I'll not feel guilty breaking a law, when my personal code of ethics doesn't forbid the activity.
Then you've got a problem.
The Law is a powerful force in a free society. In a culture like ours-- for wherever you happen to live, we share the same culture-- no man is beholden to any other. Men give up their liberty only to the Law. We do this in the name of equity, and justice, and security. Our social structures are all founded on a respect for the Law.
No man can choose which laws he'll obey and which ones he'll ignore. To do that is to place yourself above the Law, which destroys the delicate balance under which we all live.
To say, "Simply because it is illegal does not make it immoral or wrong" is to deny the very nature of Law. It is against the Law, and therefore it is wrong. Period.
There are sometimes bad laws. These laws should be changed. We have a system for doing so. But until those laws are changed, they must be obeyed.
In situations where the system completely breaks down, men are justified in engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. In the worst of all circumstances, armed revolution to overthrow the government is justified. If you seriously believe you're in a situation that warrants either of those responses, I'd request that you check yourself into the nearest psych ward and stay there until you're all better.
Obey the Law, or break it, or work to change it. But you must not simply ignore it.
Just because something can be modelled by a machine, doesn't mean that it is a machine.
What does that have to do with anything? Computer programs are not mathematical proofs, nor vice versa. Computer programs are functional constructs, built by programmers, that perform operations. They do things, like fly the space shuttle or control a tape deck or download pornography. Statements of mathematics do not do things. No set of mathematical statements, however complex, can tell a videotape deck to go into record.
The creation of a mathematical proof is very similar to the creation of a computer program.
If this were true-- it isn't, as anyone who has worked in commercial software development would know intuitively-- then so what?. As I've said over and over, a mathematical proof or statement does not do anything. It is either correct or incorrect, but it performs no function. It can be evaluated, either manually or by automation, but the process of evaluating the proof or statement is separate from the proof or statement itself.
Computer programs do things. That makes them different from math, or music, or literature. Why aren't you seeing that?
Let us not lose sight of the point, here. You keep insisting that source code is equivalent to mathematical or scientific knowledge, and should therefore be shared for the same reasons that those things should be shared. You are the one who invoked Newton, after all. Repeating "that's not what I said" or "there you go with should again" isn't really going to get us anywhere.
If you want to retract your statement about Newton, then that's just fine.
But as a side note, do you really think that abstract knowledge isn't crafted?
Yup. "Craft" is a verb, meaning "to make by hand and with much skill." The constituents of the sciences and of mathematics aren't crafted things; they're discoveries of principles, relations, or facts. You may take pride in how well you choose to express them, but in all aspects these things are basically nothing more than statements of fact.
Computer programs are constructs. They are built from raw materials (bits, at the lowest level; instructions for the more abstractly minded) and perform a function. They are more like machines than they are like something from math or the sciences.
The argument, which you advocated, that software should be shared like scientific knowledge just doesn't hold any water.
First of all, you are clearly mistaken if you consider natural resources and crafted things to be morally and economically equivalent. I'd recommend a basic textbook on transactional ethics. Start with "Henny Penny" and work your way up.
Finally, I refuse to get into another argument that hinges on the assumption that software is equivalent to abstract knowledge. There is a huge difference between sharing the knowledge of how to write a database and actually sharing the database itself. You're trying to say that source code is abstract knowledge, and should be shared so that others may learn from it. That's bullshit. Source code is a crafted, constructed thing. You are no more entitled to it-- morally or economically-- than you are to another person's furniture.
Your post is well said, and I don't want to take anything out of context by trying to quote you.
But I still don't agree. You seem to be saying that CDs cost $16 apiece because the record companies (which you call "cartels" for reasons that are not entirely clear) fix prices. I guarantee you-- I make a personal promise to you-- that if the record companies collectively sold half the CDs next year that they sold last year, prices would drop suddenly.
Let us not point the finger exclusively at record companies. They sell CDs for $16 each because untold millions of people buy them at that price. No other reason.
On the subject of usury, the word actually means the practice of charging interest on a loan. Depending on your interpretation, it may mean the charging of excessive interest, or the charging of interest period. And yes, there's a story in the Bible about usury. But banks still do it every day.
The "humanity has come a long way" argument is essentially meaningless, sorry to say. All you're basically saying there is that you think everybody ought to behave according to your preferences, but in more high-minded terms.
To bring this back on topic. programmers could paid to write the code and release it freely under the GPL then they have to go off and try and find new problems to solve, more code to write, or improve existing code.
Who, exactly, would pay them? If somebody pays, then somebody has to get paid. The GPL say, essentially, that the product of my labor (my source code) is of zero economic value. Who's going to pay me to generate thousands of kilobytes of zero-economic-value?
