A packet associated with an RIAA DoS attack is still a packet. So the RIAA plants some dummy file on a computer that results in other computers sending out extra requests to other systems in the P2P network. How is this different from any other DDos attack?
Let's say that a user does a search for a copyrighted song. He then downloads the song and finds out it is a decoy. Frustrated, he gives up and stops trying to download copyrighted material. The decoy song has not created any significant extra bandwidth.
Now imagine that the user doesn't give up after he downloads the decoy song. He keeps downloading alternate copies of the song until he finally finds one that isn't a decoy. In this case, the network will be flooded with extra requests, but whose fault is that?
The authors of Gnutella may claim that the system was not intended for pirating music, however willful ignorance is not an excuse in the eyes of the law. If you throw a bag of drugs in the dumpster, and then later "just happen to find" a $100 bill on the street and it turns out that the guy who dropped the $100 went and picked up the drugs out of the dumpster, your flimsy excuse that you were not trafficking in drugs is not going to fly. Likewise, the "we just make software... we don't control what people use it for" excuse doesn't work either.
It is small steps that set people up for justification of other more drastic steps. They may not have referred to ping-bombs, but they go ahead and do it anyways with the justification that it was not specifically disallowed. That is how they abuse the system.
IMHO, slippery slope arguments should not be the basis for legislation. Taking an argument to its logical extreme is a useful too in mathematics, but it fails miserably in real life.
There is only one flaw in your argument - going after specifically targeted songs is one thing, but a DoS attack disables the entire network regardless of what is crossing its wires
Are you sure you know what you are talking about? There are many types of DoS attacks. You can DoS attack a whole network, a single host, or just a single protocol. The effect of targetted decoy tracks is to disrupt the activities of people who are specifically looking for those tracks (a DoS attack). The rest of the users (who are presumably trading recipes or something) shouldn't be affected. Neither the article, nor the message you replied to, was advocating other types of DoS attacks, such as ping-bombs.
Ultimately, tightly knit groups of developers in close contact with the users has a better chance of delivering the goods. Look at BSD or GNU/Linux. They've come so far because of a close knit group. As long as we keep our eye on the ball we will do well. Tackle the issues one at a time and build on the foundation.
Whatever happened to this whole Cathedral and the Bazaar thing?
Finally an open source analogy your grandmother can understand
Yeah, despite the fact that it's a ridiculous analogy. Analogies don't prove anything. They just make you more convinced of your beliefs, whether they're right or wrong.
Don't you think the huge difference in proportion is relevant? When you buy a car, you do so with a 100% guarantee that the car will require service, and that service is a significant portion of the total cost of ownership of the car. The average consumer who buys an off-the-shelf software product (e.g. a game) will probably never need support. In the case of a more major purchase (e.g. an OS/Office suite), you get free updates off the web. The average consumer doesn't pay to have someone customize their OS for them. If they're technically challenged, they might pay someone to install it for them.
Go to a large enterprise (their target), and give them a choice:
1. This distibution, built form a consortium of companies CERTIFIED to run with Oracle, DB2, Checkpoint-1, etc etc... for some price (say $2,500)
2. This free distribution which has all the same components, but is backed by some volunteers over the internet. It mirrors (1) in all regards but support and certification.
Most medium to large companies will go with (1) in a heartbeat.
This assumes that the purchasing managers at large companies are idiots, and will continue to act like idiots. Let's see how long they are willing to flush money down the toilet when the economic slump continues for another 3 years. Unless you are an experienced con-artist, any business plan that depends on the gullibility of the consumer is probably flawed.
Seriously, why would you pay $2,500 to get something when you can get the *EXACT* same thing for free. We're not talking about a cheap knock-off here. It's the *same damn thing*. So what if it's backed by a consortium of companies? If a bug in Linux causes me to lose data or allows an intruder to hack into my network, I guess I can sue Caldera, then? Why would I bother suing a financially strapped company with no discernable revenue source; why wouldn't I just use the free version and buy some insurance from a bank?
