Napster lost specifically because they were found by the court to be gaining commercially.
The legal question, as I understand it, is not about personal use, but commercial use. I am absolutely not an expert on this issue, and I may be horribly off base, but this is the way I have understood it to be since the Audio Home REcording Act of 1992.
See this website for a lot more authoritative discussion of this topic: http://hrrc.org
Your idea of someone maliciously giving away many copies of someone's work to undermine their sales is interesting. I think if I was a judge, I would consider that a commercial act, because the intent is to further your own economic interests by undermining a competitor.
Agreed, as long as we don't drift to the other extreme viewpoint, oft quoted here and elsewhere: "if you publish it, we will copy it, and we will never pay for digital content, ever."
I hope that one day it will be truly easy to pay someone over the internet. Ya click a button, and a quarter goes out of my accoutn and into yours. No hassles, no worries (I know I'm dreaming). I would happily click that button a couple of times if I got a good download from a band, or read a particularly good article online. As it is, the transaction now would cost more than the actual donation.
I tried to donate some money to Mandrake the ohter day because even though I can't afford to join their club right now I wanted to give them 20 bucks to show my support. It took 3-5 min to fill out the form, and then for some reason it rejected my credit card. Maybe I mistyped or something but in order to resend it I would have had to refill out the entire form and I was out of the mood by then. Sometime when I have a few minutes I will try again, but the transaction time is not trivial enough for me to just drop everything and go do it. (Of course I somehow found the time to post four times to this/. thread.. Oh well)
To what? If it's zero, bye-bye content. This site is an example of zero payment content. Linux is content created for near zero payment all the blogs and all the fansites and all the _stuff_ that's Out There now is created because people like to be creative. There is no god-given right to become a millionaire because you sing a song or write a book. The best work is done for the love of the work and intrinsic need for self-expression.
The internet and digital revolutions make it possible for almost anyone to create and publish their content, without having to grovel before a powerful media oligarchy. When the price of content approaches zero, only content which is important to _somebody_ will be produced.
But that's not really gonna happen. There's always gonna be some way to make a money in the music/art/publishing business. The controversies we see today with sssca and dmca and all that stuff is the friction between two eras in history. In the end, there is only one possible outcome, and that is a world in which the problem is not getting published but in getting read or listened to. Content will proliferate, not stagnate.
The kind of content that's gonna go away is the mass audience stuff, because there will be no such thing as a mass audience. Look at your tv tonight, and choose from a hundred or so channels. Only 20 years ago there were four. Now there's at least four ESPN's alone. Four news channels. Almost anyone can be a web radio station now, and they can broadcast worldwide. No longer must I invest $millions in starting up a radio station. THe cost of becoming a broadcaster has dropped a thousand fold in the last 5 years.
Anyone can produce, anyone can publish, anyone can record, anyone can broadcast. That's the real problem for the media industry, long term. In the short term, they are clinging to their monopoly prices and behaviors. In the long term they will lose.
I know this is turning into a rant, but it seems so obvious to me that all of this is going to happen, but some people just don't get it. That's part of the whole dotcom bubble--people understood that in the new economy the internet is king, but they didn't understand the new economy lowers the barriers to entry in so many industries to almost zero. There will indeed be a few major dotcom successes, but in the big picture it's not the few major successes, but the _millions_ of minor successes that are going to define the new economy. Pricewatch connects me to fifty small vendors in a fraction of a second. I can buy used books from Portland. I can order a specialty part for my bicycle from Dublin. Very few will get very rich, but many can earn a living. It levels the playing field and it lowers the pinnacle of success (except for Bill Gates).
Again (and again.. sigh...), I am not defending making $50M on plastic disks. I'm advocating the same thing that everyone else in this debate is advocating: compensating the artists, writers and developers fairly.
I firmly believe that sharing my favorite bands with my friends by copying cd's will _increase_ the total amount that that band makes in the long run. No advertisement is as meaningful as word of mouth. I am a zealous advocate for my favorite bands, and I have often dragged friends to shows or recommended they purchase a certain cd, and I know for a fact that I have friends who will go to a store and buy a cd that I recommend. I keep a list on my Palm Pilot of books, movies, and albums that people I respect have recommended to me. Less than an hour ago, someone i barely know recommended a book to me, without me asking. He just happened to know I have an interest in a certain topic, and he said "you should read this.."
