I've read through most of the comments here, and it strikes me that there is a lot of discussion about how bad file formats are. Yeah file formats are bad, remember this when you design your next one. Yeah, it's useful to know how to extract hidden info from these various file formats.
Now address the point that releasing this info may lead to some peoples deaths. Which I feel is much more important at this point than the file formats. Have the people who may be at risk been warned? If you know someone who may know someone who may be at risk, perhaps now is the time to ask around and try to pass the info on. Let's try to make sure no-one gets hurt because of the dumb-ass actions of all actors in this sorry episode.
In a past life I was a software publisher. It was part of my job to make decisions about packaging format.
There are several factors that came into my thinking...
1. How much do I want people to pay? And whatever price I want, if the customer sees the product before purchase, the customer had better feel comfortable and happy that they are getting value for money. So a fifty dollar product can come in packaging that looks less important and is cheaper than a one thousand dollar package. On the other hand - if the customer doesn't see the product before purchase, then the packaging can be as cheap as you like - witness the OEM versions of Microsoft products.
2. There's an arms-race happening, currently at a stability-point. When a purchase sits on a shelf, the customer can only judge relative value by the packaging. So, if you make your packaging look and feel better, convey more information, and makes the customer more comfortable than the packaging that the opposition are using, then you will gain some sales that you would not otherwise have had. On the other hand, you also don't want to break the equilibrium that exists by producing something that the competitors have to match. For instance - packaging in gold foil may send the message that your product is a premium high-value product, but guarantees that the competition will have upgrade their packaging to compete. You just both end up spending more money for no overall gain.
3. Distributors and retail agents like 'regular' packaging. These are important people to please - they control whether your end-users will see the package. If you make packaging that is difficult for them to display, pack or handle you can be sure that some of them won't bother. So this means that you can't make an oversized box for instance if you want it to fit on ordinary shelving. And it means that while hexagonal boxes may be eye-catching, they will be a real problem to store.
4. Security. Someone has to pay for stolen stock. The smaller you make your packaging the more will be stolen, providing the value stays the same. So if you have a highly desireable product, make the packaging bulky. Also, make the packaging more complex, so that it is harder for casual shoplifters to gain entrance.
So - the reason that it's not going to change is that packaging is currently at an equilibrium point. For any change to happen there needs to be a new force - like a change in public sentiment about packaging or a new law. I don't think that's going to happen real soon.
No not apples and oranges. Green apples and red apples. All goods exist on a scale of development cost plus reproduction cost. Cars have high development cost and high reproduction cost. Good software has high development cost but low reproduction cost. Having a low reproduction cost does not mean that that the goods should be free.
It does mean that different economics apply to the car industry and the software industry. Probably software (red apples - cos I prefer them)should be compared to book publishing (slightly less red apples) or consultancy of the Gartner Group kind.
This business model does not work. It depends on having a limited competition. As soon as Linux gets real popular and x thousand other guys want to sell the same goods without passing any money back to Red Hat bang goes any profit.
You can only sensibly make profit where you control resources. The terms of the GNU licence mean that any profit that is more than nominal will attract competition that can't be defended against. You may view this as a good thing if you are against commercial software; the GNU licence is designed to stop people from controlling resources.
So my advice - don't base a business on the GNU licence if you want to be wealthy.
Those people in the southern United States and in South Africa who in the early part of this century passed laws against 'miscegenation' did so for reasons which they viewed as moral - just as significantly moral as Meyer's (or Stallman's) view their arguments on free software.
Speaking as a South African: No they didn't. They passed laws for economic and racial purity reasons and conveniently cloaked it in a guise of morality.
The recent Microsoft hole generated a fair amount of vitriol. There is a distinct lack of it in this discussion. Perhaps some AC's would like to add some vicious slurs in the interests of fairness?/irony
I think that this highlights an important point. Balanced views and comments give the/. community, Linux and OSS credibility. Unbalanced views do exactly the opposite.
I personally favour restraint when critisizing, and encourage others to think carefully about the tone of their posts before hitting the button. I think that this sends a much better message - that the community, Linux and OSS is reasonable - than hurling abuse does.
In the interests of transparency - I am a Windows user. I am a Linux user. I develop for Windows. I expect to develop for Linux. But I really don't care much about the platform so long as it provides the services and audience that I require.
Until recently I worked in a software publisher. We, and I am sure every other publisher, had the same debate from time to time.
The answer to your question depends on your users and the industry/use that your software is targeted at. The way to find out is to explain the trade-offs to some of your users, and to ask their opinion.
Here are some of the trade-offs: 1. Time to market is longer. This is because the lead time for printing is longer than the lead time for pressing CD's or putting the software on the net. The normal course of events seems to be that the software is still changing in small subtle ways until very very shortly before it is shipped. This is natural since the more time you have the more bugs you . Leads to mismatches between software and manuals.
2. Over time, the manuals lag the software. Printing is expensive compared to online, so naturally when a minor revision of the software is introduced, the manual gains an addendum.
3. Printed manuals improve the perception of value of software because they are visible. Even if they are never used, users attach value to them. Online manuals can't be seen - much lower value.
4. Manuals make the software cost more.
After talking to our users, some of the conclusions that we reached:
- The installation notes and troubleshooting should definitely be on paper (nice online too).
- Basic intro tutorials are better on paper, but can be pushed to online. If you make the tutorial interactive with the software then this is best, and obviously can't be duplicated on paper.
- If you put it online, don't use pdf. Athough this prints out nicely, most people are not going to print out the whole manual. You send the message 'This is online because we are cheap' and not 'This online because it is most useful like this' when you use pdf. Use HTML or some similar screen-based format. There is one exception to this: If your software contains elements that many users will want access to - for instance a workbook accompanying educational material - then this is useful both as a photocopiable original and pdf.
