Opening trade is not condoning Maoist or Stalinist-style Communism. Trade is a way of making the world closer knit through economic ties. It lessens the threat of armed conflict [because it's bad to kill your customers]. The Generally Accepted Tariffs & Treaties (aka. WTO) along with the Marshall plan were post-WW2 plans to effectively help our former enemies (Japan & Germany). They worked, marvelously. And the world is a better place for it.
Humans are adaptable and creative creatures... they are best suited to do creative & entrepreneurial work. Some day, robots & software will probably automate all repetitive work.
The problem is that many people don't *want* this. They don't want to have to use their intellegence. Their focus is on JOBS for the future, retaining the status quo. A future without jobs as they are today would be a dystopia for these people (who have a hard time understanding the blessings of doing less work on repetitive & mundane tasks and more work on interesting & creative tasks).
So.. while I sort of agree, I think there's going to be a resurgence of neo-luddites before we become a completely more automated society.
I don't want to beat this into a dead horse, but I just enjoy discussing these issues, so bear with me...:)
Microsoft charges for their software (the intangible part) through their restrictive licence. One can go to http://msdn.one.microsoft.com to download pretty much any Microsoft product, assuming you're a licenced MSDN universal subscriber.
Redhat does not restrict the service of downloading the source from its site because the GPL restricts them from doing so. In effect, Redhat can't charge for access to its software. The GPL has freed the software, hence they can't make money at it beyond providing a value-added service such as CD-ROM packaging.
The result is that Redhat is not going to be making a significant amount of revenue relative to Microsoft. This is not to say revenue & profit are the sole judgements of everything good and happy. On the contrary. We must, however, remind ourselves that "software is expensive" economically. It takes time, effort, skill, and talent. More software will be created if it (the intangible form) can be regulated through the marketplace -- hence requiring a concept of property. Do we want more software and less freedom, or more freedom and less software? Recall that copyright was created originally to answer the desire for "more books".
Free source code is a worthwhile thing, but to me it's an author's choice to choose whether they want to allow that.
Obscurity is relative based on the amount of experience you have in that environment. At least with the Mac it doesn't take very long to figure out that PPP settings are Control Panels->Remote Access and Control Panels->TCP/IP. From there it's fairly intuitive.
Windows isn't much better, with the added bonus of knowing that you need a "Dial up adaptor".
Thankfully both Windows and the Mac have "internet setup assistants" that help newbies tremendously.
I think in general that Windows tends to have less consistency than the Mac but overall both OS's have similar levels of being able to tweak & fiddle with stuff. The major difference is that there's less users & hence less info out on the more esoteric points on the mac.
Does it make you feel better about yourself when you bring everyone around you down? You're hoisting your world view onto other people in a desparate attempt to convince yourself that because you're a failure, everyone else has to be.
They're charging for the service of placing the software on a physical medium and distributing it to a store. In their S-1 prospectus they make it very clear that their revenue stream is primarily through this avenue and if Internet bandwidth increases significantly it will dry this stream up because their software is, in effect, zero cost.
Secondly, no matter what, softwre is expensive produce, even if you're doing it for fun. This is because when I say "expensive" I'm talking about economic cost - i.e. opportunities lost. Free software is not expensive if your time has no economic value.
My feeling is that OSS is an excellent alternative to mainstream/commercial software for pragmatic reasons, but I A) do not agree that copyright is unethical, B) I do not think OSS principles can be "universalized" because doing something for "fun" is a voluntary act. C) Abolishing copyright won't promote sharing, it will destroy the basis of our future economy. Instead let us work to evolve copyright. The current trend (and the one John Perry Barlow seems to allude to in his famous essay on IP) is to use encryption as the means of IP protection, over laws. Will this work? I have my doubts...
As for Bertrand, yes he makes glaring errors of logic (the man is somewhat of a zealot even in the OO world).
All of us in jobs are on them to survive. We hardly have any choice but to accept exploitative jobs, or create exploitative jobs.
