Back in the day when Microsoft Office had more competition from the likes of WordPerfect, a business I was working for went out and bought Word for all its PCs (a couple of hundred) because a senior manager had a "pirated" copy at home.
Unlike some other software at that time which employed dongles and other copy prevention measures, Microsoft didn't seem to have any real security on their software - you just copied the disks. It seemed as if they almost meant it to be copied a few times in order to get market exposure and more sales (looks like it worked as well).
I can see what you are getting at, but I'm not sure your analogy is correct.
Ignoring the fact that if I steal the car, the dealer no longer has a car to sell, whereas if I copy the car, he still does, there is still the issue of power.
To have a real market, the buyer and seller have to have an equal footing, which is why attention is paid to things such as price fixing and other anti-trust issues.
In the case of the car dealer, he does not have a monopoly and so his competitors can offer the same car under different terms and you, as the customer, can choose which offering suits your requirements the best. In this way a true marketplace exists and, other than the "no stealing rule", the government need not be involved.
In the case of the entertainment industry, there is a monopoly - if you want to listen to a track by your favourite band, being offered the choice between that band and one you don't want to listen to, is no real choice at all.
In this case however, rather than looking at this situation as a monopoly one and regulating in favour of the customer, in order to balance the market position, governments (perhaps as a result of lobbying) instead legislate in favour of the music industry, thereby distorting the market further and significantly disadvantaging the consumer by reducing their legal rights (e.g. not being able to take advantage of their fair use rights as this will contravene the industry's new rights to protect their encryption, etc)
You might not agree, but it is not necessarily entirely surprising that, being put in such a disadvantaged position, the customers look to subvert the status quo, by circumventing the controls the seller tries to impose.
ignoring the fact that we live in a more connected society where media like films, album master tapes, and so on last longer, and so content owners can make money on something for many more decades than in the past.
Copyright was originally introduced to cover written works such as books. Go to any decent library and you will find books that have lasted a lot longer than most films do.
Copyrights were extended to reflect the times.
In reality, copyright laws were introduced to encourage creative people to create more stuff for the enrichment of society as a whole. The terms of these copyrights were carefully chosen to give the creator enough time to make some money, but not so long that they could simply stop creating and sit back and live of an afternoon's work they put in fifty years before in a recording studio.
...and if they pay and they watch, only to find that it doesn't live up to the hype that got them wanting to watch in the first place, we give them back their money?
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
But do they want widespread adoption?
I don't know if they do or not, but I definitely get the feeling at times that there are many people who use Linux because it distinguishes them from Joe Sixpack and his mates, as much as for any other reason.
If this is the case then, consciously or sub-consciously, they would not want Linux adopted much more widely than it is at present - after all, if the world and her granny are all using Linux, what makes it so special any more?
(I fully acknowledge that there are many Linux users whose motivation is very different to this, its just that this is how it seems at times)
What's to stop either side in a case disseminating plausible but fake information around sites that rank highly in Google for searches relating to the case?
In this way a jury member that is looking there for "all the information at their disposal" could be significantly prejudiced without the other side being aware.
Surely this is one of the reasons why such rules exist?
Not only that, but it's a free world, who gives them the right to tell ME what to work on?
No one. However if you want to build market share, how do you convince someone to change from running their business on M$ software, backed (as they would see it), by a large, dependable company, to running their business on a bunch of software knocked up by a bunch of hobbyists, who rightly point out that they owe them no on-going support beyond that which they feel like giving?
I can see your point and all the other points raised here but, if the Linux market share is to grow, I am not your audience, the current M$ customers are.
I share a lot of your sentiment here, but surely the suggestion is being made due to the lack of market share growth. If so, to grow the market share, you are inevitably going to involve people who are strangers to Linux, aren't you?
Many people from the M$ world (who would surely make up the majority of the target audience for market share growth) possibly don't even know that Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, etc are all actually Linux and may therefore be put off by the confusion.
