So if this is the case, why don't they sue PC World or the local PC dealer for distributing the machines with Intel processors?
That's simply because the money isn't in it. Look at the article, they expected to pay $11 million in legal fees. As you don't have a 'loser pays' system (I know there are exceptions) you'll have to sue someone that can pay you enough in damages to make it worth your while.
So, the moral is; if you're doing open/free source development. Make sure you are poor, shouldn't be too hard:-), or have the backing of someone with a lot of patents themselves (IBM). Note however that IBM cannot scare away the 'IP only' companies that have sprung up in the past ten years or so. As they don't have anything to lose (they have no production of their own) they don't have competitors, and hence cannot be scared off by their patents.
Another patent article that goes to show you that patents are weapons in the corporate portfolio in this day and age.
Yes, I've written many posts here that drives home the point that patents today are there to exclude the small players from the market. The big guys have enough patents to achieve patent 'MAD - mutual assured destruction'. Obviously that didn't quite work here, which is a bit surprising. The problem is probably that intergraph doesn't actually do much, and hence cannot be scared away by a HP's patent portfolio.
Did HP have anything to do with the design of the cache in the Pentium? If not, why are they paying anything? Surely it's up to Intel to pay royalties on patents they breached, not their customers. I particularly can't see any way Gateway could have been liable for this.
That's not how patents work I'm afraid. In the words of the USPTO:
The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.
So storing every license holders information and license key is free to MS is it? I would have though given the numbers involved that would be a very expensive setup myself....
That may be, but that's not the issue. Microsoft already does this, so the cost is already borne by your purchase. That's not to say that they necessarily must give you a new one free of charge, and therefore I allowed for a reasonable fee for the new key.
Hell, the transaction cost could conceivably be written off as providing added incentive for people to register. Having the customer information in their database would probably be worth more to MS than the cost of having to provide you with an extra key.
I think that the only reason they're not already doing this is that they're not used to selling to end users. MS was founded on selling to corporations, and they don't have this problem as they have a site (or other) license with a single key.
And if you lot lost your passport you'd go to the border and argue you still have the right to travel would you?
But I still do. I just may not have the means to prove that I do. That's not to say that I understand your argument. If I lose my passport, the embassy is happy to give me a new one for a small fee to cover the cost of production of the passport. They don't make me be reborn so that I get a new birth certificate.You can't analyse this situation with classical economics as it's a political system, not an economic one. Passports can't be bought and sold (at least not on the open market).
P.S. And I'm in the EU, so yes, even if I did lose my passport I'd go to the border as they'd more often than not just let me through, provided I showed them my driver's license.
Maybe My entire family are geeks, but my mother's new laptop runs Fedora Core 3, as do I and my 6 and 8 year old children.
In the best traditions of one-upmanship: My two year old son runs RedHat 6.2 on his own laptop. Granted he hasn't learned how to log in yet, but that doesn't seem to lessen his enjoyment any. If that's not 'ready for the non technical user' I don't know what is.:-)
That does not make sense to me. If I buy a mobile phone, and somehow lose it, I cannot go to the reseller and claim a new phone simply because I "already own it". If I lose it, then it's lost and I will have to buy a new one.
If cell phones were almost zero marginal cost (the business model instead being charging me for calls) you're damn right I would expect to get a new one, perhaps for a small nominal handling fee. However, unlike Windows, cell phones aren't zero marginal cost, so that won't happen.
And note that software isn't the only thing that can be close to zero marginal cost. Here in Sweden we have a long tradition (though it's changing due to the EU) of strict alcolhol legislation with a monopoly by state owned outlets. To keep demand down, price is held artificially high by adding a substantial tax. Taking this into account, if you were clumpsy enough to break a bottle within a short period of time walking home from the store, they'd give you a new one, on the principle that all you have paid were taxes anyway, the bottle and contents didn't actually cost much. Alcoholics started to abuse this system by breaking the bottles in a bucket outside the store and taking the soggy plastic bag in again for a free exchange, so it was tightened, they now have to actually see you break the bottle (on the premises is fine). If they do, you get a new one, free of charge, as it doesn't really cost them anything.
Going along with that and the "linux helps developing nations develop" cries, by that logic we should also include and factor in the contributions of Windows based products, both legit and illegal copies.
I'd actually only include the illicit copies. And that's incidentally always been my problem with the "But Linux is free (as in beer) which helps the poorer nations". Guess what, so is every other major software, as they simply don't pay for it. A copied version of Windows costs just as much as downloaded version of Linux, so no change there. Which is incidentally why I'm against copyright infringement. If only Bill would actually start to enforce the Windows copy right world wide. Alas he's much to clever to do that. Welcome to an economy with almost zero margin cost.
