But the same copyright law that serves a purpose in ensuring I don't unfairly profit from your work also enables you to be able to prevent me from singing a song I've heard you sing.
That law has gotten in the way of millenia of established precident - that our oral culture is in the public domain, that everyone is free to take what came before, modify it if desired, and pass it on.
Certainly, I shouldn't profit simply from the distribution of your works, as in producing and selling recordings of you, but what about when my art is based on the oral reproductions of popular culture? Copyright law then favour you over me, and doesn't begin to address the issue of you having full access to the popular culture you grew up with, yet denying access to new culture to the next generation.
There's a right to make money from your labour, few people will support someone else coming in at the last minute and appropriating your work as their own, but there's the much older issue of the shared knowledge-base of our race. You didn't invent the language you wrote your song in, I see you as owing something to the society that invented these things for you to use - you owe them (us all) the right to build on your creations.
Can you imagine the insanity if every "creative work" (language, vocabulary, etc) invented through history had a price tag attached to it? If you had to pay the estates of people long-dead for the right to use your language, or western musical scales, or the inventor of a guitar, etc?
At some point these things need to be part of the public domain. Until the law allows for things like this it isn't going to be equitable and people aren't going to respect it, even if that hurts some musicians in the meantime.
The future of Linux gaming is good solid games like UT2004 - ones that install and work as well in Linux as they do in Windows.
It installed trivially (I mean it - click install, get a K-menu icon when done) in Mandrake 9.1 and 10.0, it shows that good programmers can make Linux work just fine.
I'm buying my copy of the full thing when I get off work today - onslaught rules!
Someone's current chosen profession and it's ability to feed them or their family should not dictate my personal freedoms.
You mean, your freedom to use their copyrighted material without compensating them? Selfish attitudes such as yours are actually quite prevalent in the world (imagine that), and believe it or not, most musicians and movie makers are not going to stand on street corners and manifest their arts for free, to anyone who comes by, out of the kindness of their hearts.
No. We mean that it's not society's responsibility to ensure that any chosen profession is profitable. There are many web-based businesses that might be profitable if micropayments worked, but it's not our responsibility to either pass laws to ensure that micropayments do happen, or to feed those web developers until micropayments happen. If they see an opening they're welcome to move in and fill it, but they have to understand that things change. A great niche ten years ago is a dead niche today and vice versa. There used to be guild-exclusivity laws, where you were not allowed to provide a service if you were not a member of the appropriate guild - often a hereditary status, and society seems to be working now even though the laws have changed even though I'm sure it caused some temporary discomfort to people in now publicly accessible industries. Change happens and it's not always bad - I'd venture to guess that the economy (and by extension, even the families of those in the once-protected industries for the most part) are richer because of the change.
Copyright *is* well-meaning. It is intended to ensure that nobody else profits from your work without going through you. It is not intended to ensure that you profit from your work - the quality of your work has something to do with this. However, lately the trend has been to strengthen the law, removing more and more rights from the public in order to ensure an income for copyright holders. It used to be a right for someone who heard a story about a mythical hero to invent a new story with the same hero to pass along. Now characters are copyrighted and this isn't legal. It used to be a right for people to sing songs around a campfire, even if they merely learned the song from someone else and didn't write it themselves. Now this isn't legal, unless you stay to music published before 1923(?).
The law should be ensuring that if anyone makes money by publishing a song book including your work that you get payed, not ensuring that nobody is able to participate in their culture without sending you a cheque. Did you invent your works from whole cloth, or are they merely a product of the culture in which you were raised? Why do you get the benefits of a rich public domain and yet get the right to forbid the same right to my children?
This is not an issue of greed, of wanting without being willing to pay, it's an issue of wanting the right to participate instead of being a consumer, unable to hum a tune without making payments to the estates of long-dead musicians.
Do you think that people should stop doing something simply because someone has found a way to base an income on providing that service?
This is the root of the issue. Copyrights are an artificial limitation on normal actions (hear a song, remember it, sing it later) and while they might serve some interests, they interfere with others. We can't simply go around passing laws because someone finds them economically convenient - they need to serve society as a whole.
Don't have a television. Seriously. It's a time waster that will keep them from getting into things like lego or whatever, and much of the programming on will reach out and lobotomize them.
