those that make similar products as yours can use the work with and you want me to agree to give way what I've funded you to develop so those that are in my industry get it for free to them?
You didn't read my posts. You fund it for your use. You get a license to it and others can use it as well. They pay for support or need to hire people to make the software work for them. You're locking it down so only you can use and benefit from it while you could also benefit from the licensing and the feedback from other developers using your prior art as a basis. Sure it's a complicated thing and it won't work for some types of applications and in some markets. No doubt about that but so many other things could be improved by just opening it. Operating systems for example could easily be open, would benefit many people. A highly specific factory control system or so could still be produced as a closed source proprietary thing. I'm just saying that the applications for broad public use shouldn't be in the hands of some weird patent lawyer. We have a common canon in literature and music and art which is mostly open and widespread for modification, why don't we do this for code in some places as well? If millions of people know the "source code" to classical music why can't we give people "classical implementations"?
Trying to explain it gets a "are you insane?" response.
Forgive me but that's what I first thought when I read your post. Don't want to be the grammar nazi but I had to read your post like five times over to get what you're trying to say. Probably isn't your primary language so no hard feelings OK? Just don't want to answer to something you didn't even want to write.
A significant problem with this model is that businesses with the resources to hire developers to program custom solutions often consider software, such as the custom solution they just paid for, to be competitive assets.
That's one of the problems with business. A competition is usually open and fair... equal grounds. Good sportsmen and musicians for example jam together or practice together to tell each other about new tweaks and hints. This way the overall situation improves for everyone. In our system or the business end of it we have strict this "hedging" of ideas. People come up with something productive and lock it up so that they are the only ones to get a benefit from it. Then they release little portions at a time to whoever pays for it. The majority of benefit flows into this, let me call it, "bubble" which grows and grows because all the benefit can only go nowhere else. At some point there is a burst and all the great ideas vanish with the locked up holders of the assets. The customers have paid time and time again and now all is lost.
With an open structure you would have to build smaller bubbles and more of them in many many places. Maybe held together like a plastic foil. Sort of a bubble wrap type of thing. Then when one of the tiny bubbles bursts it makes an interesting "pop" sound and the people feeding, tending and eventually pushing the bubble until it burst have a kind of gratification. But the overall structure of the system wouldn't be compromised. You just go to the next bubble that does practically the same thing.
Businesses rightly consider it foolish to give assets that they paid for away to their competitors. As a result, they will often be reluctant to pay for a custom solution only to have their competitors receive it for free.
Look at the phone market just now, or the netbooks. One company started it (Apple iPhone, Asus Eee PC) and everyone is buying one of these things, disassembling, analyzing and reproducing it. Some of the Meizu phones look just like an iPhone where one has to wonder "How drunk was their designer to draw the exact same thing". It's already going on. Everyone's copying already, that's what our human nature is about. Sharing ideas. We only still have to find a way of building smaller bubbles. So in a way the competitors are already getting the work for free. They just copy some of the concepts, modify them and produce it. But why are the originals still mostly dominant? Not because of the market power but because they provide quality service. If someone came along with an iPhone clone that did the same things and better, worked with all carriers and was cheaper do you think Apple would still sell theirs well? I think not, but so far Apple has done a good job to provide services (iTunes, MobileMe etc.) to make their product more attractive. And that's just what needs to go on in the FOSS model. People providing good solutions. They don't have to protect their partial "assets" (like code) because their overall product/service quality is the asset. Most of the parts could probably be done in a better way stand-alone from someone but only those that succeed to put it all into one and juggle that package seem to make it in the market. Linux is a good example here, I don't hear anyone shipping Arch Linux to noob users because they have some good concepts but overall their stuff is still to convoluted. Ubuntu on the other hand has marketing, support and fair organisation behind it and it seems to work.
Consequently, they often choose to pay for custom solutions that are proprietary, so that their important IT business assets remain theirs and theirs alone. Alternatively, they will reach for proprietary, paid solutions ensuring that competitors who wish to use the same will incur the same costs. They'll then pay their own people or contractors to customize the proprietary solution, again, ensuring that the fruits of their investment in software ac
Not at all. TFA said "the global loss due to proprietary software", not the global costs. It's not no-evidence figure pushing, there have been studies. Me, I think the figure is conservative.
