I find it interesting that the lawyers speak of "intellectual property rights" rather than the actual rights supposedly being trounced. Is this a patent, copyright, or license case?
From what I can gather, FBM wrote software that works with their hardware. This violates no copyright law, unless the DMCA somehow figures into it (side beef: the DMCA is not copyright, it is use-right).
It might be one of those "software patent" or "business plan patent" cases. Do they hold a patent for using a scanner to get information based on a bar code? If so, they might have a legal (though, IMHO, illegitemate) beef.
Finally, though not likely, they are trying to enforce a license agreement. I don't have one of these scanners, so I don't know what sort of click-through licensing there is. However, these traditionally apply only to the software which is being thrown away here.
If it isn't any of the above, I figure they don't have a leg to stand on. They might as well have Craftsman sue me for using a claw hammer as a meat tenderizer.
Egos are amazing. More than once, I have sent email out to my co-workers noting that I wrote the bug that was causing the day's grief (usually with "Mea Culpa" as the subject line) Every time, people come back to me and are amazed that I am one of the few developers willing to admit that I wrote a bug.
If enough developers can get over themselves, and admit that they make mistakes once in a while, we might get a little further...
Usually, customers aren't individuals. They are usually large outfits, buying in bulk.
Sure, they can't fix things when they break. But they can hire somebody.
If I am a dot-com, I have a commercial web server, and it crashes under certain circumstances, I can only work with the vendor. If they want to fix it and can, I'm in luck; otherwise, I'm hosed. If I have an OSS web server, and it crashes under certain circumstances, I can hire people to fix it. I probably won't actually put them on my payroll; I'll just look for a contract.
The fact that developers have so much freedom with an OSS product directly implies that users with money can get said developers to push the software in their preferred direction. In the commercial market, the customer is stuck with the prayer method of software support.
The entire point is to get the product out and making money. If making it clean doesn't help that, don't make it clean!
Unfortunately, the company often doesn't realize that keeping it clean helps you work faster, and that gets the product out the door faster. Getting the product out the door faster is something they can understand. Clean code, to people who read code as line noise, sounds like some esoteric virtue, so they don't care about it.
The solution is often to make the code clean as your personal version of "I'm working as fast as I can". I've fallen into the trap of trying to speed up by sacrificing cleanliness. Unless you are doing a sprint measurable in hours, this doesn't work; you end up sloshing through mud.
The analogy I've heard comes from house painting. Ask a company to come in and paint a room, and the first thing they do is come in with drop cloths, blue tape, and do a lot of things that are not painting. This is patently unneccesary; if they are careful, they won't get paint where it's not wanted. but once they do all this prep work (the equivalent of cleaning code), they can paint fast-fast-fast. The prep work actually saves time.
Similarly, cleaning code saves time, usually immediately. It makes you faster at coding, reduces the debug cycles, reduces the amount of time you have to listen to QA/management/customers rant on about bugs.
That is something I never understood. You got some person that goes to business school or 4-6 years (if they even went to school in some cases) that didn't take 1
single computer corse in college. Yet these are the people making the biggest and most crictical judgements that will effect the software the most.
If the business types are competent, they don't have to know a thing about how to make software. They do need to know what features will sell, and how well. That is, they need to grok the customer. That's their job.
If the techies are competent, they don't have to know a thing about the customer. They have to understand what the business types are telling them to build, and to build it to their satisfaction.
You don't want techies telling the business people what features need to go in (unless the software is to be consumed by techies, perhaps), and you don't want business people telling techies how to put the features in. Once that happens, people are stepping on each others' toes.
Sure, the spec is going to change. The business reality is going to change. What's going to happen in three months in this biz? I don't know, and I'm a Slashdotter! There are several ways to handle this, and every good software engineering methodology, from extreme programming to Rational Unified Process, takes that into account.
