Um, I don't know where you come from but the only people you are stealing from when you download movies, programs, or music is shareholders and CEOs. And I've got NO moral qualms about that.
HOW, you ask?
No, Why, I ask. But we'll let that slide.
It is simple, content creators are usually paid a flat fee for their work, for programmers it is their salary, for movie makers it is what the movie studip pays them, and for musicians it is 0.
Hmmm... while I can think of individual cases where this is true, I can think of plenty where it's not.
For example, the company I now work for gives all of its employees a percentage of the company profits. It's a software company. So, no, the programmers there don't get paid a flat fee.
So no, content creators aren't always paid on a work-for-hire basis. And you appear to have this idea that if you're a company, you don't deserve to have money. Clue for you: Companies are made up of people like you and me. I have a company. I'm the CEO. It has precisely ONE official employee - me. But it's still a company.
They get paid regardless of how much their product sells.
Theoretically, yes. Assuming your argument to be correct... how much any given product sells determines whether or not more products are made, which determines whether or not they continue to make a salary.
If they lose money on a product, the team that makes that product will be laid off, and no more of those products will be made.
Anyone who gets paid in points is an idiot and deserves to be taken advantage of.
There you go, stealing IP is not only moral, it's morally RIGHT!
No, it's not morally right. You've just given examples of people who work in the content industry, made a handwaving argument with no basis in actual reality about how people in that industry are paid and compensated, and you have NO link in your conclusion which takes that information and makes a moral determination one way or another.
Try again, but this time, put some thought into your argument.
The person who simply used that as an excuse to accuse him of rationalising "taking" stuff that doesn't belong to him was trolling
Really?
So you think that he's not just using a slippery-slope argument to rationalize his copyright infringement?
Copyright law being extended does NOT give you the right to ignore it. It does NOT mean that the corporations are "stealing" anything from you - because you never owned the works you want to copy in the first place.
It's a lame, and pretty damn transparent argument - it appeals to the idea that the corporations are faceless entities with Enough Money that the Robin Hood principle applies (Steal from the Rich, Give to the Poor).
The thing about the Robin Hood principle is that, while always popular with the masses, it suddenly gets unpopular with the masses once it's applied to them individually and someone's copying their work.
Ultimately, it's a selfish act on the part of those who want to freeload off the back of the hard work of others. The marginal cost of replication is NOT related to the cost of creation of the copyrighted goods - and when people copy others' works without compensating them, they're ignoring the cost of producing those works.
It all comes down to two basic fallacious arguments:
1. Corporations have Enough Money. They don't need any more. Them asking for more is hurting me because I want their things. I should get everything I want that they produce for free.
- this is a lousy argument at best. If you want to set up such a system, who decides and how is it decided when you have "enough"? And why should YOU be excluded?
2. Copyright law is restrictive, and I'm fighting them by being disobedient!
- Bullshit. You just want free stuff, and you're trying to justify it. If you really believed in your principles here, you'd boycott them. That way you're legally in the right, morally in the right, and you're not giving them any ammunition to use against you. But people don't do that - ergo, they're just using this as an excuse to legitimize their copyright infringement.
But hey, if you don't believe that he's rationalizing this theft, why dont' you explain what he was doing?
Oh, and by the way... disagreeing with people is not "trolling".
Look up the following: Mplayer, Kaffeine, Xine, LibDVDRead and BZFlag. Not replacements for closed source, really. Far better, IMO.... but to use MPlayer for the most part you have to use a whole slew of DLLs illegally copied from Windows distributions.
Replacements for closed source that need to steal closed source code to work aren't really "replacements".
Well, each time Congress extends the length of copyright or strengthens patent law, they're stealing from me, they're stealing from you, and they're stealing from each person in this country who could gain anything from that work, even if it's just 90 minutes of enjoyment from watching an old movie for free. I, for one, am outraged, and now that Congress has turned to looting from me for the benefit of the few who are wealthy and powerful, I will feel no remorse when I download music, or copy DVDs.
Well, heck, whatever it takes for you to feel better about taking someone else's work without compensating them, I guess.
It's amazing how easy it is to rationalize those things away, isn't it?