The way you describe it, it really does sound like the UnitedLinux companies are just selling insurance. Sure, they may contribute the odd bug fix here and there, but it reminds me of that insurance commercial where the car insurance company describes how they fund research into eliminating dangerous intersections "because ensuring your safety saves us money."
What I read from the subtext of this article is that the major Linux distribution companies have lost confidence in the GPL. He doesn't come right out and say it, but it's clear that they are fighting the license. Without violating the GPL, they are trying to make it inconvenient for users to redistribute the software and avoid the per-seat licensing. He also says that he not does believe in a Linux model that requires ongoing charity to survive. This sounds like a dig at Mandrake.
He is right, though. Charity is a terrible business model. The only time it works well is when you campaign for some worthy cause (e.g. feeding starving children in Africa) and then spend 90% of the money on "administration". Here's an interesting tidbit from the other side of the political spectrum. Did you know that Ayn Rand (a laissez-faire capitalist and staunch opponent of taxes) believed that if income tax was abolished then the rich citizens of America would voluntarily donate money to establish an army? Can you imagine a world in which armies were established and paid for solely by robber barons? I mean, they'd probably be sent off to fight any country that threatened to mess with our oil supply. Oh wait, that already happens.
the Stroustrop C++ book is actually pretty good, Pretty good, but also brutally terse. Experts love it, beginners usually despise it.
Okay, well I don't actually own it. But I remember flipping through it a few times and finding out some useful stuff. What I do own, is an STL reference, which comes in very handy. You're right, though. Stroustrop C++ is probably not a good book for beginners, and it should be stricken from this list, just like K&R.
When someone asks for a good programming book, why does someone always recommend K&R? Where did we get this crazy notion that the guys who invented the language obviously wrote the best book about it? I mean, the Stroustrop C++ book is actually pretty good, but K&R is terse, obtuse, and out-of-date. It's like trying to learn Perl from the man pages.
I still remember my introduction to C. I was in high school and a friend of the family arranged for me to volunteer at the CS department of the local university. Someone handed me a copy of K&R and told me to go write something. I was already an experienced Pascal/Basic programmer by that point, but K&R C was clear as mud. I think I managed to hack the thing together by trial and error. The next year I took a C course which was pretty much self-directed (the prof didn't actually know C), and I learned the language mostly from the TurboC help files... a better reference than K&R if you ask me.
I disagree; take a look at other industries. Some of the highest-quality products are produced by the tiny, niche-market manufacturers. The best cigars in the world are not from Phillip-Morris. The finest cuisine on your block is not the mega-corporation with the giant yellow 'M'. The most accurate watches don't come from time-giant Timex. The finest literature on the bookshelf isn't necessarily from the biggest publisher.
Not that I disagree with your conclusions, but this premise is pretty sketchy. Every product you cite (except the literature one) is an example of a luxury item. Luxury items are things that people blow money on. When a company is buying a per-seat license for a software tool, they have to think about the bottom line. Also, the software market is different from these other markets because the cost to develop software is far greater than the cost per unit.
the window repairman isn't doing useless work either, but after breaking a window and having him repair it, there is no net increase in wealth. The economy would be better off if the window's owner could spend his money on something other than window repairs. Likewise, paying many programmers to write nearly-identical code is a much less efficient use of resources than using free software and directing those resources toward other activities (which may involve developing new software, rather than reinventing the wheel).
Having multiple people develop the same software creates diversity. Different programmers employ various architectures and programming languages, and this creates an atmosphere where the consumer has a choice. This even happens with open source projects. Look at how many distributions of Linux there are, not to mention all the BSDs. As a C++ programmer and advocate, I wouldn't be a kernel hacker, even if I was an open source zealot. I would rather be working on an OS that was written in C++. If free software puts me out of work, that's too bad for me but a net gain for the economy. I can help myself and produce a larger economic gain by writing better software, or by figuring out how to add value to free software solutions.
I, like a lot of people, feel that free software will have a stifling effect on the economy because of viral licensing. That's why I'm not viscerally opposed to the BSD license or the LGPL. I think the jury's still out on whether they will have a net good effect, but I'm very confident that the GPL will have a bad effect.
