Seems to me, they should be warning Microsoft. After all, 90% of people who run Microsoft products end up being infected with many, many varieties of spyware, viruses, worms, and other sorts of Malware. Clearly, Microsoft platforms are the hosts of a wide variety of ills to which consumers would prefer not to be exposed.
That's exactly why long-term backups that can be read without any computer equipment need to be periodically created. When you've collected that much knowledge in one place, you need to save it all over so that in the event of some catastrophe, the knowledge can eventually be recovered.
If civilization collapses for some reason, an offline backup of Wikipedia might help bring it back much faster.
Here is the criteria I've decided to use for whether a patent is worth granting or not...
Is the public served by the disclosure of the technique in the patent?
This eliminates one-click immediately. The public gains not a thing by disclosure of the technique, as the technique is obvious as soon as you look at the site.
I think the patent system as a whole is of dubious value. But, perhaps if that criteria were strictly applied the damage they do could be mitigated significantly, and they might even do some good. In strictly applying that criteria, the patent would not be granted if it could not be easily understood by the average engineer. not the average patent lawyer. A patent application written in legalese doesn't serve the public at all.
If you look at the case of cryptography for example, patents have set the security of computer systems across the world back significantly. The cost to the public of granting those patents is very high. I think the benefit is dubious. Would RSA or Diffie-Hellman been lost as trade secrets if they hadn't been patented? I suspect not. I think they were published in research journals before the patents were even applied for. So the public got nothing for granting the monopoly. Not a fair trade at all.
You must not be living in the same Universe I am if you think the DMCA was for copyright holders and not middlemen. Apple and everybody else is quite aware of exactly who the DMCA is supposed to 'protect' and if you think it's the artists, I have some nice swampland in Florida for you.
The FBI should be the subject of a class action lawsuit about their destruction of seized computer equipment. Computer equipment is very expensive, and the way the FBI treats it basically subjects you to a several thousand dollar fine just for being raided, regardless of your guilt or innocence. And you can bet the cost of the equipment isn't deducted from the fine if you're found guilty and fined.
I don't suggest that anybody Open Source anything that isn't already. I think that eventually all code will be Open Source simply because it has to be in order to compete. I'm very happy about this likely reality, and I would prefer to meet it head on. This means thinking carefully about revenue and business models instead of crying and moaning about how existing business models have this or that problem if you Open Source your code.
Users should be encouraged to provide monetary feedback. Systems of tip buckets for providing certain features large numbers of users want should be organized and institutionalized.
The huge Mozilla debacle where everybody wanted remote bookmark functionality is a perfect example. The developers didn't want to do it. But there were a lot of users who really wanted the feature, and many of them were willing to fund its development.
And I think it has many interesting points that are worth thinking about and/or taking to heart.
But, I have a critique of point 3 (All software should be free) and an observation about point 5 (Scratching the personal itch).
First, there is profitable Open Source software out there. The biggest example I can think of is LiveJournal. Sure, what LJ sells is premium features for their site, but they wouldn't have a thing to sell without their software, which they've wisely chosen to Open Source. LJ makes enough money to afford some pretty hefty server farms in back of it. There are many clone sites out there that use their software, and are free to make money in the same way, but none of them have come even close to putting LJ out of business yet. In fact, I think they've just strengthened LJs business.
So, software can be free, and still make money.
In point 5, Neil Gunton cogently observes in the last sentence "A commercial company, on the other hand, can afford to scratch the personal itches of its end-users, because the end-users are the ones paying the bills.". This very true, and I think it provides a useful illustration of a means by which an Open Source company can make money by directly selling software.
I think I ought to be able to go into a store and bu a copy of gimp. In fact, I think there are several Open Source packages which would lend themselves well to being sold seperately from distributions. This would do a lot to raise the visibility of these packages from a consumer perspective.
I just answered a question by someone where they were wondering about Open Source packages for doing various things. I gave them a list of them. But every single one of those packages usually comes with a distribution. This person was totally unaware of this.
These packages need marketing and distribution seperately from the OS. That marketing and distribution would raise their profiles, and provide a valuable way for end-users to get involved in how a package is produced. Their money would pay for support. They could be introduced to the concept of Open Source and how to effectively contribute constructive criticism and development money for their pet features to Open Source projects. The distribution company could provide a focal point for this, and a project could put things up on its homepage about how well it was being served by various distribution companies.
This would both generate revenue for Open Source projects, adressing point 1. And it would provide direct consumer involvement that could drive feature development, addressing point 5.