Hell, even if they simply sit on the net for hours a day, at least it forces them to read, and games are interactive. Better than the idiot box.
They are independent. They used to make drives with sync cables so you could tie the rotation speed exactly the the master drive. With the spindles synced you could get faster access to data. With spindles unsynced you've got to wait about (n-1)/n of a rotation to read data striped across drives, on average.
With the spindles synced you could read that small block of data almost instantly. The overall throughput doesn't change, but the access time for small blocks drops. Then you only have to wait on average 1/2 of a revolution for the data, same as on a single drive.
Old drives sometimes also included multiple heads around the platter. Instead of cracking up the rotational speed they simply effectively halved the rotational latency by being able to read in two places. This also allowed tricks like having the heads idle over different tracks, chopping the maximum seek time down. And then there's the benefit of being able to service a huge ongoing IO like video streaming while still handling other smaller IOs on the second head.
I agree, Moz very rarely crashes. In fact, I used to never shut Mozilla down (until it died) and I'd upgrade it every time it was shut down. As in, I had 4+ week uptimes with Moz and there's always be another official release available. I'm not a light user. If I ever have less than ten tabs open it's because I'm just starting up. I usually sit around 30+ in three windows.
(And Mozilla never died on me in Windows, probably because XP always went first.)
Why would anyone contribute any time to making a Microsoft product better? It's only helping the company that's trying to stamp out our freedoms.
There's already a way to make IE standard's compliant... Go to www.mozilla.org and download a working browser. Anything else just helps Bill's quest to own the internet.
This is actually true, in some sense. Modern HDs remap bad sectors and some do this a lot. My IBM drives slowly died and if they had 10% extra space that was 7GB of almost-functioning sectors of data that they hid away, out of touch of any format tools. What data was in there would be random and would probably contain frequently written stuff like swap, but those memory dumps could contain something interesting.
It's a reason why even a "military grade" overwrite and wipe routine can't be considered secure. Who can say you're wiping the same blocks you put your data on? Even tinfoil hat people have valid ideas.
How can compressing an image in a digital camera be inventive enough to warrant a patent? Hello!? Image compression has been an idea since the 60s, and the JPEG standard popularized it long ago. Simply the fact that the compression goes on in a camera isn't an invention. The compression, by necessity, happens on the device that creates the image.
Why is it that in every patent discussion some apologist comes along and tells everyone that tying shoelaces now deserves a patent, BECAUSE OF THE INNER_WEB TH1NGY!!!1! that is somehow remotely involved, or some other retarded change to an old and well-known procedure.
If this is such a valid patent, why don't you prove it? Tell us some non-obvious claim. (No, the fact that the patent was granted means nothing. The PTO is useless and corrupt, they'll rubber-stamp anything.)
Make the forum and message number into a directory, but leave the optional components (UTF-8, etc) as script parameters. This way google will recognize that a given message is the same, despite having three users link to it with different parameters.
Better yet though, provide a nested view (like Slashdot) and have that the default forum view, have everything else (threaded, individual message, etc) be additional options. Google will follow a link to a single message, then seeing a ton of links to the same 'page' with option differences will hopefully follow the first link, a small 'view thread in nested mode' link, and see all of the content at once.
Any bot-specific stuff (other than a robots.txt) will probably be counter-productive because the search engines try to avoid letting people provide them with edited content to please the bot. (You'll probably lose ranking if the non-google-UA bot that checks up on this sees different content.)
Actually, under US copyright law, there's a specific exemption made for copies required to use the software. To the HD, if it's an installable game, to RAM, of copyrighted images to video hardware, etc. If they intend to product to do it they can't pretend you don't have permission to do it.
The DMCA the sidesteps some of your rights to copy, but it's obviously an unjust law. At least earlier copyright laws made some attempts at being fair.
So the EULA is again just worthless paper. If you don't get it until you open the box (post sale) you can't be bound by it.
The license isn't binding. Not in the slightest. When you buy Windows from a store you get the license to use it as you'd use a book. The paper in the box saying otherwise is a post-sale restriction and in many cases, is actually illegal.
Further, "break" the copyright law and you'll have violated a copyright. Pirate is a word the recording industry misapplied because it sounds worse than copyright violator. Like calling parking violators by the term rapists to demonize them. Doesn't make it accurate.
