I think the difference is, useful scientific ideas and such are more difficult to come by. Furthermore, the old ideas are more critical for the creation of new ideas, so there's more danger from a long copyright.
Example: An idea for a useful household product (say, a Blender) isn't something easily duplicated. But with a book or a movie, it's not difficult to change a few names, concepts, and plot twists to get an "original creation." How many clones did "Survivor" and "Who Wants to Beat Up Regis Philbin" touch off? But none of them were sued for copyright infringement.
Okay, you've painted both sides. Too short a term, and it's difficult to profit from your creations. Too long a term, and the public doesn't reap the rewards of a rich public domain, and there's little incentive to keep creating.
A balance needs to be struck.
By filing suit against this particular copyright extension, Lessig is basically saying that the balance is already heavily skewed towards the latter situation, and only getting worse. In that sense, the CTEA is indeed an attack on "the progress of science and the useful arts."
If the goal of copyright law is to get works created that would otherwise not be, then allowing the copyright to be transferred would indeed fulfill that purpose.
"Eh? But they're already dead!"
Imagine a situation where a person--say, Tom Clancy--has a terminal disease. If he devotes the last six healthy months that he has to writing it, he can finish his latest techno-spy-thriller, "Five Iguanas."
So the question on Mr. Clancy's mind is, "what's in it for me?" Under the current system, it might just be worth finishing "Five Iguanas" to pay for college for the kids and set up a trust fund for the wife, dog, and tropical fish. Under your system, the thing will be public domain before it ever hits the shelves. So he may as well spend the last few months of health on vacation in Tahiti.
Now, imagine Tom Clancy in a speed-o. Do you see why we don't dare change the current copyright system? Do you???
Also, if an author's works immediately went into the public domain after his/her death, it would be a marvelous incentive to assign away rights to a corporation in order to guarantee residuals "just in case." As an anti-corporate shill, I just don't see that as a good thing.
I believe you're incorrect. You can't have exclusive rights to the information itself, but you can have rights to your compilation of that information. For example, the phone company has a copyright on the White Pages, even though you could theoretically compile exactly the same information by going door to door and getting peoples' numbers.
But ask yourself this: Does this so-called "real life" have Surround Sound? Huh? Does it?
Oh.
Re:No longer profitable as payware
on
Blender Is GPL
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Here's the timeline:
January 1 - Microsoft announces that they will open source Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 for the paltry sum of $50,000. Apparently, this is to make up for the money Bill Gates lost when he ran his wallet through the laundry.
February 12 - "The Freedows Project" (sounds like "Fritos") obtains the required $50,000 through generous donations by individuals and random muggings.
February 13 - Microsoft turns over the source code.
February 14 - The Freedows project sues Microsoft for violating the GPL by deliberately obscuring their code. Microsoft counters by explaining that, no, that's the code they really were using. They enter as evidence fifty pages of source code for IE 7.
March 22 - Freedows announces that they've overcome the first project hurdle: Separating out the integrated Solitare code from the rest of the OS.
March 25 - Freedows is forked, and a new project called XFreedows emerges.
March 27 - Freedows forks again after an SMP patch is rejected. The new project is called "Lindows."
March 28 - Lindows is sued by Lindows.
April 1 - Freedows announces that Freedows OS is now running on top of the Linux kernel. Nobody believes them.
April 2, 3, 4, and 5 - Freedows resends the press releases, publishes all sorts of screenshots and demos, bribes CmdrTaco to publish a, "No it wasn't an April Fools Joke" story. Freedows is slashdotted, detonating three servers and killing five. The project is set back a month.
May 15 - A seven day flame war erupts when someone on the Freedows mailing list suggests changing the UI to require "triple clicking" for some functions.
June 1 - XFreedows is integrated back into the Freedows main branch, adding native NVIDIA support, an OpenGL-based 3D GUI, 16-way SMP support, the XFAT file system (a relational database filesystem which supports file sizes up to 300 petabytes and transparent compression), full 32 bit, 64 bit, and 128 bit support, and DRM support that can be disabled with a couple of IFDEFs.
July 15 - IBM "donates" ten million dollars to the Freedows project in what can only be described as a corporate mugging.
August 5 - Solitare is re-integrated into the OS, improving performance 300-fold.
