Good point. It's not so much a question of whether they get the top space on the results page for free, though, as the fact that they are guaranteeing it to themselves. Nobody else has a shot.
Now that you bring it up, I think the analogy with leveraging a desktop pseudo-monopoly to leveraging a search pseudo-monopoly is not completely off-base.
I still haven't decided if I care, though. The Google has built up a lot of goodwill over the years.
Absolutely. I wasn't disagreeing with you... just trying to help show why there was a difference in the oft-quoted 50% tax-rate and the one you were quoting.
To make a fair comparison, I guess you'd have to find an american think-tank that calculates the same sort of tax burden indicator and use that.
(And beyond that, as you point out, you should really make sure that the tax burden measured would be applicable to your lifestyle. i.e., how much of your income do you spend on alcohol, cigarettes, etc.)
When you hear 50% tax rates, they are including all the ways the government taxes us, not just income tax.
"[This calculator includes] all taxes from all levels of government that Canadians pay. This includes: income & sales taxes; liquor, tobacco, amusement & other excise taxes; automobile, fuel, & motor vehicle licence taxes; CPP/QPP and EI contributions, medical & hospital taxes; property taxes; import duties; profit taxes; and natural resource levies"
You can find the Fraser Institute (right-wing thinktank) tax freedom calculator here. Just did mine (for Ontario) and it turned out to be almost exactly 50%.
The Ontario school board used Word Perfect in the past, which made sense, giving money to an Ontario company. I don't know why they didn't just use OpenOffice now
You might just have answered your own question. Last I heard, (could be out-of-date now), OpenOffice had no wordperfect filters, but Star Office did. Legacy documents, anyone?
From the Lessig blog December 19: Posner is a friend. I was his clerk. But the best thing about being his clerk is that he does his own writing, which means the clerk's job is just to disagree. But in the area of copyright and patent, I've found less and less to disagree with. Indeed, if you want a brilliant and balanced analysis of a wide range of IP issues, from the perspective of economics, see his (and Professor Landes') latest book, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law.
I haven't read it yet, but am eagerly awaiting its arrival from interlibrary loan.
No, the tower is not for self defense (what!??!?!) or to dry yourself (as indeed hotels do provide towels last time I checked) For the unenlightened, this is from South Park (S5E8 - 8 Aug 01 - Towelie) http://www.tvtome.com/SouthPark/season5.html#ep73
I've been thinking the same thing for a while... but last week stumbled upon the fact that there are a bunch of folks up here with 'relatively' (if hacked) normal/working TiVo (that has Canadian content).
Unsure how much faith to put in the online descriptions, I emailed one guy, got invited to his house, and can attest that it's true... at least in Ottawa. Too cool. I went home and won a tivo auction on ebay that night. (too early to say whether the machine actually makes it to me.);-)
Check out tivo_canada at yahoo groups for more info. (registration required) Me, I can hardly wait. It seems much better than the crap pvr expressvu has on offer.
You just brought back one of those embarrassing first job moments. Worse than selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, it was selling home pop-machines! Evil company called 'sodamistic', long-since-defunct, I'm sure.
A valuable formative experience in the sleazy world of hard-sell direct sales, it lets me watch movies like Tin Men or Boiler Room with an insider's appreciation, and more importantly, it taught me the importance of never ever letting a salesman inside your house. (Not that time-share group sales pitches are much better.)
For those who are interested, a google search for sodamistic turned up a minor reference in the comments section of this totally on-topic to this story web page: How to Make Your Own Carbonated Soda (Coke, Pepsi,...).
but they weren't all. I remember some, you-could-almost-say-beautiful, kaleidoscope themes. When I lived in Japan there were clubs where people would design clever and attractive ones. Floral patterns, space patterns, favourite cartoon characters, whatever...
It's hard thing to explain to someone whose idea of 'themes' comes from the microsoft default 'options', but the immediate and powerful impression you got when you saw a mac really decked-out with customizations like kaleidoscope was real. It was one of those things non-geeks could do that bullt a relationship with their machine. Sure, it sounds corny and belonging to the 'get-a-life' category, but it was one of those things that made people love their macs the way windows users rarely did.