Presumably you haven't seen Alley Cat. Or any of the games available for "home computers" at the time.
Are you unable to read?
I said this:
"The thing is, I'd love to see you do better on 1981 hardware."
Given that you're quoting games from 1984 - by which point, the hardware was much more capable - one must assume that you have reading comprehension problems.
Alley Cat was released in 1984.
Here's a screenshot of what most games released in 1981 looked like. ZX81 screenshot
Sure I do. The Microsoft ones. You know, that are highly optimized for their platform. Compare the source code between their version and GCC's version if you want - the only similarities you'll see are the header files.
Are you using an AVL tree? That comes from open source. Ditto for a B+Tree. Ditto for quicksort. Ditto for almost any of the basic techniques. Actually, I can't think of even ONE that originated from the closed source world. And there are good reasons why this is true. If it were to originate in the closed source world, nobody would ever hear about it, so it would die with the product it was built
It really is rediculous all around. Bill neglects to carefully consider that the GPL and other open source licenses are simply gifts of intellectual property to the community at large. In no way does the GPL or BSD licenses "disrespect" commercial licenses, they just offer a better value than the commercial licenses, ie., our software is our gift to you.
Gifts don't typically come with strings attached.
The BSD license doesn't - but the GPL certainly does. Big fat chains, if you will.
"We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen... we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments."
The problem isn't that Microsoft was founded by programmers. The problem is that it was founded by bad programmers.
The thing is, I'd love to see you do better on 1981 hardware.
RMS answered the "communist" accusation in 1992's Why Software Should be Free, the section "Why don't you move to Russia?".
Of course, the problem is that he's talking about the Soviet Republic's own brand of Communism, not Communism in general (which OSS actually fits pretty well).
Yep, he pretty much just said that if you don't support IP then your a Communist.
No, he pretty much just said that if you think that everyone should be able to copy anyone else's work just because they think that it's their right to do so, that you're a Communist.
Kind of the same thing, but let's be explicit here.
The world's richest man and still as greedy as ever
Hmmm... I agree with him... yet I'm certainly not rich. I don't think that expecting to be paid for my work makes me greedy. I think that others expecting to get my work for free makes them freeloaders though.
Heh. No. What I mean is that people see what most consider "rightful sampling" as outright theft. Like Photoshop. It costs what? 650? 700usd? Eventho you may download it, not be making a profit at it, and would have never bought a legal copy, they see you as a criminal.
That's because you're doing something which is against the law. Which, by definition, makes you a criminal, because you're committing a crime.
Especially when you can download a trial version of Photoshop for free, so your whole "rightful sampling" argument goes out of the window.
I would (and have in fact done so previously) that on Open Source Operating System merely creates a level playing field that no one can exploit the way MS can with Windows.
The problem with level playing fields is that they tend to produce mediocre results.
Look at ANY school system which has tried the same thing. Or any standard (eg. HTML - where's CSS3.0 again? Why didn't we have a box with edges and corners layout model to being with).
Of course the flaw in both our arguements is that we are discussing a creation which is very difficult and expensive to reproduce
The biggest flaw is not that - it's that you're talking about patents, and he's talking about copyrights. Your example ONLY holds for patent law - it has no equivalent under copyright law.
It is sad though that Bill Gates thinks that by associating GPL with an "american taboo word of the 20th century," he can accomplish something. Now, he seems to be taking the role of Steve Ballmer. May be time to see Bill Gates jumping up and down screaming "Developers... Developers... Communists... Develpers..".
He's just responding to RMS's comments from the other day.
RMS: You're Antisocial! Gates: You're a Communist! RMS: You're Antisocial! Gates: You're a Communist! RMS: Antisocial! Gates: Communist!
Your opinion is your own. I have seen what I have seen.
Nobody can see the closed sources, so there is no possibility of proving this one way or the other.
You're just calling into disrepute all of the professional software developers of the world who work on Closed-source software.
That's what I call a blatant lie.
I've worked on closed source software for years (some of which I've put the source into the public domain). NONE of this was copied from ANY "Open Source" source.
