Yes, it's not licensed from MS at all. They just wrote something to work with the protocol (actually I believe it works through Exchange's web interface, which means they basically wrote a very comprehensive screen-scraper.) I'm not sure what you mean about an option to not sell it or sell it; it's there's and they can do whatever they want with it.
It is, however, a violation of his intellectual property, the rights which the poster was claiming he should not have.
And you seem to prove there's no purpose in him possessing these alleged "rights." After all, you concede that point F is not true, thus he did not suffer any damage, despite your violation of his alleged "right." I contend that since he did not suffer any damage, there is no such right.
For cases where possessors of a copyright allegedly suffer economic damage from infringement, I contend this is only devaluation of inventory brought about through competition, and I don't believe that should be an actionable "damage." After all, if I sell shoes and you open a shoestore next door to me, you've devalued my business through your competition, and I've suffered economic "damage," but you still have the right to open your shoe store.
Most religions hold that their system of morality is absolute. If you don't believe that, then why go to church?
Think you misunderstood, or missed the context. I do believe that system of morality is absolute. I also do not believe I have the authority to enforce it.
Yes, I mean overlapping areas. Spain, Portugal, and France are three different areas for this discussion. I'll describe below what I mean, where there could be any number of governments within the territory we call "Spain."
The non-coercion or non-initiation of force principle is often misunderstood. The idea is not that all force is forbidden; the idea is that it is wrong to initiate it. Take this simple example: you walk into a dark alley and someone attempts to mug you. They have initiated force against you, and you have the right of self-defense.
One of the basic principles of libertarianism is that the right of self-defense can be delegated, and that is why we have governments that defend us; they are merely exercising a right we possessed and delegated. (As a corollary, another basic principle is that rights we do not possess can not be delegated. For example, I do not possess the right to confiscate your money and use it on public services, thus I cannot delegate such a right to the government; even if we vote on it, then, taking your money away to fund these things is an exercise of a power government cannot legitimately possess. Many minarchist libertarians still concede the necessity of minial taxes, but a growing number are beginning to conclude that all such services should be funded by voluntary donations (and preferable handled outside the purview of government, anyway. This is not so farfetched; public television operates mostly on donations, and when was the last time you noticed one of those breast cancer marathons to raise money?)
A friend who helped me become a libertarian once said that a government, as we currently understand it, is simply an organization that claims a monopoly on the use of force in a particular geographic area. They claim to be the only legitimate authority to exercise force and that all small-scale private uses must be authorized (delegated) by them. This is actually completely backward.
So, imagine that we demonopolized this. Then suppose five or ten or twenty or even a thousand different groups sprung up, all with completely voluntary participation, each considered to be the government of its members. These might all take radically different forms; some would be elective democracies; some might even be monarchies. Some might allow membership (citizenship) in additional governments; some might require exclusive citizenship.
Now, as long as the relationship between a government and its members is private, everything is fine and nobody else's business. But suppose a government or some of its members begin infringing the rights of persons outside of their government. Those people of course have the right of self-defense, which may or may not be delegated to one or more organizations (governments) to exercise that right on their behalf. Those people could do just what we would do now if a foreign government attacked us: fight in their own defense.
In this way, each government would act as a check on the others. This is checks and balances to the extreme! As long as people practice a "live and let live" policy toward each other, they have no cause for concern. You might work with people who are members of ten different governments, and presumably you would all be peaceable to each other. There's just no incentive to violate other people's rights when their government will come after you. (And that government has no incentive to violate other people's rights when those rights will be defended by another government.)
What an incredible world to imagine -- and all of it is based on voluntary agreement. Noone has to be a member of a government if they don't want to; if you don't like yours, you leave and join another or start your own. If you don't want to be a member of one, you can stay out of the whole thing if you like. If you really want to have a hereditary monarchy, more power to you, as long as noone else has to accept it except those who choose to. As long as people respect each other's rights, they can live in the same society in harmony this way. The multiple governments enforce the kind of live and let live, ain't nobody's business if I do kind of society some slashdotters here can only dream of.
Although the free stream does not use traditional copyright, it does observe, and unofficially enforce, a "credit right". Works are frequently copied and excerpted with attribution -- but attempts to steal credit are usually detected speedily, and decried publicly. The same mechanisms that make copying easy make plagiarism very difficult. It's hard to secretly use someone else's work when a Google search can quickly locate the original. For example, teachers now routinely do Google searches on representative phrases when they suspect plagiarism in student papers.
