You need to do what I always do. When you're at the interview stage, explain to your potential employers that you write software in your free time and that it has no value for them. Then they can add an amendment to your contract allowing you to do this sort of thing. You could even go in to your current boss and ask - asking doesn't hurt.
The point about these sorts of contracts is to avoid you looking at all the employer's "trade secrets" and figuring out something really whizz-bang using them, and then setting up in direct competition. Many contracts forbid you setting up in direct competition (or working at the direct competition) within 6-12 months of leaving, too.
But what you've got to remember about contracts is that (a) they're legally binding and (b) they are negotiable. Never forget (b) - it's your best friend.
Wow, I hadn't got the full scoop about that hack. I knew they had IDs on the devices, but I didn't imagine that was the main thrust of the thing. I guess demographic information is highly valuable.
The thing that really made me laugh though was this SciFi channel commercial - 30 minutes long, you know the type. The setting was in Heaven, where Bob the Angel (can't remember the name) visits Heaven's R&D department, and the top-of-the-line item that Heaven's R&D department has come up with is - no, not an Aston Martin with flamethrowers and ejector seat, but THE CUECAT!!!
Then they described it as the biggest technological breakthrough ever. Seriously, that's *exactly* what they said.
The word arrogance doesn't even come close.
You're probably right about the lawyers, but offering a similar service under not such an obvious name might be a good idea. Maybe some jobbing hardware hacker can design the same thing but for the COM port - and while she's at it, make it accept data from remote controls too, so I can operate my DVD drive from my bed;)
I saw the CueCat commercial on SciFi on Monday night. It made me laugh. A lot. But it also made me think.
DC have actually got a really, really good business plan. It goes like this: give people free barcode scanners, get them to scan their stuff in, then they go to our website (via our software) and we redirect them to the company that "owns" the barcode.
So Digital Convergence's real money-spinner is not the cuecat at all, it's SELLING SPACE TO ADVERTISERS. You think Coke aren't going to be paying to have CueCat link to their site from their barcode? You think Pepsi won't pay Cuecat more to have the Coke barcode take people to the Pepsi site?
All DC need is a huge database of barcodes and URLs, and a large market share - currently, they have the only market share. They want to be the VideoPlus of URLs.
Since that's their main asset, then, I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND why they care about people reversing their hardware. It's a lousy design anyway - people need to use a keyboard to surf the web (esp. to "reorder pharmaceuticals" - an advertised use of CueCat - so they can enter their Visa/MC number). It should go in through COM2.
The only thing they should be worried about is if another company made a better database than them. But that's simple free-market competition. I guess they're trying to lock down the cuecat to make it harder for such competitors, but they're not going to succeed, so why don't they invest their time and money in making their product the best so that the competition can't out flank them?
Maybe because they know their actual service is a shoddy pile of crap? I don't know - I haven't used it. But since it's just a 1-table SQL database with an ASCII string as the primary key and an ASCII string as the only other column, how bad could it be?
I say that the OS movement should make a rival site - www.qcat.com - and write software to send people there from *every* OS. Everytime anyone sees a DC barcode they should scan it, note the URL, and put it onto the qcat database. It'd be like CDDB. Then we can offer the exact same service, but with privacy, and cheaper for businesses to subscribe to, and drive the fsckers out of business. We could use the proceeds to fund Open Source projects. Then DC would be a *good* memory - "Hey, remember that company that gave us all free barcode scanners before going out of business? They were cool.";)
I read ESR last night (TCaTB) and I realized that - in a lot of Slashdot discussions - I tacitly assume that the value *is* just the sale value.
That's because I am one of the 5% of developers whose salary is linked to sale value.
In the other 95% of the industry, you're almost certainly right - I'm just blinkered to that 95%. In the consumer application/games industry you really can't do much other than sell boxes at $40 a pop.
But isn't a person's time a scarce resource? Especially if that person is skilled and therefore rare?