By having Windows, Word,and Excel, they are able compete with and work with those companies in more developed countries. Plus they have the advantage of working with common software, and don't have the hassle of incompatibilities.
I'm not sure that's much of a factor in the situation we're discussing here, i.e. the rural (subsistance farming) areas where lack of vaccination is a problem. These people typically have very spotty electricity, if at all, so competing with anyone on anything remotely 'industrial' is in general not on. Having Word or not is not the problem.
No, my argument is basically the broken window fallacy. The money you paid for software (some of which now pays for vaccinations) could have been paying for vaccinations directly and if you used Linux you'd still have the software as well, so arguably, more money could have paid for vaccinations. If the people actually in need of the vaccinations copies windows or Linux doesn't really factor much into it, as they don't have the money to pay for vaccinations in the first place. (Especially if they had to pay for Windows).
It should of course be noted that this doesn't have anything to do with the generosity of Bill Gates or not. This is solely an argument as to whether the Free source movement actually contributes anything to the economy. So far we're clearly ahead.
1) The assumption that *a* linux CD is worth the cost of all its development
No, that's not it. The total value of all donated software can be calculated from each CD, by estimating the work that went into it. It's not the cost of each CD. We're operating at near zero marginal cost, remember?
Look, I know what for example HP-UP cost, and how much certain upgrades to it would have cost (unfortunately I'm not allowed to tell you). The figures mentioned here aren't all that off from that data point and other data points I have from my other job. This leads me to belive that we're not that far off from a true value. I don't think that these figures are cases of "We've intercepted narcotics worth x million on the street" or "Copyright infringement are costing us y billon per year." And it's not that difficult to track the work in the sense that we don't care, we're saying that if we had to produce this software commercially it would cost about this many hours (at about this average hourly rate).
But if you have any better breakdown of hours etc, I'd love to see it.
SEE? Linux DOES make you stupid. Tell me how that translates into real available medical aid?
That's relatively easy. Bill Gates doesn't actually print money. He makes it selling software to people. If he choses to give some of that away to people doing medical work (note that Bill Gates himself won't vaccinate a single person) it isn't his money, but money that came from society. If said society could get said software without spending money on it, that money could be spent elsewhere, on medical aid for example. The case if of course trivial in the instance where a hospital or aid organisation uses Linux instead of an OS that cost money. If you want a direct link between medical aid and the flow of money in society, it's taxation you're after, not Bill Gates.
You'll want to read up on the "broken window fallacy" (try Wikipedia) as it's related.
See, that wasn't so hard. Even you should be able to understand it.
References? I would LOVE to see how someone hacked up that number.
There's Eric Greens among others. In any case I take it you're questioning that anybody could come up with a number? Myself I don't see how not. We know how much time it takes to write certain types of software (more or less) and as time equals money, you'd easily arrive within an order of magnitude at least. In my day job as a requirements bureacrat I do this sort of thing all the time. Every major corporation does.
Let's see the Linux community match that generosity
Sure we can. There is an estimate that the cost of the software on a typical Linux distribution disk is $4 billion (i.e. 4x10^9). Which we're giving away for free (as in gratis) in most cases.
I mean, the Germans during the holocaust had no idea what they were doing was terrible.
What? Even the most hard core Nazis didn't even think that. Why do you think that the strictest secrecy was deemed necessary when it came to the operation of the death camps? Because they were a horrible, gruesome affair, that's why. To go on, mass murder by machine gunning naked civilians (as in Babi Yar) was deemed unsuitable, not because of a lack of efficiency, but because the high command was affraid that the psychological toll on the troops would ultimately be too high. A more humane method (to the troops carrying out the murders) was adopted in the form of gassings. Why do you think that camps that were closed (such as Treblinka) long before the risk of being overrun were obliterated, as if nothing had ever happened there? Hardly the work of someone who thinks he's done nothing wrong. If you have nothing to hide hy not just leave it there? No, they clearly knew they were up to no good. They rationalised this with it being a necessary evil and in the cause of a greater good, but that it was fundamentally wrong wasn't lost on the vast, vast majority of the people doing the dirty work.
No, the guilt of the contemporary german population who in their own words "Didn't know" was not in the fact that they didn't know. Hitler and Himmler made it damn difficult to know. It was in the fact that they didn't question.
Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization?
Amen and not me. I mean, I even went back to finish my PhD because I thought that I'd develop personally from it (not because it would make me more money, over the course of my career it's a net loss). Hence I (and every damn geek I know) are firmly in the 'craftsman' category.
Corporations OTOH is in the business of making money, not making cars, or software or whatever. (They're even required by law to be in this business; increase share holder value or else). When the inefficiencies of corporations have diminished (as a result of competition) then paradoxically, there's less of a place for people in those corporations that are in any other business than making money. I note that very few people are in that business. People instead seem to insist to cling on to old fashioned ideas and outmoded values such as behaving morally (instead of lawfully), programming computers (instead of maximising profit or minimising cost), increasing their skills for self satisfaction (instead of doing a cost benefit analysis) etc. etc.
I think you point to an interesting dilemma in that of course a thousand man corporation can't just be expected to go belly up and die just because one guy walks home and takes the blue prints with him. For no other reason than that that isn't exactly fair to the other 999 guys (or gals) working there. On the other hand, in order to address this the pressure today is 100% on making everybody completely replacable, that's how economy works, instead of finding a balance between the needs of the one and the needs of the many.
With the world (through globalisation) becoming ever more efficient, the pace increasing and the people in it not changing much, it'll be interesting where and how it all will end. It's clear that it cannot just continue on the road it's on now, we'll hit the end sooner or later, we can't all end up worker bees with one (or three) queen(s) on top. Can we?
You're welcome.:-). What I meant to stress was that while all you say is true, I think most of those of us that use the GPL think that that's OK. I certainly don't mind people just using my work without contributing back. (Maybe they're not programmers and cannot contribute). I mean, it would certainly be nice if they did, but I can live with them slacking off. I mean, I don't contribute to Firefox or Emacs and I use both each day.
I do contribute by releasing all my other software as GPL on the off chance that someone would want it.
However, if people started to use my work in the sense of building on it and then taking the whole of the work for themselves, that would piss me off. I contributed it with no such strings attached and I damn well expect that others will do the same to me. That's why you won't see any BSD or similar code from me, or the company I work for (as they then could see a competitor climbing up to an advantageous situation on their backs).
Now, if rich corporations find some software extremely useful, it would of course be in their best interest to support it. So I think that that case can take care of itself.
Frankly, there are a number of businesses who really rely on this software and refuse to believe that they owe anything in return - money or code.
And hence the GPL as then you're not getting it for 'free'. The code you put into our project, you owe us back in return. So that we and others may remain free (as in libre).
Is it ok to notify the community about how the leader feels and where he's headed from a medical perspective? Yes. But, is the official changelog of the distribution the right place to do it? Would such a thing be done in a commercial product?
I don't see why not. If people don't like it, they can, as you say, fork.
However, your question of whether that would be done in a commercial product needs a more serious answer.
In a word, 'no', you would not expect to see that in a commercial product (at least not typically, see below). The reason is that commercial products are produced by organisations that like to project (the falsehood) that they have transcended the inviduals working for them. I.e. we the organisation will support and stand by, this product, even if all the 'worker bees' that actually build it and know it would all go and croak tomorrow. As anyone who has ever been involved in professional software development can attest, that's simply and emphatically not true. If only a few key personel leaves a product development team then pandemonium (and frequently hillarity) ensues as the organisation reels from the shock and grief and desperately tries to find it's balance again.
As the customers of said (large) organisation already have a feeling this is true, they must always be kept as completely in the dark as possible about the individuals in the organisation actually doing the work (and their well being). If it were otherwise, the customers suspicions would be confirmed within a week and they'll all run away rather than walk.
This is why we've had the 'quality' revolution in the past decade or so. Corporations hate to be in the hands of the worker bees, since said worker bees then can (and will) demand more of a share. Hence every large corporation (or organisation, think the military that practice for a scenario where a large percentage of the worker bees/and even a few queens/ can be killed at any instant) must 'commoditize' the work done for them, making the workers as replacable as possible, so that they can be replaced. Not even cogs in the machinery, because the typical machine will stop with a cog missing, but rather less than cogs.
That's why you see CMM and the like. To make workers less of craftsmen (i.e improving their skils, taking pride in their work etc, as craftsmen have a tendency to make themselves irreplacable) and more like worker bees. Instantly replacable.
This has gone on for quite some time in 'ordinary' industry, started with Henry Ford in fact, and the transformation in the production industry is now almost complete. Less so when it comes to the design side of things as the corporations still need design skil. They're trying as hard as they can though, hence the call for process improvements.