Furthermore, they (kaleidoscope ultra-themes) were the one feature of the Mac I have never seen even remotely equalled outside the mac world. (I don't discount that it may have been done in the multi-window-manager world of the unices, but i've personally never seen the equivalents, and as far as windows? forget about it.)
Being able to customize their their interfaces, right down to the shapes and design of the scroll bars, the location of the close/windowshade buttons, the title bars... it let you feel your mac was truly yours. (And the smilely mac face gave a bit of personality, too.)
I think apple's new policy sucks. IMHO.
Re:choice / customization is a *GOOD* thing
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 2
I thought the same thing above when I saw a previous poster wrote "If I've read correctly the kde.dot text above".
You read the article?! Part of me wanted to scream "Narc!"
I swear this is the first time I've ever read a post on Slashdot that effectively says "Careful! You don't want to irritate Microsoft!":-)
Beyond that, I _do_ miss your point, you're right.
I don't know what you are talking about when you say they would require/control how it was done. Control what? How what was done? Control how their internal implentations are done? Why shouldn't they? What else could they control?
If the UK Industry Ministry or the Canadian Department of Fisheries for some reason deemed it in their interest to control open source... what could they do? Copyleft is copyleft. Beyond something destructive like disallowing clickwrap or shrinkwrap warranty disclaimers, (wait a minute, I think UCITA is already threatening to do that. What else?), what can anyone do that would harm the mechanism of copyleft, short of abolishing copyright?
I try not to make rash generalizations, but I'm tired, so what the hey: I find this level of government-phobia nuts and unsustainable logically. How is it that a government department buying closed source software would be any less subject to the constraints you mention?
Fine, fine. So, instead of "hire a small number of motivated and interested developers to work on contributing towards localization problems ", how about contract a small number of motivated and interested developers to work on contributing towards localization problems?
Perhaps there's a competent OSS developer out there somewhere who might be willing to take the gig for a few extra bucks? Or would the fact that they're willing to gasp! take money from the government de facto switch them from competent to trained monkey?
Re:best response to the incentives problem...
on
Open Source Limitations?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
oops. metaphorical corollary, not metaphysical corollary... That would be getting into a whole different realm of incentives, I think.:-)
By "public investment," do you mean from governments? In that case, your idea is flawed on several levels. First, the results, the open source software, would not be free as in beer. They would have been paid for with money seized from taxpayers, so if you have a job, you're paying for the software anyway, whether you want to use it or not.
Pick an average-sized government department in one of the major economies. Odds are, that department is currently spending a few million bucks a year for software licensing. Now, as a small experiment, imagine if just that department switched to OSS.
You'd likely see a drastic reduction in licensing fees. (90% sounds about right to me, but in reality I'm just making that number up.)
This isn't new expenditure... that department _already_ is spending that money. They are also already spending money on i.t. support. Take some given amount, say, 25% of the difference, and hire a small number of motivated and interested developers to work on contributing towards localization problems that may be unique to your department... and, for fun, contribute whatever they come up with back to the community. Couldn't hurt.
Yes, it is "public funding", and if those words make you cringe, well, so be it. It isn't by a long shot the same thing as calling for a department of software development, and it isn't the same thing as 'seizing' new money for OSS development. It's just one small way that some programmers might get remuneration for their work, and the commons of OSS could expand.
best response to the incentives problem...
on
Open Source Limitations?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The best response to the incentives problem for contributing to open source, imho, is not the usual boring ESR reputation benefits, but rather Eben Moglen's classic "metaphysical corollary."
"The dwarf's basic problem is that "incentives" is merely a metaphor, and as a metaphor to describe human creative activity it's pretty crummy. I have said this before, but the better metaphor arose on the day Michael Faraday first noticed what happened when he wrapped a coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet. Current flows in such a wire, but we don't ask what the incentive is for the electrons to leave home. We say that the current results from an emergent property of the system, which we call induction. The question we ask is "what's the resistance of the wire?" So Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone."
And then, even more fun, he adds: "The only question to ask is, what's the resistance of the network? Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Ohm's Law states that the resistance of the network is directly proportional to the field strength of the "intellectual property" system. So the right answer to the econodwarf is, resist the resistance."
The lone Peruvian congressman and his remarkable letter are impressive, sure... from the moment you started to read it you couldn't help but think that you were witness to an important contribution to the ongoing debates: a politician who actually got it.
