Dude, I agree that information is abundant after first created, but that's not the point.
Do you get enjoyment out of watching Bugs Bunny re-runs? Or news stories from 3 years ago? Or old versions of Linux (pre 0.99) ?
Or do you get enjoyment out of NEW works? Think about it.
A lot of people are repeating the "Information is abundant" mantra without realizing that replicated information is subject to demand-side diminishing returns. As soon as everyone's "seen it", the value of information degrades in a big way.
Farming in the 19th century was certainly less miserable than farming is now. Back then you could get out of debt.
With fewer tools & fewer hands to help? I think not. Farming in the past was done to survive - if there was a crop shortage, there's a good chance you were going to have a very, very long and hard winter.
Getting out of debt vs. not having enough to eat. Hmm. I'll take debt.
If "progress" continues at its present rate, the conditions you live in now will, in 100 years, seem as brutish and primitive as the conditions you describe in the last century (the 19th; the 20th century has about nine months left in it:)
This is such a wild assertion; I really would enjoy some evidence to support it. Economic growth in the G7 countries has been clipping on a 3-4% per year basis for the last 60 years, with a few recessions serving as a bump in that growth.
Real disposable income has growth significantly over the last 100 years. Income equality for the majority of the century was actually getting *better*. The last 20 years, unfortunately, have seen that equality erode somewhat. We'll have to work on this difficult, but not unsurmountable, problem.
Your set of opinions tend to focus on what you want to see. There certainly is a lot of crap, depression, waste, and hopelessness in the world. There also is a lot of hope, ambition, excitement, and joy.
Well, in some ways, there really isn't a free lunch. In open source you're limited by the base of people who will contribute their time for free, and you're also limited by the personal itches that they wish to scratch. I find that open source focuses on those who write the software, not those who use it.
Supply & demand seems to break down in this system because there is no price system to allocate resources to get a feature done... i.e. I want feature X, but, I'm not a developer. It's a crummy job, so no one wants to develop it. So either I pay a developer, or find a way to create "increased hype" surrounding the feature.
The problem with this scenario is return on investment.. is a feature really worth paying $50,000 for? [Assuming 1 expert developer working for 4 months.] You're effectively re-releasing it to the community if the original software is under GPL so you can't recoup the cost.
Could you give me an example of something that is abundant that is forced to be put under market structures? I believe that Intellectual works aren't abundant, since there's a scarcity of skill & talent in the world.
and yes, I agree about money not being a good motivatior. It is, however, a good investment allocation mechanism, which is what I was referring to. Focusing capital on talent can provide an environment where that the skills can spread and multiply among people in an organization...
I admit that Keynes really isn't a rightest, so that was my mistake.
But as for Drucker.. half of what he says is obvious most likely because he's the one who first made it obvious:) as for the rest of his stuff, sure, some of it hasn't been realized, but most of it has (The rise of the knowledge worker, decentralization, privatization, the pension & mutual fund owning most of the stock markets, etc.)
The "greed" argument is somewhat valid but is dangerous in that it brings an unnecessary negative connotation to the whole "free market/capitalism" system. It misses a further root cause of the need for a market-driven system: scarcity.
The question is not that "I want more than you", it's that "I want something, but there's not enough to go around". Hence we use a market to allocate resources, and we use profit to cover risks and investment for the future. It's flawed (i.e. focuses on efficiency, not justice), but it works.
This does not deny the existence of greed, I just don't believe it's the pre-requisite to a functioning market society.
What great political/socio-economic thinkers has the left brought us in the 20th century? The right has:
John Maynard Keynes Peter Drucker Fredrich Hayek Milton Friedman
Yes they're all business or economic thinkers, but they all have had major influence on our world.
In contrast, the Left hasn't given rise to many great political/socio-economic thinkers since Marx.
After reading Marx, one should pick up some of Drucker's early work on socio-economic theory [The Future of Industrial Man] or Hayek's "Road to Serfdom".
