Slide the "hold button" on and then nothing will get activated while it's in your pocket.
Which means that every time I put it in my pocket, I have to remember to hit the hold button, and every time I want to do something, I have to find the hold button and hit it, THEN hit volume-up or whatever. It's a kludge to make up for a bad control design (and it's the same kludge if it's on a portable CD player, though it's clearly not universal because I didn't need nor notice on on my last CD player).
I actually bought the remote control for the thing, and while it has a more reasonable set of controls it's another damn bit of kit I have to keep track of, more cables... the shuffle was definitely an upgrade for me, simply because it's easier to use.
Personally, I really dislike the user interface of the iPod. The wheel is too sensitive, you can't just shove it in your pocket like you can the iPod Shuffle's more conventional "nintendo-style" button pad. But none of the other companies have really done a better job... at least I haven't found one that I like well enough to buy. They either ape the iPod badly, or they have little joysticks that snag on everything, or they have randomly shaped buttons stuck randomly anywhere they fit.
Under the GPL, trainers are ensured that they can support any derivitive works in the future.
No more so than with commercial or BSDL products. Forwards and backwards compatibility and the long-term usefulness of training can be blown to bits just as easily in open-source projects. Consider the differences between successive releases of Red Hat, or the whole Linux libc mess. BSD itself has far more long-term stability than Linux, and more consistency between versions... I've found it a LOT easier to move between SunOS, Tru64, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X than between Red Hat and Debian, or even between Red Hat 2 and Red Hat 4 and Red Hat 6 and RHEL 3. I've even used code from the FreeBSD source tree to debug and fix problems in Tru64.
Theoretically, I can see where you're coming from. My experience over the past quarter of a century is radically different. I've been in open source since long before it had that name, since before the GPL existed, and not even Microsoft has been able to twist the open source software they've used so badly that I haven't been able to apply the lessons learned.
If this is the route you want to take then maybe it would be a more efficient use of your time if you just worked for a company from the start and got paid to develop all of it.
You're making it out as an "either-or" situation. It's not. Why isn't it? Because open source works better for the company as well. Even if they build a proprietary system on top of the open-source software (whether that's LGPL, BSDL, or whatever kind of license that's compatible with a mixed environment) they still benefit from having the open source core open.
And if they fork their core and keep their fork closed... they STILL can't take the open-source code off the net. So, either their product takes off and other people use it... and they're my next employer, or their product doesn't and the open source version is still out there to go back to. Having the company take a fork of the project and fail? That's no different from any other fork, and that happens all over the place.
And if the open source project fails because I'm working for Sugar Daddy Inc and not working on it any more, then it wasn't really much of an open source project in the first place. Open source that depends on one person to keep it usable and useful, that can't be taken forward by anyone else? What's the point?
Yes there are lots of companies that don't get the GPL right now. It's changing.
Read that as "there are lots of companies that don't get open source right now", and you'll see where I'm coming from. "Getting" open source is why they're "getting" the GPL. And since open source is a win for them, it's no less a win just because there isn't the GPL forcing them to take everything in the product open source. Because they can't do that, always, no matter how much they want to. Because, for a lot of programs, a proprietary model works better: there still isn't a real open-source-derived word processor, for example... open office was tossed over the wall into the open source world when the original company gave up trying to compete with Microsoft.
Look: back when the GPL came out my first reaction was "where's the good open source spreadsheet going to come from?" and now it's 20 years later adn the answer is "it's not going to come from the open source world". So, we're going to have a mixed software ecosystem for the long term, probably forever. I see no reason for that to change.
But for the kinds of things open source works well for, where the end-users include enough developers to keep it moving forward, it's brilliant. I've believed in open source and open systems since before the GPL was written, back when only one of those two terms had even been coined. Open source was already taking off before the GPL, and would have taken off with or without it, because it's not the ideological purity of the GNU manifesto that's really driving it... but the fact that it works better for a huge variety of software.
Without that, it wouldn't be anything but a footnote.
