As I said before, you and most people on slashdot understand very little about patents. You're all too ready to tar and feather any patent holder based on your misinterpretation of specific patents and patent law (not to mention a lack of appreciation for certain fundamental aspects of business)
That said: Infringement can be (and often is) found if a product violates any one individual claim in the patent. The product, however, must violate every limitation found within that claim, i.e., if you violate all but 1 part of it, then you can't be infringing that claim. If a claim is a dependent claim, i.e., it makes a reference to another claim, then that dependent claim is just incorporating aspects of the patent it is referring to in itself (instead of repeating the independent claim) so you're still essentially just concerned with the language one claim (even if that one claim brings in another claim). Just because a product violates a claim though does not mean that the patent or the claims the product allegedly violates will actually hold up in court (prior art).
I have not made a thing up. All I've done, with respect to your statements, is quote, accurately paraphrase, and draw simple yet unescapable conclusions from your own words. You have done nothing to counter it besides whine that I could dare hold you to your own words. You say, for instance, that you object to my positing that you effectively deny the importance of the relationship between newspaper quality and newspaper revenue yet you:
- want to destroy newspaper ads; - want to eliminate IP rights; - complain if newspaper wants to charge a fee for online acccess (instead of hitting with ads); - want free (or at least very cheap) access to all newspaper content with meta news-services; - assert that low-revenue public radio/indymedia business models are viable alternative; and so on.
What else is a reasonable person supposed to think? You either have a magic alternative formula for the generation of substantial revenues (which complies with your wishlist -- which you've yet to share) OR you think that newspapers don't deserve to exist OR you simply don't think professional newspaper content should exist (which your bitching and whining about access fees and such would tend to disprove). At the very least your desire to forcefully alter the newspaper model, an institution that is so critical to our society, is feckless and facile.
What "real" arguments have I failed to address?
Name two.
You are obviously unaccustomed to having your idle dreams be challenged with any kind of intellectual rigor.
I said, "continue the straw man arguments like 'if the relationship between funding and journalistic quality are totally unrelated' (not a claim I made)", then I went into other problems in your argumentation like weak challenges to my facts that do not present much of a challenge to the substantive point I was making...
No matter your intentions, the sentence (or lack thereof) you spewed forth implied that everything in your list was one of my "strawman arguments".
your argumentation like weak challenges to my facts that do not present much of a challenge to the substantive point I was making (money is being made and people are using the software)
Nowhere in this entire thread did I ever refute that some money was being made with open source or that some people were using the software. To the contrary, I acknowledged this several times. This would be a strawman argument on your part.
The only relevant question in this vein was about the level of success that the anti-ownership movement can claim. The entire thrust of my argument from the start of this thread was that RMS proposed that we judge the success of a programming effort based on its level of use ("The real contribution to the wealth of society happens only when the program is used. And if you prevent the program from being used, the contribution doesn't actually happen") and that, on those pragmatic grounds (which he has since abandoned), his anti-IP movement has unquestionably been shown up by IP-based development efforts by several orders of magnitude.
If he were merely proposing that copyleft is useful in some circumstances (like Torvalds and other more pragmatic people) and did not propose that we completely abandon proprietary/copyright/patent rights we would not be having this debate.
and the double standard that seems to apply to supporting premises you make versus those I present (you make facts up that could just as easily be reversed because you don't have any support for them at all - not to mention the facts change from being products to being revenue depending on which post you read when you use your made up ratios).
There is no double standard. There is a difference of several orders of magnitude regardless of whether you measure in dollars (though dollars can be a pretty good proxy for units/installed base when you adjust for price), market share in unit terms, installed base in unit terms, number of market leading packages, number of developer hours, and so on. I don't see how any reasonable person that is even remotely involved with IT could refute these state of affairs unless they live in a cave. It's like arguing that the earth really isn't round. You may not like it. You may not want to hear it. You may think it is going to change, but you cannot seriously deny the gist of what I have presented. You, in fact, have not. All you've done is express outrage that I would dare to challenge the position of open source as a serious contender for the average person's software use.
Instead of assuming something might be unclear in the argument as I expressed it or that you might be missing something, you instead went your interpretation, it's implications and concluded that I do not understand what a strawman argument is because obviously the second two points aren't strawman arguments.
I attempted to address your points as any reasonable person would have interpreted them. You may have expresssed them poorly, but I cannot help that. Furthermore, the bulk of my responses had little to do with whether or not it possessed strawman-like qualities. You have managed to completely ignore them.
Much easier for you to assume I am uninformed and know nothing about "business and finance", strawman arguments and whatever else may be the topic of discussion. It's a consistent pattern th
1) The big companies, who can keep newcomers out. 2) Litigation companies, with no purpose other than suing.
It can not serve the little guy with an innovative products, as all products build on older ideas, and the lifetime of a patent is much longer than the generation gab between products.
Nonsense. I've personally known "little guys" (several million in funding, family members of mine, friends, etc) that have successfully gone up against much bigger companies (multi-billion dollar businesses) in the same industries with innovative products protected by patents. Contrary to your position, large established businesses have the most to gain (on average) from losing the patent system. All the small company has to its advantage is a few innovative ideas and the ability to respond quickly to changing events. The big company has at its disposal a ton of cash, lots of infrastructure, large sales/marketing forces, and often a large pool of existing customers. Big companies often spend money on significant amounts of money on R&D and many of them come up with good ideas, but they lack the vision and spine to follow through with a polished product (see PARC/Xerox, Bell Labs, etc). However, once some upstart comes along and starts taking 5%+ of the market from them, they stand up and take notice. Once they do it's all too easy for them to incorporate the innovations of the small company into their product and push it through their pre-existing pipelines and destroy the window of the opportunity for the innovator -- unless that small company has strong IP.
There are certainly problems with the patent system, primarily insofar as it has allowed too many low quality patents through (overly broad and obvious). This problem is particularly bad in areas that the patent office understands little due to its relative novelty and when there is a rapid growth in applications (e.g., internet tech). However, many slashdotters also grossly overstate the scale of the problem because they have no idea how to read patents and because they themselves have never been involved with sizable entrepreneurial activity. All they see are reports of the problems (about half the time with grossly inaccurate information) and they never hear about companies of all sizes using patents to secure real innovation (or small companies/entrepreneurs licensing their tech to much bigger firms for $$$).
Yes, some guy with just a few thousand dollars to his name/idea is going to have a difficult time filing a _strong_ patent today(many people have weak patents which are easily worked around). But he sure as hell can file a provisional patent application with a little research (cheap) which can then give him the legal leverage and confidence to talk to other engineering types, VCs, etc to seek out funding, assistance, and guidance. What's more, if that (really) little guy can't obtain funding from anyone, the odds are that he won't be able to develop the idea in the first place. Most competent investors won't even invest if you don't have or can't obtain a strong patent (there are some exceptions)
The only comment that seems appropriate at this point is to say that it seems like you have definitely caught the free market religion. I don't happen to share that particular faith - which also apparently means I don't understand finance or economics.
I find it very ironic that you call the free market and intellectual property "religion", despite the mountain of empirical evidence and well documented theory behind it, yet you demand that we not only merely try your faith, no that's not good enough, you insist that the entire world takes the plunge and rejects on mere faith that which has done so much in favor of the copyleft cult, that has done so little for users to-date, that has so little theoretical backing, and where similar ideas have failed througout the world time and time again. I might be able to understand you a little better if you actually directly contributed to the system you advocate, if you were merely asking people to be more like yourself, but somehow I suspect you don't. Please correct me if I'm wrong:
How many lines of code have you contributed to open source projects?
How much money have you invested in open source companies (particularly innovative ones)?
How much money have you donated to open source projects?
How much money have you personally spent with open source companies? (and how much for closed source?)
How much open source software do you even use on the desktop? What about your family?
What precisely have you done for open source projects besides free-load? In what way have you carried your own weight?
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Me? I actually practice what I preach. I buy closed source software fairly regularly because it is better than the open source alternatives (and use and occasionally buy a small amount of open source software when appropriate). I am also investing time and money into my own proprietary software company.
While you are at it, continue the straw man arguments like "if the relationship between funding and journalistic quality are totally unrelated" (not a claim I made)
I never said you did. You do, however, imply that these very low revenue / free contribution models (public radio, Indymedia, etc) are somehow a superior alternative. You imply that newspaper companies shouldn't really be concerning themselves with mundane issues like trying to find how to fund a payroll of 3K+ employees. You obviously recognize that the newspapers offer services that you value (which is why you want free/open access to them and complain if they want to charge you for it), yet you don't seriously offer an alternative for them. In other words, you want to have your cake and eat it too.
For the record, I listen to my local NPR station regularly and I think it's better than anything else on the radio. I do, however, recognize that NPR's costs are but a fraction of what it costs to publish a major newspaper (even when you trim out some of the fat/junk) because NPR is not in the business of collecting, managing, and publishing nearly as much information (though they run ads of sorts in the form of corporate sponsorship and have to virtually shutdown the radio for days at a time to get people to donate and depend on government subisidies...) If you think you can run an online newspaper that is equivalent or better than what the major papers pubish at a fraction of the cost (say, 1/10th of the ~400m dollars it takes to run a major city paper) on donations or some other non-ad revenue model alone, then please go for it. Prove me wrong by outcompeting the papers, until you do though all you have is an unproven theory (which you haven't even presented yet).
your challenge of the prediction figures quoting other sources at $672 million (in 2004, RHAT by itself had revenue of $125 million, they must be one of the only ones making money right?),
Monopolies granted by government, which you call IP, are fundamentally anti-competitive. This is one example of half-assed thinking, on your part.