Now for the dirty little secret. If you have competent businesspeople and competent techies, this will work. If you have incompetent businesspeople, or incompetent techies, the product will be a hard sell. The nasty part is, unlike a McDonald's, no amount of process or other idiotproofing measures can change this. I've seen process go out of hand to try to reign in incompetent businesspeople and incompetent techies: it just doesn't work. Any process heavy enough to keep an incompetent from doing damage (to say nothing about making progress) is so heavy that the competent people must ignore it in order to get anywhere.
There are exactly two ways to handle incompetent businesspeople and techies on a software project: training and severence pay.
There are at least two types of code out there: money-critical (failures cost money) and life-critical (failures cost lives). The Shuttle code lives clearly in the second category; most of us are programming in the first category.
Building life-critical software is fundamentally different from making money-critical software. This is because, for life-critical software, people will trade off time-to-market and feature base to get quality (absence of bugs).
Open Source doesn't even provide this. Think about it. If you needed a pacemaker (life-critical), would you want it to run on Linux? I wouldn't. Linux has uptimes of over a year; I need uptimes measured in decades. Frankly, no top 10 OS is qualified for life-critical stuff. I'll trust Linux with my data, even my money, but not with my pulse, my shuttle, or my airliner avionics.
When you build life-critical software, you do it anal-retentively, line-by-line, and work at a snail's pace. The result is something that does one thing (or a few things) very well under incredible circumstances.
Try working that way in the commercial world of money-critical software, and you will be beat to market every time. And not by a little. I bet that it would take decades to build a word processor to compete with today's stuff, if it had to have life-critical reliability.
The code is different, the process is different, the people are different.
Here's another (justifiably) paranoid explanation.
Microsoft lets this "development" leak through channels. Either they blow it completely out their ears, or they do a half a job, then call it quits.
This is the standard MS vaporware strategy. It freezes competition. "Don't bother deploying StarOffice/ThisOffice/ThatOffice, Microsoft is porting theirs."
You are correct. However, the point of the T-shirt is to show the court that they are indeed dealing with a speech issue. To a non-geek, source code looks like so much technotrash, not an actual communication.
Without the T-shirt, the court may have made the mistake of assuming that it was dealing with mere technology, rather than actual speech. Code is technology, and most technology is not speech. A car isn't free speech, is it? T-shirts show that, unlike most technology, software is speech.
T-shirts are just another medium, but it is a medium that non-geeks recognize as speech.
I don't say this as a standard "kill the lawyers" gripe, but as a statement of fact. Indeed, I would not want to live somewhere where law was based on true, Lewis Carrol-style logic.
The wonder of logic is that, given enough information, it produces perfect results. The problem with logic is that, given insufficient information, it is silent. While this is fine in a math class, this is not good enough for the legal situations we place ourselves or wind up in.
Hell, we humans are good at illogic, exactly because life rarely gives us all the information in advance. BTW, this is likely a problem for AI.
Yes, the measure of truth in law is convincing a judge or jury that your argument is superior or correct. That is because we haven't found the Cosmic Truthmeter, and a judge or jury is the closest thing we can find. Don't complain unless you can find something better;^>
We get these articles, but nobody ever shows how to get to the actual bill, so everything is hearsay.
If I did my research correctly, this is bill number H. R. 3125. Go to the Thomas site at the Library of Congress and enter that in as a search parameter.
I think that what you are talking about is a railgun. Railguns would not work here because of the "splut factor"--they can produce at least thousands of gees, and are obviously lethal.
That's why I suggested several miles of catapult, based on how long it would have to be to break the sound barrier at one gee. Face it, there are rifles (real, hand held ones) out there that can get a piece of lead up to mach 1 in under a meter.
I can think of two possible ways to do this. One is a serial gauss gun. You put a series of electromagnets on the rail, and turn magnets on just before the catapult shuttle (equivalent to the thing they hook up to navy fighters' nose gear) reaches them and off just as it hits. Thus, a ferrous cat shuttle would always be pulled forward by magnetism.