The Internet *itself* is peer-to-peer. All connections between systems are virtual, they only exist in what the endpoints know about each other. Everything in between is just one node after another pushing a packet one step closer to home. All the routing protocols, BGP, EGP, OSPF, IGRP, they're all built on top of that... but at the IP (Internet Protocol) level, there's just store-and-forward. Routing is policy, it could be changed (and is, routinely, consider load balancing... that's done small-scale but it could easily be done large scale with asymmetrical routine, it's only the relative tradeoffs from redundancy versus the cost of out-of-order packets that makes one or the other more desirable), the basic protocol is just "push the packet a hop closer to home".
So it's not just files on a P2P network that get shredded into a million pieces. By making a connectionless protocol the lowest level, IP does that with every connection that every file is sent over...
perhaps you can tell me how sending out thousands of requests to thousands of servers asking for bits and pieces of a file is more "efficient" bandwidth-wise?
Well of course it means that the bandwidth available to any one server is no longer the bottleneck, but that's not the whole thing. It also means that you have a choice about where to get files or pieces of files, and you have a metric that measures the distance between systems (hop count), so it should be possible to fetch pieces from nearby systems by preference. That means that when I get a file and the guy near me gets my piece, only one copy went over the internet as a whole, the other went over the local neighborhood.
Whether the current implementations take advantage of that or not, I don't know, but like routing in IP that is just policy, the protocol doesn't depend on policy.
Or maybe you're supporting GPL software? OR maybe paid to add features to GPL software? What about being paid to train people to use GPL software? There are a lot of possible revenue streams..
Yeh, but the GPL doesn't work any better than any other license for them. If anything, getting a sugar-daddy company to pick up your software and pay you to support it is easier if they can build a conventional application on top of your free software.
Maybe your time is worth nothing, but i know i value mine.
I never said my time was worth nothing. To the contrary, I invest it where I know it will pay me back.
I was thinking more along the lines of it being the money you make from the software.
Unless you're doing something like using the GPL as part of a dual license strategy, whatever you get from your GPL software is indirect at best... it's not like you're putting time into a "time market" and you get a better rate of return from the GPL and from the BSDL. As far as money's concerned, OSS is advertising and education. It's like a degree... you've got a Bachelor's of Linux, I've got an Associates degree in BSDology.
Basically x86 Mac shares the same problem as Linux, emulation is viable.
Not for games. Not for high end games, anyway. Why? DirectX. Once you've done the work to support OpenGL as well as DirectX, you've done most of the work for a Mac port anyway... and you can probably toss off an SDL version for Linux as well...
Ryan Gordon, Epic Games: From a game development (rather, a game porting) viewpoint, this will be a huge win once we get the majority of users over to these systems, both in terms of developer expertise and end-user performance. Most games we deal with are already running on Windows/x86, and were optimized with the x86 in mind, so "porting" these Mac games is turning off the byte swapping and turning back on the SSE codepaths. Not having to write anymore Altivec code is a GOOD THING for everyone involved. All my bitching about having 30 windows developers and one me are a non-issue in terms of optimization.
I could probably get, say, ut2004 up and running on an x86 Mac within...well, the time it takes to change a few lines in a Makefile and recompile the game, and I'd have optimizations suddenly enabled that were never previously feasible to put into the Mac version.
Too bad you don't read Wil's blog. It sounds like the person you describe is a 15-year-old boy.
Some of the people I'm thinking of have more than 15 years seniority where I work. They're not going to see the low side of 35 again, let alone 15. What do they do on Windows when they're not at work? Play games. Or they AIM me for help with their Windows boxes, if they've figured out my AIM handle. That's most of the software you can sell for Windows: games or stuff to fix Windows better.
IF YOUR BUSINESS MODEL IS TO SELL SOFTWARE TO 15-YEAR-OLD BOYS, YOU ARE SCREWED ALREADY.
Yeh, I know that. I've written games for home computers. Selling software to Windows users is like selling software to 15-year-old-boys. Even if they're 28-year-old yuppies or 35-year-old school mums.
Regardless, it's obvious by your comment that you didn't read my comment, or didn't understand it.
To blame napster for poisoning the well is just too much. Shawn Fanning was just some 19-year old college kid on a pet project.