Bull. Jobs are not exploitative if you don't want them to be. You have the power to educate yourself to a level that is commensurate with what ever endeavour you wish to partake in.
This, of course, does not help people who have no ambition and just want to sit on the couch smoking pot all day long. For them, yes, jobs are exploitative.
a musical recording artist != a performing artist. Why would an electronic musician perform it live when the art is in the talent of studio production?
There's room for copyright still. Perhaps not DMCA-style, but some form of it.
Any functioning society must have a minimal amount of coersion (aka. government) such to ensure "negative rights" are upheld. anything else would be anarchy.
If society wants proliferation of intellectual works, there needs to be some form of property attached to those works in order to guarantee remuneration. Without property the free market cannot operate.
Should the free market be allowed to proliferate in intellectual works? Well, yes, if we feel that there is a principle of scarcity at work. It just so happens that it intellectual work there is scarcity - the scarcity of skill & talent to write good books, music, software, etc.
If social forces all of a sudden decide "no, we don't need any as much of a flow of music or books for a while", then yes, intellectual roperty rights can and should be abolished.
I thought his argument was quite logical and understandable.
- Free software must also be zero-cost software. - Zero-cost software happens to make zero-economic sense (because cheap reproduction costs don't change the fact that software is expensive to produce in the first place) - Economics can be overridden by ethics - What ethical principle is there behind libre software? Nothing coherent.
Meyer divided the process of making free software up into economic categories because he was trying to piece together how a system where "everything was free" would actually work.
I think he did a decent job of showing that it probably wouldn't work, at least not in the sense that the software industry would be generating as much revenue as it is today.
The moral absolutist vs. relativist debate has been raging for centuries, with no sound proof yet in sight, and you're going to come up with a trivial proof right here in this forum?
Please, spare me. Re-read Philsophy for Dummies, will ya?
If source code availability were the real issue, we would not have so many people screaming from the rooftops about the Sun Community Source Licence, the Apple source licence, and the Qt Public licence and how immoral they all are because they don't fit the open source definition.
These licenses do not guarantee the full "freedoms" of the OSD, but they are legitimate attempts at placating user needs without giving away the family jewels, so to speak.
This is unacceptable to the most vocal of the OSS community, as seen on countless Slashdot articles. They clearly want RMS-style freedom or nothing... and I think Meyer's essay here throws a big fat dart into the centre of their "new moral order".
ACID transactions are the fundamental way of ensuring reliability in a distributed system. there is no "revolution" against transactions. in fact, they're making a comeback (see com+)
Doing design completely up-front is as much a mistake as doing no design at all. The IBM person probably wouldn't have liked the results of an up-front design: more bugs and flawed assumptions.
Iterative and incremental processes are what develop quality software.
Now as for the quality of the software & user interfaces - IIRC the NASA group that has the SEI's CMM level 5 rating has only had this for around 5-6 years. That's not a long time given the slow pace of change of shuttle interfaces. From my what I've read before, the new control system is well designed and easy to decipher.
So you really think that this Napster thing is going to destroy the majority of Metallica's fan base?
I can't say that I agree. In fact, I think you're dead wrong. Many Metallica fans have stuck with them since the 80's and into the 90's and agree with them in their quest to stop the piracy of their music. I'm one of them.
Taligent was a project hijacked by good intentions. Its developers felt C++ was the "language of the gods" and could effectively write everything as a composibile framework. Taligent CommonPoint 1.0 was actually releaed in 1995 and was visionary, useful, but also bloated and way ahead of its time. It was also released at the same time Win95 was... that sealed their fate.
Take a look at the 1996 Orfali/Harkey/Edwards book "Distributed Objects Survival Guide" for screen shots and descriptions of what Taligent offered. Its "people/places/things" metaphor is still a useful paradigm.
Both Taligent and OpenDoc were industry efforts that included IBM... OpenDoc was poised to fight it out with COM as "the" component model, but when it became clear that OS/2 wasn't going anywhere in market share, developer support languished. The release of JavaBeans caused IBM's support to disappear.. what's Apple supposed to do?