Read my post. I'm all talking about the word "loss" he used. He could have said "cost" but that wouldn't make his point. "Loss" is the amount of money you don't get when your software can't read a foreign currency cell and breaks your macro resulting in violation of deadline and loss of the contract. What we're talking about here is the "reduction of cost" not a "loss". He's trying to make it look like people are losing money buying proprietary software. Yeah, if directly compared to using F/OSS. But in no reasonable scenario is "not using open source" a substitute for "losing money". It's "spending too much money while you could do cheaper" but that's not losing.
I know these monetary business terms are very flexible and what is a "overpriced solution" to me might be a "loss of projected available liquid funds" to someone else but in this case he cheaply used this word "loss" to emphasize his point that Linux would be cheaper. Thusly implying that the only right thing to do is go for open source right now. Imho I think both will have their places and if only we can get people to "save money" by using more open source while sticking with proprietary solution for special needs this world would be a much better place to own a computer. "Would be cheaper" is not "a loss" because you decided to lose that money by going for the more expensive solution. Linux has not just popped up yesterday and there have been incredible changes that make it much more feasible for office and end user systems. No one wanted to take these chances and stayed with Microsoft because they felt safer (and in some cases were probably persuaded by lobbyists). That's like throwing away my keys as hard as I can and then argue that I "lost" them.
He's just trying to make a statement for the use of open source and I appreciate that but this time I throw the same rocks at him that I use when some Microsoft exec flings his poo at me. Because it's the same kind of rhetoric poo flinging that we accuse Microsoft of for so many years now. Isn't this what F/OSS is about? Shouldn't we be able to do better? Why package obvious truths into slimy backdoor rhetoric when the facts and advantages have so much more to tell. Yeah it's free. Yeah you can save money if you don't have to pay these expensive licenses. But that's no inadvertent "loss" it's your own darned decision to use pricey Microsoft products. I'm just saying he should have said "They could save money" not "They're losing money" sounds like the same thing but it isn't.
Not really, this is about customers. The industry doesn't win customers over by telling them how much they believe is stolen from them each year. It works for court cases as long as the judges don't ask too many questions and just go with the pledge. The latest case around how download do not equal losses is a good sign for the paradigm-change that is happening. In any case, relying solely on telling the other part how much money they are (not) screwed out of isn't enough to sell a product. In my mind it still needs some actual advantages and features. Linux has enough of those and if you, as a side note, also refer to it as being free this will count as a bonus.
Go ahead mark me troll, but have any of you seriously given thought to what will happen if open source were to become the norm and all these people were out of work, being asked to volunteer the skills they once got paid for?
Who says that Open Source has to be free? Seriously. This model is still completely misunderstood. Someone wants a specialized application for whatever... they pay you to write it. You publish it under a license and share the code. That way you get money AND free input from the community. Sure there will be competing products that base on your code but look at the distro vendors. SuSe, Canonical, RedHat they all use more or less the same code and sell their specific very individual solutions.
I can imagine what would happen if programmers were no longer bound to huge companies by NDAs and Non-Compete agreements and all code was open: We'd get a shit ton of awesome code to work with and all the brilliant results stemming from there.
The difficult part is to change the perception of open source from the one like yours "Everything is free as in Beer and the brewer goes broke" to "Everything is free as in speech and you get paid for the quality and sustainability of your work". I wouldn't mind having companies go broke that re-release the same product year after year with little to no improvements. If there are other companies that do the job better and improve over time I guess it would only be fair. The current market is based on monopolism and power struggle between the monopolies. That's what has to change for FOSS to succeed and we need to start in the heads.
...overall it has been estimated that the global loss due to proprietary software is "in excess of $1 trillion a year."
That's the same kind of lame-ass no-evidence silly figure pushing that the RIAA and MPAA uses to sell their Anti-Piracy measures. I love Linux and I'd love to see it spread even more but this way of propagating it is just retarded. You get Microsoft software for your money, be that a good investment or not is your decision. It's clearly not a "loss" it's merely a costly under-utilization of alternatives.
