There are enough suckers who would buy a Dell Linux box just to save the $30 Windows license cost - Dell's just too lazy to go to the effort to push Linux, it's safer to not annoy Microsoft.
I'll admit that I'm exaggerating "two weeks" and the simplicity of the support script, but I don't see where my general statement is wrong. Providing a pre-installed GNU/Linux should largely be the same as providing Windows, except that bundling things becomes slightly easier due to the more advantageous license terms.
The system manufacturer gets the final say as to what is included on the user's desktop. If you pay Mozilla to add your link to Firefox, and I pay Dell to replace it, my link wins - at least for Dell users. Further, people who buy junk PCs and don't know to ignore the default desktop icons are an *excellent* market segment for making sales. That's why companies are willing to pay Dell - Dell users actually buy their products. I'd expect it to be the same for Linux Dells as Windows Dells.
The fact is, I don't know if patents on physical devices are a good idea or not, but I don't think that assuming that it is a good idea because it hasn't completely stopped the production of new devices is a good place to start.
I was under the impression that patent law was intended to protect intellectual property.
In that case, you are confused.
It doesn't surprise me that there are people confused about this topic, because certain special interest groups have been promoting the inaccurate "intellectual property is like real property" view for a while now - with the specific intention of creating this sort of confusion.
Patent law in the United States has a very clear history, going back to a section of the United States constitution:
In Section 8, Congress is granted the power...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Thus, at least in the United States, patents exist for the express purpose of "promoting the progress of Science and the Useful Arts".
Who cares? If it did infringe copyright that wouldn't make me any less a dick for refusing to give directions for the sake of cartographer profits. If I refuse to help a friend over a foolish law that can't be enforced, that makes me a dick.
A bit of commercial bundling already occurs with GNU/Linux distributions.
Let's look at a fresh Ubuntu 6.10 install for a moment. It's got:
The Ekiga SIP phone - which promotes Ekiga.net pc-to-phone VoiP calls.
Firefox - Google search bar by default. Mozilla makes tons of $$$.
Commercial Support menu item - Links to the Ubuntu Marketplace.
That stuff isn't especially intrusive. Most people don't even notice. Sure, there's a threshold above which experienced users will automatically do a clean install, but the convenience of having everything correctly configured out of the box is worth dealing with a couple desktop icons, an integrated music store in the music player, and a Yahoo! search bar in Firefox.
Patent law is an economic tweak that is intended to "promote innovation". It's possible to see if it's really doing that, and if it isn't then it obviously should go away. Even if it does promote innovation, that still doesn't mean it's a good idea - like any economic choice it has a benifit and a cost, and the cost should be looked at closely and frequently for any country-wide economic policy decision.
It wouldn't be especially hard for Dell to use the same bundling scheme with Linux as they do with Windows. In fact, they could bundle stuff that they don't get to on Windows because Microsoft has already exploited some angle.
Consider: Bundling Realplayer with Linux and promoting premium Real Video content. They can set default search engine, bundle a music store, hell - they could even modify the software so it interacts with their bundled stuff better.
Now, this would make Linux Dells shitty like Windows Dells... but that's Dell's business model - sell shitty computers with bundled crap on them.
a major vendor like Dell cannot simply start shipping machines with Linux on them. There's a lot to be done beforehand.
Yea, about two man-weeks worth of work:
Make the desktop Linux restore disk image.
Do some basic testing to make sure the hardware is supported.
Run through basic operations to build the desktop support script.
Add "Whatever Linux - $0" to the online store.
Give the support guys the new support script.
None of this is hard. Even the support issue is overrated - the support people follow the same sort of script, that ends in the same two places ("We don't support 3rd party software" OR "Looks like it's hosed, use the restore CD").
You can't compare the process as being just as easy. Once you've hit the ATI website, it's easy to get through it. I wouldn't have a clue that i wanted "Proprietary drivers for devices (restricted)" or "linux-restricted-modules-2.6.10.5-1". Hell, the word restricted would put me off thinking i'm fucking about with something major.
You're right - following a process you've used before is easier than following a new process.
On the other hand, as a Linux user the Windows process seems retarded. Why would you be surfing around the web to get drivers?
At a certain point, *any* computer activity like this is learned. The Linux process is slightly easier because it's well documented (at least with Ubuntu) - you go to the Ubuntu website and follow the simple directions and your driver is installed. With Windows, you just have to muddle through it and sometimes it doesn't work at all.
