I knocked that up a few days ago for some other purpose, just to set out my thoughts on the subject - it was destined to be disposed of.
And this subject came up on slashdot YET AGAIN.
And given it had zero posts, I thought "Yep, now's a good time to see if a gust of wind catches my take on the issue".
Your idea of typing up pieces on recurring/. subjects isn't that silly... I'd patent that - US allows business model patents after all...;)
Anyway, yup I could have just said "Please check out my site: www.digitalartauction.com ".
But that wouldn't work would it?
:)
As for whoring. Well that's the oldest profession innit? There's a living to be made in old fangled ways. I'm talking about how artists can still make tons of money after copyright (just like before). I'm not talking about how we should all become communists and share it all out for nothing.
However, there is a common perception that copyright is a right. People don't like losing rights cos they think they're inalienable - not because they necessarily understand them and their value.
If copyright had been called "a little wheeze to make publishers' revenue collection a bit easier, but we just need the government to enshrine it in law, whether people like it or not" there might not be such a perception that it was a moral right. Unlike an arguably moral right for an author to retain recognition as the author of their work...
Er, nope matey, 3rd person plural is by far the better substitute for 2nd neuter singular:
The determined pirate, of course, will not be affected by the new CDs. They will simply connect their stereo to their computer, then press "record" on their ripping software as they press "play" on their conventional CD player.
What is the fundamental basis on which we deal with the customer?
Exchange (This bottle of water, this service, this information, etc.)
Access (Attend this conference, hire this car, use this road, etc.)
One's a single-shot deal (mostly): say hello, exchange goods/money, say
goodbye.
The other's a deal that lasts for a certain period. In the case of this
conference, three days.
In both cases the physicality of the commodity wholly represents the product
and the work that went into producing it. The property is clear, the deal is
clear.
Non-Physical Commodities? (Digital Content)
An oxymoron surely?
Let's see. Here's some digital content I'd like to make available for
you to download (in only twelve bytes of ASCII) - Write the following down on
a piece of paper: "A, D, A, M, space, H, A, D, space, apostrophe, E, M". Thus: "Adam
Had 'em."
Incidentally, I'm not the copyright holder of this work, Ogden Nash is. So
all of you who've made digital copies by writing it down have just become
criminals by copying the work in its entirety.
It's called 'Fleas', also known as the shortest poem in the world, and
thus highly valuable. I understand that printed copies of this poem currently
retail for up to £5,000 and that consequently the punitive damages for illicit
copying may be quite substantial.
If literary works of art were this easy to copy a few hundred years ago,
no-one would have invented copyright, let alone convinced themselves that
digital content was a commodity.
Copying Physical Commodities is not inherently profitable, so it doesn't
need to be controlled
There's nothing wrong with copying physical commodities, because in
general the copies are just as much work to produce as the originals.
This is except for novel, patentable devices which enjoy a dispensation to
retain a legal monopoly on production for a certain period (to enable the
development costs to be recouped). This is to foster economic and technological
progress, not to create a human right.
If a non-physical commodity doesn't represent the labour that went into it,
then either we assign a right to copy it, or we stop treating it like a
commodity. If the latter, then the original work represents the work.
Art is slightly different to a commodity, it's an idea given form
Art, whether written, pictorial, or sculpted is a little different though.
Once upon a time (and today if you've got the money) you could commission
art, or you could buy art from artists who'd produced it for sale.
Then, forging art didn't so much hurt the artist as hurt the purchaser.
Overt copying was fine, it enabled the art to be enjoyed by more people, e.g.
the Bible.
In the case of popular but painstakingly original art the economics were
difficult, i.e. it's difficult for an artist or author say, to communicate en
masse to their potential readership and encourage them to club together in
funding a new work (unlike royalty, aristocrats, etc.). So with the advent of
the performance of plays and the printing of books designed for a larger
audience, we see in retrospect a new revenue mechanism arise: price each
performance or copy as though it were a share in funding the original work. This
also requires some ability to prevent anyone else producing copies.