I don't believe ideas are property, so I'm not advocating theft.
That's absurd. Your opinion means piss-all if it's contrary to the law of the land. And the law of the land says that my ideas are my property-- my intellectual property. Before you convince me that another way is better, you're going to have to do a lot better than "nuh-uh."
Im reffering to misguided attempts to maximise profits and gouge the public by inflicting copy prevention technology.
Pirated CDs and DVDs are a huge problem. Have you ever been to southeast Asia? You can buy pirated media on street corners in K-L for, literally, pennies. This isn't one guy copying a CD for his mate. This is large-scale mass production. Is it not appropriate and understandable for the music and movie industries to try to put a stop to this practice?
What we've established here is that the music and movie industries are in the right to try to prevent the sort of widespread piracy we see in Asia. Their method for doing so is distasteful to you, and to me, and probably to lots of other people. But there's a difference between doing the wrong thing and doing the right thing in the wrong way.
The music and movie industries's attempts to curb large-scale piracy do not amount to an invalid business model. Sorry.
So why aren't you looking at this as an opportunity? Get off your butt and figure out how to implement fair copy protection in music CDs and DVDs. Maybe a system like SCMS that lets you make a copy, but not a copy-of-a-copy. You're smart, figure it out! Then sell it to the record companies and retire to a life of leisure.
Unless, of course, you're a GNU/Communist. In that case, you'll give it to the record companies for nothing and go back to your workaday job, right? Right.
Im talking about attempts to use and abuse legislation to enforce riduculously long copyright terms.
First of all, the purpose of copyright legislation is to protect the rights of copyright holders. If I'm a copyright holder-- which I am, as are you-- then it's fair and appropriate for me to lobby to get those protections extended.
Nobody's acting immorally or illegally here, either. They're just acting in a way that's different from what you think they should do. That doesn't mean their business model is invalid, either.
Besides, I'd like to know who died and left you in charge of deciding what's "riduculous" and what's reasonable.
Im talking about the over inflated price of CDs, the abject failure of the mainstream music industry to adapt to MP3s and the internet.
The price of CDs, like any other economic entity, is governed by market forces. They charge $16 for a CD because people will pay it. It is not morally wrong or illegal to charge whatever price the market will bear. In fact, some believe that it's morally wrong not to do so.
And as for what you so dramatically called "the abject failure of the mainstream music industry," you're making it sound like MP3 technology and the Internet are some kind of divine force that must be reckoned with. Seriously, does it really matter whether you can download music over the Internet? Do you think the fact that you can't represents some kind of failure of the music industry?
You do? Well, then, get off your lazy ass and start a record company. Sign up some artists, or buy the rights to some music, and start delivering content over the Internet. It's your opportunity to lose.
Of course, if you want to do that, then you're going to need some cash. Maybe lots of it. You could-- and, if fact, will-- gamble your life savings, but unless you're incredibly rich, that won't be nearly enough. (If you were incredibly rich, you wouldn't be complaining about the price of CDs. So that's probably not the case.)
So what do you do? You get yourself a business partner or two, and get them to gamble their life savings too. That won't be enough, either, so you'll have to find some investors. Before they give you any money, you'll have to convince them that they can make it back, so you'll need a business plan. Make it a good one, too, 'cause what you're talking about has been tried before, and investors have already lost their shirts on it once. They're definitely in wardrobe-protection mode these days.
If you do all of that just right, you'll have solved the problem you're bitching about.
What's that? You can't do all of that? You don't have a business plan? The investors turned you down?
Maybe that's because it's a terrible idea.
Your argument is, in a word, absurd.
Expecting to continue to make the kind of profit margins for distributing music is what im saying is unrealistic and invalid.
If that were true, then the big record companies would be experiencing a decline in profits. They aren't. They're seeing record numbers. Why? Because people are continuing to pay $16 apiece for CDs. If any of your points was the least bit valid, we'd see some kind of market effect. But we don't.
So basically it sounds like you're just whining. You want to download MP3s for free, and you're not getting it, and you can't figure out how to do it yourself, so you're venting your frustrations by indicting the whole music sales business model.
Personally I feel that you have no right to try and hoard an idea, so I will reverse-engineer your software if I want it, and I will redistribute it, because I believe in free software.
Do you use that "Preview" button when you post? Did you even read your words? Are you aware that you're advocating theft here?
I believe ideas are property. My justification for this is simple: if I have it and you don't, then it's property, and subject to the laws of economics. Five centuries of judicial tradition and codified law supports this opinion.