But that's just the one guy. I'm not aware of any Peruvian laws or officially adopted policies in the open source direction. (Not proprosals, but actual official laws or policies.) I'm still hopeful, but I haven't seen any yet.
As for Mexico, I wish people would stop mentioning it at all as an open source success story. Fiasco more like. The article included the caveat that the installations may have been botched, but, it's worse than that. Not only did they supposedly botch those installations, but Microsoft stepped in with megabucks and bought out the threat. (I resisted the temptation to say 'bought out the officials'.) Mexico's vaunted i.t. initiative is going to be a Microsoft shop, set up with Microsoft money, on Microsoft's terms.
(lost the link, but if you want more information, ask Miguel. _He's_ the one who purportedly spoke to Vicente Fox about it all.)
Honestly, my first reaction was just like yours. But I think maybe both of us were missing a bit of the point... There is a connection with open source, however narrow. (Enough that I wouldn't call the comparison a sham.)
Open Source/ Free Software and the like are loaded terms, and 'open source' in particular is almost more of a basket of loosely-related phenomenon than it is a specific thing. (Open Source Definition not withstanding.)
Some of the things in that basket are itch-scratching and enriching the public domain, to be sure. But there are other things in that basket as well. One, which is receiving a fair amount of academic attention, is "peer-enabled content production". It may have to do with methodology instead of ideology, but the open source movements have provided much of its source material.
So, was this contest "open source"? Well... there was open access to the known 'source' data of the mine. Is that enough for it to be open source? Maybe not. But it's enough for a comparison, imho. Was it peer-enabled production? Well... the winning entry was (I think) actually a collaboration of two teams, and they were 'peered' with the mine company halfway around the world. Enough for the label? I dunno. But sham seems too harsh.
Reading over the articles, I can't help but feel that the Atkinson article doesn't deserve the attention and response. It's more of a sound-bite recitation of the pro-intellectual-propertization CopyRighteousness than it is a reasoned analysis.
My favourite two bits:
1- from the Mission Statement of Atkinson's "Progress and Freedom Foundation"... The sentence which begins "The Foundation's public policy work brings a market-oriented, pro-technology perspective" is said without any sense of irony. Didn't copyright start out as a tool for government censorship? Is prohibiting study and reverse engineering of code really either pro-technology or pro-market?
2- from the article itself: "But "we" act through highly imperfect governmental institutions, subject to influence by the very corporations that Lessig distrusts. Worse yet, as Lessig himself has recognized, these institutions tend to be bureaucratic, resistant to innovation, and insufficiently flexible to respond in Internet time." Speaking of bureaucratic and insufficiently flexible, how about still discussing/framing the issue in 2002 based on what we thought, back in 1995, that the future would be (aka: information wants to be free, internet routes around censorship,...) instead of what it is increasingly apparent the future will actually be, (aka: more and more content encrypted and accessible only on the extremely restrictive licensing terms of the major content-owning conglomerates.) And the "we act through highly imperfect governmental institutions" bit, too, as if the DMCA or even copyright itself weren't acting through those same institutions! Man.
Wait a minute, I fell for it too. Doh! My apologies to Miller. Respond-away.
If you enter the following into a.txt file, rename it to a.reg file, then double-click it, you can have your internet explorer "I'm feeling lucky" address bar. --Well, almost-- Actually you must type: . searchterms (aka: period space searchterms)
Say whatever else you want to about him, but you've got to give RMS this: selling free software (including linux) on the basis of anything other than freedom is risky business.
I remember once, just out of highschool with an awful sales job, (for home pop machines, if you can believe it), my sleazy boss used to always say: never try to sell people on cost. They'll get bogged down with numbers and you'll never make the sale. Sell them on xxxx (in that case convenience) and let people work out the numbers for themselves. His logic was that numbers were easy to fudge when you're trying to rationalize something, and better they play around to get the numbers to make themselves happy than they catch you playing around with them.
In the context of free software, the same logic almost holds:
-for a big enough or strategic enough account, you can't beat MSFT on financial terms. That is, they can always either reduce/forgoe the licensing fees or heck, _pay you_ to use the stuff if they want it badly enough. (Just ask Miguel about Vicente Fox and the Mexican initiative.) You can't, (well, _I_ can't), outbid Microsoft.