Of course, in this case, anyone can just click "parent" and find out who really wrote the post you copied, so it's even easier.
What do you think is going to keep us out of the future Stallman outlines in the Right to Read? [gnu.org]
The main thing keeping us out of this is the willingness of some people to continue producing Free content and Free software. As long as the "intellectual property"-ites continue to maintain the facade of "property rights," they cannot deny anyone the right to do with their "intellectual property" as they wish, including the right to give it away. Sure, some stuff may be locked up for awhile, but in the mean time, some those who learn to do without it or with substitutes will make their methods available to everyone.
Do you really think the future is going to sway against copyright?
Yes, I do. The competition from Free systems is just too strong; the incentives to cooperate just too valuable. And some day, you'll be thinking, "Oh, there was some freak on slashdot who told me this was going to happen!":)
You do bring up some significant obstacles, particular the issue of it being illegal to interface free systems to proprietary. However, I believe this is a transient concern. For one thing, the current legal weight seems to be to press for interoperability and the open standards that make it possible. For another, interoperability is just too valuable on its own, even if not coerced through legislation, for people to make impossible forever; and, if the systems are interoperable with open standards, they will be interfaced to by Free systems, even if just as an act of civil disobedience; there is furthermore no technologically unbreakable way to prevent or detect this. Finally, even if such a legal "Berlin wall" were established between Free and proprietary systems, enough people are interested in going it alone with Free systems only to still outcompete the proprietary. It'd just be the victory of gzip over compress/LZW all over again. I for one know which side of the wall I'd pick, even on just practical grounds without any ideology.
The demonstration is in progress. Watch the adoption rate of Free software climb along with the rejection rate of proprietary software. It's not done, yet, but you can already see several areas where Free software is a category killer.
Since you don't think we should have IP laws, surely you won't mind if I swipe your post and claim I wrote it.
There are several responses to that. One is that claiming you wrote something you did not would be fraud, and there are those who do not believe the government should grant the monopolies we refer to as "intellectual property" but still believe the government should protect against fraud. Another point of view is that claiming you wrote something you did not is an immoral or unethical act, but that it is not the government's place to enforce morality. I believe everyone should go to church, for example, but I do not believe the government should mandate that everyone go to church and enforce that law. So you and I might agree that claiming credit for someone else's work is immoral... so what? Who's to say that our morality is any better than anyone else's? Why should the government enforce that morality?
After hearing at least this argument and the opposite argument (that it's communist) 1,000 times, I've got a neat theory: Open source combines the best aspects of both systems. You get the cheapness, efficiency, and transparency of a free market and you also get the equality and sharing of a communist model.
It's the ideal demonstration that given Freedom, individuals will choose the level of cooperation that benefits them the most (or best fits their goals, or whatever). As long as everything is free and voluntary, it's still a free system, even if people choose to cooperate. That's the fundamental difference with Communism, where people have no choice but to "share" and "cooperate."
I have seen the Free software movement to be, at least in part, a backlash against the increasing oppression of poor protections of the public domain.
I don't see it that way, at least not primarily. I think as a whole it is the realization of an economic reality: that the proprietary software model cannot compete with any software that might be released without proprietary restrictions, and that noone can stop software from being released free of these restrictions, so there is far more sense in helping oneself by using (and contributing, if applicable) to Free software than using or producing closed.
I have concerns about the free software ferver waning should the legal intellectual monopolies ease their grip
I think you are seeing Free software more from as an ideological viewpoint than as a practical necessity. I encourage you to spend a little while looking at the Open Source branding effort for Free software for awhile, which emphasizes the practical benefits rather than the idealistic and ethical motivations. The "ferver" will not fade, because the vast majority of it is based on the pragmatic fact that the Open Source or Free model meets the needs of people and businesses better than the other. This won't change no matter how restrictive the intellectual monopolies are with their software; on the contrary, if they open up, all they are doing is increasing the amount of Free software in the world and contributing to the movement. And if they loosen up without fully opening things, they will still be outcompeted by the collaborative Free software model.
gain enough legal strength with such things as software patents to marginalize the movement.
Patents are still to be feared.
I think that if all protections were removed, these same influences would exert their power in less controlled ways.
What protections? All we have now is their "protection" of their alleged "intellectual property." If that were removed, what would happen would be they would discover even sooner that they cannot compete long term with Free software. As near as I can tell, there aren't any legal protections that are protecting "us" against "them."