Physical property is a "monopoly" too. Without this kind of monopoly you're going to have very little investment. Like with open source to IP you might point to the small success of communal farming plots, but we all know that this doesn't scale.
Or perhaps IP in journalism and the need to sell advertising space is exactly why so much journalism is so bad. We have alternative models, such as public broadcasting, collaborative efforts like Indymedia and so forth. It would mean it would have to change, but being a "shadow of itself" is merely hyperbole and is not "fact". It should not be a shadow of itself. IIt should be totally different.
Great, so if you don't value the commercial product put out by NYTimes, WSJ, etc, if the relationship between funding and journalistic quality are totally unrelated, go ahead and read your indy "media", blogs, etc. You don't need them.
Newspapers and other media outlets may be making mistakes (and I'd be one of the first ones to criticize the TV/radio news media), but this doesn't make the institution of IP wrong anymore than your ability to build an ugly house means that your right own land should be infringed on.
For example, all you have to do is consult some proprietary information sources on Linux revenues and adoption to...Oh, what is that?
This is supposed to be news to me? This is the best you can come up with? Please.
You think that because Linux has ~25% market share in the server market against overpriced competition that this demonstrates the superiority of open source or shows that proprietary code isn't necessary in the many other markets? I suppose we're supposed to ignore that ~75% market share owned by Microsoft, Sun, etc in the server market (never mind the many other important markets where open source is a non-entity). Linux has a significant pricing edge because it's really only competing against Windows (which is way overpriced for many uses) and against commercial Unix systems (which are burdened with non-commodity/proprietary hardware costs and existing customers can more easily move many of these applications to Linux).
The Linux market is rapidly growing and the revenue of servers, desktops, and packaged software running Linux is expected to exceed $35.7 billion by 2008." That $35.7 billion dollars is quite a few proprietary software companies' lunch.
That is someone's prediction. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know what that means, but if you've been in the industry for more than 2 years I'd think you'd appreciate just how wildly wrong such predictions have been. If you actually checked the source, you'd realize that the same source pegged the current amount at less 15B dollars and that this estimate was also higher than other peoples' estimates because it actually counted the hardware costs even when Linux was installed over it (e.g., format Windows with Linux) and when it was installed in a virtualized environment. That same estimate also includes non-OSS software for Linux, like Oracle, so it's rather silly to cite it in the first place. Other sources have placed the estimates much lower (i.e., ~672M in 2004).
Since you are so interested in facts, could you explain why you offer this completely baseless conjecture? You don't know what this ratio is now or might be in the future.
I didn't say that was true per se. I only said open source software's small successes does not preclude the possibility of much higher success (1000:1) in proprietary software. Whether the difference is 1000:1 or 500:1 matters little and is not worth quibbling about. Take a walk down the software aisle sometime; look at your
If you don't mind my asking, what kind of background do you have in economics?
I have a degree in finance, though I took a lot of economics courses at business school as part of the curiculuum and for my own personal edification. Economists don't agree on all that much, but most of what I've said is pretty widely accepted. I see the primary value of advanced economics as being the empirical study various economies (it can be instructive as most other people don't stop to do it, i.e., we can see that certain things tend to correlate strongly if nothing else). However, much of the advanced/theoretical aspects of economics are just that: theory.
More importantly, imho, is that I have a strong practical grasp on the realities of how businesses actually operate as a result of being an entrepreneur myself and as a consequence of the fact that I closely followed my parents' entrepreneurial businesses as I was growing up. There's a lot of highfalutin debates on market theory, transparency, corporate governance, etc that hold little water in the real world.
It depends on what the CEO does with that money. If he doesn't need $50 of it, and puts it away somewhere, it doesn't flow back into the economy, causing problems.
There is no way a US CEO is going to take money out of the economy unless he, perhaps, gets his check in cash and hides it under his mattress (for a long time) or burns it all up. The odds are that that CEO is going to invest much of that money back into the equity markets, particularly in higher risk stocks than what less affluent people are apt to make, which has very real and important benefits for the economy. He may put some of his money in the bank, but that's going to help people buy houses in the form of cheaper mortgage interest rates. He may buy, say, some 5M dollar painting, but then the painter or auction house is going to invest/spend that money too. Basically the only way to meaningfully remove from the economy is to do less, i.e., don't work harder/smarter for more money and take whatever money you have an invest it in the most conservative instrument possible... I think our current capitalist system generally incents us to do more: to work harder, smarter, invest, spend on things we want, etc. The greatest danger to our economy is that which threatens to slow it all down by removing the incentive to work hard, to spend, and to invest.
I'm not defending the highest CEO salary/bonuses per se, but there are justifications for it (supply and demand, etc) and that this is really a call for the board / shareholders to make.
If instead, the CEO gets $80 and the employee gets $21, the CEO is still well off (having the ability to invest the $30 after his original $50 in expenses), and the employee is much better off (with $20 more), and more of it flows back into the economy. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Well, except this really isn't the situation we find ourselves with. Where the CEO recieves X, the individual workers at these firms, due to the size of them, will almost always recieve X / 100,000+. What would have been a 50M bonus for the CEO would usually be closer to a $500 bonus for the employee (assuming the CEO deserves nothing): nice but not going to make a huge dent in the lifestyle of the employee. What's more, those employees may tend to spend disproportionately more of their share on retail spending, but I'd argue that, in many cases, society ultimately gets a lot more bang for the buck over than long run in having 50M dollar be invested in a deserving equity even than a short burst of spending spread out throughout the entire economy. What's more, I think the 50M dollars is a much better incentive to the CEO than $500 would be for most of the employees and if that $50M dollar incentive results in even a 10% boost in sales/efficiency the results are going to be widespread (and it pay for shareholders to do so usually)
Exxon's CEO pulled in nearly $50M last year, and I know a lot of Exxon employees. They're the ones drilling the wells and maintaining the equipment that Exxon can't exist without, and they get paid *decent* wages. They don't get significant end-of-year bonuses and these oil field guys are some of the hardest working people I've met.
It may be unfair, but it makes little difference to their salaries. Last time I checked Exxon had over 100K employees (and that's excluding all their contractors and such) -- that 50M dollars divided up would work out to mere $500 per employee per year. Sure, it'd be nice, but it's not going to make a big dent in their overall income.
Furthermore, the issue is one of supply and demand. There are very few people that would make acceptable CEO's to the shareholders and a large number of the people that are capable have decided they don't want to do it. It's not worth the stress, the extra hours (100 hour work weeks for many), constant traveling (even on a private jet, it sucks), having a gazillion people second guess your every move, and the unpredictability (yes, if you get fired, which is very likely, you may enjoy a pre-negotiated severance package, but the odds are you're going to be out of work for several years). I'm not arguing that it is the "right" number, but that it's stupid for the government to try to blunder their way into it and choose a better number.
You are basically taking a pro-status quo position that cannot imagine other circumstances that would support intellectual businesses.
No, I'm supporting the rule of law and the fundamental principle of competition. I don't view theft of IP as being any form of competition. If people want to write books, software, and music and give away the fruits of their labor for free that is their choice. Let them compete on those ground rules. What I don't accept is blatant theft of IP and the half-assed justifications of it.
The newspaper industry needs to change just like the record and movie industries need to change
I disagree. The newspaper industry needs to change, but only because their product itself is less valuable than it used to be. Craigslist, career builder, monster.com, ebay, and other online sites have essentially edged out much of the newspapers ad revenue. Readers also have less time to and desire to read papers these days. Some people want to view content online, but they pay subscription fees or view online ads instead. Without the fundamental institution of IP journalism will be a shadow of itself when and if it moves online (where rapid piracy can be facilated).
Software is one area where businesses have had to adapt because of the power of the free software model.
I disagree. It's been 20+ years: where is the evidence? Except for, perhaps, Microsoft with Windows Servers/IIS (vs Linux/Apache), IE (vs Firefox), and a very small handful of other products, you basically have almost zero pressure being applied on proprietary companies. These competing open source products basically amount to no more than 10 or perhaps 15 identifiable products and, what's more, the competition isn't so fundamentally different that they've had to change everything. The kind of response necessary is largely the same it would be if that competition were simply another proprietary competitor. (Microsoft would not be able to get away with charging several hundred dollars for the 500 millionth copy of Windows had it had real competition--it'd be a fraction of that amount)
You are saying it is a failure.
Not exactly. I'm saying that the anti-ownership claims of Stallman's were a total failure, yes (even by his own "use" metric). That, however, does not preclude some small successes for open source software (especially insofar as it makes its inroads largely against a blundering monopoly and against entrenched products with "me-too" features). Nor, for that matter, do the small successes mean that for every 1 success of open source, you don't have 1000 more for proprietary software.
I am saying not only is it not a failure, it is a model that can be applied to other areas (whether the current business models can support them or not).
To some small extent, maybe, but not to the whole of the software industry or even the majority of it. No way, no how. I'm not advocating that "free software" is necessarily bad, immoral, or that it should be stopped. I think competition in any form is great (even if much of it inevitably will fail). The analogy I'd make is basically that you're extropolating from the fact that, say, Mother Teresa was willing to live a life of poverty and give away food to the poor that the rest of society could or would live like this. Some people may be willing to give away stuff for free, whether its code or food, but the mere fact that a few people are willing to do this does not mean that we should expect the rest of society (programmers) to follow suit (or even that it'd be advisable). It's just not something that's going to scale unless there is a real economic motivator behind it. Yes, you have some business models that might return some fraction of the revenue that the proprietary model would, but this model only works in a very small percentage of th
Now, I don't want to sound like the macho guy. I'm not, far from even... Combine 1 and 2. You do realise that most family these days are working couples. Two incomes, not the one income of the 50s and 60s. So according to the US Census bureau the median income is about $43K/year. (for 2004). More than often this household is composed by two incomes, so -perhaps- just -perhaps- that 50s guy that came home to his housewife who held his martini cool for him has a better income relatively.