The second possibility would be to put an electric motor and a (possibly) a transmission into the shuttle itself, let it draw power from charged rails, and let the shuttle pull everything. It would work like an electric train on steroids.
In either case, the two important things are handled. One, the energy source is immobile and we don't have to waste energy accelerating it. Two, we can control the acceleration and make it something that humans can handle.
Given that you're right about getting to Mach 1, we can get some interesting things done about that. What would happen given a large catapult?
I'm not talking about a medieval rock-thrower, I'm talking about something more like an aircraft carrier cat, on a huge scale. Several flat, straight miles of catapult (the middle of a Plains state, anyone?) should get something to mach 1 in just under 30 seconds, pulling at a somewhat comfortable one gee. All this, and you haven't had to lift one ounce of fuel or engine--all the power is ground-bound and thus relatively cheap.
From mach 1, you can light up a ramjet--an engine simpler than today's turbofans that doesn't need impellors to scoop up air. You launch around (or a bit beyond) the sound barrier, horizontally, and your first stage carries nothing but hydrogen. When you get high enough to starge the ramjets, you drop that stage and go to a conventional rocket--probably at speed and altitude exceeding an SR-71.
Nobody's ever gotten a cat up to those speeds, but I suspect that's because nobody cares to. Electromagnets could do that, given some mighty big capacitors and your favorite ground-bound power source. Ramjets are a known technology--we launch them from under bomber wings, because their problem is that they cannot go from a standing start.
The GPL requires that, if you distribute the software, you grant the same GPL rights that you yourself have been granted, such as right to distribute (with source code et al).
An NDA would specifically remove those rights, so NDAs are incompatible with GPLs.
Software makers aren't liable. Software vendors are liable. Last time I checked, Linus has yet to sell a single copy of Linux. He's given away millions of copies, but that's another story. You don't get the right to sue just because you sent him a virtual beer.
Arguably, you should be able to sue your distro vendor when the code pukes, but even that is a legal grey area (are they really selling software, or just the ability to install it without downloading it off the Web?)
Why should Linus cover you if aren't paying him? that would make people responsible for unlimited liability with zero compensation.
You pay nothing for the software, you have no right to complain about its quality or warranty. You pay money for the CDs it came on and the books it shipped with, you have a true beef.
All goods come with an implicit warranty for use; this warranty is protected under law. If I buy a pen, I have a right to sue (or more realistically, get my money back) if it doesn't write--that is, if it doesn't perform like a pen.
With OSS software, the most you pay for is a distribution--a tape, a CD--maybe a book. You can argue that you get the implied warranty on the software if you buy a distribution, or just that the implied warranty applies to the physical distribution (the CD actually contains bits; the tape won't tear in your drive). If an OSS distro has an implied warranty (courts can decide this; IANAL), that onus is on the distribution vendor, not the software authors.
If you download OSS software, however, the legal grey area goes away. You paid nothing, you get no warranty.
The pirate has no legal leg to stand on. Even if the court rules the EULA null and void, the pirate is guilty of copyright infringement.
Software companies want to tell you that they need EULAs to prevent piracy. The laws are already there to prevent that. Copy a music CD, or a book, for a friend? You're a pirate, and the real owner can pull you into court, EULA or no EULA.
Software companies don't think that copyright law is good enough. They want you to have fewer rights over the software you buy than you have over the books that you buy. The twin tools of that fight are the EULA and the concept of "we're not selling you a copy; we're selling you a license, and the bits on the CD are secondary".
I'm not turning around and saying all (or even most) software companies are evil due to the EULA. A company that doesn't use a EULA could be sued by its shareholders for not adequately protecting itself. IMHO, a multilateral disarmament is necessary--probably not by a new law, but by a court decision.
That's actually not a bad clause. That clause doesn't take away any rights you have, that just affirms Norton's actual copyright.