I have not seen enough legal pushback to open up the intellectual monopolies and shorten the time periods. I fear that the greater power to make those decisions lies with those receiving the money and that the populace won't be moved enough to stand against it. It is a matter of incentive. The populace with little understanding of it's loss gets outweighed by the greed incentive of a selfish individual(s) to lobby the law. I think that laws have been placed that will never be taken back.
This is why I take a minarchist libertarian point of view. If the government is restrained in its very constitution from having these kinds of powers, then noone can lobby the government to take these actions. Government should exist only to protect us from outside threats, protect our rights from violation by fellow citizens, and enforce civil contracts. If government's power to grant special privileges, monopolies, etc. were completely abolished, there would be no point in lobbying government. Everyone would finally have, at last, the exact same rights as everybody else. The problem is too many people want to receive new "rights" at the expense of everyone else.
Thank you for your insightful contribution to the discussion. I can tell you are well-informed about the original purpose of copyright and patents. I do take issue with one of your assumptions, though:
I would not want to see society take the step back to the dark ages where people horded information in guilds, abbeys and personal libraries.
I do not believe that would happen, and I offer as a counterexample the Free software movement itself. Many in the industry have seen (and the industry itself as a whole is slowly learning) that there is far more incentive to share ideas/software than to hoard it, even when the law gives them the legal right to hoard it! I don't think anything can stop that.
Uh, ever seen Linux Central? They seem to believe they are making money selling CDs of Free software. I guess they'll continue to do so as long as they believe they are making money.
There is no rule in Free software that says you can only sell for a nominal cost. You can sell for any cost you want. There is only the economic rule that people will not pay more for it than it is worth.
Sure I am. I'm currently a minarchist libertarian, but learning towards anarchist, also known as anarcho-capitalist.
There's more than one kind of libertarian, you know. Those who, like me, disagree with intellectual property laws are still a minority within the movement, but we are a significant minority. Here's a good discussion of the issue. Here's some more perspective. Saying libertarians are all agreed on the issue and that I'm not a libertarian because of my position on this is a misrepresentation. As Eric Raymond says, the non-coercion principle is about the only thing all libertarians agree on.
Secondly, a basic government is needed to protect property rights (that's a tenent of Libertariansim)
You're dismissing an entire branch of libertarianism, there. Anarcho-libertarians do not believe a basic government is needed, at all, or believe that government itself should be demonopolized (allowing a choice between any number of independent governments in a geographic area, or starting your own). Now, most of the ones I hear from still seem to believe in intellectual property, but I'm at a loss as to how intellectual property law is to be enforced in anarchy.
Furthermore, as I said in my post (did you read it?), I do not believe "intellectual property" is a property right. Nowhere in our legal code is it acknowledged as a right; it is a gift from the public encoded in the Constitution NOT because people have an "inherent right" to their ideas, but in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. (Did you read the Constitution?)
Your assumption is that everybody wants to code for free, which is utter bullshit.
Where did I say that? Strawman, or else you're reading somebody else's post.
I don't code for free, but I don't produce proprietary software, either. Something like 70% or more of the coding industry is not jobs for software makers like Microsoft or your favorite game company but coding custom software that is only of interest to one particular company. This will never go away; intellectual property laws have zero bearing on whether this kind of work needs to be done or not. Furthermore, removing the government-monopoly grant of intellectual property would radically change the software industry but not destroy it. Free software is demonstrating that. We are slowly approaching the point where, even with the protection of the government grant of exclusive rights "for a time," proprietary software will be unable to compete on price, features, performance, or TCO with Free software. That's the point of the whole article from Tocqueville! They see Free software as a neutron bomb that will "kill" the industry. What it will do is not kill it, but change it forever. There will still be money to be made in Free software. And even if not, people still have the right to give their "intellectual property" away for free, so this change is going to happen anyway.
How do you propose protecting the rights of people who develop software and want to sell it?
I do not believe anyone has a right to a profit at any particular business model, nor do I believe anyone has an exclusive right to an idea they have originated, thus I do not propose protecting these alleged "rights." (I do, of course, believe in protecting all the same rights for everybody, so they'd have the same basic rights as you and me.)
Meanwhile, it's not impossible to make money selling Free software. Why don't you do some reading some time?
so all software development is in the hands of people who happen to have the time and mone
Read Selling Free Software from GNU. As I said in my other post, noone ever seems to bother to actually read the things RMS and GNU puts out.
I'm not really karma whoring with this link; just trying to get more people to read this so we can actually see informed discussions instead of misunderstandings like this.