In open source we don't have to try and fool our customers as we aren't dependent on them. Hence we don't have to keep up the pretense that the project isn't in the hands of a few skilled people. Some smaller companies with heroes can operate the same way (as going with them is the long shot anyway, their customers aren't as easily scared). I remember when Dan Hildebrand (the chief architect of QNX) died from cancer. The company put his obituary on the front page and had it there for quite some time. Now, of course, in that business everyone already knew that he'd died, so trying to pretend that it hadn't happened wouldn't have worked anyway.
So, the fact that we all know that Linus is the boss of Linux and that the project will flounder without him if e.g. he were to step in front of a bus (at least for quite some time) is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. We have smarter 'customers' who can handle the truth. "You wan't the truth, you can't handle the truth!"
The thing that stood out to me in the article was how billie seems to think people have no other incentive in innovating than profit. True innovators innovate for the challenge and because that's just what they LIKE doing. Profiting from it is just a side effect.
Yes, being a few weeks away from my PhD (knock on wood) I'm reminded of the graphs of how university grades correlate with income. It's a rising curve up till just under the top when there's a sharp (or at least distinct) drop. Why? Because the people with the very highest grades can get admitted to graduate school and have a career in research instead of industry. All the while knowing they'll earn less money. Many of these people choose to.
Myself, I cut my salary by about a third going back to finish my PhD. Under Bill's model, that couldn't be done, while in actual fact it's not all that uncommon. I want to be able to do what I want to do, and make as much as I can doing it, obviously, but not to the deteriment of enjoying doing it. (And, no, I wont ever make back the money lost.)
There's a lot more to life than money and there's a lot of smart people out there who don't make as much money as they can because of choice.
I remember my freshman year at university, cramming for a linear algebra exam, being surprised at a sign in a shop saying "Matrix 3.99" (in Swedish 'Matris'). Why on earth would they sell matrices? And wasn't that on the expensive side? It took me a long while to realise that what the sign actually said was "Rice" ('Mat ris' in Swedish).
Several friends reported the same experience, aparently a rite of passage for the budding student. So it's not just games. Maths can also do it to you.:-)
I'm talking about a cultural taboo against communism which continues in western cultures today.
Should be: continues in the USA today. For better of worse, in most of the the rest of the 'west' i.e. Europe, there are still a lot of people that refer to themselves by that label, and while that doesn't go down well in all (most?) circles, and is a frequent point of actual honest-to-God debate, the word taboo is much too strong.
I've no problem with your main point though, and very much like your analogy with the bake sale (even though it's interesting to note that that wouldn't work in most places in Europe either). Bill is trying to blow smoke up your collective arses. It's interesting to note that it won't work as part of his European campagin. And that if this is the sort of rethoric he has to resort to, he must be scared.
Yes, I remember reading about it in comp.risks. Apparently it got confused when an even week followed an odd week when it thought that an even week should have followed. This reference have more info than one probably wanted to know about week numbering.
Also it should be remembered that there was a second problem in 2000, because of the 29th april (in 2000 there was no april 29th despite it's devidable by 4, because its also devidable by 100, or something alike).
What?:-) Look, there's always an April 29th, the leap day being added always to February. And the year 2000 was a leap year, though many thought it so for the wrong reason. The rule is: if year is evenly divisible by 4 if not divisible by 100 unless divisible by 400. Which makes year 2000 a very special leap year as it is indeed divisible by 400.
Re:Cool idea but may be dangerous
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Bayesian Tail
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· Score: 2, Informative
Why not use it to colorize, Or to rebuild the logs in HTML.
I published a paper, with GPL source code (you need Python etc) a few months back using visualisation (colorisation) to lend the user insight into the operation of a Bayesian classifier.
It actually works pretty well, and the idea could be applied to other uses of the Naive Bayesian classifier.
But with the DMCA, if you use any "digital means" to perform the copyright infringement, it's automatically a criminal offense. Either way, it's still illegal to copy something in its entirety that you don't already own.
OK, I guess I've just focused on the "circumvention device" part of the DMCA. In either case I must say that making copying a CD from a friend (or making a cassette of an LP in the days of yore) a crime is just stupid. That's the sort of law that just makes everybody a criminal and hence leads to a dilution of the idea of what a law is.