I guess that Norton's reasoning (other than defending their copyright) is that, if you want to hand your users copies of the manual, they'll be happy to sell you a box full of 'em.
Speaking as a former player, there are some serious problems here.
It's the dystopian future of 2026. . I thought that it was the dystopian future of 2050 or so.
Shadowrunners are the individualists who live on the margins, able to "slide like a whisper" through the databases of giant corporations, spiriting away the only thing of real value -- information.
You describe "deckers", a subcategory of shadowrunners. A shadowrunner is an elite freelance agent, a black operative with no allegience. For non-players, think of the old "Mission: Impossible" TV show (not the movies) for reference. You get in, do a job (sabotage, defend, steal, kill, kidnap), and get out before anybody knows you're there. You work for one authority at a time, and spend your run avoiding the other authorities.
While a lot of us feel like characters in a Shadowrun world (IMHO, more of a CyberPunk 2.0.2.0. world), but not as Shadowrunners ourselves.
A lot of the people reading this are already Shadowrunners, or are about to be. You're telling me that most Slashdotters are freelance criminals working their crimes for a corporate clientele? Wow, I've been missing the boat--I should hang out in bars more often, waiting for Mr. Johnson from AT&T...
All corporatists have a shared goal: to give stockholders maximum rewards. That outweighs any other consideration. Magic, the recourse of the idiosyncratic individual, is anathema to corporatism -- inherently illogical, unpredictable, thus unprofitable. You missed a trick here--a big trick. Note the Shadowrun corp called Aztechnology. They live on magic.
The Shadowrunners, in the game and in the world, are realists. They understand the nature of the world they live in. They are what is perhaps the rarest of figures in contemporary American public life -- heretics. More often than not, they also tend to be cold-blooded murderers. I'm not. Are you?
One more big trick. The generic plot of a Shadowrun game is that you and your buddies (freelance black ops all) get hired for a job by a "Mr. Johnson" (shadowspeak for "anonymous employer") to do a job that will usually take no more than a week. Mr. Johnson almost invariably works for a megacorporation or government, and is hiring you to do a run against another megacorporation or government. After all this individualism and rebellion against the megacorps, they're the ones footing the bill for you.
If I were you, I would check out R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. The magic and elves are gone, the feel is grittier (more Blade Runner and Neuromancer than the anime feel of Shadowrun), and the game is much more open-ended. That is, characters are sometimes shadowrun-type freelancers, sometimes work for a corp, sometimes are a corp, whatever.
Re:Selling your soul to the devil? License it inst
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 2
The Devil is smarter than that. He'll only buy a license if he can figure out a way to defeat you in court and make it a full sale. Otherwise, he's got a lot of suppliers who will just sell theirs to him...
We don't need laws to protect the consumer. We need to get rid of the laws that assault the consumer. These are two entirely different things.
Consumers do pretty well at protecting themselves from government or business. Consumers have problems when government and business don't gang up on them.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I can gather, FBM wrote software that works with their hardware. This violates no copyright law, unless the DMCA somehow figures into it (side beef: the DMCA is not copyright, it is use-right).
It might be one of those "software patent" or "business plan patent" cases. Do they hold a patent for using a scanner to get information based on a bar code? If so, they might have a legal (though, IMHO, illegitemate) beef.
Finally, though not likely, they are trying to enforce a license agreement. I don't have one of these scanners, so I don't know what sort of click-through licensing there is. However, these traditionally apply only to the software which is being thrown away here.
If it isn't any of the above, I figure they don't have a leg to stand on. They might as well have Craftsman sue me for using a claw hammer as a meat tenderizer.
If enough developers can get over themselves, and admit that they make mistakes once in a while, we might get a little further...
Sure, they can't fix things when they break. But they can hire somebody.
