You know, if someone is intent and willing to kill for drugs or money, then then I don't think it is too far a stretch to think that that person would kill for less. So legalize drugs;sell it legally in some shop. The cartels kill the competition when it is legal. Why would they all of a sudden become better people and let the legal competition slide?
That part is funny!! Do you think any cartel could stop some company of the size of Philip Morris, for example, from trading pot and cocaine if it were legal? Drug cartels are no competition for large corporations.
But to think that it (legalization) will somehow make shitty murderous people better is pretty naive.
So they will kill you for your iPod or whatever makes them money.
Shitty murderous people are not born that way. There are places in the world where becoming part of a drug cartel does improve your lifestyle. Funding is what makes that possible. If consumers stopped paying those people for killing whoever stands in the middle of dope and them, they would get their money elsewhere. Maybe without murdering people. It's not safe to shoot people, they might shoot back. Most of them would rather be paid for browsing/. like us, instead.
This world is ruled by money. If you want someone to change their behavior, you can start by not paying them to do what you don't like.
Your idea is not that bad. I see a problem with it, maybe you come up with a great idea, build a product for big business and patent the idea (I know ideas should not be patentable, but that's what software patents are). You can choose to license it at a thousand dollars per processor, and it would be OK in a financial sense. I come up with the same idea, but for consumer products. It's good, maybe some multitasking improvement, but not worth your thousand dollars per processor. You stop me from innovating, period.
Here's a better idea: no patents. I don't see any downside.
Why would anyone want to do this? It's like attacking the UN peace keeping troops or the Red Cross. reCAPTCHA is doing good work, digitizing scanned printed books so that the the text can be made available for online searching. Breaking reCAPTCHA is like defecating in the village well, ensuring that everyone suffers. No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one.
What "freedom" does a user have if the software he wants never exists in the first place, because the GPLed code prevents a company from investing time and money into the product that the user wants?
You couldn't be more wrong. The GPLed code can't prevent companies from investing time and money. The only way someone could prevent other companies from building stuff would be using patents, and the GPL doesn't involve filing patents. The GPL enables us to form a walled community inside which we get to share our stuff, and not get ripped off. Companies are free to join our community, or not do it. They can stay outside and build their own stuff, or come inside and share with us the respect for users freedom.
Most users don't give a fuck about having access to the source code. Whether the source is open or closed has approximately zero value to them. They want a product. They want to buy it from a company who spent time and money ensuring that it will work, won't lose data, won't catch on fire, etc. A company that provides a warranty and support. They want to pay for something that works; note the success of Apple's various idiot-friendly interfaces.
Those users can still buy from Apple, and they do as a matter of fact. The GPL doesn't prevent people from buying from Apple.
but it gives freedom to users that the BSD license does not.
Or, you could say, it TAKES freedom from users (ie: developers using a library) that the BSD license does not.
Wrong. It takes freedom from those developers only while they are wearing their distributor hats. They can use GPLed libraries as much as they like. They are just limited from distributing in a way that takes freedom away from users. Their freedom as _users_ is not harmed.
Not saying BSD is better, just saying GPL doesn't give "more freedoms" on a whole, it just assigns them to different people.
You are right here. It takes freedom away from distributors, and gives it _all_ to users. Just they are not necessarily different people, just different roles.
Not leaving brackets around one-liners is an invitation to mistakes. If you want to add a debug line to the one-line block, you need to add brackets. If you remove it, then remove the brackets. Using them always gives you one less thing to think about.
I love it here in Europe, just the other day a colleague of mine surprised me by wanting to install Ubuntu.
People here are less resistant to change and have a tiny bit more of patience to adapt to new things. They do not equate "new/unknown" with "crap" as other countries do.
Europe is not a country, yet.
About your sig: Ubuntu actually means "I can't be bothered to configure Debian". Messing with Slackware was fun, but since I was going to let apt do all the hard work for me, Ubuntu seemed like the logical next step.
That girl was just being a good Christian. That "zero" thing is an invention from the DEVIL! My minister says that it was made by Osama's great-great-daddy, an arab, and we all know they are all agents of the devil.
