We can't force everyone to give ideas away. Some people may actually want to negotiate the compensation for their efforts if they specify the right to do so at the time of publication.
You have the wrong idea on the subject. Abolishing copyright would not be forcing anyone to do anything. Copyright has the intent of giving an incentive for people to give their works away (not their ideas, ideas are supposed to be free). When you release a copyrighted work, you are giving it to the public domain in that act. In exchange, you get a long monopoly on distribution from your government, but in the end, after you die, everyone should win, because the public domain will be one work wealthier.
Copyright tries to incentivate people to share, and forces everyone else to respect an artifical monopoly, in an effort to expand the public domain, and improve the pool of works available to everyone. It's just not working ok right now. Copyrights are too extended in time, right now they are virtually endless, and the public doesn't actually benefit from them.
I don't think we should be granting distribution privileges to authors anymore.
This is not the same as forcing them to give their works away, they can keep them to themselves, or ask for money in advance to release them (like the Blender project GPL release), but I don't think the public is getting anything from paying for distribution privileges to authors that are actually not giving anything back anymore to the public for their efforts in protecting their monopolies.
Your point is interesting, but wrong. It's GPL'ed. He _could_ have a trademark on the name "cdrtools", but they are distributing with another name, so that's not even an issue. This is what you commit to, when you stamp the GPL on your code. Users are free to fork your work, and they are even protected from your own nonsense.
Eclipse 3.2 (Web Tools Project for JSP, and PHPEclipse for PHP)
But if you are actually programming with JSP, maybe you are doing something wrong. You could use a nice framework for java webapps. JSF is nice, and WTP supports it.
I have been talking with good designer friends for ages about that issue. What I have come to understand is that Dreamweaver is a great app for web development. What I finally understood, and they confirmed, is that the wysiwyg part of Dreamweaver is not what makes it so great. They love it for the integration it provides, and powerful management of project (searches, publishing, that kind of stuff). They don't use the visual editing, because it doesn't produce profesional output, and editing right into the code view is much more reliable.
If that is your case too, plus, you are proficient with common console tools, like grep/diff, and using shell scripts to perform batch jobs like changing jpegs resolutions, you can replace Dreamweaver with Quanta Plus, or the lighter Bluefish. All the help you need for editing html and css. And remember to install ies4linux , so you can see the result on IE, too.
If that is not your case, keep DreamWeaver and try to be happy. But stay away from NVU, that's only useful for mockups or very quick and small stuff.
But it's _faster_ to just set a breakpoint, and inspect whatever you need. I'm sure you can run programs in your mind. The problem is that debugging output, while very useful, is slower in some occasions. Then, it's faster to use a debugger. Aside from that, if you did make a mistake in your code, you could make it again when running it in your head, and make incorrect assumptions, when you can see the value of all variables on demand, whether you think they are relevant or not, you get an advantage.
I am a joe fan, just a simple console editor and nothing else. I tried Emacs, and I liked it. Now I'm using Eclipse for Java, and once you understand how it works, there's just too much to gain from it. I don't browse the code, I navigate it. I don't navigate to files, I search for them. Go to declaration, forward and back editor navigation, automatic javadoc, automatic class and member creation, method extracting (yay!) are all features that, when combined, make an IDE that actually helps you build better code, faster. Of course an IDE does get in your way, but Eclipse gives so much that it's worth it. Debuggin with eclipse is great, it's the first debugger I'm actually using and liking since turbo pascal 5.5! (the VB6 debugger, I didn't enjoy that much)
I understand that CDT doesn't have as many features as the java stuff, but I think that going to Eclipse would be a good investment for anyone. You just need to adapt to it, and discovering features is not that difficult, you can start by printing a cheatsheet.
I'm sure emacs can do most of this stuff too, and way faster, but it does take more commitment.
- Copyright is about restricting the freedom of the user of the stuff.
No, it's more about protecting the freedom and interests of whoever made a work of art, which is its intention.