When I copy and share cd's with my friends it is emphatically not stealing. It is truly sharing; and when I hear a good cd from some band, I am more likely to purcahse their next one or go to their show when they come to my area.
If the Internet is allowed to turn into the warez network, then these self-proclaimed supporters of the artists will have done nothing of the kind.
As of now, there is no good technology for sharing high-quality copies due to bandwidth problems. The solution for content providers is to continue to improve their content such that it cannot be easily reproduced (I don't mean copy protection) in a home. Things like IMAX movies come to mind as something that are not likely to be warezed on the internet. How about improving the moviegoing experience in general and oh maybe lowering prices at the popcorn stand so that more people go to the movie because it is a fun thing to do on a date. You know, _innovate_. That's what competion is going to do to the media companies; it's gonna force them to innovate.
I think most people will pay a fair price for a good CD or book. I think those same people should frown on people who don't pay that fair price.
But what is fair? We have become accustomed to a very select group of megastars who earn monopoly profits. We will instead have thousands of minor stars making a more realistic income. I think that is a net gain for art and society.
If there is no possibility of making a living in the first place because anything that can be digitized is universally warezed, then there *will* be no ability for these people to do anything creative, because they'll be working double shifts at the FoodKing.
Even under your hypothetical world in which everything is universally warezed (which would mean an artist would only be able to sell one copy of any recording) they would still be able to make a living by performing live.
What is not possible in such a future is to make $50M by selling vast quantities of $.35 plastic disks for $18.99.
Record companies, book publishers, newspapers, motion picture companies, and other content providers are going to have to adjust to a new reality, in which two inexorable forces are going to drive down the market value of their content.
1. anyone can be their own producer/publisher because the pc revolution and the internet make it possible for any aspiring hack to produce and publish high quality content worldwide for very very low cost.
2. it is virtually impossible to prevent people from making and distributing copies of the work produced by major companies on the internet.
It is a new reality; and it cannot be changed. They must adjust their business models to this new reality or they will slowly whither and die.
So far their reactions have been to attempt everything possible to prevent copying, but it is going to be increasingly difficult to compete with the content created by people not affiliated with the major media companies.
The market value of content will continue to decrease, whether they manage to suppress copying and sharing mechanisms or not.
You can copy for personal use, you can not copy to distribute I think you are wrong there. From what I understand, and I dont think I have to add that IANAL, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 expressly permits "noncommercial" home taping. it doens't say you can't give away copies. I don't mind being proveed wrong, but please point me to some evidence. The text of the AHRA of 1992 can be found at http://www.hrrc.org/html/ahra.html
Did you read the article? it's about making duplicate copies of cd's and sharing them with friends. It certainly is illegal to sell copied cd's, but home copying for sharing is legal. Her'es what it said in the article;
Stopping the practice of CD burning, however, could be thorny on legal grounds. ''Is CD burning legal? That's a little complicated. Probably the answer is yes,'' says William Fisher, co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society.
''The cottage industry of kids burning CDs and selling them around dorms is plainly illegal. That's a commercial use,'' he adds, noting that it violates the Audio Home Recording Act Congress passed in 1992. ''But if a kid wants to distribute 10 copies around his dorm for free, that's looking a lot more like it's OK...And gifts are not commercial, so it's very hard to stop.''
I think we're basically in agreement with eachother, although I have to quibble a little with the following statement:
Those outlandish sums reflect the true cost of designing a large suite/os with lots of features, debugging, doing usability testing, etc.
I understand that developing good software is astonishingly expensive, but the simple fact that BG is the richest person on earth tells me that they are charging more than just the cost of production. If they had any real competition, they would have to reduce their prices to something more akin to their costs. In a monopoly market, the cost and the price are utterly divorced. Of course, in a competitive market cost and price are occasionally divorced, but not over any lengthy period of time.
. Most high schoolers don't know that much about computers - they know how to download MP3s, chat and install warez,
I get the impression that you haven't been in a high school lately.
The "most" students that you talk about are indeed the vast majority. They do things like steal the 802.11b cards out of the iBooks and pop the keys off the keyboard.
The smart ones figure out all sorts of tricks, and they show off to their friends, and they show it to thier friends, and soon an exploit is common knowledge in the student body.