So what you're saying is that you think I have no right to be secure in my personal property. If we were talking about my couch, you'd be advocating theft. If we were talking about the contents of my fridge, you'd be advocating theft. If we were talking about a screenplay, you'd be advocating theft. You think just because you're talking about source code, it means you're no longer advocating theft??
Well, you know what I believe? I believe idiots should be safely behind bars. So if you'd be so kind as to post your address, I'll be right over to lock you in my basement.
What's that you say? I can't do that? Well, why not?
I guess you have a different definition of "not significantly different" than I-- or most people, I suppose-- have.
As to original arguments, it was said, "If everyone licensed their software under the GPL..." then so-and-so would occur. My statement was to say that if everyone licensed their software under the GPL, then the software industry as we know it would collapse.
The corollary, of course, is that if everyone licensed their software under the GPL, then the rapid development of software and software engineering techniques that we've experienced over the past fifteen years would come to a grinding halt. Which would be a Bad Thing.
Sure, GPL'd products can coexist with non-GPL'd products. But if you currently make money selling software, then applying the GPL to that software will put you out of that business permanently. You simply cannot stay in business selling software that's covered by the GPL. And since the GPL covers derivative works, then you also can't stay in business if you use GPL'd software-- including software libraries-- in your commercial product.
If that happened to my company, I'd be out of work. If that happened to all software companies (i.e., "if everyone licensed their software under the GPL"), then I'd really be in trouble. And so would a lot of other people.
So your statement that "GPL'd code doesn't put programmers out of work" is true only to the extent that the programmers you're referring to aren't trying to do business by selling software.
Hmm. I guess I'm not getting your argument. You seem to be comparing software to air, water, and sunlight. That's bogus.
Software isn't a natural resource. It's the result of human effort, just like a meal cooked in a restaurant, or a pair of shoes.
It's this whole "software should be free" thing that gets me down. My software is not free, because I thought of it, and you didn't. You're more than welcome to ask me to give it to you out of some sense of charity or altruism or I-don't-know-what, but I will continue to say "no."
I do not release any of my code under the GPL, and I will never do so, and no company that I work for will ever do so, because I have serious moral objections to the "Free" Software Foundation in particular, and RMS's political leanings in general. I will therefore continue to try to persuade people not to participate in the "free" software movement.
The shrinkwrapped office productivity software market is done. Excel and Word haven't gotten significantly better since 1997.
If you used them, you might have a different opinion. I use Office 2000 on Windows and Office v. X on Mac regularly, and I can tell you that they're clearly superior to their circa-1997 counterparts. Your point is demonstrably untrue.
The only interesting shrinkwrapped software nowadays are multimedia (audio, digital video), and web-authoring software.
You are clearly uninformed. Let's pick on teeny-tiny market segment that I happen to be thinking about today: television station automation. There are a dozen vendors-- maybe more-- producing shrink-wrapped, licensed software for controlling television station equipment. Louth, Crispin, Seachange, and others are making a mint developing and selling shrink-wrapped software, and they're innovating like crazy to keep ahead.
Oh, you mean traditional PC applications? Like those you'd buy at CompUSA or something? Well, consider Adobe. I just got my copy of Photoshop 7 yesterday; I'd say they've been doing some work on it. It's changed a lot in the past couple of years. For that matter, what about personal accounting software, like Quicken and its competitors? That software is still undergoing active development.
And that's not even talking about enterprise software that businesses use, like Oracle and Sybase and SAP. Hell, even QuickBooks is shrinkwrapped and licensed.
Basically, I think you're way off here. There's a lot more happening in the commercial software market than you seem to realize.
which one has gotten lots of free advertising, and which crustly POS is dying?
Bad analogy, and you know it. Try this one:
commercial -> irix free -> linux
- or -
commercial -> solaris free -> linux
- or -
commercial -> vxworks free -> linux
- or -
commercial -> windows free -> linux
- or -
commercial -> mac os x free -> linux
Market research is, of course, full of lies and errors. But all market research studies seem to agree that Linux, *BSD, and the other free operating systems are mere niche players, in terms of pure number of users.
The grandparent of this post is correct. "Free" software cannot compete with commercial software when it comes to market penetration. There are simply no resources for it.
Um... are you saying that the entertainment industry is an invalid business model? Making movies or records, and selling them to the public, is an invalid business model? And, likewise, writing and selling software in an invalid business model?
Please back this up with some kind of reasoning. Any kind will do.
Readers of Slashdot already know my opinion, so I won't bother restating it here. But I would like to know on what basis you formed yours.
RMS is saying that if everyone licensed their software under the GPL, then distributions wouldn't be able to have restrictive licenses like this.
In other words, if everyone licensed their software under the GPL, nobody could make any money selling that software. The software economy would collapse, and hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone would be out of work.
