Hmmm, I didn't know that the DOE was funding this. This is not a good thing in my view. I can see one of my earlier posts is going to come back to haunt me. You'd think I'd learn to read the entire article first before commenting on it:-)
However, I notice that most people bitching about this are not complaining about the source of funding, rather they are bitching that money is going someplace other than where they want it to.
For a crowd that likes to toss around the words FREE and FREEDOM as much as they do, they are very stuck on the notion that there is only one right way to do something.
The quickest way to earn the enmity of the Free Software community is to freely and voluntarily choose something. Choose *BSD and they bitch about proprietary exploitation. Choose KDE and they moan that it's illegal. Choose Redhat and they kvetch that it's too commercial.
Choose to award someone $100K in a contest to improve autoconf and they're incensed that someone would spend his money without asking permission of Slashdot first.
"Basically, if you are linking to a competitor of one of our "doners" you site can be shut down. Sound like a good thing to you?"
No, it doesn't sound like a good thing. However, it is not my network. It belongs to PSU. Not the students. Not the professors. Not IT. If, on the other hand, they placed restrictions on your own personal network, that definitely be illegal. But as it stands now, it is merely bad form.
My employer has every right to limit my browsing porn sites, or submitting resumes to other companies, while using the company networks and computers. A university has exactly these same rights.
The purpose of DVD encryption is not to prevent piracy. Instead, it is to comfort the groundless paranoia of the MPAA.
There is a very big difference between encrypting an application on a demo CD and encrypting DVD media. In the first case a legitimate intellectual property is being protected. It is a demo CD and the application has not yet been purchased. However, in the second case, rights to the DVD media have already been purchased. The consumer own his or her copy of the DVD. Copyright law already allows the owner of a copy to make copies for personal use, including copies necessary TO VIEW THE MEDIA.
If the movie industry had implemented a security system that prevented unauthorized copying that would be one story. But they don't even attempt this. Anyone can copy encrypted DVD media to a blank DVD and play it anywhere. This encryption does nothing to stop bootleggers. What it does do is stop authorized viewers from accessing the media in a legitimate manner.
Imaging if you purchased an ordinary paper and ink book, but discovered that you could only read it by the light of a specific light bulb. You would be pretty upset at the publisher. It's no wonder that people are upset at the MPAA for doing exactly the same thing.
"Only to be "reprogrammed" by a Microsoft owned college:)"
I hate to burst your bubble, but Microsoft doesn't own any colleges. Do you hate them so much that you will believe anything negative someone says about them? They have a marketing agreement with certain universities. So what? So does McDonalds and Starbucks. Are you also pissed at Ford for entering into agreements with certain other universities to supply them with vehicles?
Microsoft did not come an campus and buy the board of regents or the deans or anyone. Rather, and I know that this is hard for people to understand, the universities voluntarily chose Microsoft. "But...but...but", you stammer, "Microsoft has billions of dollars and you can't compete with a competitor." BFD. The universities needed new network infrastructures. That takes money. Sure Redhat could have given them a couple hundred free CDs, but they don't have the cash resource to build a new network for them. The universities had a choice between Microsoft (and others) and a network, or Redhat and no network. Did you expect them to be stupid?
But what if a university did decide on Redhat? What does that do to Debian, SuSE and Slackware? What does that do to FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD?
I think you have missed a very important paradigm. I may be struck down by lightning for heresy, but the fact is that Free Software is trying to fit itself into the wrong paradigm.
Free Software, except in the last year, has been created by only three classes of people: hobbyists, researchers and ideologues. But what is happening now is that these people are trying to do is fit Free Software into the commercial software paradigm. I am fully confident these two opposing forces will synthesize a new paradigm of software development.
But in the meantime, both of these paradigms, which are based on the voluntary transactions of individuals, are attempting to use government power to ensure their culture's survival. The commercial paradigm is attempting to use government power (through UCITA) to enforce its way. It takes no small leap of the imagination to foretell the Free Software paradigm doing something similar. It should strike nobody by surprise when calls for banning closed-source software arrive. And already there have been calls for government funding of Free Software.
Both sides need to relax and lighten up. A new paradigm is coming and it is for the marketplace of ideas to decide what it will be. There will be a way for developers to sell their software while letting it remain free.