-on technical merit, they can argue any particular point into the ground, or even, for big enough or strategic enough cases, find what's broken and 'fix' it. (gasp)
But sell freedom and you're onto something. (You _may_ even have people/past-victims making the technical/financial arguments for themselves.) The best part is that, when they use sledgehammers like the BSA, MSFT make the case for you.
Try as they might, MSFT is going to have a hard time erasing the memory of these audits/sales-tools from the overworked/underfunded school systems. Sure, they let you slide on the licensing now... but stick with them and you'll never be free of the threat of the audit. (And that whether you're in compliance or not.)
He did, uh, link to his article in case you cared enough to think "huh?" and post a comment.
"We want it in part because for most of us, TV advertising is a terrible financial deal. The TV network charges the advertiser only around a penny for each viewer, sometimes less. That means a penny for 30 seconds of my attention, or $1.20 for an hour of it. "
Sunday was a great day for reading intelligent and insightful commentary on Free Software and Copyleft.
First, I got up to read the letter mentioned here. (Was that really the congressman who penned that?? Wow. In any event, what a very nice read.)
Next, I go to the bookstore and stumble across: Free, as in Speech and Beer, absolutey without peer as the _best_ most insightful book on copyleft and free software and its implications that I have yet read. (And I've read a bunch of them.)
The strangest thing: I'd never even heard of it. It was just sitting there on the new releases.
Read the letter above, then go and buy the book, too. On both counts you will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of discourse taking place on the topics we all care about. (Something you don't always get from/. comments.)
The book doesn't appear to be at Amazon yet, but what the hey... Canadian dollars are cheap! (The link above is to the Canadian equivalent of Amazon/B&N)
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. It's not so much a question of whether they get the top space on the results page for free, though, as the fact that they are guaranteeing it to themselves. Nobody else has a shot.
Now that you bring it up, I think the analogy with leveraging a desktop pseudo-monopoly to leveraging a search pseudo-monopoly is not completely off-base.
I still haven't decided if I care, though. The Google has built up a lot of goodwill over the years.
Absolutely. I wasn't disagreeing with you... just trying to help show why there was a difference in the oft-quoted 50% tax-rate and the one you were quoting.
To make a fair comparison, I guess you'd have to find an american think-tank that calculates the same sort of tax burden indicator and use that.
(And beyond that, as you point out, you should really make sure that the tax burden measured would be applicable to your lifestyle. i.e., how much of your income do you spend on alcohol, cigarettes, etc.)
When you hear 50% tax rates, they are including all the ways the government taxes us, not just income tax.
"[This calculator includes] all taxes from all levels of government that Canadians pay. This includes: income & sales taxes; liquor, tobacco, amusement & other excise taxes; automobile, fuel, & motor vehicle licence taxes; CPP/QPP and EI contributions, medical & hospital taxes; property taxes; import duties; profit taxes; and natural resource levies"
You can find the Fraser Institute (right-wing thinktank) tax freedom calculator here. Just did mine (for Ontario) and it turned out to be almost exactly 50%.
The Ontario school board used Word Perfect in the past, which made sense, giving money to an Ontario company. I don't know why they didn't just use OpenOffice now
You might just have answered your own question. Last I heard, (could be out-of-date now), OpenOffice had no wordperfect filters, but Star Office did. Legacy documents, anyone?
From the Lessig blog December 19:
Posner is a friend. I was his clerk. But the best thing about being his clerk is that he does his own writing, which means the clerk's job is just to disagree. But in the area of copyright and patent, I've found less and less to disagree with. Indeed, if you want a brilliant and balanced analysis of a wide range of IP issues, from the perspective of economics, see his (and Professor Landes') latest book, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law.
I haven't read it yet, but am eagerly awaiting its arrival from interlibrary loan.
No, the tower is not for self defense (what!??!?!) or to dry yourself (as indeed hotels do provide towels last time I checked) For the unenlightened, this is from South Park (S5E8 - 8 Aug 01 - Towelie) http://www.tvtome.com/SouthPark/season5.html#ep73
:-)
Let's not be too hasty. There's nothing wrong with "wetting a towel for use in hand-to-hand combat".