For 1963 families with the "Wife Not in Paid Labor Force" the median income was 29.5K vs 40K in for a similarly situated family in 1999 (all in 2001 dollars).
For 1963 families with the "Wife in Paid Labor Force" the median income was 38K vs 70K in 1999 (all in 2001 dollars).
For a 1963 female household (no husband present) the median income was 15.7K vs 25.2K in 1999 (all in 2001 dollars).
The median income of all families (regardless of marital status) was 30.6K in 1963 vs 51.9K in 1999 (all in 2001 dollars).
The median income of all married-couple families was 32K vs 60K today (all in 2001 dollars)
You can argue that certain things might cost more today and that people outside of the middle class may be in a different boat (though I can show you numbers that would largely disprove this as well), but the middle of the country is able to buy and do significantly more today than they used to on the whole regardless of whether or not the wife is working. I'm not suggesting that individual people aren't struggling, but that many more people were struggling then and that, by and large, the issue is that our lifestyle expectations are much higher than they used to be. We want bigger houses, better/more cars, computers, washing machines, dryers, TVs, cell phones, various forms of entertainment, and more.
What's more, even if we wanted to "keep things like they were" -- it simply wasn't dooable. Change is inevitable and the greatest violence to society comes when we try to keep things static by restricting trade, keeping out all kinds of foreigners, etc. Those people that enjoyed extremely high paying jobs in manufacturing (relative to their training/education/hours worked) were enjoying jobs whose days were numbered from the start regardless of US policy. It was only a matter of time till the rest of the world modernized, till Japan figured out that they didn't need or want unions in their workforce and how to produce many goods more efficiently and more reliably...
We also simultaneously managed to figure out how to create enough net jobs that women have much better opportunities today without depressing wages (in fact, most wages have gone up). Even if you think that we could live in a vacuum -- what would you suggest? That we keep women out the workforce? That we don't expect them to get educated? Change may be uncomfortable sometimes, but a little discomfort is the price of advancement.
As said, I don't want to come over as a macho... I just see this myself: my dad could pay for our whole family, and I struggle with both me and my wife employed. (Okay, struggle is an exaggeration, but if I want to build a house someday, it will be "struggle")
I don't know what your father did or what you do, but no one (sane) ever claimed that progress means that each person will enjoy a higher standard of living every year (or higher than his parents necessarily). What it does tend to bring is significant improvement on average. I know the popular view on the 50/60s (ignoring for a minute that it was a very unique time in history) and such might contradict this and that certain neighborhoods and professions may have declined, but the numbers just don't bear support this notion for the larger share of society.
The fact remains that ingenuity is worthless. If it had value, people would be willing to pay for it. I've never heard of anyone willing to exchange money for ingenuity. We instead pay for time. A resource in limited supply.
Nonsense. First, this debate is about whether or not economics is zero sum. The fact is that net wealth for society has increased dramatically in very real terms: food production has skyrocketed; people are living longer; our computers do several thousand times as many computations as they used to in a fraction of the space for a fraction of the cos; cars can be produced more efficiently; and so on. Second, the resource is not simply "time".
When you purchase an OTS software program you care little about how much time it took the vendor to produce, but how much "good" that program will do for you relative to what you can afford and relative to what its competion does.
When you hire a laywer, you can easily pay 400% more for the "time" of a really sharp and experienced lawyer than you would for that of a mediocre one.
When a company contracts with someone to develop a sophisticated customer software for you, they're typically going to want negotiate a fairly fixed bid for the output instead of just paying time and materials. What's more, these quotes can vary wildly from vendor to vendor. One vendor may have better tools, have more educated and more motivated developers, have better design methods, re-use code (legally), and so on.
Albert Eistein's time would have much less valuable as a ditch digger, perhaps even less than the average digger, than it was as a theoretical physicist.
In short, what you the use care about most is the output, not how long it took the seller to produce whatever it is to make it. Even if you're theoretically paying for time and materials, you can almost always find someone who will work for a fraction of the cost, but be 90% less efficient and 500% less reliable. That's the whole point about modern capitalism. We incent for output and quality (which in turn rewards things like innovation, real hard work, education, focus, drive, etc), not just for how much time someone supposedly puts in.
Furthermore, when you say "[time] is in limited supply", this also misses the point as innovation and our modern economic system has made "time" much more valuable. For instance, given the same amount of input (time/man hours) a factory can produce orders of magnitude more than it did 100 years ago because of the assembly line, robots, lasers, computer designed equipment, increasing specialization, etc. What's more, because of all the various innovation and efficiencies in our system, the skilled worker has been freed up from doing a lot of wasteful work inside his own house like pumping water, food prep, finding/feeding the heating system, washing clothes, lighting candles, manually brushing the floors, repairing windows, etc.
You might argue that there is some theoretical limit to how much goods can be produced with a constant amount of labor (and ignor technological innovations like machines, robots, nano tech, etc), but no reasonable and informed person could claim that we haven't dramatically expanded our output/efficiency over the past several hundred years. Nor could they intelligently claim that we don't have a long ways to go yet....
Try withdrawing that 401k because you need to have an MRI done on a sick child, and see how much of that they actually let you keep.
Numbers on paper mean NOTHING. Cash in hand means EVERYTHING. Until you cash out, you don't really know what you've earned and what you haven't.
I already transfered the funds out, around 42K worth (around 200% more than my contribution), and into a completely different fund as I'm self employed now -- no significant hit. If I took it completely out of a qualified fund, the government would penalize me with taxes.
If you lost a lot of money it likely had little to do with the fund and everything to do with the government (taxes) and your employer penalizing you for withdrawing early (though you should get a deduction for hardship)
With 7 billion humans, human ingenuity is not a valuable resource. Anything that has a virtually unlimited supply has NO value, by the simple law of supply and demand. So your entire statement is based upon a premise that is a myth. Come back when you can analyse things starting with facts rather than myths.
So I guess the internal combustion engine, penicillin, municipal water/waste, nitrogenated soil, mechanized farming, airplanes, computers.... they have no "value".
I guess that simple mathematical facts like that American farms have increased their corn output from roughly 40 bushels/acre in 1900 to more than 150 bushels/acre today, with less labor input, have not resulted in a net increase in wealth (250%+ efficiency boost). Please. Without these kinds of improvements in efficiency (which results in net wealth creation) you wouldn't have been able to afford the time to bitch and wine on slashdot all day long -- you'd still be on the farm trying to eak out a living.
If you had invested 10k dollars in 1963, it would all be gone into Brokerage fees by now and be worth NOTHING, because all the stock would have been sold long ago to pay for the brokerage fees.
Only if you're fool enough to buy a crappy fund. Many people have done very well in the market over time, myself included.
Or at least, that was the story with my meager 10k 401k in 2001. I now don't trust bankers OR stock brokers.
I'd really like to know how you managed this. Which fund or investments did you make? The only way I can see this happening is if you picked undiversified stocks (and made aweful choices), traded on margin, engaged in day trading, and did other similarly stupid things.
I averaged more than ~20%/year average growth in my 401K since 2000 by investing 100% of my (small) contribution in a low-fee emerging market index fund (for a total return of more than 250%). Of course these numbers are phenomenal and that unbalanced an investment portfolio would have been stupid had I not had investments in other areas outside of my 401K, but it does go to show that it's totally possible without having any special access or knowledge.
One of the sharper eyed members had noticed the reduction in the American Labor force from 86 million to 64 million between 1999 and 2002, and a similar increase in the disabled/displaced/discouraged numbers that aren't officially a part of the labor force.
And I suppose this sailed right past your bullshit detector because you can't do math? ~64M employed means that only one in five of the 300M americans have jobs. Even if you assume that no kids and elderly are working, 20 - 64 years olds still make up roughly 60% of the population, or about 180M, meaning that only 1 in 3 of them are employed.
Does this resemble your neighborhood? I doubt it unless you live in a trailerpark and even then...
No wonder you had a hard time finding employment as a programmer.
By technology before 1950, and by outsourcing after 1963, yes. I make that distinction of periods of time for a reason- there's a SIGNIFICANT difference in jobs created by technology that fueled the expansion of the middle class before 1963, and outsourcing that has destroyed the middle class since then.
Ahh, isn't it wonderful to view history through rose colored glasses?
When:
1) US median household income was less $35K/year (2005 dollars) and considerably less than the $46K/year in 2005.
2) Women had near zero job opportunities
3) Unemployment often averaged around 5.5% (vs about 4.5% now)
4) Some 81M jobs simply hadn't been created (about 140% growth in non-farm employment roles)
5) The average 65 year old could expect to live about 4 years less than they could today (~14+ vs ~18+)
6) Our labor costs (and healthcare expectations) were low enough to make exporting cars and manufactured goods viable and particularly before the advent of foreign competition....
Why oh why can't we return to the good old days?
Horse trainers and carriage makers found good union jobs in the auto industry. Textile workers were just dumped into welfare. For the first group, there was an increase in real compensation, for the second there has been a real loss when compared to inflation.