Frankly, as a closed-source software developer, I take great offense at your claims. In MY experience, having worked at a large number of software companies - including Microsoft - you're lying through your teeth. I *HAVE* seen the source. You *haven't*. So stop lying.
It's possible that most code in proprietary software can no longer be traced to previously open sources outside the companies that are selling it. But that certainly used to be the case, and I see no reason to believe that anything has changed just because I can no longer check.
You're making an illogical statement. You've still not proved that most proprietary software is based on Open source code. You're just making that wild ass claim with nothing to back it up.
Look up the history of DOS and MSWind. Look up the history of MSBasic.
Sorry to tell you this... but Microsoft doesn't create the majority of proprietary software.
Whether you're right or not about them "stealing" it, frankly, you're not right about the majority of proprietary software. You're just biased and very very wrong.
When you lose that programming job, after having been forced to train your outsourced replacement who will be getting 1% of your wages, and won't be able to find another programming job for reasonable wages - please come back and tell us more about how outsourcing creates more jobs here in the US.... of course, the amusing thing is, what do you think that "Free" software does to the job market? Make it better?
Morals? How can a thief justify the morality of his actions? How? By hiding the origin of what he's selling. I.e., by making the source code hidden. (And that tells you exactly where I believe most "proprietary" companies are coming from.)
So you believe that most proprietary software companies are stealing others' code?
That's a pretty strong statement. Bordering on insane, some might say.
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Um, I don't know where you come from but the only people you are stealing from when you download movies, programs, or music is shareholders and CEOs. And I've got NO moral qualms about that.
HOW, you ask?
No, Why, I ask. But we'll let that slide.
It is simple, content creators are usually paid a flat fee for their work, for programmers it is their salary, for movie makers it is what the movie studip pays them, and for musicians it is 0.
Hmmm... while I can think of individual cases where this is true, I can think of plenty where it's not.
For example, the company I now work for gives all of its employees a percentage of the company profits. It's a software company. So, no, the programmers there don't get paid a flat fee.
So no, content creators aren't always paid on a work-for-hire basis. And you appear to have this idea that if you're a company, you don't deserve to have money. Clue for you: Companies are made up of people like you and me. I have a company. I'm the CEO. It has precisely ONE official employee - me. But it's still a company.
They get paid regardless of how much their product sells.
Theoretically, yes. Assuming your argument to be correct... how much any given product sells determines whether or not more products are made, which determines whether or not they continue to make a salary.
If they lose money on a product, the team that makes that product will be laid off, and no more of those products will be made.
Anyone who gets paid in points is an idiot and deserves to be taken advantage of.
There you go, stealing IP is not only moral, it's morally RIGHT!
No, it's not morally right. You've just given examples of people who work in the content industry, made a handwaving argument with no basis in actual reality about how people in that industry are paid and compensated, and you have NO link in your conclusion which takes that information and makes a moral determination one way or another.
Try again, but this time, put some thought into your argument.
The person who simply used that as an excuse to accuse him of rationalising "taking" stuff that doesn't belong to him was trolling
Really?
So you think that he's not just using a slippery-slope argument to rationalize his copyright infringement?
Copyright law being extended does NOT give you the right to ignore it. It does NOT mean that the corporations are "stealing" anything from you - because you never owned the works you want to copy in the first place.
It's a lame, and pretty damn transparent argument - it appeals to the idea that the corporations are faceless entities with Enough Money that the Robin Hood principle applies (Steal from the Rich, Give to the Poor).
The thing about the Robin Hood principle is that, while always popular with the masses, it suddenly gets unpopular with the masses once it's applied to them individually and someone's copying their work.
Ultimately, it's a selfish act on the part of those who want to freeload off the back of the hard work of others. The marginal cost of replication is NOT related to the cost of creation of the copyrighted goods - and when people copy others' works without compensating them, they're ignoring the cost of producing those works.
It all comes down to two basic fallacious arguments:
1. Corporations have Enough Money. They don't need any more. Them asking for more is hurting me because I want their things. I should get everything I want that they produce for free.
- this is a lousy argument at best. If you want to set up such a system, who decides and how is it decided when you have "enough"? And why should YOU be excluded?
