Proprietary consumer applications is a dead market. Those small apps would be fairly easy to code, which means you'd be likely to have an instant free competitor. If there is sufficient demand for the applications there will be enough programmers who want such an application which will end up with them writing it.
Vertical markets and games are the only places where you will be able to make any money. Things like ERP systems and very specialized software, because those things are both complicated, have no spare-time hackers who need them, and have customers likely to pay for them. And games, because there is always room for new ones.
OT: Possible but not likely last I looked. Read the old KDE archives to figure our why.
Oh, yeah, and the people who actually use the software. And multibillion corporations who want to cut down on IT budgets. And those with experience enough in the industry to know that with proprietary products you're gonna depend on a company staying in buisness and actually supporting their products (which usually isnt exactly what happens over a 5 year period). And those who need to customize their software. Well, ok, actually open source is for everyone who isnt a buisness basing their buisness model on selling proprietary software.
And if you want to make money by charging for consumer productivity software, you've got to be named Microsoft and sell software called Windows and Office.
That, of course, leaves the options of moving to China and changing the company name to Microsoft and the product name to Windows, or finding an alternate way of making money off software.
Considering the number of people here who's bought Loki games, me included, and who no longer are willing to put up with the crap windows gives you even for just playing games, I dont think Loki is going to have any long term problem. Especially with XFree 4 coming online in standard stable distributions.
That they want to popularize linux gaming is understandable, since as far as Ive seen it's not even common knowledge in the Linux crowd that a lot of the titles are available, and they would do well to expand the market through some grassroots efforts, altho it would be a fine line to tread between alienating ordinary channels and reaching more potential customers. Still, the LUG's are probably somewhere around 5 percent of the Linux users total, so what the effect would be remains to be seen.
Theft is depriving someone of the use of their property. If I copy a song you've written, are you deprived of the use of it? No, you can still play that song as many times as you want. You have not been deprived. There is no theft going on.
Copyright was invented to promote creation of new art, through granting temporary rights to works. However, the world is rapidly changing.
The problem your friends are having and which is going to get worse is that the idea of small local bands worked fine while distribution was limited. How many Gaelic folk music creators do you think there are in the world? 250? 1000? How many albums do they release per year? One? A half? Best case, that would be 125 albums per year, for the crowd interested in gaelic folk music. Now, that works fine while just the greatest 5 are distributed around the world, and the rest are sold at local sites, since you'd get a small selection.
But enter the Internet. And you have 125 albums per year available over the net. Only the absolute cream is _ever_ going to get a demand at all. You're competing on a worldwide basis, and there creative people are a dime a dozen.
Im sorry, but your friends just arent needed anymore. I've never bought more than 20 cd's in a year and I never will. I dont, nor does anyone else, want to listen to five songs at once 24 hours per day, 365 days per year just to hear all the available music in the small segment (altho larger than gaelic folk music) I am interested in.
That, not the copying of music, is the problem facing small scale bands (and largescale ones as well... it isnt strange the big music companies can get away with screwing artists over... the line wanting to replace them as lifetime debt losers of the month is long).
Copyright was dreamed up to promote creativity. We do not need that promotion as much anymore. The hobbyist people and those being creative for fame or for fun will more than satisfy ability of consumers to consume.
Not really. Companies usually have some form of claim to inventions, but straight copyright work is fairly safe. If you have a special contract saying otherwise, Id suggest you charge overtime for every single line of code you ever write.
The issue is, are they paying you to do something? If they are, it's theirs. If they arent, they have no claim. It usually hard to claim that an invention related to your job was not thought out or inspired during work. But those 25000 lines of code at home are another matter.
Yep. Just imagine the happy funny talking clip. Dear Mrs HailStormUser, your husband has just been killed in a car accident, but dont worry, HailStorm has already arranged the funeral details and rescheduled your appointments for that day. MSDatingService has been notified of your profile and prospective new HailStormPartners are being scheduled for dates. You have 35 new automated condoleance messages waiting.
Sure, I believe MS is going to do exactly what they feel like, if you are ever in a position where they need you for something. If they can forge evidence and show to a courtroom what makes you think theyd even think twice about that?
