Explaining how to think about the world, starting with understanding subatomic particles, then moving onto items of greater complexity -- atoms, then molecules, then autocatalytic networks, self-reproducing systems, adaptive systems, intelligence and mind -- is something Steve is very good at. It must come from all the thinking he does.
This is just my opinion, but I think this is completely the wrong way to go about it. I think an analogy will help explain what I mean. Suppose I show you a picture, then ask you to write a program which generates pictures. It would be stupid for you to start analysing the subatomic particles so that you could get a better idea of the pigments, so you could understand the use of colour...
A much better approach in the case of the picture (and I would assert in the case of life) would be to give up the reductive approach. Instead, one should focus on the function the picture serves and try to replicate that. I.e. try to do the same job rather than trying to do the job in the same way.
I think this whole obsession with reductive solutions stems from the success of physics. In physics looking at subatomic particles has been fruitful, but this is because of the particular nature of the problems physics tries to solve. Problems involving life and consciousness, for example, are very different: we should rethink our methods rather than blindly trying to apply those that worked in the past.
In a related matter that may point to a growing chasm between U.S. and European legal treatment of ISP responsibility, a Florida Supreme Court ruled for AOL Thursday, stating that ISPs are not responsible for material created by their customers.
I think this raises an interesting point. If you're going to make people responsible for their action online, the enforcement mechanism will almost certainly need to work through the isp. Once isp's are relieved of this responsibility, it will be much harder to catch people committing online crimes. This is because isp's willl have no incentive to check the identity of their customers, which they would otherwise need to do so that if the isp were sued, it could in turn sue the customer for breaching their agreement.
You may argue that it is good if responsibility online cannot be enforced since you disagree with some the laws that are in place. However, this is an indefensible position. If the law should be changed, it should be changed using the democratic mechanisms that exist for this purpose. Supporting any other way would be revealing an unhealthy disrespect for democracy and setting a dangerous precedent.
ownership (Re:SOAP==the end of free software)
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SOUP is Good for You
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· Score: 1
ownership.
You can't feel ownership of a remotely managed and remotely owned application. Human nature tells us to achieve to OWN not RENT.
An interesting point, but just because the software is on a remote computer doesn't mean you cannot own it. I.e. M$ could give you the choice between a $14/month licences for office or a $800 lifetime one.
I'm going to say something that may appear controversial, but please hear me through.
While tech kingpins such as Microsoft and Oracle have rushed to one-up each other in introducing Web-delivered software, Ximian is doing work behind the scenes to make sure Web services can run on the Linux and Unix operating systems.
While web-delivered software seems like a good idea, I wonder what the consequences for free software are. Obliviously free software isn't going to go away - but I see it becoming a less viable alternative. There are several reasons for this.
(1) If software is delivered via the web, you will require someone else's computing power at the other end of the line. Someone has to pay for this. As the recent experience of the dotcoms shows, business models based on giving stuff away free almost invariable don't work. Software provides will have to be paid for the service they provide. So an end to the free beer aspect of software.
(2) If software is running on remote server's, then even if it is covered by an open source licence, in many cases, the people running the severs will not be distributing binaries, so won't be required to provided source code for any changes they make. Hence an end to the free speech aspect of free software.
Sure, not everyone will use web delivered software, so open source software will continue to be used by niche users. However, once the mainstream embrace web delivered software (and this is likely since its being pushed by MS and Sun et al), open source software will be permanently confined to the backwaters. This will mean its benefits will only be enjoyed by a select few.
"Critics and non-believers can no longer dismiss the Linux market as a fad," Gillen said.
Try telling that to someone who bought linux shares.
"If leading hardware vendors are willing to risk their credibility by endorsing and placing Linux systems in the market, it's easy for customers to conclude there must be something real about Linux."
Hmm.. Great logic. Of course vendors never risk their credibility by endorsing something that's not real.
What dictionaries say not really what's important. What is important is how much opportunity firms have to increases prices (above cost of producing whatever they sell) without losing customers. The more firms there are, the less opportunity each firm has to do this. But even with more than one firm, there is still some opportunity.
Free-market economic theory would indicate that CEOs would never do this
Not necessarily. You can look at it as a repeated prisoners dilemma, which case, your best strategy is usually cooperating (i.e. keeping prices high). Try for yourself here.