RMS would, evidently, consider this to be a good thing.
No, I added the drive and when they pushed the update for 2.0 they took 12 hours of my new space for "reserved" space. That's theft.
For the last time, it's not theft. There's no possible interpretation of this situation that could justify the use of the word "theft." During a software upgrade, your TiVo reserved some of your hard drive space for software features. If you're not happy about that, then put yours up on eBay or something! But quit slinging hyperbole in an effort to get attention.
The most enticing thing to me about a TiVo was the pause live TV deal, as well as the quality enhancement over VHS tape.
Just so you know, I think TiVo trades one kind of poor quality for another. TiVo lets you do one of four different levels of compression, from "basic" to "best." On anything other than "best," the compression results in visible artifacts. I bought a 30-hour model (meaning 30 "basic" hours, or about 8 "best" hours), which I then upgraded to a 130-hour model (about 30 "best" hours) by adding a second drive. Now I record everything on "best," and I'm very happy.
But with just the out-of-the-box capacity, you're either going to be disappointed by the quality of the picture, or by the amount of space you get.
Every cable company I've dealt with has several different packages based on the number of channels.
My ISP charges a different fee if I have 768 kbit of bandwidth or 1.5 Mbit of bandwidth. I pay them $X per month for my bandwidth, but if I wanted less bandwidth I could pay only $Y, which is some value less than $X.
That doesn't mean, of course, that I'm paying for Slashdot every month. I'm merely paying for the pipe. The content I download over it is either free (e.g., MTV) or paid for separately (e.g., HBO).
BBC is, as I understand it, paid for by the government with tax dollars. I don't live in the UK, so go easy if I've got that wrong.
Pay-per-view is, of course, not free. We were talking about free TV without commercials, so pay-per-view doesn't qualify.
PBS is a good example, but technically it's paid for by donors. Ideally, everybody who watches PBS should send them some money periodically, even though they don't charge for their programming directly.
So I stand by my statement that there's no such thing as free TV without commercials.
Please read my other post, in which I pointed out that when you buy cable TV, you're paying for the medium, not the content. Premium and pay-per-view content aside, of course.
Some of us are comfortable with the command line, own a wrench, and are perfectly capable of working a VCR without a special interface. For us, the 'service' is very little help and a major source of annoyance. I think he knows exactly what he wants, and the last thing he should do is listen to you.
Hmm. Okay, if you want to take responsibility for knowing what programs are on at what time on which channels, please be my guest. Myself, I prefer not to have to worry about whether Farscape is on at 10 or 11, or whether it's a new episode or a rerun.
This becomes particularly relevant when networks do things like run 34- or 68-minute shows. NBC has run several 34-minute episodes, but I couldn't say of which shows. Last fall, UPN ran a 68-minute episode of Buffy. Remembering to record the extra 8 minutes wasn't my problem; the TiVo did it for me, based on the schedule data I bought.
But if you want to tell people that they shouldn't listen to me, then you must do what you think is right, of course.
First of all, do you define a troll as being a person who vocally and vehemently disagrees with your point of view, even to the point of mocking you for advocating it? If so, then I'm a troll.
If you prefer to spend your money and time buying and integrating video gear and software to edit out commercials and burn DVDs, then that's your prerogative. It's clearly your life, and everybody needs a hobby.
But to stand up and defend this practice as if it were some kind of normal-- nay, even laudable-- endeavor, that's just crazy.
Of course, you consider television commercials to be "undue and unwelcome efforts at influence and repetative conditioning." That sort of paranoid characterization puts in all in perspective for me. I understand now why you spend your time constructing what is essentially an elaborate and expensive tin-foil hat.
When you drive, do you close your eyes? After all, billboards are just undue and unwelcome efforts at influence and repetative [sic] conditioning.
You are clearly a nut with too much free time and completely fouled up priorities.
I'd suggest that, rather than sitting in front of your computer all the time, you go talk a walk in a park. You'd be amazed at the kind of frame rates you get, even at absurdly high resolutions.
They stole space from a hard drive I purchased to make the reserved space area.
That's bullshit, and you know it. Having that reserved space is a design feature of the TiVo. The hard drive is yours, yes, so if you prefer, you can just erase it and use it to store your collection of MP3s or whatever.
I can't believe you'd seriously use the word "stole" in this context. That's just nuts.
Given your attitude, if I worked for TiVo, I'd be thrilled that you're not a customer.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll not feel guilty breaking a law, when my personal code of ethics doesn't forbid the activity.
Then you've got a problem.