But never mind that. They'll get cracked fairly fast, and do you think the crackers will mind using you as a scapegoat for their latest defacement spree or new virus? Imagine your HailStorm account filled with enough information that you'll rot in jail? Do you think Microsoft will assist you with logs showing that your account was cracked, or do you think they'll just say its not possible to crack HailStorm, delete anything suspicious and let you take your chances?
Heeey, are you trying to impersonate my forged identity?
Its sorta sad tho, messing with the personal info has become such a habit that I regularly screw it up even when the requester has a legit reason, or where you can even opt out of registering.
You dont think so? Remember, this is the company that presented forged evidence in a courtroom and lied into the face of a judge.
If a company is capable of that, where exactly do they draw the line? Could we have a statement from Microsoft where they clearly outline the corporate policy? It's ok to lie to a judge. Its not ok to assign customers property to us. It is ok to assign customers property to us, in case we can sell them another copy of what they had already paid for. What does the policy look like?
Heh. Basic internal debit for a pc at the place I work is at $3000 per year. Oh, and thats with nothing but the basics in software.
You wouldnt have to do much more training for switching over to a corporate Linux setup than you have to do anyway when you change Windows and Office releases.
If you hadnt noticed, you pay as much for a good NT admin as you do for a good Unix admin. Of course, there are a lot more cheap drooling retard apes pretending to be NT admins than there pretending to be Linux admins, but trust me, you dont want those people running your NT machines. Unless you enjoy letting everyone take a 7 hour coffee break every other week as your company grinds to a standstill after someone opened their virus of the day mail.
No, I think hes right. Without Linux a lot of the free software development creating synergies for the large unix vendors wouldnt happen. The software base would erode, as the Unix vendors moved into the mainframe area and left developers with the choice of spending money on very expensive development equipment or moving to NT. The free software base would be much smaller, and Solaris boxen whose only purpose is running Apache with various free software arent exactly unusual.
Simulations software would be written to run on NT clusters instead of unix clusters.
You'd have a much smaller base of new developers and not nearly as many people who could function as sysadmins.
Microsoft could hitch their profit margins even more. Now they cant because they can be replaced and will be replaced if necessary.
Linux, I think, is the saving grace for the unix companies. And for all the people who want a future without rebooting every single electronic device in your house daily.
Its not very easy tho. In the situation Be is, with Apple rather annoyed at them, and a track record of playing fast and loose and getting caught violating the GPL, they'd _have_ to do it the legal way through a clean room implementation. That means one team reading the source and then explaining those ideas (in writing, I suggest) to the team implementing the new code. Expensive.
True, the support sucks currently unless you really know what you're doing. It will change with the next release cycle of dists as everything is moving to XFree 4 which has GLX, instead of the earlier hacks available to get hardware fullscreen 3d (and lets not even get into how fun it is to get your card in a funky state with some bugs in your 3d program, so it sucked even worse for developers).
At this point it will stabilize since you have an offical way of doing things rather than the addon hack way.
Because they will have to wether they use DX or OpenGL. As it is currently, you cant use those features unless you want to code for specific cards and it doesnt matter which API you're using. Oh, or maybe you regard 0.5 fps as 'working'?
That's the problem of letting yourself getting locked into a platform. How much is it going to cost you? They can raise the price until it costs what it would cost you to migrate per decision period minus one dollar. The migration cost is a one time painful charge, but keeping paying a vendor locking will be a slightly lower cost time and time again. Just high enough to maximize profits and just low enough to keep you from wholesale migration.
Most companies who have custom software are used to porting applications and maintaining legacy platforms. You keep them around. For those applications that have alternatives on the new platform, use the alternatives. For those that are easy to port you port. For those that cant be solved, you keep a Terminal Server until you can throw it out.
You could always use... SAP... heeh. If its something you cant do without, well, keep that terminal server. The rest, have a consultant write you a web application. Small buisness management software isnt rocket science, and the big buisness is available.
You mean, they'd get a mail system that doesnt go boom from viruses for a day every second week? Switch off those Linux servers running viruswall and the exchange servers tend to spontaneously combust. Sounds like a good saving for anyone using mail for anything buisness related.
Small companies. They are usually the ones getting mentioned in piracy discussions, because like you say they arent planning on getting any licenses.