Copyright is Artificial, not 'self-evident'
So we see that copyright is also not a human right, it's just another
expedient mechanism to enable the copy to act as the share certificate. You
bought a book? You're a paid up shareholder.
The thing is though, copyright's a magic purse. It need never stop bringing
in revenue (well beyond the original development costs). And in some fortunate
cases, for particularly popular art, a few artists and much of the publishing
industry can enjoy great wealth.
It's a brave government that would recall all these magic purses from the
rich, powerful and popular. However, there is one organization more powerful
than both combined.
Widespread Copying is Endemic
What happens, when there are half a billion people online (out of a planet of
6 billion), each of whom can make a copy of any art they fancy in a moment's
thought?
We're talking on a scale of mankind. If people, globally, en masse, copy
art, it's possible that it's not really wrong. Rather it's that the law,
created to enable a revenue mechanism that requires exclusive copy privileges,
is now ineffective, irrelevant and redundant. You cannot prosecute the world. It's
the revenue mechanisms that must adapt or die.
Loss of Physical Media
We've lost the physical media upon which art was distributed. This served
to reinforce general acceptance of the underlying revenue mechanism in people's
minds. However, online, the Emperor is now wearing the finest of sheer silks
(fully naked if you ask me). There's no scrap of clothing, no wodge of paper,
magnetic tape, plastic box, not even an acrylic disc. It's now just a memory.
The only thing that reminds us we've paid our share for the pure information
that now comprises art, is the click of the I Agree button on the license page.
So what's the answer?
Don't sell the horse after you've let it out of the stable. Or in other
words, don't release the digital content and then try to sell it (relying on
copyright). You can't sue 5 billion people. Nor can you place a compensating
levy on computers (madness!).
And of course the classic: don't try to lock the stable door after the
horse has bolted. Here, I'm obviously talking of encryption and digital rights
management. If the art can get into people's eyes or ears, it can be copied by
a computer. Encryption is fine for keeping things exclusive when the parties
concerned wish to. If you're communicating with someone who doesn't care for
exclusivity, encryption won't really work, it just hinders.
Deal En Masse
So what should we do?
Sell the horse before you let it out of the stable. Go back a few hundred
years and pick up the old revenue mechanisms that weren't quite so good,
because it was difficult to do deals en masse.
And this is because something has changed. For the same reason that copyright
is becoming ineffectual, so the public commissioning revenue mechanisms are now
becoming feasible.
The biggest mental block facing business today, both online and even with
interactive TV companies, is to be unable to think of dealing with the market
except as a collection of individuals.
The only deal we're particularly familiar with en masse is voting, e.g.
democracy, etc. We dabble with this in TV shows, even with online polls, but
that's about it.
Who has dared to let people vote with their money? In the same transaction?
The new value chain
Bypass the agents, the publishers, the marketers, the advertisers, the
distributors, the retailers, the packagers, etc. The new value chain is the
artist and the audience. We're right back at the craftsman and the customer.
Except this time, there's nothing stopping the artist doing a deal with a
million people at once. Though no one's thought to create the necessary de
facto e-commerce web site for such a deal. Still too busy selling to punters one
by one...
The Emperor is Naked
Of course, it's very difficult to believe an emperor could possibly be
naked.
If you're selling digital art, digital content, digital whatever, reserve a
tiny piece of your long term strategy for the inconceivably possibility that
King Canute's bottomless purse of copyright will be overrun by a tide of
countless tiny infractions.
Even so, the end of copyright is not the end of commercial viability for
digital content, it's the end of a particular revenue mechanism.
Consider Revenue Mechanisms that don't need Copyright
The OSDA Initiative is a collaborative effort to provide resources
to help people who work on Open Source projects.
The initiative was started as a service to the members of
SAGE-AU - the System
Administrator's Guild of Australia, and it has now been
made available to the general public.
The initial OSDA Initiative resources are a group of documents
providing suggested variations to employment contracts that would
allow employees to develop Open Source software without
encumbrance from their employer, where there is no conflict of
interest.
I remember putting one of those little music box mechanisms (tiny little alloy chassis) against a railway carriage window and being very surprised by how very loud it suddenly sounded (as were most of the other passengers).