Still, thanks for the enlightenment.
How often do you sit in front of the TV and listen to MP3s?
:-)
Never, so far... Hence, the question.
I've been thinking the same thing for a while... but last week stumbled upon the fact that there are a bunch of folks up here with 'relatively' (if hacked) normal/working TiVo (that has Canadian content).
;-)
Unsure how much faith to put in the online descriptions, I emailed one guy, got invited to his house, and can attest that it's true... at least in Ottawa. Too cool. I went home and won a tivo auction on ebay that night. (too early to say whether the machine actually makes it to me.)
Check out tivo_canada at yahoo groups for more info. (registration required) Me, I can hardly wait. It seems much better than the crap pvr expressvu has on offer.
You just brought back one of those embarrassing first job moments. Worse than selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, it was selling home pop-machines! Evil company called 'sodamistic', long-since-defunct, I'm sure.
...).
A valuable formative experience in the sleazy world of hard-sell direct sales, it lets me watch movies like Tin Men or Boiler Room with an insider's appreciation, and more importantly, it taught me the importance of never ever letting a salesman inside your house. (Not that time-share group sales pitches are much better.)
For those who are interested, a google search for sodamistic turned up a minor reference in the comments section of this totally on-topic to this story web page: How to Make Your Own Carbonated Soda (Coke, Pepsi,
Most Kaleidoscope interfaces were ugly as sin...
but they weren't all. I remember some, you-could-almost-say-beautiful, kaleidoscope themes. When I lived in Japan there were clubs where people would design clever and attractive ones. Floral patterns, space patterns, favourite cartoon characters, whatever...
It's hard thing to explain to someone whose idea of 'themes' comes from the microsoft default 'options', but the immediate and powerful impression you got when you saw a mac really decked-out with customizations like kaleidoscope was real. It was one of those things non-geeks could do that bullt a relationship with their machine. Sure, it sounds corny and belonging to the 'get-a-life' category, but it was one of those things that made people love their macs the way windows users rarely did.
Furthermore, they (kaleidoscope ultra-themes) were the one feature of the Mac I have never seen even remotely equalled outside the mac world. (I don't discount that it may have been done in the multi-window-manager world of the unices, but i've personally never seen the equivalents, and as far as windows? forget about it.)
Being able to customize their their interfaces, right down to the shapes and design of the scroll bars, the location of the close/windowshade buttons, the title bars... it let you feel your mac was truly yours. (And the smilely mac face gave a bit of personality, too.)
I think apple's new policy sucks. IMHO.
I thought the same thing above when I saw a previous poster wrote "If I've read correctly the kde.dot text above".
You read the article?! Part of me wanted to scream "Narc!"
I swear this is the first time I've ever read a post on Slashdot that effectively says "Careful! You don't want to irritate Microsoft!" :-)
Beyond that, I _do_ miss your point, you're right.
I don't know what you are talking about when you say they would require/control how it was done. Control what? How what was done? Control how their internal implentations are done? Why shouldn't they? What else could they control?
If the UK Industry Ministry or the Canadian Department of Fisheries for some reason deemed it in their interest to control open source... what could they do? Copyleft is copyleft. Beyond something destructive like disallowing clickwrap or shrinkwrap warranty disclaimers, (wait a minute, I think UCITA is already threatening to do that. What else?), what can anyone do that would harm the mechanism of copyleft, short of abolishing copyright?
I try not to make rash generalizations, but I'm tired, so what the hey: I find this level of government-phobia nuts and unsustainable logically. How is it that a government department buying closed source software would be any less subject to the constraints you mention?
Fine, fine.
So, instead of "hire a small number of motivated and interested developers to work on contributing towards localization problems ", how about contract a small number of motivated and interested developers to work on contributing towards localization problems?
Perhaps there's a competent OSS developer out there somewhere who might be willing to take the gig for a few extra bucks? Or would the fact that they're willing to gasp! take money from the government de facto switch them from competent to trained monkey?
oops. metaphorical corollary, not metaphysical corollary... That would be getting into a whole different realm of incentives, I think. :-)
By "public investment," do you mean from governments? In that case, your idea is flawed on several levels. First, the results, the open source software, would not be free as in beer. They would have been paid for with money seized from taxpayers, so if you have a job, you're paying for the software anyway, whether you want to use it or not.