Supply-and-demand is OK, as long as you don't tie it to the scarcity of physical resources, and acknowledge the scarcity of human resources too.
About anti-progress: where is the "progress" you desire taking us as a species? If its towards devaluation of human effort then I'd say *that* is anti-progress.
I half-agree with what you're saying. I'm not trying to offend. Really;)
I don't think the cost is the only reason free software is popular. Hell, let's call it Open Source software explicitly, and then it speaks for itself. It's popular for the reason that people can tweak it and fix bugs and see the source, etc. etc.. But doesn't RMS claim that Open Source software doesn't have to be free anyway? What about Netscape?
But you then go on to list four people who make a living from free software. Like you say, ESR and RMS speak. If they were nobodies how would they pay the rent?
Linus and Cox work for companies and do free software in their spare time (actually I think Linus gets a good deal out of this, don't know about Cox). But again, these people are figureheads of the OS movement. It would be a poor show indeed if they couldn't do this.
But what about us mere mortals?
I would love nothing more than to muck around in free software. But I have a job, which pays my bills, and in my free time I like to spend time with friends and with my wife. How do I change this situation into one where I'm mucking about with free software?
Tell me, I'd really like to know. You could change my life if you gave me a good answer to this question.
This isn't a black hole emulation done using OpenGL, it's a black hole emulation done using a standard Newtonian physics engine and then rendered using OpenGL.
Shame, really, because there is potential to use OpenGL's image processing hardware to actually calculate large 2D fluid dynamics problems, and doing that would definitely count as news. You'd blow a Cray out of the water with a Voodoo3.
Value, in the economic sense, is defined by scarcity
That's the problem. This is a bad definition of value. It was fine when economics was born, in the 19th century, but it doesn't work today. My arguments circle around this point but never quite make it.
The probable situation is that information technology simply doesn't fit into a 19th-century economic framework. I think *everyone* on Slashdot would agree with this. It's just the modifications to the framework that we can't quite agree on. The government is going for a path-of-least-resistance evolutionary approach, and that's what we'll be stuck with until someone thinks of something better.
You're right, but even the Open Source model has people pay for support (and Microsoft charge for support). Maintenance is another issue - but in the shrinkwrap model maintenance of V1.0 is simply the development cost of V2.0.
I deliberately avoided marketing costs because Linux has proved that software can become highly popular without full-page spreads in the Sunday supplements.
So I think my analysis still stands, given these riders.
You think the solution is to charge $10,000,000 for the first copy of Windows and make the others free? That's plain stupid. But see my later post - I do agree with you in principle.
I'm not the one that's whimpering and wailing, by the way - "oh why does copyright exist why can't I have everything free" sounds more like whimpering and wailing to these ears. I have nothing to fear from anarchy, because the government is busy making damned sure it won't happen.
I'm just trying to explain the situation for the people who can't even comprehend the concept of an economy. Obviously you're not one of these.
Well, I think Marx was spot on. Those "better Slashdotters" are just regurgitating the so-called "law" of supply and demand, and that was invented when economics *was* all about supply and demand. Marx was a little more forward-thinking.
I mean that question seriously, the answer to it is the future, not some future where everything is free (at least, not yet).
It's evolved from a system where consumers are individuals. You can sell individuals a book, a CD, a T-shirt, so the current model is evolved from that.
Thing is, it doesn't cost $15 to make a music CD. Ignoring the legalized embezzelment that the music industry is engaged in, it costs at least $20,000 to record even a lamely-produced album, and then you can't print 1 CD and 1 inlay sheet, you have to print 1000 CDs and 1000 inlay sheets. Then you add the time it took the band to (if you're fair) write the songs, rehearse them and record them - a year's salary for 4 people. Say, $120,000. So you have to invest, say, $143,000 to make 1000 CDs. The next 1000 only cost $3,000 though, so you hope you sell more than 1,000. If you think you'll sell 10,000 you can price the CD at around $15 and break even. If you think you'll sell 1,000 then your price is $150 per CD and that's too much (some technical books cost something approaching this figure, for this reason).