The Law is a powerful force in a free society. In a culture like ours-- for wherever you happen to live, we share the same culture-- no man is beholden to any other. Men give up their liberty only to the Law. We do this in the name of equity, and justice, and security. Our social structures are all founded on a respect for the Law.
No man can choose which laws he'll obey and which ones he'll ignore. To do that is to place yourself above the Law, which destroys the delicate balance under which we all live.
To say, "Simply because it is illegal does not make it immoral or wrong" is to deny the very nature of Law. It is against the Law, and therefore it is wrong. Period.
There are sometimes bad laws. These laws should be changed. We have a system for doing so. But until those laws are changed, they must be obeyed.
In situations where the system completely breaks down, men are justified in engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. In the worst of all circumstances, armed revolution to overthrow the government is justified. If you seriously believe you're in a situation that warrants either of those responses, I'd request that you check yourself into the nearest psych ward and stay there until you're all better.
Obey the Law, or break it, or work to change it. But you must not simply ignore it.
Just because something can be modelled by a machine, doesn't mean that it is a machine.
What does that have to do with anything? Computer programs are not mathematical proofs, nor vice versa. Computer programs are functional constructs, built by programmers, that perform operations. They do things, like fly the space shuttle or control a tape deck or download pornography. Statements of mathematics do not do things. No set of mathematical statements, however complex, can tell a videotape deck to go into record.
The creation of a mathematical proof is very similar to the creation of a computer program.
If this were true-- it isn't, as anyone who has worked in commercial software development would know intuitively-- then so what?. As I've said over and over, a mathematical proof or statement does not do anything. It is either correct or incorrect, but it performs no function. It can be evaluated, either manually or by automation, but the process of evaluating the proof or statement is separate from the proof or statement itself.
Computer programs do things. That makes them different from math, or music, or literature. Why aren't you seeing that?
Let us not lose sight of the point, here. You keep insisting that source code is equivalent to mathematical or scientific knowledge, and should therefore be shared for the same reasons that those things should be shared. You are the one who invoked Newton, after all. Repeating "that's not what I said" or "there you go with should again" isn't really going to get us anywhere.
If you want to retract your statement about Newton, then that's just fine.
Talking of not reading things.
But as a side note, do you really think that abstract knowledge isn't crafted?
Yup. "Craft" is a verb, meaning "to make by hand and with much skill." The constituents of the sciences and of mathematics aren't crafted things; they're discoveries of principles, relations, or facts. You may take pride in how well you choose to express them, but in all aspects these things are basically nothing more than statements of fact.
Computer programs are constructs. They are built from raw materials (bits, at the lowest level; instructions for the more abstractly minded) and perform a function. They are more like machines than they are like something from math or the sciences.
The argument, which you advocated, that software should be shared like scientific knowledge just doesn't hold any water.
Sorry. Try again another time.
First of all, you are clearly mistaken if you consider natural resources and crafted things to be morally and economically equivalent. I'd recommend a basic textbook on transactional ethics. Start with "Henny Penny" and work your way up.
Finally, I refuse to get into another argument that hinges on the assumption that software is equivalent to abstract knowledge. There is a huge difference between sharing the knowledge of how to write a database and actually sharing the database itself. You're trying to say that source code is abstract knowledge, and should be shared so that others may learn from it. That's bullshit. Source code is a crafted, constructed thing. You are no more entitled to it-- morally or economically-- than you are to another person's furniture.
Your post is well said, and I don't want to take anything out of context by trying to quote you.
But I still don't agree. You seem to be saying that CDs cost $16 apiece because the record companies (which you call "cartels" for reasons that are not entirely clear) fix prices. I guarantee you-- I make a personal promise to you-- that if the record companies collectively sold half the CDs next year that they sold last year, prices would drop suddenly.
Let us not point the finger exclusively at record companies. They sell CDs for $16 each because untold millions of people buy them at that price. No other reason.
On the subject of usury, the word actually means the practice of charging interest on a loan. Depending on your interpretation, it may mean the charging of excessive interest, or the charging of interest period. And yes, there's a story in the Bible about usury. But banks still do it every day.
The "humanity has come a long way" argument is essentially meaningless, sorry to say. All you're basically saying there is that you think everybody ought to behave according to your preferences, but in more high-minded terms.
To bring this back on topic. programmers could paid to write the code and release it freely under the GPL then they have to go off and try and find new problems to solve, more code to write, or improve existing code.
Who, exactly, would pay them? If somebody pays, then somebody has to get paid. The GPL say, essentially, that the product of my labor (my source code) is of zero economic value. Who's going to pay me to generate thousands of kilobytes of zero-economic-value?
I don't believe ideas are property, so I'm not advocating theft.