If I ever make consumer oriented Open Source software, I intend to sell it on my webpage, and not provide it for free download. I will tell them that if they can't afford the download, they should get a copy from their friends. I will provide source with the download. If someone wants to grab my source and try to compete with me in selling it under a different name, they're welcome to try, but I'm fairly confident that I can continue to add value to this software that I originally wrote better than anybody else, and they will eventually decide to rejoin my project anyway.
Well, yes, but complaining about that is like complaining that the green glowing symbols that are supposed to be the representation of The Matrix make no sense from a software perspective.
The three laws are a useful abstraction for talking about ethics even if they couldn't ever be perfectly implemented.
Yes, it does. I probably violate at least 20-30 patents every time I write a piece of software. I have no idea which ones they are. It is in my fervent best interests to not know. But, when some patent holder decides they can make a buck off me, the court system will still use political force to make me pay. There is no feasible way for me to opt-out of the system.
I'm in complete support of property rights, and generally think that encouraging entrepreneurism is a good thing.
On the other hand, I greatly question copyright, patent and trade secret law. I have fewer problems with trademark law. These things are not property. Conflating the two leads to fuzzy thinking and illogical adherence to principles that are fine for property, but are not fine for copyrights, patents, trade secrets or trademarks.
I do not encourage the conflating of copyright, patents, trademark and other laws with property. They are different things and should be thought of as such. Most of the nastiest and most pernicious misconceptions are born of this conflation.
The patent system gives people the right to use force to make me do things its way. It is wrong, and corrupt, and should be dismantled. It does not serve its purpose, and does significantly more harm than good.
Some support your idealistic goals, many others do not.
You are completely ignoring most of what he said, and concentrating solely on his suggested behavior for scientists and engineers. In large part, he is exactly correct. In the current legal environment, it is a very bad idea for scientists or engineers to read patents, which is utterly contrary to their purpose, encouraging disclosure. And in fact, patents are specically written in a language that's designed to be hard for the average engineer or scientist to read.
It's very clear from this that the entire patent system is completely corrupt, and is now geared towards providing 'business leaders' (aka MBAs) with weapons against competitors, and not towards encouraging the disclosure of secret processes, which is the original purpose of patents.
They make no money for me, and put no food on my table, and they never will if I have anything to say about it.
How is a technology 'protected' by patenting it? Is it in some danger? Is it about to be beaten, so we have to quick slap a patent on it?
If I bust my ass developing technology X, I'm not going to give it away.
My suggestion to you then is to not develop it until you have an assurance that you will get paid. If it's useful, I'm certain you will find the funding to do it, regardless of whether or not patents or copyrights are available tools.
It doesn't work well most of the time. Patents and copyrights no longer serve the purpose they were intended to serve, the public good.
You might want to go around and try reading the arguments against these forms of government monopoly grant before you blanketly decide that your view is correct. There are mathematical models that show, for example, that patents are actually harmful for technological advancement when the primary means of advancement is through small, evolutionary changes instead of big, revolutionary ones.
I think this is the primary effect of copyright and patent law. It becomes more important to be the person who controls the output of scientists than it is to be a scientist yourself.
That line of reasoning is wrong. Always assuming guilt encourages companies to make baseless accusations because people like you will simply assume that the defending party must be guilty.
The word 'steal' is inappropriate in this context. It implies the errnoeous assumption that ideas have owners. Ideas are not property. They do not have owners.
The patent system is a societal restriction on the natural right we all have to copy. We have all (supposedly) agreed to this restriction on our natural freedom in the hopes of achieving certain goals.
Actually, while I suspect I would think suit was justified and proper in this case, I think the patent system as a whole is completely broken and needs a major overhaul and partial replacement.
Given that, it makes me nervous to find myself supporting any litigation involving patents.
Also, they are not thieving, they are violating patents. They aren't taking anything from anyone. They are violating a societal restriction of the natural right to copy ideas that we all have (supposedly) agreed to. That is not thievery, it is patent violation. Applying the word 'thievery' implies the erroneous premise that ideas have owners.
*laugh* The human eye is generally very sensitive to contrast differences, even on very small scales. So, the artifically sharp contrast differences from anti-aliased fonts would still be noticeable until each pixel of the display lit up an area much smaller than a single nerve cell in your eye.
This is exactly the display I want for coding work. I can't understand why people complain about text size! That's an OS defficiency, not a display problem. More resolution is never bad. The OS should let you scale all the fonts on the display.
I would love to have this display and work with all anti-aliased fonts, even in my editor windows, even if I had to give up emacs (perish the thought) to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me, they should be warning Microsoft. After all, 90% of people who run Microsoft products end up being infected with many, many varieties of spyware, viruses, worms, and other sorts of Malware. Clearly, Microsoft platforms are the hosts of a wide variety of ills to which consumers would prefer not to be exposed.
