At first glance this seems like a great victory against monopolies... but what does it really mean???
It means you won't be facing a monopoly in the sky just like the one you've currently got on the ground. I think the companies involved will muddle on through to providing the services you desire without merging into a mega-corp.
The case that nobody's mentioning is a situation where the software already exists and is licensed under the GPL.
I don't feel that the government should GPL all its code on principle. But should the government be forbidden to make modifications to a mature GPL software project if that software fills the requirements of some particular project? Imagine that the government wants to use Linux for a particular application, because they feel it's the best tool for the job-- should they be forbidden from adapting it to suit their particular needs (as companies like Tivo have), or even releasing bug-fixes?
It strikes me that in many cases the public and the government can both benefit from this sort of transaction. It's certainly far more efficient than the typical "pay a contractor to develop something and then let them retain the copyright" scenario.
Then there's of course the question about what does 'owner pays' mean? If it means "I pay my operator's charge, You pay Your's", all is good and dandy when calling within operator, or between two that have direct link. But when the call is routed via third operator (eg. long distance, also in roaming where the two networks don't have a physical overlap/linkpoint), who should pay the carrier fee to get the call from caller's op to callee's op?
The person who selects the long-distance carrier should pay for it. That's the core of the argument. If I'm forced to pay for a carrier that somebody else picked out, I don't have the opportunity to minimize my costs by hunting for a cheaper carrier. By custom, in the US this is the person who initiates the call, and it seems like a good custom. The idea is that customers should know roughly how much they're going to be paying for a call so they can decide whether or not to answer it-- making them pay incoming long-distance fees puts a wrench in this.
Note that in most cases, the cellphone provider selects the long-distance carrier. That still doesn't break the system-- if my provider doesn't try to minimize their long-distance costs, they'll have higher rates than the competition and people will switch.
Also, I'm now assuming that in US the phone works when You're on Your ops service area (where they have their own network or have service network with dialtone). If the phone works in other areas, it's roaming - You are on another ops service area but Your op has a roaming contract and thus You do get the dialtone of a third party which routes Your calls (incoming, outgoing) to Your op.
Sure, there are still agreements between carriers analagous to roaming. For instance, PacBell provides service to AT&T customers on the West coast (and probably vice versa). What's been largely eliminated are the roaming fees. You can travel over a much larger area and not have to pay those fees because carriers have made deals amongst themselves to provide coverage for their customers.
What probably happens is something like: AT&T pays PacBell a certain fee for all of the minutes that their customers use while roaming on the PacBell network, and PacBell pays AT&T a fee for the minutes their customers use while roaming on the AT&T network. If the total charge that their customers' rack up on the other network is equal, the totals cancel out. Under the European roaming system, both companies would be making large profits off of their respective customers.
Because the rates are low, I most certainly do answer my phone when I'm "roaming" on the West coast. Why not? It's dirt cheap.
(Incidentally, there's still one major exception to this situation: analog cellular service. Most plans will require you to pay an extra charge if you "roam" onto an analog network. This only applies if you need to use your phone in an extremely rural area, and it's gradually being displaced even in those places. Most phones are set up not to use analog unless you specifically request it.)
Do You pay call-termination when answering landline? I don't. Landline is a phone, as is cell. So, I don't pay call-termination for cell, either.
No, our landlines work a lot like your cellphones. If somebody calls me, they pay all of the costs. And it also provides one of my major arguments against caller-pays. See, in the US, local phone companies reverse-bill a 2.5 cent/minute fee to my long-distance carrier for terminating the call. Of course, local phone companies have learned that their actual cost for terminating calls is far less than 2.5 cents, so they're all racing to get into long-distance so they can offer cheaper long-distance. If local customers paid their own call-termination fees, it would be up to them to get a cheaper plan, and call-termination fees would be more in line with actual costs.
Do You pay for incoming mail? I don't. Mail is communications, the sender pays.
Mail's kind of a different situation. It's not a cooperative effort. I pay a certain amount of money, then my carrier takes the mail all the way to its destination. If, on the other hand, my carrier could only take the mail halfway to the destination and then had to hand it off to someone else's carrier-- and there was some sort of reverse-billing going on-- then I think my argument would be more applicable.
There are people like me - those who have small phone bills, and mostly have cell for availability, and don't think availability is worth all that much money afterall. If these people (me included) ditched the cell because of costs, would the telecom market be more efficient?
Again, these people are a special case. If losing them was enough to destroy the cellphone market, it wouldn't exist in the US. In general, my hope is that cellphone costs will be driven down by our system, because there are fewer places to "hide" costs, and this will make charges so low that people don't worry too much about them.
What's with that equation? Gross simplification:
More calls overall on the same phone network means the network infra (and general management overhead) has higher utilization and thus the income needed to cover the infra can be spread over larger number of calls (and minutes), meaning cheaper calls. And, if call termination was billed from callee, it would mean moving money from private persons to companies, with overall increase in prices.
So, how could billing call termination from callees make for more efficient (and thus cheaper) pricing? Just a gut feeling?
I can't tell you the situation in Finland, but it'd be interesting to compare utilization in the US and European countries. The scenario you outline (people not using their phones because they have to pay for incoming calls) just isn't happening. There's tons of calling, and utilization is rising steadily. Tons of calls originate from private people, and this demographic is increasing, too.
As for why cellphone-owner-pays is better, I've already described my reasoning; it's not simply a gut feeling-- it's a hypothesis with some supporting rationale, but it's certainly not proven yet. I'd like to wait and see how costs compare in a few years.
The problem, which your post neatly summarizes, is that Europeans are hooked on caller-pays, and will be loath to give it up. It's perfectly possible to have a healthy and functioning cell network without it, but it's awfully hard to make the transition once you're used to one system.
What does that do to my cell use? It means that I don't answer to my private phone when not in Finland. I just check the text messages and voicemail, but I don't answer the phone. Because the call termination costs oftentimes more than making the call within Finland costs overall.
And that's a bummer. Roaming fees all over Europe are ridiculous. You avoid them (smart), but a lot of people obviously don't, as evidenced by the fact that they make up a big revenue source for European mobile companies. So essentially your calling rates are also being subsidized by these fees, which puts Europeans in a quandary: keep roaming fees high and pay less for regular calling... Or get rid of the outrageous roaming fees like we've done in the US and therefore pay higher rates for normal calls.
Yes, but given that there are only 4 networks, theres a reasonable chance that it will be on the same network as you, and so cost virtually nothing.
This must sure make it hard to start up a new network. Small mobile companies now have to deal with all of the obstacles involved in building out a system and getting customers, but they also have to worry about entrenched networks shutting them out by charging them outrageous cell-termination fees.
Remember also that these calls usually come out of your inclusive minutes, so the actual cash cost is often irrelevant. I'm lucky in that most of the people I call regularly are on the same net as me, so I pay very little
Yes, but inclusive minutes do translate back into real cash somewhere down the line. I'd be curious to see an analysis of what customers are really paying the cellphone companies (once you strip off all of the gimmicks like inclusive minutes) under both the US system and under the European system. And I'd be fascinated to see how those numbers change over time. I wonder if anyone really does this kind of study.