Flash is installed in most computers, and there's even a free alternative, gnash. I happen to be using it, it's the only way to get video acceleration in GNU/Linux. Flash is kind-of-needed for youtube and stuff, even though there is html5 video, it's still the most popular video solution.
Silverlight gives us nothing. In this particular application, it brings us nothing beyond flash (which is already installed), most clients don't have silverlight, and it also gives is nothing beyond html5 (which is better, and an open standard).
Exactly. For some people, OSS is like a crusade, but for many others (most of the people doing the heavy lifting, especially at companies that would be bought) I'm betting it's a paycheck.
You divide all developers into fanatics and mercenaries.I think it's ugly and wrong, because I think only a small minority is in either of those classes. Aside from that, OSS is not a crusade for anyone. OSS is a technical thing. Us religious fanatics, who care about ethics, are with Free Software. That is the ideological front, caring about the silly stuff like freedom.
At the end of the day, if an open source project you depend on is maintained by a for-profit company, and the project is sufficiently valuable, someone will eventually come along and buy its maintainer. And if the project is cutting into the bottom line of the buyer, as was the case with MySQL and Oracle, you can be sure that the new owner will make the change as disruptive as possible. It's a basic vulnerability that is built into the commercialization of Open Source. Whether it's a significant risk with any particular project will vary, of course, but it's always there, and the ability to fork is not a panacea.
At the end of the day, any product you depend on has that risk. The only difference with open source is that there are real world chances that you keep using the software you need after the acquisition, and getting support. Were you using proprietary software, either you jump on the upgrade treadmill of the buyer company, or you get no chance to have support. The issue here is not open/proprietary. The risk of larger companies buying the software producer is always high if the software is good and visible enough, and you are not buying from a large company in the first place. In that last case, there are other risks, like the company losing interest in the product. In the end, nothing is 100% certain, you can only choose what is best for you.
The problem with your stealing argument is, when you steal something, your taking away from someone else and leaving them with nothing. Copyright infringement is NOT stealing. It's wrong, but IMO not as bad as thieving a physical object.
Stealing has zero to do with "physical" and 100% to do with value. Your argument is completely without merit. The harm that stealing does is to take something of value from someone else without consent and/or recompense. If you drain someone's paypal account, you're not taking anything physical, you're just fiddling with numbers. But you're stealing because you're taking value directly. If you take a copy of software from them for nothing, where they only wish to part with it for recompense, you're increasing your value without compensating the creator. That's theft. If you take someone's virginity without their consent, you have stolen something irreplaceable, even if there is no physical change at all.
Theft is the act of appropriating value that you have no right to. It isn't the "picking up of something physical", and it has nothing to do with what you leave behind, either: It has to do with value you take away you have no right to.
Theft is not about value, it involves stealing property. Copyrighted works are the property of the public domain. Publishers only get distribution rights. It's only sane, because ownership is kind of impossible unless the stuff is secret, or you are the public domain. Then, you need to try again, getting everybody to accept your redefinition of "theft" as something like "misappropriation of value", with all its funny consequences.
There is zero ethical difference between these two; in both cases, the artist creates, the art is used, and the artist's payment is weaseled out of. There is zero ethical difference between taking a digital product against the producer's wishes and stealing a vase out of my company showroom.
Stealing property is only unethical because you deprive people of their property. If stealing your sandwich would just involve making a copy of it, then it would just not be wrong. So, taking stuff for free doesn't have to be unethical by itself.
Copyright infringement is closer to listening to a street artist, and then refusing to tip him. It's not even unethical. It might even be somewhat cruel, though. Of course, everybody knows that a street artist expects to be paid. Of course, if no one did tip them, they might even disappear.
Depriving someone of profit is not stealing by itself. There are lots of examples where you can get for free stuff that is intended to make money for their producers, somehow. Copying a song is one of those cases, that's why there are campaigns trying to convince people that it's stealing, because most people don't believe it's so. They are right.
Depriving someone of property, and keeping it to yourself are necessary for stealing to happen, if any of those two conditions are not met, you are in a different situation, with regard to ethics.