Wrong. There was a minor stock market correction in October, 1929 (roughly like the wobbles NASDAQ has been having the last few days). The market recovered within a few weeks, and not until years later was the correction mythologized by revisionists into a "crash". The economy was fine until 1933, when FDR, having lied his way into office, dictatorially closed the banks and threw the economy into a tailspin. That was the start of the Great Depression: Government interference on a massive scale. The "history" you've been taught was, of course, written by the "victors". It is not even remotely accurate.
Blaming FDR for the depression is quite a long shot. Especially since it was the government that got us OUT of the depression (through massive spending around the start of WW2 that spurred up aggregate demand...).
He closed the banks because he had to, since a bank panic was imminent. He had to make a national address to explain to Joe Average that no, most banks don't carry enough money to allow everyone to withdraw it at once. This isn't revisionist history, it's economic truth - the monetary system is a very fragile thing when the masses panic.
This is not to say that the bank panic wasn't a contributor to the depression - it was definitely a psychological factor. Many other things, however, also went wrong: a typical business-cycle recession was already imminent by 1929, the 1929 crash, the Fed tightening the money supply, the poor crop yields, the general FEAR generated by these events, and the Smoot-Holly legislation that raised tarriffs to psychotic levels.
There seems to be a very widespread fallacy that since information is so easy to duplicate (or cheap), that it is an abundant resource and shouldn't be subject to economic laws. This is the "information wants to be free" argument.
Ideas want to be free. Good ideas, however, are scarce. People will pay for a good idea, or an entertaining one.
Information is still a scarce resource because there is a scarcity of skill and talent to create new, innovative, valuable works.
The basis of intellectual property is to divert investment capital to those people who ARE talented and have skills so that they can create MORE of these innovative and valueable works for society.
The "new economy" is not about mega-corporations, mergers, and the destruction of consumer rights. It is about celebrating the consumer as the center of all economic activity; it is about shifting capital from the distributors to the innovators.
"But if the cost of duplicating and distributing something is negligible (as is the case with a lot of information), then the assumption that that resource is limited is invalid. The concept of "intellectual property" is attempting to force a model of a limited resource onto something that isn't limited."
I respectfully disagree. Intellectual property *is* a limited resource because NEW works are what drive the economy, not duplications of old works. There is a scarcity of skill and talent in the world, which are required to create new and innovative works of information. For this reason it is crucial that we have a workable set of international intellectual property laws.
If you look at RMS' essay on copyright, available on fsf.org, you'll notice that while copyright is instrumental in enforcing the GPL today, RMS' end goal is to eliminate copyrights.
In such a case, the only way to promote sharing in a no-copyright envrionment is to force disclosure of all source code.
Information wants to be free, but we're not all geniuses.
Hence, we need to keep money flowing to those that have the skill and talent to actually enthrall us...
.. Or would you prefer a cacophony from the whole world sharing "free information", where the truly valuable stuff is drowned out amid the noise?
Controversial thought: Some thoughts and opinions are more valuable than others. To paraphrase the editor of Slate magazine, "There's no such thing as an intellectual free lunch".
Slashdot is a prime example of this observation in effect.
You seem to be missing (or overlooking?) a lot in your above statements.
Supply and demand are not destroyed through the information age. Oh, sure, they are in superficial and trivial ways, such as the "abundance of distribution" argument... but we discovered that almost a decade ago: remember, Microsoft is a monopoly today partially because of the theory of increasing returns.
There will *always* be a shortage of skill and talent when it comes to producing interesting content. That is: good software, good music, good movies, good books, good periodicals, etc.
The old media companies are noticing this disturbing trend: we're watching less TV, we're buying less music, and even though we're watching more box-office movies, we're renting less movies - indicating that we're becoming more demanding with the movies we watch.
To solve this, their bulking up through mergers and lobbying - trying to set up a situation where they can milk every last cent out of the relatively few "hits" they have. They're not innovating, they're running away frightened.
If the record companies don't offer you the business model you want, does that give you the right to break the law?