August 7 - Thanks to IBM's generous donation, Freedows can move its CVS server onto a ludicrously powerful server running the Freedows OS.
August 29th - 2:14 a.m. Freedows becomes self-aware.
After the whole 2.6/3.0 debate, Linus Torvalds, after a dream where he was visited by one of his bearded viking ancestors, told all the other kernel developers that renaming the kernel to match Red Hat's numbering system would "ensure the complete and utter domination of Linux in this century and the next."
Then he went off on a twenty minute diatribe about beasts, horns, seals, and trumpets. Which everyone thought was pretty funny. Seals playing the trumpet? That's the sort of imagery you usually get after a heavy investment in illegal substances.
I still don't know what to make of it. I looked for info on the "evaluation version" I heard rumored, but all I can find are mentions of a general release sometime down the road.
If you browse through their Click-n-Run warehouse, you'll find source packages. For example:
kernel-source-lindows-2.4.19 Linux kernel source. 25.07MB
toolchain-source (Untested) The GNU binutils and gcc source code 27.05MB
But even if I could find every package, I couldn't download them all without paying $99 for access to their "Click-n-Run" warehouse. Furthermore, their "evaluation version" should also count as a distribution. In short, my impression is that Lindows is not fulfilling the terms of the GPL. If I'm wrong, somebody step in and correct me.
The simplest solution, I think, would be to allow free access to those source packages.
You misunderstand. It sounds like the $5 price drop is supposed to come from the fact that they are (temporarily) barred from price-fixing, not from the $67M itself.
This is also important to remember when you're doing the $480M - $67M math. While they were allowed to keep $413M from their pricefixing scheme over the last five years, the real injury to them comes from the fact that they won't be able to make the $480M again over the next five years.
Of course, with $480M on the line, I'm sure they'll pay some lawyer to find a loophole in the settlement. Heh heh. Shoot the lawyer twice. I love it.
Addendum: I recently got into a rather silly flame war with an AOL user who couldn't find her caps lock key. She threatened to sue if I republished our conversation on the Web.
So I looked into this issue, and it's basically as you say*. But there are a couple of points you didn't mention. First, while you don't have a right to redistribute their creative works, you are allowed to use it in a "fair use" context, and they have no expectation that their message remain private. That is, you can quote the most relevant portions, and explain the whole situation in your own words.
Also, in the case of works with no real commercial value (most e-mail qualifies), you can be successfully sued, but it's very unlikely that you can be sued for monetary damages. The best they can do is force you to take the correspondence down. If your responses were libelous, it's a different story.
Having said that, I side with the posters who say that, in the case of the clueless CEO, the best plan is to back away slowly, document everything, and don't do anything to provoke him. And talk to a lawyer if it makes you feel more secure.
* IANAL, so CYA.
Re:This is the biggest problem with Linux
on
Linux Kernel 3.0?
·
· Score: 2
I couldn't agree more. You're just not being bold enough.
Why is this a novel technology? Sure, it's never been done by the music industry, but the commercial software folks have been providing "registration keys" for decades now.
This just doesn't strike me as something that should be patentable. Of course, that seldom impedes the patent process.
Bon Jovi rocks! Peace, out.
Re:Should stuff *ever* enter the public domain?
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There are problems with this line of reasoning. Copyright law isn't a codification of some obvious "natural right" to have control of your creative works after your death. In fact, it's a rather arbitrary set of laws that was put in place to protect creators from the worst effects of the cheapness of copying information.
Copyright law is vital, because it provides a great deal of incentive to creators, allowing them to profit from their work. But the purpose isn't to ensure creative people a livelihood, but to ensure that the marketplace of ideas is continually being resupplied and enriched.
Public domain is also a vital part of the equation. I believe that all ideas ultimately belong in the public domain, and the only argument is over what sort of delay is most effective in cultivating new ideas. The reason for this is simple: No person, no matter how creative, has ever given more to the marketplace of ideas than he or she received from it. Every work, no matter how original or unique, was inspired or influenced by ideas that did not belong to the author of the work.
For any person or group of people to say that it's right for them to have sole ownership of their own ideas until the sun goes nova is simply unethical. They're benefitting from the seething collection of memes that makes up our culture, while minimizing their own contribution to that culture.
