People explicity refers to the US citizenry which was in existance - 1792 as opposed to 1777, we had won our independance and had been functioning as a confederation.
It could just as easily refer to residents of the US.
like the current E.U., which was not working.
If it was "like the EU" they certainly wouldn't be US citizens, they'd be citizens of the original 13 states.
o look up the fourth amendment. It doesn't say 'residents'. In fact, neither 'resident' nor 'citizen' occurs in the bill of rights
The most important thing to remember is that the "bill of rights" is about restricting the ability of the US Government trampling on peoples' inate rights.
In most government contracts, there are clauses about repair and upkeep of products. For example, when the US Navy bought a school complex for more than $100M, the contractr was required to have a 24-hour on call repair expert for the first 3 years, as well as comprehensive repair teams for anything that the command said was broken. This was part of the specification that the contractor bid on.
So you can sue them if they don't comply. Which is all very nice, but it dosn't actually get the problem fixed. If the contractor goes bankrupt then sueing them isn't much use at all.
So all citizens have a right to see the plans on making a nuclear missle? Or the location of every nuclear sub iin the world?
The latter is a different type of information from the first. The former is like knowing how a database is constructed, the latter is like knowing all the data which is in the database. Even if you ran an entire navy on GPL software nothing in the licence would require you to say where any ship was at any time. Since the GPL does not require disclosing data held in or processed by GPL software. However some proprietary licences do require this or give ownership of data to the software supplier. Does any country, including the US, really want Microsoft to know what they are doing with their warships?
The best aspect of Open Source is that there can be many companies supporting, prodiving or developing a given product. If one company fails, there will likely be another one to take its place. Competition will keep costs down and no monopoly can ever rule.
If a company supplying proprietary software failed then their software is likely to be tied up in the process of bankruptcy. If a company supplying open source software fails anyone can take over support and development of the software. If it's extensivly used software then other software companies have a sound commercial reason to do so.
Any consumer that would have to choose between open-source and closed-source will come to the conclusion that open-source is to be preferred.
When the customer gets a choice and can see through the blanket of FUD sucessful proprietary software companies have thrown up.
Any improvements to the source can still be obtained and so eventually, open-source will be very good.
Also they are not tied to the same supplier or contractor.To a customer there dosn't appear to be any benefit to proprietary software. There are far more customers and users of software than there are suppliers of proprietary software. Indeed it wouldn't suprise me if the proprietary software has sent more software companies bankrupt than it has made rich. Software development is likely to be a lot cheaper when you have more software you can reuse.
Security. Closed source software may contain dormant or active backdoors and remote exploits, either due to bugs or due to demands from an Inteligence Agency. This is especially relevant for software that is used by government agencies (still, don't forget good old industrial espionage).
As well as corporate interests enguaging in government manipulation and perversion. Anyway the former means that governments should never touch proprietary software produced by a foreign corporate entity.
I hate to find myself defending Microsoft and it's allies, but I think the main problem they have is that GPL'd software can't be commercially sold or incorporated in commercial software.
Thing is that this simply isn't true. You can sell GPL software for any price you like. "commercial" does not equate to "proprietary".
I work for a large multinational corporation, and *I* want to be allowed to use high-quality professional software too.
Does this mean that your corporation uses software, but is not in the business of supplying software to third parties.
The GPL allows anyone to make use of GPL code, with the restriction that they must share the results with the community. I would not consider that "heavily encumbered"
The only entities who are encumbered in any way here are those who's business relys on selling proprietary software. A business which sells proprietary software as a minor sideline might be a little bit encumbered. A entity which uses software, which is the vast majority of individuals and corporates (profit and non profit) isn't encumbered at all. Nor would a company (or individual) who works as an IT contractor.
notice that they also asked that research not be put under GPL-like licenses, under the assumption that government-funded research should be resold afterwards... personally, i don't appreciate giving money to the government, in the form of taxes, and then having to buy back from them what they discovered thanks to my money
Especially when it's a company like Microsoft, who so effectivly evades taxation that they didn't contribute at all in the first place. The real question should be about there needing to be a very good reason why state funded research isn't public domain.
But, determining which tool is right is the real issue. If the government is producing documents, of whatever sort, whether they be text documents, graphics, databases, web pages, etc., they should be in formats that are open and freely implementable. Otherwise the government is forcing citizens to purchase proprietary software to view public information.
It's also important to remember that whilst a proprietary format can force the user to have to use proprietary software an open format can allow both open source or proprietary programs to access it.