There is however a semi-govermental watchdog (oftel) who regulate the market and who have been muttering about forcing them to lower charges
That's a good thing, but we've had the experience of having governmental agencies set prices before (as have you), and I think the lesson learned was that the mandated rates are rarely as low as rates set through actual competition. I think the best use of regulatory resources is in making sure that the system is competitive, rather than simply trying to put limits on rates.
Just the same as if someone want to send me a letter, they buy the stamp, and if someone wants to come visit me they buy the petrol (gas). I would seriously object to being charged for the actions of someone else over who I have no control
The petrol and stamp analogies are good ones. On the other hand, do you object to the idea of splitting a restaurant check? You're both eating, so what's wrong with paying your share?
I understand your concern, that you'll be forced to pay for lots of unwanted calls. Of course, nowadays there's caller ID and voicemail. Unless you're ridiculously popular, your charges for unwanted calls-- assuming you check caller ID, etc, are generally small enough that it's not a big deal. If you really do have a problem, you can seek out a first-minute-free plan (if you can't decide whether you want to take a call in a minute, you probably should pay for it.)
You wouldn't have had the idea of kids with mobiles for a start - as it stands little Timmy gets a phone so his parents can find out where he is, and he can call them in an emergency. The cost is virtually nothing (minimum line rental + outgoing call charges). Now imagine the callee pays, and Timmy's friends get hold of the number:) Wouldn't fly.
I admit that this is certainly useful. I'm just not certain whether it cancels out the potentially anti-competitive effects of the caller-pays system. We'll wait a few years and see.
Well, the good news is then that in America, everybody will now pay! We get the benifits of competition in (er.. "on") both ends! Hurray for us!
It's goof if everyone pays, as long as everyone only pays a for their portion of the call. It's like the difference between splitting the restaurant bill or having one person pay the whole thing.
I can choose my provider and plan without any fees (except possibly a small fee for new plan or change of plan). That is, I can terminate my plan with just a notice to the provider, and don't need to pay them anything for that.
Perhaps I used the wrong term. Call-termination fees are the charges you pay when you all a cellphone in another network.
And, if a new provider comes up with a plan where calling the big provider's numbers doesn't cost any more than it would with the big provider's plan, the big provider will either lower the price or lose customers.
When I call an AcmeMobile cellphone from my provider, AcmeMobile gets to determine how much it's going to bill my provider for making the connection. My provider can't charge me less than whatever amount AcmeMobile charges them without losing money.
So if a large provider (AcmeMobile) decides to charge a small provider (MiniCo) $5/minute everytime a MiniCo customer calls an AcmeMobile customer, that charge will be passed along to the MiniCo customers. MiniCo could try to insulate their customers by subsidizing the fee (and therefore losing money on the transaction), but they probably wouldn't stay in business too long.
So even if MiniCo had the best service out there and had new technology that cut their costs by tenfold, you'd still be screwed if all of your friends used AcmeMobile.
Now, if a carrier came in Finland with a plan that charges their part of an incoming call from the one who answers the phone, I wouldn't take their plan. Not even if it costs me very little to call from their account. Unless they plain and simple promised in written that I'd never have to pay more than a few euros a month for answering the phone, whoever calls me. I don't want to pay for answering the phone - it's the callers responsibility to bear the costs of getting to talk to me.
And that's a shame. Because the American companies have already made the hard decision of making their customers pay for all of their calls, I think that we'll have a much more efficient enterprise down the line-- this means lower overall bills, or at least higher levels of service for the cost.
i note you still fail to note the main thrust of my argument that mobile phone access is cheaper, more ulbiquitous and improving at a faster rate then in the usa in spite of your theory.
I didn't respond to this because it's not completely supported. I give you that right now cell networks are more ubiquitous in Europe, and that Europe had a really good head-start, largely do to government regulation (for which they deserve loads of credit.) How much of the current ubiquity is due to the head-start, I couldn't tell you.
I'm not at all convinced that European cellphone networks are improving at a faster rate than those in the USA. Europe still uses GSM, which is a TDMA network. Many US networks have rolled out CDMA in the meantime, and god knows what the next advances will be. Europe is probably going to have to adopt some sort of CDMA network, and will have a long expensive path upgrading because of its standardization. This is a question that will be answered over the next few years. Unhatched chickens.
(I remember when I lived in France a few years back when they rolled out the Minitel. At the time it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. One would imagine that France would to this day have the best computer infrastructure in the world, but that's not true-- other technologies bypassed the little Minitel and it's still too expensive to get ISP access in France.)
As for European cell-phones being "cheaper", I don't know, and I don't see any support for it. My cell plan is dirt cheap. Some of the European plans people have described in this thread are outrageous. When you factor in the high costs of the reverse-charging we're talking about, along with the huge amounts of money cell providers swindle you for in roaming charges (which, by the way, used to exist in the US but are now ancient history), I'm not convinced that service is cheaper in Europe.
I think that there may be some instances in which it appears cheaper: for instance, if you own a phone simply to receive incoming calls, it will appear to cost almost nothing. Of course, the phone company is actually charging quite a lot for that service-- but they're doing it in the form of higher rates out the back-end... The owner of the phone just isn't paying the costs.
Except that I *do* pay for my own calls; if you phone me, you pay, no matter who you get your line from. If I phone you, I pay. Simple, and easy to understand.
Semantics. If I go to a restaurant with somebody I can pay the bill, they can pay, or we can go dutch. If you choose to pay for my lunch, I'm still the one ordering and I'm still the one eating it. Call it "your meal" if that makes you feel more comfortable.
Let's stick with the restaurant analogy. Say I want to invite you out to lunch, but I'm strapped for cash and looking to pay as little as possible. If we go dutch, you can order Lobster Thermadore and it makes no difference to me-- I can just get an appetizer and save myself a bunch of money. Lots of choices.
If I'm somehow obligated to pay for your meal because I invited you, then I have a lot less control over how much I'm going to spend. My options become far more limited: I can simply avoid asking you out to lunch... But that's sort of rude, and if you found yourself having to pay for all of our lunches, then we'd probably stop eating lunch together completely.
Throw in the most insidious part: pretend that the restaurants in question are private clubs, and non-club members have to pay much higher rates than club-members. There's a certain incentive for the club management to overcharge non-club-members and use the additional income to subsidize the meals of club-members. People choose their club largely based on how much they'll pay for their meals; they care to a much lesser extent whether their lunch dates are getting a little overcharged. But the club management cares and will use the opportunity to line its pockets.
You could convince your friends to all join the same club, but then what if a newer, cheaper, better club opens down the street? It'll be hard to convince everyone to switch with you, so you wind up staying at the same place even though it's less desirable.
In addition, nothing forces you to choose any particular landline or cellphone plan. If you want to call my cellphone cheaply, find a plan that will let you.
The alternative you suggest-- getting on the sam landline or cellphone plan as all of your friends-- has the same problems. You're essentially picking a plan because a critical mass of people are already using it, not because it's the best or the most efficient. This, of course, reduces the pressure on that plan to be the best or most efficient. Even if some other plan comes along that can offer the service for a fraction of the price, people will be loath to switch because the larger provider will hit them up with huge fees when they call their friends on that other provider. Competition stifled.
