It isn't clear at all from either the article nor the judge's opinions what the facts of the case were. There is a principle involving contracts and changes to contracts, but nowhere could I see an actual description of the original contract that the shrinkwrap license sought to "change". So I cannot comment on this specific case, only on the general topic...
And I can't believe that this comes as a surprise to anyone! When was the last time you had any legal recourse for bugs in software? You have to pay to upgrade OSs and applications - often the supplier is good about it and charges nominal upgrade fees for 3.0 to 3.01, but for 3.0 to 4.0 you usually have to pay.
The only really bug-free software is used in life-support systems and the like, and that sort of software is fantastically expensive to develop, using formal proofs and Z-notation and all a large corpus of highly-qualified staff to ensure that it is 100% bug-free. No one reading this could afford to buy a copy of any software written this stringently.
The people who are complaining about bugs in software, and who think they should be able to sue companies who put out buggy software, should consider this: If the law changes to make software manufacturers liable then software would become too expensive for us all. Even corporations couldn't afford it. The entire computer industry would just die. We'd go back to using paper and pen... and mistakes would still occur. (I can't believe these bozos who lost $1.7 million on a contract didn't cross-check the figures before quoting them!)
And Open Source software... well, if the Open Source community had any liability for the quality of their products we'd all be screwed. I'm not saying that OSS isn't high quality, probably higher in many cases than equivalent commercial software, but a change in the law like this would require guarantees of zero bugs, and that just ain't gonna happen.
Be careful what you wish for. I'm quite happy with software that comes without guarantees. The alternative is just too horrible to contemplate.
We've got a PS2 dev kit here, and we've talked about porting MAME to it (just for fun). You could probably fit everything MAME will run onto a single DVD-ROM.
I was thinking along the lines of interoperability. Sure the people with PS2s + this imaginary Master System emulator have to sign up with sega.com to get the downloads, but if they do so there's nothing stopping Sony from providing the software to make it work, and it's possible that Sega would be more-or-less forced to allow this. IANAL but it just seems to be far enough into the grey area that Sony could pull it off.
You're right, though, Sony probably couldn't care less.
ROFL! I'm sure having Saturn emulation would really increase their user base;)
The Dreamcast also has no cartridge port. If Sony were to do a Master System emulator, what's to stop it downloading files from the same place Sega do? Sony have the right to reverse-engineer the protocols in order to get this to work ("for purposes of interoperability"), and Sega could get some more $1.50s... although I'm sure they wouldn't be happy about it.
Firstly, how many of the old games do Sega per se have the rights to? Have they bought licenses from all their 3rd-party developers, are they going to just offer Sega-brand titles, or is someone getting ripped off here (besides the consumer - $1.50 a day is a lot of money for old rope).
Secondly, this seems not much different to what Sony is doing with PSX2 - except Sony don't expect the owners of original PSX games to pay the extra to play them on their new console. Would I get a rebate for owning an original cartridge of Space Harrier for the Master System, or would I still have to pay?
Seems to me that Sega are desperately trying to catch up with all the cool features of PS2. I don't think they ever will. If Sega can put Bleem onto Dreamcast, Sony can certainly put some Master System emulator onto PS2!
My personal stand on Metallica's music is that they totally kicked ass for the first 5 albums (all released in the 80s except the black one) and then - in my opinion - vanished up their own rear ends somewhere betweeen black and Load.
It's not "something they did", it's something they recorded;) I also went off Megadeth, Testament and Slayer at about the same time (Testament somewhat earlier;)
But I will defend to the death your right to listen to recent Metallica. I didn't mean to sound like I was telling you what to listen to!
If you do get a chance to check out Cradle of Filth, I heartily recommend them!
Chill out, dude, I'm just offering my opinion. No-one's forcing you to listen to anything. You can listen to Celine Dion for all I care. She's less corporate than Metallica these days anyway.
Metallica changed many years ago. They were cool in the EIGHTIES. It's now 2000, 16 years since they released Kill 'em All and 7 or 8 years since the atrocious pile of crap called Load. The only good Metallica songs from the last decade have been their covers of Motorhead and some rather more obscure NWOBHM bands.
