All software started out free. In fact, the whole idea that someone can "own" an idea and sell it in widget form is relatively new in the world.
Some people would argue that attempting to sell something which can be duplicated for zero cost just about anywhere on the planet is a poor business model in the first place:)
The guy you responded was getting paid to write free software-- the parts his clients needed the most.
Most software simply isn't viable as widget in the first place. It may be very specific to a certain use, it may not even be a complete program. Thus nothing is lost by using an open source licence. But things can be gained, the developer can take any piece of OSS and incorporate it in their project. They might need to modify it to fit their needs, but that is perfectly acceptable.
No, there won't be many companies writing free software and trying to profit from it. Some companies pay programmers to make software that goes with their hardware, many companies pay programmers to customize existing open source software.
As plenty pay people to alter proprietary software in various ways. The difference with OSS is that the company would no longer be relient on the whims of a third party software vendor.
Yes that means there will be fewer programming jobs overall, eventually.
It's kind of difficult to tell if there would be fewer, about the same number or more programming jobs were everthing to go open source. Different companies would want their software to do different things. When you have the source code available modifications can be made without limit, rather than just whatever some third party thinks should be changable.
I think that a good starting point would be to impose strict term limits on our Representatives and Senators. Our country can do without the people who make it their career to be politicians and contribute nothing else.
The only way this could possibly happen is through civil revolt, if not outright revolution. Politicians rarely act altruistically. Especially when they are percieved more as "leaders" than as "public servants".
Look at Gray Davis; he's pissed off because he's been recalled from office by angry voters. Gray Davis passed stupid laws from which he was detached from the consequences. He had a big political machine that crushed the opposition in the last election cycle. He didn't care that he raised car taxes through the roof. He didn't care that foolish policies crippled California's power system. It's great to see that someone finally made him face the music.
One down, how many more to go though?
My point is, politicians don't understand anything but politics these days because that's all they do.
Which makes them fundermentally incapable of doing the job they were put in place to do.
Software began as open source and was shared. It is proprietary software that is the new model, and companies are switching back to open source because of the problems inherent in that model.
The proprietary software idea only really makes much sense with the kind of business model which involves a piece of software being sold to many customers. Whilst this is possibly the most visible part of the software industry it isn't the majority of it.
Even in proprietary software, code sharing occurs at some level between areas of companies, companies collaborating, and even customers,
Code being proprietary is a barrier here, since it can be a complex process working out if piece of code A can be included in project B. (It's perfectly possible to wind up with a situation where a developer no longer owns code they wrote in the first place.) Whereas if everything involved is open source there is no possible problem with code reuse.
The key essence of your jobs wan't that the software used was free. The same thing - by the admission - could have been done with proprietary software. And right now the proprietary stuff employs a multitude of people more than you.
If developing proprietary means having to duplicate code which already exists or employ lawyers to work out complex licencing systems then that is more a sign of inefficency.
The fact remains that writing software and giving it away has yet to be proven as a longtime viable industry.
Only a tiny amount of software ever written exists as an "off the shelf product". For the vast majority of software the potential for selling it as is as some kind of product is zero. (Even where some software may be capable of being altered into some kind of generic product it could easily be uneconomic to do so.)
From a business standpoint the OSS projects that are profitable make moeny from support, bugfixes, and donations.
Software has an intrinsic property that the cost of duplicating it is trivial. What actually costs money is writing it in the first place, altering it, installing it, configuring it. In more generic terms human labour. In many cases where software is used it is infrastructure so it makes sense to treat it like plumbing, cabling, buildings, etc.
Therefore, it's better to use a tool that's 90% right, if it'll be there forever, as opposed to a tool that's 100%, but might be gone tomorrow.
If your system is based on a proprietary platform you are totally at the mercy of that supplier. Why should any sane business make themselves relient on any single supplier?
Anyone can become a "terrorist" at any moment for no predictable reason.
But you can predict what kinds of situations are likely to lead to "terrorism". States which enguage in invasions, occupations and state sponsored terrorism are far more likely to be the targets of "terrorism" than those which don't.
If only more people understood this, we might have more reasonable copyright laws. Copyright laws exist because without them, few people would bother to make (in this case) movies.