"Slack jumped ahead of all the other distributions, others felt it necessary to "keep up with the Jones" and match the version number."
If you look at the number of actual releases Redhat made versus the number Slackware made, you'll understand why Slackware should really be at version 42.
And perception is everything. A neighbor wanted to try out Linux, so I gave him SuSE 6.0. He had a rough time of it and wanted to know if there was something easier. I had just got a Caldera 2.3 disk in the mail so I gave it to him. He replied "don't you have anything newer?"
Actually, with a new graphical installer, disk partitioner, and hardware manager, as well as numerous other major changes, I would think that Mandrake deserves a major version change. A 6.1->6.2 just doesn't cut it.
And moreover, I think that this is the version that will make Mandrake more than just a Redhat clone.
"MNDRK seems to be after the almighty buck and that's about it."
I'm starting to question whether you even live on the same planet I do.
At the last LWCE in San Jose, Redhat had a glitzy marketroid booth staffed with drones. Mandrake had a stool in a corner of someone else's booth (PickSys?). Didn't even have free demos to pass out, only photocopies of an info sheet. The Mandrake "booth" even made the Slashdot compound look like Las Vegas casino in comparison. Guess who won distribution of the year there though?
How much of the money Bill Gates is donating is actually his? Contrary to popular belief, he does not have billions of dollars. He is only *worth* billions. The majority of his worth is shares in Microsoft and other companies.
The news media outlets never gave any details of his donations. But I should think his liquidating (selling) a billion dollars worth of Microsoft stock would cause a very noticable blib in the stock value. I never noticed any. Instead, I suspect he played some money games and that in the end he was worth exactly the same after as before.
Some will see this as a sign that the media cannot be trusted. Man, you guys are late. They've been doctoring magazine and newspaper photos for years. I reached my last straw with the flap over setting explosive charges in trucks and then reporting their lack of safety. The media has always been manipulating your news. They didn't need new technology to do it. W. R. Hearst certainly didn't need digital technology for his yellow journalism.
There are good people and there are bad people. It's a law of nature. It should surprise no one that there are bad people in the media.
If you only get your news from one source, or worse, from only one television source, you're a dupe. The only way they can fool you is if you let them.
Re:So you get off installing FreeBSD...
on
New CTO at Red Hat
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· Score: 2
It took be 45 minutes to install from start to finish. I would not classify this as "long hours". How long did it take you to install NT? And with FreeBSD or Linux, I only have to install once.
And since it only took me 45 minutes, how do you know I didn't also get laid in the hours before or after? I don't know what you guys do in the Windows world, but here in the free Unix world, 45 minutes is considered a cheap quickie!
Besides, it was a TUESDAY night. Tuesday is not the most romantic day of the week. I think Fridays and Saturdays are much better days for romance.
"Hey big boy, how 'bout we go back to my place?" "I can't. I have to reinstall Windows again." "But you did that last week." [sob] "I know..."
Everybody is saying vi, but WHICH vi? I heartily nominate elvis!
Smaller than vim, coolest name, best compatibility, and often seen in laundrymats. Besides which, it is default on Slackware, and nothing more needs saying.
It's a huge stretch to call the FSF a charity. After all, they proudly proclaim the fact that they sell their own software for higher prices than anyone else (ever looked at the price of "GNU Deluxe?). This is either incredible chutzpah, or an extremely subtle hack.
More people have switched TO Linux FROM DOS/Windows than have ever switched TO DOS/Windows FROM anything! Hell, the number of people who have dumped Windows in favor of FreeBSD is staggering in comparison...
ps. I blew away my Windows drive last night and replaced it with FreeBSD.
"So you think your stock price will stay the same after that huge fine?"
Sometimes it even goes up after a fine (okay, the lawsuit's over, they're still in business, now buy, buy, buy...)
A stock price is the price of a share of ownership. There is nothing a judge can do to affect it other than a very indirect influence upon public perception.
"Liability is limitted to the amount of the shareholder's investment in the company."
No, there's no liability at all! If I own one out of one million shares of Corporation A, and a court subsequently fines them one million dollars, I myself will not share any of the liability, not even the one dollar that is my share. If the day comes when Judge Jackson fines Microsoft several million or even billion dollars, none of it will come out of Bill Gates' pocket. Even if the Microsoft share price plummets as a result, there is still liability against Bill Gates other than his actions as a Microsoft employee.