I sympathise - I'm into techno as well and have found dozens of artists through MP3s - but that doesn't give me the right to do what I do. I do it knowing that it's against the law. And I go out and ACTUALLY BUY the CD if I like the artist to sort of make amends (yes, even if it's a $40 import).
The "it's too expensive, but I'll steal it anyway" argument is inconsisent: you're hurting not just the record companies, but the artists who make this music too. Yes their portion of revenue is comparatively small, but that is irrelevant - they still deserve that portion.
To me, this is just impatience with entrepreneurs to find a workable (legal) and innovative solution to this problem.
It *will* happen. That's what the corporations are afraid of - their power will be eroded by entrepreneurs because they're too big to move quickly & innovate. They WILL be held hostage to the small frys who figure out how to properly use electronic music distribution while making money.
Intellectual property law is not destroyed by the internet - to believe so is to be dangerously naive. The current implementation of IP law *may* be unsuited to this new technology, but throwing out the whole notion of intangible property will be dangerous in a world of scarce skill & talent.
Sure, a corporation has a split responsibility between shareholders, customers, employees and society. This is a dynamic & often unequal releationship... but in the end the true resonsibility is responsibility TO ITSELF. It must remain competitive while staying in the spirit of the law.
And despite the rhetoric to the contrary, I don't think it's so easy to call out the 1-click patent as a blatant violation of the system. The most important and effective innovations are those that are NATURALLY OBVIOUS but no one else DID IT BEFORE. If prior art can be found, then Amazon has no case. Otherwise, I really do think this fits into the spirit of patent law: protect a process innovation from competitors to bolster investment.
Copyrights and patents in many ways can HELP competition by forcing companies to look at NEW things to innovate on, instead of copying the old things.
Over-broad patents are a danger, especially in software infrastructure.. I definitely do think they should be shortened to something like 5 years over the current 20-some years. But, patents are needed to encourage investment into innovation...
They have a legitimate basis: one granted by society to encourage the proliferation of those works as spelled out in most of the intellectual property laws of the industrial world.
If the FSF can band together enough people to donate $, they can lobby the government to show them that "society" doesn't want this anymore. For now, however, this isn't the case, primarily because most people appreciate the benefits gained from IP law outweigh the costs of destroying it.
IP law has centuries of history behind it in bolstering innovation. Open source philosophy has barely 15+ years and only 3 major successes under it's belt [Linux/Apache/Perl]. It can definitely be argued that IP law *can* inhibit innovation if abused, but that's not necessarily descriptive of all facets of IP law (it's unique to some pieces of software, mainly inrastructure).
This says nothing about the benefit of open source sofware, of course. It just says that there is justification for closed source software when it beneifts society as a whole (again due to scarcity of skill & talent).
Open source software has a potential for a strong future, but that may be derailed if the community continues to think they can override basic economic principles.
Now, extending the "right of access" for a spec or source code to those that can't afford to pay money is a valid argument.
It does, however, preclude a company from making money off of licencing a "specified" innovation.
Furthermore, this talk of "financial elitism" is rather obtuse. By saying "business/commerce" mentality has no place in the Open(-Source) arena, you're effectively promoting a zero-sum game: no one can make money because they can't charge money, since that would alienate those 'poor homeless programmers' who need access to the specs & code.
I'm not confusing the issue of "free" vs. "freedom" - I'm saying that if you want pure "freedom", you effectively want everything available for zero-cost. Sorry, in a world of scarcity of skill, talent & knowledge, this is unrealistic.
You wonder why people often mistake free software for gratis software? It's because of complaints like these.
Ideally a spec should be GPL. Barring that, it should be open. Barring that, it should be "competitively priced". $2500 is *not* expensive for most professional developers. There should be no problem for the major Linux distributions to purchase these specs. The DVD CSS licence, on the other hand, IS prohibitively expensive.
Open source supporters like to say over and over "yes you can make money our way", but in cases like this the message gets clouded by people who seem to just want everything in life for free.