...it's essentially impossible to do anything truly original with a computer....every piece of software you write is created in a language... a processor contains only the instruction sets designed into it by the manufacturer, who is... human...they [the instruction] are clearly in existence before the software is written... Therefore... no software that is written, ever can qualify as unique technology.
So if I build a machine out of cogs and springs, am I not allowed to patent it? And anyway, since every machine obeys the laws of physics, which are more or less known, no machine can qualify as a unique technology under your scheme.
I think where you are mistaken is that while a machine may be made of components that are known inventions (wheels, cogs, springs etc) or a program made up of known instructions and algorithms; it is the arrangement of the components or instructions/algorithms that is capable of being unique and so patent worthy.
Troll? If you look at my user info, you'd see I actually give reasoned responses to people who reply to my posts rather than laughing at them for taking the bait.
Good job quoting the source, when that quote does not appear anywhere in the article quoted.
Eh? Try under the Weak Spots in the System heading - about half way through (if you read that far).
In addition, you get in a nice pot-shot against bias ("Competent examiners") and then give up before you try to examine any other arguments!
Well, instead of dredging up every bad argument I've heard against patents, then saying what I thinks wrong with it; I thought I'd challenge you to come up with a good one that would still stand up once you had competent examiners in the patent office.
Law professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley, charges that the PTO "simply can't be competent in issuing [business-method] patents" because of examiners' insufficient training and "woefully inadequate prior art"--the legal term for previously published descriptions of a patented invention.
I think this hits the nail on the head. For a patent system to work, you need competent examiners and way to determine whether there is prior. This is the problem that needs to be solved. Once this is done, there are no good arguments against having patents. (Or I have yet to hear them.)
KDE 2.1: A Desktop Aimed at Grownups?
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KDE 2.1 Is Out
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Instead of concentrating on features such at automatic upgrades and automatic provision of desktop content from the Internet, the developers of KDE-2.1 concentrated on stability, bug squashing, and improvement of the underlying technology....they point to the development tools available such as KDevelop, the IDE that with the this release has been pronounced ready for prime time.... These things, it is reasoned, will be of particular interest to the enterprise...
While I don't doubt KDE is getting better, surely it stands little chance competing against Win 2000 in mainstream enterprises.
What the majority of businesses use desktops for is Office applications. If the likes of StarOffice/OpenOffice cannot even effectively compete with MSOffice on windows, there is little chance of them temping users to a different OS as well as a different Office suite.
If it can't compete in the mainstream office environment, it will never escape its niche since network effects come into play. If everyone else is using MS word, the cost for me of not using it is high. First, the file filter are not perfect, so there is the cost of not being able to read some documents people send me. Second, if I hire new staff, they will need retraining.
The claim of being ready for prime time seems premature.
While its true Microsoft do take a lot of their ideas from elsewhere, I don't think anyone could deny that MS Office, IE, and perhaps even VB are the best products available of their class. Sure, VB is not the most beautiful language out there, but if you want to get the job done quickly and have little experience, it is probably the best tool available.
Also, are you saying we should let companies get away with violating the law in order to prevent investors from realizing that investment is simply gambling by another name? Or are you saying we should simply change the laws so that companies and investors don't have to worry that unethical behavior is against the law anymore?
I am saying that there should be clear-cut laws and penalties for dealing with anticompetitive behaviour. I.e. it should not be left to the discretion of whichever judge happens to be sitting when the case comes to court. This reduces uncertainty and the related problems mentioned in my post above. If this means less regulation, so be it!
First off, I don't see a good reason why my post above got moderated to flamebait. If the moderator would care to explain his/her action in an A/C post, I'm listening...
Second:
which would be a good point... except this entire battle is over potentials, not realities, and megalomania. Right now, the RIAA is a functional monoply of music content. They, in a very real sence, control all music and musical media... except what napsters giving away for free.
This does not make sense. If anyone wants to distribute the music they create on the Internet, they are completely free to do that. Simply put your MP3s on a webpage and register it on the search engines. You don't need napster for this! Anyone can do it.
...what they are really doing is cutting back on what the projected increase was supposed to be. So, instead of a 10 billion dollar increase, they get only 8 billion, and the press reports this as a 2 billion cutback.... RIAA uses it the same way, I'd wager.
It seems stupid to criticize them for doing it this way: this is the right way of doing it. If you're trying to find the size of the effect of A on B, then you should estimate how big B would be without A; not ask whether B is bigger than it was last year.