- Make sure that the online material is searchable. Document the method in the paper portions.
In the educational software industry having the reference material on paper as well as online is important enough to the users that most indicate that they would pay extra for it.
My personal viewpoint. Most manuals are more useful online than offline. Binders sound nice until the pages get torn out. I like to be able to search the reference material.
This was an excellent essay describing the current state of play.
I see that once again there is a theme of Katz-says-the-obvious. Before I begin I'd like to say that I think that this is unreasonable. There is a place on/. for summing current state of play, particularly with respect to the effects that technology is having and may have on our lives and industries. These sort of essays encourage debate and thought about where we are heading. They encourage useful ideas. They make me think.
Jon, thank you for sharing your thoughts and research with us.
In a previous existence I worked for a large publisher of excellent repute. There is indeed a serious discussion in the publishing industry about the effect of the net on publishing.
The current consensus is that the medium is good for publishing content that has a short shelf-life: newspapers. But that current screen technology makes it a bad medium for longer pieces and those that are not immediate. This seems obvious now - but it hasn't always been so.
The online newspapers are still experimenting. It's pretty clear to most newspaper publishers that they are being overtaken, and that is why they are going online. But like everyone else, they are still developing the model. Expect to see newspapers becoming more/.ish - becoming more of a community conversation than they have been.
Books. Some important but subtle points. The current form of the book and the forms of story are inventions. Part of the reason that these are successful is that they meet the social needs in a useful form factor. It is likely that the way that stories are presented will change in response to the internet form factor. There are many experiments running now of which Glassbooks, PDF publishing, etc are just a few. The most important thing from the point of view of publishers is not the way that words are presented, it is the income they generate. Publishers are businesses - this may seem self evident - but the point is to make money. If in the process publishers can publish great and worthy material then they will. But the form factor that material is delivered in is not sacrosanct.
What do publishers do? There is a line of thought that says that publishers are middlemen that the net will cut out. This has a grain of truth. But in fact publishers provide many more services to the public and to authors than are generally recognised. Some of these have been mentioned already - they act as filters - there is an enormous amount of work out there. Lots of it is not worth the cost of the paper it could be printed on. They act as valves - publishers aim to release work to a schedule - this means that readers to some extent are not going to be overwhelmed with important works at the same time. They act as quality control - most books contain flaws that people find annoying unless corrected. They act as distribution - very important while books are on paper. They act as PR. Promoting a work to ensure sales is a critical part of making sure that authors have money to eat and write. Now some of these will drop away/reduce with the advent of electonic publishing on a serious scale. But the others are reasons why publishers are unlikely to go away. (But they will change.)
Profit. Publishing is a business. The point is to make sure that you and your employees eat and sleep well. So publishers have to keep up the margins. To some extent the prices on books are artificial - for instance hardback vs softcover price depends on the value people vest in hardcover and not just the cost of manufacturing. But a portion of the coverprice represents the cost of of the dead tree and the cost of distributing the dead tree. With electonic publishing you can cut these out of the price, drop the price and sell more - goes the argument. The problem is that electronic publishing as the music industry is finding out makes the object that much more copiable. Now there is a fundemental problem; when people buy a book they have something physical. They associate the price with the physical item and not the content. When you have electronic publishing you no longer have the physical tie, and hence you lose the value that people ascribe to the physical. Furthermore - for a particular book there is a market of x people, by putting the book in a more copiable format you are guaranteed that you will lose some sales that you would have made. A way to pull back those sales is to reduce the price. But by reducing price you cut margins, and you decrease the value that people associate with the work. Potential for a nasty spiral if you are a publisher or author. And all because we've broken the stable price/content/value/form factor that is embodied in the publishing industry currently.
So this goes back to the notion of format. Current publising formats are likely to change for electronic publishing. It is hard to defend your margins when your publications are easily copied. It will always be possible (easy?) to circumvent technical locks on content - like those that Glassbook provides. the likely solution will be that the format of the story changes. Perhaps more stories will be presented in a eposodic fashion, to increase the revenue that publishers can gain from advertising. They may involve some realtime experience - for instance, at crucial parts of the story you may have to connect to a server for an update of key plotlines - rather like a Soap. Perhaps discussion between the author and the audience will be a key element. There are lots of experiments out there.
The trick will be to etablish a new *stable* price/content/value/form factor.
There is another view of the future - some of this drive towards different format is because of the form factor of current display technology. It is particularly unpleasant trying to hold a monitor in your hand while you are in the bath. But a lot of people have seen the obvious advantages of having cheap thin light flexible screens with book-level resolution. There are a number of groups working on this sort of tecnology and it is virtually certain that one of them will be successful, if only because there is massive demand. How the format of the book changes will be driven in part by the availability of this technology. If it takes 2 years to arrive then books can still be associated with a physical element, and I would expect to see a gradual shift in the the format as people discover that epaper is not paper. On the other hand, if it takes 10 years to arrive, then you can expect large changes in the publishing world as margins are eroded.
The sort of changes: an explosion of small publishing houses offering ewares. More mergers between large publishers in an attempt to cut costs. A drop in the number of fringe books appearing on paper. A drop in the investment made in first time authors. An diversification in other format books - for instance book on tape, book on cd, readings of book streamed across the net. (But note that these are harder-to-copy formats).
That's all. Publishers reading this - I am prepared to give my opinion for a fee. Other entrepeneurs and angels. I am thinking about this stuff. I welcome your thoughts.