Innovation is not a ground-breaking thing. That's invention.
Innovation is fulfilling a market need. I.e. it is filling in an opportunity. It make bring an invention to the masses, but it rarely is actually "bright idea" invention.
Linux is an innovation. It doesn't invent anything new, but it does fill needs, and it brings UNIX to the masses.
Innovation is important because it is not hard to do and yet is immensely beneficial. Most people can't be genius inventors, but they CAN be innovators.
Has Microsoft innovated in the past? Yes. Have they lately? In some ways. IE 5 was extremely innovative because it provided developers TREMENDOUS support for doing web work beyond simple HTML. The support for XML, DOM, XSL, etc. are well appreciated by developers and have lead to lots of people flocking away from Netscape. Mozilla, otoh, is being innovative too in its own way, however we have to wait until final release to determine if it is more innovative than Microsoft has been.
Was Microsoft innovative in tying the browser to the OS? Yup.
Was Microsoft innovative with turning COM from a way of embedding spreadsheets in word documents into a multi-tier transactional component model? You bet.
I think we have a lot of double standards in this community. For every little thing Linux does, we lavish praise. However, we convieniently ignore the little things that Microsoft does to fill their own market's needs.
Microsoft can make crappy software. They also have abused their monopoly position. And, no, they haven't had any ground-breaking innovations in a while. But they DO innovate.
Just a clarification. I think I understand you, but whenever people moan about "profit", I wonder where they're coming from.
Profit is not self-interest. It is the primary economic objective an organization must fulfill if it is to stay in business.
A company that exists solely to make profit is a company devoid of purpose or passion, and has little reason to exist. However, a bankrupt company does no one any good.
Basically, a company without a purpose is not going to survive much longer given the rising level of competition. General Motors is probably the biggest example of a company in it "only for the money" that is failing quite fast.
Why can't sales & marketing be counted as costs of creating an intellectual work? If you create something, and no one knows about it, what good is that?
Furthermore, even if information were free, why would such costs go away?
These costs need to be covered. We need a mechanism to ensure they are covered. Some form (perhaps not today's) of intellectual property is the solution to this.
IMHO, information is a market good with some characteristics of a public good.
It is a market good because there is still a principle of scarcity at work: the scarcity of skill & talent to make these works.
It is a public good because the cost of duplication is negligible and information is an "experience product", meaning you don't know if you want it until you have it.
However, it does not follow that completely zero-cost copying should be always allowed. Again, because there are economic costs involved with creating information, these costs must be covered to ensure that demand is satiated. The supply of information, in other words, is not unlimited because the only relevant supply is that of NEW WORKS. Not re-runs.
So, basically, the freedom to spread information without burden of copyright could become reality if and only if there is a mechanism in place to guarantee remuneration at some point after a person acquires such information, if the author (or publisher) so wishes... If such a mechanism comes in to place, it's harder to justify that an author should be able to excercise complete control over an intellectual work's distribution.
Developing countries, students, etc. do have viable arguments for "lower cost" access to information. But it does not follow that every person in the world will all of a sudden become a scientific genius if only they had free (gratis) access to the information out there. There *always* will be a scarcity of skill and talent.
I think it's pretty clear that many creative people, whether artists, scientists, programmers, etc. are not "in it for the money".
However if these people can't make a living at what they do because there is no more guaranteed remuneration for their work ("information is free, you know"), then yes, there will be fewer artists, scientists, and programmers. People will do "other things" to make a living. And the tragedy is that society would be better off if these talented individuals focused ALL of their efforts on their labour of love: science, art, etc.
This isn't about a ruling class, this is about simple economics. There is a scarcity of skill and talent in the world, and there always will be.