Keep in mind that the "surprise" diamond engagement ring was invented by DeBeers (who paid for for the placement of said surprises in movies) specifically because their research showed that when the man asked the woman what she wanted, she almost _always_ preferred the man to spend the money on something practical like a down payment on a house or a car. Only by making men believe that women wanted a diamond ring, and didn't want to be asked about it, could they convince men to spend several months' salary on something the woman didn't actually want, and embarrass the woman into not admitting to that fact.
DeBeers also worked hard to create the idea of "a diamond is forever". For the reason that a second hand diamond market would kill their whole business.
However, like IP addresses, these are handed out in inefficient methods, because they go in blocks of 100,000. Which means you need to pay somebody some money to get ahold of one.
Actually the UPC is worst than IP addresses since it only allows one block size. At least originally IP addresses allowed blocks of 253 65,533 or 16,777,213. Another situation where you see such a problem is telephone numbering, numbers being assigned in blocks of 10,000. Especially in places such as North America where you have fixed 3 digit area codes and 7 digit local numbers.
This is a common problem for aspiring independent artists who want to get their music out. They get to make a choice... do I pay someone for a UPC, or do I go without? Stores generally won't accept a CD for sale w/o a UPC code on it.
One thing the EAN (and for that matter ISBN) allows for different lengths of company and item fields. Thus it would be quite possible for such an artist to get an 8 or even 9 digit manufacturer code.
Does anyone know if old bar cdes are ever reused, or when a product is cancelled, is it just retired. For example, is the bar code for "New Coke" usable for some other, less-disgusting product, like Motor Oil, or has it forever disappeared into the ether.
Because of the way the bar codes are assigned the only way this would be possible would be if the Coca Cola company started selling motor oil. Or possibly a soft drink called "motor oil".
Anyone know how produce codes are assigned? How the hell do you go through 12 digits? Obviously a lot of it got wasted in some way.
Currently the US uses the 12 digit UPC which has 5 digit manufacturer and 5 digit product fields. The 13 digit EAN (which uses the same encoding) has a country code (with psudo country codes for things such as ISBNs), a manufacturer code and a product code, all of which can be variable length.
The remaining digits have a variable length publisher code and a variable length product code -- Prentice Hall is 13, Oxford is 19, Addison Wesley is 201, Perseus is 7382, O'Reilly is 56592.
If the system is sensibly designed then all publisher codes starting with 1 with be 2 digit, all starting with 2 will be 3 digit, etc. Though it's possible for a publisher to have more than one code or a contiguious block of codes.
ISBN's almost always start with zero or one, although that's changing as more companies get into the game. Texkbooks and reference books usually start with 9, for example.
The first digit serves to indicate the language the book uses. Though unfortunatly no distinction is made between English, American and Australian.
Hardcover, trade paper and Mass Market editions of the same book have different ISBNs, but different editions/printings of the same book usually have the same isbn. While conserving available codes, it's quite annoying when someone's looking for a specific edition.
There is a suplimentry barcode which could be used for the edition, but it can also be used to indicate the price...
The rest of the world uses 13 digit codes already, so they are just harmonizing with that.
The US adopting something from the rest of the world should be considered big news. Since it is so unusual. More usually "harmonization" winds up meaning trying to get the rest of the world to do things the American way:)
An programmer can put in a hard days work, and will get paid for it over and over and over again.
Assuming the programmer has produced a piece of general software. They may have produced a piece of software for one specific entity or modified an existing program to meet specific requirements or put together a package of software to meet a specific need.
A bricklayer can put in a hard days work and he will only get paid for it once. Why? Because the bricklayer is producing a physical product, "media" if you will, whereas the programmer (or actor, or musician) is producing content. Content can be copied, media can't.
But this does not imply that all content must be create once sell many times, especially with software. Content can be a building block as much as a brick. The difference is that bricks cost money, though they only make a minor part of the cost of the building since the major part is always labour.
Until recently, the technology to produce copies of content were prohibitively expensive,
If we had the type of irrational rhetoric coming from the AAAA back in the days of Geutenberg - he would have been accused of being a medieval Napster.
After all, he could crank out orders of magnatude the number of copies that could be crated in the past - making it seem silly to have scribes any more. his invention basically made it so that instead of just a few writers making tons of money - you'd be able to have tons of lame writers flodding the market - making it hard to find who was good and who was not good.
It's quite possible that the people who actually read the resulting books would have different opinions from the scribes guild as to what was a good (and thus worth copying) book.
i think we are fundamentally screwed - because this time, unlike the previous incarnations of technology that obsoleted people - these people are mch more motivated - they are going to lose high-paying jobs that gave them hig pay for doing not a whole lot.. previous folks who lost there jobs weren't making a ton of money.