I tend to praise Linux and rant against Microsoft but this OSI guy Tiemann just blew the frame by using the same silly and faulty means of propaganda rhetoric. One thing I try to learn and live by is "Just because THEY do it doesn't mean we have to or even should do it too". By pulling figures out of his ass to make himself look more interesting he's not a single notch better than Microsoft with it's installbase or the supposed piracy figures by the media companies. That is just NOT the way to convince people of the right thing.
When they move they'll have to notify the county where they live. They'll have to let their neighbors know (So they can keep their kids away from these nasty people).
*Ding Dong*
"Hi my name is Megan, I just moved in next door. I'm 20 and I have to inform you that I will probably force you to see me naked."
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! We can't let that happen.
Calling people names like "troll" doesn't help your cause. Please try to keep the tone polite and helpful.
Read the post I responded to again, I just threw back what he tossed into my yard. I'm not the one writing anonymous posts that I don't answer calling other people silly names. If you didn't notice that was a witty way to give him a taste of his own medicine.
A casual user can't change Linux either, because they "can't even write patches or have a reasonable way of requesting features" because, if they do request features, some zealot tells them to write it themselves. It's very frustrating.
Yeah? And where is that? On Slashdot in the comments? Not exactly the appropriate place to call for new GNOME features. I have filed dozens of bugs and feature requests with several projects and many of those were answered very politely and nicely. Some where even implemented and/or fixed. That's way more than I ever got from Microsoft support. If people use every opportunity and discussion about any FOSS project to complain about what's wrong with the software but never actually file a request with the project itself then that, also, is very frustrating as you can imagine. It's no surprise that "zealots" will tell them to stfu. I requested features for WINE, Xfce, Deluge, Comix, Guake Terminal and many others and I always got very nice responses and sometimes fixes within 48 hours.
You can run around the streets 24/7 shouting "BMW are bastards they build shit cars" because your in-drive computer froze. People will tell you to quit the whining and won't be very helpful at all. Now, if you go to your BMW dealer on the other hand and tell them about it they probably will be very interested to understand your problem and help you as a user. See my point?
And readable text isn't a "feature." It's a baseline requirement.
And running a 1024x768 resolution on a 14" display and then complain about scaling is a baseline user behavior? So what the text is broken, it's readable. I have to use translated versions of MS Windows all the time and it's a pain what they did to error messages and menus. Don't even start with German Vista. Write a complaint about it to the GNOME people and someone might fix it for you. That's just what a non-professional system will bring with it. You can just as well BUY a Windows license and stop blaming people for your problems with the FREE software you're using.
My mother is a claims adjuster for a subsection of healthcare coverage, maybe I should burst into her room and start kicking her all over the place because no insurance company will cover my chronic condition?
So you're comparing a one-in-a-few-thousand claims adjuster's position for an insurance company with "Deputy Attorney General" which according to the all-knowing trash heap is "the second-highest-ranking official in the United States Department of Justice". Pretty fancy boiler he'll stand around...
And if your Mom did coincidently put lots of her work into refusing chronic patients and advising other adjusters to do as well?
The first time I heard the name David Ogden I didn't know either. Then I went on Scroogle.org and found myself some documents with his name on them. Lots of them were from copyright litigation cases and such. He effectively assisted in the legal proceedings that lead to sentences in favor of the RIAA and other organisations. That to me, personally, acts as proof. I obviously can't say what he'll do once in office but his team has pretty much been called. Read the article I linked my first post and then do some research on Ogden. Looks definitely plausible to me.
Sure off-topic, see that little "branch" in the thread structure... new discussions start there. GNOME IS usable for casual users. The guy I answered to was complaining that the current state didn't reflect HIS expectation of GNOME as a UI system. That's no casual requirement so there you go. A casual user doesn't want to change Windows or do they? I bet they do but since they can't even write patches or have a reasonable way of requesting features Linux is even ahead in this respect.
I dare you to find one Slashdot Microsoft/Linux article of any category that is still entirely "on-topic" after the second thread branch. First register a username and understand how the comments work here before you write. Otherwise go away, troll.