That's exactly why long-term backups that can be read without any computer equipment need to be periodically created. When you've collected that much knowledge in one place, you need to save it all over so that in the event of some catastrophe, the knowledge can eventually be recovered.
If civilization collapses for some reason, an offline backup of Wikipedia might help bring it back much faster.
Here is the criteria I've decided to use for whether a patent is worth granting or not...
Is the public served by the disclosure of the technique in the patent?
This eliminates one-click immediately. The public gains not a thing by disclosure of the technique, as the technique is obvious as soon as you look at the site.
I think the patent system as a whole is of dubious value. But, perhaps if that criteria were strictly applied the damage they do could be mitigated significantly, and they might even do some good. In strictly applying that criteria, the patent would not be granted if it could not be easily understood by the average engineer. not the average patent lawyer. A patent application written in legalese doesn't serve the public at all.
If you look at the case of cryptography for example, patents have set the security of computer systems across the world back significantly. The cost to the public of granting those patents is very high. I think the benefit is dubious. Would RSA or Diffie-Hellman been lost as trade secrets if they hadn't been patented? I suspect not. I think they were published in research journals before the patents were even applied for. So the public got nothing for granting the monopoly. Not a fair trade at all.
You must not be living in the same Universe I am if you think the DMCA was for copyright holders and not middlemen. Apple and everybody else is quite aware of exactly who the DMCA is supposed to 'protect' and if you think it's the artists, I have some nice swampland in Florida for you.
The FBI should be the subject of a class action lawsuit about their destruction of seized computer equipment. Computer equipment is very expensive, and the way the FBI treats it basically subjects you to a several thousand dollar fine just for being raided, regardless of your guilt or innocence. And you can bet the cost of the equipment isn't deducted from the fine if you're found guilty and fined.
I don't think you're right about that. Has anybody actually tried the model? Seems like RedHat's making out pretty well with RHEL 3 that way.
I don't suggest that anybody Open Source anything that isn't already. I think that eventually all code will be Open Source simply because it has to be in order to compete. I'm very happy about this likely reality, and I would prefer to meet it head on. This means thinking carefully about revenue and business models instead of crying and moaning about how existing business models have this or that problem if you Open Source your code.
That's not completely true. We're using MySQL for some things internally because it's too much trouble to set up and administrate an Oracle database.
Users should be encouraged to provide monetary feedback. Systems of tip buckets for providing certain features large numbers of users want should be organized and institutionalized.
The huge Mozilla debacle where everybody wanted remote bookmark functionality is a perfect example. The developers didn't want to do it. But there were a lot of users who really wanted the feature, and many of them were willing to fund its development.
And I think it has many interesting points that are worth thinking about and/or taking to heart.
But, I have a critique of point 3 (All software should be free) and an observation about point 5 (Scratching the personal itch).
First, there is profitable Open Source software out there. The biggest example I can think of is LiveJournal. Sure, what LJ sells is premium features for their site, but they wouldn't have a thing to sell without their software, which they've wisely chosen to Open Source. LJ makes enough money to afford some pretty hefty server farms in back of it. There are many clone sites out there that use their software, and are free to make money in the same way, but none of them have come even close to putting LJ out of business yet. In fact, I think they've just strengthened LJs business.
So, software can be free, and still make money.
In point 5, Neil Gunton cogently observes in the last sentence "A commercial company, on the other hand, can afford to scratch the personal itches of its end-users, because the end-users are the ones paying the bills.". This very true, and I think it provides a useful illustration of a means by which an Open Source company can make money by directly selling software.
I think I ought to be able to go into a store and bu a copy of gimp. In fact, I think there are several Open Source packages which would lend themselves well to being sold seperately from distributions. This would do a lot to raise the visibility of these packages from a consumer perspective.
I just answered a question by someone where they were wondering about Open Source packages for doing various things. I gave them a list of them. But every single one of those packages usually comes with a distribution. This person was totally unaware of this.
These packages need marketing and distribution seperately from the OS. That marketing and distribution would raise their profiles, and provide a valuable way for end-users to get involved in how a package is produced. Their money would pay for support. They could be introduced to the concept of Open Source and how to effectively contribute constructive criticism and development money for their pet features to Open Source projects. The distribution company could provide a focal point for this, and a project could put things up on its homepage about how well it was being served by various distribution companies.
This would both generate revenue for Open Source projects, adressing point 1. And it would provide direct consumer involvement that could drive feature development, addressing point 5.