The stop hurts because you decelerate far faster than 1G (9.8 m/s2).
The hurt is caused by force.
The force is proportional to your mass and its change in velocity (and inversely to the time over which that change takes place).
The soles of our feet while standing are subjected to a force equivalent to a deceleration of 1G.
Jump off a building and unless you land in water or an air bed it will be several Gs indeed.
So, no one gets hurt by accelerating at 1G. In fact this is a problem for cosmonauts, because they're not accelerating at 1G. 1G is what the body prefers, always.
I guess this means we can look forward to people carrying large foldable/portable antennae along with their notebooks? Or mounting huge ones on their rooftops?
So, you could have ilke 10 wifi cards each hooked up to a different access point, and collect the bandwidth up.
Maybe we should just skip straight to peer-to-peer systems and make more effective use of this more distributed network?
Until the industry settles, check out ACE/TAO
on
Java RMI
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm seriously considering using ACE for a cross-platform networking layer in a dstributed system I'm designing. I note that this also has an ORB thingy called TAO (which may just use DCOM/CORBA/RMI depending on the platform). So that may be another option to consider in the interim, i.e. rather than decide which ORB to back right now.
So check out ACE (It's Open Source of course) at http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html and TAO at http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html .
Here's some blurb:
TAO is an open source product with zero cost licensing.(Development and run time.) TAO is a C++, CORBA 2.3 compliant ORB designed for real-time but equally applicable in general-purpose situations. TAO runs across multiple O/Ss and chip architectures enabling a wide integration capability, for diverse elements, within a single ORB implementation. TAO's baseline design for real time considerations ensures end to deterministic behavior and leverages both system and network characteristics.
Maybe this is an 'emporer's new clothes' shibboleth kind of thing, i.e. those who believe the 'tongue in cheek' link there ( http://www.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/bmart icles/uml/page.html ), and those who believe the converse, that UML is sound.
The shibboleth works like this. You read it, and if you laughed at how ridiculous a send-up it is, you are in the UML camp, and if you laughed at how plainly true it is, you are in the "The Emperor's Got No Clothes!" camp.
Frankly, in my book, the emperor's naked.
Until programming actually becomes an act of 'semantically arranging diagrams' for want of a better phrase then trying to keep everything in synch manually seems like a nightmare. And I don't think UML with or without computer assistance is quite there yet.
I'd say do the systems modelling in your head and then put it into diagrams that can be read by people who haven't spent the last 5 years learning UML.
That said, I reckon there's a big future for someone to create a truly graphical programming language.
You can really improve this algorithm by making the seed the same seed that would generate our universe (assuming it was generated from a seed ( hence the big bang)), and then developing a URI system for any subset of this universe. I wonder if the size of the URI would typically be less than the size of the information it referenced?
A bit like saying "can one create a URI for an infinite string of digits like PI, and can one guarantee that it will be shorter than the sub-strings one will be interested in.
Anyway, there is a pretty good compression scheme that exceeds 100:1 in many cases for any item of information on the web, i.e. a URL.
In other words the best compression scheme involves creating a database (the web) that contains every possible stream of data that mankind is currently interested in, and then having a URI scheme where the URL's length is inversely proportional to the frequency that the file is referred to.
I wonder what kind of compression ratio Google's database manages?
If history is destined to repeat itself then perhaps there is a finite limit to the web's growth?
Just went to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html
and it says:
"The Berkeley Database License (aka the Sleepycat Software Product License).
This is a free software license and is compatible with the GNU GPL. "
Maybe the GPL should apply to the issuer of the license too???
Can a company really release software under the GPL and yet re-release it under a separate closed source license?
Sure, they can say "Ah, but we don't look at or incorporate anyone else's changes to our software. Our proprietary license only applies to software developed in-house."
Yeah.... right...
What about bug-fixes? "Well, we have a clean-room of developers who re-engineer a solution to each bug that is reported".