It's the same with software - but worse. Teams are generally bigger than bands, and they expect a higher salary, being "skilled" workers. Your software might additionally take two years or more to write. Let's say 6 programmers on $60,000 for 2 years - that's a whopping $720,000. If the software's "value" is $40 (i.e. people would pay $40 for it) then you need to sell 18,000 copies. Mind you, if you knew you could sell 180,000 copies you could charge everyone $4, and if you knew you could sell 1,800,000 then it's just 40c each (I'm now ignoring cost-of-materials completely - the internet economy has no need for printed manuals and CDs, although I wish Intel did printed PIII manuals;).
Now, most items are of marginal popularity. That is, the company works out beforehand how big the market is for the product. It then calculates how much the product costs to develop. It then calculates the market price for the product. It's a fact of life, strange, but a seemingly immutable law, that marginal products of this nature almost always EXACTLY BREAK EVEN. That is, if D is the development cost, N is the market size and P is the market price, D = N*P. Every business plan in the world exhibits this law. It's only in extreme cases that the law breaks down - the extreme case where the product becomes popular.
If an item is popular, this all breaks down. The market price is unchanged, because popularity doesn't affect market price, since a popoular product can enforce a monopoly - it's popular, so you pay what we say you pay. Look at how much Lucas charged for the Episode 1 video! Even without this explicit greed, the price charged is generally the same as for similar, but unpopular, items. So the Britney Spears CD costs about the same as the Cradle of Filth CD. The development cost is the same - maybe slightly higher if the developers knew beforehand it was going to be popular (Britney had a better producer than the Filth). But N goes through the roof by a factor of 100 or more. So you look at N and P and D and you say, "this company is greedy".
OK, now the whole problem arises because of the mismatch between N*P and D. There is no physical law that says N*P = D. In fact, N*P = D is only achieved by fiddling the books. You reduce D so it matches N*P (cheap and cheerful PSX games); you increase P so it matches D/N (research-level textbooks); the only thing you can't directly affect is N, but marketing attempts to do this.
Now, what would be nice is if copright law, said that P would vary with N. That is, the first people to buy would pay more, then the cost would gradually go down until, when enough people have bought the product, development has been paid for and the product enters the public domain.
This is what happens in HARDWARE now. The "early adopters" of CD players paid - what - $500 for a player. Then as economies of scale kicked in the price dropped until now a CD player is a commodity item you can pick up for $40 upwards.
If the same thing happened in software, then paying per copy would not be the same thing at all. You'd be paying, not for a copy, but TOWARDS THE COSTS. And when they are paid (say, when they are paid four times over, so everyone involved can make a healthy profit) then the whole thing enters the public domain and is free.
This is what people EXPECT of these old movies, old video games (hello, Mattel!), old TV shows, etc. etc. but corporate greed is such that they won't let them go. Disney has made back the money it spent on Mickey Mouse many many times over - why not let him enter the public domain?
So, to summarize, I don't think software wants to be free. It doesn't, it costs money to make and it needs to make that money back. But it doesn't have to be shackled to corporate greed.
If the media industries voluntarily moved towards a system like this, people would love them for it.
It's not the crux of the issue. It's what naive college students with adolescent philosophies think is the crux of the issue, but once they get out into the real world ("oh, no, I have to get my rent somehow, my parents won't bail me out any more") they realize that getting paid for time and effort is the crux of the issue.
Otherwise, for every cabinet the carpenter makes, he would charge exactly the same amount as that weight of logs would cost from the lumbar yard. Oh, wait, why should the lumbar yard charge for logs when they're just GROWING for free all around? And minerals are underground, everywhere. We have cows wandering the fields. Why do we have to pay for ANYTHING AT ALL?
This idea that only possesions have any value is an utterly materialistic concept, and it won't do at all in an information-based society. Money is to pay for people's time and effort, not for the raw materials they used.