That's absurd. Your opinion means piss-all if it's contrary to the law of the land. And the law of the land says that my ideas are my property-- my intellectual property. Before you convince me that another way is better, you're going to have to do a lot better than "nuh-uh."
Im reffering to misguided attempts to maximise profits and gouge the public by inflicting copy prevention technology.
Pirated CDs and DVDs are a huge problem. Have you ever been to southeast Asia? You can buy pirated media on street corners in K-L for, literally, pennies. This isn't one guy copying a CD for his mate. This is large-scale mass production. Is it not appropriate and understandable for the music and movie industries to try to put a stop to this practice?
What we've established here is that the music and movie industries are in the right to try to prevent the sort of widespread piracy we see in Asia. Their method for doing so is distasteful to you, and to me, and probably to lots of other people. But there's a difference between doing the wrong thing and doing the right thing in the wrong way.
The music and movie industries's attempts to curb large-scale piracy do not amount to an invalid business model. Sorry.
So why aren't you looking at this as an opportunity? Get off your butt and figure out how to implement fair copy protection in music CDs and DVDs. Maybe a system like SCMS that lets you make a copy, but not a copy-of-a-copy. You're smart, figure it out! Then sell it to the record companies and retire to a life of leisure.
Unless, of course, you're a GNU/Communist. In that case, you'll give it to the record companies for nothing and go back to your workaday job, right? Right.
Im talking about attempts to use and abuse legislation to enforce riduculously long copyright terms.
First of all, the purpose of copyright legislation is to protect the rights of copyright holders. If I'm a copyright holder-- which I am, as are you-- then it's fair and appropriate for me to lobby to get those protections extended.
Nobody's acting immorally or illegally here, either. They're just acting in a way that's different from what you think they should do. That doesn't mean their business model is invalid, either.
Besides, I'd like to know who died and left you in charge of deciding what's "riduculous" and what's reasonable.
Im talking about the over inflated price of CDs, the abject failure of the mainstream music industry to adapt to MP3s and the internet.
The price of CDs, like any other economic entity, is governed by market forces. They charge $16 for a CD because people will pay it. It is not morally wrong or illegal to charge whatever price the market will bear. In fact, some believe that it's morally wrong not to do so.
And as for what you so dramatically called "the abject failure of the mainstream music industry," you're making it sound like MP3 technology and the Internet are some kind of divine force that must be reckoned with. Seriously, does it really matter whether you can download music over the Internet? Do you think the fact that you can't represents some kind of failure of the music industry?
You do? Well, then, get off your lazy ass and start a record company. Sign up some artists, or buy the rights to some music, and start delivering content over the Internet. It's your opportunity to lose.
Of course, if you want to do that, then you're going to need some cash. Maybe lots of it. You could-- and, if fact, will-- gamble your life savings, but unless you're incredibly rich, that won't be nearly enough. (If you were incredibly rich, you wouldn't be complaining about the price of CDs. So that's probably not the case.)
So what do you do? You get yourself a business partner or two, and get them to gamble their life savings too. That won't be enough, either, so you'll have to find some investors. Before they give you any money, you'll have to convince them that they can make it back, so you'll need a business plan. Make it a good one, too, 'cause what you're talking about has been tried before, and investors have already lost their shirts on it once. They're definitely in wardrobe-protection mode these days.
If you do all of that just right, you'll have solved the problem you're bitching about.
What's that? You can't do all of that? You don't have a business plan? The investors turned you down?
Maybe that's because it's a terrible idea.
Your argument is, in a word, absurd.
Expecting to continue to make the kind of profit margins for distributing music is what im saying is unrealistic and invalid.
If that were true, then the big record companies would be experiencing a decline in profits. They aren't. They're seeing record numbers. Why? Because people are continuing to pay $16 apiece for CDs. If any of your points was the least bit valid, we'd see some kind of market effect. But we don't.
So basically it sounds like you're just whining. You want to download MP3s for free, and you're not getting it, and you can't figure out how to do it yourself, so you're venting your frustrations by indicting the whole music sales business model.
Pretty weak, if you ask me.
Personally I feel that you have no right to try and hoard an idea, so I will reverse-engineer your software if I want it, and I will redistribute it, because I believe in free software.
Do you use that "Preview" button when you post? Did you even read your words? Are you aware that you're advocating theft here?
I believe ideas are property. My justification for this is simple: if I have it and you don't, then it's property, and subject to the laws of economics. Five centuries of judicial tradition and codified law supports this opinion.
So what you're saying is that you think I have no right to be secure in my personal property. If we were talking about my couch, you'd be advocating theft. If we were talking about the contents of my fridge, you'd be advocating theft. If we were talking about a screenplay, you'd be advocating theft. You think just because you're talking about source code, it means you're no longer advocating theft??