Actually we don't know if this actually is the case. Since copyright (and it's associated third party publisher/distributor business model) was well established prior to the invention of the cini-camera.
As a society, we have more movies to choose from because of copyright law. The longer the copyright term, the more incentive there is.
Even if it can be demonstrated that copyright is good at promoting the distribution of movies that need not imply that more copyright is better. There could easily be an optimum copyright term for encouraging movies, beyond which more copyright makes little difference.
However, a longer copyright term also makes it harder to access older movies, discourages derivative works, and does little to encourage production. So there's a tradeoff.
There are plenty of situations where something which is good in moderation is bad in excess. A small amount of all sorts of spices added to food can improve the taste, a large amount can render it inedible. Similarly a tiny amount of a chemical can cure someone, whereas a larger amount would quickly poison them.
So there's a tradeoff. One week is too short (would you pay $9 to see a movie that would be free next weekend? Didn't think so) while life+70 years is too long (how much money my movie makes between the years 2107 and 2127 isn't very important to me). Somewhere in the middle is an optimal term that benefits all of us the most.
If you are going to make a movie you might well be borrowing the money anyway. How long before whoever lent you the money will be expecting it back?
Unfortunately, we've lost track of why copyright law exists. It's not there to protect Hollywood studios; it's not there to protect millionaire actors; it's not even there to protect the "average" people shown in the MPAA propaganda.
Are Hollywood and expensive actors actually a requirement for the production of movies which entertain people in the first place? Most people involved in the production of a movie are likely to get paid for the work they do.
I was not arguing for a socialist model at all, merely a reasonable appraisal that if a project is not going to make sufficient profit to justify its going ahead within 50 years, it is highly unlikely to generate that extra money in the final 20 years.
In how many cases is the possibility of a 50-70 year long monopoly going to be at all relevent. Even contracts for managment of buildings rarely last that long. A company renting office space or charging bridge tolls has a reasonable chance of continuing income. Typically movies make the majority of the money they are ever going to make within the first few years.
Unfortunately, most western economies are too reliant on IP laws. If copyright were to simply be abolished (which I agree is the right final outcome) then a signficant number of businesses currently rigged to take advantage of the existing situation would encounter financial difficulties.
A century ago plenty of companies were "rigged to take advantage of" horse drawn transport. Indeed the entire economy was tied to this. Even though virtually all of these companies went bankrupt the Western Economy still exists.
But I'd love to see how they, or better yet -- the government, justify retrospective copyright extension given that the original reason for the artificial structure or copyright is to encourage new products not to encourage people to create one thing then sit on their arses for the rest of their lives.
Retrospective extension cannot possibly encourage the creation of something which already exists in the first place. If something already exists then what ever incentives in terms of copyright term which existed when it was created must have been more than adequate. How much evidence is there that very long copyright terms encourages creation of new works in the here and now? N.B. since just about every creative work is in some way derived from existing works it could just as easily be claimed that a lack of recent material going into the public domain is a barrier to publication of new works. Another datum point is that the most sucessful author in publishing history does not appear to have been inspired by the idea of life plus 70 years of copyright.
Copyright should apply to a fixed period (maybe flat 50 years for a "traditional" work of art, maybe quite a bit less for a computer prigram but the appropriate period is reasonably up for debate).
Why should it be anything like that length of time on a movie or music recording which the publisher will judge "hit" or "miss" in at most a few years? Quite possibly within a few months.
My second point is not advocating endless copyright. I'm suggesting a token payment to signal active upkeep start from day one and be required every X years until the copyright runs out.
A token payment is unlikely to help much with "copyright squatting". Far better is a payment which rises exponentially.
I wish for works to be in the public domain 2 years after the ORIGINAL AUTHOR dies.
What's so special about "author's life plus X" anyway? How did this concept get into copyright law in the first place...
The best solution would be that the original author retains the copyright, but only LICENSES the work to publishers and others to sell and distribute for profit. That way the original author would be able to do whatever he pleases with his OWN work, including revoking a license from a publisher so that no future copies could be made. Including putting it to public domain after he's made enough money from it.