I know about the broken window fallacy. It is not a perfect analogy because the programmers in this case are not doing useless work. They are merely doing useful work that others are willing to do for free.
Let's say you are a factory worker who is being laid off because the factory is being moved to Mexico, where the workers will be paid 8 cents an hour. I doubt you would use the broken window argument here. This is a protectionism vs. globalization argument, pure and simple.
If I put a dollar value (imaginary money?) on everything I did, *I'd* be Bill Gates. Come on, folks, not everything comes down to money, and it's kind of a flaw in our culture, IMNSHO, that nothing is seen as important unless you can dollar-figure quantify it, package it, and sell it.
Your opinion may not be humble, but that doesn't prevent it from being wrong. As it turns out, everything does come down to money. If you write a program that you maybe could have sold, but you didn't, that's an opportunity cost. The rent on my apartment costs me $N an month. If I moved to a larger apartment, it would cost me more. An extra $100 in my retirement fund every month may allow me to retire 2 years earlier. Again it comes down to money vs. time. Of course, I could also spend that $100 on Cocoa Puffs, but all that means is that the aphorism "time is money" has no less validity than "Cocoa Puffs are money" or "time is Cocoa Puffs". Everything that has value is interchangeable.
People spend all of their time either spending money or earning money. In general, you can't decide how much you earn, but you can decide how much you spend. If you decide that your time is worth $2000 dollars an hour then you probably ought to quit your job if you are getting paid less than that, but you might find yourself reevaluating your priorities when you're living on the street. As a gainfully employed member of society, I have the opportunity to determine how much my time is worth to me. I can choose to not take my allotted 3 weeks vacation and take the money instead. I always take the vacation because I am paid enough that I have the luxury of valuing my time highly. Meanwhile, my sister only makes minimum wage, but she chooses to work two jobs because she needs the money. The things she can buy with the money (an education) are worth more than the free time now.
BTW, IMHO anyone who prefaces an argument with IMNSHO ought to be shot.
The amount of great software I've received for free, not to mention the amount of freedom I've gained in both my business and home life by using free software, more than compensates me for the time I put into it, whether it is writing stuff as a hobby, or testing it (and reporting bugs) for my job.
What you lack, my friend, is an elementary knowledge of game theory. I have never contributed a single line of code to a free software project, and yet I still have access to all the great free software that you do. My gain, in any tangible sense, is exactly the same as your gain. If you perform a good deed and then you find a $100 bill lying on the street, you are not being rewarded for your good deed, although if you believe in karma you might interpret it as such.
I too embark on the occasional programming project just for fun. Mostly they are for my own interest. I have released a few of the binaries for free, but I don't open source them. Anyway, they are just toys. You justify your contributions by the warm and tingly feeling you get when you think that some random person is using your app for free. I get my warm and tingly feeling from the knowledge that I am not thoughtlessly putting other programmers out of work.
The point is, neither of us is gaining any tangible benefit from releasing or not releasing the software that we were going to write anyway, but our decision about what to do with it reflects our value systems.
-a Free software: programmers helping programmers to stay unemployed.
This would be a perfectly valid complaint if it wasn't posted to a forum that regularly argues that a) music swapping should be legal, and b) copyright shouldn't exist. The beauty of such a forum is that people can advance their mutually contradictory arguments, and yet everyone can still agree.
That's great, but I think we've all seen this list before. When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in 0 gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C.
This is another moldy oldy, and what's more, it's wrong:
NASA never asked Paul C. Fisher to produce a pen. When the astronauts began to fly, like the Russians, they used pencils, but the leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the [capsule's] atmosphere where there was no gravity. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed a safer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurized ball pen, with its ink enclosed in a sealed, pressurized ink cartridge. Fisher sent the first samples to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Houston Space Center. The pens were all metal except for the ink, which had a flash point above 200C. The sample Space Pens were thoroughly tested by NASA. They passed all the tests and have been used ever since on all manned space flights, American and Russian. All research and developement costs were paid by Paul Fisher. No development costs have ever been charged to the government.
