The problem with functionally infinite copyright isn't really that you lose the ability to copy the material for free. It's that the owners retain the exclusive right to distribution - and if they decide to stop making the material available it's lost. Perhaps there's some provision in the law that requires copyright owners to periodically reassert their rights in order to keep them - or better, a requirement that the owners offer the material for sale in order to keep the exclusive rights.
There's sort of a parallel issue with patents. The biggest problem with software patents IMO was the inability to get at material locked up in patented data formats. If an audio track was in MP4, and the only way to get at the content was to buy a copy of Windows that comes with a free MP4 player - or possibly buy an expensive MP4 player from Fluendo or some other company that licensed the ability to implement the CODEC, then you're out of luck trying to consume content you've paid for. Not exactly a copyright issue, but at the same time it's a case of intellectual property being held hostage to the whims of a corporation that are leveraging a file format in an anti-competitive way. It comes down to the point where there's no practical way to enforce sanity in IP law except to limit what can be monopolized that way.
Google achieved search dominance when Windows was the utterly dominant platform - so owning the OS doesn't seem to matter so much. Of course, if the EU hadn't prevented Microsoft from locking out Google search, history might have been different. Though, I'll bet lots of IE users still don't bother to change their default search engine, and Google's done fine regardless... In any case, without Firefox around to blunt the IE monopoly before Safari and Chrome came along and standards compliance actually started to matter, things might have turned out quite differently. Without Safari, the iPhone would've been a much smaller phenomenon. And without iPhone, no Android (and no Windows Phone either, for that matter). Hell, if Apple hadn't gone exclusive with AT&T, there might have been no Android, and Windows Phone might have taken a much bigger market share. History works out in weird ways.
I think it's a little worse than you paint. Take this EU case. Microsoft is not a party to the case at all. They're not claiming harm from Google's alleged tying of its various products to its search engine - because they don't have shopping search products, or if they do, you can bet they're preferred on Bing. Google is certainly in competition with Bing itself, but that's a perfectly legal competition (except, perhaps, for the fact that Bing scrapes Google searches and reports the results as their own).
The point of the original article is that Microsoft wants to hurt Google any way they can - and helping Google's other competitors sue them is a sneaky way to do it. Just like SCO. Just like wielding bogus patents as a weapon while complaining about patents wielded against you. And a kind of unethical way for EU regulators to bolster their case. Kind of refutes your argument that Microsoft is doing anything other than competing. Bing is competing and failing - so they're trying to get the EU government to make Google less profitable, and so less able to compete. How about simply improving your search engine - and acting in ways that don't earn you a reputation that makes large numbers of people unwilling to even try it. Too late for that, probably...
Perhaps. But what can they do to be more open than they already are. You can sideload apps. You can install another app store. Can you do this on iOS or WinPhone? I suppose they could allow OEMs to install the Play store without any Google apps - or at least without all of them. But a lot of stuff migrated to the app store because the OEM's weren't providing OS upgrades and Google wanted a way to keep phones more or less up to date without relying on OS upgrades. And developers that target those services expect them to be there. Maybe they could develop a dependency system that automatically installs services you need along with any app that needs them. But that's getting pretty deep into design details, no? Moving services out of the OS made sense. In any case, Android provides more opportunity for competition than just about any other platform. How else was Blackberry able to support Android apps - as Microsoft is also rumored to be planning. If Android represents unfair monopolization, it's hard to know what that means.
Perhaps better than the IPR mechanism would be an appeals process by which anyone can make an 'obviousness' challenge to any patent approved by the rank and file PTO staff to a higher-level and more technical board that must review the patent before it's actually enforceable. All funded by the USPTO itself, eliminating the high cost of challenging patents. Also greatly reducing the effectiveness of patent enforcement blackmail - and possibly raising the standards for initial approvals by causing the granting of bad patents to actually cost the patent office something - instead of generating revenue.