2. Copyright law is restrictive, and I'm fighting them by being disobedient!
- Bullshit. You just want free stuff, and you're trying to justify it. If you really believed in your principles here, you'd boycott them. That way you're legally in the right, morally in the right, and you're not giving them any ammunition to use against you. But people don't do that - ergo, they're just using this as an excuse to legitimize their copyright infringement.
But hey, if you don't believe that he's rationalizing this theft, why dont' you explain what he was doing?
Oh, and by the way... disagreeing with people is not "trolling".
Look up the following: Mplayer, Kaffeine, Xine, LibDVDRead and BZFlag. Not replacements for closed source, really. Far better, IMO. ... but to use MPlayer for the most part you have to use a whole slew of DLLs illegally copied from Windows distributions.
Replacements for closed source that need to steal closed source code to work aren't really "replacements".
Well, each time Congress extends the length of copyright or strengthens patent law, they're stealing from me, they're stealing from you, and they're stealing from each person in this country who could gain anything from that work, even if it's just 90 minutes of enjoyment from watching an old movie for free. I, for one, am outraged, and now that Congress has turned to looting from me for the benefit of the few who are wealthy and powerful, I will feel no remorse when I download music, or copy DVDs.
Well, heck, whatever it takes for you to feel better about taking someone else's work without compensating them, I guess.
It's amazing how easy it is to rationalize those things away, isn't it?
So now I have copyrighted 0 and 1.
You can't copyright numbers. Or mathematical equations. Sorry.
You can copy an individual expression of those numbers, but posting them on a bulletin board effectively voids your hold on them anyway.
Slavery is still slavery when it's legal, rape is still rape when it's legal. Censorship is still censorship when it's legal.
But amusingly, Slavery is illegal, Rape is illegal, and distributing someone else's copyrighted works over the net is - you guessed it - also illegal.
So what was your argument again?
i did better on 1981 hardware at age 4.
Really? What did you do?
I was doing things myself on 1981 hardware at age 6... including a cops & robbers game (kind of a maze game). What did you write?
Presumably you haven't seen Alley Cat. Or any of the games available for "home computers" at the time.
Are you unable to read?
I said this:
"The thing is, I'd love to see you do better on 1981 hardware."
Given that you're quoting games from 1984 - by which point, the hardware was much more capable - one must assume that you have reading comprehension problems.
Alley Cat was released in 1984.
Here's a screenshot of what most games released in 1981 looked like. ZX81 screenshot
You don't use any C libraries?
Sure I do. The Microsoft ones. You know, that are highly optimized for their platform. Compare the source code between their version and GCC's version if you want - the only similarities you'll see are the header files.
Are you using an AVL tree? That comes from open source. Ditto for a B+Tree. Ditto for quicksort. Ditto for almost any of the basic techniques. Actually, I can't think of even ONE that originated from the closed source world. And there are good reasons why this is true. If it were to originate in the closed source world, nobody would ever hear about it, so it would die with the product it was built
That's not Open Source. That's Public Domain.
HUGE difference there, my friend. HUGE.
I'd love to see Microsoft do better on 2020 hardware.
Apparently you've not seen any of the Microsoft Studio games recently. Or you're amazingly biased. One or the other.
It really is rediculous all around. Bill neglects to carefully consider that the GPL and other open source licenses are simply gifts of intellectual property to the community at large. In no way does the GPL or BSD licenses "disrespect" commercial licenses, they just offer a better value than the commercial licenses, ie., our software is our gift to you.
Gifts don't typically come with strings attached.
The BSD license doesn't - but the GPL certainly does. Big fat chains, if you will.
"We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen ... we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments."
The problem isn't that Microsoft was founded by programmers. The problem is that it was founded by bad programmers.
The thing is, I'd love to see you do better on 1981 hardware.
RMS answered the "communist" accusation in 1992's Why Software Should be Free, the section "Why don't you move to Russia?".
Of course, the problem is that he's talking about the Soviet Republic's own brand of Communism, not Communism in general (which OSS actually fits pretty well).
But hey, nice attempt at spin control there, RMS.
Yep, he pretty much just said that if you don't support IP then your a Communist.