It means that there should be no general liability for writing software. If you write control software for medical machinery you should certify that the whole thing works, software and hardware. If you write a solitaire game you certify nothing. As long as nobody tries to run a solitaire game on a medical computer you don't need to certify that the game won't kill anyone.
The guilty party would be the company that made a video card that could overheat and catch fire. Unless Microsoft somehow knew about this bug and, while fiddling around with the overheat option forgot to set it back to the default "don't kill everyone" level.
It's pretty simple to regulate the ammount of power into a device and include short-detection and shut it down when it undergoes meltdown.
Don't run third-party software on your medical equipment.
Seriously, computers in control of serious things shouldn't have a general network connection and shouldn't be able (through signing binaries or whatever) run unapproved software.
Look at the ABM treaty from another point of view. Not as a powerful country trying to get more powerful, but as a scared person looking for protection.
Imagine the world now as a collection of unstable people locked in a room with guns. Some people have bigger guns, and some smaller, but everyone is able to mortally wound anyone else. One person (country) is trying to put on a bullet-proof vest to avoid living in fear.
You're only looking at the short term, that they'll be armed and invulnerable and can then rule the room. (Not really true, even the best ABM system would have limits.) The long-term is that as people play nice and stop shooting each other they'll be encouraged and helped to build their own bullet-proof vests and everyone will be safe. (Against that threat anyways.)
If you think that the USA wants to do this in order to take over, ask yourself if they've showed any signs of this? Every time they go into a poor country to chase a dictator it costs them billions of dollars a day for little potential gain. They've tried to get the UN to help put a democratic system in Iraq, which should indicate that they aren't installing a puppet dictator who'll give them oil.
The truth of the matter is that the USA is old and tired. They'd just as soon build a really big force field around themselves (and maybe the Bahamas and Canada) and pretent the rest of the world doesn't exist. If they don't go into Afghanistan they get accused of being uncaring about the plight of women and religious minorities. If they do go in they get accused of wanting to kill "poor brown people". They're accused of being the great satan either way. The last thing they want is to rule the world. (That's Canada - they're the ones to watch, tricksedy devils...)
You don't need to recompile your inventory system, it's probably some light-weight front-end for the stored procedures in the DB. The DB engine could be recompiled though.
It would be interesting to see this on a 64-bit Linux with PostgreSQL recompiled.
For every staid fortune 500 company there are tens or hundreds of smaller companies like ISPs and web stores who run everything in Linux and are small and nimble enough to recompile parts of their software to take advantage of this.
No, the wishes of the publisher/author as to the preservation of the game do not enter into the question. Copyright is about ensuring the creation of works to enrich the public domain by enabling the author to make money on it.
Actions which go against enriching the public domain (refusing to release old games to encourage the purchase of new games) are a perversion of copyright law.
If you want control over the viewing of your work you shouldn't publish it. Why should may tax dollars be spent enforcing a monopoly for you if I won't benefit from it?
Jim Allchin from Microsoft has called free software Unamerican and communist. He's supposedly a mouthpiece for the company and Bill is very much the company in a nutshell.
The complaint from MS is that if free software takes off, it'll destroy the industry. That's bullshit of course. It'll only destroy companies that can't compete with a free product.
Even if open source did take over and kill most of the software houses, programmers would still have jobs as consultants. Much of my professional coding has been customizing programs like Access and Paradox to present a specified interface to a database and build custom websites from tracking this data. Nothing that any other company, even in the same field, would want. Just too specific.
Of course, this assumes that doing unpaid contract work doesn't scratch anyone's itch, but I doubt it. Even if you like the work the endless meetings and changes at the last minute get annoying. But there'll always be work in this field. Hell, I've gotten paid for writing macros for every employee in a company. Just going from person to person and analyzing their workflow and finding a better program or macroing a complex task, etc. Your complex tasks aren't the same as mine so you need specific solutions.
The issue is closer to, "Why is it okay to buy an intellectual product with the 'hood' welded shut, where you are supposedly contractually forbidden to research how to interoperate the product with someone else's product, buy spare parts from a competitor, etc, and not okay with a physical product?"