(About copyright infringement being right or wrong, I won't address that in this post, for the sake of discussion. This is about copyright infringement being the same as stealing)
Some people just seem to forget that the world doesn't owe them anything. If you're injured or born without the ability to walk, that's nobody's problem except your own.
...
Move to a city where businesses can afford good handicapped access. Hire someone to spend an hour each week getting your groceries. There are hundreds of solutions other than forcing your problems onto others.
Ok. Exile for the disabled, or make them pay a tax for their disabilities. It's not cruel, it's stupid.
If I were a fundamentalist individualist, like you seem to be, I would prefer to have laws that protect the disabled, just in case I became one of them. From that point of view, maybe everyone should be forced to pay a disability insurance, so they would not be a burden to society in the even they become disabled, or have disabled kids.
That's not the way I think. I think a society is not better than how it treats its weaker constituents. That does not only include disabled people, but also the elderly, people who are very poor, and others. I think their problems _are_ mine, and I am also responsible of taking care of them. That's because that's the kind of society I want to live in, I'm not ok with what I get so far.
I understand that catering to the needs of those with disabilities should not imply squashing other people. Anyhow, I don't see why you care about the hardware store owner, with your views, his financial issues are nobody's problem but his. He has the job he deserves, due to his inability to properly manage a business.
Seriously, since when is "program it yourself" a solution to "are there any open source software packages that do what I want?"? The answer you're looking for is "no". That's the correct answer.
Your answer is the response to "I want a ready to use dictation software, and I don't want to pay for it". If you find an open source backend, and payment is not your sole concern, you can get someone, maybe even the authors, to code the parts you need. You might even do it yourself, of course.
The thing is that _you_ assumed that "open source" meant "free as in beer". Some of us didn't. For those of us, it was a good response.
US did standardize on QWERTY. That's the problem. If keyboards had been designed taking into account the different languages, at least the ones in Latin-1, then US keyboards would just have left some empty space, that other layouts could use for their extra keys. As it is, the US keyboard is not extensible, so you have to remove some keys to fit the ones you need. That's why I don't have a dedicated slash key, because the eñe is more frequent in spanish than the slash. If the original US layout was designed with i18n in mind, there would be room for the eñe and the tilde in my case, or for the couple of Portuguese / French / German keys that differ from English.
Now I enjoy just buying the product with a click of a button, see theres extra value in the product when you actually own it, and I also understand that people making these games wouldn't be making them if everyone were stealing from them like you.
You don't own it legally, because you just get a license, if anyone, the public domain owns copyrighted works, and authors have a monopoly on distribution. If you are referring to the practical aspects of "owning", you don't own stuff that has DRM, because it can be taken away from you at the whims of the publisher. It's more similar to a rental. If you got it as an unauthorised copy, chances are that you get to keep it as long as you like.
To keep this whole discussion honest, yes it is. A registration code is a form of digital rights management. While more recent forms have been much more controversial, type in the wrong code and see if you get to play the game.
Not really. You buy a code, and that code unlocks your game, forever and ever, the transaction is finished. It's true you couldn't use the full game before the code, but you hadn't paid for it yet. The problem with DRM is publishers retaining control on stuff you already paid for, after the fact.
I am not trying to hide my opinion (WTF?). Yes, that is what I mean, that you could honestly misunderstand "free software", but using "open source" meaning "visible source" is either ignorance or malice. In general, it's the first, in your case it's most probably due to professional trolling.
That's *an* open source definition, not *the* open source definition.
That sentence is right. The problem is that you can use that reasoning to question anything. It's right, but useless. That's *an* Internet Protocol, not *the* Internet Protocol. That's *a* World Wide Web, not *the* World Wide Web.
People use conventions in order to communicate. When someone uses "open source", and knows what he is talking about, he means OSI open source. There is the possibility that that someone does not yet know what open source means, or that he is trying to twist its meaning, but there is a general convention about what we mean when we say "open source".
There was the same problem with "free software", and that might lead to confusion ("software libre" in spanish doesn't leave any doubts). I don't think anyone who knows enough can honestly use "open source" meaning something other than OSI open source.
Ok. You want an easy way to find good quality apps. Apple does that by restricting production. It might work. Google should do that by smart ranking, even if they are not doing it well now, more apps doesn't mean it's going to be worse. In fact, Google is good at finding the good stuff in a sea of crap. A larger volume of data might be of help.