All that means is he poisoned the well accidentally rather than deliberately.
I don't think anyone looked that far ahead.
Lots of us did. Of course when we pointed out that Napster's business model was basically the knowing promotion of illegal activity, we got slammed by the extreme anti censorship brigade... but the fact is that Napster screwed us all by establishing this connection between P2P and piracy in the general consciousness.
That they would label this article as, "Man busted for chipping box." When in fact it had nothing to do with the chip itself, but the PIRATED SOFTWARE the hard drive contained.
Without the court docket all we have to go on is the article. The article says he was actually convicted for chipping, not copyright violation. Possibly he plea-bargained down to that (or the UK equivalent)... but regardless, IF he was convicted for chipping then this case can be used to help make the next case against someone doing something less obviously illegal, like selling Linux XBoxes...
Linux has lower penetration in areas of high piracy because people who just want a free operating system rip off Windows instead of using Linux. How does that contribute profit to MS?
It means that the people who are now stealing Windows, in five years, or ten, whenever they are better off and have their own assets at risk and their own wealth to protect and when the price of Windows is something they can afford, they will be familiar with Windows and be more likely to buy Windows than to switch to Linux.
This has been a tremendously valuable tool for Microsoft over the years, in the US and abroad. Combined with their proprietary file formats it's helped them keep the market for competitors to Office down... someone who can't afford Office is a potential market for a $50 word processor, except that it's easier to "borrow" Office from the office... so there's no low-cost competition to Office any more and even free software has a rough ride.
I suspect that's one reason they didn't put any effective copy protection in Windows prior to XP. Once they had the market penetration, they could go wild.
I oppose piracy not because it harms big companies, but because it helps them.
The same thing is true for music. There are some tremendous musicians out there doing amazing work, and promoting themselves through free music and listings on MP3blogs like 3hive. They're hurt by Grokster, because a huge chunk of their potential market is swallowed up by the P2P networks. I suspect that if the networks did go down, the labels would just find themselves facing a whole new threat from independants who are right now taking a bigger hit from P2P than the labels are.
Wouldn't this also apply to Apple's "Rip. Mix. Burn." campaign?
Copying music for your own personal use is explicitly legal. Apple is very clear that the goal is to give you control of your own playlist, not to aid piracy. Their packaging and advertising is full of statements like "iTunes is licensed for reproduction of non-copyrighted materials or materials the user is legally permitted to reproduce. The music tracks shown are for demonstration purposes only."
You have the right idea, but you seem to be buying in to some unfortunate memes that really should be scotched: "plausible deniability", "promoting illegal actions", "get away with aiding mass piracy"... Bittorrent is promoting legal actions, it's aiding the distribution of software, it doesn't need to "deny" anything. The problem is that there's a limited amount of bandwidth, the solution is a Usenet-style store-and-forward distribution system.
If Bittorrent had come first, and these systems had started out like Usenet as a way for people to share information (discussion boards, open source software, and so on) nobody at the EFF would dream of defending Grokster on the grounds that they're only making their money from "arms length" piracy, just like nobody sane would call an ISP a censor for refusing to carry alt.binaries.warez.
There's nothing new about peer-to-peer networks. The Internet is a peer-to-peer network. Usenet, UUCP, Fidonet, peer-to-peer networking has been the nerve fibers of the community that slashdot is part of since long before the Internet has been available to carry its traffic.
So it's a damn shame that Napster and its successors were created to take advantage of the limited anonymity of peer-to-peer networking rather than its bandwidth-accelerating capabilities... to uise the technology as a cut-out so they could make money from mass copyright violations rather than sharing legal material. Because they may have ended up poisoning the well for good, given the way even defenders of systems like Bittorrent are using this kind of language.
OK, Microsoft doesn't have a complete media burning framework or a complete DVD player. Point is, most of the software I've bought for Windows is stuff to plaster over problems in Windows itself.
Shipley's comment was so glib and cavalier, it's hardly worth taking seriously.
You just avoid using code that's under that license.
OK, I assume then when you said "you need to actively circumvent it [...] by mistake" you included "you need to accidentally use GPLed code".