Metallica suck. Get over it. Listen to Cradle of Filth instead. They have more originality in their upper E strings than Metallica have in their whole Marshall stack.
GNU Banned in (some) Fortune 500 companies?
on
Motif's Not Dead
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· Score: 1
This was a comment passed in the author's response to a letter about his article. Apparently GNU software has been banned in some Fortune 500 companies because of its legal ramifications.
I was not aware that there were any legal ramifications of using GNU software, only of editing and redistributing it. Have I misread the GPL?
Er... most people would be happy to leave a company and then get hired back as a consultant. If they didn't, it's hardly a big deal if the company tries. I can see it now, "Oh no, my ex-employer has just offered me quadruple my old salary to do a month's consultancy. I think I'll shoot myself now."
Yeah, I'm a little confused as to the free as in beer/speech issue here. He says Napster is bad because it's proprietory, and yet Napster is free as in beer. What is wrong with Napster then? Is it because it uses "secret" protocols to communicate? If Napster did all its communications in XML over HTTP (say) would that be "better" or still "bad" for some distinct reason? I'm no expert on the opinions of Richard Stallman.
I guess I read the article as saying that "all software companies are inherently evil" - maybe I'm misinterpreting what he said.
OTOH, relativism is interesting, isn't it?;) I actually said I'm a firm believer in Hegel's dialetic principle, which isn't relativism anyway. As you say, how can one be a pure relativist, any more than one can be a pure determinist? Practicalities intervene. However, I don't believe there's anything wrong with taking an intellectual stand on the subject, while totally ignoring that stand on a day-to-day basis.
Anyway, my take on that issue is that I find it impossible to take the view "proprietary software is bad". But I *do* find it possible to take the view "free software is good". Stallman seems to be fighting something which believes is evil, at the risk of being incorrect (in his own words, he's either right or wrong on this). All he really needs to do is pursue something which he believes is good, for its own sake. Then he can never be wrong!
Of course, we wouldn't have these interesting discussions in that case;)
I can imagine how Russell's argument would go, and I have struggled with the same problem.
Russell's opinion would have come from a pragmatic desire to generate a consistent ethical viewpoint rather than a desire to know the truth per se. This is the Marxist approach to philosophy (it must be pragmatic), and I find myself rejecting this attitude. The truth is, there are no consistent ethical viewpoints. This is the problem. Once we face this, we can begin the study of ethics afresh.
Relativism, in my understanding, does not state that all possible answers are just as correct as each other. It merely accepts that ethics is viewpoint dependent. This is not the same thing at all. It is however possible that my definition of relativism does not match yours. YMMV.
You seem to view relativism as an unneccessary and crippling adjunct to philosophy. I view relativism as a simple truth, which any philosophy must embrace in order to be meaningful.
I guess relativism is different things to different men <sic>
I find his philosophy wholly one-sided, however. I like the idea of free software, but not as the One True Way. If he persists with his idealistic crusade against paying for software, isn't he doing harm to the people who currently have vested interests in commercial software? How is that ethically justified? Does he mean "do no harm to others, as long as they agree with my ideals"? It seems to me he skirts this issue by calling these people "evil", which I can't accept.
I also dislike his attitude of "if two people disagree, one of them is wrong". This is totally against Hegel's dialectic principle in which I am a firm believer, and in fact it smacks of pre-Renaissance thinking which is odd since Stallman is certainly *trying* to be a Renaissance man.
Maybe when he gets relativism his views might improve in quality.
Good question. In the games industry, many companies pay well under the odds for programmers (compared to other sectors of the programming industry) and make it up with a bonus or royalty scheme. When that bonus fails to appear because of piracy, I end up being underpaid. This is different from just a vague desire to earn more money (I have that too, of course;)
Tech support has no IP component so I fail to see the relevance of that. I wouldn't do it as a job, but there you go - if you're not happy, quit and do something more lucrative. If you can get a better salary doing the same work, go for that too. But at least you'll know you didn't take a salary hit so that some warez d00d could prove what a big dick he has.
But, to answer your last point, YES. Not a standard for intellectual property laws, but a standard for the pricing of IP. The owner of the IP gets to set the price. That's fundamental. The IP owner decides the price; the market determines the success or failure of that IP based on the price relative to the IP's "worth" (whatever that means).