And regarding books, yes, it's been a few years since I copied a whole book. Though there is still the odd copy of the out-of-print one in my bookshelf. Thinking about the DMCA I do remember that Xerox was sued in the UK way back when (there must have been something similar in the US?) for encouraging copyright infringement (much like the Betamax case in the US). Luckily it didn't fly.:-)
In any case I think we can agree that with the law so diverse in different places that's not support for the idea of calling copyright infrigement theft in any case. If you walked into a library in Sweden as well as the US and left with a book (without checking it out, nor the intention of returning it) that would indeed be theft in both countries. But if you used the digital photocopier in the US library to make a copy that would be a against the law there, but not here.
Since when? Last time I tried to copy pages out a a book at a library, there were signs saying that there was something around a 15 page limit per-book.
Interesting, I didn't know that was the law is the US. It's not in many other parts of the world e.g. in Sweden. As long as you're the one doing the copying for your own use, then you can copy away to your hearts content. (It has to be you though, can't have your secretary do it for you.) EU changed that in the case of software, but for printed matter it's still in effect.
This stems from the French copy right tradition, which was always more about the moral rights of the author, than the Anglo-saxon one, which was always about who got to make the buck (or guinea as it were). There is little difference in today in actual law between the two, but there are still some it seems.
Oh, and btw, copying a CD from a friend is also fully legal. Same caveats as above applies. Even downloading files of the internet is still legal, but the law has changed on that, though it's not in effect yet.
Slashdot Mirror
That's simply because the money isn't in it. Look at the article, they expected to pay $11 million in legal fees. As you don't have a 'loser pays' system (I know there are exceptions) you'll have to sue someone that can pay you enough in damages to make it worth your while.
So, the moral is; if you're doing open/free source development. Make sure you are poor, shouldn't be too hard :-), or have the backing of someone with a lot of patents themselves (IBM). Note however that IBM cannot scare away the 'IP only' companies that have sprung up in the past ten years or so. As they don't have anything to lose (they have no production of their own) they don't have competitors, and hence cannot be scared off by their patents.
Yes, I've written many posts here that drives home the point that patents today are there to exclude the small players from the market. The big guys have enough patents to achieve patent 'MAD - mutual assured destruction'. Obviously that didn't quite work here, which is a bit surprising. The problem is probably that intergraph doesn't actually do much, and hence cannot be scared away by a HP's patent portfolio.
That's not how patents work I'm afraid. In the words of the USPTO:
Note the word use in the text above.
That may be, but that's not the issue. Microsoft already does this, so the cost is already borne by your purchase. That's not to say that they necessarily must give you a new one free of charge, and therefore I allowed for a reasonable fee for the new key.
Hell, the transaction cost could conceivably be written off as providing added incentive for people to register. Having the customer information in their database would probably be worth more to MS than the cost of having to provide you with an extra key.
I think that the only reason they're not already doing this is that they're not used to selling to end users. MS was founded on selling to corporations, and they don't have this problem as they have a site (or other) license with a single key.
But I still do. I just may not have the means to prove that I do. That's not to say that I understand your argument. If I lose my passport, the embassy is happy to give me a new one for a small fee to cover the cost of production of the passport. They don't make me be reborn so that I get a new birth certificate.You can't analyse this situation with classical economics as it's a political system, not an economic one. Passports can't be bought and sold (at least not on the open market).
P.S. And I'm in the EU, so yes, even if I did lose my passport I'd go to the border as they'd more often than not just let me through, provided I showed them my driver's license.
Very well, but did it provide him/her with hours of enjoyment? Surely that's the metric we're after.
In the best traditions of one-upmanship: My two year old son runs RedHat 6.2 on his own laptop. Granted he hasn't learned how to log in yet, but that doesn't seem to lessen his enjoyment any. If that's not 'ready for the non technical user' I don't know what is. :-)
If cell phones were almost zero marginal cost (the business model instead being charging me for calls) you're damn right I would expect to get a new one, perhaps for a small nominal handling fee. However, unlike Windows, cell phones aren't zero marginal cost, so that won't happen.
And note that software isn't the only thing that can be close to zero marginal cost. Here in Sweden we have a long tradition (though it's changing due to the EU) of strict alcolhol legislation with a monopoly by state owned outlets. To keep demand down, price is held artificially high by adding a substantial tax. Taking this into account, if you were clumpsy enough to break a bottle within a short period of time walking home from the store, they'd give you a new one, on the principle that all you have paid were taxes anyway, the bottle and contents didn't actually cost much. Alcoholics started to abuse this system by breaking the bottles in a bucket outside the store and taking the soggy plastic bag in again for a free exchange, so it was tightened, they now have to actually see you break the bottle (on the premises is fine). If they do, you get a new one, free of charge, as it doesn't really cost them anything.