I think the phrase "actively circumvent" contains a lot of connotations that don't apply.
In the BSDL world [...] any bully can take your lunch.
No, they can't. It's not possible for a bully to take my lunch. They can take a copy of my lunch, but I still have my lunch. There's nothing they can do with that copy of my lunch that will keep me from having my lunch. It's like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, except anyone can do it, you don't have to be Jesus Christ to give away more than you get without giving away anything at all.
And given that, I have a choice. I can give my stuff away to anyone who wants it, knowing that some of them aren't going to do the same thing, or I can give it away only to people who are prepared ahead of time to give it away.
Either way, a lot of the people who get it are going to give it back. This has nothing to do with "hope". Hope's something you have inside of you, it doesn't do anything in the real world. This has to do with what really happens in the real world. I don't "hope" someone's going to give it back, I know they are, because I've been giving copies of my lunch away since the '70s, and I've got some really amazing stuff back.
This has nothing to do with socialism, either. Socialism is an economic system. Economic systems are about control of limited resources. Copies of software aren't a limited resource, making copies doesn't take anything away from the giver. The only reason to limit who can use your software are economic ones: you want money for it, or you want to promote some economic system. If that's what you want, fine, but that's got nothing to do with keeping the bullies from taking your lunch.
If all you want is for people to give back, it doesn't make any sense to try and keep it from the bullies, because the outcome is the same whether you do or not.
He's a successful con artist, like Bill Warman (the screen protector guy -- google for '"Bill Warman" patent') and no doubt thousands of other blokes who have acquired some legal hook they can use to bully people into sending them money for fear of a lawsuit.
AOL Instant messenger (which is getting tobe the most effective virus distribution mechanism after Outlook Express).
Windows Media Player.
Games.
Nero (because Microsoft doesn't have a media burning framework).
Games.
DVD Express (because Microsoft doesn't have a DVD player).
Did I mention games?
NASA World Wind and Google Earth are cool right now (except that they're really games).
Oh yeh, games.
Basically, you have programs that ship with Mac OS X anyway but Windows needs them to patch the OS, and games. There's some of that on the Mac, too... Shapeshifter, Codetek Virtual Desktop, and so on. But those don't port to Windows real well.
Games? A year from now, we'll be seeing Windows games getting ported to the Mac.
Yeh, I can see his point. I don't think I'm entirely convinced, but I get it.
To be threatened by the GPL, you need to actively circumvent it - either by mistake or by malice.
Or you simply don't want to be constrained by the GPL. Not wanting to put all your software under an open source license is not malicious. It's not incompatible with good will. Companies or individuals may even be enthusiastically cooperative and still keep some of their code proprietary.
The GPL can make it hard to do that. The LGPL doesn't. The BSDL doesn't. The MPSL and APSL don't.
The thing is, in Mac OS X even the stuff that looks bland doesn't look ugly.
I actually kind of like the Windows 3.1 look, it's plain and uncluttered. Microsoft adopted something like it for the Pocket PC and it looked a whole lot better than the Windows 95 style interface their previous handheld OS used.
Then there's Luna, the Windows XP theme. Oh my god.
That's a feature, Fred. It used to be more of a feature before Steve got this bug up his ass about how kewl Metal was, so now you have regular apps and OH WOW I'M IMPORTANT metal apps. Luckily you can turn most of the metal off.
With rapid development environments like Visual Basic around for the Windows OS, it's not surprising that there is a lot more crap out there for Windows, verses other OS that don't have these easy to pick up IDEs.
I just want to own the freaking hammer, I don't want to join a hammer cult.
I joined a hammer cult, with cool candy-apple red toolboxes and lifetime guarantees on tools and stores that were great places to buy hammers and guys working there who were veritable gurus of how to join things together, make holes in them, and finish them off.
I've bought Sears Craftsman tools that I've never used, because they were so cool. I've got a screwdriver here with 32 unique security tips. I've never had to use a security tip in my life, but if I need to open up a weird sealed box in my car some day, I'm ready for it.
Sears hasn't been quite the same since they merged with or got bought by KMart (one of those big marts anyway), but I'm sticking with the Hammer Cult for now.