Disney's willingness to use public domain works like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and the Grimm Brothers' stories, and then lock up the resulting ideas for what increasingly looks to be an unlimited time, is just one of the more obviously hypocritical examples of copyright run amok. Another example would be a play called, "The Wind Done Gone," which was a satire of "Gone With the Wind" as told by Scarlett's black slaves. The estate successfully sued because they'd taken the time to fill out the copyright renewal form every twenty-five years. In other words, an idea was never allowed into the marketplace of ideas, in order to protect the revenue stream to the great grandchildren of a creative person.
Ideas aren't physical property, and to imply--as you seem to be doing--that a creator like Robert Frost has a clear right to his or her ideas for as long as he has living descendants is simply untenable. If we treat ideas as physical property, we will end up in a world where you cannot create anything of significance without paying royalties to thousands of people who were fortunate enough to have a creative ancestor.
Do creators deserve to benefit from their work? Certainly. But for their entire lives, and at the expense of the health of our overall culture? No. Creators can certainly recoup their investment within 20 or 30 years, if their ideas have any value at all. I find it ludicrous that anyone at all is actually motivated by the idea of receiving royalty checks hundreds of years after his or her death, and I find it even more ludicrous that this additional motivation provides more benefit to society than the release of these works to the public domain.
The downside is that people might look at the difference in the pricetags, and think, "Hmm. . . I must be getting SOMETHING for that extra cash. Windows must be better." Then they'll buy the cheaper system anyways, because hey, this is Wal-Mart.
If Linux can benefit from the spreading of the mega-corporate cheap-crap lovefest, more power to it.:)
I think -- and don't quote me on this -- is that, as the lawsuit progressed, Lindows realized that the less it touted the "Windowsiness" of its operating system, the less of a case Microsoft had.
Just my theory. I didn't follow the case very closely. I'm not even sure who won.
Another challenge was to get the OSes to cooperate with each other. It's like putting a pit bull, a cat, a parakeet, a Komodo dragon, an antelope, a wolverine, a rattlesnake, and a duck-billed platypus all in a room and saying, "Now please get along, children."
As someone who has tried this,* I have to give this guy props for his courage. Well done!
"And linux is not a social movement, it's an operating system."
Indeed. Excellent point. And can an operating system go bankrupt? Windows may crash for many reasons, but never due to a lack of steady revenue. By the 2012 revision of Windows, this statement may no longer hold, but let's ignore that for the time being.
The Linux OS does not constitute a social movement. Linux users do not constitute a social movement. But Linux kernel hackers do, and they're part of a larger social movement that they've created: people who have a wholehearted and irrational love for their operating system of choice.
Just because you code for Unix doesn't make you part of this movement. But if you find yourself browsing ThinkGeek and thinking that it would be prudent to buy five hundred plush Tux toys for all your friends and family, you just might be. Double points for setting them up so that they stare at a poster of Bill Gates a la Alfred Hitchcock.
I have a totally different opinion on this. I don't want the mouse buttons in Mozilla to do precisely what they do in IE. I want the middle-click button to open the link in a new tab. Don't take that away from me just so you can have that ugly little arrow button for scrolling, because the mouse wheel is right there!
Let's not blindly follow IE's lead on the interface, because as imperfect as Mozilla's UI is, IE is no bed of roses either. It's just what people "are used to." My advice would be to copy the relative handful of shortcut keys that are used by the vast majority of people, and then choose what makes sense for the rest.
Example: IE's use of the mouse wheel doesn't make much sense. In Mozilla, if you're focused on a form, then the mouse wheel will scroll around on that form. In IE 6 (which I'm writing on right now), the mouse wheel just scrolls the entire page. Since my hand is already on the mouse, and it's easy to click elsewhere on the page to move the focus, why not add that functionality? In this case, Mozilla's handling seems like an obvious improvement.
Also, IIRC, Mozilla will allow you to scroll around on a page, even if there's a dialog box up in front of you. IE doesn't.
In conclusion, "IE does it" == "People are used to it" != "Good idea". The goal should be to make the best browser possible, not the most IE-like browser possible. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going over to Bugzilla to complain about the lack of Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab for switching between tabs.:)
Sigh. . . I really don't see what the original poster's beef is with the Mozilla interface. I like it. But every time someone complains that it doesn't act like IE, some other clueless individual responds by posting the IE theme.