The programs that limit functinoality are fair to middlin' in my experience. Like if they don't let you rename files they don't stop you from going into a Save As dialog and clicking twice on a filename to change it. That's just one example.
Or if they do in fact prevent mischief, they make the computer basically useless.
Yes, because as we all know, Microsoft makes most of its money off of the one MSN ad that I apparently saw when I upgraded to IE6, and not from selling Windows and Office
No one is going to make the kind of money selling OSS that you can make selling proprietary software, of course. But you can theoretically make money.
Where OSS really makes business sense is on the demand side, where companies and end users don't have to pay outlandish sums for an office suite and an OS.
Likewise, there aren't enough free software enthusiasts -- and they aren't spending 40+ hours a week writing free software,
Absolutely correct, with an important exception. First of all, there are never going to be strong communities built around the toilet cleaning applications. That is going to have to be done by entrepreneurs.
The exception to the limit on the number of enthusiasts is that there are still billions of humans who are not online yet. When that changes, if even a miniscule fraction of those billions become enthusiasts, then no company can compete with a determined subset of that community in terms of person hours alone, nevermind any questions of productivity per person, etc.
The GPL (or a similar license) makes better business sense for a corporation that doesn't want to risk funding a competitor.
It also makes it possible for companies to pool resources to solve a common problem, even if they are not in direct competition... If half of the Forbes 500 companies each chipped in a fraction of what they pay M$ for Office each year to help polish up Open Office, they could save themselves and the rest of the world Billions each year.
Such a scenario is win-win for everyone except M$. I think BG understands this, and that's why they are pushing the "viral nature of GPL" FUD.
One of your other respondents says PC manufacturers don't pay retail... I wonder then why the off the shelf copy costs so much if the OEM version is like $20?
If you call M$ for support the first thing they want to know is your product key id number. If that id contains the letter OEM, they will tell you to call your OEM.
So when you buy a Dell or GW, you technically are paying less $ to M$, but you are still paying for support from Dell or GW. So even at OEM prices, you are paying more than a couple percent for the OS and support.
Meanwhile, Mandrake can take Red Hat's distribution, rebrand it with a a few added bells and whistles, and sell their own packaged version.
But where did RH get all their stuff to begin with? RH didn't write an OS, nor most of the other stuff on those CD's.
The software was created by a community of online hackers, not RH. If you dont' like the terms of the license under which it is released, then go buy or write your own code.
Believe it or not, there is money to be made in OSS. If Mandrake, RH, or another distro really takes off massively, they will make their money by having control over stuff like default icons and home pages, etc., just like M$. When you upgrade to IE6 the first thing you get on your new improved browser is an ad for MSN.
For the first time in five years, I felt the urge to buy a pre-assembled computer.
Resist the temptation.
We are suppposed to receive a Gateway laptop today and I think we are going to refuse delivery because of salepersons lying to us rather than face the possibility that we might go somewhere else to buy a computer. It was originally promised to be delivered 1 week after we ordered it. I called 8 days later and the guy said "It was manufactured today (remember this is 1 day after it was supposed to arrive), but it doesn't have a tracking number yet" He said it should go out in the UPS that day or the next. I asked him where it comes from so I could have an idea of when it would arrive. I asked him where it would be sent from, and he said they come from North Sioux City, SD, which is normally an overnight shipment to here, two days at the most. I called Tuesday and their automated system gave out a tracking number, so I thought for sure it would have been here Wednesday, so I called last night and talked to someone who verified that it had indeed been shipped, but not from Sioux City. It was shipped from _Taiwan_.
I'm not about to roll my own notebook, but I'm not gonna buy anymore from GW. I don't like being lied to.
What, exactly, is the difference between the integration of Windows and IE vs the integration of KE and Konqueror?
M$ would not allow OEM's like Gateway, Compaq, and Dell to include any other browser on their machines. You could ONLY have IE, and you HAD TO INCLUDE IE with every machine.
That destroyed Netscape, and any other would be competitors.
When you buy the os, a DONATION is automatically given to IE.
Or, you could say that M$ sells the browser for less than $0 because they are subsidizing the browser with their monopoly profits. No one makes money off the browser, it's what people do with the browser that matters.
M$ knows that they are not going to be able to maintain their monopoly on the desktop because they cannot compete with the price of GNU/Linux.