Of course, it is possible to make a bad estimate the size of B without A, but this does not imply that all estimates are bad. Furthermore, if napster really did not affect RIAA profits (as it seems half of slashdot would like us to believe), then there would be no incentive for the RIAA to attempt to close it down, and they would have an incentive not to given the bad publicity it gives them. It's hard to believe that the RIAA are that stupid, given the amount of income they have.
Considering MS has affects its competitors too. I think that some kind of _retalliation_ might be good for the industry as whole.
Why should MS be punished for the incompetence of its competitors? E.g. apple trying to make a quick profit rather than build a user base or Netscape trying to sell a browser when they had a better product, then complaining when someone gave away a better browsers for free.
Monopoly power should be the prize for companies that produce a good product and market it well, we shouldn't be punishing them.
Its funny how analysts complain about potential stock losses from investing in Microsoft...
You may find this funny, but there is actually a good argument why regulation should be avoided due to its effect on investors. The argument goes likes this: more regulation leads to more uncertainty about profits. The greater the uncertainty about profits, the greater is the risk of investing in the company. As the risk of investing in the company increases, investors will demand a higher return on there investment. This will mean that fewer investment projects are profitable, so there will be less investment, and so less innovation.
Less innovation by M$ makes everyone worse off. Of course, the linux user will object that it does not affect them: they are wrong. If it weren't for M$ continually developing software requiring ever more powerful hardware, they wouldn't have cheap, fast processors for their linux boxes. Furthermore, if it weren't for the spread of cheap PCs, the commercialisation of the internet would not have occurred. There would be less demand for programmers, so their wages would be lower.
I know most people on slashdot hate M$, but on the balance of probabilities, M$ has benefited them indirectly.
I know that by saying what I am about to say I am swimming against the tide of opinion on slashdot. Even so, I believe that its better to say what you believe is right rather than what you believe people want to hear.
RMS writes:
The "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not price; specifically, that all computer users should have the freedom to study, change, and redistribute the software that they use.
My claim is as follows: the BSD vs GPL debate which Microsoft has entered by endorsing BSD and vilifying GPL is confused by misconceptions about freedom, and these misconceptions, from my reading at least, seem particularly widespread on slashdot.
The problem starts with the beer/speech distinction between types of freedom, which RMS alludes to in the quote above. I admit that at first glance this distinction has a certain appeal to it - free beer obviously is free in a different way from free speech. However, what this distinction misses is that every freedom for one person involves taking away a freedom from someone else. Once you grasp this idea, it is obvious that any talk of GPL being more free than BSD or vice versa is utter nonsense. What does make sense is to talk of one license (or system of government etc) offering more freedoms of a certain flavour. Which flavour you prefer depends on your tastes and how much you stand to benefit or lose when that flavour is enforced. Criticisms of the flavours other people prefer (e.g. calling it "Un-American" or the splurges of moral indignation regularly seen on Slashdot) when they are not backed up by a reasoned argument based on something other than freedom are just as nonsensical as criticisms of other peoples preferred flavours of ice cream!
Now, the flavour of freedom much of the open source community prefers is to be free to view, copy, and modify the source code and, in some cases, to prevent others from removing this freedom when they modify the source code and distribute binaries. On the other hand, the freedom Microsoft and many closed source vendors prefer is the freedom to recoup their investments and make profits by requiring users of their software to buy a licence for the software.
Which flavour should we choose? As ever in politics, the answer will involve trying to find the best way of reconciling conflicting preferences. What it does not involve is a choice between freedom and lack of freedom - it is a choice between different flavours of freedom.
I know that by saying what I am about to say I am swimming against the tide of opinion on slashdot. Even so, I believe that its better to say what you believe is right rather than what you believe people want to hear.
My claim is as follows: the BSD vs GPL debate which Microsoft has entered by endorsing BSD and vilifying GPL is confused by misconceptions about freedom, and these misconceptions, from my reading at least, seem particularly widespread on slashdot.