In cellphone-owner-pays, I pay for you to call me; what happens if you dial the wrong number? What happens if you call me, and I don't want to speak to you? What happens if you call for a chat, and I answer thinking that it's urgent?
There are three answers to this problem: caller ID, low rates, and first-minute-free plans. Caller ID is self-explanitory, and quite sufficient to deal with most types of calls. First-minute-free plans give you an unbilled minute to decide whether the call is worth paying for.
And the low rates are pretty straightforward: you pay so little for a minute of cellphone time (in fact, I get free nights and weekends) that the nuisance you describe is financially insignificant (and becoming more so as phone plans compete for lower rates.)
Why is it so unfair that the caller has to pay? I pay for my calls, and have chosen my operator and plan because most of the people I call to have the same operator, and calls to the same operator's cellphones are always cheaper. I chose a plan that suits my calling habits. If someone wants to call me, he can pay. If he wants to make calls to me cheap, he can get a line from the operator I use.
Nobody said anything about "unfair". In fact, the European system sounds more "fair". I just don't think it's as efficient.
Look at your own statement: you chose a plan because other people use it, not because of its own merits. So if a carrier manages to get a plurality of the subscribers in a region, they can hold onto their dominance even if a better, smaller company comes along. That's not wonderful for competition, and it's not wonderful for costs.
If people were free to choose any carrier they wanted without paying punishing call-termination fees, carriers would be in direct competition to over the merits of their service. Over the long run this would result in lower costs for everybody.
plus there's still the fact that my mobile phone works here in ireland, and across nearly every developed country in the world. today. right now. (when roaming i have to pay to receive calls)
Europeans love to tout this, and they're right-- it's a nice feature. On the other hand, I can get on a plane and travel 3000 miles from New York to Los Angeles, then step off the plane and use my phone without any roaming charges.
Doing the equivalent in Europe would net you horrific roaming charges. Hell, going the equivalent of two states over would net you ridiculous roaming charges. When you go to other continents, I'm sure it's useful... but I think I'll save myself a bunch of money and just rent a phone in that case.
Note that under my proposed system, I would simply pay the local portion of an incoming call. The other party would pay their local and long-distance costs. Essentially I would pay the same per-minute charge for receiving calls whether the call was local, long-distance or international; it would be up to the caller to pay for the long-distance charges.
So, you'd be prepared to pay for recieving calls on your landline then? Thought so...
Hell yes. In fact, I wish this was the American system-- our phone bills would be lower. Here's why:
Under our system, the local phone company gets to charge some gov't mandated fee for connecting a local call. For example, when I use my 7 cents/minute plan to call from a phone in California to a phone in New York, I'm paying a gov't mandated 2.5 cents to the California local phone company, and another 2.5 cents to the New York local phone company. Once you've factored in those charges, which are not set by competition but rather by gov't fiat, something becomes obvious: a long distance company can't charge less than 5 cents/minute and make money.
Here's the funny part: all of the local companies and long distance companies realize that they can provide that local connection for much less than the gov't mandated 2.5 cents/minute. So the long distance companies are racing to get into local phone service (very difficult and expensive), and the local companies are racing to get into long distance (lots of government deregulation to buy.)
But the alternative to doing this is disaster. If a local company like Verizon provides can provide long-distance and also provide the service to at least one of the phones on the connection, they don't have to pay themselves that gov't mandated 2.5 cents and can therefore significantly reduce their charges (forcing long-distance companies out of business.) If Verizon provides service to both phones on the connection, they get an even bigger advantage (and Verizon is a big local phone company.)
The government means well by setting those call-termination fees, and they seem pretty low. But the industry's actions have made it clear that they're probably not reflective of real costs.
If I paid for receiving calls on my landline, this wouldn't be an issue. If I could pick out the carrier with the lower call charges, I would, and this would put direct pressure on the phone companies to keep rates low rather than leaving it up to government regulation. The only problem with this scenario is that lack of competition in local land-line phones-- this, however, is not a problem with cellphones, so I'm glad the US companies do it the way they do.
Yes it costs a lot to call a mobile from a landline, but as I said in a previous post it doesn't happen all that much - most calls are mobile to mobile due to the sheer number of them out there.
Don't you pay the same reverse-charges when you call from a mobile to a mobile in another network?
The landline network (usually BT here) will charge that, plus their own markup, back to the caller. So there are differences between the different cell networks - I'm on Orange and calling that from a landline is significantly less expensive than, say, Vodafone.
What incentive do the cell-networks have to keep their call-termination fees low? It seems to me that most cell customers would glady accept high call-termination fees in exchange for lower outgoing-call rates-- after all, customers pay for their outgoing calls, but "other people" pay the call-termination fees. It's nice to save your friends money, but most people won't save their friends a few cents if they can save themselves a few bucks.
It sounds like a big boondoggle to me. The cell companies have a terrific system whereby they can keep some of their rates high. Large cell networks can get away with charging outrageous call-termination fees because they have the most customers, which makes it less likely that people will sign up for the competition.
If the owner of the cellphone pays all of his/her own charges, there's a much more direct kind of pressure on the providers to keep rates low. Over time, that will probably lead to more efficient operations.
Well, the I personally think that this method works out the best - and plus - let's say u were popular - wouldn't having every tom, dick and harry calling u in America cost the reciever a lot of money?
I live in the US and use Vonage VoIP. I've noticed that Vonage charges me only 5 cents/minute to call a UK landline, but a whopping 23 cents/minute to call a UK cellphone. It's possible that Vonage is inserting some sort of markup there, but given that their rates are generally bare-bones low, it would appear that British cellphone companies are charging (close to) 18 cents/minute to simply provide service from the cellphone tower to the handset-- not including the long distance charges. That's a lot.
Here's my question: what do you do if you feel that cost is too high? Under the US system, when my phone bills are too high I look for a cheaper provider (the mere threat of this keeps prices low.) If the prices are too high in the UK, it looks to me like you have a whole lot less recourse. Either you shell out that 18 cents/minute, or you don't call other peoples' cellphones at all. Where are these charges set, anyway-- does the government mandate the charges?
It seems as though you've got a lot more leverage over your cellphone company's charges when you pay for all the costs vs. when there's reverse-billing going on. Theoretically, this should lead to a more competitive and therefore more efficient US cellphone industry, which benefits us all.
These were essentially the same charges UK land-line owners pay to call UK mobile phones, but three times as much. He fought the charges, and since AT&T didn't really understand international mobile calls, he won.
Most phone plans have different international rates for landline and mobile. I use Vonage (VoIP) and calls to landlines are 5 cents/min, while calls to mobile phones are 23 cents/min.
(23 cents/minute... In other words, there's an 18 cent/minute markup for calling a cellphone-- that seems a little steep! Maybe the caller-pays isn't such a hot idea.)
Anyway if your phone company doesn't make this clear it should be their lookout. I just took a look at AT&T's rates and didn't see any mention of higher mobile charges. It's hardly fair to advertise 10 cents to Europe and not mention that you're charging more for calls to cellphones.