I think you're the one who hasn't read it closely enough.
At the very least, the authors of the GPL were clearly not as sure about section 7 as you are: "If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances."
That's the only section of the GPL that contains that kind of language.
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Slide the "hold button" on and then nothing will get activated while it's in your pocket.
... the shuffle was definitely an upgrade for me, simply because it's easier to use.
Which means that every time I put it in my pocket, I have to remember to hit the hold button, and every time I want to do something, I have to find the hold button and hit it, THEN hit volume-up or whatever. It's a kludge to make up for a bad control design (and it's the same kludge if it's on a portable CD player, though it's clearly not universal because I didn't need nor notice on on my last CD player).
I actually bought the remote control for the thing, and while it has a more reasonable set of controls it's another damn bit of kit I have to keep track of, more cables
Personally, I really dislike the user interface of the iPod. The wheel is too sensitive, you can't just shove it in your pocket like you can the iPod Shuffle's more conventional "nintendo-style" button pad. But none of the other companies have really done a better job... at least I haven't found one that I like well enough to buy. They either ape the iPod badly, or they have little joysticks that snag on everything, or they have randomly shaped buttons stuck randomly anywhere they fit.
Under the GPL, trainers are ensured that they can support any derivitive works in the future.
No more so than with commercial or BSDL products. Forwards and backwards compatibility and the long-term usefulness of training can be blown to bits just as easily in open-source projects. Consider the differences between successive releases of Red Hat, or the whole Linux libc mess. BSD itself has far more long-term stability than Linux, and more consistency between versions... I've found it a LOT easier to move between SunOS, Tru64, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X than between Red Hat and Debian, or even between Red Hat 2 and Red Hat 4 and Red Hat 6 and RHEL 3. I've even used code from the FreeBSD source tree to debug and fix problems in Tru64.
Theoretically, I can see where you're coming from. My experience over the past quarter of a century is radically different. I've been in open source since long before it had that name, since before the GPL existed, and not even Microsoft has been able to twist the open source software they've used so badly that I haven't been able to apply the lessons learned.
If this is the route you want to take then maybe it would be a more efficient use of your time if you just worked for a company from the start and got paid to develop all of it.
You're making it out as an "either-or" situation. It's not. Why isn't it? Because open source works better for the company as well. Even if they build a proprietary system on top of the open-source software (whether that's LGPL, BSDL, or whatever kind of license that's compatible with a mixed environment) they still benefit from having the open source core open.
And if they fork their core and keep their fork closed... they STILL can't take the open-source code off the net. So, either their product takes off and other people use it... and they're my next employer, or their product doesn't and the open source version is still out there to go back to. Having the company take a fork of the project and fail? That's no different from any other fork, and that happens all over the place.
And if the open source project fails because I'm working for Sugar Daddy Inc and not working on it any more, then it wasn't really much of an open source project in the first place. Open source that depends on one person to keep it usable and useful, that can't be taken forward by anyone else? What's the point?
Yes there are lots of companies that don't get the GPL right now. It's changing.
Read that as "there are lots of companies that don't get open source right now", and you'll see where I'm coming from. "Getting" open source is why they're "getting" the GPL. And since open source is a win for them, it's no less a win just because there isn't the GPL forcing them to take everything in the product open source. Because they can't do that, always, no matter how much they want to. Because, for a lot of programs, a proprietary model works better: there still isn't a real open-source-derived word processor, for example... open office was tossed over the wall into the open source world when the original company gave up trying to compete with Microsoft.
Look: back when the GPL came out my first reaction was "where's the good open source spreadsheet going to come from?" and now it's 20 years later adn the answer is "it's not going to come from the open source world". So, we're going to have a mixed software ecosystem for the long term, probably forever. I see no reason for that to change.
But for the kinds of things open source works well for, where the end-users include enough developers to keep it moving forward, it's brilliant. I've believed in open source and open systems since before the GPL was written, back when only one of those two terms had even been coined. Open source was already taking off before the GPL, and would have taken off with or without it, because it's not the ideological purity of the GNU manifesto that's really driving it... but the fact that it works better for a huge variety of software.