Given IBM's need for continued growth, if they have a technology in house that they think has, say, a 33% chance of replacing hard drive, it would make perfect sense to sell the hard drive business for 20 billion and invest 6 billion in the new technology. A gamble, but with a potentially huge payoff
Well sure, in theory. If it's a good investment, they'll make it. However, I hope you're not insinuating that the numbers 20B, 6B and 33% have any mathematical relation to this decision because that would be ridiculous.
Extrordinary claims need extrordinary proof. Build the device and demonstrate that it works. Publish the specs. Have other people who are not associated at all with you build these devices. If they confirm the results then the claim can be made relatively authoritatively. If it doesn't happen then that's also fine, it means that a hypothesis was shown to be not an accurate model of how the universe works. The method described is science in action, the way it is supposed to work.
Of course the way science really works is that the 99% of people who propose kooky ideas like this, and who don't work for a university, get labelled as cranks while this guy gets recognition and publicity based solely on some back of the envelope speculation.
Oh come on. Do you use your CDs as coasters or something? It's funny how people use new technology as an excuse to award themselves rights that never previously existed. Back in the olden days, if you forgot your book on the bus you just went out and bought a new one. You didn't bitch and moan and write the publisher, demanding a new copy. When tapes came along, people started making backups of their LPs. This led to some piracy, but well within manageable levels. But now people have gotten the idea that the rights of the copyright owner must come second to their the inalienable right to access any song whenever and whereever they want.
I've got news for you, buddy. Our society is not optimized for fringe cases, nor should it be. If you want a backup copy of a CD then make it yourself. The right of the music owners to not have their works freely pirated is more important than the odd chance that you might be walking down the street with your mobile-iPod and you suddenly want to connect to a server in Finland and download this song that you used to own (well actually you borrowed the CD from your brother-in-law and never gave it back) but was destroyed in a freak accident when you actually dropped it down an elevator chute.
Maybe in the future, you will be able to purchase an individual license to a song. In return for giving up some freedoms (e.g. the anonymity of buying a CD), you can become a registered "user" of a particular song. In that case, you can download the song from whereever you want, but you probably won't be able to resell it later, like you can with a CD.
-a
The advantage of the GPL is that your customers can maintain and upgrade your software, even after you go bankrupt.
I hope it is the music companies who have found a clever way to shut out free-loaders. One of the points that people often ignore here is that a wide-scale solution to music piracy does not have to be technologically perfect; it merely has to make it sufficiently inconvenient or shameful to pirate music that most people won't bother. That's essentially what the much-loathed DRM technology does. This new technique of flooding the netwaves with junk clips is even better because the only "victims" are criminals.
-a
--- The advantage of the GPL is that your customers can continue to maintain your code after you go bankrupt.
2. An artiste will gain repute throught the excellence of their work and the demand for their future work will grow with this repute. In the case of performers, they can gain wealth by performing and can gain repute by the wide distribution of their recorded works that in turn increases demand for their limited performances. I guess "artistes" like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits are screwed. Good songwriters, but who really wants to pay to hear them perform! I'd much rather wait for the cover version. Oh well, who really needs good songwriters anyway? The real money is in the costumes and the dance choreography. That's why Britney does so well.
-a
--- The advantage of the GPL is that your customers can continue to maintain your software after you go bankrupt.
Okay, is it just me or is the difference b/w these pretty much nonexistent? I assume there are other open-source licenses, but they'd all do the same thing anyway.
The advantage of open source is that your customers can continue to maintain and upgrade your code after you go bankrupt.
-a
--- When the man in front of you is shot, pick up his gun and start shooting.
Slashdot Mirror
A packet associated with an RIAA DoS attack is still a packet. So the RIAA plants some dummy file on a computer that results in other computers sending out extra requests to other systems in the P2P network. How is this different from any other DDos attack?
Let's say that a user does a search for a copyrighted song. He then downloads the song and finds out it is a decoy. Frustrated, he gives up and stops trying to download copyrighted material. The decoy song has not created any significant extra bandwidth.