So even in your local calling area you're paying for other people's calls
No, you're paying for your own calls. Just because somebody calls you doesn't mean that you're not involved in the conversation.
I admit that it can suck if you answer a lot of wrong numbers or undesirable calls... But that's what caller ID and voicemail is for, and they work pretty well for the most part. I'm convinced that the American system is actually better, and you certainly avoid messy situations like the one described by the poster above. When somebody calls me from abroad, I know I'm not paying their international charges.
Outside of North America, it is common for the party calling the cell phone to incur the extra cost.
Oh goody. I get to post my favorite rant on why "caller pays" isn't better. In a nutshell, here's why:
When the person who owns the cellphone pays for their own calls, they have a strong incentive to seek out the cheapest plan they can get. Hence, they put direct pressure on their cellphone company to be more efficient and keep their operating costs as low as possible.
When the person who owns the cellphone doesn't pay for the call, the charges for the call are "reverse-billed" back to the caller. Since the caller isn't a customer of the cellphone company, the cellphone company has far less incentive to keep the reverse-charges low. (Ever notice that collect calls are more expensive than regular long-distance calls? A similar economic principle is at work.) Typically the government steps in to regulate the prices that companies are allowed to charge, and that's rarely as efficient as direct competition.
I'm convinced that over the long-run, the "caller-pays" system will result in higher costs than a "cellphone-owner-pays" system. This depends, of course, on the remaining competitive barriers coming down: in the US, for instance, it's still too difficult to switch from one provider to the other. Hopefully the new regulations which allow cellphone owners to switch providers without losing their phone number will help in this area.
The fact is the GPL does prevent companies from making money from selling software.
The GPL prevents companies from keeping their sources proprietary. This is incompatible with some companies' business models. Not, however, with companies like IBM, Tivo and RedHat, which all make money thanks to GPLed software. ASPs and other sorts of businesses can also benefit from free software, not to mention the enormous number of companies who use software rather than writing it, and therefore have lots to gain from free, flexible software.
I cannot think of a single instance where a GPL'ed piece of software has had nearly the wide adoption of software licensed under BSD. Apache, sendmail, bind, etc. all use BSD style licenses.
On the flipside, there are a huge number of applications that simply don't exist in BSD-licensed form. And the gap between the two groups appears to be getting wider. While BSD-type licenses really shine in a few areas (Apache, Sendmail), if you need a free program to do something, chances are that you're going to find a GPLed version that's more mature than the BSD version. As much as I love the BSD OSes, it's hard not to notice that they rely increasingly on GPLed components. Perhaps this is due to simple religious fervor, or maybe the GPL has some advantages.
Pick your metric and run with it.
You haven't read the Bayh-Dole act, have you? It grants Federal research institutions the rights to license and patent the work they do. One of the other ongoing goals in this realm is to help make research institutions somewhat self-funding through licensing fees.
I work in a private (non-governmental) computer research facility, so I have some insight into the needs of researchers. While it's fun to imagine that we're all about writing new code from scratch every day, that's rarely the case. One of the biggest challenges of the job is not reinventing the wheel every time you need to solve a problem.
In this area, Open Source software is extremely useful. The code is available, it's free, and it's easy to modify. Ditto for tools. It's wonderful to be able to leverage these projects, and it's not unreasonable that the price should be some contribution back to the community. Naturally we don't give away our proprietary secrets, but it would really bum me out if some regulation came down preventing me from having any dealings with GPLed software at all.
The point here is that we all know what our job is, and that's to make money for the company. We also recognize, however, that this doesn't always involve writing software and licensing it. For one thing, you often can't make the case for a particular research project until you've created a market for it (think of the fax machine here-- what can you do with a single fax machine?) Open Sourcing a piece of software is useful because it can create the beginnings of a market while still giving you a leg up if you eventually want to sell your code as a proprietary product. Using the GPL is especially good, because it insures that you probably won't see your code made proprietary and distributed by your competitors. You can still go to them and say, hey, would you like to license our work for your proprietary products?
The key here is that the GPL is an useful tool here under certain circumstances. If that purpose doesn't suit the mission of the lab, then they won't use the GPL. But there's no good reason to prevent anyone from using it.
Finally, what if the government wants to use a piece of GPLed software. Should they be prevented from modifying it to suit their needs, if the alternative is buying expensive proprietary software? Note here that we're not even talking about research; this is essentially a question of fiscal responsibility. The public gains nothing if our hypothetical agency is forced to buy expensive proprietary software rather than making a few changes to a GPL project and saving a bundle.
The way MS wants this argument to go is this: Gov$$ should not go to GPLed programs
And this, of course, is the key. Under the proposed law, if an agency has the option of spending $5000 modifying a GPLed program to suit their purpose, or alternatively spending $100,000 to get the same thing from a proprietary software vendor, they have to go with the more expensive solution.
Folks, wake up! This won't be about spending to create GPLed software vs. spending to create public-domain software. It will a choice between using a cost-effective GPLed tool vs. sending excessive amounts of dough to Microsoft for exactly the same service. In the first case, at least the public might benefit from the government's contribution to the project and from the tax savings. In the latter case, only Microsoft shareholders benefit (and we all pay for it).
What bothers me most is that the people who are currently babbling about the "restrictions" of the GPL today are the same types who are going to be bitching about their high taxes tomorrow. Blame it on boondoggles like this.
Why should there be any restrictions on how I use the software that I paid for? (through my taxes)
Government works are public domain by law. There are no restrictions on how you can use them. Unless, of course, the work belongs to an outside contractor. In that case, releasing that code under any sort of license would be light years better than what typically happens to it today.
In a world without copyrights, you'd be right. Let me give you an example of why (unlicensed) public domain is not the most "public" license out there:
All Federal legislation is required to be in the public domain. The government, however, does not necessarily do the work of publishing and disseminating those public domain texts, so publication often falls to private companies. These companies add copyrighted material (page numbers!), making a proprietary work out of a public one.
In a world without copyright, that sort of thing wouldn't be an issue. There wouldn't be such a thing as copyrights on works derived from the public domain, so you wouldn't need complex compensatory licensing schemes like the GPL to prevent it from happening. This world is not a perfect place.
You could, of course, argue that anyone has the right to obtain the original legislation and thereby avoid the trap of copyrighted stuff. The problem is that in the general sense, it's not always so easy to a) find the original, unaltered public domain sources of something (and here I'm talking about things other than Federal legislation), and b) insure that the source you're using really is the public domain version and not some modified, proprietary version (lack of copyright notices don't provide this guarantee, as someone could have simply taken them off before it reached you.)
For example, let's say I want a high-quality image of some famous (old, out-of-copyright) painting. I can't just go into the museum and take a photo myself in most cases, so I have to settle for an image someone else has taken. But what if that person has made digital edits (resizing, cleanup, color changes) that are acceptable as copyrightable proprietary modifications? I can't use it (or at least, I might get sued for doing so.) There are whole worlds of material in the public domain that aren't accessable because the only published copies are modified and therefore proprietary.