And... Word 2000 looks sortof similar to Word 97, but its not the same either. Its not harder to retrain for Staroffice than it is to retrain and migrate to a new version of Word.
It should, of course, be added to the TCO calculation. License management is a large factor that works in favour of free software, if it were regularly included in cost calculations.
Nope, thats trademarks. Patents or copyrights you dont have to defend to be able to enforce. And with patents its a good idea to let them get incorporated in standards (or propose them yourself), or just spread seeds around, so you can sue everyone. That way you just have to have laywers, not actually produce and sell anything. Almost as popular as spamming and pyramid schemes.
Maybe. How many TV's do you think people were forced to buy because Macrovision was put into videos?
Ive been through that twice. Buy a new video and funnily enough, the picture gets distorted on my old but perfectly fine TV. Not when I use the old VCR tho. So, I leave the video in for service and they cant figure out what was wrong. Neither could I.
Then a few years later I find out about Macrovision. Those ****ing retards cost me a ****load of money for buying a new TV.
Now, I would have bought that Macrovision enabled video when HELL froze over, had I known that it wouldnt work with my old TV.Or just told them to ****ing fix it, because the pile of crap did NOT work as advertized. Nowhere did it say it would not work with an older tv.
But thats just the thing. Theyre not gonna tell anyone. Joe Average Consumer isnt going to know about this kind of crap until it hits him solid in the wallet, _AFTER_ hes bought his new stuff.
And through that giving away of ssh under opensource terms it became a popular protocol. They used ssh as a generic term, it became popular enough to be a generic term... and then decide to revert to semi-proprietary status and try to keep a trademark on a, by then, generic term.
IANAL, but: Trademark law 101: You must enforce your trademark from the start. If you ever allow it in any way to become a generic term it is no longer a trademark. Maybe Kleenex and Xerox will sympathize, but a court is unlikely to.
Well, if he had, ssh would never have taken off, nobody would have used it, he would have no company and the protocol would be relegated to the heaps of wannabe proprietary secure protocols.
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Hmm. But I'd like a bit of a slowdown. A 25 hours per day period would match my natural day/night cycle much better.
Proprietary consumer applications is a dead market. Those small apps would be fairly easy to code, which means you'd be likely to have an instant free competitor. If there is sufficient demand for the applications there will be enough programmers who want such an application which will end up with them writing it.
Vertical markets and games are the only places where you will be able to make any money. Things like ERP systems and very specialized software, because those things are both complicated, have no spare-time hackers who need them, and have customers likely to pay for them. And games, because there is always room for new ones.
OT: Possible but not likely last I looked. Read the old KDE archives to figure our why.
Oh, yeah, and the people who actually use the software. And multibillion corporations who want to cut down on IT budgets. And those with experience enough in the industry to know that with proprietary products you're gonna depend on a company staying in buisness and actually supporting their products (which usually isnt exactly what happens over a 5 year period). And those who need to customize their software. Well, ok, actually open source is for everyone who isnt a buisness basing their buisness model on selling proprietary software.
And if you want to make money by charging for consumer productivity software, you've got to be named Microsoft and sell software called Windows and Office.
That, of course, leaves the options of moving to China and changing the company name to Microsoft and the product name to Windows, or finding an alternate way of making money off software.
Considering the number of people here who's bought Loki games, me included, and who no longer are willing to put up with the crap windows gives you even for just playing games, I dont think Loki is going to have any long term problem. Especially with XFree 4 coming online in standard stable distributions.
That they want to popularize linux gaming is understandable, since as far as Ive seen it's not even common knowledge in the Linux crowd that a lot of the titles are available, and they would do well to expand the market through some grassroots efforts, altho it would be a fine line to tread between alienating ordinary channels and reaching more potential customers. Still, the LUG's are probably somewhere around 5 percent of the Linux users total, so what the effect would be remains to be seen.
Theft is depriving someone of the use of their property. If I copy a song you've written, are you deprived of the use of it? No, you can still play that song as many times as you want. You have not been deprived. There is no theft going on.
Copyright was invented to promote creation of new art, through granting temporary rights to works. However, the world is rapidly changing.