The only difference is average joe user can no longer buy a support contract for it, which is no difference, because average joe user bought his RedHat CDs from LinuxCentral instead, without a support contract. (I know, because I did.)
I'm a libertarian and an extreme laissez-faire capitalist. I agree with you that I can't see how people believe Free software is anti-capitalism. I am pro-Free software because I am a laissez-faire capitalist.
Intellectual property is a government granted monopoly. I do not agree with government granted monopolies, both on ethical grounds (just not right to restrain everybody else that way) as well as practical (not as good for the economy as some people think; the alternative is better, as demonstrated by Free software). Thus I value Free software as a legal means of resistance against these monopolies.
Read clearly what it says is the purpose of intellectual property in the Constitution some time. The purpose is not to recognize the inherent right people have to their ideas; the purpose is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by "securing for a limited time" an exclusive right to an idea for its inventor. That's a government-granted monopoly. If there were some issue of inherent rights here, then this right would last forever and making it end after the limited time would be immoral. (Your rights to your house don't expire after 14 years.)
Furthermore, I don't agree that the progress of science and the useful arts is part of the purpose of government. I believe granting these monopolies and restraining everyone else who didn't come up with an idea is unethical. Furthermore, I believe it actually hinders the progress of science and the useful arts. Free software is proving that when these monopolies (effectively) don't exist, everyone can build on the work others have released, and the science of software construction advances faster than it would have had people exercised their privilege of government-granted monopoly. In the same way, all science in history has been built on the work of others, and we can best help the advance of science by not restraining those who would use and advance the ideas of others.
Yes, as many point out, if intellectual property laws didn't exist, the GPL and copyleft could not exist, either. However, this misunderstands the purpose of copyleft. If you read what RMS has actually said (most people don't), you'll find that copyleft was invented as a weapon to strike against what he felt was an immoral exercise of copyright. He talks about how he used the rationale that it was acceptable to use the enemy's own weapon against them, even though he didn't agree with what they were doing. Copyleft is a way to use copyright law to work against what RMS felt was an abuse of copyright law.
RMS may be a communist hippie or something like many people say; I don't know. He and I certainly don't see eye to eye on everything (he doesn't advocate the abolition of intellectual property laws or copyright, actually). All I know is, when I think things through from a libertarian point of view, I arrive at the conclusion that Free software is the laissez-faire capitalist way.
Gah! Please ignore my other comment. I misread your post to say "shipping and handling." Pretend I was just trying to add to what you said, instead of contradicting you.:)
The idea that one deserves to burn whatever he can pay for makes less sense when you consider that the money only covers the cost of shipping and refining.
You have some insight, but that last comment has some economic problems. The money paid for gasoline pays for shipping, handling, refining, R&D, extraction, drilling, locating oil, any number of other things in the process I don't know about, and a (presumably hefty) profit to boot. When the cost of any of these components rises (say, for example, the cost of locating oil as we begin to run out and it becomes IMPOSSIBLE to find more), then the price at which they will be willing to sell it will rise, as well. Eventually, it will presumably be cheaper to use alternative energy sources.
What grounds would MS have to threaten them? In this country, you still can't threaten someone simply for competing with your business, even if you're a monopoly. I don't read anywhere where they need MS's approval to keep this source available.
I think you have missed some things. RedHat did not abandon the desktop, nor did they resign their mindshare. Their mindshare was reassigned to Fedora, and most of it stayed there. Fedora == RedHat. Yes, there's some differences, but Fedora is still what the old plain vanilla RedHat Linux was. The only difference is average joe user can no longer buy a support contract for it, which is no difference, because average joe user bought his RedHat CDs from LinuxCentral instead, without a support contract. (I know, because I did.)
So, RedHat didn't abandon the desktop. Meanwhile the RedHat Enterprise Linux product continues as before, and RedHat announces the new Desktop product for corporate users. Meanwhile Fedora continues to occupy the same niche as the old RedHat Linux.
I keep seeing these misconceptions repeated, so, one more time, everyone, all together: "Fedora == RedHat Linux."
I don't have any problem with Top 40 and Talk Radio being available. Nothing wrong with that.
I do have a problem with the fact that, in most markets, they are the ONLY formats available.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's not licensed from MS at all. They just wrote something to work with the protocol (actually I believe it works through Exchange's web interface, which means they basically wrote a very comprehensive screen-scraper.) I'm not sure what you mean about an option to not sell it or sell it; it's there's and they can do whatever they want with it.