Therefore, in a world with strict copyright laws, sometimes a license is the only way to keep something public an accessable.
Government projects which are funded for by us all, individuals and OSS corporations and closed-source corporations alike, should have their benefits reapable by all -- including those who for whatever reason have objections to the GPL.
The government can't license its code under the GPL or under BSD. Both of those licensing schemes rely on copyright, and the government is not allowed to copyright its works. They can hire private contractors to write copyrighted works, and in that case, I see nothing wrong with recommending the default use of BSD.
But it's not as simple as that. The real issue is: should the government be allowed to use GPLed code (and make slight modifications to it where necessary)?
For instance, let's say the government really needs a piece of software to calibrate widgets. There's nothing on the market that does exactly what they need, but there is a piece of GPLed software that, with a minimal investment of development time, could be modified to do exactly what the government wants. The alternative is to buy an imperfect, packaged solution for many times the cost.
Should the government be allowed to go with the most appropriate and least expensive solution in this case, or should we allow these Senators to pass some general beaureaucratic measure that prevents people from making appropriate case-by-case decisions? If this law goes through, the government is essentially banned from distributing even the smallest tweaks to GPLed software, and that could very well cost us all money without gaining us a thing.
I've seen people risk graduate degrees to steal reams of paper, risk a 200k job to steal 10k worth of stuff...
Quite frankly, any company that can afford to pay $200,000 but won't pony up for office supplies needs to seriously rethink its priorities.
If you're that valuable, the company should be going out of its way to insure that you get all the paper you need rather than classifying it as "theft".
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It means you won't be facing a monopoly in the sky just like the one you've currently got on the ground. I think the companies involved will muddle on through to providing the services you desire without merging into a mega-corp.
I don't feel that the government should GPL all its code on principle. But should the government be forbidden to make modifications to a mature GPL software project if that software fills the requirements of some particular project? Imagine that the government wants to use Linux for a particular application, because they feel it's the best tool for the job-- should they be forbidden from adapting it to suit their particular needs (as companies like Tivo have), or even releasing bug-fixes?
It strikes me that in many cases the public and the government can both benefit from this sort of transaction. It's certainly far more efficient than the typical "pay a contractor to develop something and then let them retain the copyright" scenario.
The person who selects the long-distance carrier should pay for it. That's the core of the argument. If I'm forced to pay for a carrier that somebody else picked out, I don't have the opportunity to minimize my costs by hunting for a cheaper carrier. By custom, in the US this is the person who initiates the call, and it seems like a good custom. The idea is that customers should know roughly how much they're going to be paying for a call so they can decide whether or not to answer it-- making them pay incoming long-distance fees puts a wrench in this.
Note that in most cases, the cellphone provider selects the long-distance carrier. That still doesn't break the system-- if my provider doesn't try to minimize their long-distance costs, they'll have higher rates than the competition and people will switch.
Also, I'm now assuming that in US the phone works when You're on Your ops service area (where they have their own network or have service network with dialtone). If the phone works in other areas, it's roaming - You are on another ops service area but Your op has a roaming contract and thus You do get the dialtone of a third party which routes Your calls (incoming, outgoing) to Your op.
Sure, there are still agreements between carriers analagous to roaming. For instance, PacBell provides service to AT&T customers on the West coast (and probably vice versa). What's been largely eliminated are the roaming fees. You can travel over a much larger area and not have to pay those fees because carriers have made deals amongst themselves to provide coverage for their customers.
What probably happens is something like: AT&T pays PacBell a certain fee for all of the minutes that their customers use while roaming on the PacBell network, and PacBell pays AT&T a fee for the minutes their customers use while roaming on the AT&T network. If the total charge that their customers' rack up on the other network is equal, the totals cancel out. Under the European roaming system, both companies would be making large profits off of their respective customers.
Because the rates are low, I most certainly do answer my phone when I'm "roaming" on the West coast. Why not? It's dirt cheap.
(Incidentally, there's still one major exception to this situation: analog cellular service. Most plans will require you to pay an extra charge if you "roam" onto an analog network. This only applies if you need to use your phone in an extremely rural area, and it's gradually being displaced even in those places. Most phones are set up not to use analog unless you specifically request it.)
Do You pay call-termination when answering landline? I don't. Landline is a phone, as is cell. So, I don't pay call-termination for cell, either.
No, our landlines work a lot like your cellphones. If somebody calls me, they pay all of the costs. And it also provides one of my major arguments against caller-pays. See, in the US, local phone companies reverse-bill a 2.5 cent/minute fee to my long-distance carrier for terminating the call. Of course, local phone companies have learned that their actual cost for terminating calls is far less than 2.5 cents, so they're all racing to get into long-distance so they can offer cheaper long-distance. If local customers paid their own call-termination fees, it would be up to them to get a cheaper plan, and call-termination fees would be more in line with actual costs.
Do You pay for incoming mail? I don't. Mail is communications, the sender pays.
Mail's kind of a different situation. It's not a cooperative effort. I pay a certain amount of money, then my carrier takes the mail all the way to its destination. If, on the other hand, my carrier could only take the mail halfway to the destination and then had to hand it off to someone else's carrier-- and there was some sort of reverse-billing going on-- then I think my argument would be more applicable.
There are people like me - those who have small phone bills, and mostly have cell for availability, and don't think availability is worth all that much money afterall. If these people (me included) ditched the cell because of costs, would the telecom market be more efficient?
Again, these people are a special case. If losing them was enough to destroy the cellphone market, it wouldn't exist in the US. In general, my hope is that cellphone costs will be driven down by our system, because there are fewer places to "hide" costs, and this will make charges so low that people don't worry too much about them.
So, how could billing call termination from callees make for more efficient (and thus cheaper) pricing? Just a gut feeling?
I can't tell you the situation in Finland, but it'd be interesting to compare utilization in the US and European countries. The scenario you outline (people not using their phones because they have to pay for incoming calls) just isn't happening. There's tons of calling, and utilization is rising steadily. Tons of calls originate from private people, and this demographic is increasing, too.
As for why cellphone-owner-pays is better, I've already described my reasoning; it's not simply a gut feeling-- it's a hypothesis with some supporting rationale, but it's certainly not proven yet. I'd like to wait and see how costs compare in a few years.
The problem, which your post neatly summarizes, is that Europeans are hooked on caller-pays, and will be loath to give it up. It's perfectly possible to have a healthy and functioning cell network without it, but it's awfully hard to make the transition once you're used to one system.
What does that do to my cell use? It means that I don't answer to my private phone when not in Finland. I just check the text messages and voicemail, but I don't answer the phone. Because the call termination costs oftentimes more than making the call within Finland costs overall.
And that's a bummer. Roaming fees all over Europe are ridiculous. You avoid them (smart), but a lot of people obviously don't, as evidenced by the fact that they make up a big revenue source for European mobile companies. So essentially your calling rates are also being subsidized by these fees, which puts Europeans in a quandary: keep roaming fees high and pay less for regular calling... Or get rid of the outrageous roaming fees like we've done in the US and therefore pay higher rates for normal calls.
