to what the BSA has been doing? I mean other than the random audits of innocent businesses and the demands for payment of penalties and purchase of software licenses?
One would think the FSF has the same right to enforce copyrights and licenses that the BSA has.
It shouldn't be held to the same liabilities as an automobile. An automobile has the potential to hurt or kill people in it if it has defects. It is the responsibility of the auto company to make sure their cars will not hurt people due to their engineering flaws. In the case of Windows, no one is stopping you from using another operating system if theirs is not stable enough for your use. I think you should be able to get a refund if their software doesn't do what it says it can and then move to Linux, OS X or whatever else you would like to use. Suing MS for bad software is like saying you cannot use something else. I use something else so why can't California?
Yet automobile manufacturers are also sued for nonhazardous situations. I think Toyota was sued for premature engine failure due to sludge build-up. I think suing Microsoft is more in line with this thinking.
Using your logic, there is no expectation of fitness for use for software at all. You can have all the features in the world. Just don't expect to use them.
'Use something else,' you say. How would you like your car "Microsoft" dealer to tell you that after you discover your car is a lemon? Oh, by the way, all the other manufacturers cars don't work on Microsoft Roads. And there is no refund.
The second thing to consider is that this is *your girlfriend*. It's not your wife, it's not your sister or your mom. It's someone with whom you do not have a determined future with. Are you prepared to give away $1,500 bucks and have it disappear forever if she decides that she likes Fuji Nakamichi more than you? Some advice (that's why you're posting here, right?) - give her a big kiss and some flowers.
the MPAA will start distributing movies with only two minutes of actual story line and filling the remaining 88 minutes with explosions, noise, bad dialogue, and product placements to prevent the unauthorized distribution of its intellectual property.
Funny, up until the recent AOLization of CNN, CNN ran an IRC server for discussing their news stories. They even provided a newsticker through the IRC channel. They just shutdown the server in the last month or two.
Now that they are out of the IRC business, they are claiming it is used by hackers? Seems more like AOL has decided all those bad people on IRC should be chatting through AIM instead like good little sheep.
Engineers don't organize for one very important reason: career path.
The career path for many engineers eventually leads to management roles within their respective employers. Engineers typically do bench work for a few years after college. Then they move up to project management. And eventually, if the stars are aligned and the engineer can swallow his or her pride, the move is made to managing the business and making nontechical decisions.
On the other hand, the value to engineers of professional organizations historically is directly proportional to how much at odds the engineers and managements views are. Since many engineers may end up being management, it really is not in their interest to fight management today and be overlooked for promotions tomorrow.
In fact, many engineers have their dues paid to professional organizations by their employers. Every time engineering organizations, such as the IEEE, have tried to hold some position against management, membership has fallen substantially.
As long as engineers aspire to being something more than glorified technicians, professional engineering organizations organized against management will be an unreachable dream of the downtrodden engineer.
BTW, Michigan Tech University offers an excellent course in the history of the engineering profession where this issue is discussed at great length.
My question is how can there be a patent on something that has been proven not to exist. DRM has been proven not to be mathematically possible, yet MS has a patent?
In this legal environment, people circumventing the slime with crampons and cleats would lead to crampons and cleats being outlawed. This would of course lead to only the outlaw being able to stand up making them much easier targets.
The rest of us law abiding folks would toe the line and slither around from place to place on our bellies as any law-abiding, God-fearing, American would do.
My point is that the consumer does not care about any of these costs. The consumer only cares about the music on the media when they purchase it at the store. Marketing costs, etc. are costs justifying the prices to themselves.
Last I checked, I don't value marketing costs, etc., as a consumer. Long lived media I might consider valuable, but I think I can find a better price elsewhere.
Publishers are just another communication channel. Before the internet, the only effective way to distribute large amounts of information was to stamp it on physical media and move it to the buyer. Back in college, a classmate calculated the effective bandwidth of a semi-truck delivering a truckload of books.
As with other communication channels, consumers pay for the information delivery service. No more, no less.
If you believe in market economics, the widespread communications capacity glut is going to depress the prices on all communication channels. Further, this is probably only the second time in human history that this has happened. As with the first time -- the invention of the printing press, it will take some time for prices to settle to an acceptable level for the public and the companies trying to serve them.