It is, however, a violation of his intellectual property, the rights which the poster was claiming he should not have.
And you seem to prove there's no purpose in him possessing these alleged "rights." After all, you concede that point F is not true, thus he did not suffer any damage, despite your violation of his alleged "right." I contend that since he did not suffer any damage, there is no such right.
For cases where possessors of a copyright allegedly suffer economic damage from infringement, I contend this is only devaluation of inventory brought about through competition, and I don't believe that should be an actionable "damage." After all, if I sell shoes and you open a shoestore next door to me, you've devalued my business through your competition, and I've suffered economic "damage," but you still have the right to open your shoe store.
Most religions hold that their system of morality is absolute. If you don't believe that, then why go to church?
Think you misunderstood, or missed the context. I do believe that system of morality is absolute. I also do not believe I have the authority to enforce it.
Yes, I mean overlapping areas. Spain, Portugal, and France are three different areas for this discussion. I'll describe below what I mean, where there could be any number of governments within the territory we call "Spain."
The non-coercion or non-initiation of force principle is often misunderstood. The idea is not that all force is forbidden; the idea is that it is wrong to initiate it. Take this simple example: you walk into a dark alley and someone attempts to mug you. They have initiated force against you, and you have the right of self-defense.
One of the basic principles of libertarianism is that the right of self-defense can be delegated, and that is why we have governments that defend us; they are merely exercising a right we possessed and delegated. (As a corollary, another basic principle is that rights we do not possess can not be delegated. For example, I do not possess the right to confiscate your money and use it on public services, thus I cannot delegate such a right to the government; even if we vote on it, then, taking your money away to fund these things is an exercise of a power government cannot legitimately possess. Many minarchist libertarians still concede the necessity of minial taxes, but a growing number are beginning to conclude that all such services should be funded by voluntary donations (and preferable handled outside the purview of government, anyway. This is not so farfetched; public television operates mostly on donations, and when was the last time you noticed one of those breast cancer marathons to raise money?)
A friend who helped me become a libertarian once said that a government, as we currently understand it, is simply an organization that claims a monopoly on the use of force in a particular geographic area. They claim to be the only legitimate authority to exercise force and that all small-scale private uses must be authorized (delegated) by them. This is actually completely backward.
So, imagine that we demonopolized this. Then suppose five or ten or twenty or even a thousand different groups sprung up, all with completely voluntary participation, each considered to be the government of its members. These might all take radically different forms; some would be elective democracies; some might even be monarchies. Some might allow membership (citizenship) in additional governments; some might require exclusive citizenship.
Now, as long as the relationship between a government and its members is private, everything is fine and nobody else's business. But suppose a government or some of its members begin infringing the rights of persons outside of their government. Those people of course have the right of self-defense, which may or may not be delegated to one or more organizations (governments) to exercise that right on their behalf. Those people could do just what we would do now if a foreign government attacked us: fight in their own defense.
In this way, each government would act as a check on the others. This is checks and balances to the extreme! As long as people practice a "live and let live" policy toward each other, they have no cause for concern. You might work with people who are members of ten different governments, and presumably you would all be peaceable to each other. There's just no incentive to violate other people's rights when their government will come after you. (And that government has no incentive to violate other people's rights when those rights will be defended by another government.)
What an incredible world to imagine -- and all of it is based on voluntary agreement. Noone has to be a member of a government if they don't want to; if you don't like yours, you leave and join another or start your own. If you don't want to be a member of one, you can stay out of the whole thing if you like. If you really want to have a hereditary monarchy, more power to you, as long as noone else has to accept it except those who choose to. As long as people respect each other's rights, they can live in the same society in harmony this way. The multiple governments enforce the kind of live and let live, ain't nobody's business if I do kind of society some slashdotters here can only dream of.
Hmm, I found the following from Karl Fogel's The Promise of a Post-Copyright World as yet another perspective on this:
Although the free stream does not use traditional copyright, it does observe, and unofficially enforce, a "credit right". Works are frequently copied and excerpted with attribution -- but attempts to steal credit are usually detected speedily, and decried publicly. The same mechanisms that make copying easy make plagiarism very difficult. It's hard to secretly use someone else's work when a Google search can quickly locate the original. For example, teachers now routinely do Google searches on representative phrases when they suspect plagiarism in student papers.
Of course, in this case, anyone can just click "parent" and find out who really wrote the post you copied, so it's even easier.