Windows 95 MS-DOS box, with one of the lone gunmen repeatedly typing a command, getting "bad command or file name".
His response: "The computer isn't responding! It's denied our access!"
Now I suppose the AI-consciousness could have deleted all of the exe's or moved them to a secure partition outside of the PATH, but... that's a lot of explaining.
I find William Gibson's X-File episodes to be very intriguing in some ways, but I can't help but cringe at the the un-reality...
You'll have to forgive Chris Carter for the computer-based story lines because this last one was co-written by William Gibson, as was the one about "uploading consciousness to the Internet".
He's never been one to let reality get in the way of his version of cyberspace.
I really like William Gibson, but it's hard not to cringe at some of the unrealistic footage.
Smalltalk was the biggest advancement in programming over the last 20 years. It brought us the GUI, the IDE, the mouse, the symbolic debugger, the class browser, and platform-independence back in 1980.
Given the choice between slow development & fast execution vs. fast development & slow execution, most businesses would choose the latter (as soon as it becomes feasible to have "slow execution" on the hardware of the day).
Smalltalk grew in popularity in the 1990's and has only begun to shrink since 1996 and the introduction of Java. It was more than an amusing tool - major production systems at banks, telcos, and utilties are running to this day on Smalltalk.
The 1980's had plenty of anti-OO discourse. It took a long time for OO to be accepted, especially C++.
After twenty years, it has become clear that while OO is not a panacea, it IS effective, it does work, and does increase productivity (by a small amount).
You're reading into this what you want to read into it.
This press release states that - they're releasing a compiler for free (as in beer) - they hope the open source community can get some use out of it, since some of these people are starting to work on Windows, and most actually do prefer a free (as in beer) compiler since they aren't getting paid to do said open source work - they hope if people like it on windows, they'll like it on Linux when it is released there
I don't see any masquerading there. Perhaps the only debatable assumption is that the open source community prefers "no cost" software [since all GPL'd software is effectively available at both "cost" and "no cost", depending on how you get access to it]
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, I agree that information is abundant after first created, but that's not the point.
Do you get enjoyment out of watching Bugs Bunny re-runs?
Or news stories from 3 years ago?
Or old versions of Linux (pre 0.99) ?
Or do you get enjoyment out of NEW works?
Think about it.
A lot of people are repeating the "Information is abundant" mantra without realizing that replicated information is subject to demand-side diminishing returns. As soon as everyone's "seen it", the value of information degrades in a big way.
Farming in the 19th century was certainly less miserable than farming is now. Back then you could get out of debt.
:)
With fewer tools & fewer hands to help? I think not. Farming in the past was done to survive - if there was a crop shortage, there's a good chance you were going to have a very, very long and hard winter.
Getting out of debt vs. not having enough to eat. Hmm. I'll take debt.
If "progress" continues at its present rate, the conditions you live in now will, in 100 years, seem as brutish and primitive as the conditions you describe in the last century (the 19th; the 20th century has about nine months left in it
This is such a wild assertion; I really would enjoy some evidence to support it. Economic growth in the G7 countries has been clipping on a 3-4% per year basis for the last 60 years, with a few recessions serving as a bump in that growth.
Real disposable income has growth significantly over the last 100 years. Income equality for the majority of the century was actually getting *better*. The last 20 years, unfortunately, have seen that equality erode somewhat. We'll have to work on this difficult, but not unsurmountable, problem.
Your set of opinions tend to focus on what you want to see. There certainly is a lot of crap, depression, waste, and hopelessness in the world. There also is a lot of hope, ambition, excitement, and joy.
Well, in some ways, there really isn't a free lunch. In open source you're limited by the base of people who will contribute their time for free, and you're also limited by the personal itches that they wish to scratch. I find that open source focuses on those who write the software, not those who use it.
Supply & demand seems to break down in this system because there is no price system to allocate resources to get a feature done... i.e. I want feature X, but, I'm not a developer. It's a crummy job, so no one wants to develop it. So either I pay a developer, or find a way to create "increased hype" surrounding the feature.