One might ask what am I getting at after all this babbling. Basically, as with the printing press, when enough content is created to fully utilize the communication capacity available prices should start to stabilize for all involved. A proactive measure of the publishers would be to increase the amount of content in their products to the point where the communications capacity is fully utilized.
For example, if CD's contained not only the 10 songs of so so material, but also maybe twenty or thirty hours of recording studio material/concerts. Many fans might not want just the 10 songs. To get the full CD, many might not be willing to upgrade to T1 lines just to get it.
Interesting artists with many interpretations of their songs might actually have a fighting chance in this scenario vs. one-hit wonders of the day. I think I would be more interested in what Sting really thinks about his songs or other approaches that he considered but couldn't get to work.
In a world of gigabyte/sec communications, giving the consumer less than 1 second of information for $20 seems pretty paltry.
if one thinks about it. Chances are relatively good that if one's parent works at Intel, one would get plenty of exposure to technology at home. Computers at school would add little new learning to students in this environment.
I believe computers at school are far more important in places where computers at home are far less prevalent. My understanding of the goal of computers at school is to prevent the high school student from showing up at their first job and not feel comfortable working with the box on the desk. That can make the difference between a job with future potential and a job flipping burgers.
If I had computers at home, the last thing I would want my tax dollars spent on at school would be computers that will not add to my child's education. Pretty obvious, I would think.
IANAL, but I believe you can make yourself subject to a liability by acting within your rights. For example, if one signs an NDA, that person has effectively said that if they exercise their right to free speech, they will compensate the other party for damages resulting.
Without promising not to exercise your rights, it would be difficult to create contracts at all. Contract law does not allow one to sign oneself into slavery, but one can contract all their future productive work to an employer for some level of compensation.
Does the idea of copyleft make sense for things other than software?
Only in so far as there is value in copying beyond fair use.
Many people use copy machines to make copies of documents that under copyright laws they should not. From a liability perspective, a library would find value in using "copylefted" documents in these cases. Signs over copy machines reminding us not to make copies of copyrighted materials could instead suggest copying of "copylefted" materials is permitted.
Publishers of compilations, such as magazines or journals, might find some value in not having to purchase copyrights to material where the author is only interested in wide distribution. The "copyleft" would indicate the author's intentions with hopefully more legal weight than a disclaimer somewhere in the text.
Distributors of digital products such as cable companies and broadband provider's may find some value in a source of unencumbered content to provide to their customers.
"It's a Wonderful Life" is one of the few feature films that has entered the public domain. Its popularity can probably be attributed to the ability of broadcasters to show it without royalties.
The question might be what incentive, other than the aforementioned wide distribution, the author would see from copyleft?
Mozilla tried to go down a path with different licenses as well. Ultimately, so many contributed GPL only contributions it became hard to seperate the GPL stuff from the non-GPL stuff. Today, Mozilla has transistioned to a GPL license.
If enough people contribute to the Mono exercise with GPL code, there really won't be a distinction. If you contribute, just GPL your stuff. If it's important enough, there really won't be much choice.
I can appreciate that there are other property rights besides owning the top 6" of soil. My point still applies however. There are owners of those other rights. Even if the owner is still the state, as a citizen, I would expect my representatives get just compensation for allowing wires to pass through.
In your example of the state widing the road, I understand that the state can buy the property at fair market value whether I want to sell or not. The original comment was in regards to free markets and private companies.
My point was that negotiating with the owner's of that property (state, mineral, underground, topsoil, etc) would be an insurmountable barrier to private companies developing networks of gas, electricity, information, et al. Complaining that the state monopolies are hindering free markets may not be the whole truth.
In some markets, there would not be markets without the state's involvement. Without the SEC, there would be no Wall Street. Without the govt. courts, there would be no contract enforcement. Without state monopolies, companies would be unable to negotiate with every party when these parties number in the hundreds of thousands.
I can understand your frustration with goverment sponsored monopolies. However, without government sponsored monopolies, how would these companies coerce landowners to allow these wires to cross their property? As a landowner, I would have a problem with the wires being handed to a private entity without compensation from the private entity for traversing my property.