All that retreat mumbo-jumbo at the moment is just the precursor to what will be brought against the people in 2009 and beyond. Obama has selected an RIAA supporting ass. attourney general with David Ogden and now that the industry has a seat on the presidents team and wan't to "cooperate" with ISPs they don't need these awful lawsuits anymore.
My piratey sense is tingling... I sense a great disturbance in the warez.
I'd much rather want to see a list of stuff that despite it being available everywhere ISN'T shared and reasons why.
Take the "Postal" atrocity by Uwe Boll for example... it took the torrent guys almost have a year AFTER the DVD was out (usually it's way before the release) to get the movie into the net because apparently nobody wanted it or didn't share it.
Instead of being intimidated by bogus numbers from studies no one will ever see I'd love to see reasons for why things aren't shared and what that can say about the quality of the products this priced "industry" is trying to shove down my pipe.
They're announcing record breaking profits year after year. Billions of Dollars. Legal download figures went up significantly last year. With all that water flowing their way they still can't drink enough? That's what's wrong with these guys. They're making billions of dollars and start complaining about what they COULD HAVE gotten if they did get the revenue from black market sales as well. That is as if BMW announced they would sue the entire East-Bloc states for the black market sales value of stolen cars. What the hell?
When we can finally get over using Windows as the market dominating OS... this only happens because people want the kind of monopoly money MS has made in the last 20 years. If they're no longer the king... no one will want their throne.
Slashdot Mirror
What? Whitewashing? What post did you read? Not mine clearly. I hate this guy, I hate his policy, I hate the effects it had on Europe where I'm from. I hate what he's done to the state of the globalized world in general. You can clearly tell that despite whatever motives (Oil, power, dominance in the middle east) were behind the wars, they were clearly set off by an initial wave of overprotectiveness. He went all out and when nobody stopped him he started enjoying himself and it got worse from there. What's whitewashing about that? This guy is a douchebag and a war criminal and it's the fault of the US government and legal system if he doesn't go to trial. THAT's whitewashing -and it will happen.
If by "experience" you mean being molested by someone and/or having sexually explicit photos taken of them for distribution to other molesters for wanking purposes, then yeah, I'm pretty intent on protecting them from that type of experience.
So you don't want your daughter in Playboy. That's OK.
... he had hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and was willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives just to protect you from something that never happened (again). Sure 9/11 was horrible but he didn't have to go all batshit crazy like that. Now the USA have country a huge image problem (even worse than before) despite Obama and why? All because that crazy old man wanted to protect his child America from being molested by foreigners. There you have it.
--
But seriously, I can see your point and I support it. The likelihood of child abuse on the other hand is much much lower than all the beautiful things your kids don't get to experience under constant supervision. I know it's a thin line to walk on but that's life. Risk everything, get everything. Risk nothing, get nothing. Would you rather know that your child can't be molested whatsoever (most cases happen in and around families) and doesn't get to play freely and run around for your fear of abduction until they're so old that they can't but hate you for all the interference with their lives. Or would you rather have your kid experience the world and try to live with the sub-percent chance that someone might do something to them? I don't have any kids so I can't say about myself, I'm just asking. Don't forget, your kid is way more likely to be hit by a car, struck by lightning or die of self-induced lung cancer than being molested or even abused.
I know that my parents treated me way too carefully and that I had a really tough time learning all the stuff that I missed (and that's when I met the bad people, trying to catch up quickly). Bad things happen. The only thing that's worse than bad things happening is someone overdoing his job of protecting you. Look at Ex-president Bush
Well you're right. English is not my primary language and even though my vocabulary is pretty good (I even knew extortion) sometimes I mix stuff up. So cut me some slack please?
If you don't I'll black-extort you.
You mean THIS guy:
;)
"was the Senior Vice President of Legal and Business Affairs for the RIAA."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Oppenheim
"Mr. Oppenheim then became active as one of the lead litigators representing the record industry in the landmark "file-sharing" cases against peer-to-peer networks, including against Napster, Aimster, AudioGalaxy, Morpheus, Grokster and Kazaa."
http://www.spoke.com/info/p6QsSD8/MatthewOppenheim
"It is not legal, ethical or cool to copy somebody else's CD for your own use."