If I were your friend I wouldn't consider you an asshole for not giving me rips of the CDs you had bought.
I don't know why you wouldn't. Refusing to share something that I have an unlimited supply of would absolutely make me an asshole. It's like if you asked me for directions - I could say "Sorry, but that would mean you didn't have to buy a map, thus hurting cartographers", but if I said that I'd be a jerk.
If IP can be owned, then the owner gets to decide who to share it with.
Thinking about "intellectual property" as being similar to real property results only in confusion and absurdities. In fact, thinking about "intellectual property" at all only results in confusion.
One thing is really clear though: If I have a computer file and my friend asks me for a copy, it is trivially easy for me to give them one. Not sharing with my friend in that case would make me an asshole.
If I borrow a CD from a library and listen to it, that "automatically makes a copy" into the anti-jitter buffer on my CD player. Is that copyright infringement?
This emphasis on number of copies is sort of silly when it comes to computer files. It just doesn't work that way - computers make tons of copies, all the time. Consider buying a song off of iTunes and putting it on your iPod - that's two copies and no-one's upset. Now - if you lend your iPod to a friend and you listen to the song on your iTunes install, is that copyright infringement?
downloading Pirates of the Carribean and seeding it is not "helping educate others by sharing information." It's copyright infringement, plain and simple.
This belief that copyrighted material *has no intellectual value* is absurd. If it has no intellectual value, then obviously there's no reason to restrict copying it. If it has intellectual value, then obviously others benifit if you share it with them.
Further, just because some act of sharing would be copyright infringement *doesn't* mean that helping others by sharing information isn't a good thing. When your parents taught you that sharing was good they were right... some sharing just happens to be illegal now.
If I borrow a CD or DVD from the library and play it on my computer, I am also making a copy on my computer.
This, right here, is an absolutely key point. Using any sort of digitally stored data innately involves making copies of it. That means that either listening to CDs should be illegal, or that simply copying a file is something that people are allowed to do.
I have to say that I favor people being able to copy a file. In fact, the idea that some random "rights holder" who I don't even know can tell me which functions of my electronic devices I am allowed to use seems absurd.
Libraries lend materials, files on the internet are copied.
The distinction is significantly less relevant than you seem to think. Accessing a file on a computer makes at least one copy into RAM. Accessing a file across a network probably makes at least four copies: disk cache on sender, recipient RAM, recipient disk cache, recipient disk.
With computerized data, "making a copy" is just a natural thing that happens. Making it into a big deal is silly - this isn't a printing press where "making a copy" is hard work, with a computer everyone who has ever seen a file naturally has a copy of it. Yes - that means that selling computerized versions of books isn't going to work if libraries lend out computer files. Maybe that's ok - not everything has to be a new revenue source.
It's easy enough to see what something like a NoCD crack is doing and duplicate the effect. Copyrights cover specific implementations, not concepts like "don't read shit off the CD before rendering every frame".
Do What The Fuck You Want As Long As You Do Not Hurt Anyone.
I agree that that's the basic sentiment that a legal system should be based on, but that law is really hard to interpret by itself.
If I taunt you mercilessly, it will cause emotional harm - is that illegal by your law?
If I buy a Toyota instead of a Ford, that causes Ford economic harm - that illegal by your law?
If you punch me in the face, and I punch you in the gut - who's at fault? What if you need surgery to get a ruptured organ fixed?
How often is checking documentation faster than being explicit? When others read the code later, they would probably prefer to not have to read documentation to understand your code. If you left a comment, you might as well have been explicit.
Almost all the time. Implicitly assumed sane defaults speed things up immensely, because they allow the user to think about only the unusual options that they've chosen.
I guess the key thing here is this: You're supposed to actually know the programming language you're working in. You're not supposed to have to look up simple things like what vector.pop() does - and for people who *do* know what that means, it's way clearer than vector.removeTheLastElementAndReturnIt(). Methods (/functions/subroutines) exist, among other reasons, to allow people to fit more things in their mind at once. If the name of the method in Java is longer than the implementation would be in other languages, you haven't really gained much in the way of mental abstraction.
If you take your first mover advantage and squander it by releasing a product with no market appeal... sucks to be you. You need more than just one good idea to build a successful business.
I sit around browsing the web with my mobile phone all the time. I even hook my laptop up to it and surf the web at decent speeds. I can even watch videos on YouTube. The latency is horrible, but what can I really expect from a reasonably immature form of network connectivity? Sure, I pay a pretty penny for my "Unlimited Phone As Modem" plan from Sprint, but it's not *that* badly priced compared to an equivalent land-line telephone & network service.