Slashdot Mirror
Opening trade is not condoning Maoist or Stalinist-style Communism. Trade is a way of making the world closer knit through economic ties. It lessens the threat of armed conflict [because it's bad to kill your customers]. The Generally Accepted Tariffs & Treaties (aka. WTO) along with the Marshall plan were post-WW2 plans to effectively help our former enemies (Japan & Germany). They worked, marvelously. And the world is a better place for it.
Humans are adaptable and creative creatures... they are best suited to do creative & entrepreneurial work. Some day, robots & software will probably automate all repetitive work.
The problem is that many people don't *want* this. They don't want to have to use their intellegence. Their focus is on JOBS for the future, retaining the status quo. A future without jobs as they are today would be a dystopia for these people (who have a hard time understanding the blessings of doing less work on repetitive & mundane tasks and more work on interesting & creative tasks).
So.. while I sort of agree, I think there's going to be a resurgence of neo-luddites before we become a completely more automated society.
I don't want to beat this into a dead horse, but I just enjoy discussing these issues, so bear with me... :)
Microsoft charges for their software (the intangible part) through their restrictive licence. One can go to http://msdn.one.microsoft.com to download pretty much any Microsoft product, assuming you're a licenced MSDN universal subscriber.
Redhat does not restrict the service of downloading the source from its site because the GPL restricts them from doing so. In effect, Redhat can't charge for access to its software. The GPL has freed the software, hence they can't make money at it beyond providing a value-added service such as CD-ROM packaging.
The result is that Redhat is not going to be making a significant amount of revenue relative to Microsoft. This is not to say revenue & profit are the sole judgements of everything good and happy. On the contrary. We must, however, remind ourselves that "software is expensive" economically. It takes time, effort, skill, and talent. More software will be created if it (the intangible form) can be regulated through the marketplace -- hence requiring a concept of property. Do we want more software and less freedom, or more freedom and less software? Recall that copyright was created originally to answer the desire for "more books".
Free source code is a worthwhile thing, but to me it's an author's choice to choose whether they want to allow that.
Obscurity is relative based on the amount of experience you have in that environment. At least with the Mac it doesn't take very long to figure out that PPP settings are Control Panels->Remote Access and Control Panels->TCP/IP. From there it's fairly intuitive.
Windows isn't much better, with the added bonus of knowing that you need a "Dial up adaptor".
Thankfully both Windows and the Mac have "internet setup assistants" that help newbies tremendously.
I think in general that Windows tends to have less consistency than the Mac but overall both OS's have similar levels of being able to tweak & fiddle with stuff. The major difference is that there's less users & hence less info out on the more esoteric points on the mac.
Does it make you feel better about yourself when you bring everyone around you down? You're hoisting your world view onto other people in a desparate attempt to convince yourself that because you're a failure, everyone else has to be.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Redhat is not charging for their software.
They're charging for the service of placing the software on a physical medium and distributing it to a store. In their S-1 prospectus they make it very clear that their revenue stream is primarily through this avenue and if Internet bandwidth increases significantly it will dry this stream up because their software is, in effect, zero cost.
Secondly, no matter what, softwre is expensive produce, even if you're doing it for fun. This is because when I say "expensive" I'm talking about economic cost - i.e. opportunities lost. Free software is not expensive if your time has no economic value.
My feeling is that OSS is an excellent alternative to mainstream/commercial software for pragmatic reasons, but I A) do not agree that copyright is unethical, B) I do not think OSS principles can be "universalized" because doing something for "fun" is a voluntary act. C) Abolishing copyright won't promote sharing, it will destroy the basis of our future economy. Instead let us work to evolve copyright. The current trend (and the one John Perry Barlow seems to allude to in his famous essay on IP) is to use encryption as the means of IP protection, over laws. Will this work? I have my doubts...
As for Bertrand, yes he makes glaring errors of logic (the man is somewhat of a zealot even in the OO world).
All of us in jobs are on them to survive. We hardly have any choice but to accept exploitative jobs, or create exploitative jobs.
Bull. Jobs are not exploitative if you don't want them to be. You have the power to educate yourself to a level that is commensurate with what ever endeavour you wish to partake in.