That doesn't sound like a hardware patent either. More like a 'process' patent - which is essentially the same thing as a software patent, and shouldn't be allowed - at least in trivial cases like the one you cite.
If this were to happen, would Google still track your activities at the various sites using AdSense? And if they did - but didn't sell ads based on it, would the "Google is evil" crowd finally accept that Google doesn't "sell your info" to advertisers?
Once they stop showing you ads, the only reason to track your activity is the original one - to provide you with 'better' (i.e. customized) search results at the main Google site. Those better results also have a revenue generating function for Google - to the extent that some of those results will be search ads, for which they charge the advertiser when you click on them. I suppose they could also let you buy your way out of seeing those too - though I find them useful when I'm actually searching for something commercial...
Can't he just pretend that the camera's on and get the same benefits to his thought process - or does his narcissism require an actual audience?
Back in the 70's, I used to play the "An American Family" game. I'd pretend I was one of the Louds and there was a camera in my kitchen capturing all my ennui as I opened and closed the cabinets looking for a snack. It was great fun.
How different? Yes, the original rejected version was overly broad. But the final, accepted version was essentially the same thing - and amounts to 'apply software authentication in a standard, already well established way to the carrying out a specific banking transaction'. If that's patentable, we're all doomed...
...which sounds a lot like the process by which OOXML was adopted as a standard by the EU. Not sure offhand who's palms were greased in the Microsoft 'standards' approval case (though many were), but the fact that USPTO's revenue stream counts on the processing of patent applications guarantees that an efficient and fair patent system is not their highest priority.
Yep. The realities of political influence over Indiana and Saudi Arabia have nothing to do with Fiorina's statement. It's all about the political calculation she's making. And that seems to be "fighting gay rights is a non-starter in America today, but running for office in America as a Republican requires that I fight gay rights. So I'll put out a false equivalency that's transparently stupid (because stupid doesn't matter once you get into the realm of he said, she said) and accuse a business leader of hypocrisy as a cover for my own hypocrisy in supporting a law I don't really believe in - but have to pretend to believe in in order to be a viable candidate".
Carly, you are toast - not that you didn't start out as toast. Your only role in 2016 (if you have a role at all) is to be able to level catty 'critiques' of Hillary because, y'know, you're a woman too. I'm glad to see you're so eager to sell your soul for such a trivial moment in the spotlight.
That might be true, but MS-specific interpretations of ODF's XML should be a lot easier to reverse-engineer than the weird, undocumentable junk that's supported by DOCX. ODF was designed to be open and implemented by multiple products, DOCX was designed to be implementable correctly only by MSWord.
Depends on how you define 'generous'. They want something in return. In this case that something is wider adoption of their framework so that they don't continue to lose developer mindshare. Their framework might be clean and efficient - but it is also pretty much by definition guaranteed to always work first and best when used on a Microsoft OS. That in and of itself wouldn't be so bad if they had been open from the beginning. It's just that to switch an existing project over to.NET would require a huge diversion of resources for a marginal benefit.
Perhaps, but in this case in order to use that 'clothing made in Vietnam', you're going to have to throw away all your existing clothing and reconfigure your body so that only clothing 'made in Vietnam' will fit in the future - unless you're willing to start all over yet again.
If you're using Java or some other cross-platform dev tools, the only reason to switch to.NET would be if.NET were to become so ubiquitous that you couldn't find Java devs to work on your code. But.NET is not ubiquitous, and there's no good reason for it to become so. In fact the current open-sourcing (too little, too late) is Microsoft's last ditch attempt to make it ubiquitous. And it'll probably fail for the same reason that Windows Phone (or 10, or whatever) - which may actually be a good platform - is not good enough to get Android devs to ditch their Android code bases and start over.
It seems Microsoft can no longer step into the field and copy what others have done with the assumption that just by being from Microsoft, their copy will become the new standard - even if it's marginally better than the original. And that's a good thing, IMO.