So this is a bit like holding Open Source in contempt then? You're not actually interested in any of its potential fruits (apart from bugs getting reported), so it's only an altruistic gesture? It's like saying "We basically have a proprietary licensing model, but because we're convinced that public distribution of our source code represents no threat to our business, we're happy to ride on the coat tails of the Open Source movement. Our licensees like to have our source code anyway, and an added benefit of making it public is that it helps prevent bespoke developers end up with a competing product they've been forced to develop from scratch. But, no, although we republish our proprietary source under a GPL-like license we're not really Open Source developers".
So this is not an 'Open Source' company making money. It's a normal software company that has no worries about publishing its source code (that is restricted to further development by a sector of the development community that it doesn't perceive as a competitor).
If it had been put this way, it wouldn't be remarkable, it would have just been sensible, enlightened practice by a commercially oriented company.
But, instead it has been put in a way that tries to portray the company as an Open Source development company.
Yeah, I wondered about this too.
A GPL license still applies even to the company that issues it. Just cos you wrote it doesn't mean you're uniquely positioned to sell it under both a GPL license and a proprietary license. Sure, you can cobble a license that looks like GPL, but has this tiny little amendement that permits dual licensing...
That's harnessing the hard labour of the Open Source developers, and saying "Thanks lads, we'll just take all your hard work on enhancements and fixing the bugs, apply it to our proprietary version, and we can then flog it off under a closed source license to the big boys, who can flog it off in their proprietary stuff, etc."
They should come clean on this. It's a BSD license in GPL clothing!
Nothing wrong with a BSD license of course, but at least it's upfront and honest and let's everyone know that it's free to be utilised in proprietary software.
A true GPL license has no back doors.
And yeah, the LGPL is a fine compromise and marks clear boundaries between GPL code and potentially proprietary code. I got no problem with companies utilising LGPL modules alongside proprietary ones.
So you think the end users of GIF files, MP3 files, copyright works, etc. need a license? Define 'need'...
Perhaps according to law they 'need' a license, but when the scale of use reaches a certain point, then the law is moot.
For small scale stuff licenses are still 'needed' in practice as well as by law. However, once you're in the realm of millions of users then licenses are irrelevant, and you're better off coming up with a different business model.
No, the GPL does not make something unsuitable for commercial use, but it does prevent software from being commercially licensed.
Yes, in the commercial sector, patents and licenses are working just fine (though the Open Source movement is presenting an alternative, possibly superior philosophy). However, if the primary revenue stream is expected to come from the masses, as opposed to VARs or other intermediaries, then patents persuade the masses against using business models that would develop into license paying ones, i.e. the masses will be persuaded more towards the cooperative ethos.
If you are developing technology or producing a product that infringes patents, then you have a choice of licensing or donating your product into the public domain, perhaps obtaining reward via marketing, and selling your services or adding value in some other way. If it's the latter then this is very close to the GPL.
The entire 'old school' music industry could come tumbling down if copyright became irrelevent to the masses, but this wouldn't necessarily prevent musicians selling their music - just the big publishers licensing the digital copies.
http://www.cyberspaceengineers.org/tda/tda.html
Yeah, patents are 'old school'.
They're not viable when faced with the law of the masses. If the majority want to infringe a patent, well, they've just democratically determined the patent null and void.
They're still applicable to old school businesses of course, but then in the case of GIF and MP3, they're not the key infringers. You might as well prosecute the odd pirate in the far east, but it's a token victory.
These days, putting a patent on a popular piece of digital technology is equivalent to slapping a GPL license on it, i.e. the only people who are going to use it are those who use it non-commercially (and a few who can afford to pay big bucks).
So, more patents please!
They're just banging more and more nails in the coffin of commercial licensability of technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, condour75's reply is a pretty compact synopsis.
:)
I'd check that out. It's right on the button.
In a nutshell, yes!
:)
Wish I could be as succinct.
Ta for the precis.
For more info on how to sell a piece of art to many people at once see www.digitalartauction.com
Serendipity mate!
/. subjects isn't that silly... I'd patent that - US allows business model patents after all... ;)
:)
I knocked that up a few days ago for some other purpose, just to set out my thoughts on the subject - it was destined to be disposed of.