If I ever make consumer oriented Open Source software, I intend to sell it on my webpage, and not provide it for free download. I will tell them that if they can't afford the download, they should get a copy from their friends. I will provide source with the download. If someone wants to grab my source and try to compete with me in selling it under a different name, they're welcome to try, but I'm fairly confident that I can continue to add value to this software that I originally wrote better than anybody else, and they will eventually decide to rejoin my project anyway.
Well, yes, but complaining about that is like complaining that the green glowing symbols that are supposed to be the representation of The Matrix make no sense from a software perspective.
The three laws are a useful abstraction for talking about ethics even if they couldn't ever be perfectly implemented.
This is the story that showed me the complete folly of the three laws: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
Yes, it does. I probably violate at least 20-30 patents every time I write a piece of software. I have no idea which ones they are. It is in my fervent best interests to not know. But, when some patent holder decides they can make a buck off me, the court system will still use political force to make me pay. There is no feasible way for me to opt-out of the system.
I'm in complete support of property rights, and generally think that encouraging entrepreneurism is a good thing.
On the other hand, I greatly question copyright, patent and trade secret law. I have fewer problems with trademark law. These things are not property. Conflating the two leads to fuzzy thinking and illogical adherence to principles that are fine for property, but are not fine for copyrights, patents, trade secrets or trademarks.
I do not encourage the conflating of copyright, patents, trademark and other laws with property. They are different things and should be thought of as such. Most of the nastiest and most pernicious misconceptions are born of this conflation.
The patent system gives people the right to use force to make me do things its way. It is wrong, and corrupt, and should be dismantled. It does not serve its purpose, and does significantly more harm than good.
You are completely ignoring most of what he said, and concentrating solely on his suggested behavior for scientists and engineers. In large part, he is exactly correct. In the current legal environment, it is a very bad idea for scientists or engineers to read patents, which is utterly contrary to their purpose, encouraging disclosure. And in fact, patents are specically written in a language that's designed to be hard for the average engineer or scientist to read.
It's very clear from this that the entire patent system is completely corrupt, and is now geared towards providing 'business leaders' (aka MBAs) with weapons against competitors, and not towards encouraging the disclosure of secret processes, which is the original purpose of patents.
I'm interested, but the link leads me to an empty page.
They make no money for me, and put no food on my table, and they never will if I have anything to say about it.
How is a technology 'protected' by patenting it? Is it in some danger? Is it about to be beaten, so we have to quick slap a patent on it?
My suggestion to you then is to not develop it until you have an assurance that you will get paid. If it's useful, I'm certain you will find the funding to do it, regardless of whether or not patents or copyrights are available tools.
It doesn't work well most of the time. Patents and copyrights no longer serve the purpose they were intended to serve, the public good.
You might want to go around and try reading the arguments against these forms of government monopoly grant before you blanketly decide that your view is correct. There are mathematical models that show, for example, that patents are actually harmful for technological advancement when the primary means of advancement is through small, evolutionary changes instead of big, revolutionary ones.
I think this is the primary effect of copyright and patent law. It becomes more important to be the person who controls the output of scientists than it is to be a scientist yourself.
That line of reasoning is wrong. Always assuming guilt encourages companies to make baseless accusations because people like you will simply assume that the defending party must be guilty.
The word 'steal' is inappropriate in this context. It implies the errnoeous assumption that ideas have owners. Ideas are not property. They do not have owners.
The patent system is a societal restriction on the natural right we all have to copy. We have all (supposedly) agreed to this restriction on our natural freedom in the hopes of achieving certain goals.
Actually, while I suspect I would think suit was justified and proper in this case, I think the patent system as a whole is completely broken and needs a major overhaul and partial replacement.
Given that, it makes me nervous to find myself supporting any litigation involving patents.
Also, they are not thieving, they are violating patents. They aren't taking anything from anyone. They are violating a societal restriction of the natural right to copy ideas that we all have (supposedly) agreed to. That is not thievery, it is patent violation. Applying the word 'thievery' implies the erroneous premise that ideas have owners.
*laugh* The human eye is generally very sensitive to contrast differences, even on very small scales. So, the artifically sharp contrast differences from anti-aliased fonts would still be noticeable until each pixel of the display lit up an area much smaller than a single nerve cell in your eye.
This is exactly the display I want for coding work. I can't understand why people complain about text size! That's an OS defficiency, not a display problem. More resolution is never bad. The OS should let you scale all the fonts on the display.
I would love to have this display and work with all anti-aliased fonts, even in my editor windows, even if I had to give up emacs (perish the thought) to do it.