This must sure make it hard to start up a new network. Small mobile companies now have to deal with all of the obstacles involved in building out a system and getting customers, but they also have to worry about entrenched networks shutting them out by charging them outrageous cell-termination fees.
Remember also that these calls usually come out of your inclusive minutes, so the actual cash cost is often irrelevant. I'm lucky in that most of the people I call regularly are on the same net as me, so I pay very little
Yes, but inclusive minutes do translate back into real cash somewhere down the line. I'd be curious to see an analysis of what customers are really paying the cellphone companies (once you strip off all of the gimmicks like inclusive minutes) under both the US system and under the European system. And I'd be fascinated to see how those numbers change over time. I wonder if anyone really does this kind of study.
There is however a semi-govermental watchdog (oftel) who regulate the market and who have been muttering about forcing them to lower charges
That's a good thing, but we've had the experience of having governmental agencies set prices before (as have you), and I think the lesson learned was that the mandated rates are rarely as low as rates set through actual competition. I think the best use of regulatory resources is in making sure that the system is competitive, rather than simply trying to put limits on rates.
Just the same as if someone want to send me a letter, they buy the stamp, and if someone wants to come visit me they buy the petrol (gas). I would seriously object to being charged for the actions of someone else over who I have no control
The petrol and stamp analogies are good ones. On the other hand, do you object to the idea of splitting a restaurant check? You're both eating, so what's wrong with paying your share?
I understand your concern, that you'll be forced to pay for lots of unwanted calls. Of course, nowadays there's caller ID and voicemail. Unless you're ridiculously popular, your charges for unwanted calls-- assuming you check caller ID, etc, are generally small enough that it's not a big deal. If you really do have a problem, you can seek out a first-minute-free plan (if you can't decide whether you want to take a call in a minute, you probably should pay for it.)
You wouldn't have had the idea of kids with mobiles for a start - as it stands little Timmy gets a phone so his parents can find out where he is, and he can call them in an emergency. The cost is virtually nothing (minimum line rental + outgoing call charges). Now imagine the callee pays, and Timmy's friends get hold of the number :) Wouldn't fly.
I admit that this is certainly useful. I'm just not certain whether it cancels out the potentially anti-competitive effects of the caller-pays system. We'll wait a few years and see.
"Good", that it is. "Goof" as well, I guess...
It's goof if everyone pays, as long as everyone only pays a for their portion of the call. It's like the difference between splitting the restaurant bill or having one person pay the whole thing.
Perhaps I used the wrong term. Call-termination fees are the charges you pay when you all a cellphone in another network.
And, if a new provider comes up with a plan where calling the big provider's numbers doesn't cost any more than it would with the big provider's plan, the big provider will either lower the price or lose customers.
When I call an AcmeMobile cellphone from my provider, AcmeMobile gets to determine how much it's going to bill my provider for making the connection. My provider can't charge me less than whatever amount AcmeMobile charges them without losing money.
So if a large provider (AcmeMobile) decides to charge a small provider (MiniCo) $5/minute everytime a MiniCo customer calls an AcmeMobile customer, that charge will be passed along to the MiniCo customers. MiniCo could try to insulate their customers by subsidizing the fee (and therefore losing money on the transaction), but they probably wouldn't stay in business too long.
So even if MiniCo had the best service out there and had new technology that cut their costs by tenfold, you'd still be screwed if all of your friends used AcmeMobile.
Now, if a carrier came in Finland with a plan that charges their part of an incoming call from the one who answers the phone, I wouldn't take their plan. Not even if it costs me very little to call from their account. Unless they plain and simple promised in written that I'd never have to pay more than a few euros a month for answering the phone, whoever calls me. I don't want to pay for answering the phone - it's the callers responsibility to bear the costs of getting to talk to me.
And that's a shame. Because the American companies have already made the hard decision of making their customers pay for all of their calls, I think that we'll have a much more efficient enterprise down the line-- this means lower overall bills, or at least higher levels of service for the cost.
I didn't respond to this because it's not completely supported. I give you that right now cell networks are more ubiquitous in Europe, and that Europe had a really good head-start, largely do to government regulation (for which they deserve loads of credit.) How much of the current ubiquity is due to the head-start, I couldn't tell you.
I'm not at all convinced that European cellphone networks are improving at a faster rate than those in the USA. Europe still uses GSM, which is a TDMA network. Many US networks have rolled out CDMA in the meantime, and god knows what the next advances will be. Europe is probably going to have to adopt some sort of CDMA network, and will have a long expensive path upgrading because of its standardization. This is a question that will be answered over the next few years. Unhatched chickens.
(I remember when I lived in France a few years back when they rolled out the Minitel. At the time it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. One would imagine that France would to this day have the best computer infrastructure in the world, but that's not true-- other technologies bypassed the little Minitel and it's still too expensive to get ISP access in France.)
As for European cell-phones being "cheaper", I don't know, and I don't see any support for it. My cell plan is dirt cheap. Some of the European plans people have described in this thread are outrageous. When you factor in the high costs of the reverse-charging we're talking about, along with the huge amounts of money cell providers swindle you for in roaming charges (which, by the way, used to exist in the US but are now ancient history), I'm not convinced that service is cheaper in Europe.
I think that there may be some instances in which it appears cheaper: for instance, if you own a phone simply to receive incoming calls, it will appear to cost almost nothing. Of course, the phone company is actually charging quite a lot for that service-- but they're doing it in the form of higher rates out the back-end... The owner of the phone just isn't paying the costs.
Semantics. If I go to a restaurant with somebody I can pay the bill, they can pay, or we can go dutch. If you choose to pay for my lunch, I'm still the one ordering and I'm still the one eating it. Call it "your meal" if that makes you feel more comfortable.
Let's stick with the restaurant analogy. Say I want to invite you out to lunch, but I'm strapped for cash and looking to pay as little as possible. If we go dutch, you can order Lobster Thermadore and it makes no difference to me-- I can just get an appetizer and save myself a bunch of money. Lots of choices.
If I'm somehow obligated to pay for your meal because I invited you, then I have a lot less control over how much I'm going to spend. My options become far more limited: I can simply avoid asking you out to lunch... But that's sort of rude, and if you found yourself having to pay for all of our lunches, then we'd probably stop eating lunch together completely.
Throw in the most insidious part: pretend that the restaurants in question are private clubs, and non-club members have to pay much higher rates than club-members. There's a certain incentive for the club management to overcharge non-club-members and use the additional income to subsidize the meals of club-members. People choose their club largely based on how much they'll pay for their meals; they care to a much lesser extent whether their lunch dates are getting a little overcharged. But the club management cares and will use the opportunity to line its pockets.
You could convince your friends to all join the same club, but then what if a newer, cheaper, better club opens down the street? It'll be hard to convince everyone to switch with you, so you wind up staying at the same place even though it's less desirable.
In addition, nothing forces you to choose any particular landline or cellphone plan. If you want to call my cellphone cheaply, find a plan that will let you.
The alternative you suggest-- getting on the sam landline or cellphone plan as all of your friends-- has the same problems. You're essentially picking a plan because a critical mass of people are already using it, not because it's the best or the most efficient. This, of course, reduces the pressure on that plan to be the best or most efficient. Even if some other plan comes along that can offer the service for a fraction of the price, people will be loath to switch because the larger provider will hit them up with huge fees when they call their friends on that other provider. Competition stifled.