And this subject came up on slashdot YET AGAIN.
And given it had zero posts, I thought "Yep, now's a good time to see if a gust of wind catches my take on the issue".
Your idea of typing up pieces on recurring
Anyway, yup I could have just said "Please check out my site: www.digitalartauction.com ".
But that wouldn't work would it?
As for whoring. Well that's the oldest profession innit? There's a living to be made in old fangled ways. I'm talking about how artists can still make tons of money after copyright (just like before). I'm not talking about how we should all become communists and share it all out for nothing.
I think I've confused you.
These things should certainly not be rights.
However, there is a common perception that copyright is a right. People don't like losing rights cos they think they're inalienable - not because they necessarily understand them and their value.
If copyright had been called "a little wheeze to make publishers' revenue collection a bit easier, but we just need the government to enshrine it in law, whether people like it or not" there might not be such a perception that it was a moral right. Unlike an arguably moral right for an author to retain recognition as the author of their work...
Thanks very much for that link Mournblade.
:-)
More grist to the mill!
Sorry mate, but cut & paste is quicker than regurgitation.
Early bird catches the mod points and all that.
But I assure you that what I pasted hasn't been used elsewhere (nor will be - without stating I pasted it on slashdot first).
Er, nope matey, 3rd person plural is by far the better substitute for 2nd neuter singular:
The determined pirate, of course, will not be affected by the new CDs. They will simply connect their stereo to their computer, then press "record" on their ripping software as they press "play" on their conventional CD player.
Physical Commodities - Exchange or Access
What is the fundamental basis on which we deal with the customer?
One's a single-shot deal (mostly): say hello, exchange goods/money, say goodbye.
The other's a deal that lasts for a certain period. In the case of this conference, three days.
In both cases the physicality of the commodity wholly represents the product and the work that went into producing it. The property is clear, the deal is clear.
Non-Physical Commodities? (Digital Content)
An oxymoron surely?
Let's see. Here's some digital content I'd like to make available for you to download (in only twelve bytes of ASCII) - Write the following down on a piece of paper: "A, D, A, M, space, H, A, D, space, apostrophe, E, M". Thus: "Adam Had 'em."
Incidentally, I'm not the copyright holder of this work, Ogden Nash is. So all of you who've made digital copies by writing it down have just become criminals by copying the work in its entirety.
It's called 'Fleas', also known as the shortest poem in the world, and thus highly valuable. I understand that printed copies of this poem currently retail for up to £5,000 and that consequently the punitive damages for illicit copying may be quite substantial.
If literary works of art were this easy to copy a few hundred years ago, no-one would have invented copyright, let alone convinced themselves that digital content was a commodity.
Copying Physical Commodities is not inherently profitable, so it doesn't need to be controlled
There's nothing wrong with copying physical commodities, because in general the copies are just as much work to produce as the originals.
This is except for novel, patentable devices which enjoy a dispensation to retain a legal monopoly on production for a certain period (to enable the development costs to be recouped). This is to foster economic and technological progress, not to create a human right.
If a non-physical commodity doesn't represent the labour that went into it, then either we assign a right to copy it, or we stop treating it like a commodity. If the latter, then the original work represents the work.
Art is slightly different to a commodity, it's an idea given form
Art, whether written, pictorial, or sculpted is a little different though.
Once upon a time (and today if you've got the money) you could commission art, or you could buy art from artists who'd produced it for sale.
Then, forging art didn't so much hurt the artist as hurt the purchaser. Overt copying was fine, it enabled the art to be enjoyed by more people, e.g. the Bible.
In the case of popular but painstakingly original art the economics were difficult, i.e. it's difficult for an artist or author say, to communicate en masse to their potential readership and encourage them to club together in funding a new work (unlike royalty, aristocrats, etc.). So with the advent of the performance of plays and the printing of books designed for a larger audience, we see in retrospect a new revenue mechanism arise: price each performance or copy as though it were a share in funding the original work. This also requires some ability to prevent anyone else producing copies.