If I am a dot-com, I have a commercial web server, and it crashes under certain circumstances, I can only work with the vendor. If they want to fix it and can, I'm in luck; otherwise, I'm hosed. If I have an OSS web server, and it crashes under certain circumstances, I can hire people to fix it. I probably won't actually put them on my payroll; I'll just look for a contract.
The fact that developers have so much freedom with an OSS product directly implies that users with money can get said developers to push the software in their preferred direction. In the commercial market, the customer is stuck with the prayer method of software support.
Unfortunately, the company often doesn't realize that keeping it clean helps you work faster, and that gets the product out the door faster. Getting the product out the door faster is something they can understand. Clean code, to people who read code as line noise, sounds like some esoteric virtue, so they don't care about it.
The solution is often to make the code clean as your personal version of "I'm working as fast as I can". I've fallen into the trap of trying to speed up by sacrificing cleanliness. Unless you are doing a sprint measurable in hours, this doesn't work; you end up sloshing through mud.
The analogy I've heard comes from house painting. Ask a company to come in and paint a room, and the first thing they do is come in with drop cloths, blue tape, and do a lot of things that are not painting. This is patently unneccesary; if they are careful, they won't get paint where it's not wanted. but once they do all this prep work (the equivalent of cleaning code), they can paint fast-fast-fast. The prep work actually saves time.
Similarly, cleaning code saves time, usually immediately. It makes you faster at coding, reduces the debug cycles, reduces the amount of time you have to listen to QA/management/customers rant on about bugs.
If the business types are competent, they don't have to know a thing about how to make software. They do need to know what features will sell, and how well. That is, they need to grok the customer. That's their job.
If the techies are competent, they don't have to know a thing about the customer. They have to understand what the business types are telling them to build, and to build it to their satisfaction.
You don't want techies telling the business people what features need to go in (unless the software is to be consumed by techies, perhaps), and you don't want business people telling techies how to put the features in. Once that happens, people are stepping on each others' toes.
Sure, the spec is going to change. The business reality is going to change. What's going to happen in three months in this biz? I don't know, and I'm a Slashdotter! There are several ways to handle this, and every good software engineering methodology, from extreme programming to Rational Unified Process, takes that into account.
Now for the dirty little secret. If you have competent businesspeople and competent techies, this will work. If you have incompetent businesspeople, or incompetent techies, the product will be a hard sell. The nasty part is, unlike a McDonald's, no amount of process or other idiotproofing measures can change this. I've seen process go out of hand to try to reign in incompetent businesspeople and incompetent techies: it just doesn't work. Any process heavy enough to keep an incompetent from doing damage (to say nothing about making progress) is so heavy that the competent people must ignore it in order to get anywhere.
There are exactly two ways to handle incompetent businesspeople and techies on a software project: training and severence pay.
Building life-critical software is fundamentally different from making money-critical software. This is because, for life-critical software, people will trade off time-to-market and feature base to get quality (absence of bugs).
Open Source doesn't even provide this. Think about it. If you needed a pacemaker (life-critical), would you want it to run on Linux? I wouldn't. Linux has uptimes of over a year; I need uptimes measured in decades. Frankly, no top 10 OS is qualified for life-critical stuff. I'll trust Linux with my data, even my money, but not with my pulse, my shuttle, or my airliner avionics.
When you build life-critical software, you do it anal-retentively, line-by-line, and work at a snail's pace. The result is something that does one thing (or a few things) very well under incredible circumstances.
Try working that way in the commercial world of money-critical software, and you will be beat to market every time. And not by a little. I bet that it would take decades to build a word processor to compete with today's stuff, if it had to have life-critical reliability.
The code is different, the process is different, the people are different.
Microsoft lets this "development" leak through channels. Either they blow it completely out their ears, or they do a half a job, then call it quits.
This is the standard MS vaporware strategy. It freezes competition. "Don't bother deploying StarOffice/ThisOffice/ThatOffice, Microsoft is porting theirs."