Nobody would accept these limitations with a physical product like a car. Nobody would even suggest that a shrink-wrap license requiring you to buy all your gas from the dealership was legal. The courts have firmly slapped down companies who require proprietary parts in order to keep your warranty.
Why do we grant software companies so much leeway?
Open source is the solution to a software industry gone wild.
It's not a physical/intellectual issue, it's purely a freedom-to-use issue.
Gates has shown himself to be fanatical against open source free software. Microsoft representatives compared it to communism, in the red-menace sense, and called it unamerican.
And he should be fanatical. While MS makes some good products (Excel is pretty nice) they also make some real crap. The only thing keeping them mega rich is tying. They don't sell office in pieces, if you want one part you buy them all. If you run their OS you can be assured that nobody else will be able to compete with them. From DR-DOS to Lotus, and on to the modern day, they've always used their position as makers of the OS to make sure that the platform favours them, sometimes to the point of breaking the competition's software completely.
If he loses control of the OS he loses half of his power. If someone adopts an open source groupware client, word processor, or spreadsheet, there's a lot less motive for them to buy a whole package which duplicates half of this functionality.
Bill's entire empire is built on control, not consumer choice. Nobody is more afraid of consumer freedom.
As for the market we'd have if free software took off, more than half of my programming jobs have been doing custom software for a company. Nothing exceptional, just custom database forms and such. (Hundreds of such forms, and views for each type of employee, but still just front ends for existing software.) People are still going to want customized software and they'll pay people to write it. Even if it was released nobody else would want it because their procedures wouldn't be the same. This market will always exist - no matter how easy coding gets there'll always be another level you'll want to get a pro to do.
Yes, but SCO claims ownership of the Linux kernel (being that it's half their code, etc). If you tried to take away their right to distribute it they'd tie you up in court with the same lawsuit. Yes, it's what "we" should be doing, but it wouldn't produce easy results.
On the other hand, SCO has no hand in making Samba, or Apache, etc. These programs are pretty clearly seperate from any claim on the UNIX codebase. Ownership is a given and that makes for a much simpler court case.
Remember that Microsoft gave SCO a big chunk of cash, they intend to use every dollar to drag this out.
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But the same copyright law that serves a purpose in ensuring I don't unfairly profit from your work also enables you to be able to prevent me from singing a song I've heard you sing.
That law has gotten in the way of millenia of established precident - that our oral culture is in the public domain, that everyone is free to take what came before, modify it if desired, and pass it on.
Certainly, I shouldn't profit simply from the distribution of your works, as in producing and selling recordings of you, but what about when my art is based on the oral reproductions of popular culture? Copyright law then favour you over me, and doesn't begin to address the issue of you having full access to the popular culture you grew up with, yet denying access to new culture to the next generation.
There's a right to make money from your labour, few people will support someone else coming in at the last minute and appropriating your work as their own, but there's the much older issue of the shared knowledge-base of our race. You didn't invent the language you wrote your song in, I see you as owing something to the society that invented these things for you to use - you owe them (us all) the right to build on your creations.
Can you imagine the insanity if every "creative work" (language, vocabulary, etc) invented through history had a price tag attached to it? If you had to pay the estates of people long-dead for the right to use your language, or western musical scales, or the inventor of a guitar, etc?
At some point these things need to be part of the public domain. Until the law allows for things like this it isn't going to be equitable and people aren't going to respect it, even if that hurts some musicians in the meantime.
The future of Linux gaming is good solid games like UT2004 - ones that install and work as well in Linux as they do in Windows.
It installed trivially (I mean it - click install, get a K-menu icon when done) in Mandrake 9.1 and 10.0, it shows that good programmers can make Linux work just fine.
I'm buying my copy of the full thing when I get off work today - onslaught rules!
No. We mean that it's not society's responsibility to ensure that any chosen profession is profitable. There are many web-based businesses that might be profitable if micropayments worked, but it's not our responsibility to either pass laws to ensure that micropayments do happen, or to feed those web developers until micropayments happen. If they see an opening they're welcome to move in and fill it, but they have to understand that things change. A great niche ten years ago is a dead niche today and vice versa. There used to be guild-exclusivity laws, where you were not allowed to provide a service if you were not a member of the appropriate guild - often a hereditary status, and society seems to be working now even though the laws have changed even though I'm sure it caused some temporary discomfort to people in now publicly accessible industries. Change happens and it's not always bad - I'd venture to guess that the economy (and by extension, even the families of those in the once-protected industries for the most part) are richer because of the change.