Well folks I've just read all the way through again, and I'd like to comment on a whole bunch of the themes.
MS vs Linux. This is a big messy subject, and every time it gets mentioned on/. I get peeved. Some points: 1. Every OS has some deficiencies - yes even Linux. 2. Every OS has some excellent areas - yes Windows does. 3. Interface is a religious issue - your preference depends on your level of expertise, your first OS experience, the number of OSes you've worked with, your graphic-aethetic quotient, the apps you want to use, your character, and the colour of your dog. There is little point to a this-is-better-than-that discussion unless you point at specific features of the OS and say why you think that this feature makes the OS better or worse, by comparing and contrasting with others. Knee-jerk facist zealot reaction from any sides of the divides wastes our time and saps patience.
Character assassination It seems to me that if you don't like an OS/UI/App/whatever, then criticize it on the grounds that you can defend. The KDE, Gnome, Windows, MacOS, etc guys are doing excellent and valuable work. Criticizing the personalities involved does absolutely nothing to move debate forward.
UI design UI design is hard. Quite possibly it is harder than program design. I know - I've done both. To get the UI right is an impossible task; you have widely divergent groups thying to use the same software. New and occasional users want simplicity, and frequent users want depth and control. It's a tight balancing act that very very few developers get right. It is much much easier to copy an existing product and improve on it than to develop something completely new. Like any art there are very few fundemental changes in reference point and lots and lots of building on the work of others. So KDE has elements of Windows. What's the problem? Depending on whether they satisfy the needs of their constintuency (like any other peice of software) KDE will survive or not. Similarly Gnome. If you think you can do better get down and do it rather than whining.
Split in the Desktop I think that this is a very serious issue. Diversity is only a strength when it can be catered for. When the diversity means that as a developer you have to support one or other platform there's a problem. This is one of the *good* things abut the Windows platform - it is relatively easy to support an application that runs on a variety of Windows platforms because the API's (in the sense of the actual calls you make to the OS) are close enough across platforms that there is often/usually not a huge amount of work to be done in order to port. At the moment writing an app that will run on KDE and Gnome is not easy. To avoid a split that becomes a problem either one of these has to die, or they have to converge. Too soon to say what will happen - watch this space in three years time.
MS vs Linux part II I think it is incredibly dangerous to define yourself as being in opposition to another tradition. Anyone who defines Linux as notWindows is doing us a disservice. If Linux is to succeed on any larger scale than hobbyist/hardcore users then it needs more of a philosophy than this. I see the philosphy of freedom as a very very powerful one. But this is not to say that it is freedom from Windows - it is the freedom to change what you want to change. Never forget that there are other OSes that do not allow you to change Window Managers. Also remember that these OSes are currently a *LOT* more successful than Linux if you define success as the number of computers that run the OS.
Change For a change, Linux is at a split in the road. From this point it can either grow, or die (or stay static, but I class this as death). Problem: where does it grow into? Well it could become a server OS - you don't see Netware on the desktop that often do you? It could grow into the Unix of choice, and then stop growing. (Let's face it the command line is not going to conquer the world.) Or it could expand into the desktop market. (Or it could stay as the kit-car OS, but I hope not since this is the static future.) Factions exist that support each of these futures - it's not clear which will win out because it depends on many external factors, as well as internal ones. I really feel that/. need to discuss more on what the future should be. Being organized generates strength.
The point is that ownership is a social construction. There is no physical thing representing ownership, and there are many societies where the notion of personal ownership is not part of the group of memes that the society is built on.
So, given that ownership is a social construct, we are free to define any ownership patterns. Generally we like to define ownership over scarce resources, like land, but this does not in any way impede us from defining ownership over vibrations in air and other things that we cannot touch.
Answer: Most stuff is patentable or becoming so
on
What Can Be Patented?
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Firstly, I am not a lawyer, nor am I a patent agent, so trust nothing I say, and please tell me of any misconceptions I have. I know something about patents because the topic interests me.
Right some fundamentals first, in general, ideas and processes that are in public are assumed to be in the public domain. However, most countries have recognised that this means that someone who invents something will keep the process of construction a secret, and possibly the invention itself, unless they are assured of protection. So the patent laws grant a limited monopoly to the inventor - I think 17 (not sure of this) years in most places with the understanding that the inventor will place the details in the public domain. So now you see why it is that the original idea was that processes are patentable and why they should be embodied in some physical device, like a machine. This monopoly grants the inventor the sole right to control use of the process. That is, the inventor can deny anyone else the use, whether they want to use it in making copies of the invention or in inventions dependent on the original invention. Usually the inventor will make a deal for use of the patent and gain a royalty. Hmm - can you see the use of patents as an offensive weapon between companies, and hence the litigation.
To determine whether an invention should receive this protection the inventor files a description of the invention together with a description of the process with the patent office. Now it should be clear why the patent office does not release details on patent applications until the patents are granted - protection of the invention. (I believe that there is now some discussion about releasing the details of patent applications 2 years after submission in an effort to stop people exploiting the system to reign in submarine patents.) And now you can see why the idea of a patent watch is probably unlikely to work.
Applications are filed using a formal language (much like, say, IDL is a formal language) and hence the difficulty in understanding them if you are not trained in the language. One of the requirements for granting an application is that the invention be non-trivial and non-obvious to anyone skilled in the art. Now you can see why some daft patents are granted - if the Patent Office does not have people skilled in the art, then they will inevitably grant some unreasonable patents. Also, to this end inventors are required to list Prior Art - that is ideas and inventions in the same area. So one of the questions that the Patent Officer has to decide is given the prior art, is the invention obvious. Oops - you can see what the omission of some important prior art could mean. Now it's not in the inventors long-term interests to miss an important piece of prior art since in the long run, their patent is likely to be knocked down - witness the Windsurfer. On the other hand under the US patent system, AFAIK, the only way to challenge a patent is through an inevitably expensive and time-consuming legal battle. Hmm, so you can see why you may get companies taking a chance.
