In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidising the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money.
Who would pay $600 for what essentially is an off-the-shelf PC with a custom shaped case. I can build the same thing with off the shelf components for under $400.
Probably the same people who pay $1000 to buy a computer from Dell/Gateway/Compaq instead of just building one themselves from off-the-shelf components for under $700.
They have every right to go after those who did pirate software.
Indeed they do, and I would support them if they were actually "go[ing] after those who did pirate software." But they're not. They're going after the makers of a utility that could be useful to people who pirate software.
When someone breaks into your house with a crowbar, do you sue the crowbar manufacturer?
Thanks for the usual April Fools Day flame- every year people fall for it. It never ceases to amaze me how angry and venomous, yet utterly clueless a few people can be despite the blatant obviousness of the joke.
Ohhhh, I see. You posted one April Fool's story after another, abondaoning all subtlety and thus destroying all the humor intentionally? You did it just so you could sit back and watch people flame you?
Internet culture has a word for people like you. The word is "troll."
Because the Democrats could do the same thing using Enron and other companies. You act like only the Democrats are puppets. Doing that would be commiting suicide for the republicians because the democrats will do the same thing, and both sides will lose out to a third party.
Enron isn't really relevant to the lives of most voters -- or at least they don't think it's relevant, which amounts to the same thing for political purposes. The collapse of Enron really has no effect on the life of the average American.
The CBDTPA, on the other hand, has the potential to directly affect the lives of anyone who buys a new VCR, computer, TV, MP3 player, car stereo, etc, etc. -- basically damn near everyone.
If it comes down to an Enron strategy for the Democrats versus a CBDTPA strategy for the Republicans, the Republicans have the advantage. And since there's no third party that's even close to winning a single Senate seat, I doubt that anyone would be pulling their punches.
The following is the letter I sent to my two Senators today. If you'd like to copy any part of it for your own letter to your Senators, please feel free. (I recommend not copying the signature unless your name is also "Adam Smith".)
Tips from the EFF on contacting your elected officials can be found here.
March 25, 2002
Office of Senator Edward Kennedy 315 Russell Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 (202)224-2742
Dear Senator Kennedy,
As one of your constituents in the state of Massachusetts, I am writing to express my grave concern over the recently-introduced Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (S.2048, sposored by Sen. Ernest Hollings.) I believe this bill will harm both consumers and technology industries, especially within Massachusetts.
The intent of the bill seems to be to require manufacturers of electronic equipment and computer software to include "Digital Rights Management" technology in all products. By doing so, the bill would assuredly cause the prices of consumer electronics, including computers, to increase. At the same time, the DRM technology would reduce the usefulness of these devices for those who want to make copies of legally acquired content for their own personal use. Thus, under the CBDTPA, consumers would be paying more money for less powerful equipment.
Furthermore, requiring DRM in all electronics and computer software will make business more costly for high-tech firms. The effects of this cost increase will fall disproportionately on smaller firms, especially start-ups. It's these small companies that most often drive innovation in technology. By harming small companies and start-ups, the bill in question would retard innovation in high-tech industries, weakening America's strong position in the global technology race. This is a special concern for Massachusetts, which is home to a large concentration of high-tech companies.
I understand that the entertainment industry thinks it needs DRM on every electronic device in order to protect its profits. However, I don't belive Congress should take action to protect an industry that has shown no interest in adapting itself to a new technological reality. I certainly think it would be foolish to risk the health of a strong technology sector in order to prop up the fat cats in Hollywood.
I have yet to see a public statement from you or your office regarding this bill. For the reasons I've outline above, I strongly urge you to oppose it. I would appreciate hearing your position on this issue.
Sincerely,
Adam Smith
(An identical letter was sent to Sen. John Kerry.)
Would this really be all that interesting? Personally, have access to raw footage isn't all that appealing. It's not like open source software where i can change the code and actually change the functionality. Just seems rather pointless to me.
What you programmers forget sometimes is that for 99% of Free/Open-Source Software users, having the source code is equally pointless. We don't have the programming skills to make use of it.
But we do recieve a lot of ancilliary benefits from having the source code available. Most of them have to do with the fact that other people who are skilled programmers can look at the code, modify it, and re-use it. Eventually, the result is better software for the rest of us. This is why I support open-source/free software, even though I can't code my way out of a paper bag.