They can only continue to maintain their profits with other hooks, such as Passport,.Net, and their proprietary file formats.
They obviously foresee a future where they cannot charge for the OS, just like they cannot charge for the browser now. And they are preparing for that day very well, I'm sad to say.
Same here, but I dont' even want to be in the club. I would just like to send them 20 bucks or something, just to show my appreciation, but I don't want or need a membership in any club, and I don't use Mandrake $60 worth a year....Yet.
I think the business model should be the same one that M$ sees in MSIE. That is, you don't make the money off the browser, you make it off the users. Now I am not in favor of Mandrake 8.3 including multiple popups requesting that you sign up for MandrakePassport or something, but if you have a hundred million boxen with a default homepage of "ShopMandrake.com" you will probably make a few bucks.
Remember there are still a few Billion people in the world who don't have a computer or an internet connection yet, so there is plenty of opportunity to emulate the M$ business model in MSIE.
They've got a great product, but Mandrake needs to get out there and convince businesses that they can safely and profitably dump Windows.
They need a litle marketing, yes, but not "hype". Hype is just BS, but good marketing could make a big difference. What we really need is for oneof the big OEM's to start selling dual-boot machines off the shelf, and *advertising* the benefits. Sure they might lose their discount from M$, but if, say, Gateway or Compaq started advertising that you get two, two, two computers in one, and showed the Free as in Beer stuff that comes with Mandrake, like Tux Racer and so on, they might be able to sell their boxen for a few bucks more than the competition.
Only problem is that the big OEM's have a big stake in the support they give and they would be adding a whole new set of user problems. That might be the impetus needed, though, to finally iron out the usability issues that remain.
If even a small percentage defects they get upset.
And well they should. They have many hooks which maintain their monopoly, but there are several that are key, and those are the places where Linux is making slow but sure headway.
1. Software and hardware vendors all must produce windows compatible software because that's where the market is. Only a few make Apple or Linux versions.
2. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint file formats.
3. NT domains and authorization schemes, etc.
Right now OSS is just biting at the heels of M$, but at some point the momentum of Linux _could_ become unstoppable. Free as in freedom is great for geeks hacking around in their spare time, but Free as in Beer is going to catch the attention of some big companies soon. When that happens, anything that makes someone in the IT dept or any powerful user say, "But what about the stuff we already have in [insert M$ proprietary format here]?" helps keep M$ in power.
What M$ knows, I think, is that at some point a small group of Fortune 100 companies are going to look at their bottom line and say to themselves, "Why not spend a few $million on OSS development? We could polish up Open Office, Wine, and Samba-- and save ourselves a few $Bill-ions over the next decade.
Somewhere down the road, as GNU/Linux/OSS picks up steam we will reach a tipping point, or critical mass, where all the OEM's and all the hardware and software vendors will have to play ball with us. M$ must stop that before it is too late, if it isn't already.
Re:Have artists ever been compensated for their mu
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Web Radio and the RIAA
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· Score: 1
Yes, mostly small indie-type bands and blues acts. If you ever see the MC Hammer episode of VH1's Behind the Music, it is interesting that when he was first approached by the labels, he turned down their offer, because they were offereing him something like $200k if he sold something like a half a million records (I don't remember the actual numbers), and he had already made half that much selling his own lp's literally out of the trunk of his car at discos. To him, signing with a major label for the usual terms would have been a step down financially.
Too bad he wasn't so financially savvy once he hit the big time.
Re:Have artists ever been compensated for their mu
on
Web Radio and the RIAA
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· Score: 1
The artists I like make all their money selling t-shirts and products on tour...
So true. In the last year I bet I purchased half of my new cd's either directly from the band at a show, or from their own web site. Often they are $10-$15 and I'm sure the artist makes more $ per unit than if I bought the same item from a store for $18.99.
The RIAA does not want us buying directly from the artists any more than they want us sharing mp3's online or streaming pirate radio to the web. If people really started buying a lot of music directly from the artists, you would see the RIAA come up with a law against it.
I almost hope the RIAA prices themselves off of the web, so that the only bands on the web are those who want to be heard because they have something to say musically, rather than because they want to make a million bucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Napster lost specifically because they were found by the court to be gaining commercially.
The legal question, as I understand it, is not about personal use, but commercial use. I am absolutely not an expert on this issue, and I may be horribly off base, but this is the way I have understood it to be since the Audio Home REcording Act of 1992.