Okay - so now for about a hundred years you could only patent processes embodied in machines. In most places that meant that if you wanted to patent a computer program you had to embed it in some sort of hardware, and make it part of a process. So it was possible to patent software, but only in a roundabout way. Then in a remarkable move, the US patent Office decided in 1992(?) (as a result of some court cases and various PTO decisions) that software was patentable.
More recently (1980) the US Supreme Court has held that an organism is patentable, and subsequently in 1987 US PTO issued a ruling that all genetically engineered multicellular organisms are potentially patentable. This in turn has lead to the patentability of gene sequences. Now this is quite a leap. From a process being patentable, now it is simply enough to read a gene sequence (using a machine that you could have in your bedroom) and get a patent on that sequence, without knowing what it does or how it can be used.
This has lead to a dramatic rush to map the human (and other) genomes and to patent anything and everything. This also leads to some unsavoury side effects - if the sequence is found in you, then you may be in breach of patent laws, and may have to pay a royalty to the patent holder. I'm not sure how they would deny you the use of the invention that they hold a monopoly on - but as US law stands at the moment they probably could. Certainly they could deny you the right to sell a body part. I'll conceded that this is an extreme view, and there have been statements that human beings are excluded under the US 13th Amendment, forbidding slavery. However, the parts of humans, for instance genetically altered human genes, tissues, cell lines, organs are potentially patentable. and the US Supreme Court has held that if a cell line is created from your cells, and patented, you have no ownership rights to the invention - John Moore vs UCLA.
[Digression] In a similar way to the problems with software patenting, allowing patents on biological machines - i.e. organisms - has lead to the granting of, for instance, patent rights over all human blood cells which have come from the umbilical cord of a new-born child where they are used for any therapeutic purposes. This, extremely broad patent was granted to a US company by the EU Patent Office.[/Digression]
In most the rest of the world the same basic rules are followed. In the US, the first inventor receives the patent. In most the rest of the world, the first to file gets the patent. So you can see the excellent potential for litigation in the US. Hmm, I wonder if the system was designed by lawyers, or am I being cynical. In most the rest of the world software is not patentable. Though this may change - the European Union (a trading block bigger than the US) is concerned about the software patent situation, and considers that its companies may be at a disadvantage. There is a draft directive (the method by which laws are brought into existence/or harmonised in each of member countries of the EU so that they have the same effect across the EU) which was due to be voted on last year - making software patents legal - but there is still discussion about whether s/w patents are desirable, and the directive has been held back. Fairly predictably, on the whole, large companies are for the idea since it make barriers to entry higher, and smaller ones and individuals are not. Actually the current laws in member countries in the EU allow patenting in some places, but not others.
Even more recently the US patent office has held that business models are patentable. That is - if you invent a new way of doing business - say for instance holding auctions on the internet - you can patent this. I don't think that business models are patentable in Europe.
It seems that the US patent system is moving towards the POV that anything new and worth money is patentable. Or they could be taking a strategy that these decisions should be tested in court.
So your answer. Pretty much anything new is patentable in the US. But not in the rest of the world, though it may become so.
Costs. Patenting is expensive. It costs tens of thousands of dollars (hundreds of thousands?) to patent something world-wide - you have to patent in each country, which means new documents - more fees for patent agents - searches - translations and much more. There are some shortcuts - for instance in the EU you can apply for an EU wide patent rather than applying in each country.
Acknowledgements - Some material comes from Jeremy Rifkin - the Biotech Century - an excellent book about which I will write a review for/. some time. Other material from Property of the Mind an essay by Jeffrey P Cunard, part of The Future of Software, Edited by Derek Leebaert. I would recommend reading this to anyone interested in software patents. TFOS is another superb book, which I think has been reviewed on/. Let me know if I am wrong, and I may write a review.
This is the attitude that makes people write you flames about not turning your code loose. No! This is the attitude that makes people not release their code The Slashdot code belongs to Slashdot. It may be based on others' work, but the modifications and additions are theirs and they are free to choose to release them when they feel ready to release them. It is completely unreasonable to flame because their release schedule does not suit you, no matter the reason that they give.
Firstly, alpha and beta are just arbitrary labels for stages in the dev cycle, and can only be labelled with some confidence after the project is complete, when their purpose (as a measure of how close you are to your goal) is no longer necessary.
In commercial software dev, you only have 3 variables to play with - time, quality and money - and changing any one of them changes the other 2, meaning that the feature-set of the final software is often fluid until shortly before shipping. And so, as well as being arbitrary the labels cover a blurry time/feature-set.
Which means that the alpha and beta definitions should be defined in a way that is useful to your project and set of circumstances. In my projects I use the entirely arbitrary, blurry, grey defintion that an alpha is one quarter of what I think will be the final product (chiefly driven by amount of time that the money variable can sustain) and a beta is three quarters.
Typically I'll declare something alpha when it is still feature incomplete but the main elements of UI are there, the key features have some (incomplete) implementation. But the implementation as it stands is reasonably stable - i.e it can be used, but don't trust it.
By the time I declare beta 1 I expect to be three quarters through development time, I expect the UI to be near-complete, functionality to be at least three quarters finished (but typically I expect it to be 95%). (Remember that time and functionality definitions are fluid though, because of the 3 variables.)