Yeah, sure, it was all perfectly smooth. Every person that lost a job just popped right into a cushy union job manufacturing cars. No one complained about job displacement and about the fact that there were far fewer jobs in manufacturing cars than there were in horse/buggy driving/maintaince/etc.
In 2001 there was a stock market crash if you didn't notice- investment is usually a bad idea when the economy goes south.
The best time the buy is when the market is down.
In fact, the stock market in general is just a method to steal money from investors and give it to stock brokers and C-level executives.
If you had invested 10K dollars in 1963 into the S&P 500, that investment would only be worth more half a million dollars today. Please let me know where I can get my money "stolen" like this.
That was my thought exactly. I, for one, have never owned a "smart phone". I can afford to spend $400-$600 on a phone, and in fact my company has offered to buy me a Motorola Q or Blackjack, but I don't want them. I sure would like to get a smart phone, but whenever a new model comes out, someone at my company gets one, and I usually get a chance to play with them. You know what? They stink. Really, they're terrible. The OS is unresponsive, the email clients have a hard time connecting, and the various applications crash too much. The interface stinks. There are too many buttons and jog wheels and doo-dads. They're all just toys, and pretty much everyone I know spends more time trying to get theirs to do something than they spend time using it
I own a Motorola Q and I can agree with some of what you're saying. However, I think it also comes down to a matter of whether or not you need their primary offerings: contacts, calender, and email. I know a lot of professionals that are not only not technophiles, they're actually technophobes, who find them utterly indispensable.
If you have a lot of contacts (several hundred or more) and especially if you keep a lot of information in them (i.e., notes, birthdays, secretary names, etc) then you really want a smartphone (or carry a seperate PDA -- which is a pain). Having the ability to update your contacts in at your desktop or your phone and have it be backed up and populated out is extremely helpful and it's something that non-smartphones haven't even come close to equaling. (Yeah, you can buy some added software/dongle/pay service... but they're generally wildly inferior to use and maintaining)
If you're a professional and have lots of appointments to keep, again this is a great tool.
If you get a lot of emails when you're away from your desk (after hours, on the road, etc) or if you simply want the freedom to leave your desk while waiting for an important email, then smartphones can also be very useful.
Some people simply don't have these needs or haven't yet figured out that they do, so smartphones don't seem to offer them much. I also think that a lot of people get a bad experience with smartphones because, frankly, windows mobile and some others are pretty poor when it comes to usability (especially one-handed/non-stylus usage) and performance (especially on sluggish platforms like the Q). I believe most of these professional users are better served by blackberry (though its calender is a bit weak) and PalmOS/Treo (which has suboptimal email unless you pay for Goodlink or like software) than they are by the theoretically higher powered devices.
To me the only reason to use the windows mobile platform today is if you want to run more demanding stuff on the phone -- like run 2.5/3G data apps and/or browse relatively rich websites. The browsing experience is not the same as a desktop, and I don't think it ever really will be, but there's certain information like, say, the weather report, traffic reports, airline info, etc that can be bookmarked and/or accessed effectively. (It's just a matter of time till someone figures out how to bundle up this information, whether through a website or a good data app, and make it readily available to most users.)
Sounds like we agree on the main point (that nobody has a viable free-information business model), but disagree on the details. That's alright with me.
I'd say a small number of specific open source companies, like MySQL, are viable insofar as they are able to stay in business and continue funding a small amount of development (though whether they can do so for long is not clear). These kinds of models only really work in niche areas (like where proprietary developers want to use their code -- but not in most areas -- like end-end applications) and, even then, they're quite limiting. I suspect MySQL is not enjoying much in the way of community code contributions and that its open source status prevents them from making much money, which in turn, leads to less development funding. MySQL's competitive edge, to the extent that they have any, is that they're one of the few multiuser RDBMS systems that developers can distribute without paying huge licensing fees -- and, of course, there's not much preventing proprietary companies from developing new or re-licensing their existing RDBMS under similar terms/pricing (except perhaps if they want to target Linux and have to workaround core GPL libraries)....
Quality has nothing to do with this. I'm talking "irrational," as in: it's irrational to attempt to completely lock down a piece of information when you must present an external party with the key. The free rider problem again: how are you going to sell this if everyone can get it for free?
I'm not sure what you mean by "key". Do you mean, like, an unlock code or method of enabling the user to actually use the software? If so, I'd say the copyright system effectively prevents most blatant piracy in the US and Western Europe. The addition of copy protection, code obfuscation, integrity-checking updates, and more make piracy a pain for casual piracy attempts and, especially, for those that might depend on their software to run reliably.
As to the selling of labor: when you purchase a CD (or software, or whatever), do you consider it a transaction for the media, or a transaction for the labor? A lot of Slashdotters might consider the purchase of a CD to be (ideally) a transaction for the labor of the artist. I get music, I pay artist for creating music. The software transaction seems to be: I get software, I pay for media containing software, not I get software, I pay developer for creating software. That's the irrational part -- why should we pay $50 for the media, when it's the developer's time that's important? Perhaps you don't think of it that way.
Someone that views payment merely as paying for the media or the developers time is missing the point. You're paying your share into the entire system which produced that software. Most importantly, dare I say it, you're paying the investors/entrepreneurs that facilitated the whole thing. They put up the money several years in advance to pay developers (and all the necessary overhead that goes along with it) to develop a program which may not have turned out like envisioned and, even if it did, may not have been well received by the users.
Think of it this way. Most early stage investor are basically making investments with incomplete information at best. Even smart ones don't know what it is going to succeed or fail in many cases. If they lose their principal on average on 9 in 10 of their investments than that 1 successful investment basically needs to pay out at least 10 times the principal (assuming all investments are equal) for the investor to even break even. What's more, if you actually want that investment to be attractive to such investors, then you need to consider that they could be investing elsewhere, get better interest/capital appreciation, and take a lot less risk. So, anyways, without going into a tortured explanation that 1 investment must payout more like 20-30 times the prin
The only thing you gain by holding the patent is the ability to make it hard for a new one from starting up in the same space.
Nonsense. A strong patent can make all the difference in the world to prevent competition from copying your ideas. This is particularly true when you'e competing against much larger and better funded competition in the same industry. I have been involved with several startups that have gone up against much larger and better funded competitors that have, with a strong patent portfolio, torn marketshare away from them and created highly successful companies in their own rite. What's more, nearly every novel idea that we brought to the table that we either did not or could not obtain decent patent coverage on was quickly copied by the bigger companies within a year or two. I know patents are unpopular with many software developer types, particularly with the younger set that tends to read slashdot, but they're absolutely critical to innovation in other industries and they can be useful in software as well. The biggest problem that we have today is with the patent office allowing too many overly broad and obvious patents through (patent quality has diminished dramatically over the past 20 years).
If they walk out the door the business is as good as dead anyway.
Obviously key employees are critical to the businesses continued success. However, strong patent protection can help prevent much of the damage if the competition is able to hire away a single engineer with lots knowledge of the product. I'd say this usually doesn't happen in the US at least anyways thanks to NDAs, non-competes and patent protection, but with some foreign and/or unscrupulous competitors it's possible and I'd much rather have patent coverage to back up my claims (in the US and other major markets).
I was making a simple argument from analogy. One of the key points of the argument was that proprietary information is less used than information that has fewer barriers or is freely distributed. It is the difference say between AP and a piece of investigative journalism by a specific paper. The license for these different sources impacts their use - which is basically the same argument RMS makes.
I wasn't disputing that restrictions or lack thereof can impact its usage (scale and style). However, what I do reject is the notion that there is no important relationship between the right to restrict and the ability to produce the product or service in the first place. All things cannot usually be held "equal" when you change the ability of the publishers to control and price access. Stallman is arguing against the ownership of information itself -- not just for his pet software model. This is an utterly unflexible and unworkable solution for most intellectual products.
However, talking about newspaper business models is a straw man. It wasn't my argument.
It was very much your argument. You suggested that we should replace the word "information" (newspapers) for software and compared the "old" newspaper model to the "new" "free" online access model. You also suggested that they're financially similar...
Having a relative in the business isn't a compelling grounds for an argument from authority.
I apologize if I offended you, but my argument was not based on an appeal to authority. I only brought it up because I can personaly point to a specific major paper where those fees are, in fact, much less than a fraction of a percent of their revenue (since I can view private financial reports). I did go on to point out that you can look up the information from several other reputable public sources (which you can) and see that the revenue couldn't possibly be more than about several percent at most papers (that in "other" revenue which includes other sources too).
Your technical assessments seem to be shaped by the needs of your argument more than an honest assessment.
And your access arguments seem to be shaped entirely by your wants instead of the need of the developers and other employees at software companies to get paid decently.
For example, your assessment of the most popular web server as "a relatively simple product and a platform" forces anyone that is trying to be charitable to your argument to question your competence to make technical judgments - and there are many here.
Go ahead and question it if you want. I don't ask you to take me as the gospel. I just point out some shared characteristics of the few successful open source projects so that you might consider that open source is not the right answer for most/many products (even 20+ years after RMS started his anti-ownership crusade)
For the record, there are objective measures that we can look at like: the complexity of the task, the number of lines of code, how readily the programming can be done in parallel, the number of man hours expended, and so on. Apache may be a great product with solid programming, but when it's less than 100K lines of code I don't think it's unreasonable to put it in a different category, that of relative simplicity, as compared to developing major and innovative applications or OSes. Apache also has the added benefit of being something that a lot of people can touch and see despite its relative simplicity. Low complexity, lots of exposure to developer-types, and not a lot of need for innovation... It's a project that I think fits relatively well into the open source development model. Contrast this with a product like photoshop, that probably has several million lines of code, which performs many complex computations, needs a good UI, which few programmers use much, and so
I disagree. Open source may have found a niche, but Stallman's anti-ownership views have been disproven. Stallman started his movement at the infacy of the PC era. His movement allegedly had a chance to compete and yet market after market proprietary software beats it and continues to be far more widely adopted (which is a far better measure of overall quality and existance from the users' POV)
Remember that the copyleft movement is a movement about purity of design; in essence, all of his conclusions about open-source vs. closed-source software are based on the assumption of all else being equal.