So the anonymous coward gets modded 3, informative for making an unfounded blanket statement of paranoia, and you get modded 2 for pointing out multiple ways he's wrong. Except for the fact that this dynamic is the new standard for the cesspool Slasdot comments have become, it's all pretty silly.
And it has nothing to do with the merits or shortcomings of ChromeOS. Any website that tracks you (be it Google's or anyone else's) tracks you pretty much regardless of what platform/browser you're using to access it. I don't know whether Chrome on ChromeOS supports ad-block, etc - but I suspect it does. Just like on Windows, Mac and Linux desktops.
Y'know, I hate advertising as much as the next guy. But whether or not selling ADs is 'evil', for the thousadth time - they don't sell information. There are others out there that doubtless do. Google has pretty brilliantly come up with a way to monetize the information you provide without selling it directly, and while performing useful services. The results are sometimes creepy, but it doesn't help to mischaracterize the process. They sell advertising in order to provide the 'junk' you mention (presumably the users of gmail, search, youTube, Android, etc don't think of them as junk) - not the other way around. And your kind of hyperbole just makes you look dumb, paranoid - or paid by Microsoft to somehow justify the same exact behavior by their parallel services.
Whether the case at hand is particularly egregious or not (I haven't paid enough attention to know), the hysteria contained in phrases like "thinly veiled ruses to get information on me and sell it" and "they are *not* a technology company" puts me in the tiresome position of defending them against bullshit charges (as if they really need my defense). So, I guess I'll stop - and simply lament how moronic so much of the commentary on Slashdot has become. I've been on here long enough to remember when it was often quite enlightening...
And this is venture capital - not technology. Just because they're investing in technology, don't assume they all need to be technologically savvy. VC is as much about showmanship and cooking the books in prep for the IPO as it is about the underlying tech they're hawking. Of course, that's an entirely different (and perhaps bigger) problem...
My point is that in a fatal error of the sort "this should never happen, so I'm going to dump to let the programmer take a look", there's no way to format an exception to have the relevant information - you don't know what that info is. And for application (as opposed to library) code to throw exceptions that are never going to be handled other than to treat them as fatal and dump, throwing an exception is a waste of energy and discards possibly useful information. You're better off dumping at the site of the exception than where the caller catches it.
Yep. I've had C++ coders who were not building general purpose libraries, but still insisted on throwing exceptions in cases of fatal errors (because 'that's what you do'?). The caller would then catch the exception and then call a routine to log the error and core dump for later debugging. But dumping at the site of the caller discards all the detailed information and variables that would've been available in the core dump if the damn app just logged and dumped at the site of the error instead of throwing it back to the caller.
So. Do you want to eat animals that are fed crops containing glyphosate? Bad enough that they're full of hormones and antibiotics. And for what? To make agriculture marginally more efficient. Okay, I don't know how much cheaper (or profitable - if they're not sold cheaper) these crops, animals, natural gas, etc would be without GMO, roundup ready, benzene pumped into the ground fracking 'efficiencies'. But I'll bet you don't either. Has it even been studied? I'll bet that even the same approaches could be taken in a less blanket way and provide 80% of the benefits with way less than 80% of the downsides. That last 20% is always the hardest, least efficient to achieve. Why should it be any less so in industrial farming and gas extraction?
A graduated tax with no loopholes would be just as effective in eliminating corruption as a flat tax would. Just fairer. Most flat tax advocates are just advocating this bargain: don't tax the rich in the first place, and then they won't use their influence to corrupt the system. But a simple graduated tax would do the same thing - just do it without the massive giveaway to the rich. A simple system doesn't have to be simplistic - unless your goals are as simplistic as the system.
It's not that the OS is free now. They still get their cut with just about every new PC sold. It's just that Windows - as in 'platform for running WIN32 apps' - is no longer in development. But it's what everybody uses, so nobody needs to upgrade beyond Windows 7 (or even XP - if it weren't for unpatched security holes). So they really can't charge for upgrades anyway.