The problem starts with the beer/speech distinction between types of freedom. I admit that at first glance this distinction has a certain appeal to it - free beer obviously is free in a different way from free speech. However, what this distinction misses is that every freedom for one person involves taking away a freedom from someone else. Once you grasp this idea, it is obvious that any talk of GPL being more free than BSD or vice versa is utter nonsense. What does make sense is to talk of one license (or system of government etc) offering more freedoms of a certain flavour. Which flavour you prefer depends on your tastes and how much you stand to benefit or lose when that flavour is enforced. Criticisms of the flavours other people prefer (e.g. calling it "Un-American" or the splurges of moral indignation regularly seen on Slashdot) when they are not backed up by a reasoned argument based on something other than freedom are just as nonsensical as criticisms of other peoples preferred flavours of ice cream!
Now, the flavour of freedom much of the open source community prefers is to be free to view, copy, and modify the source code and, in some cases, to prevent others from removing this freedom when they modify the source code and distribute binaries. On the other hand, the freedom Microsoft and many closed source vendors prefer is the freedom to recoup their investments and make profits by requiring users of their software to buy a licence for the software.
Now for the question posed in the parent:
Why should our governments contribute to closed-source development?
Well, one reason is this, open source GPLed developments lack a flavour freedom that is important to some people (MS shareholders are also people!). Of course, other people like the flavour of freedom that comes with GPLed developments. As ever in politics, the answer will involve trying to find the best way of reconciling conflicted preferences. What it does not involve is a choice between freedom and lack of freedom -- it is a choice between different flavours of freedom.
Open source stifles innovation. This is demonstrably arrant nonsense.
Not necessarily true. Sure some innovations have come through open source development, but a lot of open source development involves using ideas from closed source products, i.e. not really innovation but borrowing. Now, if the development of these closed source products is expensive, the development will only take place if the Microsoft or whoever believes the cost can be recouped, e.g. through monopoly profits when the product is finished. However, if the there is a prospect of competing with an open source project who will take the best ideas from the product and ship their version for free, then the expected monopoly profits are lower, maybe even to the extent that it is not worth investing in innovation at all. Hence, Open source stifles innovation. Of course, this negative aspect of open source has to be weighted against the benefits (of which you give good examples), but there is a sense in which his claim is defensible.
Open source is bad for the intellectual-property business. .... Businesses built on artificial scarcity will fail and should fail.
There is no good reason why they should fail. In fact, economic theory gives us a cause to believe that some degree of artificial scarcity improves welfare as it provides the necessary incentive to invest when technologies that are expensive to design but easy to copy. If there were no artificial scarcity, some firms could not recoup their R&D costs. I'm not denying that there are costs to artificial scarcity - there clearly are - but the optimal system would involve maximising the difference between the costs and benefits rather than ignoring the benefits and throwing out all artificial scarcity because there are some costs.
To me it seems that although Alchin's statements were clearly motivated by self-interest and bias, so are those of most of the people criticising him.
I agree in principle that if you copy what I have produced without paying me, and that even if I knowing that you are going to do this still produce the music, invention whatever, then in principle there is no reason for preventing you copying it. I.e. I don't believe that I have any natural rights over what I produced. However, in practice, there is no way to tell whether this is the case - both of us would have an incentive to lie. The solution is some kind of compromise, e.g. give me rights over what I produce for a limited length of time, then let anyone us it. The only justification for the right is that it provides an incentive for me to be productive. And I would argue that this is the only incentive for any kind of property right but that is another question
People do a lot of things that inhibit your 'use of something to earn a living'.
And that is precisely why property rights should be assigned. If something that I do benefits me but harms you, either I should be assigned the right to do it, and you the option to buy that right from me (if we can strike a deal), or you should be assigned the right to stop me doing it, and I the option to buy that right. The important point is that someone should be assigned the right. This leads to the further question: who should be assigned the right. When rights concern things that are costly to produce, it is best that the right be assigned to whoever produced it, so that producers have a greater incentive to produce things. (Of course, if the producer is public spirited, then they are free to give up their rights without financial compensation if they so wish).
Incidentally, you mention that in driving down the street you can inhibit me from doing it at the same time - this is why there is a good argument for road tolls, so that drivers pay for the extra congestion they cause.
Now for the slashdot comments and loafing about arguments. If you really believe that your comments significantly benefit others and you need an incentive to write, maybe you should go on strike until you are given some of the slashdot advertising revenue. Likewise with loafing about the net, if it really does benefit others and you need an incentive to do it, then there is a good case for setting up a system to compensate you.
Your house argument doesn't exactly hold water, because having random people living in your house can damage it.
However, I think if someone takes something that's 'yours', and uses it without damaging it in anyway and without inhibitng your use of it (Say they...copy your music...), I think they should be able too.