See this website for a lot more authoritative discussion of this topic: http://hrrc.org
Your idea of someone maliciously giving away many copies of someone's work to undermine their sales is interesting. I think if I was a judge, I would consider that a commercial act, because the intent is to further your own economic interests by undermining a competitor.
This is why all work has value, no matter how small. Time is money. Time spent on something gives it value by virtue of the value of the time spent.
This was the major mistake that Marx made. He, too, thought that labor created the value. (I guess I'm calling you a communist)
Value is created by demand, not supply.
Agreed, as long as we don't drift to the other extreme viewpoint, oft quoted here and elsewhere: "if you publish it, we will copy it, and we will never pay for digital content, ever."
/. thread.. Oh well)
I hope that one day it will be truly easy to pay someone over the internet. Ya click a button, and a quarter goes out of my accoutn and into yours. No hassles, no worries (I know I'm dreaming). I would happily click that button a couple of times if I got a good download from a band, or read a particularly good article online. As it is, the transaction now would cost more than the actual donation.
I tried to donate some money to Mandrake the ohter day because even though I can't afford to join their club right now I wanted to give them 20 bucks to show my support. It took 3-5 min to fill out the form, and then for some reason it rejected my credit card. Maybe I mistyped or something but in order to resend it I would have had to refill out the entire form and I was out of the mood by then. Sometime when I have a few minutes I will try again, but the transaction time is not trivial enough for me to just drop everything and go do it. (Of course I somehow found the time to post four times to this
To what? If it's zero, bye-bye content.
This site is an example of zero payment content.
Linux is content created for near zero payment
all the blogs and all the fansites and all the _stuff_ that's Out There now is created because people like to be creative. There is no god-given right to become a millionaire because you sing a song or write a book. The best work is done for the love of the work and intrinsic need for self-expression.
The internet and digital revolutions make it possible for almost anyone to create and publish their content, without having to grovel before a powerful media oligarchy. When the price of content approaches zero, only content which is important to _somebody_ will be produced.
But that's not really gonna happen. There's always gonna be some way to make a money in the music/art/publishing business. The controversies we see today with sssca and dmca and all that stuff is the friction between two eras in history. In the end, there is only one possible outcome, and that is a world in which the problem is not getting published but in getting read or listened to. Content will proliferate, not stagnate.
The kind of content that's gonna go away is the mass audience stuff, because there will be no such thing as a mass audience. Look at your tv tonight, and choose from a hundred or so channels. Only 20 years ago there were four. Now there's at least four ESPN's alone. Four news channels. Almost anyone can be a web radio station now, and they can broadcast worldwide. No longer must I invest $millions in starting up a radio station. THe cost of becoming a broadcaster has dropped a thousand fold in the last 5 years.
Anyone can produce, anyone can publish, anyone can record, anyone can broadcast. That's the real problem for the media industry, long term. In the short term, they are clinging to their monopoly prices and behaviors. In the long term they will lose.
I know this is turning into a rant, but it seems so obvious to me that all of this is going to happen, but some people just don't get it. That's part of the whole dotcom bubble--people understood that in the new economy the internet is king, but they didn't understand the new economy lowers the barriers to entry in so many industries to almost zero. There will indeed be a few major dotcom successes, but in the big picture it's not the few major successes, but the _millions_ of minor successes that are going to define the new economy. Pricewatch connects me to fifty small vendors in a fraction of a second. I can buy used books from Portland. I can order a specialty part for my bicycle from Dublin. Very few will get very rich, but many can earn a living. It levels the playing field and it lowers the pinnacle of success (except for Bill Gates).
Again (and again.. sigh...), I am not defending making $50M on plastic disks. I'm advocating the same thing that everyone else in this debate is advocating: compensating the artists, writers and developers fairly.
I firmly believe that sharing my favorite bands with my friends by copying cd's will _increase_ the total amount that that band makes in the long run. No advertisement is as meaningful as word of mouth. I am a zealous advocate for my favorite bands, and I have often dragged friends to shows or recommended they purchase a certain cd, and I know for a fact that I have friends who will go to a store and buy a cd that I recommend. I keep a list on my Palm Pilot of books, movies, and albums that people I respect have recommended to me. Less than an hour ago, someone i barely know recommended a book to me, without me asking. He just happened to know I have an interest in a certain topic, and he said "you should read this.."