Prices do need to come down. Speeds do need to go up. Most importantly, latency needs to come way down. But... usable cellular data services do exist.
If demand increases beyond current production capacity, the manufacturers will build more fabs. When they build fabs, they'll build them on the most modern process. A process change means that the same RAM capacity gets cheaper to make. Due to competition, they'll pass that savings on to customers.
So yes, in Econ 101 they teach you that more demand increases price. That's not true in general because significantly increased production increases economies of scale. It's even less true than that for computer stuff, because those economies of scale are enhanced by the march of technology progress.
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There are enough suckers who would buy a Dell Linux box just to save the $30 Windows license cost - Dell's just too lazy to go to the effort to push Linux, it's safer to not annoy Microsoft.
I'll admit that I'm exaggerating "two weeks" and the simplicity of the support script, but I don't see where my general statement is wrong. Providing a pre-installed GNU/Linux should largely be the same as providing Windows, except that bundling things becomes slightly easier due to the more advantageous license terms.
The system manufacturer gets the final say as to what is included on the user's desktop. If you pay Mozilla to add your link to Firefox, and I pay Dell to replace it, my link wins - at least for Dell users. Further, people who buy junk PCs and don't know to ignore the default desktop icons are an *excellent* market segment for making sales. That's why companies are willing to pay Dell - Dell users actually buy their products. I'd expect it to be the same for Linux Dells as Windows Dells.
My argument would probably start with The Tragedy of the Anti-Commons.
The fact is, I don't know if patents on physical devices are a good idea or not, but I don't think that assuming that it is a good idea because it hasn't completely stopped the production of new devices is a good place to start.
In that case, you are confused.
It doesn't surprise me that there are people confused about this topic, because certain special interest groups have been promoting the inaccurate "intellectual property is like real property" view for a while now - with the specific intention of creating this sort of confusion.
Patent law in the United States has a very clear history, going back to a section of the United States constitution:
Thus, at least in the United States, patents exist for the express purpose of "promoting the progress of Science and the Useful Arts".
Who cares? If it did infringe copyright that wouldn't make me any less a dick for refusing to give directions for the sake of cartographer profits. If I refuse to help a friend over a foolish law that can't be enforced, that makes me a dick.
A bit of commercial bundling already occurs with GNU/Linux distributions.
Let's look at a fresh Ubuntu 6.10 install for a moment. It's got:
That stuff isn't especially intrusive. Most people don't even notice. Sure, there's a threshold above which experienced users will automatically do a clean install, but the convenience of having everything correctly configured out of the box is worth dealing with a couple desktop icons, an integrated music store in the music player, and a Yahoo! search bar in Firefox.
Do you have any reason for this belief?
Patent law is an economic tweak that is intended to "promote innovation". It's possible to see if it's really doing that, and if it isn't then it obviously should go away. Even if it does promote innovation, that still doesn't mean it's a good idea - like any economic choice it has a benifit and a cost, and the cost should be looked at closely and frequently for any country-wide economic policy decision.
It shouldn't be that hard. All the script needs to do is get the tech to one of the following conclusions:
It wouldn't be especially hard for Dell to use the same bundling scheme with Linux as they do with Windows. In fact, they could bundle stuff that they don't get to on Windows because Microsoft has already exploited some angle.
Consider: Bundling Realplayer with Linux and promoting premium Real Video content. They can set default search engine, bundle a music store, hell - they could even modify the software so it interacts with their bundled stuff better.
Now, this would make Linux Dells shitty like Windows Dells... but that's Dell's business model - sell shitty computers with bundled crap on them.
Yea, about two man-weeks worth of work:
None of this is hard. Even the support issue is overrated - the support people follow the same sort of script, that ends in the same two places ("We don't support 3rd party software" OR "Looks like it's hosed, use the restore CD").
You're right - following a process you've used before is easier than following a new process.
On the other hand, as a Linux user the Windows process seems retarded. Why would you be surfing around the web to get drivers?
At a certain point, *any* computer activity like this is learned. The Linux process is slightly easier because it's well documented (at least with Ubuntu) - you go to the Ubuntu website and follow the simple directions and your driver is installed. With Windows, you just have to muddle through it and sometimes it doesn't work at all.