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/june03/copyright2.html
See, he doesn't even agree with himself. What the RIAA does is not legal, ethical or cool since they copy the artists CDs for their own use. Bad Bad RIAA
And this may seem a bit tangent but I'd argue that we really need to use our progress to push our frontiers, IE space. Without any real frontiers to remind us all that life can be dangerous it's far too easy for people to slip into a very 'safe at any cost' mentality.
Tell that to the hysteria-drenched housewives whose horizon reaches just above the kitchen sink and the television set with celebrity news on them. We have entire generations of moms (and dads) that never did anything, let alone anything dangerous or adventurous. To them every kid should live in a cushioned cell full of cotton candy and rainbows and god help us if anything ever happens. Hysteria!!! PANIC! We need to teach these people how to deal with life or they'll forever ruin it for the curious rest of us (that don't mind a little risk here and there to spice things up).
Please excuse my ignorance but why is UK's current situation so touchy with child abuse?
No the child molesters are afraid of getting stabbed ...
Or does "won't somebody think of the children" throw a mental blanket over common sense ?
Yes, it does.
Absolutely, what are you going to answer to that?
..." is immediately dismissed and ignored after the first three syllables. People that live on these "we have to protect our children from any type of experience" are so ignorant it doesn't even matter if you speak their language or not.
"Fuck the children" will get you dirty looks and probably a visit by the coppers. Any answer other than that starting with "But wait a minute
First they get the live online-coverage of one of these processes postponed. Now they try to legally blackmail the defense lawyer. What's next?
"That's an awfully nice courtroom you have here, your honor. Wouldn't it be terrible if something happened to it?"
Jeez, I hate these guys.
Nah people understand pay for what you want.
Apparently they don't because many people don't even know there's alternatives so they can't "want" Windows but they pay for it anyway. So not everybody seems to understand "pay for what you want" (and only what you want).
People understand "free" as in some one else paid for what they wanted and are giving away freebies that we may not want/need.
That's exactly the problem, since when has cooperation become "ach if you give it to me it must be worthless", certainly didn't come from the people it came from the business thinking.
People can't wrap their heads around its free/open, but you still want me to pay for it,
These are the same people that don't get it when you try to explain to them why their tax money is helping homeless and addicted people. We currently live in a society where paying is forced and has become a habit for us. I want back to the place where you pay because you're happy and you appreciate what someone has done for you not because it always had a price. I tend to give my money only to those I want to support. I don't feel comfortable having to buy stuff just because I have to for some weird reason.
and those that make similar products as yours can use the work with and you want me to agree to give way what I've funded you to develop so those that are in my industry get it for free to them?
You didn't read my posts. You fund it for your use. You get a license to it and others can use it as well. They pay for support or need to hire people to make the software work for them. You're locking it down so only you can use and benefit from it while you could also benefit from the licensing and the feedback from other developers using your prior art as a basis. Sure it's a complicated thing and it won't work for some types of applications and in some markets. No doubt about that but so many other things could be improved by just opening it. Operating systems for example could easily be open, would benefit many people. A highly specific factory control system or so could still be produced as a closed source proprietary thing. I'm just saying that the applications for broad public use shouldn't be in the hands of some weird patent lawyer. We have a common canon in literature and music and art which is mostly open and widespread for modification, why don't we do this for code in some places as well? If millions of people know the "source code" to classical music why can't we give people "classical implementations"?
Trying to explain it gets a "are you insane?" response.
Forgive me but that's what I first thought when I read your post. Don't want to be the grammar nazi but I had to read your post like five times over to get what you're trying to say. Probably isn't your primary language so no hard feelings OK? Just don't want to answer to something you didn't even want to write.
A significant problem with this model is that businesses with the resources to hire developers to program custom solutions often consider software, such as the custom solution they just paid for, to be competitive assets.
That's one of the problems with business. A competition is usually open and fair ... equal grounds. Good sportsmen and musicians for example jam together or practice together to tell each other about new tweaks and hints. This way the overall situation improves for everyone. In our system or the business end of it we have strict this "hedging" of ideas. People come up with something productive and lock it up so that they are the only ones to get a benefit from it. Then they release little portions at a time to whoever pays for it. The majority of benefit flows into this, let me call it, "bubble" which grows and grows because all the benefit can only go nowhere else. At some point there is a burst and all the great ideas vanish with the locked up holders of the assets. The customers have paid time and time again and now all is lost.