The 100 dollar quote was good to get attention, but everybody got it wrong. They said they would get to 100 dollars after reaching significant volumes. They didn't.
Then, there's the dollar devaluation. In Uruguay, from our point of view, it wasn't that expensive. The original 100 dollars, at 26 pesos per dollar, meant 2600 pesos when they said it. When they shipped a hundred thousand laptops, the price was 175 dollars, but at the exchange rate of 20 pesos per dollar, it was 3500 pesos. It's still not the price set as a goal, but it's not that far away, esp when you get technology that is not available anywhere else.
About the G1G1 thing, it was supposed to be a charity, it could be 4 thousand dollars each if they wanted to. And if you expect a thank you note when you donate money, then you don't really understand the concept of charity (disclaimer: I don't support charity in any way).
The benefit for the developed world was the commercial availability of netbooks, at reasonable prices. No dual mode LCDs yet, though. Reading on a netbook must be hard.
First, you are answering to a guy who says copyrights should last 15 years, and have nothing to do with life of the artist.
Second, you are not god, you can't create property.
Copyrighted works are not property, because they have no physical existence, you can't own something that doesn't exist. "Intellectual property" is a law term that doesn't share most of the characteristics of property. For instance, you can't copy property for free, and that's where its value resides, in its inherent scarcity. Copyrighted works, for example, that scarcity is not one of it's characteristics, and it's almost impossible to make it so.
There is a bargain where you give copyrighted works belong to the public domain, and get in exchange a monopoly on its distribution. It's supposed to be an incentive for artists, but it's not working like it should, maybe it doesn't make sense anymore.
Right now, there is an abundance of creative works being published without claims to copyright. You can see them in Youtube, Blogger and Facebook. That seems to hint that people no longer need the copyright incentive to publish their works, so maybe that ought to be revised.
About some movies needing corporations, well, I don't think it's the only way to make huge movies, and even if it were, it doesn't justify copyright by itself.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, if someone is intent and willing to kill for drugs or money, then then I don't think it is too far a stretch to think that that person would kill for less. So legalize drugs;sell it legally in some shop. The cartels kill the competition when it is legal. Why would they all of a sudden become better people and let the legal competition slide?
That part is funny!!
Do you think any cartel could stop some company of the size of Philip Morris, for example, from trading pot and cocaine if it were legal?
Drug cartels are no competition for large corporations.
But to think that it (legalization) will somehow make shitty murderous people better is pretty naive.
So they will kill you for your iPod or whatever makes them money.
Shitty murderous people are not born that way. There are places in the world where becoming part of a drug cartel does improve your lifestyle. Funding is what makes that possible. If consumers stopped paying those people for killing whoever stands in the middle of dope and them, they would get their money elsewhere. Maybe without murdering people. It's not safe to shoot people, they might shoot back. Most of them would rather be paid for browsing /. like us, instead.
This world is ruled by money. If you want someone to change their behavior, you can start by not paying them to do what you don't like.
Your idea is not that bad.
I see a problem with it, maybe you come up with a great idea, build a product for big business and patent the idea (I know ideas should not be patentable, but that's what software patents are). You can choose to license it at a thousand dollars per processor, and it would be OK in a financial sense.
I come up with the same idea, but for consumer products. It's good, maybe some multitasking improvement, but not worth your thousand dollars per processor.
You stop me from innovating, period.
Here's a better idea: no patents. I don't see any downside.
That's not how you are supposed to behave here in /.
Why would anyone want to do this? It's like attacking the UN peace keeping troops or the Red Cross. reCAPTCHA is doing good work, digitizing scanned printed books so that the the text can be made available for online searching. Breaking reCAPTCHA is like defecating in the village well, ensuring that everyone suffers. No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one.
Good OCR is more valuable than good captchas.
What "freedom" does a user have if the software he wants never exists in the first place, because the GPLed code prevents a company from investing time and money into the product that the user wants?
You couldn't be more wrong.
The GPLed code can't prevent companies from investing time and money.