This, of course, does not help people who have no ambition and just want to sit on the couch smoking pot all day long. For them, yes, jobs are exploitative.
a musical recording artist != a performing artist. Why would an electronic musician perform it live when the art is in the talent of studio production?
There's room for copyright still. Perhaps not DMCA-style, but some form of it.
Any functioning society must have a minimal amount of coersion (aka. government) such to ensure "negative rights" are upheld. anything else would be anarchy.
If society wants proliferation of intellectual works, there needs to be some form of property attached to those works in order to guarantee remuneration. Without property the free market cannot operate.
Should the free market be allowed to proliferate in intellectual works? Well, yes, if we feel that there is a principle of scarcity at work. It just so happens that it intellectual work there is scarcity - the scarcity of skill & talent to write good books, music, software, etc.
If social forces all of a sudden decide "no, we don't need any as much of a flow of music or books for a while", then yes, intellectual roperty rights can and should be abolished.
I thought his argument was quite logical and understandable.
- Free software must also be zero-cost software.
- Zero-cost software happens to make zero-economic sense (because cheap reproduction costs don't change the fact that software is expensive to produce in the first place)
- Economics can be overridden by ethics
- What ethical principle is there behind libre software? Nothing coherent.
That's the argument.
Meyer divided the process of making free software up into economic categories because he was trying to piece together how a system where "everything was free" would actually work.
I think he did a decent job of showing that it probably wouldn't work, at least not in the sense that the software industry would be generating as much revenue as it is today.
The moral absolutist vs. relativist debate has been raging for centuries, with no sound proof yet in sight, and you're going to come up with a trivial proof right here in this forum?
Please, spare me. Re-read Philsophy for Dummies, will ya?
If source code availability were the real issue, we would not have so many people screaming from the rooftops about the Sun Community Source Licence, the Apple source licence, and the Qt Public licence and how immoral they all are because they don't fit the open source definition.
These licenses do not guarantee the full "freedoms" of the OSD, but they are legitimate attempts at placating user needs without giving away the family jewels, so to speak.
This is unacceptable to the most vocal of the OSS community, as seen on countless Slashdot articles. They clearly want RMS-style freedom or nothing... and I think Meyer's essay here throws a big fat dart into the centre of their "new moral order".
uh.
you believe that.
ACID transactions are the fundamental way of ensuring reliability in a distributed system. there is no "revolution" against transactions. in fact, they're making a comeback (see com+)
Doing design completely up-front is as much a mistake as doing no design at all. The IBM person probably wouldn't have liked the results of an up-front design: more bugs and flawed assumptions.
Iterative and incremental processes are what develop quality software.
Now as for the quality of the software & user interfaces - IIRC the NASA group that has the SEI's CMM level 5 rating has only had this for around 5-6 years. That's not a long time given the slow pace of change of shuttle interfaces. From my what I've read before, the new control system is well designed and easy to decipher.
So you really think that this Napster thing is going to destroy the majority of Metallica's fan base?
I can't say that I agree. In fact, I think you're dead wrong. Many Metallica fans have stuck with them since the 80's and into the 90's and agree with them in their quest to stop the piracy of their music. I'm one of them.
So people who are rich got so likely because they abused and exploited people?
This sounds like sour grapes. Sure, it happens. That doesn't mean it's the rule.
Taligent was a project hijacked by good intentions. Its developers felt C++ was the "language of the gods" and could effectively write everything as a composibile framework. Taligent CommonPoint 1.0 was actually releaed in 1995 and was visionary, useful, but also bloated and way ahead of its time. It was also released at the same time Win95 was... that sealed their fate.
Take a look at the 1996 Orfali/Harkey/Edwards book "Distributed Objects Survival Guide" for screen shots and descriptions of what Taligent offered. Its "people/places/things" metaphor is still a useful paradigm.