Without that, it wouldn't be anything but a footnote.
The Internet *itself* is peer-to-peer. All connections between systems are virtual, they only exist in what the endpoints know about each other. Everything in between is just one node after another pushing a packet one step closer to home. All the routing protocols, BGP, EGP, OSPF, IGRP, they're all built on top of that... but at the IP (Internet Protocol) level, there's just store-and-forward. Routing is policy, it could be changed (and is, routinely, consider load balancing... that's done small-scale but it could easily be done large scale with asymmetrical routine, it's only the relative tradeoffs from redundancy versus the cost of out-of-order packets that makes one or the other more desirable), the basic protocol is just "push the packet a hop closer to home".
So it's not just files on a P2P network that get shredded into a million pieces. By making a connectionless protocol the lowest level, IP does that with every connection that every file is sent over...
perhaps you can tell me how sending out thousands of requests to thousands of servers asking for bits and pieces of a file is more "efficient" bandwidth-wise?
Well of course it means that the bandwidth available to any one server is no longer the bottleneck, but that's not the whole thing. It also means that you have a choice about where to get files or pieces of files, and you have a metric that measures the distance between systems (hop count), so it should be possible to fetch pieces from nearby systems by preference. That means that when I get a file and the guy near me gets my piece, only one copy went over the internet as a whole, the other went over the local neighborhood.
Whether the current implementations take advantage of that or not, I don't know, but like routing in IP that is just policy, the protocol doesn't depend on policy.
Or maybe you're supporting GPL software? OR maybe paid to add features to GPL software? What about being paid to train people to use GPL software? There are a lot of possible revenue streams..
Yeh, but the GPL doesn't work any better than any other license for them. If anything, getting a sugar-daddy company to pick up your software and pay you to support it is easier if they can build a conventional application on top of your free software.
Maybe your time is worth nothing, but i know i value mine.
I never said my time was worth nothing. To the contrary, I invest it where I know it will pay me back.
I was thinking more along the lines of it being the money you make from the software.
Unless you're doing something like using the GPL as part of a dual license strategy, whatever you get from your GPL software is indirect at best... it's not like you're putting time into a "time market" and you get a better rate of return from the GPL and from the BSDL. As far as money's concerned, OSS is advertising and education. It's like a degree... you've got a Bachelor's of Linux, I've got an Associates degree in BSDology.
Not for games. Not for high end games, anyway. Why? DirectX. Once you've done the work to support OpenGL as well as DirectX, you've done most of the work for a Mac port anyway... and you can probably toss off an SDL version for Linux as well...
Too bad you don't read Wil's blog. It sounds like the person you describe is a 15-year-old boy.
Some of the people I'm thinking of have more than 15 years seniority where I work. They're not going to see the low side of 35 again, let alone 15. What do they do on Windows when they're not at work? Play games. Or they AIM me for help with their Windows boxes, if they've figured out my AIM handle. That's most of the software you can sell for Windows: games or stuff to fix Windows better.
IF YOUR BUSINESS MODEL IS TO SELL SOFTWARE TO 15-YEAR-OLD BOYS, YOU ARE SCREWED ALREADY.
Yeh, I know that. I've written games for home computers. Selling software to Windows users is like selling software to 15-year-old-boys. Even if they're 28-year-old yuppies or 35-year-old school mums.
Regardless, it's obvious by your comment that you didn't read my comment, or didn't understand it.
free... also free... that's free too... free version of just about any app...
:)
as far as software i bought... um... games...
Like the Fine Article said, Windows users don't buy much software.
To blame napster for poisoning the well is just too much. Shawn Fanning was just some 19-year old college kid on a pet project.
All that means is he poisoned the well accidentally rather than deliberately.
I don't think anyone looked that far ahead.
Lots of us did. Of course when we pointed out that Napster's business model was basically the knowing promotion of illegal activity, we got slammed by the extreme anti censorship brigade... but the fact is that Napster screwed us all by establishing this connection between P2P and piracy in the general consciousness.
Now I'm not an expert on Hubbardisms, but I strongly suspect that the word you're thinking of is "engrams".