I expect usually to go to a beta 2 and sometimes beta 3. Beta 1 is usually for internal use. Beta 2 can go to trusted customers. Beta 2 has a frozen UI. Beta 3 is for general preview - often used as a marketing tool.
I know I have reached ship-stage when the software contains no known bugs that cause data loss. It will contain some known low-priority bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read through most of the comments here, and it strikes me that there is a lot of discussion about how bad file formats are. Yeah file formats are bad, remember this when you design your next one. Yeah, it's useful to know how to extract hidden info from these various file formats.
Now address the point that releasing this info may lead to some peoples deaths. Which I feel is much more important at this point than the file formats. Have the people who may be at risk been warned? If you know someone who may know someone who may be at risk, perhaps now is the time to ask around and try to pass the info on. Let's try to make sure no-one gets hurt because of the dumb-ass actions of all actors in this sorry episode.
Jeff Veit
In a past life I was a software publisher. It was part of my job to make decisions about packaging format.
There are several factors that came into my thinking...
1. How much do I want people to pay? And whatever price I want, if the customer sees the product before purchase, the customer had better feel comfortable and happy that they are getting value for money. So a fifty dollar product can come in packaging that looks less important and is cheaper than a one thousand dollar package. On the other hand - if the customer doesn't see the product before purchase, then the packaging can be as cheap as you like - witness the OEM versions of Microsoft products.
2. There's an arms-race happening, currently at a stability-point. When a purchase sits on a shelf, the customer can only judge relative value by the packaging. So, if you make your packaging look and feel better, convey more information, and makes the customer more comfortable than the packaging that the opposition are using, then you will gain some sales that you would not otherwise have had. On the other hand, you also don't want to break the equilibrium that exists by producing something that the competitors have to match. For instance - packaging in gold foil may send the message that your product is a premium high-value product, but guarantees that the competition will have upgrade their packaging to compete. You just both end up spending more money for no overall gain.
3. Distributors and retail agents like 'regular' packaging. These are important people to please - they control whether your end-users will see the package. If you make packaging that is difficult for them to display, pack or handle you can be sure that some of them won't bother. So this means that you can't make an oversized box for instance if you want it to fit on ordinary shelving. And it means that while hexagonal boxes may be eye-catching, they will be a real problem to store.
4. Security. Someone has to pay for stolen stock. The smaller you make your packaging the more will be stolen, providing the value stays the same. So if you have a highly desireable product, make the packaging bulky. Also, make the packaging more complex, so that it is harder for casual shoplifters to gain entrance.
So - the reason that it's not going to change is that packaging is currently at an equilibrium point. For any change to happen there needs to be a new force - like a change in public sentiment about packaging or a new law. I don't think that's going to happen real soon.
Jeff Veit
No not apples and oranges. Green apples and red apples. All goods exist on a scale of development cost plus reproduction cost. Cars have high development cost and high reproduction cost. Good software has high development cost but low reproduction cost. Having a low reproduction cost does not mean that that the goods should be free.
It does mean that different economics apply to the car industry and the software industry. Probably software (red apples - cos I prefer them)should be compared to book publishing (slightly less red apples) or consultancy of the Gartner Group kind.
This business model does not work. It depends on having a limited competition. As soon as Linux gets real popular and x thousand other guys want to sell the same goods without passing any money back to Red Hat bang goes any profit.
You can only sensibly make profit where you control resources. The terms of the GNU licence mean that any profit that is more than nominal will attract competition that can't be defended against. You may view this as a good thing if you are against commercial software; the GNU licence is designed to stop people from controlling resources.
So my advice - don't base a business on the GNU licence if you want to be wealthy.
Speaking as a South African: No they didn't. They passed laws for economic and racial purity reasons and conveniently cloaked it in a guise of morality.
The recent Microsoft hole generated a fair amount of vitriol. There is a distinct lack of it in this discussion. Perhaps some AC's would like to add some vicious slurs in the interests of fairness? /irony
/. community, Linux and OSS credibility. Unbalanced views do exactly the opposite.
I think that this highlights an important point. Balanced views and comments give the
I personally favour restraint when critisizing, and encourage others to think carefully about the tone of their posts before hitting the button. I think that this sends a much better message - that the community, Linux and OSS is reasonable - than hurling abuse does.
In the interests of transparency - I am a Windows user. I am a Linux user. I develop for Windows. I expect to develop for Linux. But I really don't care much about the platform so long as it provides the services and audience that I require.
Jeff
Until recently I worked in a software publisher. We, and I am sure every other publisher, had the same debate from time to time.
The answer to your question depends on your users and the industry/use that your software is targeted at. The way to find out is to explain the trade-offs to some of your users, and to ask their opinion.
Here are some of the trade-offs:
1. Time to market is longer. This is because the lead time for printing is longer than the lead time for pressing CD's or putting the software on the net. The normal course of events seems to be that the software is still changing in small subtle ways until very very shortly before it is shipped. This is natural since the more time you have the more bugs you . Leads to mismatches between software and manuals.
2. Over time, the manuals lag the software. Printing is expensive compared to online, so naturally when a minor revision of the software is introduced, the manual gains an addendum.
3. Printed manuals improve the perception of value of software because they are visible. Even if they are never used, users attach value to them. Online manuals can't be seen - much lower value.
4. Manuals make the software cost more.
After talking to our users, some of the conclusions that we reached:
- The installation notes and troubleshooting should definitely be on paper (nice online too).
- Basic intro tutorials are better on paper, but can be pushed to online. If you make the tutorial interactive with the software then this is best, and obviously can't be duplicated on paper.