Pick an average-sized government department in one of the major economies. Odds are, that department is currently spending a few million bucks a year for software licensing. Now, as a small experiment, imagine if just that department switched to OSS.
You'd likely see a drastic reduction in licensing fees. (90% sounds about right to me, but in reality I'm just making that number up.)
This isn't new expenditure... that department _already_ is spending that money. They are also already spending money on i.t. support.
Take some given amount, say, 25% of the difference, and hire a small number of motivated and interested developers to work on contributing towards localization problems that may be unique to your department... and, for fun, contribute whatever they come up with back to the community. Couldn't hurt.
Yes, it is "public funding", and if those words make you cringe, well, so be it. It isn't by a long shot the same thing as calling for a department of software development, and it isn't the same thing as 'seizing' new money for OSS development. It's just one small way that some programmers might get remuneration for their work, and the commons of OSS could expand.
The best response to the incentives problem for contributing to open source, imho, is not the usual boring ESR reputation benefits, but rather Eben Moglen's classic "metaphysical corollary."
"The dwarf's basic problem is that "incentives" is merely a metaphor, and as a metaphor to describe human creative activity it's pretty crummy. I have said this before, but the better metaphor arose on the day Michael Faraday first noticed what happened when he wrapped a coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet. Current flows in such a wire, but we don't ask what the incentive is for the electrons to leave home. We say that the current results from an emergent property of the system, which we call induction. The question we ask is "what's the resistance of the wire?" So Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone."
And then, even more fun, he adds:
"The only question to ask is, what's the resistance of the network? Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Ohm's Law states that the resistance of the network is directly proportional to the field strength of the "intellectual property" system. So the right answer to the econodwarf is, resist the resistance."
Brilliant.
Not so fast.
The lone Peruvian congressman and his remarkable letter are impressive, sure... from the moment you started to read it you couldn't help but think that you were witness to an important contribution to the ongoing debates: a politician who actually got it.
But that's just the one guy. I'm not aware of any Peruvian laws or officially adopted policies in the open source direction. (Not proprosals, but actual official laws or policies.) I'm still hopeful, but I haven't seen any yet.
As for Mexico, I wish people would stop mentioning it at all as an open source success story. Fiasco more like. The article included the caveat that the installations may have been botched, but, it's worse than that. Not only did they supposedly botch those installations, but Microsoft stepped in with megabucks and bought out the threat. (I resisted the temptation to say 'bought out the officials'.) Mexico's vaunted i.t. initiative is going to be a Microsoft shop, set up with Microsoft money, on Microsoft's terms.
(lost the link, but if you want more information, ask Miguel. _He's_ the one who purportedly spoke to Vicente Fox about it all.)
-1, We've heard this comment or a slight variation of it a thousand times, please stop repeating it
Uh, "-1, Redundant" ??
Bang on for the other two, though.
"All your base are belong to us."
(How much do you want to bet?)
Honestly, my first reaction was just like yours. But I think maybe both of us were missing a bit of the point... There is a connection with open source, however narrow. (Enough that I wouldn't call the comparison a sham.)
Open Source/ Free Software and the like are loaded terms, and 'open source' in particular is almost more of a basket of loosely-related phenomenon than it is a specific thing. (Open Source Definition not withstanding.)
Some of the things in that basket are itch-scratching and enriching the public domain, to be sure. But there are other things in that basket as well. One, which is receiving a fair amount of academic attention, is "peer-enabled content production". It may have to do with methodology instead of ideology, but the open source movements have provided much of its source material.
So, was this contest "open source"? Well... there was open access to the known 'source' data of the mine. Is that enough for it to be open source? Maybe not. But it's enough for a comparison, imho. Was it peer-enabled production? Well... the winning entry was (I think) actually a collaboration of two teams, and they were 'peered' with the mine company halfway around the world. Enough for the label? I dunno. But sham seems too harsh.
Reading over the articles, I can't help but feel that the Atkinson article doesn't deserve the attention and response. It's more of a sound-bite recitation of the pro-intellectual-propertization CopyRighteousness than it is a reasoned analysis.