It's about protecting the interests of the original distributor, at the expense of restricting the users freedom, if you want to say it that way.
The original intent was about the authors, right now it's more tailored to the needs of distribution companies rather than creators themselves, at least in most countries. For example, duration: death + a lifetime is too much for a single person. Death + 20 years would be good enough if it was about the interests of the creators.
With public domain, you are giving people the right to do as they choose with it. They could chose to extend and turn your software into a proprietary package.
Thus, public domain ensures complete freedom _as_distributors_, but only to the people that get it straight from you. (Freedom _as_users_ is not restricted in any case, because copyright doesn't apply to users, so licenses do not apply. EULAs try to restrict that kind of thing, but we are not discussing them, only distribution licenses). You can think of public domain as a great way to ensure the freedom of the first step of distribution. It can't get better than that, for them.
GPL, on the other hand, restricts the freedom of the first distributor, who gets the software straight from you, with the intent of preserving the freedom of further distributors. You can think of the GPL as a restriction on first-step distribution that ensures no furthr restrictions in the whole distribution/improvement/redistribution tree.
Public domain _is_ good, but it's too naive, trusting too much on distributors to not restrict others. Copyleft licenses, like GPL, are built with the intent to counter the harmful effects of copyright. Public domain is not good enough for that.
Public domain is great for the guy that gets the stuff straight from you. Further distributions could restrict that freedom, though. For the end user that never distributes anything, licenses have no point, because they only apply to distributors. After all, cop
When you release GPLed stuff, you take freedom away from distributors, and give it to the users. When people receive GPLed software, they can become distrbutors too, lacking
I'll bite. People don't usually whine about microsoft in/. , they whine about being forced to use it, or support it, or pay for it.
And about living there, I don't live in the US, and I don't want to live there, either, but I don't have a choice of not being affected by the kind of things you do.
With the promise of investment, buying more beef, and stupid stuff like that, the US is trying to sign an FTA with my country, so they can impose your draconian copyright laws, and nonsense patents, including software. So I don't have a choice. Well, if this actually happens, and I ever have my own software development house, I am sure I would have to move to Argentina or Brazil in order to be ruled by reasonable rules about software.
Free would be no copyright. There's a reason why the GPL s a copyleft license. The whole idea of it is using copyright laws to fight their effects over code.
In a world without copyright applied to software, the GPL wouldn't apply, but then, it would be the ideal world for a RMS-style GPL advocate, so it would be OK.
Licenses don't _restrict_ freedom, they _grant_ freedom. The GPL grants you more freedom than most licenses. BSD style licenses grant you even more freedom, including the freedom to further limit other users freedom, that you don't get from the GPL.
With software patents, you don't need to use other peoples software to be in infringement, that's a big difference, you don't choose to infringe on a software patent, but you have the choice to use GPLed software.
About the GPL, you are right, you lose rights as a developer and give them to the user. No the end user, that's the point. You don't get to dictate that the user is the "end user" anymore, they can choose to become distributors, too.
The whole idea behind the GPL is the freedom of the user. Lots of developers like it, because we are mostly users of software, and distributors too. Nobody forces you to use GPL code in your programs, of course the idea is that you feel tempted to do so, and then in exchange, you share your code. But from the start, nobody is trying to rip you off, everything has a price. The freedom that comes with GPL has a price. You can't restrict other users. If you don't want to pay the price, there's other options, of course.
Please, don't use so flawed analogies. Analogies are a bad way to share a rational reasoning, and in the one you chose, it's badly chosen. You can keep your secret recipe to yourself, just keep out of our GPLed spice garden!
You are wrong. Copyright is about restricting the freedom of the user of the stuff.
The distributor performs the service of giving you the information, and you pay for it. End of story, no agreement, no contract. Then, there is a law that says that your freedom to distribute the information you paid to access is restricted. You have to wait a lot of time, virtually forever, and then you can share it anyway you like.