When I copy and share cd's with my friends it is emphatically not stealing. It is truly sharing; and when I hear a good cd from some band, I am more likely to purcahse their next one or go to their show when they come to my area.
If the Internet is allowed to turn into the warez network, then these self-proclaimed supporters of the artists will have done nothing of the kind.
As of now, there is no good technology for sharing high-quality copies due to bandwidth problems. The solution for content providers is to continue to improve their content such that it cannot be easily reproduced (I don't mean copy protection) in a home. Things like IMAX movies come to mind as something that are not likely to be warezed on the internet. How about improving the moviegoing experience in general and oh maybe lowering prices at the popcorn stand so that more people go to the movie because it is a fun thing to do on a date. You know, _innovate_. That's what competion is going to do to the media companies; it's gonna force them to innovate.
I think most people will pay a fair price for a good CD or book. I think those same people should frown on people who don't pay that fair price.
But what is fair? We have become accustomed to a very select group of megastars who earn monopoly profits. We will instead have thousands of minor stars making a more realistic income. I think that is a net gain for art and society.
I don't think "distribution" can be equated with "personal use".
The operative word is not "personal use", but "noncommercial". That's what the Home Recording Act of 1992 says.
If there is no possibility of making a living in the first place because anything that can be digitized is universally warezed, then there *will* be no ability for these people to do anything creative, because they'll be working double shifts at the FoodKing.
Even under your hypothetical world in which everything is universally warezed (which would mean an artist would only be able to sell one copy of any recording) they would still be able to make a living by performing live.
What is not possible in such a future is to make $50M by selling vast quantities of $.35 plastic disks for $18.99.
Record companies, book publishers, newspapers, motion picture companies, and other content providers are going to have to adjust to a new reality, in which two inexorable forces are going to drive down the market value of their content.
1. anyone can be their own producer/publisher because the pc revolution and the internet make it possible for any aspiring hack to produce and publish high quality content worldwide for very very low cost.
2. it is virtually impossible to prevent people from making and distributing copies of the work produced by major companies on the internet.
It is a new reality; and it cannot be changed. They must adjust their business models to this new reality or they will slowly whither and die.
So far their reactions have been to attempt everything possible to prevent copying, but it is going to be increasingly difficult to compete with the content created by people not affiliated with the major media companies.
The market value of content will continue to decrease, whether they manage to suppress copying and sharing mechanisms or not.
You can copy for personal use, you can not copy to distribute
I think you are wrong there. From what I understand, and I dont think I have to add that IANAL, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 expressly permits "noncommercial" home taping. it doens't say you can't give away copies. I don't mind being proveed wrong, but please point me to some evidence. The text of the AHRA of 1992 can be found at http://www.hrrc.org/html/ahra.html
Did you read the article? it's about making duplicate copies of cd's and sharing them with friends. It certainly is illegal to sell copied cd's, but home copying for sharing is legal. Her'es what it said in the article;
Stopping the practice of CD burning, however, could be thorny on legal grounds. ''Is CD burning legal? That's a little complicated. Probably the answer is yes,'' says William Fisher, co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society.
''The cottage industry of kids burning CDs and selling them around dorms is plainly illegal. That's a commercial use,'' he adds, noting that it violates the Audio Home Recording Act Congress passed in 1992. ''But if a kid wants to distribute 10 copies around his dorm for free, that's looking a lot more like it's OK...And gifts are not commercial, so it's very hard to stop.''
I think we're basically in agreement with eachother, although I have to quibble a little with the following statement:
Those outlandish sums reflect the true cost of designing a large suite/os with lots of features, debugging, doing usability testing, etc.
I understand that developing good software is astonishingly expensive, but the simple fact that BG is the richest person on earth tells me that they are charging more than just the cost of production. If they had any real competition, they would have to reduce their prices to something more akin to their costs. In a monopoly market, the cost and the price are utterly divorced. Of course, in a competitive market cost and price are occasionally divorced, but not over any lengthy period of time.
. Most high schoolers don't know that much about computers - they know how to download MP3s, chat and install warez,
I get the impression that you haven't been in a high school lately.
The "most" students that you talk about are indeed the vast majority. They do things like steal the 802.11b cards out of the iBooks and pop the keys off the keyboard.