Why do people on Slashdot insist on knocking Microsoft just because they copied everyone else. What is Linux except a lame UNIX clone? At least Microsoft copied software written in the 80s when we knew a little about usability. So let's have a look at the Linux usability tools - KDE and Gnome. And what are they? Cheap, slow and buggy Windows 95 knock-offs.
Microsoft are the market leaders; if that's China in your world then you must be living in 3000BC.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux unzips its own kernel, and that's not slow at all.
The point about these sorts of contracts is to avoid you looking at all the employer's "trade secrets" and figuring out something really whizz-bang using them, and then setting up in direct competition. Many contracts forbid you setting up in direct competition (or working at the direct competition) within 6-12 months of leaving, too.
But what you've got to remember about contracts is that (a) they're legally binding and (b) they are negotiable. Never forget (b) - it's your best friend.
Yeah, in fact what the fsck's that box at the top of the Slashdot page? Come on, Capt Quesadilla, let's get rid of these evil advertisers.
The thing that really made me laugh though was this SciFi channel commercial - 30 minutes long, you know the type. The setting was in Heaven, where Bob the Angel (can't remember the name) visits Heaven's R&D department, and the top-of-the-line item that Heaven's R&D department has come up with is - no, not an Aston Martin with flamethrowers and ejector seat, but THE CUECAT!!!
Then they described it as the biggest technological breakthrough ever. Seriously, that's *exactly* what they said.
The word arrogance doesn't even come close.
You're probably right about the lawyers, but offering a similar service under not such an obvious name might be a good idea. Maybe some jobbing hardware hacker can design the same thing but for the COM port - and while she's at it, make it accept data from remote controls too, so I can operate my DVD drive from my bed ;)
DC have actually got a really, really good business plan. It goes like this: give people free barcode scanners, get them to scan their stuff in, then they go to our website (via our software) and we redirect them to the company that "owns" the barcode.
So Digital Convergence's real money-spinner is not the cuecat at all, it's SELLING SPACE TO ADVERTISERS. You think Coke aren't going to be paying to have CueCat link to their site from their barcode? You think Pepsi won't pay Cuecat more to have the Coke barcode take people to the Pepsi site?
All DC need is a huge database of barcodes and URLs, and a large market share - currently, they have the only market share. They want to be the VideoPlus of URLs.
Since that's their main asset, then, I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND why they care about people reversing their hardware. It's a lousy design anyway - people need to use a keyboard to surf the web (esp. to "reorder pharmaceuticals" - an advertised use of CueCat - so they can enter their Visa/MC number). It should go in through COM2.
The only thing they should be worried about is if another company made a better database than them. But that's simple free-market competition. I guess they're trying to lock down the cuecat to make it harder for such competitors, but they're not going to succeed, so why don't they invest their time and money in making their product the best so that the competition can't out flank them?
Maybe because they know their actual service is a shoddy pile of crap? I don't know - I haven't used it. But since it's just a 1-table SQL database with an ASCII string as the primary key and an ASCII string as the only other column, how bad could it be?
I say that the OS movement should make a rival site - www.qcat.com - and write software to send people there from *every* OS. Everytime anyone sees a DC barcode they should scan it, note the URL, and put it onto the qcat database. It'd be like CDDB. Then we can offer the exact same service, but with privacy, and cheaper for businesses to subscribe to, and drive the fsckers out of business. We could use the proceeds to fund Open Source projects. Then DC would be a *good* memory - "Hey, remember that company that gave us all free barcode scanners before going out of business? They were cool." ;)
Any takers?
That's because I am one of the 5% of developers whose salary is linked to sale value.
In the other 95% of the industry, you're almost certainly right - I'm just blinkered to that 95%. In the consumer application/games industry you really can't do much other than sell boxes at $40 a pop.
Supply-and-demand is OK, as long as you don't tie it to the scarcity of physical resources, and acknowledge the scarcity of human resources too.
