Escrow doesn't work if FailedCo (or perhaps just the FailSoft product) is bought out by a competitor who wants to kill the product and force the customers to migrate to the competitor's product.
I have seen a number of mergers where the value of a company had nothing to do with its products -- it was in the value of the customer base.
Very interesting. This shows that the company doesn't have to go bankrupt for the Rentware problem to bite you. 3com is alive and well, but your investment is toast!
Why rent anything to satisfy a need that doesn't go away? Installing any non-trivial software system is an expensive proposition. My thought is that we buy something with the intention of keeping it long enough to justify a perpetual license. If we honestly plan on walking away from the product in less than 5 years, I have to ask the questions: (1) "Why are we doing this?" (2) "Can we find something that is not a throwaway system?" Of course, we pay for annual support, so there is always a "pay-as-you-go" element to all of this anyway. Why should we tolerate a periodic licensing hassle? In the pure throwaway scenario, you look for an ASP -- simply buy the app, server, and service concurrently.
Having the perpetual license is an important damage control mechanism. Software companies go bankrupt or they merge and put the customers on a "death march migration plan". We need to have the option of indefinite self-support, so as to keep the existing systems on "life support" long enough to consider our long-term options.
I predict we will see more and more companies (led by M$), trying to make this a "pay-per-click" world. I also predict the free market will continuously reject such initiatives. I don't want to rent an app any more than I want to rent a phone, house, car, clothing, eyeglasses, appliances, furniture, computer, or DVD (remember DIVX???) The final nail in the Rentware coffin is that software rental is an operating expense, whereas software purchase can be capitalized.
The only positive thing I can imagine is that Rentware makes it easier to walk away from a bad decision. If you buy the wrong software, you can eventually stop paying for it and buy something more appropriate next time. I have seen a few systems that were poorly chosen and eventually discarded. Renting those would have been nice. Not as nice as buying the right thing in the first place, but better than a total writeoff.
I rarely exceed 350K download, and of course upload is capped at 128K. There is also some kind of cap on Usenet downloads. As an added bonus, I have excessive latency and packet loss.
On bad days, the latency and packet loss combine with the overall bandwidth shortage, resulting in overall throughput that is worse than dialup. Cost is about $40/month.
The only thing they have not found a way to water-down or cripple is the fact that the IP addresses are static. That would require knowledge of DHCP, and these folks have their hands full with SMTP.
I'll submit my list of songs that I authorize Napster to redistribute. 60 characters * 127 7-bit ASCII characters; sounds like a big file (127**60 bytes, right?) Sounds like a quickie program for a high-school student.
RIAA can read the list and dispute my ownership of those titles where they have have a valid copyright. I'm sure Napster will cheerfully remove any disputed titles where RIAA can prove ownership. Of course any new song titles are a violation of my copyright, since I thought of it first, and the proof is that it's on my list!
In the old days, all the games were on Ch. 38 in Boston, and it was on cable systems througout New England. This was good.
Then came NESN (as an extra-cost "premium" channel), and most of the games were not on free TV anymore.
Then we had the player strike, which eliminated the value of NESN. As if by magic, NESN became a pseudo-free channel (included with extended basic service), which brings us back to where we started.
People forget how hard MLB had to work to re-establish interest in the game after the strike was over -- people found other things to do with their time.
I predict the fees for on-line audio will magically disappear after the next strike. The greedier these people get, the more they will have to give away to get the fans back.
This will take the *nix guys about a month to hack, perhaps two or three for the Windoze version. At first glance, it looks like you need a program that reads the dd output and repairs the damaged TOC. If we're lucky or smart, the "fair use--re-enabler" will stay off-line long enough for RIAA to fully deploy this dumbware.
How about requiring a government warning label: "Warning! this product fails to adhere to CD-ROM industry standards. Your "fair use" rights under the Home Audio Recording Act may be difficult to exercise.
I agree. They would need to patent the "piglatin-scrambling-scheme" or PSS algorithm. Then they could license the technology to the people who develop Napster clients, MP3 players, anyone except RIAA.
The workaround by RIAA would be to manually derive the pig latin version of their song titles and copyright those too. This is where we can learn a lesson from Microsoft. AIMster could "embrace and extend" PSS into something with features and semi-intentional bugs. The AIMster implementation of Pig Latin could never be translated by hand, thus requiring the use of the PSS algorithm to generate the pig latin file names. How about something really stupid, like the punctuation used by spammers on Usenet?
As revolutionary as the Napster concept is, the spin-offs (like the resurrection of weak encyrption) are even more amazing! If we can't outsmart them, we can outdumb them!
The proper solution would be to "solve the problem from the ground up", but legislative action is not what geeks are good at.