- If you put it online, don't use pdf. Athough this prints out nicely, most people are not going to print out the whole manual. You send the message 'This is online because we are cheap' and not 'This online because it is most useful like this' when you use pdf. Use HTML or some similar screen-based format. There is one exception to this: If your software contains elements that many users will want access to - for instance a workbook accompanying educational material - then this is useful both as a photocopiable original and pdf.
- Make sure that the online material is searchable. Document the method in the paper portions.
In the educational software industry having the reference material on paper as well as online is important enough to the users that most indicate that they would pay extra for it.
My personal viewpoint. Most manuals are more useful online than offline. Binders sound nice until the pages get torn out. I like to be able to search the reference material.
Hope that helps,
Jeff Veit
This was an excellent essay describing the current state of play.
/. for summing current state of play, particularly with respect to the effects that technology is having and may have on our lives and industries. These sort of essays encourage debate and thought about where we are heading. They encourage useful ideas. They make me think.
/.ish - becoming more of a community conversation than they have been.
I see that once again there is a theme of Katz-says-the-obvious. Before I begin I'd like to say that I think that this is unreasonable. There is a place on
Jon, thank you for sharing your thoughts and research with us.
In a previous existence I worked for a large publisher of excellent repute. There is indeed a serious discussion in the publishing industry about the effect of the net on publishing.
The current consensus is that the medium is good for publishing content that has a short shelf-life: newspapers. But that current screen technology makes it a bad medium for longer pieces and those that are not immediate. This seems obvious now - but it hasn't always been so.
The online newspapers are still experimenting. It's pretty clear to most newspaper publishers that they are being overtaken, and that is why they are going online. But like everyone else, they are still developing the model. Expect to see newspapers becoming more
Books. Some important but subtle points. The current form of the book and the forms of story are inventions. Part of the reason that these are successful is that they meet the social needs in a useful form factor. It is likely that the way that stories are presented will change in response to the internet form factor. There are many experiments running now of which Glassbooks, PDF publishing, etc are just a few. The most important thing from the point of view of publishers is not the way that words are presented, it is the income they generate. Publishers are businesses - this may seem self evident - but the point is to make money. If in the process publishers can publish great and worthy material then they will. But the form factor that material is delivered in is not sacrosanct.
What do publishers do? There is a line of thought that says that publishers are middlemen that the net will cut out. This has a grain of truth. But in fact publishers provide many more services to the public and to authors than are generally recognised. Some of these have been mentioned already - they act as filters - there is an enormous amount of work out there. Lots of it is not worth the cost of the paper it could be printed on. They act as valves - publishers aim to release work to a schedule - this means that readers to some extent are not going to be overwhelmed with important works at the same time. They act as quality control - most books contain flaws that people find annoying unless corrected. They act as distribution - very important while books are on paper. They act as PR. Promoting a work to ensure sales is a critical part of making sure that authors have money to eat and write. Now some of these will drop away/reduce with the advent of electonic publishing on a serious scale. But the others are reasons why publishers are unlikely to go away. (But they will change.)
Profit. Publishing is a business. The point is to make sure that you and your employees eat and sleep well. So publishers have to keep up the margins. To some extent the prices on books are artificial - for instance hardback vs softcover price depends on the value people vest in hardcover and not just the cost of manufacturing. But a portion of the coverprice represents the cost of of the dead tree and the cost of distributing the dead tree. With electonic publishing you can cut these out of the price, drop the price and sell more - goes the argument. The problem is that electronic publishing as the music industry is finding out makes the object that much more copiable. Now there is a fundemental problem; when people buy a book they have something physical. They associate the price with the physical item and not the content. When you have electronic publishing you no longer have the physical tie, and hence you lose the value that people ascribe to the physical. Furthermore - for a particular book there is a market of x people, by putting the book in a more copiable format you are guaranteed that you will lose some sales that you would have made. A way to pull back those sales is to reduce the price. But by reducing price you cut margins, and you decrease the value that people associate with the work. Potential for a nasty spiral if you are a publisher or author. And all because we've broken the stable price/content/value/form factor that is embodied in the publishing industry currently.
So this goes back to the notion of format. Current publising formats are likely to change for electronic publishing. It is hard to defend your margins when your publications are easily copied. It will always be possible (easy?) to circumvent technical locks on content - like those that Glassbook provides. the likely solution will be that the format of the story changes. Perhaps more stories will be presented in a eposodic fashion, to increase the revenue that publishers can gain from advertising. They may involve some realtime experience - for instance, at crucial parts of the story you may have to connect to a server for an update of key plotlines - rather like a Soap. Perhaps discussion between the author and the audience will be a key element. There are lots of experiments out there.
The trick will be to etablish a new *stable* price/content/value/form factor.
There is another view of the future - some of this drive towards different format is because of the form factor of current display technology. It is particularly unpleasant trying to hold a monitor in your hand while you are in the bath. But a lot of people have seen the obvious advantages of having cheap thin light flexible screens with book-level resolution. There are a number of groups working on this sort of tecnology and it is virtually certain that one of them will be successful, if only because there is massive demand. How the format of the book changes will be driven in part by the availability of this technology. If it takes 2 years to arrive then books can still be associated with a physical element, and I would expect to see a gradual shift in the the format as people discover that epaper is not paper. On the other hand, if it takes 10 years to arrive, then you can expect large changes in the publishing world as margins are eroded.
The sort of changes: an explosion of small publishing houses offering ewares. More mergers between large publishers in an attempt to cut costs. A drop in the number of fringe books appearing on paper. A drop in the investment made in first time authors. An diversification in other format books - for instance book on tape, book on cd, readings of book streamed across the net. (But note that these are harder-to-copy formats).