Copyright is Artificial, not 'self-evident'
So we see that copyright is also not a human right, it's just another expedient mechanism to enable the copy to act as the share certificate. You bought a book? You're a paid up shareholder.
The thing is though, copyright's a magic purse. It need never stop bringing in revenue (well beyond the original development costs). And in some fortunate cases, for particularly popular art, a few artists and much of the publishing industry can enjoy great wealth.
It's a brave government that would recall all these magic purses from the rich, powerful and popular. However, there is one organization more powerful than both combined.
Widespread Copying is Endemic
What happens, when there are half a billion people online (out of a planet of 6 billion), each of whom can make a copy of any art they fancy in a moment's thought?
We're talking on a scale of mankind. If people, globally, en masse, copy art, it's possible that it's not really wrong. Rather it's that the law, created to enable a revenue mechanism that requires exclusive copy privileges, is now ineffective, irrelevant and redundant. You cannot prosecute the world. It's the revenue mechanisms that must adapt or die.
Loss of Physical Media
We've lost the physical media upon which art was distributed. This served to reinforce general acceptance of the underlying revenue mechanism in people's minds. However, online, the Emperor is now wearing the finest of sheer silks (fully naked if you ask me). There's no scrap of clothing, no wodge of paper, magnetic tape, plastic box, not even an acrylic disc. It's now just a memory. The only thing that reminds us we've paid our share for the pure information that now comprises art, is the click of the I Agree button on the license page.
So what's the answer?
Don't sell the horse after you've let it out of the stable. Or in other words, don't release the digital content and then try to sell it (relying on copyright). You can't sue 5 billion people. Nor can you place a compensating levy on computers (madness!).
And of course the classic: don't try to lock the stable door after the horse has bolted. Here, I'm obviously talking of encryption and digital rights management. If the art can get into people's eyes or ears, it can be copied by a computer. Encryption is fine for keeping things exclusive when the parties concerned wish to. If you're communicating with someone who doesn't care for exclusivity, encryption won't really work, it just hinders.
Deal En Masse
So what should we do?
Sell the horse before you let it out of the stable. Go back a few hundred years and pick up the old revenue mechanisms that weren't quite so good, because it was difficult to do deals en masse.
And this is because something has changed. For the same reason that copyright is becoming ineffectual, so the public commissioning revenue mechanisms are now becoming feasible.
The biggest mental block facing business today, both online and even with interactive TV companies, is to be unable to think of dealing with the market except as a collection of individuals.
The only deal we're particularly familiar with en masse is voting, e.g. democracy, etc. We dabble with this in TV shows, even with online polls, but that's about it.
Who has dared to let people vote with their money? In the same transaction?
The new value chain
Bypass the agents, the publishers, the marketers, the advertisers, the distributors, the retailers, the packagers, etc. The new value chain is the artist and the audience. We're right back at the craftsman and the customer. Except this time, there's nothing stopping the artist doing a deal with a million people at once. Though no one's thought to create the necessary de facto e-commerce web site for such a deal. Still too busy selling to punters one by one...
The Emperor is Naked
Of course, it's very difficult to believe an emperor could possibly be naked.
If you're selling digital art, digital content, digital whatever, reserve a tiny piece of your long term strategy for the inconceivably possibility that King Canute's bottomless purse of copyright will be overrun by a tide of countless tiny infractions.
Even so, the end of copyright is not the end of commercial viability for digital content, it's the end of a particular revenue mechanism.
Consider Revenue Mechanisms that don't need Copyright
Your audience is your market - deal with it!
Check out this site for more info:
The Digital Art Auction
The OSDA Initiative is a collaborative effort to provide resources to help people who work on Open Source projects. The initiative was started as a service to the members of SAGE-AU - the System Administrator's Guild of Australia, and it has now been made available to the general public.
The initial OSDA Initiative resources are a group of documents providing suggested variations to employment contracts that would allow employees to develop Open Source software without encumbrance from their employer, where there is no conflict of interest.
How about the problems of old CRTs where the vertical and horizontal scanning voltages disappeared?
Most monitors these days have special protection so that line or field scan failure automatically switches off the beam's EHT supply.