In cellphone-owner-pays, I pay for you to call me; what happens if you dial the wrong number? What happens if you call me, and I don't want to speak to you? What happens if you call for a chat, and I answer thinking that it's urgent?
There are three answers to this problem: caller ID, low rates, and first-minute-free plans. Caller ID is self-explanitory, and quite sufficient to deal with most types of calls. First-minute-free plans give you an unbilled minute to decide whether the call is worth paying for.
And the low rates are pretty straightforward: you pay so little for a minute of cellphone time (in fact, I get free nights and weekends) that the nuisance you describe is financially insignificant (and becoming more so as phone plans compete for lower rates.)
Nobody said anything about "unfair". In fact, the European system sounds more "fair". I just don't think it's as efficient.
Look at your own statement: you chose a plan because other people use it, not because of its own merits. So if a carrier manages to get a plurality of the subscribers in a region, they can hold onto their dominance even if a better, smaller company comes along. That's not wonderful for competition, and it's not wonderful for costs.
If people were free to choose any carrier they wanted without paying punishing call-termination fees, carriers would be in direct competition to over the merits of their service. Over the long run this would result in lower costs for everybody.
Europeans love to tout this, and they're right-- it's a nice feature. On the other hand, I can get on a plane and travel 3000 miles from New York to Los Angeles, then step off the plane and use my phone without any roaming charges.
Doing the equivalent in Europe would net you horrific roaming charges. Hell, going the equivalent of two states over would net you ridiculous roaming charges. When you go to other continents, I'm sure it's useful... but I think I'll save myself a bunch of money and just rent a phone in that case.
Note that under my proposed system, I would simply pay the local portion of an incoming call. The other party would pay their local and long-distance costs. Essentially I would pay the same per-minute charge for receiving calls whether the call was local, long-distance or international; it would be up to the caller to pay for the long-distance charges.
Hell yes. In fact, I wish this was the American system-- our phone bills would be lower. Here's why:
Under our system, the local phone company gets to charge some gov't mandated fee for connecting a local call. For example, when I use my 7 cents/minute plan to call from a phone in California to a phone in New York, I'm paying a gov't mandated 2.5 cents to the California local phone company, and another 2.5 cents to the New York local phone company. Once you've factored in those charges, which are not set by competition but rather by gov't fiat, something becomes obvious: a long distance company can't charge less than 5 cents/minute and make money.
Here's the funny part: all of the local companies and long distance companies realize that they can provide that local connection for much less than the gov't mandated 2.5 cents/minute. So the long distance companies are racing to get into local phone service (very difficult and expensive), and the local companies are racing to get into long distance (lots of government deregulation to buy.)
But the alternative to doing this is disaster. If a local company like Verizon provides can provide long-distance and also provide the service to at least one of the phones on the connection, they don't have to pay themselves that gov't mandated 2.5 cents and can therefore significantly reduce their charges (forcing long-distance companies out of business.) If Verizon provides service to both phones on the connection, they get an even bigger advantage (and Verizon is a big local phone company.)
The government means well by setting those call-termination fees, and they seem pretty low. But the industry's actions have made it clear that they're probably not reflective of real costs.
If I paid for receiving calls on my landline, this wouldn't be an issue. If I could pick out the carrier with the lower call charges, I would, and this would put direct pressure on the phone companies to keep rates low rather than leaving it up to government regulation. The only problem with this scenario is that lack of competition in local land-line phones-- this, however, is not a problem with cellphones, so I'm glad the US companies do it the way they do.
Don't you pay the same reverse-charges when you call from a mobile to a mobile in another network?
The landline network (usually BT here) will charge that, plus their own markup, back to the caller. So there are differences between the different cell networks - I'm on Orange and calling that from a landline is significantly less expensive than, say, Vodafone.
What incentive do the cell-networks have to keep their call-termination fees low? It seems to me that most cell customers would glady accept high call-termination fees in exchange for lower outgoing-call rates-- after all, customers pay for their outgoing calls, but "other people" pay the call-termination fees. It's nice to save your friends money, but most people won't save their friends a few cents if they can save themselves a few bucks.
It sounds like a big boondoggle to me. The cell companies have a terrific system whereby they can keep some of their rates high. Large cell networks can get away with charging outrageous call-termination fees because they have the most customers, which makes it less likely that people will sign up for the competition.
If the owner of the cellphone pays all of his/her own charges, there's a much more direct kind of pressure on the providers to keep rates low. Over time, that will probably lead to more efficient operations.
I live in the US and use Vonage VoIP. I've noticed that Vonage charges me only 5 cents/minute to call a UK landline, but a whopping 23 cents/minute to call a UK cellphone. It's possible that Vonage is inserting some sort of markup there, but given that their rates are generally bare-bones low, it would appear that British cellphone companies are charging (close to) 18 cents/minute to simply provide service from the cellphone tower to the handset-- not including the long distance charges. That's a lot.
Here's my question: what do you do if you feel that cost is too high? Under the US system, when my phone bills are too high I look for a cheaper provider (the mere threat of this keeps prices low.) If the prices are too high in the UK, it looks to me like you have a whole lot less recourse. Either you shell out that 18 cents/minute, or you don't call other peoples' cellphones at all. Where are these charges set, anyway-- does the government mandate the charges?
It seems as though you've got a lot more leverage over your cellphone company's charges when you pay for all the costs vs. when there's reverse-billing going on. Theoretically, this should lead to a more competitive and therefore more efficient US cellphone industry, which benefits us all.
Most phone plans have different international rates for landline and mobile. I use Vonage (VoIP) and calls to landlines are 5 cents/min, while calls to mobile phones are 23 cents/min.
(23 cents/minute... In other words, there's an 18 cent/minute markup for calling a cellphone-- that seems a little steep! Maybe the caller-pays isn't such a hot idea.)
Anyway if your phone company doesn't make this clear it should be their lookout. I just took a look at AT&T's rates and didn't see any mention of higher mobile charges. It's hardly fair to advertise 10 cents to Europe and not mention that you're charging more for calls to cellphones.
No, you're paying for your own calls. Just because somebody calls you doesn't mean that you're not involved in the conversation.
I admit that it can suck if you answer a lot of wrong numbers or undesirable calls... But that's what caller ID and voicemail is for, and they work pretty well for the most part. I'm convinced that the American system is actually better, and you certainly avoid messy situations like the one described by the poster above. When somebody calls me from abroad, I know I'm not paying their international charges.
Oh goody. I get to post my favorite rant on why "caller pays" isn't better. In a nutshell, here's why:
When the person who owns the cellphone pays for their own calls, they have a strong incentive to seek out the cheapest plan they can get. Hence, they put direct pressure on their cellphone company to be more efficient and keep their operating costs as low as possible.