Those may be his words now, but that's not what he was saying 20 years ago. The measure he used was words like "the real contribution to the wealth of society happens only when the program is used". Well guess what? Open source programs are little used in most markets despite its many supposed advantages (better price, ability to modify code, and code sharing).
With no other factors involved, his three points about software are absolutely correct. More people will use a free product over a product they have to pay for, if those products are equal (and/or are percieved as equal). People are more productive when they can adjust their tools to their preferences. And no one likes reinventing the wheel over and over just because of some proprietary agreements.
The argument for proprietary status, then and today, is about incentive and capital investment. You can't just seperate them and have "all things being equal". That's the whole point. Stallman's failure of vision was an utter lack of ability to appreciate just how important these issues were in the development of modern software then and particularly in later years as software got increasing more complex, more sophisticated, and entered the era of commodity hardware.
Unfortunately for his movement, we don't live in a world where all else is equal, and there are a number of very important factors affecting people's software choices. Advertising. Capital. Perception. Inertia. Economy. All of these create conditions where proprietary software thrives (in terms of sheer number of programs), seemingly contradicting his aims.
I think you're trying to side-step the issue at hand. The fact is that open source has produced very little software that the average user would want to use even if it was placed in front of them. You can talk about advertising and perception all you want, but I bet when you get down to the issue at hand, your family uses little if any in the way of open source software. You presumably know better... but what? The software is either not there, by and large, or it simply stinks.
Of course capital is all important. The open source model can barely afford to pay more than a handful of programmers, so of course, it can't afford to advertise either (which leads to having even less capital to invest in development). These issues are all inter-related.
Companies that create software still, for the most part, see software as a product, and not a means to achieve a service. Therefore, they apply all the standard rules to their product that any other company would: they keep the plans and the means to reproduce it secret, so that they can't be undercut in the market by someone else with a lower initial investment.
Please. Shareholders care about getting paid, first and foremost, and could care less about what it is called. Arguing that they're simply ignorant is a cop-out and ignores the fact that "software as service" has produced damn little of note in the free/open source world. Even the few notable "successes" in the open source world revolve around the ownership of code. MySQL and QT are both GPL compliant, but the dirty little secret is tha
When he originally made these statements, the situation was different. There was no widespread pc usage.
So what you're saying is that Stallman's movement started out on near even footing with proprietary software at the infancy of the PC era and lost despite the fact that its development methods are allegedly superior and it costs its users much less than non-free software.
The only reason closed source software has taken a lead in "popularity" is because that is what basically clueless "users" have been fed, and become used to. The likes of Microsoft and Apple have thrived on making software "easy to use" rather than the end user actually having to learn anything fundamental (and thereby threatening the major software houses).
Please. I was using PCs long before 1986 and "ease of use", ala GUI, was hardly a factor at the time. Where was the open source answer to MS-DOS? Wordstar (and later Wordperfect/Word)? Lotus 123 (and later Excel)? Peachtree? dBase? BASIC? Turbo Pascal and C? Not only were these programs "easier to use", they "existed" and hard many more "features" than anything open source even dreamed of putting out. Long before Windows/GUI applications gained traction proprietary applications had dominated the market.
If free software and open source had been the metric from the beginning, then maybe we wouldn't have such a script kiddy culture today. Maybe the DMCA wouldn't exist, as there would be no need for such a law. Most people are far more intelligent that they are given credit for, but as with anything learned, if you don't use it, you lose it. Due to the culture of dependence (fostered by Microsoft and Apple), people have become lazy and conditioned to being spoonfed what someone else tells them is good for them.
Yes, word processors, spreadsheet programs, accounting software, database programs, compilers and more are complete wastes of time. Time saving is bad! We should have implemented the full employment act of 1986 and demanded no more progress! Real men should be happy to flip bits in binary. In fact, I propose we go back to punch cards. No more of this keyboard nonsense!
Ironically, supporting proprietary software over free/open software is like the buggy whip makers fight against the rise of the motor car. Just because a particular financial advantage exists today, doesn't mean that's the way it should stay forever. (It's ironic because the buggy whip makers were essentially the equivalent of open source compared to the car manufacturers, but the complaints are the same - preserve my business model)
Pfft. Are you for real? I've yet to hear proprietary software companies beg to have the open source companies regulated out of existence. This is silly because it implies that open source is a real threat to a large number of proprietary companies and not a benefit to others (like IBM).
Outcompeted in what way? Market share? Free software has a lower cost to the end user. Install base?
Both Marketshare and installed base (which is nothing more than marketshare over time). RMS said that "the real contribution to the wealth of society happens only when the program is used". On this basis open/free software has made much less of a contribution than proprietary software has.
Don't you think the install base of free software would be higher if the largest proprietary software vendor were not a convicted monopolist?
No. Microsoft, the convicted monoplist, only has real market powers on the desktop/OS, the web browser, and perhaps Word and Excel. Proprietary software still dominates in almost every other area. What's more, I think that Microsoft's monopoly powers have actually had the opposite impact that you suggest. They have effectively prevented healthy competition in those markets while simultaneously putting out what has generally been a fairly mediocre and overpriced product. This created a significant opening for Linux (vs Windows) and Mozilla/Firefox (vs IE) which otherwise would probably not be able to gain traction had Microsofts' products been better and more reasonably priced (relative to the vast size of the market).
Or are you referring to quality or performance? I don't buy your argument that free software is not competitive with proprietary software.
I'm referring to a whole wide array of qualities which consumers select software on. Quality refers not just to bugs, but to features, usability, scalability, predictability, and more. You can argue till you're blue in the face that your favorite open source software package is "better", but the fact is that most consumers have different criteria and disagree with your assessment.
Would you really load a Linux/desktop for parents or grandparents and expect them to do all of even their basic tasks well, like, loading digicam pics, attaching/emailing them, edit contacts, browsing the web, etc?
Would you ask a professional graphic artist to use GIMP over Photoshop?
A CFO to run Open Office instead of Excel (even ignoring compatibility issues)?
Some corny open source note taking software app to Evernote or OneNote 2007?
A corporate programmer to build quick applications using open source tools instead of Visual Studio/C# or Delphi?
Tuxracer to Quake 4?
GNUcash to Quicken?
Some crummy OSS app to iTunes/WMP?
There are only a handful of open source projects where it is even a question and these are usually only if your needs are more prescribed (and usually of the "geeky" variety).
Slashdot Mirror
Per Abrahamsen,
As I said before, you and most people on slashdot understand very little about patents. You're all too ready to tar and feather any patent holder based on your misinterpretation of specific patents and patent law (not to mention a lack of appreciation for certain fundamental aspects of business)
That said: Infringement can be (and often is) found if a product violates any one individual claim in the patent. The product, however, must violate every limitation found within that claim, i.e., if you violate all but 1 part of it, then you can't be infringing that claim. If a claim is a dependent claim, i.e., it makes a reference to another claim, then that dependent claim is just incorporating aspects of the patent it is referring to in itself (instead of repeating the independent claim) so you're still essentially just concerned with the language one claim (even if that one claim brings in another claim). Just because a product violates a claim though does not mean that the patent or the claims the product allegedly violates will actually hold up in court (prior art).
What "bogus" arguments did I "make up"?
I have not made a thing up. All I've done, with respect to your statements, is quote, accurately paraphrase, and draw simple yet unescapable conclusions from your own words. You have done nothing to counter it besides whine that I could dare hold you to your own words. You say, for instance, that you object to my positing that you effectively deny the importance of the relationship between newspaper quality and newspaper revenue yet you:
- want to destroy newspaper ads;
- want to eliminate IP rights;
- complain if newspaper wants to charge a fee for online acccess (instead of hitting with ads);
- want free (or at least very cheap) access to all newspaper content with meta news-services;
- assert that low-revenue public radio/indymedia business models are viable alternative;
and so on.
What else is a reasonable person supposed to think? You either have a magic alternative formula for the generation of substantial revenues (which complies with your wishlist -- which you've yet to share) OR you think that newspapers don't deserve to exist OR you simply don't think professional newspaper content should exist (which your bitching and whining about access fees and such would tend to disprove). At the very least your desire to forcefully alter the newspaper model, an institution that is so critical to our society, is feckless and facile.
What "real" arguments have I failed to address?
Name two.
You are obviously unaccustomed to having your idle dreams be challenged with any kind of intellectual rigor.
No matter your intentions, the sentence (or lack thereof) you spewed forth implied that everything in your list was one of my "strawman arguments".
Nowhere in this entire thread did I ever refute that some money was being made with open source or that some people were using the software. To the contrary, I acknowledged this several times. This would be a strawman argument on your part.
The only relevant question in this vein was about the level of success that the anti-ownership movement can claim. The entire thrust of my argument from the start of this thread was that RMS proposed that we judge the success of a programming effort based on its level of use ("The real contribution to the wealth of society happens only when the program is used. And if you prevent the program from being used, the contribution doesn't actually happen") and that, on those pragmatic grounds (which he has since abandoned), his anti-IP movement has unquestionably been shown up by IP-based development efforts by several orders of magnitude.