Microsoft understands that the money they lose by not selling upgrades to Windows 10 isn't worth going after. They need to move everybody to their new platform - which has some serious adoption problems. Free upgrades can help there, and if they can get everybody back onto the upgrade mill, maybe they can start charging for upgrades again someday. But more important is to prime the pump for Windows Mobile and Bing. WinMob, because they're losing badly in mobile. Bing, because they think they need to bring down Google - and because they wouldn't mind taking a big chunk of Google's search advertising revenue stream while they're at it.
The main (presumed) benefit of this is that it will be cheaper than cable TV bundles. But, assuming you get your broadband from a cable company, how long can that last? Sure, today broadband is sold cheap as a loss-leader by the cable providers for their expensive TV bundles. But if they wanted to, couldn't they re-balance the cost so that buying broadband from them without TV becomes much more expensive than it is today? TV+Broadband customers would pay the same, but the itemized costs for each would be different so that the current cable TV bundle wouldn't be much more expensive than what Apple's offering
Or does net neutrality prevent that? I don't think it does, so the only way this would work is if some serious competition were to open up in the broadband industry. Google fiber, perhaps? Then Apple, Google, and yes, Comcast could all compete to sell you TV bundles over your broadband connection that you got in a similarly competitive market. Otherwise, Comcast holds its content hostage, Time Warner follows suit (if they're not absorbed by Comcast).
No, I think the key to amnesty is for Microsoft to decide that getting an upgrade out everywhere is essential to their business plan. I think the primary purpose of 'Windows 10 upgrades free for everyone' is to get Metro everywhere and jumpstart the WinPhone app store. But I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 10 (and their new 'not IE' version of IE) also forces Bing on you in ways they weren't allowed to in Windows 7 - assuming the clock has run out on the EU's monopoly remedies.
In other words, the Windows 10 upgrade is free (even for pirated copies) because Microsoft wants to be able to use their desktop monopoly to help their other failing properties. Business as usual...
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The problem with functionally infinite copyright isn't really that you lose the ability to copy the material for free. It's that the owners retain the exclusive right to distribution - and if they decide to stop making the material available it's lost. Perhaps there's some provision in the law that requires copyright owners to periodically reassert their rights in order to keep them - or better, a requirement that the owners offer the material for sale in order to keep the exclusive rights.
There's sort of a parallel issue with patents. The biggest problem with software patents IMO was the inability to get at material locked up in patented data formats. If an audio track was in MP4, and the only way to get at the content was to buy a copy of Windows that comes with a free MP4 player - or possibly buy an expensive MP4 player from Fluendo or some other company that licensed the ability to implement the CODEC, then you're out of luck trying to consume content you've paid for. Not exactly a copyright issue, but at the same time it's a case of intellectual property being held hostage to the whims of a corporation that are leveraging a file format in an anti-competitive way. It comes down to the point where there's no practical way to enforce sanity in IP law except to limit what can be monopolized that way.
Google achieved search dominance when Windows was the utterly dominant platform - so owning the OS doesn't seem to matter so much. Of course, if the EU hadn't prevented Microsoft from locking out Google search, history might have been different. Though, I'll bet lots of IE users still don't bother to change their default search engine, and Google's done fine regardless... In any case, without Firefox around to blunt the IE monopoly before Safari and Chrome came along and standards compliance actually started to matter, things might have turned out quite differently. Without Safari, the iPhone would've been a much smaller phenomenon. And without iPhone, no Android (and no Windows Phone either, for that matter). Hell, if Apple hadn't gone exclusive with AT&T, there might have been no Android, and Windows Phone might have taken a much bigger market share. History works out in weird ways.
I think it's a little worse than you paint. Take this EU case. Microsoft is not a party to the case at all. They're not claiming harm from Google's alleged tying of its various products to its search engine - because they don't have shopping search products, or if they do, you can bet they're preferred on Bing. Google is certainly in competition with Bing itself, but that's a perfectly legal competition (except, perhaps, for the fact that Bing scrapes Google searches and reports the results as their own).