As painful as state monopolies are sometimes, I don't think there are viable alternatives. Negotiating with millions of landowners would be prohibitively expensive. Griping about how state monopolies don't support free-markets does not provide an alternative to this situation.
1) Open Source software development is by definition a producer/consumer system. The point is that freeloading is allowed - in fact, necessary! What would be the point in a load of hackers writing the Linux kernel if loads of people didn't download it? End users don't have to contribute back to the pool; that's why they are so called.
I believe this assertion is taking a very narrow view of what constitute contributions back into the pool. I agree that most people using open source don't contribute source code, but they do contribute in other ways.
Many speak to their friends about it (marketing), use it in their business, find problems (testing), voice concerns on direction of development on the mailing lists (management), offer resources (investment), run benchmarks (research), etc.
If one were to include all the ways to contribute, there are very few who don't contribute in some positive way.
With this broader definition of free-loader, I think the article is far more applicable to Open Source development.
As far as "punishment" goes, one only has to look as far as the Nvidia binary only drivers to see the negative comments about Nvidia's approach. I would even go so far as the comments come from those with a narrower definition of contribution.
This path makes far more sense than fighting with the consumer on copy protection. Watermark their files so that it would be relatively easy for law enforcement to "know" a file has been illegally copied. Are they going to raid someone's home looking for them? Probably not. But they might look through a suspected criminal's computer (with a warrant, of course) and prosecute based on what they find.
I really don't have a problem with this as it would be no different than car manufacturer's putting the VIN everywhere they can on a vehicle.
In this case, enforcement might be substantially easier than prevention.
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to what the BSA has been doing? I mean other than the random audits of innocent businesses and the demands for payment of penalties and purchase of software licenses?
One would think the FSF has the same right to enforce copyrights and licenses that the BSA has.
It shouldn't be held to the same liabilities as an automobile. An automobile has the potential to hurt or kill people in it if it has defects. It is the responsibility of the auto company to make sure their cars will not hurt people due to their engineering flaws. In the case of Windows, no one is stopping you from using another operating system if theirs is not stable enough for your use. I think you should be able to get a refund if their software doesn't do what it says it can and then move to Linux, OS X or whatever else you would like to use. Suing MS for bad software is like saying you cannot use something else. I use something else so why can't California?
Yet automobile manufacturers are also sued for nonhazardous situations. I think Toyota was sued for premature engine failure due to sludge build-up. I think suing Microsoft is more in line with this thinking.
Using your logic, there is no expectation of fitness for use for software at all. You can have all the features in the world. Just don't expect to use them.
'Use something else,' you say. How would you like your car "Microsoft" dealer to tell you that after you discover your car is a lemon? Oh, by the way, all the other manufacturers cars don't work on Microsoft Roads. And there is no refund.
The second thing to consider is that this is *your girlfriend*. It's not your wife, it's not your sister or your mom. It's someone with whom you do not have a determined future with. Are you prepared to give away $1,500 bucks and have it disappear forever if she decides that she likes Fuji Nakamichi more than you? Some advice (that's why you're posting here, right?) - give her a big kiss and some flowers.
The one day I wish I had moderation points . . .
These little gems that make a person go back to look at the history are one of the reasons I read slashdot at all.
I have one as well. It's small enough to slip into a pocket during a run. And it acts just like a CF reader when its plugged in to the USB port.
The headphones weren't the greatest, but I prefer ear buds for the gym anyway.
the MPAA will start distributing movies with only two minutes of actual story line and filling the remaining 88 minutes with explosions, noise, bad dialogue, and product placements to prevent the unauthorized distribution of its intellectual property.
DOJ essentially gives up the anti-trust case and Microsoft code names the next version of Windows after a Texan word like Longhorn? Coincidence?
I think not!
Funny, up until the recent AOLization of CNN, CNN ran an IRC server for discussing their news stories. They even provided a newsticker through the IRC channel. They just shutdown the server in the last month or two.
Now that they are out of the IRC business, they are claiming it is used by hackers? Seems more like AOL has decided all those bad people on IRC should be chatting through AIM instead like good little sheep.