If he were merely proposing that copyleft is useful in some circumstances (like Torvalds and other more pragmatic people) and did not propose that we completely abandon proprietary/copyright/patent rights we would not be having this debate.
There is no double standard. There is a difference of several orders of magnitude regardless of whether you measure in dollars (though dollars can be a pretty good proxy for units/installed base when you adjust for price), market share in unit terms, installed base in unit terms, number of market leading packages, number of developer hours, and so on. I don't see how any reasonable person that is even remotely involved with IT could refute these state of affairs unless they live in a cave. It's like arguing that the earth really isn't round. You may not like it. You may not want to hear it. You may think it is going to change, but you cannot seriously deny the gist of what I have presented. You, in fact, have not. All you've done is express outrage that I would dare to challenge the position of open source as a serious contender for the average person's software use.
I attempted to address your points as any reasonable person would have interpreted them. You may have expresssed them poorly, but I cannot help that. Furthermore, the bulk of my responses had little to do with whether or not it possessed strawman-like qualities. You have managed to completely ignore them.
There are certainly problems with the patent system, primarily insofar as it has allowed too many low quality patents through (overly broad and obvious). This problem is particularly bad in areas that the patent office understands little due to its relative novelty and when there is a rapid growth in applications (e.g., internet tech). However, many slashdotters also grossly overstate the scale of the problem because they have no idea how to read patents and because they themselves have never been involved with sizable entrepreneurial activity. All they see are reports of the problems (about half the time with grossly inaccurate information) and they never hear about companies of all sizes using patents to secure real innovation (or small companies/entrepreneurs licensing their tech to much bigger firms for $$$).
Yes, some guy with just a few thousand dollars to his name/idea is going to have a difficult time filing a _strong_ patent today(many people have weak patents which are easily worked around). But he sure as hell can file a provisional patent application with a little research (cheap) which can then give him the legal leverage and confidence to talk to other engineering types, VCs, etc to seek out funding, assistance, and guidance. What's more, if that (really) little guy can't obtain funding from anyone, the odds are that he won't be able to develop the idea in the first place. Most competent investors won't even invest if you don't have or can't obtain a strong patent (there are some exceptions)
How much do you want to bet that slashdot is one of the variables in the formula? :-)
I find it very ironic that you call the free market and intellectual property "religion", despite the mountain of empirical evidence and well documented theory behind it, yet you demand that we not only merely try your faith, no that's not good enough, you insist that the entire world takes the plunge and rejects on mere faith that which has done so much in favor of the copyleft cult, that has done so little for users to-date, that has so little theoretical backing, and where similar ideas have failed througout the world time and time again. I might be able to understand you a little better if you actually directly contributed to the system you advocate, if you were merely asking people to be more like yourself, but somehow I suspect you don't. Please correct me if I'm wrong:
How many lines of code have you contributed to open source projects?
How much money have you invested in open source companies (particularly innovative ones)?
How much money have you donated to open source projects?
How much money have you personally spent with open source companies? (and how much for closed source?)
How much open source software do you even use on the desktop? What about your family?
What precisely have you done for open source projects besides free-load? In what way have you carried your own weight?
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Me? I actually practice what I preach. I buy closed source software fairly regularly because it is better than the open source alternatives (and use and occasionally buy a small amount of open source software when appropriate). I am also investing time and money into my own proprietary software company.
I never said you did. You do, however, imply that these very low revenue / free contribution models (public radio, Indymedia, etc) are somehow a superior alternative. You imply that newspaper companies shouldn't really be concerning themselves with mundane issues like trying to find how to fund a payroll of 3K+ employees. You obviously recognize that the newspapers offer services that you value (which is why you want free/open access to them and complain if they want to charge you for it), yet you don't seriously offer an alternative for them. In other words, you want to have your cake and eat it too.
For the record, I listen to my local NPR station regularly and I think it's better than anything else on the radio. I do, however, recognize that NPR's costs are but a fraction of what it costs to publish a major newspaper (even when you trim out some of the fat/junk) because NPR is not in the business of collecting, managing, and publishing nearly as much information (though they run ads of sorts in the form of corporate sponsorship and have to virtually shutdown the radio for days at a time to get people to donate and depend on government subisidies...) If you think you can run an online newspaper that is equivalent or better than what the major papers pubish at a fraction of the cost (say, 1/10th of the ~400m dollars it takes to run a major city paper) on donations or some other non-ad revenue model alone, then please go for it. Prove me wrong by outcompeting the papers, until you do though all you have is an unproven theory (which you haven't even presented yet).
Firstly, this wouldn't
Physical property is a "monopoly" too. Without this kind of monopoly you're going to have very little investment. Like with open source to IP you might point to the small success of communal farming plots, but we all know that this doesn't scale.
Great, so if you don't value the commercial product put out by NYTimes, WSJ, etc, if the relationship between funding and journalistic quality are totally unrelated, go ahead and read your indy "media", blogs, etc. You don't need them.
Newspapers and other media outlets may be making mistakes (and I'd be one of the first ones to criticize the TV/radio news media), but this doesn't make the institution of IP wrong anymore than your ability to build an ugly house means that your right own land should be infringed on.
This is supposed to be news to me? This is the best you can come up with? Please.
You think that because Linux has ~25% market share in the server market against overpriced competition that this demonstrates the superiority of open source or shows that proprietary code isn't necessary in the many other markets? I suppose we're supposed to ignore that ~75% market share owned by Microsoft, Sun, etc in the server market (never mind the many other important markets where open source is a non-entity). Linux has a significant pricing edge because it's really only competing against Windows (which is way overpriced for many uses) and against commercial Unix systems (which are burdened with non-commodity/proprietary hardware costs and existing customers can more easily move many of these applications to Linux).
That is someone's prediction. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know what that means, but if you've been in the industry for more than 2 years I'd think you'd appreciate just how wildly wrong such predictions have been. If you actually checked the source, you'd realize that the same source pegged the current amount at less 15B dollars and that this estimate was also higher than other peoples' estimates because it actually counted the hardware costs even when Linux was installed over it (e.g., format Windows with Linux) and when it was installed in a virtualized environment. That same estimate also includes non-OSS software for Linux, like Oracle, so it's rather silly to cite it in the first place. Other sources have placed the estimates much lower (i.e., ~672M in 2004).
I didn't say that was true per se. I only said open source software's small successes does not preclude the possibility of much higher success (1000:1) in proprietary software. Whether the difference is 1000:1 or 500:1 matters little and is not worth quibbling about. Take a walk down the software aisle sometime; look at your
More importantly, imho, is that I have a strong practical grasp on the realities of how businesses actually operate as a result of being an entrepreneur myself and as a consequence of the fact that I closely followed my parents' entrepreneurial businesses as I was growing up. There's a lot of highfalutin debates on market theory, transparency, corporate governance, etc that hold little water in the real world.
That being said...
I simply appeal to your ability to think
There is no way a US CEO is going to take money out of the economy unless he, perhaps, gets his check in cash and hides it under his mattress (for a long time) or burns it all up. The odds are that that CEO is going to invest much of that money back into the equity markets, particularly in higher risk stocks than what less affluent people are apt to make, which has very real and important benefits for the economy. He may put some of his money in the bank, but that's going to help people buy houses in the form of cheaper mortgage interest rates. He may buy, say, some 5M dollar painting, but then the painter or auction house is going to invest/spend that money too. Basically the only way to meaningfully remove from the economy is to do less, i.e., don't work harder/smarter for more money and take whatever money you have an invest it in the most conservative instrument possible... I think our current capitalist system generally incents us to do more: to work harder, smarter, invest, spend on things we want, etc. The greatest danger to our economy is that which threatens to slow it all down by removing the incentive to work hard, to spend, and to invest.
I'm not defending the highest CEO salary/bonuses per se, but there are justifications for it (supply and demand, etc) and that this is really a call for the board / shareholders to make.
Well, except this really isn't the situation we find ourselves with. Where the CEO recieves X, the individual workers at these firms, due to the size of them, will almost always recieve X / 100,000+. What would have been a 50M bonus for the CEO would usually be closer to a $500 bonus for the employee (assuming the CEO deserves nothing): nice but not going to make a huge dent in the lifestyle of the employee. What's more, those employees may tend to spend disproportionately more of their share on retail spending, but I'd argue that, in many cases, society ultimately gets a lot more bang for the buck over than long run in having 50M dollar be invested in a deserving equity even than a short burst of spending spread out throughout the entire economy. What's more, I think the 50M dollars is a much better incentive to the CEO than $500 would be for most of the employees and if that $50M dollar incentive results in even a 10% boost in sales/efficiency the results are going to be widespread (and it pay for shareholders to do so usually)
Furthermore, the issue is one of supply and demand. There are very few people that would make acceptable CEO's to the shareholders and a large number of the people that are capable have decided they don't want to do it. It's not worth the stress, the extra hours (100 hour work weeks for many), constant traveling (even on a private jet, it sucks), having a gazillion people second guess your every move, and the unpredictability (yes, if you get fired, which is very likely, you may enjoy a pre-negotiated severance package, but the odds are you're going to be out of work for several years). I'm not arguing that it is the "right" number, but that it's stupid for the government to try to blunder their way into it and choose a better number.