I'd actually only include the illicit copies. And that's incidentally always been my problem with the "But Linux is free (as in beer) which helps the poorer nations". Guess what, so is every other major software, as they simply don't pay for it. A copied version of Windows costs just as much as downloaded version of Linux, so no change there. Which is incidentally why I'm against copyright infringement. If only Bill would actually start to enforce the Windows copy right world wide. Alas he's much to clever to do that. Welcome to an economy with almost zero margin cost.
I'm not sure that's much of a factor in the situation we're discussing here, i.e. the rural (subsistance farming) areas where lack of vaccination is a problem. These people typically have very spotty electricity, if at all, so competing with anyone on anything remotely 'industrial' is in general not on. Having Word or not is not the problem.
No, my argument is basically the broken window fallacy. The money you paid for software (some of which now pays for vaccinations) could have been paying for vaccinations directly and if you used Linux you'd still have the software as well, so arguably, more money could have paid for vaccinations. If the people actually in need of the vaccinations copies windows or Linux doesn't really factor much into it, as they don't have the money to pay for vaccinations in the first place. (Especially if they had to pay for Windows).
It should of course be noted that this doesn't have anything to do with the generosity of Bill Gates or not. This is solely an argument as to whether the Free source movement actually contributes anything to the economy. So far we're clearly ahead.
No, that's not it. The total value of all donated software can be calculated from each CD, by estimating the work that went into it. It's not the cost of each CD. We're operating at near zero marginal cost, remember?
Look, I know what for example HP-UP cost, and how much certain upgrades to it would have cost (unfortunately I'm not allowed to tell you). The figures mentioned here aren't all that off from that data point and other data points I have from my other job. This leads me to belive that we're not that far off from a true value. I don't think that these figures are cases of "We've intercepted narcotics worth x million on the street" or "Copyright infringement are costing us y billon per year." And it's not that difficult to track the work in the sense that we don't care, we're saying that if we had to produce this software commercially it would cost about this many hours (at about this average hourly rate).
But if you have any better breakdown of hours etc, I'd love to see it.
That's relatively easy. Bill Gates doesn't actually print money. He makes it selling software to people. If he choses to give some of that away to people doing medical work (note that Bill Gates himself won't vaccinate a single person) it isn't his money, but money that came from society. If said society could get said software without spending money on it, that money could be spent elsewhere, on medical aid for example. The case if of course trivial in the instance where a hospital or aid organisation uses Linux instead of an OS that cost money. If you want a direct link between medical aid and the flow of money in society, it's taxation you're after, not Bill Gates.
You'll want to read up on the "broken window fallacy" (try Wikipedia) as it's related.
See, that wasn't so hard. Even you should be able to understand it.
There's Eric Greens among others. In any case I take it you're questioning that anybody could come up with a number? Myself I don't see how not. We know how much time it takes to write certain types of software (more or less) and as time equals money, you'd easily arrive within an order of magnitude at least. In my day job as a requirements bureacrat I do this sort of thing all the time. Every major corporation does.
Sure we can. There is an estimate that the cost of the software on a typical Linux distribution disk is $4 billion (i.e. 4x10^9). Which we're giving away for free (as in gratis) in most cases.
If that's not generous, I don't know what is.
What? Even the most hard core Nazis didn't even think that. Why do you think that the strictest secrecy was deemed necessary when it came to the operation of the death camps? Because they were a horrible, gruesome affair, that's why. To go on, mass murder by machine gunning naked civilians (as in Babi Yar) was deemed unsuitable, not because of a lack of efficiency, but because the high command was affraid that the psychological toll on the troops would ultimately be too high. A more humane method (to the troops carrying out the murders) was adopted in the form of gassings. Why do you think that camps that were closed (such as Treblinka) long before the risk of being overrun were obliterated, as if nothing had ever happened there? Hardly the work of someone who thinks he's done nothing wrong. If you have nothing to hide hy not just leave it there? No, they clearly knew they were up to no good. They rationalised this with it being a necessary evil and in the cause of a greater good, but that it was fundamentally wrong wasn't lost on the vast, vast majority of the people doing the dirty work.
No, the guilt of the contemporary german population who in their own words "Didn't know" was not in the fact that they didn't know. Hitler and Himmler made it damn difficult to know. It was in the fact that they didn't question.