What do you think is going to keep us out of the future Stallman outlines in the Right to Read? [gnu.org]
The main thing keeping us out of this is the willingness of some people to continue producing Free content and Free software. As long as the "intellectual property"-ites continue to maintain the facade of "property rights," they cannot deny anyone the right to do with their "intellectual property" as they wish, including the right to give it away. Sure, some stuff may be locked up for awhile, but in the mean time, some those who learn to do without it or with substitutes will make their methods available to everyone.
Do you really think the future is going to sway against copyright?
Yes, I do. The competition from Free systems is just too strong; the incentives to cooperate just too valuable. And some day, you'll be thinking, "Oh, there was some freak on slashdot who told me this was going to happen!" :)
You do bring up some significant obstacles, particular the issue of it being illegal to interface free systems to proprietary. However, I believe this is a transient concern. For one thing, the current legal weight seems to be to press for interoperability and the open standards that make it possible. For another, interoperability is just too valuable on its own, even if not coerced through legislation, for people to make impossible forever; and, if the systems are interoperable with open standards, they will be interfaced to by Free systems, even if just as an act of civil disobedience; there is furthermore no technologically unbreakable way to prevent or detect this. Finally, even if such a legal "Berlin wall" were established between Free and proprietary systems, enough people are interested in going it alone with Free systems only to still outcompete the proprietary. It'd just be the victory of gzip over compress/LZW all over again. I for one know which side of the wall I'd pick, even on just practical grounds without any ideology.
The demonstration is in progress. Watch the adoption rate of Free software climb along with the rejection rate of proprietary software. It's not done, yet, but you can already see several areas where Free software is a category killer.
Since you don't think we should have IP laws, surely you won't mind if I swipe your post and claim I wrote it.
There are several responses to that. One is that claiming you wrote something you did not would be fraud, and there are those who do not believe the government should grant the monopolies we refer to as "intellectual property" but still believe the government should protect against fraud. Another point of view is that claiming you wrote something you did not is an immoral or unethical act, but that it is not the government's place to enforce morality. I believe everyone should go to church, for example, but I do not believe the government should mandate that everyone go to church and enforce that law. So you and I might agree that claiming credit for someone else's work is immoral ... so what? Who's to say that our morality is any better than anyone else's? Why should the government enforce that morality?
After hearing at least this argument and the opposite argument (that it's communist) 1,000 times, I've got a neat theory: Open source combines the best aspects of both systems. You get the cheapness, efficiency, and transparency of a free market and you also get the equality and sharing of a communist model.
It's the ideal demonstration that given Freedom, individuals will choose the level of cooperation that benefits them the most (or best fits their goals, or whatever). As long as everything is free and voluntary, it's still a free system, even if people choose to cooperate. That's the fundamental difference with Communism, where people have no choice but to "share" and "cooperate."
In other words, it's about Freedom, not about Open Source. How about that?
This would be great if my employer didn't restrict access to archive.org as allegedly being in the "sex" category.
I have seen the Free software movement to be, at least in part, a backlash against the increasing oppression of poor protections of the public domain.
I don't see it that way, at least not primarily. I think as a whole it is the realization of an economic reality: that the proprietary software model cannot compete with any software that might be released without proprietary restrictions, and that noone can stop software from being released free of these restrictions, so there is far more sense in helping oneself by using (and contributing, if applicable) to Free software than using or producing closed.
I have concerns about the free software ferver waning should the legal intellectual monopolies ease their grip
I think you are seeing Free software more from as an ideological viewpoint than as a practical necessity. I encourage you to spend a little while looking at the Open Source branding effort for Free software for awhile, which emphasizes the practical benefits rather than the idealistic and ethical motivations. The "ferver" will not fade, because the vast majority of it is based on the pragmatic fact that the Open Source or Free model meets the needs of people and businesses better than the other. This won't change no matter how restrictive the intellectual monopolies are with their software; on the contrary, if they open up, all they are doing is increasing the amount of Free software in the world and contributing to the movement. And if they loosen up without fully opening things, they will still be outcompeted by the collaborative Free software model.
gain enough legal strength with such things as software patents to marginalize the movement.
Patents are still to be feared.
I think that if all protections were removed, these same influences would exert their power in less controlled ways.
What protections? All we have now is their "protection" of their alleged "intellectual property." If that were removed, what would happen would be they would discover even sooner that they cannot compete long term with Free software. As near as I can tell, there aren't any legal protections that are protecting "us" against "them."