Well, you know what I believe? I believe idiots should be safely behind bars. So if you'd be so kind as to post your address, I'll be right over to lock you in my basement.
What's that you say? I can't do that? Well, why not?
I guess you have a different definition of "not significantly different" than I-- or most people, I suppose-- have.
As to original arguments, it was said, "If everyone licensed their software under the GPL..." then so-and-so would occur. My statement was to say that if everyone licensed their software under the GPL, then the software industry as we know it would collapse.
The corollary, of course, is that if everyone licensed their software under the GPL, then the rapid development of software and software engineering techniques that we've experienced over the past fifteen years would come to a grinding halt. Which would be a Bad Thing.
Sure, GPL'd products can coexist with non-GPL'd products. But if you currently make money selling software, then applying the GPL to that software will put you out of that business permanently. You simply cannot stay in business selling software that's covered by the GPL. And since the GPL covers derivative works, then you also can't stay in business if you use GPL'd software-- including software libraries-- in your commercial product.
If that happened to my company, I'd be out of work. If that happened to all software companies (i.e., "if everyone licensed their software under the GPL"), then I'd really be in trouble. And so would a lot of other people.
So your statement that "GPL'd code doesn't put programmers out of work" is true only to the extent that the programmers you're referring to aren't trying to do business by selling software.
Hmm. I guess I'm not getting your argument. You seem to be comparing software to air, water, and sunlight. That's bogus.
Software isn't a natural resource. It's the result of human effort, just like a meal cooked in a restaurant, or a pair of shoes.
It's this whole "software should be free" thing that gets me down. My software is not free, because I thought of it, and you didn't. You're more than welcome to ask me to give it to you out of some sense of charity or altruism or I-don't-know-what, but I will continue to say "no."
I do not release any of my code under the GPL, and I will never do so, and no company that I work for will ever do so, because I have serious moral objections to the "Free" Software Foundation in particular, and RMS's political leanings in general. I will therefore continue to try to persuade people not to participate in the "free" software movement.
The shrinkwrapped office productivity software market is done. Excel and Word haven't gotten significantly better since 1997.
If you used them, you might have a different opinion. I use Office 2000 on Windows and Office v. X on Mac regularly, and I can tell you that they're clearly superior to their circa-1997 counterparts. Your point is demonstrably untrue.
The only interesting shrinkwrapped software nowadays are multimedia (audio, digital video), and web-authoring software.
You are clearly uninformed. Let's pick on teeny-tiny market segment that I happen to be thinking about today: television station automation. There are a dozen vendors-- maybe more-- producing shrink-wrapped, licensed software for controlling television station equipment. Louth, Crispin, Seachange, and others are making a mint developing and selling shrink-wrapped software, and they're innovating like crazy to keep ahead.
Oh, you mean traditional PC applications? Like those you'd buy at CompUSA or something? Well, consider Adobe. I just got my copy of Photoshop 7 yesterday; I'd say they've been doing some work on it. It's changed a lot in the past couple of years. For that matter, what about personal accounting software, like Quicken and its competitors? That software is still undergoing active development.
And that's not even talking about enterprise software that businesses use, like Oracle and Sybase and SAP. Hell, even QuickBooks is shrinkwrapped and licensed.
Basically, I think you're way off here. There's a lot more happening in the commercial software market than you seem to realize.
comercial -> sco unix
free -> linux
which one has gotten lots of free advertising, and which crustly POS is dying?
Bad analogy, and you know it. Try this one:
commercial -> irix
free -> linux
- or -
commercial -> solaris
free -> linux
- or -
commercial -> vxworks
free -> linux
- or -
commercial -> windows
free -> linux
- or -
commercial -> mac os x
free -> linux
Market research is, of course, full of lies and errors. But all market research studies seem to agree that Linux, *BSD, and the other free operating systems are mere niche players, in terms of pure number of users.
The grandparent of this post is correct. "Free" software cannot compete with commercial software when it comes to market penetration. There are simply no resources for it.
Um... are you saying that the entertainment industry is an invalid business model? Making movies or records, and selling them to the public, is an invalid business model? And, likewise, writing and selling software in an invalid business model?
Please back this up with some kind of reasoning. Any kind will do.
Readers of Slashdot already know my opinion, so I won't bother restating it here. But I would like to know on what basis you formed yours.
RMS is saying that if everyone licensed their software under the GPL, then distributions wouldn't be able to have restrictive licenses like this.
In other words, if everyone licensed their software under the GPL, nobody could make any money selling that software. The software economy would collapse, and hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone would be out of work.
RMS would, evidently, consider this to be a good thing.