The problem with this scenario is return on investment.. is a feature really worth paying $50,000 for? [Assuming 1 expert developer working for 4 months.] You're effectively re-releasing it to the community if the original software is under GPL so you can't recoup the cost.
Hmm. Many things to ponder.
Could you give me an example of something that is abundant that is forced to be put under market structures? I believe that Intellectual works aren't abundant, since there's a scarcity of skill & talent in the world.
and yes, I agree about money not being a good motivatior. It is, however, a good investment allocation mechanism, which is what I was referring to. Focusing capital on talent can provide an environment where that the skills can spread and multiply among people in an organization...
I can buy that, but does ambition == greed?
I think the two are different, but easily confused because there's a subjective line between them.
I admit that Keynes really isn't a rightest, so that was my mistake.
:) as for the rest of his stuff, sure, some of it hasn't been realized, but most of it has (The rise of the knowledge worker, decentralization, privatization, the pension & mutual fund owning most of the stock markets, etc.)
But as for Drucker.. half of what he says is obvious most likely because he's the one who first made it obvious
The "greed" argument is somewhat valid but is dangerous in that it brings an unnecessary negative connotation to the whole "free market/capitalism" system. It misses a further root cause of the need for a market-driven system: scarcity.
The question is not that "I want more than you", it's that "I want something, but there's not enough to go around". Hence we use a market to allocate resources, and we use profit to cover risks and investment for the future. It's flawed (i.e. focuses on efficiency, not justice), but it works.
This does not deny the existence of greed, I just don't believe it's the pre-requisite to a functioning market society.
Ice cubes are cheap?
Need I remind you that Canada is the 2nd most prosperous economic superpower in the G7 over the last 40 years [behind Japan]?
What great political/socio-economic thinkers has the left brought us in the 20th century? The right has:
John Maynard Keynes
Peter Drucker
Fredrich Hayek
Milton Friedman
Yes they're all business or economic thinkers, but they all have had major influence on our world.
In contrast, the Left hasn't given rise to many great political/socio-economic thinkers since Marx.
After reading Marx, one should pick up some of Drucker's early work on socio-economic theory [The Future of Industrial Man] or Hayek's "Road to Serfdom".
Wrong. There was a minor stock market correction in October, 1929 (roughly like the wobbles NASDAQ has been having the last few days). The market recovered within a few weeks, and not until years later was the correction mythologized by revisionists into a "crash". The economy was fine until 1933, when FDR, having lied his way into office, dictatorially closed the banks and threw the economy into a tailspin. That was the start of the Great Depression: Government interference on a massive scale. The "history" you've been taught was, of course, written by the "victors". It is not even remotely accurate.
Blaming FDR for the depression is quite a long shot. Especially since it was the government that got us OUT of the depression (through massive spending around the start of WW2 that spurred up aggregate demand...).
He closed the banks because he had to, since a bank panic was imminent. He had to make a national address to explain to Joe Average that no, most banks don't carry enough money to allow everyone to withdraw it at once. This isn't revisionist history, it's economic truth - the monetary system is a very fragile thing when the masses panic.
This is not to say that the bank panic wasn't a contributor to the depression - it was definitely a psychological factor. Many other things, however, also went wrong: a typical business-cycle recession was already imminent by 1929, the 1929 crash, the Fed tightening the money supply, the poor crop yields, the general FEAR generated by these events, and the Smoot-Holly legislation that raised tarriffs to psychotic levels.
There seems to be a very widespread fallacy that since information is so easy to duplicate (or cheap), that it is an abundant resource and shouldn't be subject to economic laws. This is the "information wants to be free" argument.
Ideas want to be free. Good ideas, however, are scarce. People will pay for a good idea, or an entertaining one.
Information is still a scarce resource because there is a scarcity of skill and talent to create new, innovative, valuable works.
The basis of intellectual property is to divert investment capital to those people who ARE talented and have skills so that they can create MORE of these innovative and valueable works for society.