Similarly, having the raw footage to the Cringley Show won't be directly useful to me, but it will allow other people to:
Watch the raw footage and verify that Cringley isn't twisting the guests' words around with sneaky editing. If he is, and they can prove it, I'll probably hear about it.
Edit the raw footage themselves to come up new cuts of the show, which may be more interesting/appealing to me than the original. I can envision a situation where one person regularly re-mixes Cringley's raw footage, and that person's cuts become more popular with certain people than the "official" version of the show.
Re-use the raw footage in other contexts, perhaps as part of a documentary, which I might later watch.
Don't just think about whether you can make use of the source footage directly, think about what other people can do with it, and how you might benefit from that.
Three pages, handwritten (and I've got a real bitch of a hand cramp, too.)
Points I touched on (feel free to borrow these, to whatever extent they apply to you):
I don't buy much of what comes out of the entertainment industry these days, since I don't find most of it interesting.
I do spend a lot of time using computers and other electronics.
Under CBDTPA, I will be paying more money for inferior hardware (e.g., processor power siphoned off to look for copyrighted content), which pisses me off. (Not that exact phrase, though.)
I'll be doing the above in order to prop up an industry I couldn't care less about (Big Media)
CBDTPA will raise the barriers to entry for startup companies, inhibiting innovation in tech industries.
The above is a special concern for a tech-heavy state like Massachussetts.
I've always liked you in the past, John. It'd be a shame if I couldn't like you after this. Sincerely, blah blah blah
To save you a lookup:
Senator John Kerry 304 Russell Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510
I will not retract my statement. RMS wants all software code to be open under terms such as GPL. The code is the ONLY THING that a small company or independant programmer owns. And I think they have the right to own that code and keep it private if they so choose.
Again, factually incorrect. Stallman and the FSF have always supported the right of authors to keep their code private and not release it at all. In fact, the FSF objected to Apple's license for the free portions of OSX, because the license said that the source code had to be made available for any deployed version of the software, rather than any published version of the software. Stallman has always held that authors should have the right to keep their code private if they wish.
What Stallman and the FSF object to is publishing/selling software and then restricting the freedom of those you sell it to to use it how they wish.
You're zero for two so far, buddy. If you're interested in debating Stallman's opinions, I suggest you do some reading and find out what they actually are.
Why would MS complain about Sony unless they did something to provoke it?
Why would MS crush Netscape unless they did something to provoke it?
I know that you shouldn't assume that Microsoft always behaves like a bunch of jerks. But the thing is that when you assume Microsoft is just being a bunch of jerks, most of the time you wind up being right.
Who remembers CD caddies? And how much you hated them? Why would you want to go back to that?
Caddies made sense if you had several and you needed to switch CDs in your drive frequently. With six caddies, you could put each of your five most frequently used CDs in its own caddy. Then, when you want to change, you eject one caddy and slap another in. No opening jewelboxes, no delicately handlind a CD by the edge, no carefully placing it in a tray. Just eject and insert. Simple as a floppy. And back in the days when a 100Mb hard drive was considered big, people did a lot of CD-swapping.
The problem is that the drive manufacturers decided to shave a few bucks off the price of a drive by only including one caddy with the drive. Thus, instead of making things easier, the single caddy actually made things harder, because in addition to opening the jewelbox, etc, you now had to open the caddy each time and gingerly insert the CD. No surprise that people jumped at motorized trays when they finally appeared.
Nowadays, of course, hard drives can hold a hundred CDs worth of data on them, so no one needs to swap CDs much anymore.
The truly odd thing about the ruling is what happened later in the process. When the ruling was later challenged, the Supreme Court upheld it on the principle of not changing old rulings even though they agreed that the old ruling made no sense . In essence they said that the ruling was stupid, they were going to let it stand anyway, but Congress was free to write new legislation to include baseball in federal antitrust law.
Judges will often decide what they think is right based on their own biases, and then try to come up with a legal argument to support their view. Remeber the "Yelling fire in a crowded theater" argument? That was invented by Oliver Wendell Holmes to support the conviction of a man arrested for distributing anti-war literature during World War I, the argument being that speaking out against the war constituted a clear and present danger to the United States.
The reason he (and now you) was clueless is nothing to do with licensing vs. purchasing. Unless of course you claim that once you purchase a game or other copyrighted work, you "own" it and can then resell it to all your acquaintances.