"if the company is sufficiently large to have significant financial reserves it can lower the costs of its goods and services until they reach unprofitable levels."
Ah, the classic rebuttal. However, it doesn't work. First of all, megacorp has to take a large profit hit for a significant amount of time. Cash reserves aren't infinite and investors are going to bail after a few quarters of losses. Second, it is not worth taking a billion dollar loss to drive a million dollar competitor out of business. Doing so would be extremely foolish, and fools don't create monopolies.
"Monopoly company will have replenished its cash reserves sufficiently to once again rout the competition."
This would only happen in the most absurd fantasy. Corporations exist to make profits, not to eliminate the competition. There is much more profit to be had by making a profit:-) than by crushing the competition.
And product price is not everything.
As a case in point, take a look at Home Depot. They probably have the closest thing to an idiot leadership as anyone. Their goal is to be the biggest. They even have a "Wall of Shame" where they display photos of all the other businesses they have bought out or run out of town. Definitely not a paragon of business acumen. So look what's happening around Home Depots. Their competitors are scrambling to build next to them. Even the small mom-and-pops want to set up shop across the street. Why? Because Home Depot customers hate Home Depot. The get rude service by ignorant salesmen. Their competitors set up shop next door and rake in business by being polite, helpful and knowledgable. Home Depot will get business from those who don't care about anything other than price, and their competitors get everyone else.
"If we really did have zero government control/regulation, what would stop a giant slug fest with the result being a few corporations basically owning and/or running the world?"
Because corporations won't have the priviledges that they now possess. In today's world, governments grant charters to corporations, declaring them to be "legal entities". Because of this, the shareholders (owners) have no liability for the actions of their company.
In a proprietorship (non-corporate business), the owners are fully liable for their company. When the company get's sued, the owners are named in the suit. There are things a proprietorship may not legally do, that a corporation, even a two-man outfit, can.
A libertarian society is about liberty, not license. People are individually responsible for their own actions. But a corporation shields individuals from the consequences of their actions. And they can only do this through the help of the government.
But libertarians do not want "zero government control/regulation". The government has among its proper purposes the defense of the individual against theft and fraud. In a world with "minimal" regulation, they playing field is level. Individuals cannot hide behind their corporate shield. Shareholders are not forced to sell to the competitor just because the SEC says so. There is no eminent domain forcing the mom-and-pop coffeeshop to sell out to Donald Trump so he can build a new casino.
In a libertarian world, the only way a business can become a monopoly is to provide a service that everyone wants. If they start jacking their prices up because they have a natural monopoly, they will quickly lose it as competitors enter the market. And in a libertarian world, monopolies have no power to stop competition, so they have to behave themselves.
"The impact of mergers like this is to deny choice, concentrate power and homogenize creativity and expression."
What? This new megalith will prevent you from reading Newsweek? This is groundless paranoia. You still have your choice. You're still free to create your own media outlets. And if a merger is all it takes to stifle your creativity, I seriously doubt you were creative to begin with.
"Many of us are free marketers here"
I hate to break the news to you,Katz, but you were never a free marketeer. Do you think I'm so stupid I can't remember any of your previous columns?
"At some point, Americans have to decide if they still want a free information culture, along with a functioning government."
What does the TW+AOL merger have to do with a functioning government? Or are you just disappointed that Judge Jackson didn't immediately step in and block it upon your advice?
"EM>This company would be much larger in cultural influence and economic power than most countries on the earth."
The State of California is equivalent to a first world nation in power. I think I recall that if it were independent, it would be the six largest economy in the world. But guess what? It is not an independent nation, and must obey the US Constitution along with it's own Constitution.
But TimeWarnerAOL is not an independent nation, nor a state, country or municpality. It must follow the very same laws that you and I must. If Microsoft's billions couldn't buy off Judge Jackson, what makes you think TimeWarnerAOL's multibillions would be any better?
"The move represents the most sweeping move yet by corporate conglomerates to control high-speed access to the Internet and to dominate its content."
They have absolutely zero control over my internet access. Zero. That's because I don't use AOL as my ISP. And should they decide to purchase my local mom-and-pop ISP, I still have a choice, many of them in fact. One of them is Pacific Bell, which even T/W/A would not be able to buy.