Copyright *is* well-meaning. It is intended to ensure that nobody else profits from your work without going through you. It is not intended to ensure that you profit from your work - the quality of your work has something to do with this. However, lately the trend has been to strengthen the law, removing more and more rights from the public in order to ensure an income for copyright holders. It used to be a right for someone who heard a story about a mythical hero to invent a new story with the same hero to pass along. Now characters are copyrighted and this isn't legal. It used to be a right for people to sing songs around a campfire, even if they merely learned the song from someone else and didn't write it themselves. Now this isn't legal, unless you stay to music published before 1923(?).
The law should be ensuring that if anyone makes money by publishing a song book including your work that you get payed, not ensuring that nobody is able to participate in their culture without sending you a cheque. Did you invent your works from whole cloth, or are they merely a product of the culture in which you were raised? Why do you get the benefits of a rich public domain and yet get the right to forbid the same right to my children?
This is not an issue of greed, of wanting without being willing to pay, it's an issue of wanting the right to participate instead of being a consumer, unable to hum a tune without making payments to the estates of long-dead musicians.
Do you think that people should stop doing something simply because someone has found a way to base an income on providing that service?
This is the root of the issue. Copyrights are an artificial limitation on normal actions (hear a song, remember it, sing it later) and while they might serve some interests, they interfere with others. We can't simply go around passing laws because someone finds them economically convenient - they need to serve society as a whole.
Don't have a television. Seriously. It's a time waster that will keep them from getting into things like lego or whatever, and much of the programming on will reach out and lobotomize them.
Hell, even if they simply sit on the net for hours a day, at least it forces them to read, and games are interactive. Better than the idiot box.
They are independent. They used to make drives with sync cables so you could tie the rotation speed exactly the the master drive. With the spindles synced you could get faster access to data. With spindles unsynced you've got to wait about (n-1)/n of a rotation to read data striped across drives, on average.
With the spindles synced you could read that small block of data almost instantly. The overall throughput doesn't change, but the access time for small blocks drops. Then you only have to wait on average 1/2 of a revolution for the data, same as on a single drive.
Old drives sometimes also included multiple heads around the platter. Instead of cracking up the rotational speed they simply effectively halved the rotational latency by being able to read in two places. This also allowed tricks like having the heads idle over different tracks, chopping the maximum seek time down. And then there's the benefit of being able to service a huge ongoing IO like video streaming while still handling other smaller IOs on the second head.
I agree, Moz very rarely crashes. In fact, I used to never shut Mozilla down (until it died) and I'd upgrade it every time it was shut down. As in, I had 4+ week uptimes with Moz and there's always be another official release available. I'm not a light user. If I ever have less than ten tabs open it's because I'm just starting up. I usually sit around 30+ in three windows.
(And Mozilla never died on me in Windows, probably because XP always went first.)
Why would anyone contribute any time to making a Microsoft product better? It's only helping the company that's trying to stamp out our freedoms.
There's already a way to make IE standard's compliant... Go to www.mozilla.org and download a working browser. Anything else just helps Bill's quest to own the internet.
This is actually true, in some sense. Modern HDs remap bad sectors and some do this a lot. My IBM drives slowly died and if they had 10% extra space that was 7GB of almost-functioning sectors of data that they hid away, out of touch of any format tools. What data was in there would be random and would probably contain frequently written stuff like swap, but those memory dumps could contain something interesting.
It's a reason why even a "military grade" overwrite and wipe routine can't be considered secure. Who can say you're wiping the same blocks you put your data on? Even tinfoil hat people have valid ideas.
How can compressing an image in a digital camera be inventive enough to warrant a patent? Hello!? Image compression has been an idea since the 60s, and the JPEG standard popularized it long ago. Simply the fact that the compression goes on in a camera isn't an invention. The compression, by necessity, happens on the device that creates the image.