The problem your friends are having and which is going to get worse is that the idea of small local bands worked fine while distribution was limited. How many Gaelic folk music creators do you think there are in the world? 250? 1000? How many albums do they release per year? One? A half? Best case, that would be 125 albums per year, for the crowd interested in gaelic folk music. Now, that works fine while just the greatest 5 are distributed around the world, and the rest are sold at local sites, since you'd get a small selection.
But enter the Internet. And you have 125 albums per year available over the net. Only the absolute cream is _ever_ going to get a demand at all. You're competing on a worldwide basis, and there creative people are a dime a dozen.
Im sorry, but your friends just arent needed anymore. I've never bought more than 20 cd's in a year and I never will. I dont, nor does anyone else, want to listen to five songs at once 24 hours per day, 365 days per year just to hear all the available music in the small segment (altho larger than gaelic folk music) I am interested in.
That, not the copying of music, is the problem facing small scale bands (and largescale ones as well... it isnt strange the big music companies can get away with screwing artists over... the line wanting to replace them as lifetime debt losers of the month is long).
Copyright was dreamed up to promote creativity. We do not need that promotion as much anymore. The hobbyist people and those being creative for fame or for fun will more than satisfy ability of consumers to consume.
Fair use includes things like reviews, criticism, satire, etc. What IP owner would willingly allow fair use if it may make them look bad?
Not really. Companies usually have some form of claim to inventions, but straight copyright work is fairly safe. If you have a special contract saying otherwise, Id suggest you charge overtime for every single line of code you ever write.
The issue is, are they paying you to do something? If they are, it's theirs. If they arent, they have no claim. It usually hard to claim that an invention related to your job was not thought out or inspired during work. But those 25000 lines of code at home are another matter.
Yep. Just imagine the happy funny talking clip. Dear Mrs HailStormUser, your husband has just been killed in a car accident, but dont worry, HailStorm has already arranged the funeral details and rescheduled your appointments for that day. MSDatingService has been notified of your profile and prospective new HailStormPartners are being scheduled for dates. You have 35 new automated condoleance messages waiting.
Sure, I believe MS is going to do exactly what they feel like, if you are ever in a position where they need you for something. If they can forge evidence and show to a courtroom what makes you think theyd even think twice about that?
But never mind that. They'll get cracked fairly fast, and do you think the crackers will mind using you as a scapegoat for their latest defacement spree or new virus? Imagine your HailStorm account filled with enough information that you'll rot in jail? Do you think Microsoft will assist you with logs showing that your account was cracked, or do you think they'll just say its not possible to crack HailStorm, delete anything suspicious and let you take your chances?
Heeey, are you trying to impersonate my forged identity?
Its sorta sad tho, messing with the personal info has become such a habit that I regularly screw it up even when the requester has a legit reason, or where you can even opt out of registering.
You dont think so? Remember, this is the company that presented forged evidence in a courtroom and lied into the face of a judge.
If a company is capable of that, where exactly do they draw the line? Could we have a statement from Microsoft where they clearly outline the corporate policy? It's ok to lie to a judge. Its not ok to assign customers property to us. It is ok to assign customers property to us, in case we can sell them another copy of what they had already paid for. What does the policy look like?
Heh. Basic internal debit for a pc at the place I work is at $3000 per year. Oh, and thats with nothing but the basics in software.
You wouldnt have to do much more training for switching over to a corporate Linux setup than you have to do anyway when you change Windows and Office releases.
If you hadnt noticed, you pay as much for a good NT admin as you do for a good Unix admin. Of course, there are a lot more cheap drooling retard apes pretending to be NT admins than there pretending to be Linux admins, but trust me, you dont want those people running your NT machines. Unless you enjoy letting everyone take a 7 hour coffee break every other week as your company grinds to a standstill after someone opened their virus of the day mail.
No, I think hes right. Without Linux a lot of the free software development creating synergies for the large unix vendors wouldnt happen. The software base would erode, as the Unix vendors moved into the mainframe area and left developers with the choice of spending money on very expensive development equipment or moving to NT. The free software base would be much smaller, and Solaris boxen whose only purpose is running Apache with various free software arent exactly unusual.
Simulations software would be written to run on NT clusters instead of unix clusters.
You'd have a much smaller base of new developers and not nearly as many people who could function as sysadmins.
Microsoft could hitch their profit margins even more. Now they cant because they can be replaced and will be replaced if necessary.