Without the T-shirt, the court may have made the mistake of assuming that it was dealing with mere technology, rather than actual speech. Code is technology, and most technology is not speech. A car isn't free speech, is it? T-shirts show that, unlike most technology, software is speech.
T-shirts are just another medium, but it is a medium that non-geeks recognize as speech.
Oh, what the heck. Teach the computers Esperanto!
I don't say this as a standard "kill the lawyers" gripe, but as a statement of fact. Indeed, I would not want to live somewhere where law was based on true, Lewis Carrol-style logic.
The wonder of logic is that, given enough information, it produces perfect results. The problem with logic is that, given insufficient information, it is silent. While this is fine in a math class, this is not good enough for the legal situations we place ourselves or wind up in.
Hell, we humans are good at illogic, exactly because life rarely gives us all the information in advance. BTW, this is likely a problem for AI.
Yes, the measure of truth in law is convincing a judge or jury that your argument is superior or correct. That is because we haven't found the Cosmic Truthmeter, and a judge or jury is the closest thing we can find. Don't complain unless you can find something better ;^>
If I did my research correctly, this is bill number H. R. 3125. Go to the Thomas site at the Library of Congress and enter that in as a search parameter.
That's why I suggested several miles of catapult, based on how long it would have to be to break the sound barrier at one gee. Face it, there are rifles (real, hand held ones) out there that can get a piece of lead up to mach 1 in under a meter.
I can think of two possible ways to do this. One is a serial gauss gun. You put a series of electromagnets on the rail, and turn magnets on just before the catapult shuttle (equivalent to the thing they hook up to navy fighters' nose gear) reaches them and off just as it hits. Thus, a ferrous cat shuttle would always be pulled forward by magnetism.
The second possibility would be to put an electric motor and a (possibly) a transmission into the shuttle itself, let it draw power from charged rails, and let the shuttle pull everything. It would work like an electric train on steroids.
In either case, the two important things are handled. One, the energy source is immobile and we don't have to waste energy accelerating it. Two, we can control the acceleration and make it something that humans can handle.
Given that you're right about getting to Mach 1, we can get some interesting things done about that. What would happen given a large catapult?
I'm not talking about a medieval rock-thrower, I'm talking about something more like an aircraft carrier cat, on a huge scale. Several flat, straight miles of catapult (the middle of a Plains state, anyone?) should get something to mach 1 in just under 30 seconds, pulling at a somewhat comfortable one gee. All this, and you haven't had to lift one ounce of fuel or engine--all the power is ground-bound and thus relatively cheap.
From mach 1, you can light up a ramjet--an engine simpler than today's turbofans that doesn't need impellors to scoop up air. You launch around (or a bit beyond) the sound barrier, horizontally, and your first stage carries nothing but hydrogen. When you get high enough to starge the ramjets, you drop that stage and go to a conventional rocket--probably at speed and altitude exceeding an SR-71.
Nobody's ever gotten a cat up to those speeds, but I suspect that's because nobody cares to. Electromagnets could do that, given some mighty big capacitors and your favorite ground-bound power source. Ramjets are a known technology--we launch them from under bomber wings, because their problem is that they cannot go from a standing start.
An NDA would specifically remove those rights, so NDAs are incompatible with GPLs.
Hey, it works for O'Reilly and Larry Wall. Sounds like a progressive business model!
Arguably, you should be able to sue your distro vendor when the code pukes, but even that is a legal grey area (are they really selling software, or just the ability to install it without downloading it off the Web?)
Why should Linus cover you if aren't paying him? that would make people responsible for unlimited liability with zero compensation.
All goods come with an implicit warranty for use; this warranty is protected under law. If I buy a pen, I have a right to sue (or more realistically, get my money back) if it doesn't write--that is, if it doesn't perform like a pen.