If it was the medium you were paying for, than it wouldn't be an ongoing monthly fee.
Do you have a cable modem, or DSL? Or, for that matter, a telephone line? You pay recurring fees for all of these things.
No, I added the drive and when they pushed the update for 2.0 they took 12 hours of my new space for "reserved" space. That's theft.
For the last time, it's not theft. There's no possible interpretation of this situation that could justify the use of the word "theft." During a software upgrade, your TiVo reserved some of your hard drive space for software features. If you're not happy about that, then put yours up on eBay or something! But quit slinging hyperbole in an effort to get attention.
The most enticing thing to me about a TiVo was the pause live TV deal, as well as the quality enhancement over VHS tape.
Just so you know, I think TiVo trades one kind of poor quality for another. TiVo lets you do one of four different levels of compression, from "basic" to "best." On anything other than "best," the compression results in visible artifacts. I bought a 30-hour model (meaning 30 "basic" hours, or about 8 "best" hours), which I then upgraded to a 130-hour model (about 30 "best" hours) by adding a second drive. Now I record everything on "best," and I'm very happy.
But with just the out-of-the-box capacity, you're either going to be disappointed by the quality of the picture, or by the amount of space you get.
Just FYI.
Every cable company I've dealt with has several different packages based on the number of channels.
My ISP charges a different fee if I have 768 kbit of bandwidth or 1.5 Mbit of bandwidth. I pay them $X per month for my bandwidth, but if I wanted less bandwidth I could pay only $Y, which is some value less than $X.
That doesn't mean, of course, that I'm paying for Slashdot every month. I'm merely paying for the pipe. The content I download over it is either free (e.g., MTV) or paid for separately (e.g., HBO).
Same thing, more or less.
Check out BBC, Pay-Per-View, PBS
BBC is, as I understand it, paid for by the government with tax dollars. I don't live in the UK, so go easy if I've got that wrong.
Pay-per-view is, of course, not free. We were talking about free TV without commercials, so pay-per-view doesn't qualify.
PBS is a good example, but technically it's paid for by donors. Ideally, everybody who watches PBS should send them some money periodically, even though they don't charge for their programming directly.
So I stand by my statement that there's no such thing as free TV without commercials.
Please read my other post, in which I pointed out that when you buy cable TV, you're paying for the medium, not the content. Premium and pay-per-view content aside, of course.
Commercial television is free.
Some of us are comfortable with the command line, own a wrench, and are perfectly capable of working a VCR without a special interface. For us, the 'service' is very little help and a major source of annoyance. I think he knows exactly what he wants, and the last thing he should do is listen to you.
Hmm. Okay, if you want to take responsibility for knowing what programs are on at what time on which channels, please be my guest. Myself, I prefer not to have to worry about whether Farscape is on at 10 or 11, or whether it's a new episode or a rerun.
This becomes particularly relevant when networks do things like run 34- or 68-minute shows. NBC has run several 34-minute episodes, but I couldn't say of which shows. Last fall, UPN ran a 68-minute episode of Buffy. Remembering to record the extra 8 minutes wasn't my problem; the TiVo did it for me, based on the schedule data I bought.
But if you want to tell people that they shouldn't listen to me, then you must do what you think is right, of course.
First of all, do you define a troll as being a person who vocally and vehemently disagrees with your point of view, even to the point of mocking you for advocating it? If so, then I'm a troll.
If you prefer to spend your money and time buying and integrating video gear and software to edit out commercials and burn DVDs, then that's your prerogative. It's clearly your life, and everybody needs a hobby.
But to stand up and defend this practice as if it were some kind of normal-- nay, even laudable-- endeavor, that's just crazy.
Of course, you consider television commercials to be "undue and unwelcome efforts at influence and repetative conditioning." That sort of paranoid characterization puts in all in perspective for me. I understand now why you spend your time constructing what is essentially an elaborate and expensive tin-foil hat.
When you drive, do you close your eyes? After all, billboards are just undue and unwelcome efforts at influence and repetative [sic] conditioning.
You are clearly a nut with too much free time and completely fouled up priorities.
I'd suggest that, rather than sitting in front of your computer all the time, you go talk a walk in a park. You'd be amazed at the kind of frame rates you get, even at absurdly high resolutions.
They stole space from a hard drive I purchased to make the reserved space area.
That's bullshit, and you know it. Having that reserved space is a design feature of the TiVo. The hard drive is yours, yes, so if you prefer, you can just erase it and use it to store your collection of MP3s or whatever.
I can't believe you'd seriously use the word "stole" in this context. That's just nuts.
Given your attitude, if I worked for TiVo, I'd be thrilled that you're not a customer.