When the person who owns the cellphone doesn't pay for the call, the charges for the call are "reverse-billed" back to the caller. Since the caller isn't a customer of the cellphone company, the cellphone company has far less incentive to keep the reverse-charges low. (Ever notice that collect calls are more expensive than regular long-distance calls? A similar economic principle is at work.) Typically the government steps in to regulate the prices that companies are allowed to charge, and that's rarely as efficient as direct competition.
I'm convinced that over the long-run, the "caller-pays" system will result in higher costs than a "cellphone-owner-pays" system. This depends, of course, on the remaining competitive barriers coming down: in the US, for instance, it's still too difficult to switch from one provider to the other. Hopefully the new regulations which allow cellphone owners to switch providers without losing their phone number will help in this area.
Incidentally, if my explanation didn't make sense, here's a much more detailed explanation.
The GPL prevents companies from keeping their sources proprietary. This is incompatible with some companies' business models. Not, however, with companies like IBM, Tivo and RedHat, which all make money thanks to GPLed software. ASPs and other sorts of businesses can also benefit from free software, not to mention the enormous number of companies who use software rather than writing it, and therefore have lots to gain from free, flexible software.
I cannot think of a single instance where a GPL'ed piece of software has had nearly the wide adoption of software licensed under BSD. Apache, sendmail, bind, etc. all use BSD style licenses.
On the flipside, there are a huge number of applications that simply don't exist in BSD-licensed form. And the gap between the two groups appears to be getting wider. While BSD-type licenses really shine in a few areas (Apache, Sendmail), if you need a free program to do something, chances are that you're going to find a GPLed version that's more mature than the BSD version. As much as I love the BSD OSes, it's hard not to notice that they rely increasingly on GPLed components. Perhaps this is due to simple religious fervor, or maybe the GPL has some advantages.
Pick your metric and run with it.
You haven't read the Bayh-Dole act, have you? It grants Federal research institutions the rights to license and patent the work they do. One of the other ongoing goals in this realm is to help make research institutions somewhat self-funding through licensing fees.
I work in a private (non-governmental) computer research facility, so I have some insight into the needs of researchers. While it's fun to imagine that we're all about writing new code from scratch every day, that's rarely the case. One of the biggest challenges of the job is not reinventing the wheel every time you need to solve a problem.
In this area, Open Source software is extremely useful. The code is available, it's free, and it's easy to modify. Ditto for tools. It's wonderful to be able to leverage these projects, and it's not unreasonable that the price should be some contribution back to the community. Naturally we don't give away our proprietary secrets, but it would really bum me out if some regulation came down preventing me from having any dealings with GPLed software at all.
The point here is that we all know what our job is, and that's to make money for the company. We also recognize, however, that this doesn't always involve writing software and licensing it. For one thing, you often can't make the case for a particular research project until you've created a market for it (think of the fax machine here-- what can you do with a single fax machine?) Open Sourcing a piece of software is useful because it can create the beginnings of a market while still giving you a leg up if you eventually want to sell your code as a proprietary product. Using the GPL is especially good, because it insures that you probably won't see your code made proprietary and distributed by your competitors. You can still go to them and say, hey, would you like to license our work for your proprietary products?
The key here is that the GPL is an useful tool here under certain circumstances. If that purpose doesn't suit the mission of the lab, then they won't use the GPL. But there's no good reason to prevent anyone from using it.
Finally, what if the government wants to use a piece of GPLed software. Should they be prevented from modifying it to suit their needs, if the alternative is buying expensive proprietary software? Note here that we're not even talking about research; this is essentially a question of fiscal responsibility. The public gains nothing if our hypothetical agency is forced to buy expensive proprietary software rather than making a few changes to a GPL project and saving a bundle.
And this, of course, is the key. Under the proposed law, if an agency has the option of spending $5000 modifying a GPLed program to suit their purpose, or alternatively spending $100,000 to get the same thing from a proprietary software vendor, they have to go with the more expensive solution.
Folks, wake up! This won't be about spending to create GPLed software vs. spending to create public-domain software. It will a choice between using a cost-effective GPLed tool vs. sending excessive amounts of dough to Microsoft for exactly the same service. In the first case, at least the public might benefit from the government's contribution to the project and from the tax savings. In the latter case, only Microsoft shareholders benefit (and we all pay for it).
What bothers me most is that the people who are currently babbling about the "restrictions" of the GPL today are the same types who are going to be bitching about their high taxes tomorrow. Blame it on boondoggles like this.
Government works are public domain by law. There are no restrictions on how you can use them. Unless, of course, the work belongs to an outside contractor. In that case, releasing that code under any sort of license would be light years better than what typically happens to it today.
In a world without copyrights, you'd be right. Let me give you an example of why (unlicensed) public domain is not the most "public" license out there:
All Federal legislation is required to be in the public domain. The government, however, does not necessarily do the work of publishing and disseminating those public domain texts, so publication often falls to private companies. These companies add copyrighted material (page numbers!), making a proprietary work out of a public one.
In a world without copyright, that sort of thing wouldn't be an issue. There wouldn't be such a thing as copyrights on works derived from the public domain, so you wouldn't need complex compensatory licensing schemes like the GPL to prevent it from happening. This world is not a perfect place.
You could, of course, argue that anyone has the right to obtain the original legislation and thereby avoid the trap of copyrighted stuff. The problem is that in the general sense, it's not always so easy to a) find the original, unaltered public domain sources of something (and here I'm talking about things other than Federal legislation), and b) insure that the source you're using really is the public domain version and not some modified, proprietary version (lack of copyright notices don't provide this guarantee, as someone could have simply taken them off before it reached you.)
For example, let's say I want a high-quality image of some famous (old, out-of-copyright) painting. I can't just go into the museum and take a photo myself in most cases, so I have to settle for an image someone else has taken. But what if that person has made digital edits (resizing, cleanup, color changes) that are acceptable as copyrightable proprietary modifications? I can't use it (or at least, I might get sued for doing so.) There are whole worlds of material in the public domain that aren't accessable because the only published copies are modified and therefore proprietary.
Therefore, in a world with strict copyright laws, sometimes a license is the only way to keep something public an accessable.
The government can't license its code under the GPL or under BSD. Both of those licensing schemes rely on copyright, and the government is not allowed to copyright its works. They can hire private contractors to write copyrighted works, and in that case, I see nothing wrong with recommending the default use of BSD.
But it's not as simple as that. The real issue is: should the government be allowed to use GPLed code (and make slight modifications to it where necessary)?
For instance, let's say the government really needs a piece of software to calibrate widgets. There's nothing on the market that does exactly what they need, but there is a piece of GPLed software that, with a minimal investment of development time, could be modified to do exactly what the government wants. The alternative is to buy an imperfect, packaged solution for many times the cost.
Should the government be allowed to go with the most appropriate and least expensive solution in this case, or should we allow these Senators to pass some general beaureaucratic measure that prevents people from making appropriate case-by-case decisions? If this law goes through, the government is essentially banned from distributing even the smallest tweaks to GPLed software, and that could very well cost us all money without gaining us a thing.
Quite frankly, any company that can afford to pay $200,000 but won't pony up for office supplies needs to seriously rethink its priorities.
If you're that valuable, the company should be going out of its way to insure that you get all the paper you need rather than classifying it as "theft".