People, "look" is only half of "look and feel." The IE theme is worse than nothing. Besides making the UI a good deal uglier (thanks, Microsoft), it leads people to assume that everything will act like IE does. But keyboard shortcuts, bookmarking, getting to the history, changing Internet options, and everything else remains exactly the same.
I don't think Mozilla should blindly follow IE's lead as far as the UI goes. And I use Mozilla enough that I find the differences to be features, not annoying inconsistencies. But the IE theme, whatever its merits, doesn't solve what people seem to think it solves. So stop it.
I wonder what things the IETF will be doing by, say, the year 2027? Giving software awards? Lobbying Congress for special privileges for the giant "Big 3" companies that run everything on the Internet? Do you suppose theres some kind of organizational law that groups that start out with legitimate, technical, engineering always degenerate into other things?
Yes, there is such an organizational law. It's called "evolution".
Complex, adaptive systems evolve. Whatever the original intentions of any large organization, whether corporate, religious, technical, or humanitarian, one of two fates awaits it. Either it will morph into something whose primary purpose is to ensure its own continued survival, or it will eventually fail because other systems are better suited to the niche it inhabits.
Okay, you may or may not think that "corporations as organisms" makes for a good analogy. But I'm not offering it up as an analogy. I'm suggesting that the organic ecosystem that is usually the focus of evolutionary study is just a special case of interaction between complex adaptive systems. The competition between human organizations is another.
Take Microsoft. We love talking about Microsoft around here, so why not? It's constantly looking for new markets to extend into, to ensure its continued income stream. And it's always looking to engulf small upstart companies with cool technology, which eliminates competition while feeding the organization. It uses all sorts of tricks to make the ecosystem it inhabits hard on competitors. These are just things that successful corporations do, and the similarity to the behavior of organisms is uncanny.
The major difference I see is that organizations have people, rather than genes, as their individual units. So the nature of an organization is more malleable. Also, it makes a wider variety of forms of reproduction possible (people leave the company for their own startup, mergers and breakups, etc).
That's why my political ideas have slowly been leaning more and more towards a semi-anarchistic system. I just don't trust any of these complex, adaptive systems to value my best interests, so it's best not to give them too much power.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the difference is, useful scientific ideas and such are more difficult to come by. Furthermore, the old ideas are more critical for the creation of new ideas, so there's more danger from a long copyright.
Example: An idea for a useful household product (say, a Blender) isn't something easily duplicated. But with a book or a movie, it's not difficult to change a few names, concepts, and plot twists to get an "original creation." How many clones did "Survivor" and "Who Wants to Beat Up Regis Philbin" touch off? But none of them were sued for copyright infringement.
Okay, you've painted both sides. Too short a term, and it's difficult to profit from your creations. Too long a term, and the public doesn't reap the rewards of a rich public domain, and there's little incentive to keep creating.
A balance needs to be struck.
By filing suit against this particular copyright extension, Lessig is basically saying that the balance is already heavily skewed towards the latter situation, and only getting worse. In that sense, the CTEA is indeed an attack on "the progress of science and the useful arts."
If the goal of copyright law is to get works created that would otherwise not be, then allowing the copyright to be transferred would indeed fulfill that purpose.
"Eh? But they're already dead!"
Imagine a situation where a person--say, Tom Clancy--has a terminal disease. If he devotes the last six healthy months that he has to writing it, he can finish his latest techno-spy-thriller, "Five Iguanas."
So the question on Mr. Clancy's mind is, "what's in it for me?" Under the current system, it might just be worth finishing "Five Iguanas" to pay for college for the kids and set up a trust fund for the wife, dog, and tropical fish. Under your system, the thing will be public domain before it ever hits the shelves. So he may as well spend the last few months of health on vacation in Tahiti.
Now, imagine Tom Clancy in a speed-o. Do you see why we don't dare change the current copyright system? Do you???
Also, if an author's works immediately went into the public domain after his/her death, it would be a marvelous incentive to assign away rights to a corporation in order to guarantee residuals "just in case." As an anti-corporate shill, I just don't see that as a good thing.