That they would label this article as, "Man busted for chipping box." When in fact it had nothing to do with the chip itself, but the PIRATED SOFTWARE the hard drive contained.
Without the court docket all we have to go on is the article. The article says he was actually convicted for chipping, not copyright violation. Possibly he plea-bargained down to that (or the UK equivalent)... but regardless, IF he was convicted for chipping then this case can be used to help make the next case against someone doing something less obviously illegal, like selling Linux XBoxes...
Linux has lower penetration in areas of high piracy because people who just want a free operating system rip off Windows instead of using Linux. How does that contribute profit to MS?
It means that the people who are now stealing Windows, in five years, or ten, whenever they are better off and have their own assets at risk and their own wealth to protect and when the price of Windows is something they can afford, they will be familiar with Windows and be more likely to buy Windows than to switch to Linux.
This has been a tremendously valuable tool for Microsoft over the years, in the US and abroad. Combined with their proprietary file formats it's helped them keep the market for competitors to Office down... someone who can't afford Office is a potential market for a $50 word processor, except that it's easier to "borrow" Office from the office... so there's no low-cost competition to Office any more and even free software has a rough ride.
I suspect that's one reason they didn't put any effective copy protection in Windows prior to XP. Once they had the market penetration, they could go wild.
I oppose piracy not because it harms big companies, but because it helps them.
The same thing is true for music. There are some tremendous musicians out there doing amazing work, and promoting themselves through free music and listings on MP3blogs like 3hive. They're hurt by Grokster, because a huge chunk of their potential market is swallowed up by the P2P networks. I suspect that if the networks did go down, the labels would just find themselves facing a whole new threat from independants who are right now taking a bigger hit from P2P than the labels are.
Wouldn't this also apply to Apple's "Rip. Mix. Burn." campaign?
Copying music for your own personal use is explicitly legal. Apple is very clear that the goal is to give you control of your own playlist, not to aid piracy. Their packaging and advertising is full of statements like "iTunes is licensed for reproduction of non-copyrighted materials or materials the user is legally permitted to reproduce. The music tracks shown are for demonstration purposes only."
You have the right idea, but you seem to be buying in to some unfortunate memes that really should be scotched: "plausible deniability", "promoting illegal actions", "get away with aiding mass piracy"... Bittorrent is promoting legal actions, it's aiding the distribution of software, it doesn't need to "deny" anything. The problem is that there's a limited amount of bandwidth, the solution is a Usenet-style store-and-forward distribution system.
If Bittorrent had come first, and these systems had started out like Usenet as a way for people to share information (discussion boards, open source software, and so on) nobody at the EFF would dream of defending Grokster on the grounds that they're only making their money from "arms length" piracy, just like nobody sane would call an ISP a censor for refusing to carry alt.binaries.warez.
There's nothing new about peer-to-peer networks. The Internet is a peer-to-peer network. Usenet, UUCP, Fidonet, peer-to-peer networking has been the nerve fibers of the community that slashdot is part of since long before the Internet has been available to carry its traffic.
So it's a damn shame that Napster and its successors were created to take advantage of the limited anonymity of peer-to-peer networking rather than its bandwidth-accelerating capabilities... to uise the technology as a cut-out so they could make money from mass copyright violations rather than sharing legal material. Because they may have ended up poisoning the well for good, given the way even defenders of systems like Bittorrent are using this kind of language.
OK, Microsoft doesn't have a complete media burning framework or a complete DVD player. Point is, most of the software I've bought for Windows is stuff to plaster over problems in Windows itself.
Shipley's comment was so glib and cavalier, it's hardly worth taking seriously.
So, what software have you bought for Windows?
You just avoid using code that's under that license.
OK, I assume then when you said "you need to actively circumvent it [...] by mistake" you included "you need to accidentally use GPLed code".
I think the phrase "actively circumvent" contains a lot of connotations that don't apply.
In the BSDL world [...] any bully can take your lunch.
No, they can't. It's not possible for a bully to take my lunch. They can take a copy of my lunch, but I still have my lunch. There's nothing they can do with that copy of my lunch that will keep me from having my lunch. It's like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, except anyone can do it, you don't have to be Jesus Christ to give away more than you get without giving away anything at all.