That's all. Publishers reading this - I am prepared to give my opinion for a fee. Other entrepeneurs and angels. I am thinking about this stuff. I welcome your thoughts.
Well folks I've just read all the way through again, and I'd like to comment on a whole bunch of the themes.
/. I get peeved. Some points:
/. need to discuss more on what the future should be. Being organized generates strength.
MS vs Linux.
This is a big messy subject, and every time it gets mentioned on
1. Every OS has some deficiencies - yes even Linux.
2. Every OS has some excellent areas - yes Windows does.
3. Interface is a religious issue - your preference depends on your level of expertise, your first OS experience, the number of OSes you've worked with, your graphic-aethetic quotient, the apps you want to use, your character, and the colour of your dog. There is little point to a this-is-better-than-that discussion unless you point at specific features of the OS and say why you think that this feature makes the OS better or worse, by comparing and contrasting with others. Knee-jerk facist zealot reaction from any sides of the divides wastes our time and saps patience.
Character assassination
It seems to me that if you don't like an OS/UI/App/whatever, then criticize it on the grounds that you can defend. The KDE, Gnome, Windows, MacOS, etc guys are doing excellent and valuable work. Criticizing the personalities involved does absolutely nothing to move debate forward.
UI design
UI design is hard. Quite possibly it is harder than program design. I know - I've done both. To get the UI right is an impossible task; you have widely divergent groups thying to use the same software. New and occasional users want simplicity, and frequent users want depth and control. It's a tight balancing act that very very few developers get right. It is much much easier to copy an existing product and improve on it than to develop something completely new. Like any art there are very few fundemental changes in reference point and lots and lots of building on the work of others. So KDE has elements of Windows. What's the problem? Depending on whether they satisfy the needs of their constintuency (like any other peice of software) KDE will survive or not. Similarly Gnome. If you think you can do better get down and do it rather than whining.
Split in the Desktop
I think that this is a very serious issue. Diversity is only a strength when it can be catered for. When the diversity means that as a developer you have to support one or other platform there's a problem. This is one of the *good* things abut the Windows platform - it is relatively easy to support an application that runs on a variety of Windows platforms because the API's (in the sense of the actual calls you make to the OS) are close enough across platforms that there is often/usually not a huge amount of work to be done in order to port. At the moment writing an app that will run on KDE and Gnome is not easy. To avoid a split that becomes a problem either one of these has to die, or they have to converge. Too soon to say what will happen - watch this space in three years time.
MS vs Linux part II
I think it is incredibly dangerous to define yourself as being in opposition to another tradition. Anyone who defines Linux as notWindows is doing us a disservice. If Linux is to succeed on any larger scale than hobbyist/hardcore users then it needs more of a philosophy than this. I see the philosphy of freedom as a very very powerful one. But this is not to say that it is freedom from Windows - it is the freedom to change what you want to change. Never forget that there are other OSes that do not allow you to change Window Managers. Also remember that these OSes are currently a *LOT* more successful than Linux if you define success as the number of computers that run the OS.
Change
For a change, Linux is at a split in the road. From this point it can either grow, or die (or stay static, but I class this as death). Problem: where does it grow into? Well it could become a server OS - you don't see Netware on the desktop that often do you? It could grow into the Unix of choice, and then stop growing. (Let's face it the command line is not going to conquer the world.) Or it could expand into the desktop market. (Or it could stay as the kit-car OS, but I hope not since this is the static future.) Factions exist that support each of these futures - it's not clear which will win out because it depends on many external factors, as well as internal ones. I really feel that
So, given that ownership is a social construct, we are free to define any ownership patterns. Generally we like to define ownership over scarce resources, like land, but this does not in any way impede us from defining ownership over vibrations in air and other things that we cannot touch.
Right some fundamentals first, in general, ideas and processes that are in public are assumed to be in the public domain. However, most countries have recognised that this means that someone who invents something will keep the process of construction a secret, and possibly the invention itself, unless they are assured of protection. So the patent laws grant a limited monopoly to the inventor - I think 17 (not sure of this) years in most places with the understanding that the inventor will place the details in the public domain. So now you see why it is that the original idea was that processes are patentable and why they should be embodied in some physical device, like a machine. This monopoly grants the inventor the sole right to control use of the process. That is, the inventor can deny anyone else the use, whether they want to use it in making copies of the invention or in inventions dependent on the original invention. Usually the inventor will make a deal for use of the patent and gain a royalty. Hmm - can you see the use of patents as an offensive weapon between companies, and hence the litigation.
To determine whether an invention should receive this protection the inventor files a description of the invention together with a description of the process with the patent office. Now it should be clear why the patent office does not release details on patent applications until the patents are granted - protection of the invention. (I believe that there is now some discussion about releasing the details of patent applications 2 years after submission in an effort to stop people exploiting the system to reign in submarine patents.) And now you can see why the idea of a patent watch is probably unlikely to work.
Applications are filed using a formal language (much like, say, IDL is a formal language) and hence the difficulty in understanding them if you are not trained in the language. One of the requirements for granting an application is that the invention be non-trivial and non-obvious to anyone skilled in the art. Now you can see why some daft patents are granted - if the Patent Office does not have people skilled in the art, then they will inevitably grant some unreasonable patents. Also, to this end inventors are required to list Prior Art - that is ideas and inventions in the same area. So one of the questions that the Patent Officer has to decide is given the prior art, is the invention obvious. Oops - you can see what the omission of some important prior art could mean. Now it's not in the inventors long-term interests to miss an important piece of prior art since in the long run, their patent is likely to be knocked down - witness the Windsurfer. On the other hand under the US patent system, AFAIK, the only way to challenge a patent is through an inevitably expensive and time-consuming legal battle. Hmm, so you can see why you may get companies taking a chance.