"The age of proprietorship may have ended yesterday" (in reference to IBM and Linux)
If by "proprietorship" you mean proprietary standards, then you may be correct. But if you are referring to mythical stalmanist utopia where all software is held in common for the Greater Good, you are way off base.
"A movement that began as a counter-cultural, individualistic effort to keep the Net free from the very kind of corporatist control the AOL/Time-Warner merger typifies"
Oh, was that why Linux, BSD, and GNU were created? To keep the net free from corporations? Okay, I'll turn off the sarcasm. Other than GNU and any projects under it, I am not aware of any open source project that is based on any ideology, let along a counter-cultural one. And GNU is hardly antagonistic to business concerns.
The internet is not under corporate control. I seriously doubt it ever will be. No corporation, even TimeWarnerAOL, has the resources to purchase every ISP, let alone all of the infrastructure of the internet. You're living in a paranoid fantasy.
"There hardly exists a free and independent journalistic culture off-line anymore."
If you mean in terms of megamedia, you may be right. But what's your point? Isn't that what you're railing against, mega-anythings? But open up your eyes. Every community in the US has its smaller media outlets including small newspapers, radio stations and television stations.
"sensationalized promoters of controversy and fragmentation, producers of tepid, homogenized information-peddling."
Careful, someone might mistake this description for you:-)
"As of this week, individuals, people who believe in free and diverse speech..."
...have the opportunity to deny the same to others based on the fact that we think they are too big.
"Wal-Mart, Blockbuster Video, Staples, Toys R Us, Starbucks, Disney and now, AOL/Time-Warner, rule our world."
Earlier in history, our world was ruled by Montgomery Wards, Penneys, Rexall and Esso. Even earlier days of yore were ruthlessly exploited by the likes of Sears and Roebuck. We are always going to have large companies. It's the nature of business. However, no one is forcing you to frequent their establishments or read their content. If you don't like Starbucks, don't drink their coffee. Simple. They aren't the only coffee stand in town.
Now don't misunderstand me, Mr. Katz. I am not in favor of corporations as fictitious legal entities that absolve their shareholders of any liability. However, size doesn't matter. If mergers are bad, then the corner drugstore merging with the downtown florist is just as bad as the big mergers. If your criteria on goodness/badness is the economic value of something, then I can only conclude that you yourself are in the wrong since you make more money than I. And what could I conclude about Andover?
Don't point your finger at size and call it a crime. Give me some specific criminal actions that TimeWarnerAOL have committed that would justify the government breaking them up.
There is no perfect government, and there never will be. Utopia is not an option. The trick is to give the government enough power to fulfill its proper role, but not so much that the "hoipolloi" can get ahold of it. This is something that a libertarian candidate would be in favor of (getting back on topic).
As an example, corporations do not pay off or bribe every member of congress (despite rumours to the contrary). All they need to do is pay off the two or three swing votes necessary for a 51% margin. But if there were a requirement that congress needed 2/3s to pass a bill, that would mean a corporation would have to pay off one out of every six congressmen in order to even have a chance at directing the outcome. Conversely, only one out of six congressmen need to be honest and incorruptable to put a damper on influence peddling.
To repeat, fear the government instead of the corporation. If government power wasn't for sale, corporations couldn't buy it.
"I believe that a lot of the people in large organizations (either corporations or bureaucracies) feel they can do bad things to other people and be shielded by their organization from any real consequences."
This cuts right to the heart of the matter. Why are individuals within a corporation shielded from their actions? A better question would be: who shields them from their actions? The answer is government.
The only difference between a corporation and a proprietorship (unincorporated business), is that the government gives special recognition to the corporation as being a legal entity. You can sue a corporation, and you can even sue executives and employees of a corporation, but you can't sue any of the owners.
If an unincorporated mom-and-pop ISP is negligent in some manner, it is mom and pop who have to show up in court. If Microsoft does the very same thing, you will not see Paul Allen (still one of the owners) in a courtroom.
The problem is not corporations, the problem is that the government treats corporations as special cases and artificially limits their liability.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you don't see any problem with that, just look at what RMS have to say about it."
Why should anyone care what RMS thinks about someone else's project? Have we all lost the ability to think for ourselves?