I wouldn't be so sure that people obsoleted by technology wern't making lots of money, by the standards of the day.
When selling goods, you charge so that you not only make up for the production of the goods, but also for the development thereof.
Software is not a good. Whilst it may have a development cost it's production cost is effectivly zero. There is plenty of software where a sell many times approach wouldn't work. Indeed there might only ever be one customer who will ever exist. Just so happens the part of the software industry which sells software as though it is a novel is more visible.
Enter the digital age. The media is unimportant. Audio, video, software, text are all just bits of information. They can be burned onto a CD. They can be sent over the internet. They can even be written to floppy disks. It no longer expensive to copy something.
It's a bit like the situation in the Star Trek universe where you can do this with material objects using "replicators". Making the first one of whatever or altering an existing object has some expense, but duplicating or transporting is a very cheap operation.
There is no longer any degradation. A seventeenth generation copy is as crisp and clear as the master. The three pillars holding up this scam are gone.
To some extent it wasn't actually a "scam" so much as the way things were in the past. Also the publishing and distribution companies want to "eat their cake and have it". They fear "piracy", but at the same time like the way in which the newer technologies have brought their costs of duplication and distribution down.
Lastly, (and I may be misunderstanding you) just because they have made back their cost of production (in some cases, decades ago) received hefty returns (in some cases, in excess of tenfold) -- do they no longer deserve their IP rights?
In the case of the US the only reason for IP existing is to get new works published.
Before you answer, put yourself in the position of a private investor -- should there be a cap on the amoount of return that you can receive on your investments?
No-one has any right to a return in the first place. Also usually the level of potential return follows the level of risk. Thus a possibility of a 1,000+% return should come with a big risk of completly losing your initial investment.
But there's already a boatload of material already paid for.
Probably quite a lot of quite new material which has been paid for
I wouldn't mind being exposed to shows I haven't seen such as documentaries or older movies. These have made back their cost of production (in some cases decades ago).
That would mean changing the business model. Which is exactly what the industry wants to avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
People explicity refers to the US citizenry which was in existance - 1792 as opposed to 1777, we had won our independance and had been functioning as a confederation.
It could just as easily refer to residents of the US.
like the current E.U., which was not working.
If it was "like the EU" they certainly wouldn't be US citizens, they'd be citizens of the original 13 states.
o look up the fourth amendment. It doesn't say 'residents'. In fact, neither 'resident' nor 'citizen' occurs in the bill of rights
The most important thing to remember is that the "bill of rights" is about restricting the ability of the US Government trampling on peoples' inate rights.
In most government contracts, there are clauses about repair and upkeep of products. For example, when the US Navy bought a school complex for more than $100M, the contractr was required to have a 24-hour on call repair expert for the first 3 years, as well as comprehensive repair teams for anything that the command said was broken. This was part of the specification that the contractor bid on.
So you can sue them if they don't comply. Which is all very nice, but it dosn't actually get the problem fixed. If the contractor goes bankrupt then sueing them isn't much use at all.
So all citizens have a right to see the plans on making a nuclear missle? Or the location of every nuclear sub iin the world?
The latter is a different type of information from the first.
The former is like knowing how a database is constructed, the latter is like knowing all the data which is in the database.
Even if you ran an entire navy on GPL software nothing in the licence would require you to say where any ship was at any time. Since the GPL does not require disclosing data held in or processed by GPL software. However some proprietary licences do require this or give ownership of data to the software supplier. Does any country, including the US, really want Microsoft to know what they are doing with their warships?
The best aspect of Open Source is that there can be many companies supporting, prodiving or developing a given product. If one company fails, there will likely be another one to take its place. Competition will keep costs down and no monopoly can ever rule.
If a company supplying proprietary software failed then their software is likely to be tied up in the process of bankruptcy. If a company supplying open source software fails anyone can take over support and development of the software. If it's extensivly used software then other software companies have a sound commercial reason to do so.
Any consumer that would have to choose between open-source and closed-source will come to the conclusion that open-source is to be preferred.
When the customer gets a choice and can see through the blanket of FUD sucessful proprietary software companies have thrown up.
Any improvements to the source can still be obtained and so eventually, open-source will be very good.
Also they are not tied to the same supplier or contractor.To a customer there dosn't appear to be any benefit to proprietary software. There are far more customers and users of software than there are suppliers of proprietary software.