We have the best legislators money can buy. Special interests with $$$ get whatever they want (DMCA, for example). No matter how much we try to educate our elected officials, the lobbyists are going to outspend and outtalk the geeks every time. We can't expect our elected officials to be any smarter or impartial than the OJ Simpson jury.
One plausible course of action is to educate our elected officials as to the limits of their power. By demonstrating both the technology and willpower to work around flawed legislation, these folks will eventually get a clue. Pig Latin encryption is a wonderful idea. It's not the best technology, but a legislator who sees a screen full of Pig Latin song titles will definitely get the message.
I don't know who the Congress was working for when they passed DMCA, but it sure wasn't us.
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Escrow doesn't work if FailedCo (or perhaps just the FailSoft product) is bought out by a competitor who wants to kill the product and force the customers to migrate to the competitor's product. I have seen a number of mergers where the value of a company had nothing to do with its products -- it was in the value of the customer base.
Very interesting. This shows that the company doesn't have to go bankrupt for the Rentware problem to bite you. 3com is alive and well, but your investment is toast!
Having the perpetual license is an important damage control mechanism. Software companies go bankrupt or they merge and put the customers on a "death march migration plan". We need to have the option of indefinite self-support, so as to keep the existing systems on "life support" long enough to consider our long-term options.
I predict we will see more and more companies (led by M$), trying to make this a "pay-per-click" world. I also predict the free market will continuously reject such initiatives. I don't want to rent an app any more than I want to rent a phone, house, car, clothing, eyeglasses, appliances, furniture, computer, or DVD (remember DIVX???) The final nail in the Rentware coffin is that software rental is an operating expense, whereas software purchase can be capitalized.
The only positive thing I can imagine is that Rentware makes it easier to walk away from a bad decision. If you buy the wrong software, you can eventually stop paying for it and buy something more appropriate next time. I have seen a few systems that were poorly chosen and eventually discarded. Renting those would have been nice. Not as nice as buying the right thing in the first place, but better than a total writeoff.
I rarely exceed 350K download, and of course upload is capped at 128K. There is also some kind of cap on Usenet downloads. As an added bonus, I have excessive latency and packet loss.
On bad days, the latency and packet loss combine with the overall bandwidth shortage, resulting in overall throughput that is worse than dialup. Cost is about $40/month.
The only thing they have not found a way to water-down or cripple is the fact that the IP addresses are static. That would require knowledge of DHCP, and these folks have their hands full with SMTP.
RIAA can read the list and dispute my ownership of those titles where they have have a valid copyright. I'm sure Napster will cheerfully remove any disputed titles where RIAA can prove ownership. Of course any new song titles are a violation of my copyright, since I thought of it first, and the proof is that it's on my list!
In the old days, all the games were on Ch. 38 in Boston, and it was on cable systems througout New England. This was good.
Then came NESN (as an extra-cost "premium" channel), and most of the games were not on free TV anymore.
Then we had the player strike, which eliminated the value of NESN. As if by magic, NESN became a pseudo-free channel (included with extended basic service), which brings us back to where we started.
People forget how hard MLB had to work to re-establish interest in the game after the strike was over -- people found other things to do with their time.
I predict the fees for on-line audio will magically disappear after the next strike. The greedier these people get, the more they will have to give away to get the fans back.
This will take the *nix guys about a month to hack, perhaps two or three for the Windoze version. At first glance, it looks like you need a program that reads the dd output and repairs the damaged TOC. If we're lucky or smart, the "fair use--re-enabler" will stay off-line long enough for RIAA to fully deploy this dumbware. How about requiring a government warning label: "Warning! this product fails to adhere to CD-ROM industry standards. Your "fair use" rights under the Home Audio Recording Act may be difficult to exercise.
The workaround by RIAA would be to manually derive the pig latin version of their song titles and copyright those too. This is where we can learn a lesson from Microsoft. AIMster could "embrace and extend" PSS into something with features and semi-intentional bugs. The AIMster implementation of Pig Latin could never be translated by hand, thus requiring the use of the PSS algorithm to generate the pig latin file names. How about something really stupid, like the punctuation used by spammers on Usenet?
As revolutionary as the Napster concept is, the spin-offs (like the resurrection of weak encyrption) are even more amazing! If we can't outsmart them, we can outdumb them!
We have the best legislators money can buy. Special interests with $$$ get whatever they want (DMCA, for example). No matter how much we try to educate our elected officials, the lobbyists are going to outspend and outtalk the geeks every time. We can't expect our elected officials to be any smarter or impartial than the OJ Simpson jury.
One plausible course of action is to educate our elected officials as to the limits of their power. By demonstrating both the technology and willpower to work around flawed legislation, these folks will eventually get a clue. Pig Latin encryption is a wonderful idea. It's not the best technology, but a legislator who sees a screen full of Pig Latin song titles will definitely get the message.
I don't know who the Congress was working for when they passed DMCA, but it sure wasn't us.