No, he pretty much just said that if you think that everyone should be able to copy anyone else's work just because they think that it's their right to do so, that you're a Communist.
Kind of the same thing, but let's be explicit here.
The world's richest man and still as greedy as ever
Hmmm... I agree with him... yet I'm certainly not rich. I don't think that expecting to be paid for my work makes me greedy. I think that others expecting to get my work for free makes them freeloaders though.
Heh. No. What I mean is that people see what most consider "rightful sampling" as outright theft. Like Photoshop. It costs what? 650? 700usd? Eventho you may download it, not be making a profit at it, and would have never bought a legal copy, they see you as a criminal.
That's because you're doing something which is against the law. Which, by definition, makes you a criminal, because you're committing a crime.
Especially when you can download a trial version of Photoshop for free, so your whole "rightful sampling" argument goes out of the window.
I would (and have in fact done so previously) that on Open Source Operating System merely creates a level playing field that no one can exploit the way MS can with Windows.
The problem with level playing fields is that they tend to produce mediocre results.
Look at ANY school system which has tried the same thing. Or any standard (eg. HTML - where's CSS3.0 again? Why didn't we have a box with edges and corners layout model to being with).
Of course the flaw in both our arguements is that we are discussing a creation which is very difficult and expensive to reproduce
The biggest flaw is not that - it's that you're talking about patents, and he's talking about copyrights. Your example ONLY holds for patent law - it has no equivalent under copyright law.
Actually, isn't a government granted monopoly (copyright) and "incentives" more communist than capitalist?
No.
I get the feeling you don't know what Communist or Capitalist means.
It is sad though that Bill Gates thinks that by associating GPL with an "american taboo word of the 20th century," he can accomplish something. Now, he seems to be taking the role of Steve Ballmer. May be time to see Bill Gates jumping up and down screaming "Developers... Developers... Communists... Develpers..".
He's just responding to RMS's comments from the other day.
RMS: You're Antisocial!
Gates: You're a Communist!
RMS: You're Antisocial!
Gates: You're a Communist!
RMS: Antisocial!
Gates: Communist!
Your opinion is your own. I have seen what I have seen.
Nobody can see the closed sources, so there is no possibility of proving this one way or the other.
You're just calling into disrepute all of the professional software developers of the world who work on Closed-source software.
That's what I call a blatant lie.
I've worked on closed source software for years (some of which I've put the source into the public domain). NONE of this was copied from ANY "Open Source" source.
Frankly, as a closed-source software developer, I take great offense at your claims. In MY experience, having worked at a large number of software companies - including Microsoft - you're lying through your teeth. I *HAVE* seen the source. You *haven't*. So stop lying.
It's possible that most code in proprietary software can no longer be traced to previously open sources outside the companies that are selling it. But that certainly used to be the case, and I see no reason to believe that anything has changed just because I can no longer check.
You're making an illogical statement. You've still not proved that most proprietary software is based on Open source code. You're just making that wild ass claim with nothing to back it up.
It's a blatant lie.
Look up the history of DOS and MSWind. Look up the history of MSBasic.
Sorry to tell you this... but Microsoft doesn't create the majority of proprietary software.
Whether you're right or not about them "stealing" it, frankly, you're not right about the majority of proprietary software. You're just biased and very very wrong.
My theory is that subconsciously people feel uncomfortable around RMS because they recognize the debt they (we) owe to him.
Nice theory, but not the case.
I personally abhor people who go around saying that I'm antisocial, or evil, and who condemn me without knowing the first thing about me.
That's why I hate the guy - because he started it.
When you lose that programming job, after having been forced to train your outsourced replacement who will be getting 1% of your wages, and won't be able to find another programming job for reasonable wages - please come back and tell us more about how outsourcing creates more jobs here in the US. ... of course, the amusing thing is, what do you think that "Free" software does to the job market? Make it better?
No, it eliminates jobs for programmers too.
Morals? How can a thief justify the morality of his actions? How? By hiding the origin of what he's selling. I.e., by making the source code hidden. (And that tells you exactly where I believe most "proprietary" companies are coming from.)
So you believe that most proprietary software companies are stealing others' code?
That's a pretty strong statement. Bordering on insane, some might say.