Hmmm, I didn't know that the DOE was funding this. This is not a good thing in my view. I can see one of my earlier posts is going to come back to haunt me. You'd think I'd learn to read the entire article first before commenting on it :-)
However, I notice that most people bitching about this are not complaining about the source of funding, rather they are bitching that money is going someplace other than where they want it to.
"I actually like autoconf, and I have been using it in some of my projects, but the Makefiles generated by automake are just too bloated"
I think you just answered your own question.
I agree totally.
For a crowd that likes to toss around the words FREE and FREEDOM as much as they do, they are very stuck on the notion that there is only one right way to do something.
The quickest way to earn the enmity of the Free Software community is to freely and voluntarily choose something. Choose *BSD and they bitch about proprietary exploitation. Choose KDE and they moan that it's illegal. Choose Redhat and they kvetch that it's too commercial.
Choose to award someone $100K in a contest to improve autoconf and they're incensed that someone would spend his money without asking permission of Slashdot first.
"Basically, if you are linking to a competitor of one of our "doners" you site can be shut down. Sound like a good thing to you?"
No, it doesn't sound like a good thing. However, it is not my network. It belongs to PSU. Not the students. Not the professors. Not IT. If, on the other hand, they placed restrictions on your own personal network, that definitely be illegal. But as it stands now, it is merely bad form.
My employer has every right to limit my browsing porn sites, or submitting resumes to other companies, while using the company networks and computers. A university has exactly these same rights.
The purpose of DVD encryption is not to prevent piracy. Instead, it is to comfort the groundless paranoia of the MPAA.
There is a very big difference between encrypting an application on a demo CD and encrypting DVD media. In the first case a legitimate intellectual property is being protected. It is a demo CD and the application has not yet been purchased. However, in the second case, rights to the DVD media have already been purchased. The consumer own his or her copy of the DVD. Copyright law already allows the owner of a copy to make copies for personal use, including copies necessary TO VIEW THE MEDIA.
If the movie industry had implemented a security system that prevented unauthorized copying that would be one story. But they don't even attempt this. Anyone can copy encrypted DVD media to a blank DVD and play it anywhere. This encryption does nothing to stop bootleggers. What it does do is stop authorized viewers from accessing the media in a legitimate manner.
Imaging if you purchased an ordinary paper and ink book, but discovered that you could only read it by the light of a specific light bulb. You would be pretty upset at the publisher. It's no wonder that people are upset at the MPAA for doing exactly the same thing.
"Only to be "reprogrammed" by a Microsoft owned college :)"
I hate to burst your bubble, but Microsoft doesn't own any colleges. Do you hate them so much that you will believe anything negative someone says about them? They have a marketing agreement with certain universities. So what? So does McDonalds and Starbucks. Are you also pissed at Ford for entering into agreements with certain other universities to supply them with vehicles?
Microsoft did not come an campus and buy the board of regents or the deans or anyone. Rather, and I know that this is hard for people to understand, the universities voluntarily chose Microsoft. "But...but...but", you stammer, "Microsoft has billions of dollars and you can't compete with a competitor." BFD. The universities needed new network infrastructures. That takes money. Sure Redhat could have given them a couple hundred free CDs, but they don't have the cash resource to build a new network for them. The universities had a choice between Microsoft (and others) and a network, or Redhat and no network. Did you expect them to be stupid?
But what if a university did decide on Redhat? What does that do to Debian, SuSE and Slackware? What does that do to FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD?
I think you have missed a very important paradigm. I may be struck down by lightning for heresy, but the fact is that Free Software is trying to fit itself into the wrong paradigm.
Free Software, except in the last year, has been created by only three classes of people: hobbyists, researchers and ideologues. But what is happening now is that these people are trying to do is fit Free Software into the commercial software paradigm. I am fully confident these two opposing forces will synthesize a new paradigm of software development.
But in the meantime, both of these paradigms, which are based on the voluntary transactions of individuals, are attempting to use government power to ensure their culture's survival. The commercial paradigm is attempting to use government power (through UCITA) to enforce its way. It takes no small leap of the imagination to foretell the Free Software paradigm doing something similar. It should strike nobody by surprise when calls for banning closed-source software arrive. And already there have been calls for government funding of Free Software.
Both sides need to relax and lighten up. A new paradigm is coming and it is for the marketplace of ideas to decide what it will be. There will be a way for developers to sell their software while letting it remain free.