This is a suitably radical idea. But it needs some further thought as to how does it affect works which have more than one author, what happens in the case of anthologies/compilations and how would copyright be applied to recordings of a performance e.g. a movie?
can't people see that the existence of widespread law breaking from copyright violation is a CLEAR signal that people do not see that the copyright contact is fair? it is so obviously not fair now that people blatantly and purposefully flaunt the laws.
as I put into another post, below. 15 years should be plenty.
Or maybe more radical changes to copyright are needed. Similar to the way in which the "Statute of Anne" fundermentally rewrote the concept.
I can see how in the case of pharmaceuticals, where companies must go through the burocracy of the FDA, it is wrong to let people import drugs from Canada where there is less expense imposed by regulatory hassles.
Most likely the problem here is with the regulation authority. Anyway there is nothing to stop any pharmaceutical company from "shopping around" for the best country to get their approvals in.
The same with automobiles across the canadian border, since the Federal Government heavily regulates the auto industry and introduces a lot of extra cost into each vehicle.
Similarly in Canadian cars are "street legal" in the US then any fault lies with US regulators. If they are not then it's a law enforcement issue.
But to my knowledge there are no such regulations on books, and so importing them is simply the free market in operation rather than a way of circumventing regulations and the associated costs.
There are no regulations concerning purfum or jeans either. If it were a regulator issue it would be governments acting, rather than private companies in the first place.
Agreed. Though all things considered, a lot has to be said for the diligence of most the Linux admins I know, compared to the M$ admins. When a patch comes out, we're usually chomping on the bit for it to show up in the various repositories (the overzealous ones have of course already compiled it an hour earlier). Whereas with the M$ stuff (as is seen by the continuing presence of cmd.exe and other IIS-virus-related requests in my apache logs), the admins don't even apply the few M$ patches that do come out in a timely manner.
One of the things MS sold Windows on was the idea of not needing specialist admins. Combined with the way Windows software often tends to expect the end user to be performing sysadmin tasks.
I believe that there is a fundamental problem with the culture within Microsoft. Microsoft was built on adding features to its software in order to appeal to the masses
Do you actually mean "the masses" or Micrsoft's Marketing Department:)
The rest is Microsoft's tendency to roll functionality changes in with security fixes. I'm not sure if it's because they really think that's a good idea or if it's just an artifact of their code management processes.
IMHO it's at least partly deliberate. A side effect of trying to make what are actually applications part of the OS. Since this is intended to shut out other software. If the design was highly modular it would be perfectly possible for someone to replace an MS component with a not MS component with minimal fuss.
If you have a system designed like a Big Ball of Mud, then a vulnerability is likely to be the result of unanticipated interactions between different modules.
Assuming it's even accurate to refer to "modules" in such a situation.
When you try to fix that, then you are just changing to a different set of unanticipated interactions.
Hence the other term for such software is "Sphagetti code".
Fixing such systems often involves making sweeping changes across all of the modules that you can think of that interact with the problem module.
In the process you may miss some bits which do interact or even break some bits which didn't interact in the first place...
well, yes... but there is a much stronger motivation to invent the zipper if you think you'll be rewarded for it.
This isn't such a simple situation. Throughout human history people have invented and created things without considering the possibility of making money off them.
If I'm going to spend a million dollars to research a new drug therapy, and somebody else can duplicate my work for free, why would I spend the million dollars?
Just because you might have spent a million dollers does not mean that whatever you did is actually worth a million dollers. Drugs are something of a special case since manufacturing is always cheap, but clinical trials to prove both that a drug is effective and safe are time consuming and expensive.
Now the theory I'm espousing here is not a matter of written law, but I think it was presumed in the original concept of patents that it took a certain amount of effort and resource to invent something that could be patented.
There is no obvious relationship between "innovation" and "effort and resources".
If it takes near zero effort, then you lose nothing when everybody else duplicates your work.
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All software started out free. In fact, the whole idea that someone can "own" an idea and sell it in widget form is relatively new in the world.
:)
Some people would argue that attempting to sell something which can be duplicated for zero cost just about anywhere on the planet is a poor business model in the first place
The guy you responded was getting paid to write free software-- the parts his clients needed the most.