I most certainly can sell my copy of the game to one friend, by giving him my original copy of the game, deleting it from my hard drive, and destroying any other copies I've made. Anything else would be violating Blizzard's copyright. I can own a book without having copyright on the contents, and I can own a game without having copyright on the game.
Of course, your use of the word "twat" suggests to me that you're not really interested in an intelligent debate as much as you're interested in name-calling.
Communism and capitalism are different economic systems, but what they have in common is that they are meant to be applied to systems of physical goods. Physical goods are limited in quantity; e.g. if you sell me a car, you no longer have the car yourself.
Software, like any information, is different. I can sell you a copy of a program I wrote while still having my own copy. To my knowledge, neither the communist nor the capitalist model address goods that can be replicated at zero (or near-zero) cost.
Capitalism uses money to reward production and allow consumption. Communism asks people to produce what they can and consume what they need. Free/Open Source Software allows people to produce however much they want and consume whatever they like. (Pity it only works with bits.)
You two seem to be arguing slightly different things.
What Mundie was saying, as I understand it, is that the GPL is bad because it prevents companies commercializing the GPL'd code. In other words, Mundie claims that when someone releases code under the GPL, it's bad for the economy and society as a whole. This is the assertion that CDWert is arguing against. He's not saying that the GPL is the best license for everyone to use, he's saying that people who release code under the GPL aren't harming anyone else.
Voyagers 1 and 2, on the other hand, are headed for the heliopause. The heliopause is where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium. The ISM is probably quite different than the energetic particles the sun spews out. They should be out into interstellar space in the near future (less than 10 years). The good news is, they're still operating well! Voyager 2 is unfortuantely running low on propellant, though.
What does Voyager 2 need propellant for? If it's heading out toward heliopause, won't it keep moving that direction forever? I'm sure it must be using propellant if it's "running low", and I'm sure there must be a reason for that. Just curious about what it's actually doing with the propellant. Attitude adjustments, maybe?
The Open Source community started out ignoring Microsoft. Then, they laughed at Microsoft. Now they're fighting Microsoft.
So does this mean that eventually Microsoft will win too?
I mean, I'm just curious here. Or does that quote only apply when it's working the way you want it to work?
Stop with the black & white thinking. Accept that there is such a thing as shades of gray. It's much healthier.
Well, since Gandhi spent most of his life fighting against an entrenched power structure, I would think the quote is probably more applicable to OSS than to Microsoft.
At any rate, why don't you take the broomstick out of your ass and lighten up a bit? I think my last sentence ("Come on, Gandhi, don't fail us now.") should have made it clear that it was mostly a joke.
But the majority of that is support, and boxed versions. That's different. I said on the software itself. I mean yea free software, but to quote Douglas Adams, "It doesn't exactly buy lunch"
Really? Can you only buy food with money that comes directly from selling the software itself?
Slashdot Mirror
Libertarians would let you decide for yourself whether you should use open software or not.
Authoritarians (like RMS) want to decide for you.
No, he's said he's not interested in outlawing proprietary software. He just wants to make it obsolete by creating better free software.
Libertarians would let you decide for yourself what to charge for your services and products.
Authoritarians (like RMS) want to decide for you.
Wrong again. The FSF encourages the selling of software.
TheFrood
Another good zinger:
In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidising the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money.
This guy is sharp.
Who would pay $600 for what essentially is an off-the-shelf PC with a custom shaped case. I can build the same thing with off the shelf components for under $400.
Probably the same people who pay $1000 to buy a computer from Dell/Gateway/Compaq instead of just building one themselves from off-the-shelf components for under $700.
TheFrood
They have every right to go after those who did pirate software.
Indeed they do, and I would support them if they were actually "go[ing] after those who did pirate software." But they're not. They're going after the makers of a utility that could be useful to people who pirate software.
When someone breaks into your house with a crowbar, do you sue the crowbar manufacturer?
TheFrood
Thanks for the usual April Fools Day flame- every year people fall for it. It never ceases to amaze me how angry and venomous, yet utterly clueless a few people can be despite the blatant obviousness of the joke.
Ohhhh, I see. You posted one April Fool's story after another, abondaoning all subtlety and thus destroying all the humor intentionally? You did it just so you could sit back and watch people flame you?
Internet culture has a word for people like you. The word is "troll."