"Slack jumped ahead of all the other distributions, others felt it necessary to "keep up with the Jones" and match the version number."
If you look at the number of actual releases Redhat made versus the number Slackware made, you'll understand why Slackware should really be at version 42.
And perception is everything. A neighbor wanted to try out Linux, so I gave him SuSE 6.0. He had a rough time of it and wanted to know if there was something easier. I had just got a Caldera 2.3 disk in the mail so I gave it to him. He replied "don't you have anything newer?"
Actually, with a new graphical installer, disk partitioner, and hardware manager, as well as numerous other major changes, I would think that Mandrake deserves a major version change. A 6.1->6.2 just doesn't cut it.
And moreover, I think that this is the version that will make Mandrake more than just a Redhat clone.
"MNDRK seems to be after the almighty buck and that's about it."
I'm starting to question whether you even live on the same planet I do.
At the last LWCE in San Jose, Redhat had a glitzy marketroid booth staffed with drones. Mandrake had a stool in a corner of someone else's booth (PickSys?). Didn't even have free demos to pass out, only photocopies of an info sheet. The Mandrake "booth" even made the Slashdot compound look like Las Vegas casino in comparison. Guess who won distribution of the year there though?
"Pgcc is just an excuse to make something that isn't compatable with others machines."
Ten years from now, when Itaniums are obsolete, will distros still be compiled for a i386?
How much of the money Bill Gates is donating is actually his? Contrary to popular belief, he does not have billions of dollars. He is only *worth* billions. The majority of his worth is shares in Microsoft and other companies.
The news media outlets never gave any details of his donations. But I should think his liquidating (selling) a billion dollars worth of Microsoft stock would cause a very noticable blib in the stock value. I never noticed any. Instead, I suspect he played some money games and that in the end he was worth exactly the same after as before.
"The conservative elements in our society take TV far too seriously."
So do the liberal/progressive elements. And since TV is largely produced by liberals and progressives, it's a wonderful symbiotry.
Some will see this as a sign that the media cannot be trusted. Man, you guys are late. They've been doctoring magazine and newspaper photos for years. I reached my last straw with the flap over setting explosive charges in trucks and then reporting their lack of safety. The media has always been manipulating your news. They didn't need new technology to do it. W. R. Hearst certainly didn't need digital technology for his yellow journalism.
There are good people and there are bad people. It's a law of nature. It should surprise no one that there are bad people in the media.
If you only get your news from one source, or worse, from only one television source, you're a dupe. The only way they can fool you is if you let them.
It took be 45 minutes to install from start to finish. I would not classify this as "long hours". How long did it take you to install NT? And with FreeBSD or Linux, I only have to install once.
And since it only took me 45 minutes, how do you know I didn't also get laid in the hours before or after? I don't know what you guys do in the Windows world, but here in the free Unix world, 45 minutes is considered a cheap quickie!
Besides, it was a TUESDAY night. Tuesday is not the most romantic day of the week. I think Fridays and Saturdays are much better days for romance.
"Hey big boy, how 'bout we go back to my place?"
"I can't. I have to reinstall Windows again."
"But you did that last week."
[sob] "I know..."
Everybody is saying vi, but WHICH vi? I heartily nominate elvis!
Smaller than vim, coolest name, best compatibility, and often seen in laundrymats. Besides which, it is default on Slackware, and nothing more needs saying.
It's a huge stretch to call the FSF a charity. After all, they proudly proclaim the fact that they sell their own software for higher prices than anyone else (ever looked at the price of "GNU Deluxe?). This is either incredible chutzpah, or an extremely subtle hack.
More people have switched TO Linux FROM DOS/Windows than have ever switched TO DOS/Windows FROM anything! Hell, the number of people who have dumped Windows in favor of FreeBSD is staggering in comparison...
ps. I blew away my Windows drive last night and replaced it with FreeBSD.
"So you think your stock price will stay the same after that huge fine?"
Sometimes it even goes up after a fine (okay, the lawsuit's over, they're still in business, now buy, buy, buy...)
A stock price is the price of a share of ownership. There is nothing a judge can do to affect it other than a very indirect influence upon public perception.
"Liability is limitted to the amount of the shareholder's investment in the company."
:-) than by crushing the competition.