Linux, I think, is the saving grace for the unix companies. And for all the people who want a future without rebooting every single electronic device in your house daily.
Its not very easy tho. In the situation Be is, with Apple rather annoyed at them, and a track record of playing fast and loose and getting caught violating the GPL, they'd _have_ to do it the legal way through a clean room implementation. That means one team reading the source and then explaining those ideas (in writing, I suggest) to the team implementing the new code. Expensive.
True, the support sucks currently unless you really know what you're doing. It will change with the next release cycle of dists as everything is moving to XFree 4 which has GLX, instead of the earlier hacks available to get hardware fullscreen 3d (and lets not even get into how fun it is to get your card in a funky state with some bugs in your 3d program, so it sucked even worse for developers).
At this point it will stabilize since you have an offical way of doing things rather than the addon hack way.
Because they will have to wether they use DX or OpenGL. As it is currently, you cant use those features unless you want to code for specific cards and it doesnt matter which API you're using. Oh, or maybe you regard 0.5 fps as 'working'?
That's the problem of letting yourself getting locked into a platform. How much is it going to cost you? They can raise the price until it costs what it would cost you to migrate per decision period minus one dollar. The migration cost is a one time painful charge, but keeping paying a vendor locking will be a slightly lower cost time and time again. Just high enough to maximize profits and just low enough to keep you from wholesale migration.
Most companies who have custom software are used to porting applications and maintaining legacy platforms. You keep them around. For those applications that have alternatives on the new platform, use the alternatives. For those that are easy to port you port. For those that cant be solved, you keep a Terminal Server until you can throw it out.
You could always use... SAP... heeh. If its something you cant do without, well, keep that terminal server. The rest, have a consultant write you a web application. Small buisness management software isnt rocket science, and the big buisness is available.
You mean, they'd get a mail system that doesnt go boom from viruses for a day every second week? Switch off those Linux servers running viruswall and the exchange servers tend to spontaneously combust. Sounds like a good saving for anyone using mail for anything buisness related.
Small companies. They are usually the ones getting mentioned in piracy discussions, because like you say they arent planning on getting any licenses.
And... Word 2000 looks sortof similar to Word 97, but its not the same either. Its not harder to retrain for Staroffice than it is to retrain and migrate to a new version of Word.
It should, of course, be added to the TCO calculation. License management is a large factor that works in favour of free software, if it were regularly included in cost calculations.
Nope, thats trademarks. Patents or copyrights you dont have to defend to be able to enforce. And with patents its a good idea to let them get incorporated in standards (or propose them yourself), or just spread seeds around, so you can sue everyone. That way you just have to have laywers, not actually produce and sell anything. Almost as popular as spamming and pyramid schemes.
Maybe. How many TV's do you think people were forced to buy because Macrovision was put into videos?
Ive been through that twice. Buy a new video and funnily enough, the picture gets distorted on my old but perfectly fine TV. Not when I use the old VCR tho. So, I leave the video in for service and they cant figure out what was wrong. Neither could I.
Then a few years later I find out about Macrovision. Those ****ing retards cost me a ****load of money for buying a new TV.
Now, I would have bought that Macrovision enabled video when HELL froze over, had I known that it wouldnt work with my old TV.Or just told them to ****ing fix it, because the pile of crap did NOT work as advertized. Nowhere did it say it would not work with an older tv.
But thats just the thing. Theyre not gonna tell anyone. Joe Average Consumer isnt going to know about this kind of crap until it hits him solid in the wallet, _AFTER_ hes bought his new stuff.
And through that giving away of ssh under opensource terms it became a popular protocol. They used ssh as a generic term, it became popular enough to be a generic term... and then decide to revert to semi-proprietary status and try to keep a trademark on a, by then, generic term.
IANAL, but: Trademark law 101: You must enforce your trademark from the start. If you ever allow it in any way to become a generic term it is no longer a trademark. Maybe Kleenex and Xerox will sympathize, but a court is unlikely to.
Well, if he had, ssh would never have taken off, nobody would have used it, he would have no company and the protocol would be relegated to the heaps of wannabe proprietary secure protocols.
Actually, the fine grained control (or at least a lot finer grained) is here in the latest Mozilla. You can disable popups from wherever you want.