My point was that living in my house while I'm away is equivalent to copying my music. While the acte of living in my house or copying music does not directly harm me, it's consequences can do. You living in my house can inhibit my use of it (because the house gets damaged), you copying my music can inhibit my use of it (to earn my living) because now anyone can get a copy for free. If you want you be consistent, you should either accept protection for both houses and music, or reject it for both.
The author proposes a world in which protections for non-scarce items do not exist.
The author has it back to front. When produced non-scarce items depend on humans, they need protection. If people are not rewarded for producing such items, fewer will be produced. Of course, you're going to object that some kind souls will produce things without financial reward. Good for them. They are free to do that whatever the system. But at least let there be some way to reward those who are not so public spirited or perhaps whose circumstance prevent them being so.
Now you may you reject this argument, but if you do so, and care about being consistent, you should also reject any property rights. I.e. why should I be able to stop you using the empty house I own but don't use? Sure enough, if
I'm actually living in the house, you should be prevented from kicking me out; but while I'm not living there and have no intension of doing so, I should have no right to stop you moving in.
Of course the objection to this last point is that if you are allowed to move into my house when I'm not using it, you have no incentive to look after your own house and likewise I have no incentive to look after my house, since I can just move into an empty house belonging to someone else. This is a good objection. The problem is that it is the same objection as to why you shouldn't be allowed to use the program that I write if I so wish because otherwise I may have no incentive to write it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just my opinion, but I think this is completely the wrong way to go about it. I think an analogy will help explain what I mean. Suppose I show you a picture, then ask you to write a program which generates pictures. It would be stupid for you to start analysing the subatomic particles so that you could get a better idea of the pigments, so you could understand the use of colour...
A much better approach in the case of the picture (and I would assert in the case of life) would be to give up the reductive approach. Instead, one should focus on the function the picture serves and try to replicate that. I.e. try to do the same job rather than trying to do the job in the same way.
I think this whole obsession with reductive solutions stems from the success of physics. In physics looking at subatomic particles has been fruitful, but this is because of the particular nature of the problems physics tries to solve. Problems involving life and consciousness, for example, are very different: we should rethink our methods rather than blindly trying to apply those that worked in the past.
I think this raises an interesting point. If you're going to make people responsible for their action online, the enforcement mechanism will almost certainly need to work through the isp. Once isp's are relieved of this responsibility, it will be much harder to catch people committing online crimes. This is because isp's willl have no incentive to check the identity of their customers, which they would otherwise need to do so that if the isp were sued, it could in turn sue the customer for breaching their agreement.
You may argue that it is good if responsibility online cannot be enforced since you disagree with some the laws that are in place. However, this is an indefensible position. If the law should be changed, it should be changed using the democratic mechanisms that exist for this purpose. Supporting any other way would be revealing an unhealthy disrespect for democracy and setting a dangerous precedent.
You can't feel ownership of a remotely managed and remotely owned application. Human nature tells us to achieve to OWN not RENT.
An interesting point, but just because the software is on a remote computer doesn't mean you cannot own it. I.e. M$ could give you the choice between a $14/month licences for office or a $800 lifetime one.
While tech kingpins such as Microsoft and Oracle have rushed to one-up each other in introducing Web-delivered software, Ximian is doing work behind the scenes to make sure Web services can run on the Linux and Unix operating systems.
While web-delivered software seems like a good idea, I wonder what the consequences for free software are. Obliviously free software isn't going to go away - but I see it becoming a less viable alternative. There are several reasons for this.
(1) If software is delivered via the web, you will require someone else's computing power at the other end of the line. Someone has to pay for this. As the recent experience of the dotcoms shows, business models based on giving stuff away free almost invariable don't work. Software provides will have to be paid for the service they provide. So an end to the free beer aspect of software.
(2) If software is running on remote server's, then even if it is covered by an open source licence, in many cases, the people running the severs will not be distributing binaries, so won't be required to provided source code for any changes they make. Hence an end to the free speech aspect of free software.
Sure, not everyone will use web delivered software, so open source software will continue to be used by niche users. However, once the mainstream embrace web delivered software (and this is likely since its being pushed by MS and Sun et al), open source software will be permanently confined to the backwaters. This will mean its benefits will only be enjoyed by a select few.
Try telling that to someone who bought linux shares.