Piracy places a zero price on IP regardless of worth, and totally screws up the whole calculation. It makes IP more expensive for everyone else, leading to a lower market acceptance because of the higher price, leading to the failure of more IP creators. This is what piracy does. It is *not* harmless.
If the company you did tech support for had a lot of theft, I bet your salary would be lower too.
I'm not sure there is any such thing as an agent for someone pursuing their fair use rights. Fair use applies to the individual owning the product, and is not necessarily transferable to an agent. I guess this is the problem with MyMP3 - they are acting as agents, when the right to do so may not actually exist.
IANAL, and I certainly wasn't one back in 1986. My action was to write a very rude letter back to Microdeal calling them hypocrites, but to back down none-the-less.
Actually, another incident involved my copying MY OWN GAME onto disk for my brother - who, as kids are, wanted his own copy of the game (and I didn't want him rooting through my disk collection with his grubby hands;)
Somehow the manufacturers of that game - Quickbeam Sofware - got wind of my activities and phoned my parents who idiotically admitted to it. They then demanded FULL PAYMENT for all 3 of the "fair use" copies I had made. And my parents coughed up.
The finer points of the law become largely irrelevant when you're on the wrong end of a court action.
Back in the mid-80s when I was 16 years old, I ran a little software house and a fanzine for the old Dragon 32 microcomputer (this was a Tandy CoCo clone, and although all the other kids had C64s or ZX Spectrums [Timex 2000] I was very happy with it).
The market for games then was so small that one company - Microdeal of St Austell, Cornwall - published virtually all the games on the platform. They were all "ports" of Tandy CoCo games from the states. "ports" means they just patched some ROM addresses, since the machine really was a clone apart from some keyboard lines being switched and having a new ROM (written by a tiny little software company called Microsoft).
Now, anyone still using the Dragon 32 in 1986 was a real enthusiast. A lot of us had bought the disk drive expansion unit, at a cost of around $600, in order to speed up loading and saving our little BASIC programs.
The problem was, Microdeal wouldn't release their games on floppy disk. The market was "too small" - it was tape, or nothing.
I was a hacker, though, so I was capable of hacking the little games and putting them onto disk. Wow. I could fit 26 games onto a single 720K floppy. That was cool. But not everyone had my patience and experience cracking the "protection" they put on these games.
So little me, with my little fanzine, decided to offer a service to people. "Send me your tapes," I said, "and I shall put them onto disk for you, at a cost of only 50p per game." You see, I wasn't in it for the money, I just wanted to help people out. I was just a kid. Anyway, I already had 90% of the games on disk already so those jobs would be easy;) In fact, it seemed silly to ask for actual tapes, so I just said "send your original inlays, to prove you own the game, and I shall send you a disk with the game on it."
Quite similar to MyMP3.com, really.
Well, Microdeal had a fit. Their President wrote me a very indignant letter, saying I was pirating the games and would I really check people had the games before sending them, and claiming that I was being immoral in offering this service.
Me?! Immoral?! All you guys have to do is write the things onto disk and upgrade people for a couple of pounds ($3.20) but you don't bother; you expect people to use these old-fashioned tapes forever.
(My legal sophistication was a little lacking in those days).
Anyway, I wasn't about to go up against some huge monolithic company like Microdeal, so I withdrew the service, with a tear in my eye.
I guess the point is that this service seems fine and dandy and reasonable, but legally it's on thin ice. I'm a little saddened, but not entirely surprised, at this court decision.
These are good points, but I fail to see what the RIAA has to do with it. You're putting the cart before the horse. Screw the RIAA, that's what I say, they are the figurehead of a disgusting international cartel.
On the other hand, it's not the RIAA that suffers when music gets pirated. It's (a) the record company and (b) the artist. I have no sympathy for the record company either, but they are a legal entity with a right to do business within the bounds set by the legal system, and as such demand the protection of the courts. Shit, guys, get over it!
The thing that disgusts me is that nowhere in all these "oh I used Napster but I'm still a good person" arguments is that no-one gives a toss about the artists who literally did work their arses off to write and record their music - and then work harder touring to promote sales of their albums.