Amen and not me. I mean, I even went back to finish my PhD because I thought that I'd develop personally from it (not because it would make me more money, over the course of my career it's a net loss). Hence I (and every damn geek I know) are firmly in the 'craftsman' category.
Corporations OTOH is in the business of making money, not making cars, or software or whatever. (They're even required by law to be in this business; increase share holder value or else). When the inefficiencies of corporations have diminished (as a result of competition) then paradoxically, there's less of a place for people in those corporations that are in any other business than making money. I note that very few people are in that business. People instead seem to insist to cling on to old fashioned ideas and outmoded values such as behaving morally (instead of lawfully), programming computers (instead of maximising profit or minimising cost), increasing their skills for self satisfaction (instead of doing a cost benefit analysis) etc. etc.
I think you point to an interesting dilemma in that of course a thousand man corporation can't just be expected to go belly up and die just because one guy walks home and takes the blue prints with him. For no other reason than that that isn't exactly fair to the other 999 guys (or gals) working there. On the other hand, in order to address this the pressure today is 100% on making everybody completely replacable, that's how economy works, instead of finding a balance between the needs of the one and the needs of the many.
With the world (through globalisation) becoming ever more efficient, the pace increasing and the people in it not changing much, it'll be interesting where and how it all will end. It's clear that it cannot just continue on the road it's on now, we'll hit the end sooner or later, we can't all end up worker bees with one (or three) queen(s) on top. Can we?
You're welcome. :-). What I meant to stress was that while all you say is true, I think most of those of us that use the GPL think that that's OK. I certainly don't mind people just using my work without contributing back. (Maybe they're not programmers and cannot contribute). I mean, it would certainly be nice if they did, but I can live with them slacking off. I mean, I don't contribute to Firefox or Emacs and I use both each day.
I do contribute by releasing all my other software as GPL on the off chance that someone would want it.
However, if people started to use my work in the sense of building on it and then taking the whole of the work for themselves, that would piss me off. I contributed it with no such strings attached and I damn well expect that others will do the same to me. That's why you won't see any BSD or similar code from me, or the company I work for (as they then could see a competitor climbing up to an advantageous situation on their backs).
Now, if rich corporations find some software extremely useful, it would of course be in their best interest to support it. So I think that that case can take care of itself.
Works for me.
And hence the GPL as then you're not getting it for 'free'. The code you put into our project, you owe us back in return. So that we and others may remain free (as in libre).
I don't see why not. If people don't like it, they can, as you say, fork.
However, your question of whether that would be done in a commercial product needs a more serious answer.
In a word, 'no', you would not expect to see that in a commercial product (at least not typically, see below). The reason is that commercial products are produced by organisations that like to project (the falsehood) that they have transcended the inviduals working for them. I.e. we the organisation will support and stand by, this product, even if all the 'worker bees' that actually build it and know it would all go and croak tomorrow. As anyone who has ever been involved in professional software development can attest, that's simply and emphatically not true. If only a few key personel leaves a product development team then pandemonium (and frequently hillarity) ensues as the organisation reels from the shock and grief and desperately tries to find it's balance again.
As the customers of said (large) organisation already have a feeling this is true, they must always be kept as completely in the dark as possible about the individuals in the organisation actually doing the work (and their well being). If it were otherwise, the customers suspicions would be confirmed within a week and they'll all run away rather than walk.
This is why we've had the 'quality' revolution in the past decade or so. Corporations hate to be in the hands of the worker bees, since said worker bees then can (and will) demand more of a share. Hence every large corporation (or organisation, think the military that practice for a scenario where a large percentage of the worker bees /and even a few queens/ can be killed at any instant) must 'commoditize' the work done for them, making the workers as replacable as possible, so that they can be replaced. Not even cogs in the machinery, because the typical machine will stop with a cog missing, but rather less than cogs.
That's why you see CMM and the like. To make workers less of craftsmen (i.e improving their skils, taking pride in their work etc, as craftsmen have a tendency to make themselves irreplacable) and more like worker bees. Instantly replacable.
This has gone on for quite some time in 'ordinary' industry, started with Henry Ford in fact, and the transformation in the production industry is now almost complete. Less so when it comes to the design side of things as the corporations still need design skil. They're trying as hard as they can though, hence the call for process improvements.
In open source we don't have to try and fool our customers as we aren't dependent on them. Hence we don't have to keep up the pretense that the project isn't in the hands of a few skilled people. Some smaller companies with heroes can operate the same way (as going with them is the long shot anyway, their customers aren't as easily scared). I remember when Dan Hildebrand (the chief architect of QNX) died from cancer. The company put his obituary on the front page and had it there for quite some time. Now, of course, in that business everyone already knew that he'd died, so trying to pretend that it hadn't happened wouldn't have worked anyway.