Now imagine that the user doesn't give up after he downloads the decoy song. He keeps downloading alternate copies of the song until he finally finds one that isn't a decoy. In this case, the network will be flooded with extra requests, but whose fault is that?
The authors of Gnutella may claim that the system was not intended for pirating music, however willful ignorance is not an excuse in the eyes of the law. If you throw a bag of drugs in the dumpster, and then later "just happen to find" a $100 bill on the street and it turns out that the guy who dropped the $100 went and picked up the drugs out of the dumpster, your flimsy excuse that you were not trafficking in drugs is not going to fly. Likewise, the "we just make software... we don't control what people use it for" excuse doesn't work either.
-a
It is small steps that set people up for justification of other more drastic steps. They may not have referred to ping-bombs, but they go ahead and do it anyways with the justification that it was not specifically disallowed. That is how they abuse the system.
IMHO, slippery slope arguments should not be the basis for legislation. Taking an argument to its logical extreme is a useful too in mathematics, but it fails miserably in real life.
-a
There is only one flaw in your argument - going after specifically targeted songs is one thing, but a DoS attack disables the entire network regardless of what is crossing its wires
Are you sure you know what you are talking about? There are many types of DoS attacks. You can DoS attack a whole network, a single host, or just a single protocol. The effect of targetted decoy tracks is to disrupt the activities of people who are specifically looking for those tracks (a DoS attack). The rest of the users (who are presumably trading recipes or something) shouldn't be affected. Neither the article, nor the message you replied to, was advocating other types of DoS attacks, such as ping-bombs.
-a
Ultimately, tightly knit groups of developers in close contact with the users has a better chance of delivering the goods. Look at BSD or GNU/Linux. They've come so far because of a close knit group. As long as we keep our eye on the ball we will do well. Tackle the issues one at a time and build on the foundation.
Whatever happened to this whole Cathedral and the Bazaar thing?
-a
Finally an open source analogy your grandmother can understand
Yeah, despite the fact that it's a ridiculous analogy. Analogies don't prove anything. They just make you more convinced of your beliefs, whether they're right or wrong.
Don't you think the huge difference in proportion is relevant? When you buy a car, you do so with a 100% guarantee that the car will require service, and that service is a significant portion of the total cost of ownership of the car. The average consumer who buys an off-the-shelf software product (e.g. a game) will probably never need support. In the case of a more major purchase (e.g. an OS/Office suite), you get free updates off the web. The average consumer doesn't pay to have someone customize their OS for them. If they're technically challenged, they might pay someone to install it for them.
-a
Go to a large enterprise (their target), and give them a choice:
1. This distibution, built form a consortium of companies CERTIFIED to run with Oracle, DB2, Checkpoint-1, etc etc... for some price (say $2,500)
2. This free distribution which has all the same components, but is backed by some volunteers over the internet. It mirrors (1) in all regards but support and certification.
Most medium to large companies will go with (1) in a heartbeat.
This assumes that the purchasing managers at large companies are idiots, and will continue to act like idiots. Let's see how long they are willing to flush money down the toilet when the economic slump continues for another 3 years. Unless you are an experienced con-artist, any business plan that depends on the gullibility of the consumer is probably flawed.
Seriously, why would you pay $2,500 to get something when you can get the *EXACT* same thing for free. We're not talking about a cheap knock-off here. It's the *same damn thing*. So what if it's backed by a consortium of companies? If a bug in Linux causes me to lose data or allows an intruder to hack into my network, I guess I can sue Caldera, then? Why would I bother suing a financially strapped company with no discernable revenue source; why wouldn't I just use the free version and buy some insurance from a bank?
The way you describe it, it really does sound like the UnitedLinux companies are just selling insurance. Sure, they may contribute the odd bug fix here and there, but it reminds me of that insurance commercial where the car insurance company describes how they fund research into eliminating dangerous intersections "because ensuring your safety saves us money."