No, I'm supporting the rule of law and the fundamental principle of competition. I don't view theft of IP as being any form of competition. If people want to write books, software, and music and give away the fruits of their labor for free that is their choice. Let them compete on those ground rules. What I don't accept is blatant theft of IP and the half-assed justifications of it.
I disagree. The newspaper industry needs to change, but only because their product itself is less valuable than it used to be. Craigslist, career builder, monster.com, ebay, and other online sites have essentially edged out much of the newspapers ad revenue. Readers also have less time to and desire to read papers these days. Some people want to view content online, but they pay subscription fees or view online ads instead. Without the fundamental institution of IP journalism will be a shadow of itself when and if it moves online (where rapid piracy can be facilated).
I disagree. It's been 20+ years: where is the evidence? Except for, perhaps, Microsoft with Windows Servers/IIS (vs Linux/Apache), IE (vs Firefox), and a very small handful of other products, you basically have almost zero pressure being applied on proprietary companies. These competing open source products basically amount to no more than 10 or perhaps 15 identifiable products and, what's more, the competition isn't so fundamentally different that they've had to change everything. The kind of response necessary is largely the same it would be if that competition were simply another proprietary competitor. (Microsoft would not be able to get away with charging several hundred dollars for the 500 millionth copy of Windows had it had real competition--it'd be a fraction of that amount)
Not exactly. I'm saying that the anti-ownership claims of Stallman's were a total failure, yes (even by his own "use" metric). That, however, does not preclude some small successes for open source software (especially insofar as it makes its inroads largely against a blundering monopoly and against entrenched products with "me-too" features). Nor, for that matter, do the small successes mean that for every 1 success of open source, you don't have 1000 more for proprietary software.
To some small extent, maybe, but not to the whole of the software industry or even the majority of it. No way, no how. I'm not advocating that "free software" is necessarily bad, immoral, or that it should be stopped. I think competition in any form is great (even if much of it inevitably will fail). The analogy I'd make is basically that you're extropolating from the fact that, say, Mother Teresa was willing to live a life of poverty and give away food to the poor that the rest of society could or would live like this. Some people may be willing to give away stuff for free, whether its code or food, but the mere fact that a few people are willing to do this does not mean that we should expect the rest of society (programmers) to follow suit (or even that it'd be advisable). It's just not something that's going to scale unless there is a real economic motivator behind it. Yes, you have some business models that might return some fraction of the revenue that the proprietary model would, but this model only works in a very small percentage of th
For 1963 families with the "Wife Not in Paid Labor Force" the median income was 29.5K vs 40K in for a similarly situated family in 1999 (all in 2001 dollars).
For 1963 families with the "Wife in Paid Labor Force" the median income was 38K vs 70K in 1999 (all in 2001 dollars).
For a 1963 female household (no husband present) the median income was 15.7K vs 25.2K in 1999 (all in 2001 dollars).
The median income of all families (regardless of marital status) was 30.6K in 1963 vs 51.9K in 1999 (all in 2001 dollars).
The median income of all married-couple families was 32K vs 60K today (all in 2001 dollars)
You can argue that certain things might cost more today and that people outside of the middle class may be in a different boat (though I can show you numbers that would largely disprove this as well), but the middle of the country is able to buy and do significantly more today than they used to on the whole regardless of whether or not the wife is working. I'm not suggesting that individual people aren't struggling, but that many more people were struggling then and that, by and large, the issue is that our lifestyle expectations are much higher than they used to be. We want bigger houses, better/more cars, computers, washing machines, dryers, TVs, cell phones, various forms of entertainment, and more.
What's more, even if we wanted to "keep things like they were" -- it simply wasn't dooable. Change is inevitable and the greatest violence to society comes when we try to keep things static by restricting trade, keeping out all kinds of foreigners, etc. Those people that enjoyed extremely high paying jobs in manufacturing (relative to their training/education/hours worked) were enjoying jobs whose days were numbered from the start regardless of US policy. It was only a matter of time till the rest of the world modernized, till Japan figured out that they didn't need or want unions in their workforce and how to produce many goods more efficiently and more reliably...
We also simultaneously managed to figure out how to create enough net jobs that women have much better opportunities today without depressing wages (in fact, most wages have gone up). Even if you think that we could live in a vacuum -- what would you suggest? That we keep women out the workforce? That we don't expect them to get educated? Change may be uncomfortable sometimes, but a little discomfort is the price of advancement.
I don't know what your father did or what you do, but no one (sane) ever claimed that progress means that each person will enjoy a higher standard of living every year (or higher than his parents necessarily). What it does tend to bring is significant improvement on average. I know the popular view on the 50/60s (ignoring for a minute that it was a very unique time in history) and such might contradict this and that certain neighborhoods and professions may have declined, but the numbers just don't bear support this notion for the larger share of society.
When you purchase an OTS software program you care little about how much time it took the vendor to produce, but how much "good" that program will do for you relative to what you can afford and relative to what its competion does.
When you hire a laywer, you can easily pay 400% more for the "time" of a really sharp and experienced lawyer than you would for that of a mediocre one.
When a company contracts with someone to develop a sophisticated customer software for you, they're typically going to want negotiate a fairly fixed bid for the output instead of just paying time and materials. What's more, these quotes can vary wildly from vendor to vendor. One vendor may have better tools, have more educated and more motivated developers, have better design methods, re-use code (legally), and so on.
Albert Eistein's time would have much less valuable as a ditch digger, perhaps even less than the average digger, than it was as a theoretical physicist.
In short, what you the use care about most is the output, not how long it took the seller to produce whatever it is to make it. Even if you're theoretically paying for time and materials, you can almost always find someone who will work for a fraction of the cost, but be 90% less efficient and 500% less reliable. That's the whole point about modern capitalism. We incent for output and quality (which in turn rewards things like innovation, real hard work, education, focus, drive, etc), not just for how much time someone supposedly puts in.
Furthermore, when you say "[time] is in limited supply", this also misses the point as innovation and our modern economic system has made "time" much more valuable. For instance, given the same amount of input (time/man hours) a factory can produce orders of magnitude more than it did 100 years ago because of the assembly line, robots, lasers, computer designed equipment, increasing specialization, etc. What's more, because of all the various innovation and efficiencies in our system, the skilled worker has been freed up from doing a lot of wasteful work inside his own house like pumping water, food prep, finding/feeding the heating system, washing clothes, lighting candles, manually brushing the floors, repairing windows, etc.
You might argue that there is some theoretical limit to how much goods can be produced with a constant amount of labor (and ignor technological innovations like machines, robots, nano tech, etc), but no reasonable and informed person could claim that we haven't dramatically expanded our output/efficiency over the past several hundred years. Nor could they intelligently claim that we don't have a long ways to go yet....
If you lost a lot of money it likely had little to do with the fund and everything to do with the government (taxes) and your employer penalizing you for withdrawing early (though you should get a deduction for hardship)
I guess that simple mathematical facts like that American farms have increased their corn output from roughly 40 bushels/acre in 1900 to more than 150 bushels/acre today, with less labor input, have not resulted in a net increase in wealth (250%+ efficiency boost). Please. Without these kinds of improvements in efficiency (which results in net wealth creation) you wouldn't have been able to afford the time to bitch and wine on slashdot all day long -- you'd still be on the farm trying to eak out a living.
Planet Earth Welcomes You.
I'd really like to know how you managed this. Which fund or investments did you make? The only way I can see this happening is if you picked undiversified stocks (and made aweful choices), traded on margin, engaged in day trading, and did other similarly stupid things.
I averaged more than ~20%/year average growth in my 401K since 2000 by investing 100% of my (small) contribution in a low-fee emerging market index fund (for a total return of more than 250%). Of course these numbers are phenomenal and that unbalanced an investment portfolio would have been stupid had I not had investments in other areas outside of my 401K, but it does go to show that it's totally possible without having any special access or knowledge.
Does this resemble your neighborhood? I doubt it unless you live in a trailerpark and even then...
No wonder you had a hard time finding employment as a programmer.
When:
1) US median household income was less $35K/year (2005 dollars) and considerably less than the $46K/year in 2005.
2) Women had near zero job opportunities
3) Unemployment often averaged around 5.5% (vs about 4.5% now)
4) Some 81M jobs simply hadn't been created (about 140% growth in non-farm employment roles)
5) The average 65 year old could expect to live about 4 years less than they could today (~14+ vs ~18+)
6) Our labor costs (and healthcare expectations) were low enough to make exporting cars and manufactured goods viable and particularly before the advent of foreign competition....
Why oh why can't we return to the good old days?
Yeah, sure, it was all perfectly smooth. Every person that lost a job just popped right into a cushy union job manufacturing cars. No one complained about job displacement and about the fact that there were far fewer jobs in manufacturing cars than there were in horse/buggy driving/maintaince/etc.
The best time the buy is when the market is down.
If you had invested 10K dollars in 1963 into the S&P 500, that investment would only be worth more half a million dollars today. Please let me know where I can get my money "stolen" like this.
If you have a lot of contacts (several hundred or more) and especially if you keep a lot of information in them (i.e., notes, birthdays, secretary names, etc) then you really want a smartphone (or carry a seperate PDA -- which is a pain). Having the ability to update your contacts in at your desktop or your phone and have it be backed up and populated out is extremely helpful and it's something that non-smartphones haven't even come close to equaling. (Yeah, you can buy some added software/dongle/pay service... but they're generally wildly inferior to use and maintaining)
If you're a professional and have lots of appointments to keep, again this is a great tool.
If you get a lot of emails when you're away from your desk (after hours, on the road, etc) or if you simply want the freedom to leave your desk while waiting for an important email, then smartphones can also be very useful.