The "new economy" is not about mega-corporations, mergers, and the destruction of consumer rights. It is about celebrating the consumer as the center of all economic activity; it is about shifting capital from the distributors to the innovators.
"But if the cost of duplicating and distributing something is negligible (as is the case with a lot of information), then the assumption that that resource is limited is invalid. The concept of "intellectual property" is attempting to force a model of a limited resource onto something that isn't limited."
I respectfully disagree. Intellectual property *is* a limited resource because NEW works are what drive the economy, not duplications of old works.
There is a scarcity of skill and talent in the world, which are required to create new and innovative works of information. For this reason it is crucial that we have a workable set of international intellectual property laws.
If you look at RMS' essay on copyright, available on fsf.org, you'll notice that while copyright is instrumental in enforcing the GPL today, RMS' end goal is to eliminate copyrights.
In such a case, the only way to promote sharing in a no-copyright envrionment is to force disclosure of all source code.
Information wants to be free, but we're not all geniuses.
Hence, we need to keep money flowing to those that have the skill and talent to actually enthrall us...
.. Or would you prefer a cacophony from the whole world sharing "free information", where the truly valuable stuff is drowned out amid the noise?
Controversial thought: Some thoughts and opinions are more valuable than others. To paraphrase the editor of Slate magazine, "There's no such thing as an intellectual free lunch".
Slashdot is a prime example of this observation in effect.
You seem to be missing (or overlooking?) a lot in your above statements.
Supply and demand are not destroyed through the information age. Oh, sure, they are in superficial and trivial ways, such as the "abundance of distribution" argument... but we discovered that almost a decade ago: remember, Microsoft is a monopoly today partially because of the theory of increasing returns.
There will *always* be a shortage of skill and talent when it comes to producing interesting content. That is: good software, good music, good movies, good books, good periodicals, etc.
The old media companies are noticing this disturbing trend: we're watching less TV, we're buying less music, and even though we're watching more box-office movies, we're renting less movies - indicating that we're becoming more demanding with the movies we watch.
To solve this, their bulking up through mergers and lobbying - trying to set up a situation where they can milk every last cent out of the relatively few "hits" they have. They're not innovating, they're running away frightened.
If the record companies don't offer you the business model you want, does that give you the right to break the law?
I sympathise - I'm into techno as well and have found dozens of artists through MP3s - but that doesn't give me the right to do what I do. I do it knowing that it's against the law. And I go out and ACTUALLY BUY the CD if I like the artist to sort of make amends (yes, even if it's a $40 import).
The "it's too expensive, but I'll steal it anyway" argument is inconsisent: you're hurting not just the record companies, but the artists who make this music too. Yes their portion of revenue is comparatively small, but that is irrelevant - they still deserve that portion.
To me, this is just impatience with entrepreneurs to find a workable (legal) and innovative solution to this problem.
It *will* happen. That's what the corporations are afraid of - their power will be eroded by entrepreneurs because they're too big to move quickly & innovate. They WILL be held hostage to the small frys who figure out how to properly use electronic music distribution while making money.
Intellectual property law is not destroyed by the internet - to believe so is to be dangerously naive. The current implementation of IP law *may* be unsuited to this new technology, but throwing out the whole notion of intangible property will be dangerous in a world of scarce skill & talent.
Sure, a corporation has a split responsibility between shareholders, customers, employees and society. This is a dynamic & often unequal releationship... but in the end the true resonsibility is responsibility TO ITSELF. It must remain competitive while staying in the spirit of the law.
And despite the rhetoric to the contrary, I don't think it's so easy to call out the 1-click patent as a blatant violation of the system. The most important and effective innovations are those that are NATURALLY OBVIOUS but no one else DID IT BEFORE. If prior art can be found, then Amazon has no case. Otherwise, I really do think this fits into the spirit of patent law: protect a process innovation from competitors to bolster investment.
Copyrights and patents in many ways can HELP competition by forcing companies to look at NEW things to innovate on, instead of copying the old things.