With an open structure you would have to build smaller bubbles and more of them in many many places. Maybe held together like a plastic foil. Sort of a bubble wrap type of thing. Then when one of the tiny bubbles bursts it makes an interesting "pop" sound and the people feeding, tending and eventually pushing the bubble until it burst have a kind of gratification. But the overall structure of the system wouldn't be compromised. You just go to the next bubble that does practically the same thing.
Businesses rightly consider it foolish to give assets that they paid for away to their competitors. As a result, they will often be reluctant to pay for a custom solution only to have their competitors receive it for free.
Look at the phone market just now, or the netbooks. One company started it (Apple iPhone, Asus Eee PC) and everyone is buying one of these things, disassembling, analyzing and reproducing it. Some of the Meizu phones look just like an iPhone where one has to wonder "How drunk was their designer to draw the exact same thing". It's already going on. Everyone's copying already, that's what our human nature is about. Sharing ideas. We only still have to find a way of building smaller bubbles. So in a way the competitors are already getting the work for free. They just copy some of the concepts, modify them and produce it. But why are the originals still mostly dominant? Not because of the market power but because they provide quality service. If someone came along with an iPhone clone that did the same things and better, worked with all carriers and was cheaper do you think Apple would still sell theirs well? I think not, but so far Apple has done a good job to provide services (iTunes, MobileMe etc.) to make their product more attractive. And that's just what needs to go on in the FOSS model. People providing good solutions. They don't have to protect their partial "assets" (like code) because their overall product/service quality is the asset. Most of the parts could probably be done in a better way stand-alone from someone but only those that succeed to put it all into one and juggle that package seem to make it in the market. Linux is a good example here, I don't hear anyone shipping Arch Linux to noob users because they have some good concepts but overall their stuff is still to convoluted. Ubuntu on the other hand has marketing, support and fair organisation behind it and it seems to work.
Consequently, they often choose to pay for custom solutions that are proprietary, so that their important IT business assets remain theirs and theirs alone. Alternatively, they will reach for proprietary, paid solutions ensuring that competitors who wish to use the same will incur the same costs. They'll then pay their own people or contractors to customize the proprietary solution, again, ensuring that the fruits of their investment in software ac
Not at all. TFA said "the global loss due to proprietary software", not the global costs. It's not no-evidence figure pushing, there have been studies. Me, I think the figure is conservative.
Read my post. I'm all talking about the word "loss" he used. He could have said "cost" but that wouldn't make his point. "Loss" is the amount of money you don't get when your software can't read a foreign currency cell and breaks your macro resulting in violation of deadline and loss of the contract. What we're talking about here is the "reduction of cost" not a "loss". He's trying to make it look like people are losing money buying proprietary software. Yeah, if directly compared to using F/OSS. But in no reasonable scenario is "not using open source" a substitute for "losing money". It's "spending too much money while you could do cheaper" but that's not losing.
I know these monetary business terms are very flexible and what is a "overpriced solution" to me might be a "loss of projected available liquid funds" to someone else but in this case he cheaply used this word "loss" to emphasize his point that Linux would be cheaper. Thusly implying that the only right thing to do is go for open source right now. Imho I think both will have their places and if only we can get people to "save money" by using more open source while sticking with proprietary solution for special needs this world would be a much better place to own a computer. "Would be cheaper" is not "a loss" because you decided to lose that money by going for the more expensive solution. Linux has not just popped up yesterday and there have been incredible changes that make it much more feasible for office and end user systems. No one wanted to take these chances and stayed with Microsoft because they felt safer (and in some cases were probably persuaded by lobbyists). That's like throwing away my keys as hard as I can and then argue that I "lost" them.
He's just trying to make a statement for the use of open source and I appreciate that but this time I throw the same rocks at him that I use when some Microsoft exec flings his poo at me. Because it's the same kind of rhetoric poo flinging that we accuse Microsoft of for so many years now. Isn't this what F/OSS is about? Shouldn't we be able to do better? Why package obvious truths into slimy backdoor rhetoric when the facts and advantages have so much more to tell. Yeah it's free. Yeah you can save money if you don't have to pay these expensive licenses. But that's no inadvertent "loss" it's your own darned decision to use pricey Microsoft products. I'm just saying he should have said "They could save money" not "They're losing money" sounds like the same thing but it isn't.