I am a games programmer, and when I see my games being pirated (they're usually on the warez sites a good few weeks before they are on the shelves of EB) I get sick to the stomach. Yeah, fuck the publisher, I don't give a toss if they lose money - they just paid us to make this game. But what about the royalties I deserve to make from this? What about the hard work I put it? The salary I earn doesn't match the work I do making a game; we all (in the games industry) hope for a success in order to make some royalties which will adequately compensate us for the work we did. Rarely does this happen - just as, for a band, rarely will they become a hit. But when I see the stuff being traded for no money, by people who are so arrogant they claim that this is their right, that makes me want to vomit.
You pirates - ALL you pirates - just stop and think a minute about who you are affecting by your actions. And, if you have imagination enough to claim that it is morally justifiable to commit theft, you should have enough imagination to work out WHY the DMCA exists, WHY it is being pounded so hard, and WHY we are going to end up with a society full of shit art and controlled by the RIAA and so on... the WHY of it is BECAUSE OF YOU FUCKERS. Just STOP PIRACY and you might get the distribution model you so desire, WHEN that distribution model is mature and viable enough to be commercially acceptable.
That's enough of my ranting, this is an emotive subject for me;)
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And I can't believe that this comes as a surprise to anyone! When was the last time you had any legal recourse for bugs in software? You have to pay to upgrade OSs and applications - often the supplier is good about it and charges nominal upgrade fees for 3.0 to 3.01, but for 3.0 to 4.0 you usually have to pay.
The only really bug-free software is used in life-support systems and the like, and that sort of software is fantastically expensive to develop, using formal proofs and Z-notation and all a large corpus of highly-qualified staff to ensure that it is 100% bug-free. No one reading this could afford to buy a copy of any software written this stringently.
The people who are complaining about bugs in software, and who think they should be able to sue companies who put out buggy software, should consider this: If the law changes to make software manufacturers liable then software would become too expensive for us all. Even corporations couldn't afford it. The entire computer industry would just die. We'd go back to using paper and pen ... and mistakes would still occur. (I can't believe these bozos who lost $1.7 million on a contract didn't cross-check the figures before quoting them!)
And Open Source software ... well, if the Open Source community had any liability for the quality of their products we'd all be screwed. I'm not saying that OSS isn't high quality, probably higher in many cases than equivalent commercial software, but a change in the law like this would require guarantees of zero bugs, and that just ain't gonna happen.
Be careful what you wish for. I'm quite happy with software that comes without guarantees. The alternative is just too horrible to contemplate.
We've got a PS2 dev kit here, and we've talked about porting MAME to it (just for fun). You could probably fit everything MAME will run onto a single DVD-ROM.
I was thinking along the lines of interoperability. Sure the people with PS2s + this imaginary Master System emulator have to sign up with sega.com to get the downloads, but if they do so there's nothing stopping Sony from providing the software to make it work, and it's possible that Sega would be more-or-less forced to allow this. IANAL but it just seems to be far enough into the grey area that Sony could pull it off.
You're right, though, Sony probably couldn't care less.
The Dreamcast also has no cartridge port. If Sony were to do a Master System emulator, what's to stop it downloading files from the same place Sega do? Sony have the right to reverse-engineer the protocols in order to get this to work ("for purposes of interoperability"), and Sega could get some more $1.50s ... although I'm sure they wouldn't be happy about it.
Secondly, this seems not much different to what Sony is doing with PSX2 - except Sony don't expect the owners of original PSX games to pay the extra to play them on their new console. Would I get a rebate for owning an original cartridge of Space Harrier for the Master System, or would I still have to pay?
Seems to me that Sega are desperately trying to catch up with all the cool features of PS2. I don't think they ever will. If Sega can put Bleem onto Dreamcast, Sony can certainly put some Master System emulator onto PS2!
I notice they're quite good at copying existing software and calling it a revolution, though ;)
No, you'd just have copies of every paper that used the words "drugs", "nuclear war", "communist" and "I love Iraq".
My personal stand on Metallica's music is that they totally kicked ass for the first 5 albums (all released in the 80s except the black one) and then - in my opinion - vanished up their own rear ends somewhere betweeen black and Load.