About private information, you enter an agreement with someone to share it with them, and they have an agreement with you, to not share it. Secrets are ok, because the only losers are those that were never intended to have the information. It's ok to have secrets. They take the responsability to restrict access to that information. You could make the case that you could not steal, but destroy a secret, because it ceases to exist once you discover it, but that would not be stealing, although it's a real damage.
Copyright is bad, and infringing it is not, because copyright is about restricting people who _are_ intended to have the information. It's not ok to _force_ others to restrict access to information you distribute, and it would be even worse to have me pay for governments to restrict other peoples access to information. That kind of thing would happen if copyright infringement was invented to be the same as stealing.
They plan on releasing by 2007. Flash player 9 doesn't exist. They are not trying hard enough. I'm replacing flash player with gnash as soon as gnash plays youtube and google right, and that is not far into the future.
msoffice doesn't produce PDF. That's my showstopper right there. I really need to share documents, in the rare ocasion I produce them. Publishing to a website is something I do. Printing is the other thing. And no, I don't have the power to force other people to install the same software I run. I wouldn't force them if I could, either. And I need them to look exactly how I made them. And I would like the process to be easy.
Aside from that, for my job, I like OOffice csv import/export features, it lets you use Unicode, UTF8, Latin-1. I never got around to understanding how this all works in msexcel. I did try, through a lot of years, but they won, I lost, I had to use oocalc.
I am just finishing my university title in computer engineering, but in all these years (loooong years, in my country people work while going to the university and it takes forever for most of us) I had to produce lots of math equations. I didn't get to learn latex, that could have been a good alternative, but the math editor in OpenOffice is a great improvement over the cumbersome ms equation editor. I used to spend a full night (8+ hours) transcribing two pages of handwritten equations to msword, in the old days. Right now, oomath is a breeze to use, because I could learn it by pointing and clicking, but for the second time I could just type and copy-paste my equations in addition to that. In this specific area, the speedup was at least 10-fold, even if it's a narrow sample.
In my country, you can buy copied DVDs everywhere, and it's a lot easier than trying to buy them from a proper distributor. If I buy a 50 dollar DVD, I don't have an easy way to back it up. DVDs get scratched, you know? And 50 dollars is a lot of money here, most people have to work more than a day for that. I wouldn't spend that money without a backup. Of course, if I bought a 3 dollar copy, I could easily get another "backup" for 3 dollars more. The issue is that I cant actually buy a DVD without feeling I'm being ripped off.
I have lots of scratched CDs, that I have paid for, and can't listen to. And I didn't pay for the media, I paid for the music, or at least that's what distributors say. In the case of CDs, I rip them to mp3 when I get them, and never touch the original anymore, but DVDs don't have that easy option.
Given the current state of affairs, I don't buy DVDs. I rent some times, I have borrowed from friends, and I go to the movies, because I like the big screen.
Hmmmm It's hard. They keep telling that the next version will be great. I stopped believing when I switched from msoffice97 to msoffice2000 and its magically dissapearing menu options, remember that? Now I use openoffice, and in the places where it's different from msoffice, it makes a lot more sense. Now I'm using msoffice at work, I am kind of forced to use msoutlook2003, and I can't make sense of this. Funcions are really hard to find, for example, search is awful (google desktop makes it somewhat better) and to see message headers (to see why it doesn't respect spam assasin headers, broken header parser, not a usability issue, though) I need to use right button menu - options (!!).
I'm not wasting my time trying yet another version, that I have learned in more than 10 years that has a big chance to be crappy.
You are not making sense. Winword doesn't have that feature.
A lot of things need to happen so you can reopen a document in another machine, and see the same that the guy who produced it.
At least, you need the same version, the same platform, and the fonts the guy used. But if you have that, openoffice is just as good, the same documents looks the same if you open it with the same version of the same program.
I stopped using winword at office2000 (I have winword2002 right now at work, but I just don't use it, so I can't judge it), and winword produced documents didn't look the same across different machines. There was always some screwed formatting when dealing with documents with some complexity.