Both Taligent and OpenDoc were industry efforts that included IBM... OpenDoc was poised to fight it out with COM as "the" component model, but when it became clear that OS/2 wasn't going anywhere in market share, developer support languished. The release of JavaBeans caused IBM's support to disappear.. what's Apple supposed to do?
Innovation is not a ground-breaking thing. That's invention.
Innovation is fulfilling a market need. I.e. it is filling in an opportunity. It make bring an invention to the masses, but it rarely is actually "bright idea" invention.
Linux is an innovation. It doesn't invent anything new, but it does fill needs, and it brings UNIX to the masses.
Innovation is important because it is not hard to do and yet is immensely beneficial. Most people can't be genius inventors, but they CAN be innovators.
Has Microsoft innovated in the past? Yes. Have they lately? In some ways. IE 5 was extremely innovative because it provided developers TREMENDOUS support for doing web work beyond simple HTML. The support for XML, DOM, XSL, etc. are well appreciated by developers and have lead to lots of people flocking away from Netscape. Mozilla, otoh, is being innovative too in its own way, however we have to wait until final release to determine if it is more innovative than Microsoft has been.
Was Microsoft innovative in tying the browser to the OS? Yup.
Was Microsoft innovative with turning COM from a way of embedding spreadsheets in word documents into a multi-tier transactional component model? You bet.
I think we have a lot of double standards in this community. For every little thing Linux does, we lavish praise. However, we convieniently ignore the little things that Microsoft does to fill their own market's needs.
Microsoft can make crappy software. They also have abused their monopoly position. And, no, they haven't had any ground-breaking innovations in a while. But they DO innovate.
Just a clarification. I think I understand you, but whenever people moan about "profit", I wonder where they're coming from.
Profit is not self-interest. It is the primary economic objective an organization must fulfill if it is to stay in business.
A company that exists solely to make profit is a company devoid of purpose or passion, and has little reason to exist. However, a bankrupt company does no one any good.
Basically, a company without a purpose is not going to survive much longer given the rising level of competition. General Motors is probably the biggest example of a company in it "only for the money" that is failing quite fast.
Why can't sales & marketing be counted as costs of creating an intellectual work? If you create something, and no one knows about it, what good is that?
Furthermore, even if information were free, why would such costs go away?
These costs need to be covered. We need a mechanism to ensure they are covered. Some form (perhaps not today's) of intellectual property is the solution to this.
IMHO, information is a market good with some characteristics of a public good.
It is a market good because there is still a principle of scarcity at work: the scarcity of skill & talent to make these works.
It is a public good because the cost of duplication is negligible and information is an "experience product", meaning you don't know if you want it until you have it.
However, it does not follow that completely zero-cost copying should be always allowed. Again, because there are economic costs involved with creating information, these costs must be covered to ensure that demand is satiated. The supply of information, in other words, is not unlimited because the only relevant supply is that of NEW WORKS. Not re-runs.
So, basically, the freedom to spread information without burden of copyright could become reality if and only if there is a mechanism in place to guarantee remuneration at some point after a person acquires such information, if the author (or publisher) so wishes... If such a mechanism comes in to place, it's harder to justify that an author should be able to excercise complete control over an intellectual work's distribution.
Developing countries, students, etc. do have viable arguments for "lower cost" access to information. But it does not follow that every person in the world will all of a sudden become a scientific genius if only they had free (gratis) access to the information out there. There *always* will be a scarcity of skill and talent.
This is a tired argument.
I think it's pretty clear that many creative people, whether artists, scientists, programmers, etc. are not "in it for the money".
However if these people can't make a living at what they do because there is no more guaranteed remuneration for their work ("information is free, you know"), then yes, there will be fewer artists, scientists, and programmers. People will do "other things" to make a living. And the tragedy is that society would be better off if these talented individuals focused ALL of their efforts on their labour of love: science, art, etc.
This isn't about a ruling class, this is about simple economics. There is a scarcity of skill and talent in the world, and there always will be.
Get a fucking clue. The Black album is one of the top 5 selling albums of all time, and Load/Reload have all sold over 5 million copies...