Most software simply isn't viable as widget in the first place. It may be very specific to a certain use, it may not even be a complete program. Thus nothing is lost by using an open source licence. But things can be gained, the developer can take any piece of OSS and incorporate it in their project. They might need to modify it to fit their needs, but that is perfectly acceptable.
No, there won't be many companies writing free software and trying to profit from it. Some companies pay programmers to make software that goes with their hardware, many companies pay programmers to customize existing open source software.
As plenty pay people to alter proprietary software in various ways. The difference with OSS is that the company would no longer be relient on the whims of a third party software vendor.
Yes that means there will be fewer programming jobs overall, eventually.
It's kind of difficult to tell if there would be fewer, about the same number or more programming jobs were everthing to go open source. Different companies would want their software to do different things. When you have the source code available modifications can be made without limit, rather than just whatever some third party thinks should be changable.
I think that a good starting point would be to impose strict term limits on our Representatives and Senators. Our country can do without the people who make it their career to be politicians and contribute nothing else.
The only way this could possibly happen is through civil revolt, if not outright revolution. Politicians rarely act altruistically. Especially when they are percieved more as "leaders" than as "public servants".
Look at Gray Davis; he's pissed off because he's been recalled from office by angry voters. Gray Davis passed stupid laws from which he was detached from the consequences. He had a big political machine that crushed the opposition in the last election cycle. He didn't care that he raised car taxes through the roof. He didn't care that foolish policies crippled California's power system. It's great to see that someone finally made him face the music.
One down, how many more to go though?
My point is, politicians don't understand anything but politics these days because that's all they do.
Which makes them fundermentally incapable of doing the job they were put in place to do.
Software began as open source and was shared. It is proprietary software that is the new model, and companies are switching back to open source because of the problems inherent in that model.
The proprietary software idea only really makes much sense with the kind of business model which involves a piece of software being sold to many customers. Whilst this is possibly the most visible part of the software industry it isn't the majority of it.
Even in proprietary software, code sharing occurs at some level between areas of companies, companies collaborating, and even customers,
Code being proprietary is a barrier here, since it can be a complex process working out if piece of code A can be included in project B. (It's perfectly possible to wind up with a situation where a developer no longer owns code they wrote in the first place.) Whereas if everything involved is open source there is no possible problem with code reuse.
The key essence of your jobs wan't that the software used was free. The same thing - by the admission - could have been done with proprietary software. And right now the proprietary stuff employs a multitude of people more than you.
If developing proprietary means having to duplicate code which already exists or employ lawyers to work out complex licencing systems then that is more a sign of inefficency.
The fact remains that writing software and giving it away has yet to be proven as a longtime viable industry.
Only a tiny amount of software ever written exists as an "off the shelf product". For the vast majority of software the potential for selling it as is as some kind of product is zero. (Even where some software may be capable of being altered into some kind of generic product it could easily be uneconomic to do so.)
From a business standpoint the OSS projects that are profitable make moeny from support, bugfixes, and donations.
Software has an intrinsic property that the cost of duplicating it is trivial. What actually costs money is writing it in the first place, altering it, installing it, configuring it. In more generic terms human labour.
In many cases where software is used it is infrastructure so it makes sense to treat it like plumbing, cabling, buildings, etc.
Therefore, it's better to use a tool that's 90% right, if it'll be there forever, as opposed to a tool that's 100%, but might be gone tomorrow.
If your system is based on a proprietary platform you are totally at the mercy of that supplier. Why should any sane business make themselves relient on any single supplier?
This is a project? Don't laugh, but at the time it was welcomed. It was a far sight better than the INI files, which were limited to 64KB.
Which is not a limit in practice. How many sections of programs need to store 64kB on a semi permement basis?
Anyone can become a "terrorist" at any moment for no predictable reason.
But you can predict what kinds of situations are likely to lead to "terrorism". States which enguage in invasions, occupations and state sponsored terrorism are far more likely to be the targets of "terrorism" than those which don't.
or that an American citizen has no records of terrorist activities (or that he/she's not a federal fugitive, for that matter).
Hoe many microseconds do you think it will take terrorists to work out that all they need do is recruit or steal the identities of such people?