-a
What I read from the subtext of this article is that the major Linux distribution companies have lost confidence in the GPL. He doesn't come right out and say it, but it's clear that they are fighting the license. Without violating the GPL, they are trying to make it inconvenient for users to redistribute the software and avoid the per-seat licensing. He also says that he not does believe in a Linux model that requires ongoing charity to survive. This sounds like a dig at Mandrake.
He is right, though. Charity is a terrible business model. The only time it works well is when you campaign for some worthy cause (e.g. feeding starving children in Africa) and then spend 90% of the money on "administration". Here's an interesting tidbit from the other side of the political spectrum. Did you know that Ayn Rand (a laissez-faire capitalist and staunch opponent of taxes) believed that if income tax was abolished then the rich citizens of America would voluntarily donate money to establish an army? Can you imagine a world in which armies were established and paid for solely by robber barons? I mean, they'd probably be sent off to fight any country that threatened to mess with our oil supply. Oh wait, that already happens.
-a
the Stroustrop C++ book is actually pretty good,
Pretty good, but also brutally terse. Experts love it, beginners usually despise it.
Okay, well I don't actually own it. But I remember flipping through it a few times and finding out some useful stuff. What I do own, is an STL reference, which comes in very handy. You're right, though. Stroustrop C++ is probably not a good book for beginners, and it should be stricken from this list, just like K&R.
-a
When someone asks for a good programming book, why does someone always recommend K&R? Where did we get this crazy notion that the guys who invented the language obviously wrote the best book about it? I mean, the Stroustrop C++ book is actually pretty good, but K&R is terse, obtuse, and out-of-date. It's like trying to learn Perl from the man pages.
I still remember my introduction to C. I was in high school and a friend of the family arranged for me to volunteer at the CS department of the local university. Someone handed me a copy of K&R and told me to go write something. I was already an experienced Pascal/Basic programmer by that point, but K&R C was clear as mud. I think I managed to hack the thing together by trial and error. The next year I took a C course which was pretty much self-directed (the prof didn't actually know C), and I learned the language mostly from the TurboC help files... a better reference than K&R if you ask me.
-a
I disagree; take a look at other industries. Some of the highest-quality products are produced by the tiny, niche-market manufacturers. The best cigars in the world are not from Phillip-Morris. The finest cuisine on your block is not the mega-corporation with the giant yellow 'M'. The most accurate watches don't come from time-giant Timex. The finest literature on the bookshelf isn't necessarily from the biggest publisher.
Not that I disagree with your conclusions, but this premise is pretty sketchy. Every product you cite (except the literature one) is an example of a luxury item. Luxury items are things that people blow money on. When a company is buying a per-seat license for a software tool, they have to think about the bottom line. Also, the software market is different from these other markets because the cost to develop software is far greater than the cost per unit.
-a
Interesting, we agree in relative terms. I'm very confident the BSD and LGPL licenses are a net positive, and I'm unsure about the GPL.
Well, this will probably be the first time a slashdot thread ends in relative agreement.
-a
the window repairman isn't doing useless work either, but after breaking a window and having him repair it, there is no net increase in wealth. The economy would be better off if the window's owner could spend his money on something other than window repairs. Likewise, paying many programmers to write nearly-identical code is a much less efficient use of resources than using free software and directing those resources toward other activities (which may involve developing new software, rather than reinventing the wheel).
Having multiple people develop the same software creates diversity. Different programmers employ various architectures and programming languages, and this creates an atmosphere where the consumer has a choice. This even happens with open source projects. Look at how many distributions of Linux there are, not to mention all the BSDs. As a C++ programmer and advocate, I wouldn't be a kernel hacker, even if I was an open source zealot. I would rather be working on an OS that was written in C++.
If free software puts me out of work, that's too bad for me but a net gain for the economy. I can help myself and produce a larger economic gain by writing better software, or by figuring out how to add value to free software solutions.
I, like a lot of people, feel that free software will have a stifling effect on the economy because of viral licensing. That's why I'm not viscerally opposed to the BSD license or the LGPL. I think the jury's still out on whether they will have a net good effect, but I'm very confident that the GPL will have a bad effect.