"If leading hardware vendors are willing to risk their credibility by endorsing and placing Linux systems in the market, it's easy for customers to conclude there must be something real about Linux."
Hmm.. Great logic. Of course vendors never risk their credibility by endorsing something that's not real.
What dictionaries say not really what's important. What is important is how much opportunity firms have to increases prices (above cost of producing whatever they sell) without losing customers. The more firms there are, the less opportunity each firm has to do this. But even with more than one firm, there is still some opportunity.
Free-market economic theory would indicate that CEOs would never do this
Not necessarily. You can look at it as a repeated prisoners dilemma, which case, your best strategy is usually cooperating (i.e. keeping prices high). Try for yourself here.
So if I build a machine out of cogs and springs, am I not allowed to patent it? And anyway, since every machine obeys the laws of physics, which are more or less known, no machine can qualify as a unique technology under your scheme.
I think where you are mistaken is that while a machine may be made of components that are known inventions (wheels, cogs, springs etc) or a program made up of known instructions and algorithms; it is the arrangement of the components or instructions/algorithms that is capable of being unique and so patent worthy.
Troll? If you look at my user info, you'd see I actually give reasoned responses to people who reply to my posts rather than laughing at them for taking the bait.
Good job quoting the source, when that quote does not appear anywhere in the article quoted.
Eh? Try under the Weak Spots in the System heading - about half way through (if you read that far).
In addition, you get in a nice pot-shot against bias ("Competent examiners") and then give up before you try to examine any other arguments!
Well, instead of dredging up every bad argument I've heard against patents, then saying what I thinks wrong with it; I thought I'd challenge you to come up with a good one that would still stand up once you had competent examiners in the patent office.
I think this hits the nail on the head. For a patent system to work, you need competent examiners and way to determine whether there is prior. This is the problem that needs to be solved. Once this is done, there are no good arguments against having patents. (Or I have yet to hear them.)
While I don't doubt KDE is getting better, surely it stands little chance competing against Win 2000 in mainstream enterprises.
What the majority of businesses use desktops for is Office applications. If the likes of StarOffice/OpenOffice cannot even effectively compete with MSOffice on windows, there is little chance of them temping users to a different OS as well as a different Office suite.
If it can't compete in the mainstream office environment, it will never escape its niche since network effects come into play. If everyone else is using MS word, the cost for me of not using it is high. First, the file filter are not perfect, so there is the cost of not being able to read some documents people send me. Second, if I hire new staff, they will need retraining.
The claim of being ready for prime time seems premature.
While its true Microsoft do take a lot of their ideas from elsewhere, I don't think anyone could deny that MS Office, IE, and perhaps even VB are the best products available of their class. Sure, VB is not the most beautiful language out there, but if you want to get the job done quickly and have little experience, it is probably the best tool available.
Also, are you saying we should let companies get away with violating the law in order to prevent investors from realizing that investment is simply gambling by another name? Or are you saying we should simply change the laws so that companies and investors don't have to worry that unethical behavior is against the law anymore?
I am saying that there should be clear-cut laws and penalties for dealing with anticompetitive behaviour. I.e. it should not be left to the discretion of whichever judge happens to be sitting when the case comes to court. This reduces uncertainty and the related problems mentioned in my post above. If this means less regulation, so be it!
Second:
which would be a good point... except this entire battle is over potentials, not realities, and megalomania. Right now, the RIAA is a functional monoply of music content. They, in a very real sence, control all music and musical media... except what napsters giving away for free.
This does not make sense. If anyone wants to distribute the music they create on the Internet, they are completely free to do that. Simply put your MP3s on a webpage and register it on the search engines. You don't need napster for this! Anyone can do it.
It seems stupid to criticize them for doing it this way: this is the right way of doing it. If you're trying to find the size of the effect of A on B, then you should estimate how big B would be without A; not ask whether B is bigger than it was last year.
Of course, it is possible to make a bad estimate the size of B without A, but this does not imply that all estimates are bad. Furthermore, if napster really did not affect RIAA profits (as it seems half of slashdot would like us to believe), then there would be no incentive for the RIAA to attempt to close it down, and they would have an incentive not to given the bad publicity it gives them. It's hard to believe that the RIAA are that stupid, given the amount of income they have.
Why should MS be punished for the incompetence of its competitors? E.g. apple trying to make a quick profit rather than build a user base or Netscape trying to sell a browser when they had a better product, then complaining when someone gave away a better browsers for free.