It's not "something they did", it's something they recorded ;) I also went off Megadeth, Testament and Slayer at about the same time (Testament somewhat earlier ;)
But I will defend to the death your right to listen to recent Metallica. I didn't mean to sound like I was telling you what to listen to!
If you do get a chance to check out Cradle of Filth, I heartily recommend them!
Hey, that was #666. Cool ;)
Chill out, dude, I'm just offering my opinion. No-one's forcing you to listen to anything. You can listen to Celine Dion for all I care. She's less corporate than Metallica these days anyway.
Metallica suck. Get over it. Listen to Cradle of Filth instead. They have more originality in their upper E strings than Metallica have in their whole Marshall stack.
I was not aware that there were any legal ramifications of using GNU software, only of editing and redistributing it. Have I misread the GPL?
Er ... most people would be happy to leave a company and then get hired back as a consultant. If they didn't, it's hardly a big deal if the company tries. I can see it now, "Oh no, my ex-employer has just offered me quadruple my old salary to do a month's consultancy. I think I'll shoot myself now."
I guess I read the article as saying that "all software companies are inherently evil" - maybe I'm misinterpreting what he said.
OTOH, relativism is interesting, isn't it? ;) I actually said I'm a firm believer in Hegel's dialetic principle, which isn't relativism anyway. As you say, how can one be a pure relativist, any more than one can be a pure determinist? Practicalities intervene. However, I don't believe there's anything wrong with taking an intellectual stand on the subject, while totally ignoring that stand on a day-to-day basis.
Anyway, my take on that issue is that I find it impossible to take the view "proprietary software is bad". But I *do* find it possible to take the view "free software is good". Stallman seems to be fighting something which believes is evil, at the risk of being incorrect (in his own words, he's either right or wrong on this). All he really needs to do is pursue something which he believes is good, for its own sake. Then he can never be wrong!
Of course, we wouldn't have these interesting discussions in that case ;)
Russell's opinion would have come from a pragmatic desire to generate a consistent ethical viewpoint rather than a desire to know the truth per se. This is the Marxist approach to philosophy (it must be pragmatic), and I find myself rejecting this attitude. The truth is, there are no consistent ethical viewpoints. This is the problem. Once we face this, we can begin the study of ethics afresh.
Relativism, in my understanding, does not state that all possible answers are just as correct as each other. It merely accepts that ethics is viewpoint dependent. This is not the same thing at all. It is however possible that my definition of relativism does not match yours. YMMV.
Yeah, my comment about the latest version of DOS wasn't to be taken literally. It's my favourite Microsoft operating system ;)
I guess relativism is different things to different men <sic>
I also dislike his attitude of "if two people disagree, one of them is wrong". This is totally against Hegel's dialectic principle in which I am a firm believer, and in fact it smacks of pre-Renaissance thinking which is odd since Stallman is certainly *trying* to be a Renaissance man.
Maybe when he gets relativism his views might improve in quality.
They probably got in early on some internet startups and are now basking in Hawaii. Life's like that ;)
Tech support has no IP component so I fail to see the relevance of that. I wouldn't do it as a job, but there you go - if you're not happy, quit and do something more lucrative. If you can get a better salary doing the same work, go for that too. But at least you'll know you didn't take a salary hit so that some warez d00d could prove what a big dick he has.
But, to answer your last point, YES. Not a standard for intellectual property laws, but a standard for the pricing of IP. The owner of the IP gets to set the price. That's fundamental. The IP owner decides the price; the market determines the success or failure of that IP based on the price relative to the IP's "worth" (whatever that means).
Piracy places a zero price on IP regardless of worth, and totally screws up the whole calculation. It makes IP more expensive for everyone else, leading to a lower market acceptance because of the higher price, leading to the failure of more IP creators. This is what piracy does. It is *not* harmless.
If the company you did tech support for had a lot of theft, I bet your salary would be lower too.
IANAL, and I certainly wasn't one back in 1986. My action was to write a very rude letter back to Microdeal calling them hypocrites, but to back down none-the-less.