About anti-progress: where is the "progress" you desire taking us as a species? If its towards devaluation of human effort then I'd say *that* is anti-progress.
But would it make it clearer if I said, Direct3D doesn't have 3D textures and OpenGL does?
But now I'm confused ;)
I don't think the cost is the only reason free software is popular. Hell, let's call it Open Source software explicitly, and then it speaks for itself. It's popular for the reason that people can tweak it and fix bugs and see the source, etc. etc.. But doesn't RMS claim that Open Source software doesn't have to be free anyway? What about Netscape?
But you then go on to list four people who make a living from free software. Like you say, ESR and RMS speak. If they were nobodies how would they pay the rent?
Linus and Cox work for companies and do free software in their spare time (actually I think Linus gets a good deal out of this, don't know about Cox). But again, these people are figureheads of the OS movement. It would be a poor show indeed if they couldn't do this.
But what about us mere mortals?
I would love nothing more than to muck around in free software. But I have a job, which pays my bills, and in my free time I like to spend time with friends and with my wife. How do I change this situation into one where I'm mucking about with free software?
Tell me, I'd really like to know. You could change my life if you gave me a good answer to this question.
Shame, really, because there is potential to use OpenGL's image processing hardware to actually calculate large 2D fluid dynamics problems, and doing that would definitely count as news. You'd blow a Cray out of the water with a Voodoo3.
Anyway, the two APIs are not functionally equivalent, unless they've added 3D textures to DirectX while I wasn't looking.
That's the problem. This is a bad definition of value. It was fine when economics was born, in the 19th century, but it doesn't work today. My arguments circle around this point but never quite make it.
The probable situation is that information technology simply doesn't fit into a 19th-century economic framework. I think *everyone* on Slashdot would agree with this. It's just the modifications to the framework that we can't quite agree on. The government is going for a path-of-least-resistance evolutionary approach, and that's what we'll be stuck with until someone thinks of something better.
Personally, I hope I'd choose option (a).
There's nothing new under the sun ;)
I deliberately avoided marketing costs because Linux has proved that software can become highly popular without full-page spreads in the Sunday supplements.
So I think my analysis still stands, given these riders.
It just goes to show that there are no easy answers.
I'm not the one that's whimpering and wailing, by the way - "oh why does copyright exist why can't I have everything free" sounds more like whimpering and wailing to these ears. I have nothing to fear from anarchy, because the government is busy making damned sure it won't happen.
I'm just trying to explain the situation for the people who can't even comprehend the concept of an economy. Obviously you're not one of these.
Well, I think Marx was spot on. Those "better Slashdotters" are just regurgitating the so-called "law" of supply and demand, and that was invented when economics *was* all about supply and demand. Marx was a little more forward-thinking.
But, on my Debian setup, KDE just doesn't work very well. It doesn't *crash*, but it doesn't load applications when you tell it to either.
KDE might have fine aims, but to an unsophisticated user such as myself it sure as hell *looks* like a Win95 knock-off.
You noticed my contrariness. Good for you! ;) I should change my username to Mary Mary ;)
Ed xxx
I mean that question seriously, the answer to it is the future, not some future where everything is free (at least, not yet).
It's evolved from a system where consumers are individuals. You can sell individuals a book, a CD, a T-shirt, so the current model is evolved from that.
Thing is, it doesn't cost $15 to make a music CD. Ignoring the legalized embezzelment that the music industry is engaged in, it costs at least $20,000 to record even a lamely-produced album, and then you can't print 1 CD and 1 inlay sheet, you have to print 1000 CDs and 1000 inlay sheets. Then you add the time it took the band to (if you're fair) write the songs, rehearse them and record them - a year's salary for 4 people. Say, $120,000. So you have to invest, say, $143,000 to make 1000 CDs. The next 1000 only cost $3,000 though, so you hope you sell more than 1,000. If you think you'll sell 10,000 you can price the CD at around $15 and break even. If you think you'll sell 1,000 then your price is $150 per CD and that's too much (some technical books cost something approaching this figure, for this reason).