I presume the CRT might eventually melt otherwise (besides instant phosphor destruction).
So, what kind of guarantee is worth anything in the event of laser scan failure?
"Hey mate! That's why we only recommend them used on one eye - means you've got a backup retina in the event of failure"
A business model that will work even without copyright:
http://www.cyberspaceengineers.org/tda/tda.html
http://www.thebuttkicker.com/
I remember putting one of those little music box mechanisms (tiny little alloy chassis) against a railway carriage window and being very surprised by how very loud it suddenly sounded (as were most of the other passengers).
The stop hurts because you decelerate far faster than 1G (9.8 m/s2).
The hurt is caused by force.
The force is proportional to your mass and its change in velocity (and inversely to the time over which that change takes place).
The soles of our feet while standing are subjected to a force equivalent to a deceleration of 1G.
Jump off a building and unless you land in water or an air bed it will be several Gs indeed.
So, no one gets hurt by accelerating at 1G. In fact this is a problem for cosmonauts, because they're not accelerating at 1G. 1G is what the body prefers, always.
I guess this means we can look forward to people carrying large foldable/portable antennae along with their notebooks? Or mounting huge ones on their rooftops?
So, you could have ilke 10 wifi cards each hooked up to a different access point, and collect the bandwidth up.
Maybe we should just skip straight to peer-to-peer systems and make more effective use of this more distributed network?
I'm seriously considering using ACE for a cross-platform networking layer in a dstributed system I'm designing. I note that this also has an ORB thingy called TAO (which may just use DCOM/CORBA/RMI depending on the platform). So that may be another option to consider in the interim, i.e. rather than decide which ORB to back right now.
So check out ACE (It's Open Source of course) at http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html
and TAO at http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html
.
Here's some blurb:
TAO is an open source product with zero cost licensing.(Development and run time.) TAO is a C++, CORBA 2.3 compliant ORB designed for real-time but equally applicable in general-purpose situations. TAO runs across multiple O/Ss and chip architectures enabling a wide integration capability, for diverse elements, within a single ORB implementation. TAO's baseline design for real time considerations ensures end to deterministic behavior and leverages both system and network characteristics.
I recognise this sound technique.
What's it's provenance eh?
Maybe this is an 'emporer's new clothes' shibboleth kind of thing, i.e. those who believe the 'tongue in cheek' link there ( http://www.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/bmart icles/uml/page.html ), and those who believe the converse, that UML is sound.
The shibboleth works like this. You read it, and if you laughed at how ridiculous a send-up it is, you are in the UML camp, and if you laughed at how plainly true it is, you are in the "The Emperor's Got No Clothes!" camp.
Frankly, in my book, the emperor's naked.
Until programming actually becomes an act of 'semantically arranging diagrams' for want of a better phrase then trying to keep everything in synch manually seems like a nightmare. And I don't think UML with or without computer assistance is quite there yet.
I'd say do the systems modelling in your head and then put it into diagrams that can be read by people who haven't spent the last 5 years learning UML.
That said, I reckon there's a big future for someone to create a truly graphical programming language.
You can really improve this algorithm by making the seed the same seed that would generate our universe (assuming it was generated from a seed ( hence the big bang)), and then developing a URI system for any subset of this universe. I wonder if the size of the URI would typically be less than the size of the information it referenced? A bit like saying "can one create a URI for an infinite string of digits like PI, and can one guarantee that it will be shorter than the sub-strings one will be interested in. Anyway, there is a pretty good compression scheme that exceeds 100:1 in many cases for any item of information on the web, i.e. a URL. In other words the best compression scheme involves creating a database (the web) that contains every possible stream of data that mankind is currently interested in, and then having a URI scheme where the URL's length is inversely proportional to the frequency that the file is referred to. I wonder what kind of compression ratio Google's database manages? If history is destined to repeat itself then perhaps there is a finite limit to the web's growth?
Hmmmn....
Just went to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html
and it says:
"The Berkeley Database License (aka the Sleepycat Software Product License).
This is a free software license and is compatible with the GNU GPL. "
Maybe the GPL should apply to the issuer of the license too???