No, there's no liability at all! If I own one out of one million shares of Corporation A, and a court subsequently fines them one million dollars, I myself will not share any of the liability, not even the one dollar that is my share. If the day comes when Judge Jackson fines Microsoft several million or even billion dollars, none of it will come out of Bill Gates' pocket. Even if the Microsoft share price plummets as a result, there is still liability against Bill Gates other than his actions as a Microsoft employee.
"if the company is sufficiently large to have significant financial reserves it can lower the costs of its goods and services until they reach unprofitable levels."
Ah, the classic rebuttal. However, it doesn't work. First of all, megacorp has to take a large profit hit for a significant amount of time. Cash reserves aren't infinite and investors are going to bail after a few quarters of losses. Second, it is not worth taking a billion dollar loss to drive a million dollar competitor out of business. Doing so would be extremely foolish, and fools don't create monopolies.
"Monopoly company will have replenished its cash reserves sufficiently to once again rout the competition."
This would only happen in the most absurd fantasy. Corporations exist to make profits, not to eliminate the competition. There is much more profit to be had by making a profit
And product price is not everything.
As a case in point, take a look at Home Depot. They probably have the closest thing to an idiot leadership as anyone. Their goal is to be the biggest. They even have a "Wall of Shame" where they display photos of all the other businesses they have bought out or run out of town. Definitely not a paragon of business acumen. So look what's happening around Home Depots. Their competitors are scrambling to build next to them. Even the small mom-and-pops want to set up shop across the street. Why? Because Home Depot customers hate Home Depot. The get rude service by ignorant salesmen. Their competitors set up shop next door and rake in business by being polite, helpful and knowledgable. Home Depot will get business from those who don't care about anything other than price, and their competitors get everyone else.
"If we really did have zero government control/regulation, what would stop a giant slug fest with the result being a few corporations basically owning and/or running the world?"
Because corporations won't have the priviledges that they now possess. In today's world, governments grant charters to corporations, declaring them to be "legal entities". Because of this, the shareholders (owners) have no liability for the actions of their company.
In a proprietorship (non-corporate business), the owners are fully liable for their company. When the company get's sued, the owners are named in the suit. There are things a proprietorship may not legally do, that a corporation, even a two-man outfit, can.
A libertarian society is about liberty, not license. People are individually responsible for their own actions. But a corporation shields individuals from the consequences of their actions. And they can only do this through the help of the government.
But libertarians do not want "zero government control/regulation". The government has among its proper purposes the defense of the individual against theft and fraud. In a world with "minimal" regulation, they playing field is level. Individuals cannot hide behind their corporate shield. Shareholders are not forced to sell to the competitor just because the SEC says so. There is no eminent domain forcing the mom-and-pop coffeeshop to sell out to Donald Trump so he can build a new casino.
In a libertarian world, the only way a business can become a monopoly is to provide a service that everyone wants. If they start jacking their prices up because they have a natural monopoly, they will quickly lose it as competitors enter the market. And in a libertarian world, monopolies have no power to stop competition, so they have to behave themselves.
"The impact of mergers like this is to deny choice, concentrate power and homogenize creativity and expression."
:-)
What? This new megalith will prevent you from reading Newsweek? This is groundless paranoia. You still have your choice. You're still free to create your own media outlets. And if a merger is all it takes to stifle your creativity, I seriously doubt you were creative to begin with.
"Many of us are free marketers here"
I hate to break the news to you,Katz, but you were never a free marketeer. Do you think I'm so stupid I can't remember any of your previous columns?
"At some point, Americans have to decide if they still want a free information culture, along with a functioning government."
What does the TW+AOL merger have to do with a functioning government? Or are you just disappointed that Judge Jackson didn't immediately step in and block it upon your advice?
"EM>This company would be much larger in cultural influence and economic power than most countries on the earth."
The State of California is equivalent to a first world nation in power. I think I recall that if it were independent, it would be the six largest economy in the world. But guess what? It is not an independent nation, and must obey the US Constitution along with it's own Constitution.
But TimeWarnerAOL is not an independent nation, nor a state, country or municpality. It must follow the very same laws that you and I must. If Microsoft's billions couldn't buy off Judge Jackson, what makes you think TimeWarnerAOL's multibillions would be any better?
"The move represents the most sweeping move yet by corporate conglomerates to control high-speed access to the Internet and to dominate its content."