The only way someone could prevent other companies from building stuff would be using patents, and the GPL doesn't involve filing patents.
The GPL enables us to form a walled community inside which we get to share our stuff, and not get ripped off. Companies are free to join our community, or not do it. They can stay outside and build their own stuff, or come inside and share with us the respect for users freedom.
Most users don't give a fuck about having access to the source code. Whether the source is open or closed has approximately zero value to them. They want a product. They want to buy it from a company who spent time and money ensuring that it will work, won't lose data, won't catch on fire, etc. A company that provides a warranty and support. They want to pay for something that works; note the success of Apple's various idiot-friendly interfaces.
Those users can still buy from Apple, and they do as a matter of fact. The GPL doesn't prevent people from buying from Apple.
Or, you could say, it TAKES freedom from users (ie: developers using a library) that the BSD license does not.
Wrong. It takes freedom from those developers only while they are wearing their distributor hats. They can use GPLed libraries as much as they like. They are just limited from distributing in a way that takes freedom away from users. Their freedom as _users_ is not harmed.
Not saying BSD is better, just saying GPL doesn't give "more freedoms" on a whole, it just assigns them to different people.
You are right here. It takes freedom away from distributors, and gives it _all_ to users. Just they are not necessarily different people, just different roles.
Number 4. :
Yes.
Not leaving brackets around one-liners is an invitation to mistakes.
If you want to add a debug line to the one-line block, you need to add brackets.
If you remove it, then remove the brackets.
Using them always gives you one less thing to think about.
I love it here in Europe, just the other day a colleague of mine surprised me by wanting to install Ubuntu.
People here are less resistant to change and have a tiny bit more of patience to adapt to new things. They do not equate "new/unknown" with "crap" as other countries do.
Europe is not a country, yet.
About your sig: Ubuntu actually means "I can't be bothered to configure Debian". Messing with Slackware was fun, but since I was going to let apt do all the hard work for me, Ubuntu seemed like the logical next step.
That girl was just being a good Christian. That "zero" thing is an invention from the DEVIL!
My minister says that it was made by Osama's great-great-daddy, an arab, and we all know they are all agents of the devil.
flash is not the same as silverlight.
Flash is installed in most computers, and there's even a free alternative, gnash. I happen to be using it, it's the only way to get video acceleration in GNU/Linux. Flash is kind-of-needed for youtube and stuff, even though there is html5 video, it's still the most popular video solution.
Silverlight gives us nothing. In this particular application, it brings us nothing beyond flash (which is already installed), most clients don't have silverlight, and it also gives is nothing beyond html5 (which is better, and an open standard).
Exactly. For some people, OSS is like a crusade, but for many others (most of the people doing the heavy lifting, especially at companies that would be bought) I'm betting it's a paycheck.
You divide all developers into fanatics and mercenaries.I think it's ugly and wrong, because I think only a small minority is in either of those classes.
Aside from that, OSS is not a crusade for anyone. OSS is a technical thing.
Us religious fanatics, who care about ethics, are with Free Software. That is the ideological front, caring about the silly stuff like freedom.
At the end of the day, if an open source project you depend on is maintained by a for-profit company, and the project is sufficiently valuable, someone will eventually come along and buy its maintainer. And if the project is cutting into the bottom line of the buyer, as was the case with MySQL and Oracle, you can be sure that the new owner will make the change as disruptive as possible. It's a basic vulnerability that is built into the commercialization of Open Source. Whether it's a significant risk with any particular project will vary, of course, but it's always there, and the ability to fork is not a panacea.
At the end of the day, any product you depend on has that risk. The only difference with open source is that there are real world chances that you keep using the software you need after the acquisition, and getting support.
Were you using proprietary software, either you jump on the upgrade treadmill of the buyer company, or you get no chance to have support.
The issue here is not open/proprietary. The risk of larger companies buying the software producer is always high if the software is good and visible enough, and you are not buying from a large company in the first place. In that last case, there are other risks, like the company losing interest in the product.
In the end, nothing is 100% certain, you can only choose what is best for you.