How about life plus 20, so that an artist's/author's creative works can support children through college?
How about they put the money they make into their kids' college fund? The same way anyone else would do. Ditto for their own pension fund.
If only more people understood this, we might have more reasonable copyright laws. Copyright laws exist because without them, few people would bother to make (in this case) movies.
Actually we don't know if this actually is the case. Since copyright (and it's associated third party publisher/distributor business model) was well established prior to the invention of the cini-camera.
As a society, we have more movies to choose from because of copyright law. The longer the copyright term, the more incentive there is.
Even if it can be demonstrated that copyright is good at promoting the distribution of movies that need not imply that more copyright is better. There could easily be an optimum copyright term for encouraging movies, beyond which more copyright makes little difference.
However, a longer copyright term also makes it harder to access older movies, discourages derivative works, and does little to encourage production. So there's a tradeoff.
There are plenty of situations where something which is good in moderation is bad in excess. A small amount of all sorts of spices added to food can improve the taste, a large amount can render it inedible. Similarly a tiny amount of a chemical can cure someone, whereas a larger amount would quickly poison them.
So there's a tradeoff. One week is too short (would you pay $9 to see a movie that would be free next weekend? Didn't think so) while life+70 years is too long (how much money my movie makes between the years 2107 and 2127 isn't very important to me). Somewhere in the middle is an optimal term that benefits all of us the most.
If you are going to make a movie you might well be borrowing the money anyway. How long before whoever lent you the money will be expecting it back?
Unfortunately, we've lost track of why copyright law exists. It's not there to protect Hollywood studios; it's not there to protect millionaire actors; it's not even there to protect the "average" people shown in the MPAA propaganda.
Are Hollywood and expensive actors actually a requirement for the production of movies which entertain people in the first place? Most people involved in the production of a movie are likely to get paid for the work they do.
I was not arguing for a socialist model at all, merely a reasonable appraisal that if a project is not going to make sufficient profit to justify its going ahead within 50 years, it is highly unlikely to generate that extra money in the final 20 years.
In how many cases is the possibility of a 50-70 year long monopoly going to be at all relevent. Even contracts for managment of buildings rarely last that long. A company renting office space or charging bridge tolls has a reasonable chance of continuing income. Typically movies make the majority of the money they are ever going to make within the first few years.
Unfortunately, most western economies are too reliant on IP laws. If copyright were to simply be abolished (which I agree is the right final outcome) then a signficant number of businesses currently rigged to take advantage of the existing situation would encounter financial difficulties.
A century ago plenty of companies were "rigged to take advantage of" horse drawn transport. Indeed the entire economy was tied to this. Even though virtually all of these companies went bankrupt the Western Economy still exists.
But I'd love to see how they, or better yet -- the government, justify retrospective copyright extension given that the original reason for the artificial structure or copyright is to encourage new products not to encourage people to create one thing then sit on their arses for the rest of their lives.
Retrospective extension cannot possibly encourage the creation of something which already exists in the first place. If something already exists then what ever incentives in terms of copyright term which existed when it was created must have been more than adequate.
How much evidence is there that very long copyright terms encourages creation of new works in the here and now? N.B. since just about every creative work is in some way derived from existing works it could just as easily be claimed that a lack of recent material going into the public domain is a barrier to publication of new works.
Another datum point is that the most sucessful author in publishing history does not appear to have been inspired by the idea of life plus 70 years of copyright.
Copyright should apply to a fixed period (maybe flat 50 years for a "traditional" work of art, maybe quite a bit less for a computer prigram but the appropriate period is reasonably up for debate).
Why should it be anything like that length of time on a movie or music recording which the publisher will judge "hit" or "miss" in at most a few years? Quite possibly within a few months.
My second point is not advocating endless copyright. I'm suggesting a token payment to signal active upkeep start from day one and be required every X years until the copyright runs out.
A token payment is unlikely to help much with "copyright squatting". Far better is a payment which rises exponentially.
I wish for works to be in the public domain 2 years after the ORIGINAL AUTHOR dies.
What's so special about "author's life plus X" anyway? How did this concept get into copyright law in the first place...