And I'm an open source guy saying this.
Maybe; just maybe, Microsoft isn't the evil machine some slashdotters make out.
But maybe, just maybe. Microsoft IS the convicted child molester who's donating to UNESCO some slashdotters think.
And by some I mean me.
And by UNESCO, I mean bribing a clown to get into the best Junior-High birthday parties in town.
Seems to work for the recording industry.
Not really, this is about customers. The industry doesn't win customers over by telling them how much they believe is stolen from them each year. It works for court cases as long as the judges don't ask too many questions and just go with the pledge. The latest case around how download do not equal losses is a good sign for the paradigm-change that is happening. In any case, relying solely on telling the other part how much money they are (not) screwed out of isn't enough to sell a product. In my mind it still needs some actual advantages and features. Linux has enough of those and if you, as a side note, also refer to it as being free this will count as a bonus.
Go ahead mark me troll, but have any of you seriously given thought to what will happen if open source were to become the norm and all these people were out of work, being asked to volunteer the skills they once got paid for?
Who says that Open Source has to be free? Seriously. This model is still completely misunderstood. Someone wants a specialized application for whatever ... they pay you to write it. You publish it under a license and share the code. That way you get money AND free input from the community. Sure there will be competing products that base on your code but look at the distro vendors. SuSe, Canonical, RedHat they all use more or less the same code and sell their specific very individual solutions.
I can imagine what would happen if programmers were no longer bound to huge companies by NDAs and Non-Compete agreements and all code was open: We'd get a shit ton of awesome code to work with and all the brilliant results stemming from there.
The difficult part is to change the perception of open source from the one like yours "Everything is free as in Beer and the brewer goes broke" to "Everything is free as in speech and you get paid for the quality and sustainability of your work". I wouldn't mind having companies go broke that re-release the same product year after year with little to no improvements. If there are other companies that do the job better and improve over time I guess it would only be fair. The current market is based on monopolism and power struggle between the monopolies. That's what has to change for FOSS to succeed and we need to start in the heads.
...overall it has been estimated that the global loss due to proprietary software is "in excess of $1 trillion a year."
That's the same kind of lame-ass no-evidence silly figure pushing that the RIAA and MPAA uses to sell their Anti-Piracy measures. I love Linux and I'd love to see it spread even more but this way of propagating it is just retarded. You get Microsoft software for your money, be that a good investment or not is your decision. It's clearly not a "loss" it's merely a costly under-utilization of alternatives.
I tend to praise Linux and rant against Microsoft but this OSI guy Tiemann just blew the frame by using the same silly and faulty means of propaganda rhetoric. One thing I try to learn and live by is "Just because THEY do it doesn't mean we have to or even should do it too". By pulling figures out of his ass to make himself look more interesting he's not a single notch better than Microsoft with it's installbase or the supposed piracy figures by the media companies. That is just NOT the way to convince people of the right thing.
When they move they'll have to notify the county where they live. They'll have to let their neighbors know (So they can keep their kids away from these nasty people).
*Ding Dong*
"Hi my name is Megan, I just moved in next door. I'm 20 and I have to inform you that I will probably force you to see me naked."
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! We can't let that happen.
Calling people names like "troll" doesn't help your cause. Please try to keep the tone polite and helpful.
Read the post I responded to again, I just threw back what he tossed into my yard. I'm not the one writing anonymous posts that I don't answer calling other people silly names. If you didn't notice that was a witty way to give him a taste of his own medicine.
A casual user can't change Linux either, because they "can't even write patches or have a reasonable way of requesting features" because, if they do request features, some zealot tells them to write it themselves. It's very frustrating.