Why is it that in every patent discussion some apologist comes along and tells everyone that tying shoelaces now deserves a patent, BECAUSE OF THE INNER_WEB TH1NGY!!!1! that is somehow remotely involved, or some other retarded change to an old and well-known procedure.
If this is such a valid patent, why don't you prove it? Tell us some non-obvious claim. (No, the fact that the patent was granted means nothing. The PTO is useless and corrupt, they'll rubber-stamp anything.)
Make the forum and message number into a directory, but leave the optional components (UTF-8, etc) as script parameters. This way google will recognize that a given message is the same, despite having three users link to it with different parameters.
Better yet though, provide a nested view (like Slashdot) and have that the default forum view, have everything else (threaded, individual message, etc) be additional options. Google will follow a link to a single message, then seeing a ton of links to the same 'page' with option differences will hopefully follow the first link, a small 'view thread in nested mode' link, and see all of the content at once.
Any bot-specific stuff (other than a robots.txt) will probably be counter-productive because the search engines try to avoid letting people provide them with edited content to please the bot. (You'll probably lose ranking if the non-google-UA bot that checks up on this sees different content.)
Actually, under US copyright law, there's a specific exemption made for copies required to use the software. To the HD, if it's an installable game, to RAM, of copyrighted images to video hardware, etc. If they intend to product to do it they can't pretend you don't have permission to do it.
The DMCA the sidesteps some of your rights to copy, but it's obviously an unjust law. At least earlier copyright laws made some attempts at being fair.
So the EULA is again just worthless paper. If you don't get it until you open the box (post sale) you can't be bound by it.
The license isn't binding. Not in the slightest. When you buy Windows from a store you get the license to use it as you'd use a book. The paper in the box saying otherwise is a post-sale restriction and in many cases, is actually illegal.
Further, "break" the copyright law and you'll have violated a copyright. Pirate is a word the recording industry misapplied because it sounds worse than copyright violator. Like calling parking violators by the term rapists to demonize them. Doesn't make it accurate.
It means that there should be no general liability for writing software. If you write control software for medical machinery you should certify that the whole thing works, software and hardware. If you write a solitaire game you certify nothing. As long as nobody tries to run a solitaire game on a medical computer you don't need to certify that the game won't kill anyone.
You see?
The guilty party would be the company that made a video card that could overheat and catch fire. Unless Microsoft somehow knew about this bug and, while fiddling around with the overheat option forgot to set it back to the default "don't kill everyone" level.
It's pretty simple to regulate the ammount of power into a device and include short-detection and shut it down when it undergoes meltdown.
Don't run third-party software on your medical equipment.
Seriously, computers in control of serious things shouldn't have a general network connection and shouldn't be able (through signing binaries or whatever) run unapproved software.
Look at the ABM treaty from another point of view. Not as a powerful country trying to get more powerful, but as a scared person looking for protection.
Imagine the world now as a collection of unstable people locked in a room with guns. Some people have bigger guns, and some smaller, but everyone is able to mortally wound anyone else. One person (country) is trying to put on a bullet-proof vest to avoid living in fear.
You're only looking at the short term, that they'll be armed and invulnerable and can then rule the room. (Not really true, even the best ABM system would have limits.) The long-term is that as people play nice and stop shooting each other they'll be encouraged and helped to build their own bullet-proof vests and everyone will be safe. (Against that threat anyways.)
If you think that the USA wants to do this in order to take over, ask yourself if they've showed any signs of this? Every time they go into a poor country to chase a dictator it costs them billions of dollars a day for little potential gain. They've tried to get the UN to help put a democratic system in Iraq, which should indicate that they aren't installing a puppet dictator who'll give them oil.
The truth of the matter is that the USA is old and tired. They'd just as soon build a really big force field around themselves (and maybe the Bahamas and Canada) and pretent the rest of the world doesn't exist. If they don't go into Afghanistan they get accused of being uncaring about the plight of women and religious minorities. If they do go in they get accused of wanting to kill "poor brown people". They're accused of being the great satan either way. The last thing they want is to rule the world. (That's Canada - they're the ones to watch, tricksedy devils...)
Sure, it runs 32b code at full speed, but you're ignoring the benefits of being able to run 64b code.
For something that should be fairly system agnostic (an SQL database) you could consider going to a 64b Linux and 64b PostgreSQL.