It's the same with software - but worse. Teams are generally bigger than bands, and they expect a higher salary, being "skilled" workers. Your software might additionally take two years or more to write. Let's say 6 programmers on $60,000 for 2 years - that's a whopping $720,000. If the software's "value" is $40 (i.e. people would pay $40 for it) then you need to sell 18,000 copies. Mind you, if you knew you could sell 180,000 copies you could charge everyone $4, and if you knew you could sell 1,800,000 then it's just 40c each (I'm now ignoring cost-of-materials completely - the internet economy has no need for printed manuals and CDs, although I wish Intel did printed PIII manuals ;).
Now, most items are of marginal popularity. That is, the company works out beforehand how big the market is for the product. It then calculates how much the product costs to develop. It then calculates the market price for the product. It's a fact of life, strange, but a seemingly immutable law, that marginal products of this nature almost always EXACTLY BREAK EVEN. That is, if D is the development cost, N is the market size and P is the market price, D = N*P. Every business plan in the world exhibits this law. It's only in extreme cases that the law breaks down - the extreme case where the product becomes popular.
If an item is popular, this all breaks down. The market price is unchanged, because popularity doesn't affect market price, since a popoular product can enforce a monopoly - it's popular, so you pay what we say you pay. Look at how much Lucas charged for the Episode 1 video! Even without this explicit greed, the price charged is generally the same as for similar, but unpopular, items. So the Britney Spears CD costs about the same as the Cradle of Filth CD. The development cost is the same - maybe slightly higher if the developers knew beforehand it was going to be popular (Britney had a better producer than the Filth). But N goes through the roof by a factor of 100 or more. So you look at N and P and D and you say, "this company is greedy".
OK, now the whole problem arises because of the mismatch between N*P and D. There is no physical law that says N*P = D. In fact, N*P = D is only achieved by fiddling the books. You reduce D so it matches N*P (cheap and cheerful PSX games); you increase P so it matches D/N (research-level textbooks); the only thing you can't directly affect is N, but marketing attempts to do this.
Now, what would be nice is if copright law, said that P would vary with N. That is, the first people to buy would pay more, then the cost would gradually go down until, when enough people have bought the product, development has been paid for and the product enters the public domain.
This is what happens in HARDWARE now. The "early adopters" of CD players paid - what - $500 for a player. Then as economies of scale kicked in the price dropped until now a CD player is a commodity item you can pick up for $40 upwards.
If the same thing happened in software, then paying per copy would not be the same thing at all. You'd be paying, not for a copy, but TOWARDS THE COSTS. And when they are paid (say, when they are paid four times over, so everyone involved can make a healthy profit) then the whole thing enters the public domain and is free.
This is what people EXPECT of these old movies, old video games (hello, Mattel!), old TV shows, etc. etc. but corporate greed is such that they won't let them go. Disney has made back the money it spent on Mickey Mouse many many times over - why not let him enter the public domain?
So, to summarize, I don't think software wants to be free. It doesn't, it costs money to make and it needs to make that money back. But it doesn't have to be shackled to corporate greed.
If the media industries voluntarily moved towards a system like this, people would love them for it.
Otherwise, for every cabinet the carpenter makes, he would charge exactly the same amount as that weight of logs would cost from the lumbar yard. Oh, wait, why should the lumbar yard charge for logs when they're just GROWING for free all around? And minerals are underground, everywhere. We have cows wandering the fields. Why do we have to pay for ANYTHING AT ALL?
This idea that only possesions have any value is an utterly materialistic concept, and it won't do at all in an information-based society. Money is to pay for people's time and effort, not for the raw materials they used.
Microsoft are the market leaders; if that's China in your world then you must be living in 3000BC.
You can explain nuclear physics in baby talk if you have the time spare.
Good answer.
You can't argue with logic like that.