I believe you're incorrect. You can't have exclusive rights to the information itself, but you can have rights to your compilation of that information. For example, the phone company has a copyright on the White Pages, even though you could theoretically compile exactly the same information by going door to door and getting peoples' numbers.
IANAL, etc.
Idealism's on Ghandi's side. History is on mine.
But ask yourself this: Does this so-called "real life" have Surround Sound? Huh? Does it?
Oh.
Here's the timeline:
January 1 - Microsoft announces that they will open source Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 for the paltry sum of $50,000. Apparently, this is to make up for the money Bill Gates lost when he ran his wallet through the laundry.
February 12 - "The Freedows Project" (sounds like "Fritos") obtains the required $50,000 through generous donations by individuals and random muggings.
February 13 - Microsoft turns over the source code.
February 14 - The Freedows project sues Microsoft for violating the GPL by deliberately obscuring their code. Microsoft counters by explaining that, no, that's the code they really were using. They enter as evidence fifty pages of source code for IE 7.
March 22 - Freedows announces that they've overcome the first project hurdle: Separating out the integrated Solitare code from the rest of the OS.
March 25 - Freedows is forked, and a new project called XFreedows emerges.
March 27 - Freedows forks again after an SMP patch is rejected. The new project is called "Lindows."
March 28 - Lindows is sued by Lindows.
April 1 - Freedows announces that Freedows OS is now running on top of the Linux kernel. Nobody believes them.
April 2, 3, 4, and 5 - Freedows resends the press releases, publishes all sorts of screenshots and demos, bribes CmdrTaco to publish a, "No it wasn't an April Fools Joke" story. Freedows is slashdotted, detonating three servers and killing five. The project is set back a month.
May 15 - A seven day flame war erupts when someone on the Freedows mailing list suggests changing the UI to require "triple clicking" for some functions.
June 1 - XFreedows is integrated back into the Freedows main branch, adding native NVIDIA support, an OpenGL-based 3D GUI, 16-way SMP support, the XFAT file system (a relational database filesystem which supports file sizes up to 300 petabytes and transparent compression), full 32 bit, 64 bit, and 128 bit support, and DRM support that can be disabled with a couple of IFDEFs.
July 15 - IBM "donates" ten million dollars to the Freedows project in what can only be described as a corporate mugging.
August 5 - Solitare is re-integrated into the OS, improving performance 300-fold.
August 7 - Thanks to IBM's generous donation, Freedows can move its CVS server onto a ludicrously powerful server running the Freedows OS.
August 29th - 2:14 a.m. Freedows becomes self-aware.
I prefer "Generation 'Y not? Everyone else does.'"
I think it's actually a fitting moniker for our generation. Screw all this inner peace/sensitivity crap and pass me the remote!
You didn't get the memo?
After the whole 2.6/3.0 debate, Linus Torvalds, after a dream where he was visited by one of his bearded viking ancestors, told all the other kernel developers that renaming the kernel to match Red Hat's numbering system would "ensure the complete and utter domination of Linux in this century and the next."
Then he went off on a twenty minute diatribe about beasts, horns, seals, and trumpets. Which everyone thought was pretty funny. Seals playing the trumpet? That's the sort of imagery you usually get after a heavy investment in illegal substances.
Well done, Linus. Well done.
Further investigation dredged up this:
Does Lindows Comply With Open Source Agreements? and The Lindows License Agreement. The latter points out that the GPL allows the charging of a fee for the transfer of source code, but omits the fact that such a fee must cover only the actual cost of distributing said source code.
I still don't know what to make of it. I looked for info on the "evaluation version" I heard rumored, but all I can find are mentions of a general release sometime down the road.
If you browse through their Click-n-Run warehouse, you'll find source packages. For example:
kernel-source-lindows-2.4.19
Linux kernel source. 25.07MB
toolchain-source (Untested)
The GNU binutils and gcc source code 27.05MB
But even if I could find every package, I couldn't download them all without paying $99 for access to their "Click-n-Run" warehouse. Furthermore, their "evaluation version" should also count as a distribution. In short, my impression is that Lindows is not fulfilling the terms of the GPL. If I'm wrong, somebody step in and correct me.
The simplest solution, I think, would be to allow free access to those source packages.