Over-broad patents are a danger, especially in software infrastructure.. I definitely do think they should be shortened to something like 5 years over the current 20-some years. But, patents are needed to encourage investment into innovation...
If the FSF can band together enough people to donate $, they can lobby the government to show them that "society" doesn't want this anymore. For now, however, this isn't the case, primarily because most people appreciate the benefits gained from IP law outweigh the costs of destroying it.
IP law has centuries of history behind it in bolstering innovation. Open source philosophy has barely 15+ years and only 3 major successes under it's belt [Linux/Apache/Perl]. It can definitely be argued that IP law *can* inhibit innovation if abused, but that's not necessarily descriptive of all facets of IP law (it's unique to some pieces of software, mainly inrastructure).
This says nothing about the benefit of open source sofware, of course. It just says that there is justification for closed source software when it beneifts society as a whole (again due to scarcity of skill & talent).
Now, extending the "right of access" for a spec or source code to those that can't afford to pay money is a valid argument.
It does, however, preclude a company from making money off of licencing a "specified" innovation.Furthermore, this talk of "financial elitism" is rather obtuse. By saying "business/commerce" mentality has no place in the Open(-Source) arena, you're effectively promoting a zero-sum game: no one can make money because they can't charge money, since that would alienate those 'poor homeless programmers' who need access to the specs & code.
I'm not confusing the issue of "free" vs. "freedom" - I'm saying that if you want pure "freedom", you effectively want everything available for zero-cost. Sorry, in a world of scarcity of skill, talent & knowledge, this is unrealistic.You wonder why people often mistake free software for gratis software? It's because of complaints like these.
Ideally a spec should be GPL. Barring that, it should be open. Barring that, it should be "competitively priced". $2500 is *not* expensive for most professional developers. There should be no problem for the major Linux distributions to purchase these specs. The DVD CSS licence, on the other hand, IS prohibitively expensive.
Open source supporters like to say over and over "yes you can make money our way", but in cases like this the message gets clouded by people who seem to just want everything in life for free.
I loved this scene:
... that's a lot of explaining.
Windows 95 MS-DOS box, with one of the lone gunmen repeatedly typing a command, getting "bad command or file name".
His response: "The computer isn't responding! It's denied our access!"
Now I suppose the AI-consciousness could have deleted all of the exe's or moved them to a secure partition outside of the PATH, but
I find William Gibson's X-File episodes to be very intriguing in some ways, but I can't help but cringe at the the un-reality...
You'll have to forgive Chris Carter for the computer-based story lines because this last one was co-written by William Gibson, as was the one about "uploading consciousness to the Internet".
He's never been one to let reality get in the way of his version of cyberspace.
I really like William Gibson, but it's hard not to cringe at some of the unrealistic footage.
Smalltalk was the biggest advancement in programming over the last 20 years. It brought us the GUI, the IDE, the mouse, the symbolic debugger, the class browser, and platform-independence back in 1980.
Given the choice between slow development & fast execution vs. fast development & slow execution, most businesses would choose the latter (as soon as it becomes feasible to have "slow execution" on the hardware of the day).
Smalltalk grew in popularity in the 1990's and has only begun to shrink since 1996 and the introduction of Java. It was more than an amusing tool - major production systems at banks, telcos, and utilties are running to this day on Smalltalk.
The 1980's had plenty of anti-OO discourse. It took a long time for OO to be accepted, especially C++.
After twenty years, it has become clear that while OO is not a panacea, it IS effective, it does work, and does increase productivity (by a small amount).
You're reading into this what you want to read into it.
This press release states that
- they're releasing a compiler for free (as in beer)
- they hope the open source community can get some use out of it, since some of these people are starting to work on Windows, and most actually do prefer a free (as in beer) compiler since they aren't getting paid to do said open source work
- they hope if people like it on windows, they'll like it on Linux when it is released there
I don't see any masquerading there. Perhaps the only debatable assumption is that the open source community prefers "no cost" software [since all GPL'd software is effectively available at both "cost" and "no cost", depending on how you get access to it]