Indeed it wouldn't suprise me if the proprietary software has sent more software companies bankrupt than it has made rich. Software development is likely to be a lot cheaper when you have more software you can reuse.
Security. Closed source software may contain dormant or active backdoors and remote exploits, either due to bugs or due to demands from an Inteligence Agency. This is especially relevant for software that is used by government agencies (still, don't forget good old industrial espionage).
As well as corporate interests enguaging in government manipulation and perversion. Anyway the former means that governments should never touch proprietary software produced by a foreign corporate entity.
I hate to find myself defending Microsoft and it's allies, but I think the main problem they have is that GPL'd software can't be commercially sold or incorporated in commercial software.
Thing is that this simply isn't true. You can sell GPL software for any price you like. "commercial" does not equate to "proprietary".
I work for a large multinational corporation, and *I* want to be allowed to use high-quality professional software too.
Does this mean that your corporation uses software, but is not in the business of supplying software to third parties.
The GPL allows anyone to make use of GPL code, with the restriction that they must share the results with the community. I would not consider that "heavily encumbered"
The only entities who are encumbered in any way here are those who's business relys on selling proprietary software. A business which sells proprietary software as a minor sideline might be a little bit encumbered. A entity which uses software, which is the vast majority of individuals and corporates (profit and non profit) isn't encumbered at all. Nor would a company (or individual) who works as an IT contractor.
notice that they also asked that research not be put under GPL-like licenses, under the assumption that government-funded research should be resold afterwards ... personally, i don't appreciate giving money to the government, in the form of taxes, and then having to buy back from them what they discovered thanks to my money
Especially when it's a company like Microsoft, who so effectivly evades taxation that they didn't contribute at all in the first place.
The real question should be about there needing to be a very good reason why state funded research isn't public domain.
But, determining which tool is right is the real issue. If the government is producing documents, of whatever sort, whether they be text documents, graphics, databases, web pages, etc., they should be in formats that are open and freely implementable. Otherwise the government is forcing citizens to purchase proprietary software to view public information.
It's also important to remember that whilst a proprietary format can force the user to have to use proprietary software an open format can allow both open source or proprietary programs to access it.
Keep in mind that the "surprise" diamond engagement ring was invented by DeBeers (who paid for for the placement of said surprises in movies) specifically because their research showed that when the man asked the woman what she wanted, she almost _always_ preferred the man to spend the money on something practical like a down payment on a house or a car. Only by making men believe that women wanted a diamond ring, and didn't want to be asked about it, could they convince men to spend several months' salary on something the woman didn't actually want, and embarrass the woman into not admitting to that fact.
DeBeers also worked hard to create the idea of "a diamond is forever". For the reason that a second hand diamond market would kill their whole business.
However, like IP addresses, these are handed out in inefficient methods, because they go in blocks of 100,000. Which means you need to pay somebody some money to get ahold of one.
Actually the UPC is worst than IP addresses since it only allows one block size. At least originally IP addresses allowed blocks of 253 65,533 or 16,777,213. Another situation where you see such a problem is telephone numbering, numbers being assigned in blocks of 10,000. Especially in places such as North America where you have fixed 3 digit area codes and 7 digit local numbers.
This is a common problem for aspiring independent artists who want to get their music out. They get to make a choice... do I pay someone for a UPC, or do I go without? Stores generally won't accept a CD for sale w/o a UPC code on it.
One thing the EAN (and for that matter ISBN) allows for different lengths of company and item fields. Thus it would be quite possible for such an artist to get an 8 or even 9 digit manufacturer code.
Does anyone know if old bar cdes are ever reused, or when a product is cancelled, is it just retired. For example, is the bar code for "New Coke" usable for some other, less-disgusting product, like Motor Oil, or has it forever disappeared into the ether.
Because of the way the bar codes are assigned the only way this would be possible would be if the Coca Cola company started selling motor oil. Or possibly a soft drink called "motor oil".
Isn't the bar code the same on each bucket? It's the same product from the same company right?
With a perishable product it's quite likely that the batch number could wind up as part of the bar code.
Anyone know how produce codes are assigned? How the hell do you go through 12 digits? Obviously a lot of it got wasted in some way.
Currently the US uses the 12 digit UPC which has 5 digit manufacturer and 5 digit product fields. The 13 digit EAN (which uses the same encoding) has a country code (with psudo country codes for things such as ISBNs), a manufacturer code and a product code, all of which can be variable length.
The remaining digits have a variable length publisher code and a variable length product code -- Prentice Hall is 13, Oxford is 19, Addison Wesley is 201, Perseus is 7382, O'Reilly is 56592.