You misunderstand. It sounds like the $5 price drop is supposed to come from the fact that they are (temporarily) barred from price-fixing, not from the $67M itself.
This is also important to remember when you're doing the $480M - $67M math. While they were allowed to keep $413M from their pricefixing scheme over the last five years, the real injury to them comes from the fact that they won't be able to make the $480M again over the next five years.
Of course, with $480M on the line, I'm sure they'll pay some lawyer to find a loophole in the settlement. Heh heh. Shoot the lawyer twice. I love it.
Addendum: I recently got into a rather silly flame war with an AOL user who couldn't find her caps lock key. She threatened to sue if I republished our conversation on the Web.
So I looked into this issue, and it's basically as you say*. But there are a couple of points you didn't mention. First, while you don't have a right to redistribute their creative works, you are allowed to use it in a "fair use" context, and they have no expectation that their message remain private. That is, you can quote the most relevant portions, and explain the whole situation in your own words.
Also, in the case of works with no real commercial value (most e-mail qualifies), you can be successfully sued, but it's very unlikely that you can be sued for monetary damages. The best they can do is force you to take the correspondence down. If your responses were libelous, it's a different story.
Having said that, I side with the posters who say that, in the case of the clueless CEO, the best plan is to back away slowly, document everything, and don't do anything to provoke him. And talk to a lawyer if it makes you feel more secure.
* IANAL, so CYA.
I couldn't agree more. You're just not being bold enough.
I have one word for you. Exponents.
Why is this a novel technology? Sure, it's never been done by the music industry, but the commercial software folks have been providing "registration keys" for decades now.
This just doesn't strike me as something that should be patentable. Of course, that seldom impedes the patent process.
Bon Jovi rocks! Peace, out.
There are problems with this line of reasoning. Copyright law isn't a codification of some obvious "natural right" to have control of your creative works after your death. In fact, it's a rather arbitrary set of laws that was put in place to protect creators from the worst effects of the cheapness of copying information.
Copyright law is vital, because it provides a great deal of incentive to creators, allowing them to profit from their work. But the purpose isn't to ensure creative people a livelihood, but to ensure that the marketplace of ideas is continually being resupplied and enriched.
Public domain is also a vital part of the equation. I believe that all ideas ultimately belong in the public domain, and the only argument is over what sort of delay is most effective in cultivating new ideas. The reason for this is simple: No person, no matter how creative, has ever given more to the marketplace of ideas than he or she received from it. Every work, no matter how original or unique, was inspired or influenced by ideas that did not belong to the author of the work.
For any person or group of people to say that it's right for them to have sole ownership of their own ideas until the sun goes nova is simply unethical. They're benefitting from the seething collection of memes that makes up our culture, while minimizing their own contribution to that culture.
Disney's willingness to use public domain works like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and the Grimm Brothers' stories, and then lock up the resulting ideas for what increasingly looks to be an unlimited time, is just one of the more obviously hypocritical examples of copyright run amok. Another example would be a play called, "The Wind Done Gone," which was a satire of "Gone With the Wind" as told by Scarlett's black slaves. The estate successfully sued because they'd taken the time to fill out the copyright renewal form every twenty-five years. In other words, an idea was never allowed into the marketplace of ideas, in order to protect the revenue stream to the great grandchildren of a creative person.
Ideas aren't physical property, and to imply--as you seem to be doing--that a creator like Robert Frost has a clear right to his or her ideas for as long as he has living descendants is simply untenable. If we treat ideas as physical property, we will end up in a world where you cannot create anything of significance without paying royalties to thousands of people who were fortunate enough to have a creative ancestor.
Do creators deserve to benefit from their work? Certainly. But for their entire lives, and at the expense of the health of our overall culture? No. Creators can certainly recoup their investment within 20 or 30 years, if their ideas have any value at all. I find it ludicrous that anyone at all is actually motivated by the idea of receiving royalty checks hundreds of years after his or her death, and I find it even more ludicrous that this additional motivation provides more benefit to society than the release of these works to the public domain.
Simple. Port Wine to Windows.
Problem solved.
The downside is that people might look at the difference in the pricetags, and think, "Hmm. . . I must be getting SOMETHING for that extra cash. Windows must be better." Then they'll buy the cheaper system anyways, because hey, this is Wal-Mart.