And given that, I have a choice. I can give my stuff away to anyone who wants it, knowing that some of them aren't going to do the same thing, or I can give it away only to people who are prepared ahead of time to give it away.
Either way, a lot of the people who get it are going to give it back. This has nothing to do with "hope". Hope's something you have inside of you, it doesn't do anything in the real world. This has to do with what really happens in the real world. I don't "hope" someone's going to give it back, I know they are, because I've been giving copies of my lunch away since the '70s, and I've got some really amazing stuff back.
This has nothing to do with socialism, either. Socialism is an economic system. Economic systems are about control of limited resources. Copies of software aren't a limited resource, making copies doesn't take anything away from the giver. The only reason to limit who can use your software are economic ones: you want money for it, or you want to promote some economic system. If that's what you want, fine, but that's got nothing to do with keeping the bullies from taking your lunch.
If all you want is for people to give back, it doesn't make any sense to try and keep it from the bullies, because the outcome is the same whether you do or not.
In other words, the man is a litigious idiot.
He's a successful con artist, like Bill Warman (the screen protector guy -- google for '"Bill Warman" patent') and no doubt thousands of other blokes who have acquired some legal hook they can use to bully people into sending them money for fear of a lawsuit.
Games.
AOL Instant messenger (which is getting tobe the most effective virus distribution mechanism after Outlook Express).
Windows Media Player.
Games.
Nero (because Microsoft doesn't have a media burning framework).
Games.
DVD Express (because Microsoft doesn't have a DVD player).
Did I mention games?
NASA World Wind and Google Earth are cool right now (except that they're really games).
Oh yeh, games.
Basically, you have programs that ship with Mac OS X anyway but Windows needs them to patch the OS, and games. There's some of that on the Mac, too... Shapeshifter, Codetek Virtual Desktop, and so on. But those don't port to Windows real well.
Games? A year from now, we'll be seeing Windows games getting ported to the Mac.
Yeh, I can see his point. I don't think I'm entirely convinced, but I get it.
To be threatened by the GPL, you need to actively circumvent it - either by mistake or by malice.
Or you simply don't want to be constrained by the GPL. Not wanting to put all your software under an open source license is not malicious. It's not incompatible with good will. Companies or individuals may even be enthusiastically cooperative and still keep some of their code proprietary.
The GPL can make it hard to do that. The LGPL doesn't. The BSDL doesn't. The MPSL and APSL don't.
The thing is, in Mac OS X even the stuff that looks bland doesn't look ugly.
I actually kind of like the Windows 3.1 look, it's plain and uncluttered. Microsoft adopted something like it for the Pocket PC and it looked a whole lot better than the Windows 95 style interface their previous handheld OS used.
Then there's Luna, the Windows XP theme. Oh my god.
However, all of the software looks the same.
That's a feature, Fred. It used to be more of a feature before Steve got this bug up his ass about how kewl Metal was, so now you have regular apps and OH WOW I'M IMPORTANT metal apps. Luckily you can turn most of the metal off.
With rapid development environments like Visual Basic around for the Windows OS, it's not surprising that there is a lot more crap out there for Windows, verses other OS that don't have these easy to pick up IDEs.
You've never used XCode.
I just want to own the freaking hammer, I don't want to join a hammer cult.
I joined a hammer cult, with cool candy-apple red toolboxes and lifetime guarantees on tools and stores that were great places to buy hammers and guys working there who were veritable gurus of how to join things together, make holes in them, and finish them off.
I've bought Sears Craftsman tools that I've never used, because they were so cool. I've got a screwdriver here with 32 unique security tips. I've never had to use a security tip in my life, but if I need to open up a weird sealed box in my car some day, I'm ready for it.
Sears hasn't been quite the same since they merged with or got bought by KMart (one of those big marts anyway), but I'm sticking with the Hammer Cult for now.
I think you're the one who hasn't read it closely enough.
At the very least, the authors of the GPL were clearly not as sure about section 7 as you are: "If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances."
That's the only section of the GPL that contains that kind of language.