The point of the original article is that Microsoft wants to hurt Google any way they can - and helping Google's other competitors sue them is a sneaky way to do it. Just like SCO. Just like wielding bogus patents as a weapon while complaining about patents wielded against you. And a kind of unethical way for EU regulators to bolster their case. Kind of refutes your argument that Microsoft is doing anything other than competing. Bing is competing and failing - so they're trying to get the EU government to make Google less profitable, and so less able to compete. How about simply improving your search engine - and acting in ways that don't earn you a reputation that makes large numbers of people unwilling to even try it. Too late for that, probably...
Perhaps. But what can they do to be more open than they already are. You can sideload apps. You can install another app store. Can you do this on iOS or WinPhone? I suppose they could allow OEMs to install the Play store without any Google apps - or at least without all of them. But a lot of stuff migrated to the app store because the OEM's weren't providing OS upgrades and Google wanted a way to keep phones more or less up to date without relying on OS upgrades. And developers that target those services expect them to be there. Maybe they could develop a dependency system that automatically installs services you need along with any app that needs them. But that's getting pretty deep into design details, no? Moving services out of the OS made sense. In any case, Android provides more opportunity for competition than just about any other platform. How else was Blackberry able to support Android apps - as Microsoft is also rumored to be planning. If Android represents unfair monopolization, it's hard to know what that means.
Perhaps better than the IPR mechanism would be an appeals process by which anyone can make an 'obviousness' challenge to any patent approved by the rank and file PTO staff to a higher-level and more technical board that must review the patent before it's actually enforceable. All funded by the USPTO itself, eliminating the high cost of challenging patents. Also greatly reducing the effectiveness of patent enforcement blackmail - and possibly raising the standards for initial approvals by causing the granting of bad patents to actually cost the patent office something - instead of generating revenue.
That doesn't sound like a hardware patent either. More like a 'process' patent - which is essentially the same thing as a software patent, and shouldn't be allowed - at least in trivial cases like the one you cite.
If this were to happen, would Google still track your activities at the various sites using AdSense? And if they did - but didn't sell ads based on it, would the "Google is evil" crowd finally accept that Google doesn't "sell your info" to advertisers?
Once they stop showing you ads, the only reason to track your activity is the original one - to provide you with 'better' (i.e. customized) search results at the main Google site. Those better results also have a revenue generating function for Google - to the extent that some of those results will be search ads, for which they charge the advertiser when you click on them. I suppose they could also let you buy your way out of seeing those too - though I find them useful when I'm actually searching for something commercial...
Can't he just pretend that the camera's on and get the same benefits to his thought process - or does his narcissism require an actual audience?
Back in the 70's, I used to play the "An American Family" game. I'd pretend I was one of the Louds and there was a camera in my kitchen capturing all my ennui as I opened and closed the cabinets looking for a snack. It was great fun.
How different? Yes, the original rejected version was overly broad. But the final, accepted version was essentially the same thing - and amounts to 'apply software authentication in a standard, already well established way to the carrying out a specific banking transaction'. If that's patentable, we're all doomed...
...which sounds a lot like the process by which OOXML was adopted as a standard by the EU. Not sure offhand who's palms were greased in the Microsoft 'standards' approval case (though many were), but the fact that USPTO's revenue stream counts on the processing of patent applications guarantees that an efficient and fair patent system is not their highest priority.
Yep. The realities of political influence over Indiana and Saudi Arabia have nothing to do with Fiorina's statement. It's all about the political calculation she's making. And that seems to be "fighting gay rights is a non-starter in America today, but running for office in America as a Republican requires that I fight gay rights. So I'll put out a false equivalency that's transparently stupid (because stupid doesn't matter once you get into the realm of he said, she said) and accuse a business leader of hypocrisy as a cover for my own hypocrisy in supporting a law I don't really believe in - but have to pretend to believe in in order to be a viable candidate".