With OSS software, the most you pay for is a distribution--a tape, a CD--maybe a book. You can argue that you get the implied warranty on the software if you buy a distribution, or just that the implied warranty applies to the physical distribution (the CD actually contains bits; the tape won't tear in your drive). If an OSS distro has an implied warranty (courts can decide this; IANAL), that onus is on the distribution vendor, not the software authors.
If you download OSS software, however, the legal grey area goes away. You paid nothing, you get no warranty.
Software companies want to tell you that they need EULAs to prevent piracy. The laws are already there to prevent that. Copy a music CD, or a book, for a friend? You're a pirate, and the real owner can pull you into court, EULA or no EULA.
Software companies don't think that copyright law is good enough. They want you to have fewer rights over the software you buy than you have over the books that you buy. The twin tools of that fight are the EULA and the concept of "we're not selling you a copy; we're selling you a license, and the bits on the CD are secondary".
I'm not turning around and saying all (or even most) software companies are evil due to the EULA. A company that doesn't use a EULA could be sued by its shareholders for not adequately protecting itself. IMHO, a multilateral disarmament is necessary--probably not by a new law, but by a court decision.
I guess that Norton's reasoning (other than defending their copyright) is that, if you want to hand your users copies of the manual, they'll be happy to sell you a box full of 'em.
BTW, this means that it is illegal to run the software on WINE or similar emulation packages.
I moved out of my parents' basement years ago.
It's the dystopian future of 2026. . I thought that it was the dystopian future of 2050 or so.
Shadowrunners are the individualists who live on the margins, able to "slide like a whisper" through the databases of giant corporations, spiriting away the only thing of real value -- information.
You describe "deckers", a subcategory of shadowrunners. A shadowrunner is an elite freelance agent, a black operative with no allegience. For non-players, think of the old "Mission: Impossible" TV show (not the movies) for reference. You get in, do a job (sabotage, defend, steal, kill, kidnap), and get out before anybody knows you're there. You work for one authority at a time, and spend your run avoiding the other authorities.
While a lot of us feel like characters in a Shadowrun world (IMHO, more of a CyberPunk 2.0.2.0. world), but not as Shadowrunners ourselves.
A lot of the people reading this are already Shadowrunners, or are about to be. You're telling me that most Slashdotters are freelance criminals working their crimes for a corporate clientele? Wow, I've been missing the boat--I should hang out in bars more often, waiting for Mr. Johnson from AT&T...
All corporatists have a shared goal: to give stockholders maximum rewards. That outweighs any other consideration. Magic, the recourse of the idiosyncratic individual, is anathema to corporatism -- inherently illogical, unpredictable, thus unprofitable. You missed a trick here--a big trick. Note the Shadowrun corp called Aztechnology. They live on magic.
The Shadowrunners, in the game and in the world, are realists. They understand the nature of the world they live in. They are what is perhaps the rarest of figures in contemporary American public life -- heretics. More often than not, they also tend to be cold-blooded murderers. I'm not. Are you?
One more big trick. The generic plot of a Shadowrun game is that you and your buddies (freelance black ops all) get hired for a job by a "Mr. Johnson" (shadowspeak for "anonymous employer") to do a job that will usually take no more than a week. Mr. Johnson almost invariably works for a megacorporation or government, and is hiring you to do a run against another megacorporation or government. After all this individualism and rebellion against the megacorps, they're the ones footing the bill for you.
If I were you, I would check out R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. The magic and elves are gone, the feel is grittier (more Blade Runner and Neuromancer than the anime feel of Shadowrun), and the game is much more open-ended. That is, characters are sometimes shadowrun-type freelancers, sometimes work for a corp, sometimes are a corp, whatever.
The Devil is smarter than that. He'll only buy a license if he can figure out a way to defeat you in court and make it a full sale. Otherwise, he's got a lot of suppliers who will just sell theirs to him...
Consumers do pretty well at protecting themselves from government or business. Consumers have problems when government and business don't gang up on them.
Ahhh...this must be Microsoft's Zero Administration effort. So ka.