Monopoly power should be the prize for companies that produce a good product and market it well, we shouldn't be punishing them.
You may find this funny, but there is actually a good argument why regulation should be avoided due to its effect on investors. The argument goes likes this: more regulation leads to more uncertainty about profits. The greater the uncertainty about profits, the greater is the risk of investing in the company. As the risk of investing in the company increases, investors will demand a higher return on there investment. This will mean that fewer investment projects are profitable, so there will be less investment, and so less innovation.
Less innovation by M$ makes everyone worse off. Of course, the linux user will object that it does not affect them: they are wrong. If it weren't for M$ continually developing software requiring ever more powerful hardware, they wouldn't have cheap, fast processors for their linux boxes. Furthermore, if it weren't for the spread of cheap PCs, the commercialisation of the internet would not have occurred. There would be less demand for programmers, so their wages would be lower.
I know most people on slashdot hate M$, but on the balance of probabilities, M$ has benefited them indirectly.
Forget who owns the code, if whoever you distribute the binaries to doesn't demand the source, whether or not it's GPLed is irrelevant!
RMS writes:
The "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not price; specifically, that all computer users should have the freedom to study, change, and redistribute the software that they use.
My claim is as follows: the BSD vs GPL debate which Microsoft has entered by endorsing BSD and vilifying GPL is confused by misconceptions about freedom, and these misconceptions, from my reading at least, seem particularly widespread on slashdot.
The problem starts with the beer/speech distinction between types of freedom, which RMS alludes to in the quote above. I admit that at first glance this distinction has a certain appeal to it - free beer obviously is free in a different way from free speech. However, what this distinction misses is that every freedom for one person involves taking away a freedom from someone else. Once you grasp this idea, it is obvious that any talk of GPL being more free than BSD or vice versa is utter nonsense. What does make sense is to talk of one license (or system of government etc) offering more freedoms of a certain flavour. Which flavour you prefer depends on your tastes and how much you stand to benefit or lose when that flavour is enforced. Criticisms of the flavours other people prefer (e.g. calling it "Un-American" or the splurges of moral indignation regularly seen on Slashdot) when they are not backed up by a reasoned argument based on something other than freedom are just as nonsensical as criticisms of other peoples preferred flavours of ice cream!
Now, the flavour of freedom much of the open source community prefers is to be free to view, copy, and modify the source code and, in some cases, to prevent others from removing this freedom when they modify the source code and distribute binaries. On the other hand, the freedom Microsoft and many closed source vendors prefer is the freedom to recoup their investments and make profits by requiring users of their software to buy a licence for the software.
Which flavour should we choose? As ever in politics, the answer will involve trying to find the best way of reconciling conflicting preferences. What it does not involve is a choice between freedom and lack of freedom - it is a choice between different flavours of freedom.
My claim is as follows: the BSD vs GPL debate which Microsoft has entered by endorsing BSD and vilifying GPL is confused by misconceptions about freedom, and these misconceptions, from my reading at least, seem particularly widespread on slashdot.
The problem starts with the beer/speech distinction between types of freedom. I admit that at first glance this distinction has a certain appeal to it - free beer obviously is free in a different way from free speech. However, what this distinction misses is that every freedom for one person involves taking away a freedom from someone else. Once you grasp this idea, it is obvious that any talk of GPL being more free than BSD or vice versa is utter nonsense. What does make sense is to talk of one license (or system of government etc) offering more freedoms of a certain flavour. Which flavour you prefer depends on your tastes and how much you stand to benefit or lose when that flavour is enforced. Criticisms of the flavours other people prefer (e.g. calling it "Un-American" or the splurges of moral indignation regularly seen on Slashdot) when they are not backed up by a reasoned argument based on something other than freedom are just as nonsensical as criticisms of other peoples preferred flavours of ice cream!
Now, the flavour of freedom much of the open source community prefers is to be free to view, copy, and modify the source code and, in some cases, to prevent others from removing this freedom when they modify the source code and distribute binaries. On the other hand, the freedom Microsoft and many closed source vendors prefer is the freedom to recoup their investments and make profits by requiring users of their software to buy a licence for the software.
Now for the question posed in the parent:
Why should our governments contribute to closed-source development?