You can't say that openoffice is worse because it fails at the same task as openoffice. You could say it's slow to load, maybe. But screwed formatting is not an openoffice issue. Version 2 achieved exactly that: the same grade of compatibility that different msoffice versions have. I think now they should forget about further msoffice compatibility, and start moving in its own direction. People are accustomed to this migration problems among msoffice versions, it's only one more towards openoffice, and from now on, no more issues.
Next time you might want to log in, so we can look at your posting history and see if you are a real person, or just an astroturfer.
Very few inventions come from a vacum - they're are almost always built on others' work. And if we remove the incentive of a patent and copyright to (hopefully) get rich, innovation and research will come to a halt.
Your first phrase is correct.
About patents, specifically software patents are not useful exactly because of your first point. "Inventions" in this field are not commonly useful 20 years after the fact. And patents don't allow others to improve on them freely until 20 years have passed. So, by _your_ argument, they halt innovation. If you really look at the real legal costs of developing new patentable technology with no legal risks, it's actually impossible to do it unless you already have a big patent arsenal to negotiate with. And it's not wise to assume than "inventors" have that kind of thing available. Maybe some people who work for IBM could develop some nice patentable stuff, but a start-up company is in a difficult position if it messes with "innovation" in patentable stuff. Legal costs can destroy your company, or drive it to the floor where you can be aquired and dissolved.
Copyright I won't discuss, it's a different beast than patents. I don't like it myself (and I produce software, I am a "creator" under coyright laws). But the issue is too hard to discuss, and there are really two strong sides to that argument.
Slashdot Mirror
We can't force everyone to give ideas away. Some people may actually want to negotiate the compensation for their efforts if they specify the right to do so at the time of publication.
You have the wrong idea on the subject.
Abolishing copyright would not be forcing anyone to do anything.
Copyright has the intent of giving an incentive for people to give their works away (not their ideas, ideas are supposed to be free). When you release a copyrighted work, you are giving it to the public domain in that act. In exchange, you get a long monopoly on distribution from your government, but in the end, after you die, everyone should win, because the public domain will be one work wealthier.
Copyright tries to incentivate people to share, and forces everyone else to respect an artifical monopoly, in an effort to expand the public domain, and improve the pool of works available to everyone. It's just not working ok right now. Copyrights are too extended in time, right now they are virtually endless, and the public doesn't actually benefit from them.
I don't think we should be granting distribution privileges to authors anymore.
This is not the same as forcing them to give their works away, they can keep them to themselves, or ask for money in advance to release them (like the Blender project GPL release), but I don't think the public is getting anything from paying for distribution privileges to authors that are actually not giving anything back anymore to the public for their efforts in protecting their monopolies.
Your point is interesting, but wrong.
It's GPL'ed.
He _could_ have a trademark on the name "cdrtools", but they are distributing with another name, so that's not even an issue.
This is what you commit to, when you stamp the GPL on your code.
Users are free to fork your work, and they are even protected from your own nonsense.
Eclipse 3.2 (Web Tools Project for JSP, and PHPEclipse for PHP)
But if you are actually programming with JSP, maybe you are doing something wrong.
You could use a nice framework for java webapps. JSF is nice, and WTP supports it.
Well, coding accounting software while drunk, stoned and getting a BJ, could mean a lot of fun.
Think of the possibilities.
I have been talking with good designer friends for ages about that issue.
What I have come to understand is that Dreamweaver is a great app for web development.
What I finally understood, and they confirmed, is that the wysiwyg part of Dreamweaver is not what makes it so great.
They love it for the integration it provides, and powerful management of project (searches, publishing, that kind of stuff).
They don't use the visual editing, because it doesn't produce profesional output, and editing right into the code view is much more reliable.
If that is your case too, plus, you are proficient with common console tools, like grep/diff, and using shell scripts to perform batch jobs like changing jpegs resolutions, you can replace Dreamweaver with Quanta Plus, or the lighter Bluefish. All the help you need for editing html and css. And remember to install ies4linux , so you can see the result on IE, too.