Yeah? And where is that? On Slashdot in the comments? Not exactly the appropriate place to call for new GNOME features. I have filed dozens of bugs and feature requests with several projects and many of those were answered very politely and nicely. Some where even implemented and/or fixed. That's way more than I ever got from Microsoft support. If people use every opportunity and discussion about any FOSS project to complain about what's wrong with the software but never actually file a request with the project itself then that, also, is very frustrating as you can imagine. It's no surprise that "zealots" will tell them to stfu. I requested features for WINE, Xfce, Deluge, Comix, Guake Terminal and many others and I always got very nice responses and sometimes fixes within 48 hours.
You can run around the streets 24/7 shouting "BMW are bastards they build shit cars" because your in-drive computer froze. People will tell you to quit the whining and won't be very helpful at all. Now, if you go to your BMW dealer on the other hand and tell them about it they probably will be very interested to understand your problem and help you as a user. See my point?
And readable text isn't a "feature." It's a baseline requirement.
And running a 1024x768 resolution on a 14" display and then complain about scaling is a baseline user behavior? So what the text is broken, it's readable. I have to use translated versions of MS Windows all the time and it's a pain what they did to error messages and menus. Don't even start with German Vista. Write a complaint about it to the GNOME people and someone might fix it for you. That's just what a non-professional system will bring with it. You can just as well BUY a Windows license and stop blaming people for your problems with the FREE software you're using.
My mother is a claims adjuster for a subsection of healthcare coverage, maybe I should burst into her room and start kicking her all over the place because no insurance company will cover my chronic condition?
So you're comparing a one-in-a-few-thousand claims adjuster's position for an insurance company with "Deputy Attorney General" which according to the all-knowing trash heap is "the second-highest-ranking official in the United States Department of Justice". Pretty fancy boiler he'll stand around ...
And if your Mom did coincidently put lots of her work into refusing chronic patients and advising other adjusters to do as well?
The first time I heard the name David Ogden I didn't know either. Then I went on Scroogle.org and found myself some documents with his name on them. Lots of them were from copyright litigation cases and such. He effectively assisted in the legal proceedings that lead to sentences in favor of the RIAA and other organisations. That to me, personally, acts as proof. I obviously can't say what he'll do once in office but his team has pretty much been called. Read the article I linked my first post and then do some research on Ogden. Looks definitely plausible to me.
Sure off-topic, see that little "branch" in the thread structure ... new discussions start there. GNOME IS usable for casual users. The guy I answered to was complaining that the current state didn't reflect HIS expectation of GNOME as a UI system. That's no casual requirement so there you go. A casual user doesn't want to change Windows or do they? I bet they do but since they can't even write patches or have a reasonable way of requesting features Linux is even ahead in this respect.
I dare you to find one Slashdot Microsoft/Linux article of any category that is still entirely "on-topic" after the second thread branch. First register a username and understand how the comments work here before you write. Otherwise go away, troll.
All that retreat mumbo-jumbo at the moment is just the precursor to what will be brought against the people in 2009 and beyond. Obama has selected an RIAA supporting ass. attourney general with David Ogden and now that the industry has a seat on the presidents team and wan't to "cooperate" with ISPs they don't need these awful lawsuits anymore.
... I sense a great disturbance in the warez.
My piratey sense is tingling
I'd much rather want to see a list of stuff that despite it being available everywhere ISN'T shared and reasons why.
... it took the torrent guys almost have a year AFTER the DVD was out (usually it's way before the release) to get the movie into the net because apparently nobody wanted it or didn't share it.
Take the "Postal" atrocity by Uwe Boll for example
Instead of being intimidated by bogus numbers from studies no one will ever see I'd love to see reasons for why things aren't shared and what that can say about the quality of the products this priced "industry" is trying to shove down my pipe.
They're announcing record breaking profits year after year. Billions of Dollars. Legal download figures went up significantly last year. With all that water flowing their way they still can't drink enough? That's what's wrong with these guys. They're making billions of dollars and start complaining about what they COULD HAVE gotten if they did get the revenue from black market sales as well. That is as if BMW announced they would sue the entire East-Bloc states for the black market sales value of stolen cars. What the hell?
Ah forget it! The figures are bogus anyway.
Then what? Seriously, when does it stop?
When we can finally get over using Windows as the market dominating OS... this only happens because people want the kind of monopoly money MS has made in the last 20 years. If they're no longer the king ... no one will want their throne.