Some people simply don't have these needs or haven't yet figured out that they do, so smartphones don't seem to offer them much. I also think that a lot of people get a bad experience with smartphones because, frankly, windows mobile and some others are pretty poor when it comes to usability (especially one-handed/non-stylus usage) and performance (especially on sluggish platforms like the Q). I believe most of these professional users are better served by blackberry (though its calender is a bit weak) and PalmOS/Treo (which has suboptimal email unless you pay for Goodlink or like software) than they are by the theoretically higher powered devices.
To me the only reason to use the windows mobile platform today is if you want to run more demanding stuff on the phone -- like run 2.5/3G data apps and/or browse relatively rich websites. The browsing experience is not the same as a desktop, and I don't think it ever really will be, but there's certain information like, say, the weather report, traffic reports, airline info, etc that can be bookmarked and/or accessed effectively. (It's just a matter of time till someone figures out how to bundle up this information, whether through a website or a good data app, and make it readily available to most users.)
I'd say a small number of specific open source companies, like MySQL, are viable insofar as they are able to stay in business and continue funding a small amount of development (though whether they can do so for long is not clear). These kinds of models only really work in niche areas (like where proprietary developers want to use their code -- but not in most areas -- like end-end applications) and, even then, they're quite limiting. I suspect MySQL is not enjoying much in the way of community code contributions and that its open source status prevents them from making much money, which in turn, leads to less development funding. MySQL's competitive edge, to the extent that they have any, is that they're one of the few multiuser RDBMS systems that developers can distribute without paying huge licensing fees -- and, of course, there's not much preventing proprietary companies from developing new or re-licensing their existing RDBMS under similar terms/pricing (except perhaps if they want to target Linux and have to workaround core GPL libraries)....
I'm not sure what you mean by "key". Do you mean, like, an unlock code or method of enabling the user to actually use the software? If so, I'd say the copyright system effectively prevents most blatant piracy in the US and Western Europe. The addition of copy protection, code obfuscation, integrity-checking updates, and more make piracy a pain for casual piracy attempts and, especially, for those that might depend on their software to run reliably.
Someone that views payment merely as paying for the media or the developers time is missing the point. You're paying your share into the entire system which produced that software. Most importantly, dare I say it, you're paying the investors/entrepreneurs that facilitated the whole thing. They put up the money several years in advance to pay developers (and all the necessary overhead that goes along with it) to develop a program which may not have turned out like envisioned and, even if it did, may not have been well received by the users.
Think of it this way. Most early stage investor are basically making investments with incomplete information at best. Even smart ones don't know what it is going to succeed or fail in many cases. If they lose their principal on average on 9 in 10 of their investments than that 1 successful investment basically needs to pay out at least 10 times the principal (assuming all investments are equal) for the investor to even break even. What's more, if you actually want that investment to be attractive to such investors, then you need to consider that they could be investing elsewhere, get better interest/capital appreciation, and take a lot less risk. So, anyways, without going into a tortured explanation that 1 investment must payout more like 20-30 times the prin
Obviously key employees are critical to the businesses continued success. However, strong patent protection can help prevent much of the damage if the competition is able to hire away a single engineer with lots knowledge of the product. I'd say this usually doesn't happen in the US at least anyways thanks to NDAs, non-competes and patent protection, but with some foreign and/or unscrupulous competitors it's possible and I'd much rather have patent coverage to back up my claims (in the US and other major markets).
I wasn't disputing that restrictions or lack thereof can impact its usage (scale and style). However, what I do reject is the notion that there is no important relationship between the right to restrict and the ability to produce the product or service in the first place. All things cannot usually be held "equal" when you change the ability of the publishers to control and price access. Stallman is arguing against the ownership of information itself -- not just for his pet software model. This is an utterly unflexible and unworkable solution for most intellectual products.
It was very much your argument. You suggested that we should replace the word "information" (newspapers) for software and compared the "old" newspaper model to the "new" "free" online access model. You also suggested that they're financially similar...
I apologize if I offended you, but my argument was not based on an appeal to authority. I only brought it up because I can personaly point to a specific major paper where those fees are, in fact, much less than a fraction of a percent of their revenue (since I can view private financial reports). I did go on to point out that you can look up the information from several other reputable public sources (which you can) and see that the revenue couldn't possibly be more than about several percent at most papers (that in "other" revenue which includes other sources too).
And your access arguments seem to be shaped entirely by your wants instead of the need of the developers and other employees at software companies to get paid decently.
Go ahead and question it if you want. I don't ask you to take me as the gospel. I just point out some shared characteristics of the few successful open source projects so that you might consider that open source is not the right answer for most/many products (even 20+ years after RMS started his anti-ownership crusade)
For the record, there are objective measures that we can look at like: the complexity of the task, the number of lines of code, how readily the programming can be done in parallel, the number of man hours expended, and so on. Apache may be a great product with solid programming, but when it's less than 100K lines of code I don't think it's unreasonable to put it in a different category, that of relative simplicity, as compared to developing major and innovative applications or OSes. Apache also has the added benefit of being something that a lot of people can touch and see despite its relative simplicity. Low complexity, lots of exposure to developer-types, and not a lot of need for innovation... It's a project that I think fits relatively well into the open source development model. Contrast this with a product like photoshop, that probably has several million lines of code, which performs many complex computations, needs a good UI, which few programmers use much, and so
I disagree. Open source may have found a niche, but Stallman's anti-ownership views have been disproven. Stallman started his movement at the infacy of the PC era. His movement allegedly had a chance to compete and yet market after market proprietary software beats it and continues to be far more widely adopted (which is a far better measure of overall quality and existance from the users' POV)
Those may be his words now, but that's not what he was saying 20 years ago. The measure he used was words like "the real contribution to the wealth of society happens only when the program is used". Well guess what? Open source programs are little used in most markets despite its many supposed advantages (better price, ability to modify code, and code sharing).
The argument for proprietary status, then and today, is about incentive and capital investment. You can't just seperate them and have "all things being equal". That's the whole point. Stallman's failure of vision was an utter lack of ability to appreciate just how important these issues were in the development of modern software then and particularly in later years as software got increasing more complex, more sophisticated, and entered the era of commodity hardware.
I think you're trying to side-step the issue at hand. The fact is that open source has produced very little software that the average user would want to use even if it was placed in front of them. You can talk about advertising and perception all you want, but I bet when you get down to the issue at hand, your family uses little if any in the way of open source software. You presumably know better... but what? The software is either not there, by and large, or it simply stinks.
Of course capital is all important. The open source model can barely afford to pay more than a handful of programmers, so of course, it can't afford to advertise either (which leads to having even less capital to invest in development). These issues are all inter-related.
Please. Shareholders care about getting paid, first and foremost, and could care less about what it is called. Arguing that they're simply ignorant is a cop-out and ignores the fact that "software as service" has produced damn little of note in the free/open source world. Even the few notable "successes" in the open source world revolve around the ownership of code. MySQL and QT are both GPL compliant, but the dirty little secret is tha
Please. I was using PCs long before 1986 and "ease of use", ala GUI, was hardly a factor at the time. Where was the open source answer to MS-DOS? Wordstar (and later Wordperfect/Word)? Lotus 123 (and later Excel)? Peachtree? dBase? BASIC? Turbo Pascal and C? Not only were these programs "easier to use", they "existed" and hard many more "features" than anything open source even dreamed of putting out. Long before Windows/GUI applications gained traction proprietary applications had dominated the market.
Yes, word processors, spreadsheet programs, accounting software, database programs, compilers and more are complete wastes of time. Time saving is bad! We should have implemented the full employment act of 1986 and demanded no more progress! Real men should be happy to flip bits in binary. In fact, I propose we go back to punch cards. No more of this keyboard nonsense!
Pfft. Are you for real? I've yet to hear proprietary software companies beg to have the open source companies regulated out of existence. This is silly because it implies that open source is a real threat to a large number of proprietary companies and not a benefit to others (like IBM).
No. Microsoft, the convicted monoplist, only has real market powers on the desktop/OS, the web browser, and perhaps Word and Excel. Proprietary software still dominates in almost every other area. What's more, I think that Microsoft's monopoly powers have actually had the opposite impact that you suggest. They have effectively prevented healthy competition in those markets while simultaneously putting out what has generally been a fairly mediocre and overpriced product. This created a significant opening for Linux (vs Windows) and Mozilla/Firefox (vs IE) which otherwise would probably not be able to gain traction had Microsofts' products been better and more reasonably priced (relative to the vast size of the market).
I'm referring to a whole wide array of qualities which consumers select software on. Quality refers not just to bugs, but to features, usability, scalability, predictability, and more. You can argue till you're blue in the face that your favorite open source software package is "better", but the fact is that most consumers have different criteria and disagree with your assessment.
Would you really load a Linux/desktop for parents or grandparents and expect them to do all of even their basic tasks well, like, loading digicam pics, attaching/emailing them, edit contacts, browsing the web, etc?
Would you ask a professional graphic artist to use GIMP over Photoshop?
A CFO to run Open Office instead of Excel (even ignoring compatibility issues)?
Some corny open source note taking software app to Evernote or OneNote 2007?
A corporate programmer to build quick applications using open source tools instead of Visual Studio/C# or Delphi?
Tuxracer to Quake 4?
GNUcash to Quicken?
Some crummy OSS app to iTunes/WMP?
There are only a handful of open source projects where it is even a question and these are usually only if your needs are more prescribed (and usually of the "geeky" variety).