You don't need to recompile your inventory system, it's probably some light-weight front-end for the stored procedures in the DB. The DB engine could be recompiled though.
It would be interesting to see this on a 64-bit Linux with PostgreSQL recompiled.
For every staid fortune 500 company there are tens or hundreds of smaller companies like ISPs and web stores who run everything in Linux and are small and nimble enough to recompile parts of their software to take advantage of this.
No, the wishes of the publisher/author as to the preservation of the game do not enter into the question. Copyright is about ensuring the creation of works to enrich the public domain by enabling the author to make money on it.
Actions which go against enriching the public domain (refusing to release old games to encourage the purchase of new games) are a perversion of copyright law.
If you want control over the viewing of your work you shouldn't publish it. Why should may tax dollars be spent enforcing a monopoly for you if I won't benefit from it?
Jim Allchin from Microsoft has called free software Unamerican and communist. He's supposedly a mouthpiece for the company and Bill is very much the company in a nutshell.
The complaint from MS is that if free software takes off, it'll destroy the industry. That's bullshit of course. It'll only destroy companies that can't compete with a free product.
Even if open source did take over and kill most of the software houses, programmers would still have jobs as consultants. Much of my professional coding has been customizing programs like Access and Paradox to present a specified interface to a database and build custom websites from tracking this data. Nothing that any other company, even in the same field, would want. Just too specific.
Of course, this assumes that doing unpaid contract work doesn't scratch anyone's itch, but I doubt it. Even if you like the work the endless meetings and changes at the last minute get annoying. But there'll always be work in this field. Hell, I've gotten paid for writing macros for every employee in a company. Just going from person to person and analyzing their workflow and finding a better program or macroing a complex task, etc. Your complex tasks aren't the same as mine so you need specific solutions.
The issue is closer to, "Why is it okay to buy an intellectual product with the 'hood' welded shut, where you are supposedly contractually forbidden to research how to interoperate the product with someone else's product, buy spare parts from a competitor, etc, and not okay with a physical product?"
Nobody would accept these limitations with a physical product like a car. Nobody would even suggest that a shrink-wrap license requiring you to buy all your gas from the dealership was legal. The courts have firmly slapped down companies who require proprietary parts in order to keep your warranty.
Why do we grant software companies so much leeway?
Open source is the solution to a software industry gone wild.
It's not a physical/intellectual issue, it's purely a freedom-to-use issue.
Gates has shown himself to be fanatical against open source free software. Microsoft representatives compared it to communism, in the red-menace sense, and called it unamerican.
And he should be fanatical. While MS makes some good products (Excel is pretty nice) they also make some real crap. The only thing keeping them mega rich is tying. They don't sell office in pieces, if you want one part you buy them all. If you run their OS you can be assured that nobody else will be able to compete with them. From DR-DOS to Lotus, and on to the modern day, they've always used their position as makers of the OS to make sure that the platform favours them, sometimes to the point of breaking the competition's software completely.
If he loses control of the OS he loses half of his power. If someone adopts an open source groupware client, word processor, or spreadsheet, there's a lot less motive for them to buy a whole package which duplicates half of this functionality.
Bill's entire empire is built on control, not consumer choice. Nobody is more afraid of consumer freedom.
As for the market we'd have if free software took off, more than half of my programming jobs have been doing custom software for a company. Nothing exceptional, just custom database forms and such. (Hundreds of such forms, and views for each type of employee, but still just front ends for existing software.) People are still going to want customized software and they'll pay people to write it. Even if it was released nobody else would want it because their procedures wouldn't be the same. This market will always exist - no matter how easy coding gets there'll always be another level you'll want to get a pro to do.
Not bad, linear time increase with number of search results.
Yes, but SCO claims ownership of the Linux kernel (being that it's half their code, etc). If you tried to take away their right to distribute it they'd tie you up in court with the same lawsuit. Yes, it's what "we" should be doing, but it wouldn't produce easy results.
On the other hand, SCO has no hand in making Samba, or Apache, etc. These programs are pretty clearly seperate from any claim on the UNIX codebase. Ownership is a given and that makes for a much simpler court case.
Remember that Microsoft gave SCO a big chunk of cash, they intend to use every dollar to drag this out.