Engineers are practical by design.
Engineers don't organize for one very important reason: career path.
The career path for many engineers eventually leads to management roles within their respective employers. Engineers typically do bench work for a few years after college. Then they move up to project management. And eventually, if the stars are aligned and the engineer can swallow his or her pride, the move is made to managing the business and making nontechical decisions.
On the other hand, the value to engineers of professional organizations historically is directly proportional to how much at odds the engineers and managements views are. Since many engineers may end up being management, it really is not in their interest to fight management today and be overlooked for promotions tomorrow.
In fact, many engineers have their dues paid to professional organizations by their employers. Every time engineering organizations, such as the IEEE, have tried to hold some position against management, membership has fallen substantially.
As long as engineers aspire to being something more than glorified technicians, professional engineering organizations organized against management will be an unreachable dream of the downtrodden engineer.
BTW, Michigan Tech University offers an excellent course in the history of the engineering profession where this issue is discussed at great length.
My question is how can there be a patent on something that has been proven not to exist. DRM has been proven not to be mathematically possible, yet MS has a patent?
In this legal environment, people circumventing the slime with crampons and cleats would lead to crampons and cleats being outlawed. This would of course lead to only the outlaw being able to stand up making them much easier targets.
The rest of us law abiding folks would toe the line and slither around from place to place on our bellies as any law-abiding, God-fearing, American would do.
I think that is the point of Hyper TEXT Transport Protocol.
My point is that the consumer does not care about any of these costs. The consumer only cares about the music on the media when they purchase it at the store. Marketing costs, etc. are costs justifying the prices to themselves.
Last I checked, I don't value marketing costs, etc., as a consumer. Long lived media I might consider valuable, but I think I can find a better price elsewhere.
Publishers are just another communication channel. Before the internet, the only effective way to distribute large amounts of information was to stamp it on physical media and move it to the buyer. Back in college, a classmate calculated the effective bandwidth of a semi-truck delivering a truckload of books.
As with other communication channels, consumers pay for the information delivery service. No more, no less.
If you believe in market economics, the widespread communications capacity glut is going to depress the prices on all communication channels. Further, this is probably only the second time in human history that this has happened. As with the first time -- the invention of the printing press, it will take some time for prices to settle to an acceptable level for the public and the companies trying to serve them.
One might ask what am I getting at after all this babbling. Basically, as with the printing press, when enough content is created to fully utilize the communication capacity available prices should start to stabilize for all involved. A proactive measure of the publishers would be to increase the amount of content in their products to the point where the communications capacity is fully utilized.
For example, if CD's contained not only the 10 songs of so so material, but also maybe twenty or thirty hours of recording studio material/concerts. Many fans might not want just the 10 songs. To get the full CD, many might not be willing to upgrade to T1 lines just to get it.
Interesting artists with many interpretations of their songs might actually have a fighting chance in this scenario vs. one-hit wonders of the day. I think I would be more interested in what Sting really thinks about his songs or other approaches that he considered but couldn't get to work.
In a world of gigabyte/sec communications, giving the consumer less than 1 second of information for $20 seems pretty paltry.
if one thinks about it. Chances are relatively good that if one's parent works at Intel, one would get plenty of exposure to technology at home. Computers at school would add little new learning to students in this environment.
I believe computers at school are far more important in places where computers at home are far less prevalent. My understanding of the goal of computers at school is to prevent the high school student from showing up at their first job and not feel comfortable working with the box on the desk. That can make the difference between a job with future potential and a job flipping burgers.
If I had computers at home, the last thing I would want my tax dollars spent on at school would be computers that will not add to my child's education. Pretty obvious, I would think.
IANAL, but I believe you can make yourself subject to a liability by acting within your rights. For example, if one signs an NDA, that person has effectively said that if they exercise their right to free speech, they will compensate the other party for damages resulting.
Without promising not to exercise your rights, it would be difficult to create contracts at all. Contract law does not allow one to sign oneself into slavery, but one can contract all their future productive work to an employer for some level of compensation.
Just my two cents.
Does the idea of copyleft make sense for things other than software?
Only in so far as there is value in copying beyond fair use.