Well, one reason is this, open source GPLed developments lack a flavour freedom that is important to some people (MS shareholders are also people!). Of course, other people like the flavour of freedom that comes with GPLed developments. As ever in politics, the answer will involve trying to find the best way of reconciling conflicted preferences. What it does not involve is a choice between freedom and lack of freedom -- it is a choice between different flavours of freedom.
Not necessarily true. Sure some innovations have come through open source development, but a lot of open source development involves using ideas from closed source products, i.e. not really innovation but borrowing. Now, if the development of these closed source products is expensive, the development will only take place if the Microsoft or whoever believes the cost can be recouped, e.g. through monopoly profits when the product is finished. However, if the there is a prospect of competing with an open source project who will take the best ideas from the product and ship their version for free, then the expected monopoly profits are lower, maybe even to the extent that it is not worth investing in innovation at all. Hence, Open source stifles innovation. Of course, this negative aspect of open source has to be weighted against the benefits (of which you give good examples), but there is a sense in which his claim is defensible.
Open source is bad for the intellectual-property business. .... Businesses built on artificial scarcity will fail and should fail.
There is no good reason why they should fail. In fact, economic theory gives us a cause to believe that some degree of artificial scarcity improves welfare as it provides the necessary incentive to invest when technologies that are expensive to design but easy to copy. If there were no artificial scarcity, some firms could not recoup their R&D costs. I'm not denying that there are costs to artificial scarcity - there clearly are - but the optimal system would involve maximising the difference between the costs and benefits rather than ignoring the benefits and throwing out all artificial scarcity because there are some costs.
To me it seems that although Alchin's statements were clearly motivated by self-interest and bias, so are those of most of the people criticising him.
Find enlightenment here...
If you're persuaded by the evil-corporation-exploiting.. arguments, it will probably be the most important thing you read today.
Anyway it's not only US companies make anti virtual software.
I know that you'll think its just another foreigner moaning, but if you think about it, its not really as bad as you think.
And that is precisely why property rights should be assigned. If something that I do benefits me but harms you, either I should be assigned the right to do it, and you the option to buy that right from me (if we can strike a deal), or you should be assigned the right to stop me doing it, and I the option to buy that right. The important point is that someone should be assigned the right. This leads to the further question: who should be assigned the right. When rights concern things that are costly to produce, it is best that the right be assigned to whoever produced it, so that producers have a greater incentive to produce things. (Of course, if the producer is public spirited, then they are free to give up their rights without financial compensation if they so wish).
Incidentally, you mention that in driving down the street you can inhibit me from doing it at the same time - this is why there is a good argument for road tolls, so that drivers pay for the extra congestion they cause.
Now for the slashdot comments and loafing about arguments. If you really believe that your comments significantly benefit others and you need an incentive to write, maybe you should go on strike until you are given some of the slashdot advertising revenue. Likewise with loafing about the net, if it really does benefit others and you need an incentive to do it, then there is a good case for setting up a system to compensate you.
However, I think if someone takes something that's 'yours', and uses it without damaging it in anyway and without inhibitng your use of it (Say they ...copy your music...), I think they should be able too.
My point was that living in my house while I'm away is equivalent to copying my music. While the acte of living in my house or copying music does not directly harm me, it's consequences can do. You living in my house can inhibit my use of it (because the house gets damaged), you copying my music can inhibit my use of it (to earn my living) because now anyone can get a copy for free. If you want you be consistent, you should either accept protection for both houses and music, or reject it for both.
The author has it back to front. When produced non-scarce items depend on humans, they need protection. If people are not rewarded for producing such items, fewer will be produced. Of course, you're going to object that some kind souls will produce things without financial reward. Good for them. They are free to do that whatever the system. But at least let there be some way to reward those who are not so public spirited or perhaps whose circumstance prevent them being so.
Now you may you reject this argument, but if you do so, and care about being consistent, you should also reject any property rights. I.e. why should I be able to stop you using the empty house I own but don't use? Sure enough, if I'm actually living in the house, you should be prevented from kicking me out; but while I'm not living there and have no intension of doing so, I should have no right to stop you moving in.
Of course the objection to this last point is that if you are allowed to move into my house when I'm not using it, you have no incentive to look after your own house and likewise I have no incentive to look after my house, since I can just move into an empty house belonging to someone else. This is a good objection. The problem is that it is the same objection as to why you shouldn't be allowed to use the program that I write if I so wish because otherwise I may have no incentive to write it.