The best solution would be that the original author retains the copyright, but only LICENSES the work to publishers and others to sell and distribute for profit. That way the original author would be able to do whatever he pleases with his OWN work, including revoking a license from a publisher so that no future copies could be made. Including putting it to public domain after he's made enough money from it.
This is a suitably radical idea. But it needs some further thought as to how does it affect works which have more than one author, what happens in the case of anthologies/compilations and how would copyright be applied to recordings of a performance e.g. a movie?
can't people see that the existence of widespread law breaking from copyright violation is a CLEAR signal that people do not see that the copyright contact is fair? it is so obviously not fair now that people blatantly and purposefully flaunt the laws.
as I put into another post, below. 15 years should be plenty.
Or maybe more radical changes to copyright are needed. Similar to the way in which the "Statute of Anne" fundermentally rewrote the concept.
I can see how in the case of pharmaceuticals, where companies must go through the burocracy of the FDA, it is wrong to let people import drugs from Canada where there is less expense imposed by regulatory hassles.
Most likely the problem here is with the regulation authority. Anyway there is nothing to stop any pharmaceutical company from "shopping around" for the best country to get their approvals in.
The same with automobiles across the canadian border, since the Federal Government heavily regulates the auto industry and introduces a lot of extra cost into each vehicle.
Similarly in Canadian cars are "street legal" in the US then any fault lies with US regulators. If they are not then it's a law enforcement issue.
But to my knowledge there are no such regulations on books, and so importing them is simply the free market in operation rather than a way of circumventing regulations and the associated costs.
There are no regulations concerning purfum or jeans either. If it were a regulator issue it would be governments acting, rather than private companies in the first place.
Agreed. Though all things considered, a lot has to be said for the diligence of most the Linux admins I know, compared to the M$ admins. When a patch comes out, we're usually chomping on the bit for it to show up in the various repositories (the overzealous ones have of course already compiled it an hour earlier). Whereas with the M$ stuff (as is seen by the continuing presence of cmd.exe and other IIS-virus-related requests in my apache logs), the admins don't even apply the few M$ patches that do come out in a timely manner.
One of the things MS sold Windows on was the idea of not needing specialist admins. Combined with the way Windows software often tends to expect the end user to be performing sysadmin tasks.
I believe that there is a fundamental problem with the culture within Microsoft. Microsoft was built on adding features to its software in order to appeal to the masses
:)
Do you actually mean "the masses" or Micrsoft's Marketing Department
The rest is Microsoft's tendency to roll functionality changes in with security fixes. I'm not sure if it's because they really think that's a good idea or if it's just an artifact of their code management processes.
IMHO it's at least partly deliberate. A side effect of trying to make what are actually applications part of the OS. Since this is intended to shut out other software. If the design was highly modular it would be perfectly possible for someone to replace an MS component with a not MS component with minimal fuss.
If you have a system designed like a Big Ball of Mud, then a vulnerability is likely to be the result of unanticipated interactions between different modules.
Assuming it's even accurate to refer to "modules" in such a situation.
When you try to fix that, then you are just changing to a different set of unanticipated interactions.
Hence the other term for such software is "Sphagetti code".
Fixing such systems often involves making sweeping changes across all of the modules that you can think of that interact with the problem module.
In the process you may miss some bits which do interact or even break some bits which didn't interact in the first place...
well, yes... but there is a much stronger motivation to invent the zipper if you think you'll be rewarded for it.
This isn't such a simple situation. Throughout human history people have invented and created things without considering the possibility of making money off them.
If I'm going to spend a million dollars to research a new drug therapy, and somebody else can duplicate my work for free, why would I spend the million dollars?
Just because you might have spent a million dollers does not mean that whatever you did is actually worth a million dollers.
Drugs are something of a special case since manufacturing is always cheap, but clinical trials to prove both that a drug is effective and safe are time consuming and expensive.
Now the theory I'm espousing here is not a matter of written law, but I think it was presumed in the original concept of patents that it took a certain amount of effort and resource to invent something that could be patented.
There is no obvious relationship between "innovation" and "effort and resources".
If it takes near zero effort, then you lose nothing when everybody else duplicates your work.
On top of everthing how do you measure "effort"?