Carly, you are toast - not that you didn't start out as toast. Your only role in 2016 (if you have a role at all) is to be able to level catty 'critiques' of Hillary because, y'know, you're a woman too. I'm glad to see you're so eager to sell your soul for such a trivial moment in the spotlight.
That might be true, but MS-specific interpretations of ODF's XML should be a lot easier to reverse-engineer than the weird, undocumentable junk that's supported by DOCX. ODF was designed to be open and implemented by multiple products, DOCX was designed to be implementable correctly only by MSWord.
Depends on how you define 'generous'. They want something in return. In this case that something is wider adoption of their framework so that they don't continue to lose developer mindshare. Their framework might be clean and efficient - but it is also pretty much by definition guaranteed to always work first and best when used on a Microsoft OS. That in and of itself wouldn't be so bad if they had been open from the beginning. It's just that to switch an existing project over to .NET would require a huge diversion of resources for a marginal benefit.
Perhaps, but in this case in order to use that 'clothing made in Vietnam', you're going to have to throw away all your existing clothing and reconfigure your body so that only clothing 'made in Vietnam' will fit in the future - unless you're willing to start all over yet again.
If you're using Java or some other cross-platform dev tools, the only reason to switch to .NET would be if .NET were to become so ubiquitous that you couldn't find Java devs to work on your code. But .NET is not ubiquitous, and there's no good reason for it to become so. In fact the current open-sourcing (too little, too late) is Microsoft's last ditch attempt to make it ubiquitous. And it'll probably fail for the same reason that Windows Phone (or 10, or whatever) - which may actually be a good platform - is not good enough to get Android devs to ditch their Android code bases and start over.
It seems Microsoft can no longer step into the field and copy what others have done with the assumption that just by being from Microsoft, their copy will become the new standard - even if it's marginally better than the original. And that's a good thing, IMO.
So the anonymous coward gets modded 3, informative for making an unfounded blanket statement of paranoia, and you get modded 2 for pointing out multiple ways he's wrong. Except for the fact that this dynamic is the new standard for the cesspool Slasdot comments have become, it's all pretty silly.
And it has nothing to do with the merits or shortcomings of ChromeOS. Any website that tracks you (be it Google's or anyone else's) tracks you pretty much regardless of what platform/browser you're using to access it. I don't know whether Chrome on ChromeOS supports ad-block, etc - but I suspect it does. Just like on Windows, Mac and Linux desktops.
Y'know, I hate advertising as much as the next guy. But whether or not selling ADs is 'evil', for the thousadth time - they don't sell information. There are others out there that doubtless do. Google has pretty brilliantly come up with a way to monetize the information you provide without selling it directly, and while performing useful services. The results are sometimes creepy, but it doesn't help to mischaracterize the process. They sell advertising in order to provide the 'junk' you mention (presumably the users of gmail, search, youTube, Android, etc don't think of them as junk) - not the other way around. And your kind of hyperbole just makes you look dumb, paranoid - or paid by Microsoft to somehow justify the same exact behavior by their parallel services.
Whether the case at hand is particularly egregious or not (I haven't paid enough attention to know), the hysteria contained in phrases like "thinly veiled ruses to get information on me and sell it" and "they are *not* a technology company" puts me in the tiresome position of defending them against bullshit charges (as if they really need my defense). So, I guess I'll stop - and simply lament how moronic so much of the commentary on Slashdot has become. I've been on here long enough to remember when it was often quite enlightening...
And this is venture capital - not technology. Just because they're investing in technology, don't assume they all need to be technologically savvy. VC is as much about showmanship and cooking the books in prep for the IPO as it is about the underlying tech they're hawking. Of course, that's an entirely different (and perhaps bigger) problem...
...and 'logging code' is no more involved than 'exception code'. You format some kind of message and make a function call - how 'wasteful' is that?