I have not seen enough legal pushback to open up the intellectual monopolies and shorten the time periods. I fear that the greater power to make those decisions lies with those receiving the money and that the populace won't be moved enough to stand against it. It is a matter of incentive. The populace with little understanding of it's loss gets outweighed by the greed incentive of a selfish individual(s) to lobby the law. I think that laws have been placed that will never be taken back.
This is why I take a minarchist libertarian point of view. If the government is restrained in its very constitution from having these kinds of powers, then noone can lobby the government to take these actions. Government should exist only to protect us from outside threats, protect our rights from violation by fellow citizens, and enforce civil contracts. If government's power to grant special privileges, monopolies, etc. were completely abolished, there would be no point in lobbying government. Everyone would finally have, at last, the exact same rights as everybody else. The problem is too many people want to receive new "rights" at the expense of everyone else.
Thank you for your insightful contribution to the discussion. I can tell you are well-informed about the original purpose of copyright and patents. I do take issue with one of your assumptions, though:
I would not want to see society take the step back to the dark ages where people horded information in guilds, abbeys and personal libraries.
I do not believe that would happen, and I offer as a counterexample the Free software movement itself. Many in the industry have seen (and the industry itself as a whole is slowly learning) that there is far more incentive to share ideas/software than to hoard it, even when the law gives them the legal right to hoard it! I don't think anything can stop that.
Uh, ever seen Linux Central? They seem to believe they are making money selling CDs of Free software. I guess they'll continue to do so as long as they believe they are making money.
There is no rule in Free software that says you can only sell for a nominal cost. You can sell for any cost you want. There is only the economic rule that people will not pay more for it than it is worth.
Did you even read what I wrote?
First off, you're not a libertarian.
Sure I am. I'm currently a minarchist libertarian, but learning towards anarchist, also known as anarcho-capitalist.
There's more than one kind of libertarian, you know. Those who, like me, disagree with intellectual property laws are still a minority within the movement, but we are a significant minority. Here's a good discussion of the issue. Here's some more perspective. Saying libertarians are all agreed on the issue and that I'm not a libertarian because of my position on this is a misrepresentation. As Eric Raymond says, the non-coercion principle is about the only thing all libertarians agree on.
Secondly, a basic government is needed to protect property rights (that's a tenent of Libertariansim)
You're dismissing an entire branch of libertarianism, there. Anarcho-libertarians do not believe a basic government is needed, at all, or believe that government itself should be demonopolized (allowing a choice between any number of independent governments in a geographic area, or starting your own). Now, most of the ones I hear from still seem to believe in intellectual property, but I'm at a loss as to how intellectual property law is to be enforced in anarchy.
Furthermore, as I said in my post (did you read it?), I do not believe "intellectual property" is a property right. Nowhere in our legal code is it acknowledged as a right; it is a gift from the public encoded in the Constitution NOT because people have an "inherent right" to their ideas, but in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. (Did you read the Constitution?)
Your assumption is that everybody wants to code for free, which is utter bullshit.
Where did I say that? Strawman, or else you're reading somebody else's post.
I don't code for free, but I don't produce proprietary software, either. Something like 70% or more of the coding industry is not jobs for software makers like Microsoft or your favorite game company but coding custom software that is only of interest to one particular company. This will never go away; intellectual property laws have zero bearing on whether this kind of work needs to be done or not. Furthermore, removing the government-monopoly grant of intellectual property would radically change the software industry but not destroy it. Free software is demonstrating that. We are slowly approaching the point where, even with the protection of the government grant of exclusive rights "for a time," proprietary software will be unable to compete on price, features, performance, or TCO with Free software. That's the point of the whole article from Tocqueville! They see Free software as a neutron bomb that will "kill" the industry. What it will do is not kill it, but change it forever. There will still be money to be made in Free software. And even if not, people still have the right to give their "intellectual property" away for free, so this change is going to happen anyway.
How do you propose protecting the rights of people who develop software and want to sell it?
I do not believe anyone has a right to a profit at any particular business model, nor do I believe anyone has an exclusive right to an idea they have originated, thus I do not propose protecting these alleged "rights." (I do, of course, believe in protecting all the same rights for everybody, so they'd have the same basic rights as you and me.)
Meanwhile, it's not impossible to make money selling Free software. Why don't you do some reading some time?
so all software development is in the hands of people who happen to have the time and mone
Read Selling Free Software from GNU. As I said in my other post, noone ever seems to bother to actually read the things RMS and GNU puts out.
I'm not really karma whoring with this link; just trying to get more people to read this so we can actually see informed discussions instead of misunderstandings like this.