If that is not your case, keep DreamWeaver and try to be happy. But stay away from NVU, that's only useful for mockups or very quick and small stuff.
But it's _faster_ to just set a breakpoint, and inspect whatever you need.
I'm sure you can run programs in your mind. The problem is that debugging output, while very useful, is slower in some occasions. Then, it's faster to use a debugger.
Aside from that, if you did make a mistake in your code, you could make it again when running it in your head, and make incorrect assumptions, when you can see the value of all variables on demand, whether you think they are relevant or not, you get an advantage.
I am a joe fan, just a simple console editor and nothing else. I tried Emacs, and I liked it.
Now I'm using Eclipse for Java, and once you understand how it works, there's just too much to gain from it.
I don't browse the code, I navigate it. I don't navigate to files, I search for them. Go to declaration, forward and back editor navigation, automatic javadoc, automatic class and member creation, method extracting (yay!) are all features that, when combined, make an IDE that actually helps you build better code, faster.
Of course an IDE does get in your way, but Eclipse gives so much that it's worth it.
Debuggin with eclipse is great, it's the first debugger I'm actually using and liking since turbo pascal 5.5! (the VB6 debugger, I didn't enjoy that much)
I understand that CDT doesn't have as many features as the java stuff, but I think that going to Eclipse would be a good investment for anyone. You just need to adapt to it, and discovering features is not that difficult, you can start by printing a cheatsheet.
I'm sure emacs can do most of this stuff too, and way faster, but it does take more commitment.
Sorry, the last two paragraphs were not supposed to be part of my post. I fsckd up the post.
- Copyright is about restricting the freedom of the user of the stuff.
No, it's more about protecting the freedom and interests of whoever made a work of art, which is its intention.
It's about protecting the interests of the original distributor, at the expense of restricting the users freedom, if you want to say it that way.
The original intent was about the authors, right now it's more tailored to the needs of distribution companies rather than creators themselves, at least in most countries. For example, duration: death + a lifetime is too much for a single person. Death + 20 years would be good enough if it was about the interests of the creators.
With public domain, you are giving people the right to do as they choose with it. They could chose to extend and turn your software into a proprietary package.
Thus, public domain ensures complete freedom _as_distributors_, but only to the people that get it straight from you.
(Freedom _as_users_ is not restricted in any case, because copyright doesn't apply to users, so licenses do not apply. EULAs try to restrict that kind of thing, but we are not discussing them, only distribution licenses).
You can think of public domain as a great way to ensure the freedom of the first step of distribution. It can't get better than that, for them.
GPL, on the other hand, restricts the freedom of the first distributor, who gets the software straight from you, with the intent of preserving the freedom of further distributors.
You can think of the GPL as a restriction on first-step distribution that ensures no furthr restrictions in the whole distribution/improvement/redistribution tree.
Public domain _is_ good, but it's too naive, trusting too much on distributors to not restrict others. Copyleft licenses, like GPL, are built with the intent to counter the harmful effects of copyright. Public domain is not good enough for that.
Public domain is great for the guy that gets the stuff straight from you.
Further distributions could restrict that freedom, though.
For the end user that never distributes anything, licenses have no point, because they only apply to distributors. After all, cop
When you release GPLed stuff, you take freedom away from distributors, and give it to the users.
When people receive GPLed software, they can become distrbutors too, lacking
I'll bite. /. , they whine about being forced to use it, or support it, or pay for it.
People don't usually whine about microsoft in
And about living there, I don't live in the US, and I don't want to live there, either, but I don't have a choice of not being affected by the kind of things you do.
With the promise of investment, buying more beef, and stupid stuff like that, the US is trying to sign an FTA with my country, so they can impose your draconian copyright laws, and nonsense patents, including software. So I don't have a choice. Well, if this actually happens, and I ever have my own software development house, I am sure I would have to move to Argentina or Brazil in order to be ruled by reasonable rules about software.