My point is that in a fatal error of the sort "this should never happen, so I'm going to dump to let the programmer take a look", there's no way to format an exception to have the relevant information - you don't know what that info is. And for application (as opposed to library) code to throw exceptions that are never going to be handled other than to treat them as fatal and dump, throwing an exception is a waste of energy and discards possibly useful information. You're better off dumping at the site of the exception than where the caller catches it.
Yep. I've had C++ coders who were not building general purpose libraries, but still insisted on throwing exceptions in cases of fatal errors (because 'that's what you do'?). The caller would then catch the exception and then call a routine to log the error and core dump for later debugging. But dumping at the site of the caller discards all the detailed information and variables that would've been available in the core dump if the damn app just logged and dumped at the site of the error instead of throwing it back to the caller.
So. Do you want to eat animals that are fed crops containing glyphosate? Bad enough that they're full of hormones and antibiotics. And for what? To make agriculture marginally more efficient. Okay, I don't know how much cheaper (or profitable - if they're not sold cheaper) these crops, animals, natural gas, etc would be without GMO, roundup ready, benzene pumped into the ground fracking 'efficiencies'. But I'll bet you don't either. Has it even been studied? I'll bet that even the same approaches could be taken in a less blanket way and provide 80% of the benefits with way less than 80% of the downsides. That last 20% is always the hardest, least efficient to achieve. Why should it be any less so in industrial farming and gas extraction?
A graduated tax with no loopholes would be just as effective in eliminating corruption as a flat tax would. Just fairer. Most flat tax advocates are just advocating this bargain: don't tax the rich in the first place, and then they won't use their influence to corrupt the system. But a simple graduated tax would do the same thing - just do it without the massive giveaway to the rich. A simple system doesn't have to be simplistic - unless your goals are as simplistic as the system.
It's not that the OS is free now. They still get their cut with just about every new PC sold. It's just that Windows - as in 'platform for running WIN32 apps' - is no longer in development. But it's what everybody uses, so nobody needs to upgrade beyond Windows 7 (or even XP - if it weren't for unpatched security holes). So they really can't charge for upgrades anyway.
Microsoft understands that the money they lose by not selling upgrades to Windows 10 isn't worth going after. They need to move everybody to their new platform - which has some serious adoption problems. Free upgrades can help there, and if they can get everybody back onto the upgrade mill, maybe they can start charging for upgrades again someday. But more important is to prime the pump for Windows Mobile and Bing. WinMob, because they're losing badly in mobile. Bing, because they think they need to bring down Google - and because they wouldn't mind taking a big chunk of Google's search advertising revenue stream while they're at it.
The main (presumed) benefit of this is that it will be cheaper than cable TV bundles. But, assuming you get your broadband from a cable company, how long can that last? Sure, today broadband is sold cheap as a loss-leader by the cable providers for their expensive TV bundles. But if they wanted to, couldn't they re-balance the cost so that buying broadband from them without TV becomes much more expensive than it is today? TV+Broadband customers would pay the same, but the itemized costs for each would be different so that the current cable TV bundle wouldn't be much more expensive than what Apple's offering
Or does net neutrality prevent that? I don't think it does, so the only way this would work is if some serious competition were to open up in the broadband industry. Google fiber, perhaps? Then Apple, Google, and yes, Comcast could all compete to sell you TV bundles over your broadband connection that you got in a similarly competitive market. Otherwise, Comcast holds its content hostage, Time Warner follows suit (if they're not absorbed by Comcast).
No, I think the key to amnesty is for Microsoft to decide that getting an upgrade out everywhere is essential to their business plan. I think the primary purpose of 'Windows 10 upgrades free for everyone' is to get Metro everywhere and jumpstart the WinPhone app store. But I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 10 (and their new 'not IE' version of IE) also forces Bing on you in ways they weren't allowed to in Windows 7 - assuming the clock has run out on the EU's monopoly remedies.
In other words, the Windows 10 upgrade is free (even for pirated copies) because Microsoft wants to be able to use their desktop monopoly to help their other failing properties. Business as usual...