They have absolutely zero control over my internet access. Zero. That's because I don't use AOL as my ISP. And should they decide to purchase my local mom-and-pop ISP, I still have a choice, many of them in fact. One of them is Pacific Bell, which even T/W/A would not be able to buy.
"The age of proprietorship may have ended yesterday" (in reference to IBM and Linux)
If by "proprietorship" you mean proprietary standards, then you may be correct. But if you are referring to mythical stalmanist utopia where all software is held in common for the Greater Good, you are way off base.
"A movement that began as a counter-cultural, individualistic effort to keep the Net free from the very kind of corporatist control the AOL/Time-Warner merger typifies"
Oh, was that why Linux, BSD, and GNU were created? To keep the net free from corporations? Okay, I'll turn off the sarcasm. Other than GNU and any projects under it, I am not aware of any open source project that is based on any ideology, let along a counter-cultural one. And GNU is hardly antagonistic to business concerns.
The internet is not under corporate control. I seriously doubt it ever will be. No corporation, even TimeWarnerAOL, has the resources to purchase every ISP, let alone all of the infrastructure of the internet. You're living in a paranoid fantasy.
"There hardly exists a free and independent journalistic culture off-line anymore."
If you mean in terms of megamedia, you may be right. But what's your point? Isn't that what you're railing against, mega-anythings? But open up your eyes. Every community in the US has its smaller media outlets including small newspapers, radio stations and television stations.
"sensationalized promoters of controversy and fragmentation, producers of tepid, homogenized information-peddling."
Careful, someone might mistake this description for you
"As of this week, individuals, people who believe in free and diverse speech..."
...have the opportunity to deny the same to others based on the fact that we think they are too big.
"Wal-Mart, Blockbuster Video, Staples, Toys R Us, Starbucks, Disney and now, AOL/Time-Warner, rule our world."
Earlier in history, our world was ruled by Montgomery Wards, Penneys, Rexall and Esso. Even earlier days of yore were ruthlessly exploited by the likes of Sears and Roebuck. We are always going to have large companies. It's the nature of business. However, no one is forcing you to frequent their establishments or read their content. If you don't like Starbucks, don't drink their coffee. Simple. They aren't the only coffee stand in town.
Now don't misunderstand me, Mr. Katz. I am not in favor of corporations as fictitious legal entities that absolve their shareholders of any liability. However, size doesn't matter. If mergers are bad, then the corner drugstore merging with the downtown florist is just as bad as the big mergers. If your criteria on goodness/badness is the economic value of something, then I can only conclude that you yourself are in the wrong since you make more money than I. And what could I conclude about Andover?
Don't point your finger at size and call it a crime. Give me some specific criminal actions that TimeWarnerAOL have committed that would justify the government breaking them up.
There is no perfect government, and there never will be. Utopia is not an option. The trick is to give the government enough power to fulfill its proper role, but not so much that the "hoipolloi" can get ahold of it. This is something that a libertarian candidate would be in favor of (getting back on topic).
As an example, corporations do not pay off or bribe every member of congress (despite rumours to the contrary). All they need to do is pay off the two or three swing votes necessary for a 51% margin. But if there were a requirement that congress needed 2/3s to pass a bill, that would mean a corporation would have to pay off one out of every six congressmen in order to even have a chance at directing the outcome. Conversely, only one out of six congressmen need to be honest and incorruptable to put a damper on influence peddling.
To repeat, fear the government instead of the corporation. If government power wasn't for sale, corporations couldn't buy it.
"I believe that a lot of the people in large organizations (either corporations or bureaucracies) feel they can do bad things to other people and be shielded by their organization from any real consequences."
This cuts right to the heart of the matter. Why are individuals within a corporation shielded from their actions? A better question would be: who shields them from their actions? The answer is government.
The only difference between a corporation and a proprietorship (unincorporated business), is that the government gives special recognition to the corporation as being a legal entity. You can sue a corporation, and you can even sue executives and employees of a corporation, but you can't sue any of the owners.
If an unincorporated mom-and-pop ISP is negligent in some manner, it is mom and pop who have to show up in court. If Microsoft does the very same thing, you will not see Paul Allen (still one of the owners) in a courtroom.
The problem is not corporations, the problem is that the government treats corporations as special cases and artificially limits their liability.