TheFrood
Because the Democrats could do the same thing using Enron and other companies. You act like only the Democrats are puppets. Doing that would be commiting suicide for the republicians because the democrats will do the same thing, and both sides will lose out to a third party.
Enron isn't really relevant to the lives of most voters -- or at least they don't think it's relevant, which amounts to the same thing for political purposes. The collapse of Enron really has no effect on the life of the average American.
The CBDTPA, on the other hand, has the potential to directly affect the lives of anyone who buys a new VCR, computer, TV, MP3 player, car stereo, etc, etc. -- basically damn near everyone.
If it comes down to an Enron strategy for the Democrats versus a CBDTPA strategy for the Republicans, the Republicans have the advantage. And since there's no third party that's even close to winning a single Senate seat, I doubt that anyone would be pulling their punches.
TheFrood
Yeah, they're so disbanded that they've just finished putting up a new website.
Idiot.
TheFrood
Interesting you signed it with the name Adam Smith (the noted moral philosopher and advocate of free trading).
"Adam Smith" is indeed the name of a noted economist. It's also my name.
TheFrood
and MS won't penalise OEM's for giving you free anti-virus software.
Whch isn't a replacement for an operating system. If they try to give you Linux or BeOS, that's a different story.
TheFrood
Helpful links:
(An identical letter was sent to Sen. John Kerry.)
What you programmers forget sometimes is that for 99% of Free/Open-Source Software users, having the source code is equally pointless. We don't have the programming skills to make use of it.
But we do recieve a lot of ancilliary benefits from having the source code available. Most of them have to do with the fact that other people who are skilled programmers can look at the code, modify it, and re-use it. Eventually, the result is better software for the rest of us. This is why I support open-source/free software, even though I can't code my way out of a paper bag.
Similarly, having the raw footage to the Cringley Show won't be directly useful to me, but it will allow other people to:
Don't just think about whether you can make use of the source footage directly, think about what other people can do with it, and how you might benefit from that.
TheFrood
Points I touched on (feel free to borrow these, to whatever extent they apply to you):
To save you a lookup:
Senator John Kerry
304 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Tomorrow I'm going to hit Kennedy.
TheFrood
I will not retract my statement. RMS wants all software code to be open under terms such as GPL. The code is the ONLY THING that a small company or independant programmer owns. And I think they have the right to own that code and keep it private if they so choose.
Again, factually incorrect. Stallman and the FSF have always supported the right of authors to keep their code private and not release it at all. In fact, the FSF objected to Apple's license for the free portions of OSX, because the license said that the source code had to be made available for any deployed version of the software, rather than any published version of the software. Stallman has always held that authors should have the right to keep their code private if they wish.
What Stallman and the FSF object to is publishing/selling software and then restricting the freedom of those you sell it to to use it how they wish.
You're zero for two so far, buddy. If you're interested in debating Stallman's opinions, I suggest you do some reading and find out what they actually are.
TheFrood
Why would MS complain about Sony unless they did something to provoke it?
Why would MS crush Netscape unless they did something to provoke it?
I know that you shouldn't assume that Microsoft always behaves like a bunch of jerks. But the thing is that when you assume Microsoft is just being a bunch of jerks, most of the time you wind up being right.
TheFrood
Who remembers CD caddies? And how much you hated them? Why would you want to go back to that?
Caddies made sense if you had several and you needed to switch CDs in your drive frequently. With six caddies, you could put each of your five most frequently used CDs in its own caddy. Then, when you want to change, you eject one caddy and slap another in. No opening jewelboxes, no delicately handlind a CD by the edge, no carefully placing it in a tray. Just eject and insert. Simple as a floppy. And back in the days when a 100Mb hard drive was considered big, people did a lot of CD-swapping.
The problem is that the drive manufacturers decided to shave a few bucks off the price of a drive by only including one caddy with the drive. Thus, instead of making things easier, the single caddy actually made things harder, because in addition to opening the jewelbox, etc, you now had to open the caddy each time and gingerly insert the CD. No surprise that people jumped at motorized trays when they finally appeared.
Nowadays, of course, hard drives can hold a hundred CDs worth of data on them, so no one needs to swap CDs much anymore.