...) instead of what it is increasingly apparent the future will actually be, (aka: more and more content encrypted and accessible only on the extremely restrictive licensing terms of the major content-owning conglomerates.) And the "we act through highly imperfect governmental institutions" bit, too, as if the DMCA or even copyright itself weren't acting through those same institutions! Man.
My favourite two bits:
1- from the Mission Statement of Atkinson's "Progress and Freedom Foundation"...
The sentence which begins "The Foundation's public policy work brings a market-oriented, pro-technology perspective" is said without any sense of irony. Didn't copyright start out as a tool for government censorship? Is prohibiting study and reverse engineering of code really either pro-technology or pro-market?
2- from the article itself:
"But "we" act through highly imperfect governmental institutions, subject to influence by the very corporations that Lessig distrusts. Worse yet, as Lessig himself has recognized, these institutions tend to be bureaucratic, resistant to innovation, and insufficiently flexible to respond in Internet time." Speaking of bureaucratic and insufficiently flexible, how about still discussing/framing the issue in 2002 based on what we thought, back in 1995, that the future would be (aka: information wants to be free, internet routes around censorship,
Wait a minute, I fell for it too. Doh!
My apologies to Miller. Respond-away.
If you enter the following into a .txt file, rename it to a .reg file, then double-click it, you can have your internet explorer "I'm feeling lucky" address bar.
e arch?btnI=I&q=%s"
--Well, almost-- Actually you must type:
. searchterms
(aka: period space searchterms)
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\.]
@="http://www.google.com/s
" "="+"
"#"="%23"
"&"="%26"
"?"="%3F"
"+"="%2B"
"="="%3D"
Say whatever else you want to about him, but you've got to give RMS this: selling free software (including linux) on the basis of anything other than freedom is risky business.
I remember once, just out of highschool with an awful sales job, (for home pop machines, if you can believe it), my sleazy boss used to always say: never try to sell people on cost. They'll get bogged down with numbers and you'll never make the sale. Sell them on xxxx (in that case convenience) and let people work out the numbers for themselves. His logic was that numbers were easy to fudge when you're trying to rationalize something, and better they play around to get the numbers to make themselves happy than they catch you playing around with them.
In the context of free software, the same logic almost holds:
-for a big enough or strategic enough account, you can't beat MSFT on financial terms. That is, they can always either reduce/forgoe the licensing fees or heck, _pay you_ to use the stuff if they want it badly enough. (Just ask Miguel about Vicente Fox and the Mexican initiative.) You can't, (well, _I_ can't), outbid Microsoft.
-on technical merit, they can argue any particular point into the ground, or even, for big enough or strategic enough cases, find what's broken and 'fix' it. (gasp)
But sell freedom and you're onto something. (You _may_ even have people/past-victims making the technical/financial arguments for themselves.) The best part is that, when they use sledgehammers like the BSA, MSFT make the case for you.
Try as they might, MSFT is going to have a hard time erasing the memory of these audits/sales-tools from the overworked/underfunded school systems. Sure, they let you slide on the licensing now... but stick with them and you'll never be free of the threat of the audit. (And that whether you're in compliance or not.)
He did, uh, link to his article in case you cared enough to think "huh?" and post a comment.
"We want it in part because for most of us, TV advertising is a terrible financial deal. The TV network charges the advertiser only around a penny for each viewer, sometimes less. That means a penny for 30 seconds of my attention, or $1.20 for an hour of it. "
Sunday was a great day for reading intelligent and insightful commentary on Free Software and Copyleft.
/. comments.)
First, I got up to read the letter mentioned here. (Was that really the congressman who penned that?? Wow. In any event, what a very nice read.)
Next, I go to the bookstore and stumble across:
Free, as in Speech and Beer, absolutey without peer as the _best_ most insightful book on copyleft and free software and its implications that I have yet read.
(And I've read a bunch of them.)
The strangest thing: I'd never even heard of it. It was just sitting there on the new releases.
Read the letter above, then go and buy the book, too. On both counts you will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of discourse taking place on the topics we all care about. (Something you don't always get from
The book doesn't appear to be at Amazon yet, but what the hey... Canadian dollars are cheap! (The link above is to the Canadian equivalent of Amazon/B&N)