Actually, another incident involved my copying MY OWN GAME onto disk for my brother - who, as kids are, wanted his own copy of the game (and I didn't want him rooting through my disk collection with his grubby hands ;)
Somehow the manufacturers of that game - Quickbeam Sofware - got wind of my activities and phoned my parents who idiotically admitted to it. They then demanded FULL PAYMENT for all 3 of the "fair use" copies I had made. And my parents coughed up.
The finer points of the law become largely irrelevant when you're on the wrong end of a court action.
The market for games then was so small that one company - Microdeal of St Austell, Cornwall - published virtually all the games on the platform. They were all "ports" of Tandy CoCo games from the states. "ports" means they just patched some ROM addresses, since the machine really was a clone apart from some keyboard lines being switched and having a new ROM (written by a tiny little software company called Microsoft).
Now, anyone still using the Dragon 32 in 1986 was a real enthusiast. A lot of us had bought the disk drive expansion unit, at a cost of around $600, in order to speed up loading and saving our little BASIC programs.
The problem was, Microdeal wouldn't release their games on floppy disk. The market was "too small" - it was tape, or nothing.
I was a hacker, though, so I was capable of hacking the little games and putting them onto disk. Wow. I could fit 26 games onto a single 720K floppy. That was cool. But not everyone had my patience and experience cracking the "protection" they put on these games.
So little me, with my little fanzine, decided to offer a service to people. "Send me your tapes," I said, "and I shall put them onto disk for you, at a cost of only 50p per game." You see, I wasn't in it for the money, I just wanted to help people out. I was just a kid. Anyway, I already had 90% of the games on disk already so those jobs would be easy ;) In fact, it seemed silly to ask for actual tapes, so I just said "send your original inlays, to prove you own the game, and I shall send you a disk with the game on it."
Quite similar to MyMP3.com, really.
Well, Microdeal had a fit. Their President wrote me a very indignant letter, saying I was pirating the games and would I really check people had the games before sending them, and claiming that I was being immoral in offering this service.
Me?! Immoral?! All you guys have to do is write the things onto disk and upgrade people for a couple of pounds ($3.20) but you don't bother; you expect people to use these old-fashioned tapes forever.
(My legal sophistication was a little lacking in those days).
Anyway, I wasn't about to go up against some huge monolithic company like Microdeal, so I withdrew the service, with a tear in my eye.
I guess the point is that this service seems fine and dandy and reasonable, but legally it's on thin ice. I'm a little saddened, but not entirely surprised, at this court decision.
On the other hand, it's not the RIAA that suffers when music gets pirated. It's (a) the record company and (b) the artist. I have no sympathy for the record company either, but they are a legal entity with a right to do business within the bounds set by the legal system, and as such demand the protection of the courts. Shit, guys, get over it!
The thing that disgusts me is that nowhere in all these "oh I used Napster but I'm still a good person" arguments is that no-one gives a toss about the artists who literally did work their arses off to write and record their music - and then work harder touring to promote sales of their albums.
I am a games programmer, and when I see my games being pirated (they're usually on the warez sites a good few weeks before they are on the shelves of EB) I get sick to the stomach. Yeah, fuck the publisher, I don't give a toss if they lose money - they just paid us to make this game. But what about the royalties I deserve to make from this? What about the hard work I put it? The salary I earn doesn't match the work I do making a game; we all (in the games industry) hope for a success in order to make some royalties which will adequately compensate us for the work we did. Rarely does this happen - just as, for a band, rarely will they become a hit. But when I see the stuff being traded for no money, by people who are so arrogant they claim that this is their right, that makes me want to vomit.
You pirates - ALL you pirates - just stop and think a minute about who you are affecting by your actions. And, if you have imagination enough to claim that it is morally justifiable to commit theft, you should have enough imagination to work out WHY the DMCA exists, WHY it is being pounded so hard, and WHY we are going to end up with a society full of shit art and controlled by the RIAA and so on ... the WHY of it is BECAUSE OF YOU FUCKERS. Just STOP PIRACY and you might get the distribution model you so desire, WHEN that distribution model is mature and viable enough to be commercially acceptable.
That's enough of my ranting, this is an emotive subject for me ;)
I prefer Unix? GNU? Huh? or UGH? ... the trademark of Microsoft engineers everywhere <g>
That sucks. And there I was thinking all of Microsoft's operating systems were compatible <g>