Where did you get the idea Ximian ever had MS's Exchange client?
Please see my original post:
The only difference is average joe user can no longer buy a support contract for it, which is no difference, because average joe user bought his RedHat CDs from LinuxCentral instead, without a support contract. (I know, because I did.)
Who cares about boxed sets?
I'm a libertarian and an extreme laissez-faire capitalist. I agree with you that I can't see how people believe Free software is anti-capitalism. I am pro-Free software because I am a laissez-faire capitalist.
Intellectual property is a government granted monopoly. I do not agree with government granted monopolies, both on ethical grounds (just not right to restrain everybody else that way) as well as practical (not as good for the economy as some people think; the alternative is better, as demonstrated by Free software). Thus I value Free software as a legal means of resistance against these monopolies.
Read clearly what it says is the purpose of intellectual property in the Constitution some time. The purpose is not to recognize the inherent right people have to their ideas; the purpose is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by "securing for a limited time" an exclusive right to an idea for its inventor. That's a government-granted monopoly. If there were some issue of inherent rights here, then this right would last forever and making it end after the limited time would be immoral. (Your rights to your house don't expire after 14 years.)
Furthermore, I don't agree that the progress of science and the useful arts is part of the purpose of government. I believe granting these monopolies and restraining everyone else who didn't come up with an idea is unethical. Furthermore, I believe it actually hinders the progress of science and the useful arts. Free software is proving that when these monopolies (effectively) don't exist, everyone can build on the work others have released, and the science of software construction advances faster than it would have had people exercised their privilege of government-granted monopoly. In the same way, all science in history has been built on the work of others, and we can best help the advance of science by not restraining those who would use and advance the ideas of others.
Yes, as many point out, if intellectual property laws didn't exist, the GPL and copyleft could not exist, either. However, this misunderstands the purpose of copyleft. If you read what RMS has actually said (most people don't), you'll find that copyleft was invented as a weapon to strike against what he felt was an immoral exercise of copyright. He talks about how he used the rationale that it was acceptable to use the enemy's own weapon against them, even though he didn't agree with what they were doing. Copyleft is a way to use copyright law to work against what RMS felt was an abuse of copyright law.
RMS may be a communist hippie or something like many people say; I don't know. He and I certainly don't see eye to eye on everything (he doesn't advocate the abolition of intellectual property laws or copyright, actually). All I know is, when I think things through from a libertarian point of view, I arrive at the conclusion that Free software is the laissez-faire capitalist way.
Gah! Please ignore my other comment. I misread your post to say "shipping and handling." Pretend I was just trying to add to what you said, instead of contradicting you. :)
The idea that one deserves to burn whatever he can pay for makes less sense when you consider that the money only covers the cost of shipping and refining.
You have some insight, but that last comment has some economic problems. The money paid for gasoline pays for shipping, handling, refining, R&D, extraction, drilling, locating oil, any number of other things in the process I don't know about, and a (presumably hefty) profit to boot. When the cost of any of these components rises (say, for example, the cost of locating oil as we begin to run out and it becomes IMPOSSIBLE to find more), then the price at which they will be willing to sell it will rise, as well. Eventually, it will presumably be cheaper to use alternative energy sources.
What grounds would MS have to threaten them? In this country, you still can't threaten someone simply for competing with your business, even if you're a monopoly. I don't read anywhere where they need MS's approval to keep this source available.
I think you have missed some things. RedHat did not abandon the desktop, nor did they resign their mindshare. Their mindshare was reassigned to Fedora, and most of it stayed there. Fedora == RedHat. Yes, there's some differences, but Fedora is still what the old plain vanilla RedHat Linux was. The only difference is average joe user can no longer buy a support contract for it, which is no difference, because average joe user bought his RedHat CDs from LinuxCentral instead, without a support contract. (I know, because I did.)
So, RedHat didn't abandon the desktop. Meanwhile the RedHat Enterprise Linux product continues as before, and RedHat announces the new Desktop product for corporate users. Meanwhile Fedora continues to occupy the same niche as the old RedHat Linux.
I keep seeing these misconceptions repeated, so, one more time, everyone, all together: "Fedora == RedHat Linux."
Thank you for the information; that does clear some things up.
I'm the AC parent of your reply.
Very glad to hear a response from you.
I don't have any problem with Top 40 and Talk Radio being available. Nothing wrong with that. I do have a problem with the fact that, in most markets, they are the ONLY formats available.
/me voices vociferous agreement. :)