So, the fact that we all know that Linus is the boss of Linux and that the project will flounder without him if e.g. he were to step in front of a bus (at least for quite some time) is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. We have smarter 'customers' who can handle the truth. "You wan't the truth, you can't handle the truth!"
Yes, being a few weeks away from my PhD (knock on wood) I'm reminded of the graphs of how university grades correlate with income. It's a rising curve up till just under the top when there's a sharp (or at least distinct) drop. Why? Because the people with the very highest grades can get admitted to graduate school and have a career in research instead of industry. All the while knowing they'll earn less money. Many of these people choose to.
Myself, I cut my salary by about a third going back to finish my PhD. Under Bill's model, that couldn't be done, while in actual fact it's not all that uncommon. I want to be able to do what I want to do, and make as much as I can doing it, obviously, but not to the deteriment of enjoying doing it. (And, no, I wont ever make back the money lost.)
There's a lot more to life than money and there's a lot of smart people out there who don't make as much money as they can because of choice.
I remember my freshman year at university, cramming for a linear algebra exam, being surprised at a sign in a shop saying "Matrix 3.99" (in Swedish 'Matris'). Why on earth would they sell matrices? And wasn't that on the expensive side? It took me a long while to realise that what the sign actually said was "Rice" ('Mat ris' in Swedish).
Several friends reported the same experience, aparently a rite of passage for the budding student. So it's not just games. Maths can also do it to you. :-)
Should be: continues in the USA today. For better of worse, in most of the the rest of the 'west' i.e. Europe, there are still a lot of people that refer to themselves by that label, and while that doesn't go down well in all (most?) circles, and is a frequent point of actual honest-to-God debate, the word taboo is much too strong.
I've no problem with your main point though, and very much like your analogy with the bake sale (even though it's interesting to note that that wouldn't work in most places in Europe either). Bill is trying to blow smoke up your collective arses. It's interesting to note that it won't work as part of his European campagin. And that if this is the sort of rethoric he has to resort to, he must be scared.
Yes, I remember reading about it in comp.risks. Apparently it got confused when an even week followed an odd week when it thought that an even week should have followed. This reference have more info than one probably wanted to know about week numbering.
What? :-) Look, there's always an April 29th, the leap day being added always to February. And the year 2000 was a leap year, though many thought it so for the wrong reason. The rule is: if year is evenly divisible by 4 if not divisible by 100 unless divisible by 400. Which makes year 2000 a very special leap year as it is indeed divisible by 400.
I published a paper, with GPL source code (you need Python etc) a few months back using visualisation (colorisation) to lend the user insight into the operation of a Bayesian classifier.
It actually works pretty well, and the idea could be applied to other uses of the Naive Bayesian classifier.
OK, I guess I've just focused on the "circumvention device" part of the DMCA. In either case I must say that making copying a CD from a friend (or making a cassette of an LP in the days of yore) a crime is just stupid. That's the sort of law that just makes everybody a criminal and hence leads to a dilution of the idea of what a law is.
And regarding books, yes, it's been a few years since I copied a whole book. Though there is still the odd copy of the out-of-print one in my bookshelf. Thinking about the DMCA I do remember that Xerox was sued in the UK way back when (there must have been something similar in the US?) for encouraging copyright infringement (much like the Betamax case in the US). Luckily it didn't fly. :-)
In any case I think we can agree that with the law so diverse in different places that's not support for the idea of calling copyright infrigement theft in any case. If you walked into a library in Sweden as well as the US and left with a book (without checking it out, nor the intention of returning it) that would indeed be theft in both countries. But if you used the digital photocopier in the US library to make a copy that would be a against the law there, but not here.
Interesting, I didn't know that was the law is the US. It's not in many other parts of the world e.g. in Sweden. As long as you're the one doing the copying for your own use, then you can copy away to your hearts content. (It has to be you though, can't have your secretary do it for you.) EU changed that in the case of software, but for printed matter it's still in effect.
This stems from the French copy right tradition, which was always more about the moral rights of the author, than the Anglo-saxon one, which was always about who got to make the buck (or guinea as it were). There is little difference in today in actual law between the two, but there are still some it seems.
Oh, and btw, copying a CD from a friend is also fully legal. Same caveats as above applies. Even downloading files of the internet is still legal, but the law has changed on that, though it's not in effect yet.