The smart ones figure out all sorts of tricks, and they show off to their friends, and they show it to thier friends, and soon an exploit is common knowledge in the student body.
The programs that limit functinoality are fair to middlin' in my experience. Like if they don't let you rename files they don't stop you from going into a Save As dialog and clicking twice on a filename to change it. That's just one example.
Or if they do in fact prevent mischief, they make the computer basically useless.
Yes, because as we all know, Microsoft makes most of its money off of the one MSN ad that I apparently saw when I upgraded to IE6, and not from selling Windows and Office
No one is going to make the kind of money selling OSS that you can make selling proprietary software, of course. But you can theoretically make money.
Where OSS really makes business sense is on the demand side, where companies and end users don't have to pay outlandish sums for an office suite and an OS.
Likewise, there aren't enough free software enthusiasts -- and they aren't spending 40+ hours a week writing free software,
Absolutely correct, with an important exception. First of all, there are never going to be strong communities built around the toilet cleaning applications. That is going to have to be done by entrepreneurs.
The exception to the limit on the number of enthusiasts is that there are still billions of humans who are not online yet. When that changes, if even a miniscule fraction of those billions become enthusiasts, then no company can compete with a determined subset of that community in terms of person hours alone, nevermind any questions of productivity per person, etc.
The GPL (or a similar license) makes better business sense for a corporation that doesn't want to risk funding a competitor.
It also makes it possible for companies to pool resources to solve a common problem, even if they are not in direct competition... If half of the Forbes 500 companies each chipped in a fraction of what they pay M$ for Office each year to help polish up Open Office, they could save themselves and the rest of the world Billions each year.
Such a scenario is win-win for everyone except M$. I think BG understands this, and that's why they are pushing the "viral nature of GPL" FUD.
One of your other respondents says PC manufacturers don't pay retail... I wonder then why the off the shelf copy costs so much if the OEM version is like $20?
If you call M$ for support the first thing they want to know is your product key id number. If that id contains the letter OEM, they will tell you to call your OEM.
So when you buy a Dell or GW, you technically are paying less $ to M$, but you are still paying for support from Dell or GW. So even at OEM prices, you are paying more than a couple percent for the OS and support.
Meanwhile, Mandrake can take Red Hat's distribution, rebrand it with a a few added bells and whistles, and sell their own packaged version.
But where did RH get all their stuff to begin with? RH didn't write an OS, nor most of the other stuff on those CD's.
The software was created by a community of online hackers, not RH. If you dont' like the terms of the license under which it is released, then go buy or write your own code.
Believe it or not, there is money to be made in OSS. If Mandrake, RH, or another distro really takes off massively, they will make their money by having control over stuff like default icons and home pages, etc., just like M$. When you upgrade to IE6 the first thing you get on your new improved browser is an ad for MSN.
For the first time in five years, I felt the urge to buy a pre-assembled computer.
Resist the temptation.
We are suppposed to receive a Gateway laptop today and I think we are going to refuse delivery because of salepersons lying to us rather than face the possibility that we might go somewhere else to buy a computer. It was originally promised to be delivered 1 week after we ordered it. I called 8 days later and the guy said "It was manufactured today (remember this is 1 day after it was supposed to arrive), but it doesn't have a tracking number yet" He said it should go out in the UPS that day or the next. I asked him where it comes from so I could have an idea of when it would arrive. I asked him where it would be sent from, and he said they come from North Sioux City, SD, which is normally an overnight shipment to here, two days at the most. I called Tuesday and their automated system gave out a tracking number, so I thought for sure it would have been here Wednesday, so I called last night and talked to someone who verified that it had indeed been shipped, but not from Sioux City. It was shipped from _Taiwan_.
I'm not about to roll my own notebook, but I'm not gonna buy anymore from GW. I don't like being lied to.
What, exactly, is the difference between the integration of Windows and IE vs the integration of KE and Konqueror?
M$ would not allow OEM's like Gateway, Compaq, and Dell to include any other browser on their machines. You could ONLY have IE, and you HAD TO INCLUDE IE with every machine.
That destroyed Netscape, and any other would be competitors.
My question is, why isn't anyone complaining about bundling in the case of Mac OS X?
Because you can *delete* those parts of OSX if you wish to use competing product.