:)
If Linux can benefit from the spreading of the mega-corporate cheap-crap lovefest, more power to it.
I think -- and don't quote me on this -- is that, as the lawsuit progressed, Lindows realized that the less it touted the "Windowsiness" of its operating system, the less of a case Microsoft had.
Just my theory. I didn't follow the case very closely. I'm not even sure who won.
* s/rattlesnack/small\ fluffy\ bunny/
The Linux OS does not constitute a social movement. Linux users do not constitute a social movement. But Linux kernel hackers do, and they're part of a larger social movement that they've created: people who have a wholehearted and irrational love for their operating system of choice.
Just because you code for Unix doesn't make you part of this movement. But if you find yourself browsing ThinkGeek and thinking that it would be prudent to buy five hundred plush Tux toys for all your friends and family, you just might be. Double points for setting them up so that they stare at a poster of Bill Gates a la Alfred Hitchcock.
I have a totally different opinion on this. I don't want the mouse buttons in Mozilla to do precisely what they do in IE. I want the middle-click button to open the link in a new tab. Don't take that away from me just so you can have that ugly little arrow button for scrolling, because the mouse wheel is right there!
:)
Let's not blindly follow IE's lead on the interface, because as imperfect as Mozilla's UI is, IE is no bed of roses either. It's just what people "are used to." My advice would be to copy the relative handful of shortcut keys that are used by the vast majority of people, and then choose what makes sense for the rest.
Example: IE's use of the mouse wheel doesn't make much sense. In Mozilla, if you're focused on a form, then the mouse wheel will scroll around on that form. In IE 6 (which I'm writing on right now), the mouse wheel just scrolls the entire page. Since my hand is already on the mouse, and it's easy to click elsewhere on the page to move the focus, why not add that functionality? In this case, Mozilla's handling seems like an obvious improvement.
Also, IIRC, Mozilla will allow you to scroll around on a page, even if there's a dialog box up in front of you. IE doesn't.
In conclusion, "IE does it" == "People are used to it" != "Good idea". The goal should be to make the best browser possible, not the most IE-like browser possible. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going over to Bugzilla to complain about the lack of Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab for switching between tabs.
Sigh. . . I really don't see what the original poster's beef is with the Mozilla interface. I like it. But every time someone complains that it doesn't act like IE, some other clueless individual responds by posting the IE theme.
People, "look" is only half of "look and feel." The IE theme is worse than nothing. Besides making the UI a good deal uglier (thanks, Microsoft), it leads people to assume that everything will act like IE does. But keyboard shortcuts, bookmarking, getting to the history, changing Internet options, and everything else remains exactly the same.
I don't think Mozilla should blindly follow IE's lead as far as the UI goes. And I use Mozilla enough that I find the differences to be features, not annoying inconsistencies. But the IE theme, whatever its merits, doesn't solve what people seem to think it solves. So stop it.
Complex, adaptive systems evolve. Whatever the original intentions of any large organization, whether corporate, religious, technical, or humanitarian, one of two fates awaits it. Either it will morph into something whose primary purpose is to ensure its own continued survival, or it will eventually fail because other systems are better suited to the niche it inhabits.
Okay, you may or may not think that "corporations as organisms" makes for a good analogy. But I'm not offering it up as an analogy. I'm suggesting that the organic ecosystem that is usually the focus of evolutionary study is just a special case of interaction between complex adaptive systems. The competition between human organizations is another.
Take Microsoft. We love talking about Microsoft around here, so why not? It's constantly looking for new markets to extend into, to ensure its continued income stream. And it's always looking to engulf small upstart companies with cool technology, which eliminates competition while feeding the organization. It uses all sorts of tricks to make the ecosystem it inhabits hard on competitors. These are just things that successful corporations do, and the similarity to the behavior of organisms is uncanny.
The major difference I see is that organizations have people, rather than genes, as their individual units. So the nature of an organization is more malleable. Also, it makes a wider variety of forms of reproduction possible (people leave the company for their own startup, mergers and breakups, etc).
That's why my political ideas have slowly been leaning more and more towards a semi-anarchistic system. I just don't trust any of these complex, adaptive systems to value my best interests, so it's best not to give them too much power.