Can a company really release software under the GPL and yet re-release it under a separate closed source license?
Sure, they can say "Ah, but we don't look at or incorporate anyone else's changes to our software. Our proprietary license only applies to software developed in-house."
Yeah.... right...
What about bug-fixes? "Well, we have a clean-room of developers who re-engineer a solution to each bug that is reported".
So this is a bit like holding Open Source in contempt then? You're not actually interested in any of its potential fruits (apart from bugs getting reported), so it's only an altruistic gesture? It's like saying "We basically have a proprietary licensing model, but because we're convinced that public distribution of our source code represents no threat to our business, we're happy to ride on the coat tails of the Open Source movement. Our licensees like to have our source code anyway, and an added benefit of making it public is that it helps prevent bespoke developers end up with a competing product they've been forced to develop from scratch. But, no, although we republish our proprietary source under a GPL-like license we're not really Open Source developers".
So this is not an 'Open Source' company making money. It's a normal software company that has no worries about publishing its source code (that is restricted to further development by a sector of the development community that it doesn't perceive as a competitor).
If it had been put this way, it wouldn't be remarkable, it would have just been sensible, enlightened practice by a commercially oriented company.
But, instead it has been put in a way that tries to portray the company as an Open Source development company.
Yeah, I wondered about this too.
A GPL license still applies even to the company that issues it. Just cos you wrote it doesn't mean you're uniquely positioned to sell it under both a GPL license and a proprietary license. Sure, you can cobble a license that looks like GPL, but has this tiny little amendement that permits dual licensing...
That's harnessing the hard labour of the Open Source developers, and saying "Thanks lads, we'll just take all your hard work on enhancements and fixing the bugs, apply it to our proprietary version, and we can then flog it off under a closed source license to the big boys, who can flog it off in their proprietary stuff, etc."
They should come clean on this. It's a BSD license in GPL clothing!
Nothing wrong with a BSD license of course, but at least it's upfront and honest and let's everyone know that it's free to be utilised in proprietary software.
A true GPL license has no back doors.
And yeah, the LGPL is a fine compromise and marks clear boundaries between GPL code and potentially proprietary code. I got no problem with companies utilising LGPL modules alongside proprietary ones.
So you think the end users of GIF files, MP3 files, copyright works, etc. need a license? Define 'need'... Perhaps according to law they 'need' a license, but when the scale of use reaches a certain point, then the law is moot. For small scale stuff licenses are still 'needed' in practice as well as by law. However, once you're in the realm of millions of users then licenses are irrelevant, and you're better off coming up with a different business model.
No, the GPL does not make something unsuitable for commercial use, but it does prevent software from being commercially licensed. Yes, in the commercial sector, patents and licenses are working just fine (though the Open Source movement is presenting an alternative, possibly superior philosophy). However, if the primary revenue stream is expected to come from the masses, as opposed to VARs or other intermediaries, then patents persuade the masses against using business models that would develop into license paying ones, i.e. the masses will be persuaded more towards the cooperative ethos. If you are developing technology or producing a product that infringes patents, then you have a choice of licensing or donating your product into the public domain, perhaps obtaining reward via marketing, and selling your services or adding value in some other way. If it's the latter then this is very close to the GPL. The entire 'old school' music industry could come tumbling down if copyright became irrelevent to the masses, but this wouldn't necessarily prevent musicians selling their music - just the big publishers licensing the digital copies. http://www.cyberspaceengineers.org/tda/tda.html
Yeah, patents are 'old school'. They're not viable when faced with the law of the masses. If the majority want to infringe a patent, well, they've just democratically determined the patent null and void. They're still applicable to old school businesses of course, but then in the case of GIF and MP3, they're not the key infringers. You might as well prosecute the odd pirate in the far east, but it's a token victory. These days, putting a patent on a popular piece of digital technology is equivalent to slapping a GPL license on it, i.e. the only people who are going to use it are those who use it non-commercially (and a few who can afford to pay big bucks). So, more patents please! They're just banging more and more nails in the coffin of commercial licensability of technology.