Many people use copy machines to make copies of documents that under copyright laws they should not. From a liability perspective, a library would find value in using "copylefted" documents in these cases. Signs over copy machines reminding us not to make copies of copyrighted materials could instead suggest copying of "copylefted" materials is permitted.
Publishers of compilations, such as magazines or journals, might find some value in not having to purchase copyrights to material where the author is only interested in wide distribution. The "copyleft" would indicate the author's intentions with hopefully more legal weight than a disclaimer somewhere in the text.
Distributors of digital products such as cable companies and broadband provider's may find some value in a source of unencumbered content to provide to their customers.
"It's a Wonderful Life" is one of the few feature films that has entered the public domain. Its popularity can probably be attributed to the ability of broadcasters to show it without royalties.
The question might be what incentive, other than the aforementioned wide distribution, the author would see from copyleft?
I learned a long time ago not to click on any links in SlashDot until long after the article is posted :-)
Which adds more proof to the theory that many slashdot contributors post comments on articles they haven't even read.
Mozilla tried to go down a path with different licenses as well. Ultimately, so many contributed GPL only contributions it became hard to seperate the GPL stuff from the non-GPL stuff. Today, Mozilla has transistioned to a GPL license.
If enough people contribute to the Mono exercise with GPL code, there really won't be a distinction. If you contribute, just GPL your stuff. If it's important enough, there really won't be much choice.
Nice comment. This comment has got to be the closest thing I have seen to a good old fashioned bible thumping sermon I have ever seen on slashdot.
I can appreciate that there are other property rights besides owning the top 6" of soil. My point still applies however. There are owners of those other rights. Even if the owner is still the state, as a citizen, I would expect my representatives get just compensation for allowing wires to pass through.
In your example of the state widing the road, I understand that the state can buy the property at fair market value whether I want to sell or not. The original comment was in regards to free markets and private companies.
My point was that negotiating with the owner's of that property (state, mineral, underground, topsoil, etc) would be an insurmountable barrier to private companies developing networks of gas, electricity, information, et al. Complaining that the state monopolies are hindering free markets may not be the whole truth.
In some markets, there would not be markets without the state's involvement. Without the SEC, there would be no Wall Street. Without the govt. courts, there would be no contract enforcement. Without state monopolies, companies would be unable to negotiate with every party when these parties number in the hundreds of thousands.
I can understand your frustration with goverment sponsored monopolies. However, without government sponsored monopolies, how would these companies coerce landowners to allow these wires to cross their property? As a landowner, I would have a problem with the wires being handed to a private entity without compensation from the private entity for traversing my property.
As painful as state monopolies are sometimes, I don't think there are viable alternatives. Negotiating with millions of landowners would be prohibitively expensive. Griping about how state monopolies don't support free-markets does not provide an alternative to this situation.
1) Open Source software development is by definition a producer/consumer system. The point is that freeloading is allowed - in fact, necessary! What would be the point in a load of hackers writing the Linux kernel if loads of people didn't download it? End users don't have to contribute back to the pool; that's why they are so called.
I believe this assertion is taking a very narrow view of what constitute contributions back into the pool. I agree that most people using open source don't contribute source code, but they do contribute in other ways.
Many speak to their friends about it (marketing), use it in their business, find problems (testing), voice concerns on direction of development on the mailing lists (management), offer resources (investment), run benchmarks (research), etc.
If one were to include all the ways to contribute, there are very few who don't contribute in some positive way.
With this broader definition of free-loader, I think the article is far more applicable to Open Source development.
As far as "punishment" goes, one only has to look as far as the Nvidia binary only drivers to see the negative comments about Nvidia's approach. I would even go so far as the comments come from those with a narrower definition of contribution.
This path makes far more sense than fighting with the consumer on copy protection. Watermark their files so that it would be relatively easy for law enforcement to "know" a file has been illegally copied. Are they going to raid someone's home looking for them? Probably not. But they might look through a suspected criminal's computer (with a warrant, of course) and prosecute based on what they find.
I really don't have a problem with this as it would be no different than car manufacturer's putting the VIN everywhere they can on a vehicle.
In this case, enforcement might be substantially easier than prevention.