-a
I know about the broken window fallacy. It is not a perfect analogy because the programmers in this case are not doing useless work. They are merely doing useful work that others are willing to do for free.
Let's say you are a factory worker who is being laid off because the factory is being moved to Mexico, where the workers will be paid 8 cents an hour. I doubt you would use the broken window argument here. This is a protectionism vs. globalization argument, pure and simple.
-a
Of course, the same basic story was also made into a movie called The Manhattan Project in 1986. One can only speculate where this kid got the idea.
-a
If I put a dollar value (imaginary money?) on everything I did, *I'd* be Bill Gates. Come on, folks, not everything comes down to money, and it's kind of a flaw in our culture, IMNSHO, that nothing is seen as important unless you can dollar-figure quantify it, package it, and sell it.
Your opinion may not be humble, but that doesn't prevent it from being wrong. As it turns out, everything does come down to money. If you write a program that you maybe could have sold, but you didn't, that's an opportunity cost. The rent on my apartment costs me $N an month. If I moved to a larger apartment, it would cost me more. An extra $100 in my retirement fund every month may allow me to retire 2 years earlier. Again it comes down to money vs. time. Of course, I could also spend that $100 on Cocoa Puffs, but all that means is that the aphorism "time is money" has no less validity than "Cocoa Puffs are money" or "time is Cocoa Puffs". Everything that has value is interchangeable.
People spend all of their time either spending money or earning money. In general, you can't decide how much you earn, but you can decide how much you spend. If you decide that your time is worth $2000 dollars an hour then you probably ought to quit your job if you are getting paid less than that, but you might find yourself reevaluating your priorities when you're living on the street. As a gainfully employed member of society, I have the opportunity to determine how much my time is worth to me. I can choose to not take my allotted 3 weeks vacation and take the money instead. I always take the vacation because I am paid enough that I have the luxury of valuing my time highly. Meanwhile, my sister only makes minimum wage, but she chooses to work two jobs because she needs the money. The things she can buy with the money (an education) are worth more than the free time now.
BTW, IMHO anyone who prefaces an argument with IMNSHO ought to be shot.
-a
The amount of great software I've received for free, not to mention the amount of freedom I've gained in both my business and home life by using free software, more than compensates me for the time I put into it, whether it is writing stuff as a hobby, or testing it (and reporting bugs) for my job.
What you lack, my friend, is an elementary knowledge of game theory. I have never contributed a single line of code to a free software project, and yet I still have access to all the great free software that you do. My gain, in any tangible sense, is exactly the same as your gain. If you perform a good deed and then you find a $100 bill lying on the street, you are not being rewarded for your good deed, although if you believe in karma you might interpret it as such.
I too embark on the occasional programming project just for fun. Mostly they are for my own interest. I have released a few of the binaries for free, but I don't open source them. Anyway, they are just toys. You justify your contributions by the warm and tingly feeling you get when you think that some random person is using your app for free. I get my warm and tingly feeling from the knowledge that I am not thoughtlessly putting other programmers out of work.
The point is, neither of us is gaining any tangible benefit from releasing or not releasing the software that we were going to write anyway, but our decision about what to do with it reflects our value systems.
-a
Free software: programmers helping programmers to stay unemployed.
This would be a perfectly valid complaint if it wasn't posted to a forum that regularly argues that a) music swapping should be legal, and b) copyright shouldn't exist. The beauty of such a forum is that people can advance their mutually contradictory arguments, and yet everyone can still agree.
-a
That's great, but I think we've all seen this list before.
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in 0 gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C.
This is another moldy oldy, and what's more, it's wrong:
NASA never asked Paul C. Fisher to produce a pen. When the astronauts began to fly, like the Russians, they used pencils, but the leads sometimes broke and became a hazard by floating in the [capsule's] atmosphere where there was no gravity. They could float into an eye or nose or cause a short in an electrical device. In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere. Paul Fisher realized the astronauts needed a safer and more dependable writing instrument, so in July 1965 he developed the pressurized ball pen, with its ink enclosed in a sealed, pressurized ink cartridge. Fisher sent the first samples to Dr. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Houston Space Center. The pens were all metal except for the ink, which had a flash point above 200C. The sample Space Pens were thoroughly tested by NASA. They passed all the tests and have been used ever since on all manned space flights, American and Russian. All research and developement costs were paid by Paul Fisher. No development costs have ever been charged to the government.