Okay - so now for about a hundred years you could only patent processes embodied in machines. In most places that meant that if you wanted to patent a computer program you had to embed it in some sort of hardware, and make it part of a process. So it was possible to patent software, but only in a roundabout way. Then in a remarkable move, the US patent Office decided in 1992(?) (as a result of some court cases and various PTO decisions) that software was patentable.
More recently (1980) the US Supreme Court has held that an organism is patentable, and subsequently in 1987 US PTO issued a ruling that all genetically engineered multicellular organisms are potentially patentable. This in turn has lead to the patentability of gene sequences. Now this is quite a leap. From a process being patentable, now it is simply enough to read a gene sequence (using a machine that you could have in your bedroom) and get a patent on that sequence, without knowing what it does or how it can be used.
This has lead to a dramatic rush to map the human (and other) genomes and to patent anything and everything. This also leads to some unsavoury side effects - if the sequence is found in you, then you may be in breach of patent laws, and may have to pay a royalty to the patent holder. I'm not sure how they would deny you the use of the invention that they hold a monopoly on - but as US law stands at the moment they probably could. Certainly they could deny you the right to sell a body part. I'll conceded that this is an extreme view, and there have been statements that human beings are excluded under the US 13th Amendment, forbidding slavery. However, the parts of humans, for instance genetically altered human genes, tissues, cell lines, organs are potentially patentable. and the US Supreme Court has held that if a cell line is created from your cells, and patented, you have no ownership rights to the invention - John Moore vs UCLA.
[Digression] In a similar way to the problems with software patenting, allowing patents on biological machines - i.e. organisms - has lead to the granting of, for instance, patent rights over all human blood cells which have come from the umbilical cord of a new-born child where they are used for any therapeutic purposes. This, extremely broad patent was granted to a US company by the EU Patent Office.[/Digression]
In most the rest of the world the same basic rules are followed. In the US, the first inventor receives the patent. In most the rest of the world, the first to file gets the patent. So you can see the excellent potential for litigation in the US. Hmm, I wonder if the system was designed by lawyers, or am I being cynical. In most the rest of the world software is not patentable. Though this may change - the European Union (a trading block bigger than the US) is concerned about the software patent situation, and considers that its companies may be at a disadvantage. There is a draft directive (the method by which laws are brought into existence/or harmonised in each of member countries of the EU so that they have the same effect across the EU) which was due to be voted on last year - making software patents legal - but there is still discussion about whether s/w patents are desirable, and the directive has been held back. Fairly predictably, on the whole, large companies are for the idea since it make barriers to entry higher, and smaller ones and individuals are not. Actually the current laws in member countries in the EU allow patenting in some places, but not others.
Even more recently the US patent office has held that business models are patentable. That is - if you invent a new way of doing business - say for instance holding auctions on the internet - you can patent this. I don't think that business models are patentable in Europe.
It seems that the US patent system is moving towards the POV that anything new and worth money is patentable. Or they could be taking a strategy that these decisions should be tested in court.
So your answer. Pretty much anything new is patentable in the US. But not in the rest of the world, though it may become so.
Costs. Patenting is expensive. It costs tens of thousands of dollars (hundreds of thousands?) to patent something world-wide - you have to patent in each country, which means new documents - more fees for patent agents - searches - translations and much more. There are some shortcuts - for instance in the EU you can apply for an EU wide patent rather than applying in each country.
Acknowledgements - Some material comes from Jeremy Rifkin - the Biotech Century - an excellent book about which I will write a review for /. some time. Other material from Property of the Mind an essay by Jeffrey P Cunard, part of The Future of Software, Edited by Derek Leebaert. I would recommend reading this to anyone interested in software patents. TFOS is another superb book, which I think has been reviewed on /. Let me know if I am wrong, and I may write a review.
This is the attitude that makes people write you flames about not turning your code loose. No! This is the attitude that makes people not release their code The Slashdot code belongs to Slashdot. It may be based on others' work, but the modifications and additions are theirs and they are free to choose to release them when they feel ready to release them. It is completely unreasonable to flame because their release schedule does not suit you, no matter the reason that they give.
In commercial software dev, you only have 3 variables to play with - time, quality and money - and changing any one of them changes the other 2, meaning that the feature-set of the final software is often fluid until shortly before shipping. And so, as well as being arbitrary the labels cover a blurry time/feature-set.
Which means that the alpha and beta definitions should be defined in a way that is useful to your project and set of circumstances. In my projects I use the entirely arbitrary, blurry, grey defintion that an alpha is one quarter of what I think will be the final product (chiefly driven by amount of time that the money variable can sustain) and a beta is three quarters.
Typically I'll declare something alpha when it is still feature incomplete but the main elements of UI are there, the key features have some (incomplete) implementation. But the implementation as it stands is reasonably stable - i.e it can be used, but don't trust it.
By the time I declare beta 1 I expect to be three quarters through development time, I expect the UI to be near-complete, functionality to be at least three quarters finished (but typically I expect it to be 95%). (Remember that time and functionality definitions are fluid though, because of the 3 variables.)
I expect usually to go to a beta 2 and sometimes beta 3. Beta 1 is usually for internal use. Beta 2 can go to trusted customers. Beta 2 has a frozen UI. Beta 3 is for general preview - often used as a marketing tool.
I know I have reached ship-stage when the software contains no known bugs that cause data loss. It will contain some known low-priority bugs.