If the system is sensibly designed then all publisher codes starting with 1 with be 2 digit, all starting with 2 will be 3 digit, etc. Though it's possible for a publisher to have more than one code or a contiguious block of codes.
ISBN's almost always start with zero or one, although that's changing as more companies get into the game. Texkbooks and reference books usually start with 9, for example.
The first digit serves to indicate the language the book uses. Though unfortunatly no distinction is made between English, American and Australian.
Hardcover, trade paper and Mass Market editions of the same book have different ISBNs, but different editions/printings of the same book usually have the same isbn. While conserving available codes, it's quite annoying when someone's looking for a specific edition.
There is a suplimentry barcode which could be used for the edition, but it can also be used to indicate the price...
The rest of the world uses 13 digit codes already, so they are just harmonizing with that.
:)
The US adopting something from the rest of the world should be considered big news. Since it is so unusual.
More usually "harmonization" winds up meaning trying to get the rest of the world to do things the American way
An programmer can put in a hard days work, and will get paid for it over and over and over again.
Assuming the programmer has produced a piece of general software. They may have produced a piece of software for one specific entity or modified an existing program to meet specific requirements or put together a package of software to meet a specific need.
A bricklayer can put in a hard days work and he will only get paid for it once. Why? Because the bricklayer is producing a physical product, "media" if you will, whereas the programmer (or actor, or musician) is producing content. Content can be copied, media can't.
But this does not imply that all content must be create once sell many times, especially with software. Content can be a building block as much as a brick. The difference is that bricks cost money, though they only make a minor part of the cost of the building since the major part is always labour.
Until recently, the technology to produce copies of content were prohibitively expensive,
Also content was bound to a media.
If we had the type of irrational rhetoric coming from the AAAA back in the days of Geutenberg - he would have been accused of being a medieval Napster.
After all, he could crank out orders of magnatude the number of copies that could be crated in the past - making it seem silly to have scribes any more. his invention basically made it so that instead of just a few writers making tons of money - you'd be able to have tons of lame writers flodding the market - making it hard to find who was good and who was not good.
It's quite possible that the people who actually read the resulting books would have different opinions from the scribes guild as to what was a good (and thus worth copying) book.
i think we are fundamentally screwed - because this time, unlike the previous incarnations of technology that obsoleted people - these people are mch more motivated - they are going to lose high-paying jobs that gave them hig pay for doing not a whole lot.. previous folks who lost there jobs weren't making a ton of money.
I wouldn't be so sure that people obsoleted by technology wern't making lots of money, by the standards of the day.
When selling goods, you charge so that you not only make up for the production of the goods, but also for the development thereof.
Software is not a good. Whilst it may have a development cost it's production cost is effectivly zero. There is plenty of software where a sell many times approach wouldn't work. Indeed there might only ever be one customer who will ever exist. Just so happens the part of the software industry which sells software as though it is a novel is more visible.
Enter the digital age. The media is unimportant. Audio, video, software, text are all just bits of information. They can be burned onto a CD. They can be sent over the internet. They can even be written to floppy disks. It no longer expensive to copy something.
It's a bit like the situation in the Star Trek universe where you can do this with material objects using "replicators". Making the first one of whatever or altering an existing object has some expense, but duplicating or transporting is a very cheap operation.
There is no longer any degradation. A seventeenth generation copy is as crisp and clear as the master. The three pillars holding up this scam are gone.
To some extent it wasn't actually a "scam" so much as the way things were in the past. Also the publishing and distribution companies want to "eat their cake and have it". They fear "piracy", but at the same time like the way in which the newer technologies have brought their costs of duplication and distribution down.
Lastly, (and I may be misunderstanding you) just because they have made back their cost of production (in some cases, decades ago) received hefty returns (in some cases, in excess of tenfold) -- do they no longer deserve their IP rights?
In the case of the US the only reason for IP existing is to get new works published.
Before you answer, put yourself in the position of a private investor -- should there be a cap on the amoount of return that you can receive on your investments?
No-one has any right to a return in the first place. Also usually the level of potential return follows the level of risk. Thus a possibility of a 1,000+% return should come with a big risk of completly losing your initial investment.
But there's already a boatload of material already paid for.
Probably quite a lot of quite new material which has been paid for
I wouldn't mind being exposed to shows I haven't seen such as documentaries or older movies. These have made back their cost of production (in some cases decades ago).
That would mean changing the business model. Which is exactly what the industry wants to avoid.