-a
Given IBM's need for continued growth, if they have a technology in house that they think has, say, a 33% chance of replacing hard drive, it would make perfect sense to sell the hard drive business for 20 billion and invest 6 billion in the new technology. A gamble, but with a potentially huge payoff
Well sure, in theory. If it's a good investment, they'll make it. However, I hope you're not insinuating that the numbers 20B, 6B and 33% have any mathematical relation to this decision because that would be ridiculous.
-a
Extrordinary claims need extrordinary proof. Build the device and demonstrate that it works. Publish the specs. Have other people who are not associated at all with you build these devices. If they confirm the results then the claim can be made relatively authoritatively. If it doesn't happen then that's also fine, it means that a hypothesis was shown to be not an accurate model of how the universe works. The method described is science in action, the way it is supposed to work.
Of course the way science really works is that the 99% of people who propose kooky ideas like this, and who don't work for a university, get labelled as cranks while this guy gets recognition and publicity based solely on some back of the envelope speculation.
-a
Oh come on. Do you use your CDs as coasters or something? It's funny how people use new technology as an excuse to award themselves rights that never previously existed. Back in the olden days, if you forgot your book on the bus you just went out and bought a new one. You didn't bitch and moan and write the publisher, demanding a new copy. When tapes came along, people started making backups of their LPs. This led to some piracy, but well within manageable levels. But now people have gotten the idea that the rights of the copyright owner must come second to their the inalienable right to access any song whenever and whereever they want.
I've got news for you, buddy. Our society is not optimized for fringe cases, nor should it be. If you want a backup copy of a CD then make it yourself. The right of the music owners to not have their works freely pirated is more important than the odd chance that you might be walking down the street with your mobile-iPod and you suddenly want to connect to a server in Finland and download this song that you used to own (well actually you borrowed the CD from your brother-in-law and never gave it back) but was destroyed in a freak accident when you actually dropped it down an elevator chute.
Maybe in the future, you will be able to purchase an individual license to a song. In return for giving up some freedoms (e.g. the anonymity of buying a CD), you can become a registered "user" of a particular song. In that case, you can download the song from whereever you want, but you probably won't be able to resell it later, like you can with a CD.
-a
The advantage of the GPL is that your customers can maintain and upgrade your software, even after you go bankrupt.
I hope it is the music companies who have found a clever way to shut out free-loaders. One of the points that people often ignore here is that a wide-scale solution to music piracy does not have to be technologically perfect; it merely has to make it sufficiently inconvenient or shameful to pirate music that most people won't bother. That's essentially what the much-loathed DRM technology does. This new technique of flooding the netwaves with junk clips is even better because the only "victims" are criminals.
-a
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The advantage of the GPL is that your customers can continue to maintain your code after you go bankrupt.
2. An artiste will gain repute throught the excellence of their work and the demand for their future work will grow with this repute. In the case of performers, they can gain wealth by performing and can gain repute by the wide distribution of their recorded works that in turn increases demand for their limited performances.
I guess "artistes" like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits are screwed. Good songwriters, but who really wants to pay to hear them perform! I'd much rather wait for the cover version. Oh well, who really needs good songwriters anyway? The real money is in the costumes and the dance choreography. That's why Britney does so well.
-a
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The advantage of the GPL is that your customers can continue to maintain your software after you go bankrupt.
Okay, is it just me or is the difference b/w these pretty much nonexistent? I assume there are other open-source licenses, but they'd all do the same thing anyway.
The advantage of open source is that your customers can continue to maintain and upgrade your code after you go bankrupt.
-a
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When the man in front of you is shot, pick up his gun and start shooting.
Who the *FUCK* mod'ed this up to +5 interesting? This tired rehash of lame arguments is about as interesting as my grandmother's shoe.
-a