I don't know why you wouldn't. Refusing to share something that I have an unlimited supply of would absolutely make me an asshole. It's like if you asked me for directions - I could say "Sorry, but that would mean you didn't have to buy a map, thus hurting cartographers", but if I said that I'd be a jerk.
Thinking about "intellectual property" as being similar to real property results only in confusion and absurdities. In fact, thinking about "intellectual property" at all only results in confusion.
One thing is really clear though: If I have a computer file and my friend asks me for a copy, it is trivially easy for me to give them one. Not sharing with my friend in that case would make me an asshole.
If I borrow a CD from a library and listen to it, that "automatically makes a copy" into the anti-jitter buffer on my CD player. Is that copyright infringement?
This emphasis on number of copies is sort of silly when it comes to computer files. It just doesn't work that way - computers make tons of copies, all the time. Consider buying a song off of iTunes and putting it on your iPod - that's two copies and no-one's upset. Now - if you lend your iPod to a friend and you listen to the song on your iTunes install, is that copyright infringement?
This belief that copyrighted material *has no intellectual value* is absurd. If it has no intellectual value, then obviously there's no reason to restrict copying it. If it has intellectual value, then obviously others benifit if you share it with them.
Further, just because some act of sharing would be copyright infringement *doesn't* mean that helping others by sharing information isn't a good thing. When your parents taught you that sharing was good they were right... some sharing just happens to be illegal now.
This, right here, is an absolutely key point. Using any sort of digitally stored data innately involves making copies of it. That means that either listening to CDs should be illegal, or that simply copying a file is something that people are allowed to do.
I have to say that I favor people being able to copy a file. In fact, the idea that some random "rights holder" who I don't even know can tell me which functions of my electronic devices I am allowed to use seems absurd.
The distinction is significantly less relevant than you seem to think. Accessing a file on a computer makes at least one copy into RAM. Accessing a file across a network probably makes at least four copies: disk cache on sender, recipient RAM, recipient disk cache, recipient disk.
With computerized data, "making a copy" is just a natural thing that happens. Making it into a big deal is silly - this isn't a printing press where "making a copy" is hard work, with a computer everyone who has ever seen a file naturally has a copy of it. Yes - that means that selling computerized versions of books isn't going to work if libraries lend out computer files. Maybe that's ok - not everything has to be a new revenue source.
It's easy enough to see what something like a NoCD crack is doing and duplicate the effect. Copyrights cover specific implementations, not concepts like "don't read shit off the CD before rendering every frame".
I agree that that's the basic sentiment that a legal system should be based on, but that law is really hard to interpret by itself.
If I taunt you mercilessly, it will cause emotional harm - is that illegal by your law?
If I buy a Toyota instead of a Ford, that causes Ford economic harm - that illegal by your law?
If you punch me in the face, and I punch you in the gut - who's at fault? What if you need surgery to get a ruptured organ fixed?
Almost all the time. Implicitly assumed sane defaults speed things up immensely, because they allow the user to think about only the unusual options that they've chosen.
I guess the key thing here is this: You're supposed to actually know the programming language you're working in. You're not supposed to have to look up simple things like what vector.pop() does - and for people who *do* know what that means, it's way clearer than vector.removeTheLastElementAndReturnIt(). Methods (/functions/subroutines) exist, among other reasons, to allow people to fit more things in their mind at once. If the name of the method in Java is longer than the implementation would be in other languages, you haven't really gained much in the way of mental abstraction.
If you take your first mover advantage and squander it by releasing a product with no market appeal... sucks to be you. You need more than just one good idea to build a successful business.
I sit around browsing the web with my mobile phone all the time. I even hook my laptop up to it and surf the web at decent speeds. I can even watch videos on YouTube. The latency is horrible, but what can I really expect from a reasonably immature form of network connectivity? Sure, I pay a pretty penny for my "Unlimited Phone As Modem" plan from Sprint, but it's not *that* badly priced compared to an equivalent land-line telephone & network service.
Prices do need to come down. Speeds do need to go up. Most importantly, latency needs to come way down. But... usable cellular data services do exist.
If demand increases beyond current production capacity, the manufacturers will build more fabs. When they build fabs, they'll build them on the most modern process. A process change means that the same RAM capacity gets cheaper to make. Due to competition, they'll pass that savings on to customers.
So yes, in Econ 101 they teach you that more demand increases price. That's not true in general because significantly increased production increases economies of scale. It's even less true than that for computer stuff, because those economies of scale are enhanced by the march of technology progress.