When you buy the os, a DONATION is automatically given to IE.
.Net, and their proprietary file formats.
Or, you could say that M$ sells the browser for less than $0 because they are subsidizing the browser with their monopoly profits. No one makes money off the browser, it's what people do with the browser that matters.
M$ knows that they are not going to be able to maintain their monopoly on the desktop because they cannot compete with the price of GNU/Linux.
They can only continue to maintain their profits with other hooks, such as Passport,
They obviously foresee a future where they cannot charge for the OS, just like they cannot charge for the browser now. And they are preparing for that day very well, I'm sad to say.
Same here, but I dont' even want to be in the club. I would just like to send them 20 bucks or something, just to show my appreciation, but I don't want or need a membership in any club, and I don't use Mandrake $60 worth a year....Yet.
I think the business model should be the same one that M$ sees in MSIE. That is, you don't make the money off the browser, you make it off the users. Now I am not in favor of Mandrake 8.3 including multiple popups requesting that you sign up for MandrakePassport or something, but if you have a hundred million boxen with a default homepage of "ShopMandrake.com" you will probably make a few bucks.
Remember there are still a few Billion people in the world who don't have a computer or an internet connection yet, so there is plenty of opportunity to emulate the M$ business model in MSIE.
They've got a great product, but Mandrake needs to get out there and convince businesses that they can safely and profitably dump Windows.
They need a litle marketing, yes, but not "hype". Hype is just BS, but good marketing could make a big difference. What we really need is for oneof the big OEM's to start selling dual-boot machines off the shelf, and *advertising* the benefits. Sure they might lose their discount from M$, but if, say, Gateway or Compaq started advertising that you get two, two, two computers in one, and showed the Free as in Beer stuff that comes with Mandrake, like Tux Racer and so on, they might be able to sell their boxen for a few bucks more than the competition.
Only problem is that the big OEM's have a big stake in the support they give and they would be adding a whole new set of user problems. That might be the impetus needed, though, to finally iron out the usability issues that remain.
If even a small percentage defects they get upset.
And well they should. They have many hooks which maintain their monopoly, but there are several that are key, and those are the places where Linux is making slow but sure headway.
1. Software and hardware vendors all must produce windows compatible software because that's where the market is. Only a few make Apple or Linux versions.
2. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint file formats.
3. NT domains and authorization schemes, etc.
Right now OSS is just biting at the heels of M$, but at some point the momentum of Linux _could_ become unstoppable. Free as in freedom is great for geeks hacking around in their spare time, but Free as in Beer is going to catch the attention of some big companies soon. When that happens, anything that makes someone in the IT dept or any powerful user say, "But what about the stuff we already have in [insert M$ proprietary format here]?" helps keep M$ in power.
What M$ knows, I think, is that at some point a small group of Fortune 100 companies are going to look at their bottom line and say to themselves, "Why not spend a few $million on OSS development? We could polish up Open Office, Wine, and Samba-- and save ourselves a few $Bill-ions over the next decade.
Somewhere down the road, as GNU/Linux/OSS picks up steam we will reach a tipping point, or critical mass, where all the OEM's and all the hardware and software vendors will have to play ball with us. M$ must stop that before it is too late, if it isn't already.
Yes, mostly small indie-type bands and blues acts. If you ever see the MC Hammer episode of VH1's Behind the Music, it is interesting that when he was first approached by the labels, he turned down their offer, because they were offereing him something like $200k if he sold something like a half a million records (I don't remember the actual numbers), and he had already made half that much selling his own lp's literally out of the trunk of his car at discos. To him, signing with a major label for the usual terms would have been a step down financially.
Too bad he wasn't so financially savvy once he hit the big time.
The artists I like make all their money selling t-shirts and products on tour...
So true. In the last year I bet I purchased half of my new cd's either directly from the band at a show, or from their own web site. Often they are $10-$15 and I'm sure the artist makes more $ per unit than if I bought the same item from a store for $18.99.
The RIAA does not want us buying directly from the artists any more than they want us sharing mp3's online or streaming pirate radio to the web. If people really started buying a lot of music directly from the artists, you would see the RIAA come up with a law against it.
I almost hope the RIAA prices themselves off of the web, so that the only bands on the web are those who want to be heard because they have something to say musically, rather than because they want to make a million bucks.