Stealing has zero to do with "physical" and 100% to do with value. Your argument is completely without merit. The harm that stealing does is to take something of value from someone else without consent and/or recompense. If you drain someone's paypal account, you're not taking anything physical, you're just fiddling with numbers. But you're stealing because you're taking value directly. If you take a copy of software from them for nothing, where they only wish to part with it for recompense, you're increasing your value without compensating the creator. That's theft. If you take someone's virginity without their consent, you have stolen something irreplaceable, even if there is no physical change at all.
Theft is the act of appropriating value that you have no right to. It isn't the "picking up of something physical", and it has nothing to do with what you leave behind, either: It has to do with value you take away you have no right to.
Theft is not about value, it involves stealing property.
Copyrighted works are the property of the public domain. Publishers only get distribution rights. It's only sane, because ownership is kind of impossible unless the stuff is secret, or you are the public domain.
Then, you need to try again, getting everybody to accept your redefinition of "theft" as something like "misappropriation of value", with all its funny consequences.
There is zero ethical difference between these two; in both cases, the artist creates, the art is used, and the artist's payment is weaseled out of. There is zero ethical difference between taking a digital product against the producer's wishes and stealing a vase out of my company showroom.
Stealing property is only unethical because you deprive people of their property.
If stealing your sandwich would just involve making a copy of it, then it would just not be wrong. So, taking stuff for free doesn't have to be unethical by itself.
Copyright infringement is closer to listening to a street artist, and then refusing to tip him. It's not even unethical. It might even be somewhat cruel, though. Of course, everybody knows that a street artist expects to be paid. Of course, if no one did tip them, they might even disappear.
Depriving someone of profit is not stealing by itself. There are lots of examples where you can get for free stuff that is intended to make money for their producers, somehow. Copying a song is one of those cases, that's why there are campaigns trying to convince people that it's stealing, because most people don't believe it's so. They are right.
Depriving someone of property, and keeping it to yourself are necessary for stealing to happen, if any of those two conditions are not met, you are in a different situation, with regard to ethics.
(About copyright infringement being right or wrong, I won't address that in this post, for the sake of discussion. This is about copyright infringement being the same as stealing)
Some people just seem to forget that the world doesn't owe them anything. If you're injured or born without the ability to walk, that's nobody's problem except your own.
...
Move to a city where businesses can afford good handicapped access. Hire someone to spend an hour each week getting your groceries. There are hundreds of solutions other than forcing your problems onto others.
Ok. Exile for the disabled, or make them pay a tax for their disabilities. It's not cruel, it's stupid.
If I were a fundamentalist individualist, like you seem to be, I would prefer to have laws that protect the disabled, just in case I became one of them. From that point of view, maybe everyone should be forced to pay a disability insurance, so they would not be a burden to society in the even they become disabled, or have disabled kids.
That's not the way I think. I think a society is not better than how it treats its weaker constituents. That does not only include disabled people, but also the elderly, people who are very poor, and others. I think their problems _are_ mine, and I am also responsible of taking care of them. That's because that's the kind of society I want to live in, I'm not ok with what I get so far.
I understand that catering to the needs of those with disabilities should not imply squashing other people. Anyhow, I don't see why you care about the hardware store owner, with your views, his financial issues are nobody's problem but his. He has the job he deserves, due to his inability to properly manage a business.
Seriously, since when is "program it yourself" a solution to "are there any open source software packages that do what I want?"? The answer you're looking for is "no". That's the correct answer.
Your answer is the response to "I want a ready to use dictation software, and I don't want to pay for it".
If you find an open source backend, and payment is not your sole concern, you can get someone, maybe even the authors, to code the parts you need. You might even do it yourself, of course.
The thing is that _you_ assumed that "open source" meant "free as in beer". Some of us didn't. For those of us, it was a good response.
US did standardize on QWERTY. That's the problem.
If keyboards had been designed taking into account the different languages, at least the ones in Latin-1, then US keyboards would just have left some empty space, that other layouts could use for their extra keys.
As it is, the US keyboard is not extensible, so you have to remove some keys to fit the ones you need.
That's why I don't have a dedicated slash key, because the eñe is more frequent in spanish than the slash. If the original US layout was designed with i18n in mind, there would be room for the eñe and the tilde in my case, or for the couple of Portuguese / French / German keys that differ from English.