BZZZZ!!
WRONG!!
Free would be no copyright. There's a reason why the GPL s a copyleft license. The whole idea of it is using copyright laws to fight their effects over code.
In a world without copyright applied to software, the GPL wouldn't apply, but then, it would be the ideal world for a RMS-style GPL advocate, so it would be OK.
Licenses don't _restrict_ freedom, they _grant_ freedom.
The GPL grants you more freedom than most licenses. BSD style licenses grant you even more freedom, including the freedom to further limit other users freedom, that you don't get from the GPL.
From bottom to top:
With software patents, you don't need to use other peoples software to be in infringement, that's a big difference, you don't choose to infringe on a software patent, but you have the choice to use GPLed software.
About the GPL, you are right, you lose rights as a developer and give them to the user. No the end user, that's the point. You don't get to dictate that the user is the "end user" anymore, they can choose to become distributors, too.
The whole idea behind the GPL is the freedom of the user. Lots of developers like it, because we are mostly users of software, and distributors too.
Nobody forces you to use GPL code in your programs, of course the idea is that you feel tempted to do so, and then in exchange, you share your code. But from the start, nobody is trying to rip you off, everything has a price.
The freedom that comes with GPL has a price. You can't restrict other users. If you don't want to pay the price, there's other options, of course.
Please, don't use so flawed analogies. Analogies are a bad way to share a rational reasoning, and in the one you chose, it's badly chosen.
You can keep your secret recipe to yourself, just keep out of our GPLed spice garden!
> 1. Want to own a gaming system.
You don't buy from Sony if you want to own something.
You don't own stuff, you license stuff.
They own stuff, and your ass.
(I know, what I say _is_ ridiculous, but I think this is the direction towards which everything is heading)
You are wrong.
Copyright is about restricting the freedom of the user of the stuff.
The distributor performs the service of giving you the information, and you pay for it. End of story, no agreement, no contract.
Then, there is a law that says that your freedom to distribute the information you paid to access is restricted. You have to wait a lot of time, virtually forever, and then you can share it anyway you like.
About private information, you enter an agreement with someone to share it with them, and they have an agreement with you, to not share it.
Secrets are ok, because the only losers are those that were never intended to have the information. It's ok to have secrets. They take the responsability to restrict access to that information.
You could make the case that you could not steal, but destroy a secret, because it ceases to exist once you discover it, but that would not be stealing, although it's a real damage.
Copyright is bad, and infringing it is not, because copyright is about restricting people who _are_ intended to have the information.
It's not ok to _force_ others to restrict access to information you distribute, and it would be even worse to have me pay for governments to restrict other peoples access to information. That kind of thing would happen if copyright infringement was invented to be the same as stealing.
No.
They plan on releasing by 2007.
Flash player 9 doesn't exist.
They are not trying hard enough.
I'm replacing flash player with gnash as soon as gnash plays youtube and google right, and that is not far into the future.
msoffice doesn't produce PDF.
That's my showstopper right there.
I really need to share documents, in the rare ocasion I produce them. Publishing to a website is something I do. Printing is the other thing.
And no, I don't have the power to force other people to install the same software I run. I wouldn't force them if I could, either.
And I need them to look exactly how I made them.
And I would like the process to be easy.
Aside from that, for my job, I like OOffice csv import/export features, it lets you use Unicode, UTF8, Latin-1. I never got around to understanding how this all works in msexcel. I did try, through a lot of years, but they won, I lost, I had to use oocalc.
I am just finishing my university title in computer engineering, but in all these years (loooong years, in my country people work while going to the university and it takes forever for most of us) I had to produce lots of math equations. I didn't get to learn latex, that could have been a good alternative, but the math editor in OpenOffice is a great improvement over the cumbersome ms equation editor. I used to spend a full night (8+ hours) transcribing two pages of handwritten equations to msword, in the old days. Right now, oomath is a breeze to use, because I could learn it by pointing and clicking, but for the second time I could just type and copy-paste my equations in addition to that. In this specific area, the speedup was at least 10-fold, even if it's a narrow sample.