A lot of people come to new ideas through word of mouth and in the early days, it can be very much a case of the blind leading the blind. What if a recent convert recomends "Linux" to a friend, only for that friend to download a different distro (why would that matter, they're all Linux after all, aren't they?). How long would it take before they both get frustrated with the constant "oh doesn't that fix it? that's how I got it working on my PC"
I think that one of the biggest problems is that possibly, many Linux users (and I have to include myself here) have a great deal of difficulty in understanding how the less tech savvy see the world and so lack enough common frames of reference to be able to educate them to the point where they too can join in.
Its just going to push every last communication on to SSL
I'm not sure that SSL would make that much of a difference.
As I understand it, the identifying of the "wrongdoer" will not be carried out by the ISP inspecting packets, but by the RIAA et al downloading a copy of the "illegal" "property" and making a note of the source IP address involved.
Using the IP address they identify the ISP, who then does their dirty work for them.
I'm in a similar position, but what I would like is for CD ripping software that, at the ripping stage, produced at least 2 versions; compact MP3 for syncing with my PMP and a lossless format for playing via my Squeezebox/HiFi.
Does anyone know of anything that does this?
The thing to recognise is that democracy is as much about voting someone out of office as it is about voting for someone.
The main difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that the people in office know that if they annoy enough of the electorate, they will lose their jobs, perks, etc.
Obviously, part of a voter's decision making process will include asking whether the challenger is likely to be worse than the incumbent, but even if they are as bad (not worse), and you have a problem with them, you should always vote against the incumbent.
What is currently missing is a way of registering with the winner the fact that what you were doing was voting against their opponent and not for them. This would ensure that they realise that their position is every bit as uncertain, and that they haven't been given a mandate to just do whatever they want.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day when Microsoft Office had more competition from the likes of WordPerfect, a business I was working for went out and bought Word for all its PCs (a couple of hundred) because a senior manager had a "pirated" copy at home.
Unlike some other software at that time which employed dongles and other copy prevention measures, Microsoft didn't seem to have any real security on their software - you just copied the disks. It seemed as if they almost meant it to be copied a few times in order to get market exposure and more sales (looks like it worked as well).
I can see what you are getting at, but I'm not sure your analogy is correct.
Ignoring the fact that if I steal the car, the dealer no longer has a car to sell, whereas if I copy the car, he still does, there is still the issue of power.
To have a real market, the buyer and seller have to have an equal footing, which is why attention is paid to things such as price fixing and other anti-trust issues.
In the case of the car dealer, he does not have a monopoly and so his competitors can offer the same car under different terms and you, as the customer, can choose which offering suits your requirements the best. In this way a true marketplace exists and, other than the "no stealing rule", the government need not be involved.
In the case of the entertainment industry, there is a monopoly - if you want to listen to a track by your favourite band, being offered the choice between that band and one you don't want to listen to, is no real choice at all.
In this case however, rather than looking at this situation as a monopoly one and regulating in favour of the customer, in order to balance the market position, governments (perhaps as a result of lobbying) instead legislate in favour of the music industry, thereby distorting the market further and significantly disadvantaging the consumer by reducing their legal rights (e.g. not being able to take advantage of their fair use rights as this will contravene the industry's new rights to protect their encryption, etc)
You might not agree, but it is not necessarily entirely surprising that, being put in such a disadvantaged position, the customers look to subvert the status quo, by circumventing the controls the seller tries to impose.
Just like it's been since entertainment began
When entertainment began, it is more likely that people would perform and then pass the hat round to get what people watching thought it was worth.
I'm not sure that copyright laws existed back then either, which begs the question; how did anyone ever make a living?
ignoring the fact that we live in a more connected society where media like films, album master tapes, and so on last longer, and so content owners can make money on something for many more decades than in the past.
Copyright was originally introduced to cover written works such as books. Go to any decent library and you will find books that have lasted a lot longer than most films do.
Copyrights were extended to reflect the times.