Now I enjoy just buying the product with a click of a button, see theres extra value in the product when you actually own it, and I also understand that people making these games wouldn't be making them if everyone were stealing from them like you.
You don't own it legally, because you just get a license, if anyone, the public domain owns copyrighted works, and authors have a monopoly on distribution.
If you are referring to the practical aspects of "owning", you don't own stuff that has DRM, because it can be taken away from you at the whims of the publisher. It's more similar to a rental. If you got it as an unauthorised copy, chances are that you get to keep it as long as you like.
To keep this whole discussion honest, yes it is. A registration code is a form of digital rights management. While more recent forms have been much more controversial, type in the wrong code and see if you get to play the game.
Not really.
You buy a code, and that code unlocks your game, forever and ever, the transaction is finished. It's true you couldn't use the full game before the code, but you hadn't paid for it yet.
The problem with DRM is publishers retaining control on stuff you already paid for, after the fact.
I am not trying to hide my opinion (WTF?).
Yes, that is what I mean, that you could honestly misunderstand "free software", but using "open source" meaning "visible source" is either ignorance or malice.
In general, it's the first, in your case it's most probably due to professional trolling.
That's *an* open source definition, not *the* open source definition.
That sentence is right. The problem is that you can use that reasoning to question anything. It's right, but useless.
That's *an* Internet Protocol, not *the* Internet Protocol.
That's *a* World Wide Web, not *the* World Wide Web.
People use conventions in order to communicate. When someone uses "open source", and knows what he is talking about, he means OSI open source. There is the possibility that that someone does not yet know what open source means, or that he is trying to twist its meaning, but there is a general convention about what we mean when we say "open source".
There was the same problem with "free software", and that might lead to confusion ("software libre" in spanish doesn't leave any doubts). I don't think anyone who knows enough can honestly use "open source" meaning something other than OSI open source.
Ok. You want an easy way to find good quality apps.
Apple does that by restricting production. It might work.
Google should do that by smart ranking, even if they are not doing it well now, more apps doesn't mean it's going to be worse. In fact, Google is good at finding the good stuff in a sea of crap. A larger volume of data might be of help.
You missed a couple of points.
The 100 dollar quote was good to get attention, but everybody got it wrong. They said they would get to 100 dollars after reaching significant volumes. They didn't.
Then, there's the dollar devaluation.
In Uruguay, from our point of view, it wasn't that expensive. The original 100 dollars, at 26 pesos per dollar, meant 2600 pesos when they said it. When they shipped a hundred thousand laptops, the price was 175 dollars, but at the exchange rate of 20 pesos per dollar, it was 3500 pesos. It's still not the price set as a goal, but it's not that far away, esp when you get technology that is not available anywhere else.
About the G1G1 thing, it was supposed to be a charity, it could be 4 thousand dollars each if they wanted to. And if you expect a thank you note when you donate money, then you don't really understand the concept of charity (disclaimer: I don't support charity in any way).
The benefit for the developed world was the commercial availability of netbooks, at reasonable prices. No dual mode LCDs yet, though. Reading on a netbook must be hard.
First, you are answering to a guy who says copyrights should last 15 years, and have nothing to do with life of the artist.
Second, you are not god, you can't create property.
Copyrighted works are not property, because they have no physical existence, you can't own something that doesn't exist. "Intellectual property" is a law term that doesn't share most of the characteristics of property. For instance, you can't copy property for free, and that's where its value resides, in its inherent scarcity. Copyrighted works, for example, that scarcity is not one of it's characteristics, and it's almost impossible to make it so.
There is a bargain where you give copyrighted works belong to the public domain, and get in exchange a monopoly on its distribution. It's supposed to be an incentive for artists, but it's not working like it should, maybe it doesn't make sense anymore.
Right now, there is an abundance of creative works being published without claims to copyright. You can see them in Youtube, Blogger and Facebook. That seems to hint that people no longer need the copyright incentive to publish their works, so maybe that ought to be revised.
About some movies needing corporations, well, I don't think it's the only way to make huge movies, and even if it were, it doesn't justify copyright by itself.