"I couldn't have poisoned his filet mignon, your honor, I just can't cook!"
Lame excuse.
In my country, you can buy copied DVDs everywhere, and it's a lot easier than trying to buy them from a proper distributor.
If I buy a 50 dollar DVD, I don't have an easy way to back it up.
DVDs get scratched, you know? And 50 dollars is a lot of money here, most people have to work more than a day for that. I wouldn't spend that money without a backup.
Of course, if I bought a 3 dollar copy, I could easily get another "backup" for 3 dollars more. The issue is that I cant actually buy a DVD without feeling I'm being ripped off.
I have lots of scratched CDs, that I have paid for, and can't listen to. And I didn't pay for the media, I paid for the music, or at least that's what distributors say. In the case of CDs, I rip them to mp3 when I get them, and never touch the original anymore, but DVDs don't have that easy option.
Given the current state of affairs, I don't buy DVDs. I rent some times, I have borrowed from friends, and I go to the movies, because I like the big screen.
Hmmmm
It's hard.
They keep telling that the next version will be great.
I stopped believing when I switched from msoffice97 to msoffice2000 and its magically dissapearing menu options, remember that?
Now I use openoffice, and in the places where it's different from msoffice, it makes a lot more sense.
Now I'm using msoffice at work, I am kind of forced to use msoutlook2003, and I can't make sense of this. Funcions are really hard to find, for example, search is awful (google desktop makes it somewhat better) and to see message headers (to see why it doesn't respect spam assasin headers, broken header parser, not a usability issue, though) I need to use right button menu - options (!!).
I'm not wasting my time trying yet another version, that I have learned in more than 10 years that has a big chance to be crappy.
You are not making sense.
Winword doesn't have that feature.
A lot of things need to happen so you can reopen a document in another machine, and see the same that the guy who produced it.
At least, you need the same version, the same platform, and the fonts the guy used. But if you have that, openoffice is just as good, the same documents looks the same if you open it with the same version of the same program.
I stopped using winword at office2000 (I have winword2002 right now at work, but I just don't use it, so I can't judge it), and winword produced documents didn't look the same across different machines. There was always some screwed formatting when dealing with documents with some complexity.
You can't say that openoffice is worse because it fails at the same task as openoffice. You could say it's slow to load, maybe. But screwed formatting is not an openoffice issue. Version 2 achieved exactly that: the same grade of compatibility that different msoffice versions have. I think now they should forget about further msoffice compatibility, and start moving in its own direction. People are accustomed to this migration problems among msoffice versions, it's only one more towards openoffice, and from now on, no more issues.
Next time you might want to log in, so we can look at your posting history and see if you are a real person, or just an astroturfer.
Very few inventions come from a vacum - they're are almost always built on others' work. And if we remove the incentive of a patent and copyright to (hopefully) get rich, innovation and research will come to a halt.
Your first phrase is correct.
About patents, specifically software patents are not useful exactly because of your first point. "Inventions" in this field are not commonly useful 20 years after the fact. And patents don't allow others to improve on them freely until 20 years have passed. So, by _your_ argument, they halt innovation. If you really look at the real legal costs of developing new patentable technology with no legal risks, it's actually impossible to do it unless you already have a big patent arsenal to negotiate with. And it's not wise to assume than "inventors" have that kind of thing available. Maybe some people who work for IBM could develop some nice patentable stuff, but a start-up company is in a difficult position if it messes with "innovation" in patentable stuff. Legal costs can destroy your company, or drive it to the floor where you can be aquired and dissolved.
Copyright I won't discuss, it's a different beast than patents. I don't like it myself (and I produce software, I am a "creator" under coyright laws). But the issue is too hard to discuss, and there are really two strong sides to that argument.
I have seen RMS's halo live, and I can tell you, it's round, and heavy, and kind of metallic.
I suppose it must feel like an old HDD platter.
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