TheFrood
The truly odd thing about the ruling is what happened later in the process. When the ruling was later challenged, the Supreme Court upheld it on the principle of not changing old rulings even though they agreed that the old ruling made no sense . In essence they said that the ruling was stupid, they were going to let it stand anyway, but Congress was free to write new legislation to include baseball in federal antitrust law.
Judges will often decide what they think is right based on their own biases, and then try to come up with a legal argument to support their view. Remeber the "Yelling fire in a crowded theater" argument? That was invented by Oliver Wendell Holmes to support the conviction of a man arrested for distributing anti-war literature during World War I, the argument being that speaking out against the war constituted a clear and present danger to the United States.
TheFrood
Try Caspi vs. Microsoft, I testified in that one, dumbass.
Really? Did you use the word "dumbass" in your testimony? Did you testify under the name l33t_j03?
TheFrood
The reason he (and now you) was clueless is nothing to do with licensing vs. purchasing. Unless of course you claim that once you purchase a game or other copyrighted work, you "own" it and can then resell it to all your acquaintances.
I most certainly can sell my copy of the game to one friend, by giving him my original copy of the game, deleting it from my hard drive, and destroying any other copies I've made. Anything else would be violating Blizzard's copyright. I can own a book without having copyright on the contents, and I can own a game without having copyright on the game.
Of course, your use of the word "twat" suggests to me that you're not really interested in an intelligent debate as much as you're interested in name-calling.
TheFrood
Communism and capitalism are different economic systems, but what they have in common is that they are meant to be applied to systems of physical goods. Physical goods are limited in quantity; e.g. if you sell me a car, you no longer have the car yourself.
Software, like any information, is different. I can sell you a copy of a program I wrote while still having my own copy. To my knowledge, neither the communist nor the capitalist model address goods that can be replicated at zero (or near-zero) cost.
Capitalism uses money to reward production and allow consumption. Communism asks people to produce what they can and consume what they need. Free/Open Source Software allows people to produce however much they want and consume whatever they like. (Pity it only works with bits.)
TheFrood
You two seem to be arguing slightly different things.
What Mundie was saying, as I understand it, is that the GPL is bad because it prevents companies commercializing the GPL'd code. In other words, Mundie claims that when someone releases code under the GPL, it's bad for the economy and society as a whole. This is the assertion that CDWert is arguing against. He's not saying that the GPL is the best license for everyone to use, he's saying that people who release code under the GPL aren't harming anyone else.
TheFrood
Voyagers 1 and 2, on the other hand, are headed for the heliopause. The heliopause is where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium. The ISM is probably quite different than the energetic particles the sun spews out. They should be out into interstellar space in the near future (less than 10 years). The good news is, they're still operating well! Voyager 2 is unfortuantely running low on propellant, though.
What does Voyager 2 need propellant for? If it's heading out toward heliopause, won't it keep moving that direction forever? I'm sure it must be using propellant if it's "running low", and I'm sure there must be a reason for that. Just curious about what it's actually doing with the propellant. Attitude adjustments, maybe?
TheFrood
God it's such a STUPIDLY improperly used quote.
The Open Source community started out ignoring Microsoft.
Then, they laughed at Microsoft.
Now they're fighting Microsoft.
So does this mean that eventually Microsoft will win too?
I mean, I'm just curious here. Or does that quote only apply when it's working the way you want it to work?
Stop with the black & white thinking. Accept that there is such a thing as shades of gray. It's much healthier.
Well, since Gandhi spent most of his life fighting against an entrenched power structure, I would think the quote is probably more applicable to OSS than to Microsoft.
At any rate, why don't you take the broomstick out of your ass and lighten up a bit? I think my last sentence ("Come on, Gandhi, don't fail us now.") should have made it clear that it was mostly a joke.
TheFrood
Can't remember who posted this first, and I don't remember the exact phrasing, but Gandhi's four steps to victory are as follows:
First, they ignore you.
Then, they laugh at you.
Then, they fight you.
Then, you win.
Looks like open-source has made it to step three. Come on, Gandhi, don't fail us now.
TheFrood
But the majority of that is support, and boxed versions. That's different. I said on the software itself. I mean yea free software, but to quote Douglas Adams, "It doesn't exactly buy lunch"
Really? Can you only buy food with money that comes directly from selling the software itself?
TheFrood
"This would destroy Windows desktop operating systems as a stable and consistent development platform."
Insert joke here.
TheFrood