In reality, copyright laws were introduced to encourage creative people to create more stuff for the enrichment of society as a whole. The terms of these copyrights were carefully chosen to give the creator enough time to make some money, but not so long that they could simply stop creating and sit back and live of an afternoon's work they put in fifty years before in a recording studio.
...and if they pay and they watch, only to find that it doesn't live up to the hype that got them wanting to watch in the first place, we give them back their money?
But do they want widespread adoption?
I don't know if they do or not, but I definitely get the feeling at times that there are many people who use Linux because it distinguishes them from Joe Sixpack and his mates, as much as for any other reason.
If this is the case then, consciously or sub-consciously, they would not want Linux adopted much more widely than it is at present - after all, if the world and her granny are all using Linux, what makes it so special any more?
(I fully acknowledge that there are many Linux users whose motivation is very different to this, its just that this is how it seems at times)
What's to stop either side in a case disseminating plausible but fake information around sites that rank highly in Google for searches relating to the case?
In this way a jury member that is looking there for "all the information at their disposal" could be significantly prejudiced without the other side being aware.
Surely this is one of the reasons why such rules exist?
Most of us don't care particularly about market share
I agree, but I was responding to the original article:
The calls from the Linux community have been growing due to Linux's failure to show significant market share growth."
Not only that, but it's a free world, who gives them the right to tell ME what to work on?
No one. However if you want to build market share, how do you convince someone to change from running their business on M$ software, backed (as they would see it), by a large, dependable company, to running their business on a bunch of software knocked up by a bunch of hobbyists, who rightly point out that they owe them no on-going support beyond that which they feel like giving?
I can see your point and all the other points raised here but, if the Linux market share is to grow, I am not your audience, the current M$ customers are.
I share a lot of your sentiment here, but surely the suggestion is being made due to the lack of market share growth. If so, to grow the market share, you are inevitably going to involve people who are strangers to Linux, aren't you?
Many people from the M$ world (who would surely make up the majority of the target audience for market share growth) possibly don't even know that Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, etc are all actually Linux and may therefore be put off by the confusion.
A lot of people come to new ideas through word of mouth and in the early days, it can be very much a case of the blind leading the blind. What if a recent convert recomends "Linux" to a friend, only for that friend to download a different distro (why would that matter, they're all Linux after all, aren't they?). How long would it take before they both get frustrated with the constant "oh doesn't that fix it? that's how I got it working on my PC"
I think that one of the biggest problems is that possibly, many Linux users (and I have to include myself here) have a great deal of difficulty in understanding how the less tech savvy see the world and so lack enough common frames of reference to be able to educate them to the point where they too can join in.
Its just going to push every last communication on to SSL
I'm not sure that SSL would make that much of a difference.
As I understand it, the identifying of the "wrongdoer" will not be carried out by the ISP inspecting packets, but by the RIAA et al downloading a copy of the "illegal" "property" and making a note of the source IP address involved.
Using the IP address they identify the ISP, who then does their dirty work for them.
I have the internet wired directly to my brain...
...and is that media blank?
perhaps it should be iFanboy?
I'm in a similar position, but what I would like is for CD ripping software that, at the ripping stage, produced at least 2 versions; compact MP3 for syncing with my PMP and a lossless format for playing via my Squeezebox/HiFi. Does anyone know of anything that does this?
The thing to recognise is that democracy is as much about voting someone out of office as it is about voting for someone.
The main difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that the people in office know that if they annoy enough of the electorate, they will lose their jobs, perks, etc.
Obviously, part of a voter's decision making process will include asking whether the challenger is likely to be worse than the incumbent, but even if they are as bad (not worse), and you have a problem with them, you should always vote against the incumbent.
What is currently missing is a way of registering with the winner the fact that what you were doing was voting against their opponent and not for them. This would ensure that they realise that their position is every bit as uncertain, and that they haven't been given a mandate to just do whatever they want.
Excellent stuff!
fyi: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now