'How does Microsoft beat Linux? The same way "you beat any other competitor: You offer good value
He makes some sense here. This is how markets are supposed to work, when competition exists. The existence of a FOSS Operating System does happen to provide competition to the "marketplace". Imagine the shitball we'd be rolling in without FOSS competition (or Mac OS).
But the scope Ballmer and his company operate in is limited. Software isn't just something that "offers value", to be "traded" in a "marketplace". It's something that works better with collaboration than competition. The marketplace can only go so far to produce useful tools when so many people can contribute to their own utility.
Sure, they might "beat" GNU by "offering value" by their own lights. All they are is a profit-seeking enterprise. But as a user, and not a "consumer", of software, I don't care about that. They can monopolize the entire software "marketplace" for all I care. I'll still be using software that grants user freedom, because, unlike Microsoft "products", it exists outside the marketplace entirely. From the narrow parochial market perspective, FOSS is undead. You can take away its marketshare, but you can't kill it.
You can't buy - or sell - freedom, despite its well-established value. You have to fight for it. And mere market "value" is no substitute for freedom.
I don't know that Ubuntu GNU/Linux isn't spreading.
I've long since given up trying to advocate a new OS to people who aren't fed up with the one they have. But last week, I heard from a friend of mine who told me his roommate installed it after seeing it on his PC. He installed it after seeing it on his girlfriend's computer. She happens to be my roommate, and she asked me to install it without prompting from me.
I didn't even install two of these systems. I didn't//have// to. The thing installs itself; I just get a postcard every so often.
Aside from that, freedom is worth more than free. I am worth more than beer. Thank you very much.
So he may be right, in the sense that Windows users basically hate freedom (like terrorists! er, no wait...), so they put a low price tag on it. But everyone I know who's installed Gutsy since it's been out has been pretty pleased with it//precisely// because of the lack of restrictions on what it lets them do, instead of trying to sell and advertise a bunch of crap they don't want, or have to pay more to get if they do want it.
Perhaps freedom won't sell. But that's because it can only be given away. And as people realize that they're paying to have their freedoms//taken away// instead of given to them, they find ways to make the switch.
And again, why is it so important that GNU/Linux "spread"? Just keep it^H^H me free.
"The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."
-- I.J. Good, 1965
Except for those inventions necessary during the period we'll have to wait for the relevant patents, copyrights, and EULAs expire. Or until Free and Open Source Software hackers manage to reverse engineer it without running afoul of the IP minefield that will be saturated around it.
To an industrialist, there are numerous disadvantages to humans. For one, it takes 16+ years to create a new one, you can only work them so many hours a week, they demand benefits, respect, and a come with a whole host of legal requirements to use as employees. Software is trivial to duplicate, easy to produce (and dispose of) new hardware for, is legal to abuse in ways you'd never get away with (for long) with humans, and is property.
Even dumb software workers has enormous economic value.
Now how much you want to bet working people will benefit from them?
Look, I'd love to lose my job to a machine as much as the next slacker. But how are we going to pay the bills?
The good news is that smart software can make for a huge economic boom. the bad news is that everyone working for a living now aren't likely to be included in it.
SomeONE who is free is better than something that is free.
This has long been my difficulty with the name "free software": the subject of the license tends to be software. But the point is the freedom, not of the software, but of the user.
My understanding of "RFID" tags is that since they are powered by the energy broadcast by the reader, the tags themselves can't do very much in terms of computation. As a result, they are limited to parroting back a static serial number (though a long one, or part of it) that's determined when the tag is manufactured.
This means that the tags themselves cannot do any encryption at all.
If this is the case, why the hell would anybody want to use it to gain secure access to anything when anybody nearby the tag with an RFID reader can read the serial number and spoof the tag?
This would be like writing your credit card number on the front of your shirt -//in infrared ink//. Sure, you'd need fancy infrared optics to read it - but why the hell would you take that chance?
Is my understanding flawed, here? Are there newer RFID tags that actually can do crypto (and are people like those in TFA using them)? I may be wrong in any number of ways, so I'm looking for some more solid info.
Ironically, moving all that fuel from Titan to Earth where it could be used would require more fuel than it has. The spent boat shell would then orbit just inside the asteroid belt.
Unless, of course, you were ok with taking shipment in, say, 500 years. By which point, civilization will have either gone extinct, or outlawed burning hydrocarbons entirely.
I don't think I've ever read a summary or an article as vacuous and devoid of substance as this. I keep re-reading sentences and paragraphs trying to figure out what it is he's actually trying to say. It comes out as more of a loosely-related, grammatically correct anagram than an argument.
This guy is not a troll. He's riddled himself with so many bad subtexts and assumptions that he's not even wrong.
The main purpose of Free and Open Source software licensing is to insure that all of a device's native capabilities are always available to the user.
The main purpose of DRM is to insure that some of a device's native capabilities (eg, the ability to copy bits) are//not// available to the user in specific circumstances.
THAT is why FOSS DRM does not really exist (and why nobody uses Sun's DReaM). It's not about software quality control - it's a flaw in the designed intent of these systems that you can point out based on the//licensing// used, without even considering any code at all.
You can't expect to design a "technological protection measure" that one commits a felony to bypass, and then release it under a license that expressly permits them to bypass it.
This isn't a case of: "what does technology do to you?" It's more like: "what do YOU do with IT?"
This isn't to say that new technologies can't oppress you in new ways when they are forced on you in (eg) employment relationships; just that the core of the problem there isn't technology - it's the employment relationship.
When we are given real control over whether and how to use technology, it's plenty liberating; but putting a pager on a serf just amplifies his subservient condition.
Much of the good that FOSS applications do is in the changes that proprietary vendors have to make in their applications in order to remain competitive.
I'm actually finding that more of my friends are really starting to think about moving over now that Windows (in particular, esp. Vista, but also XP) is starting to become buried by its own limitations (authoritarian updates, security vulnerabilities, etc.) at the same time distros like Ubuntu make desktop usability on a FOSS platform very comfortable.
So the freedom aspect is vital, in the sense that vendors and developers need it in order to have the freedom to produce applications that software markets frame as "competitive". Only when they do can users without a desire to get into the guts really see the benefits, but that doesn't mean user freedom doesn't matter. But as we see shrinking market shares result from growing user freedom, market demands will only force proprietary software (and media) vendors to lock down their applications making them, ironically, more difficult to use and thus less desirable.
We've reached a tipping point where, now that usability of FOSS platforms has matured, licensing serves as a more prominent basis for differentiating software products.
pro: single point of failure for the rest of us. Break once, hack anywhere.
Like anti-spam measures, filtering systems will probably only work well//because// they're not popular enough to merit much attention of attackers looking to circumvent the system. Diversity pays.
* This is not a war. Constitutionally, Congress reserves the right to declare war, and they have not. the "AUMF" is not a formal declaration of war. No other circumstances stipulated in the Constitution authorize the suspension of Habeas Corpus.
* The 2000 and 2004 elections both elected the Democratic candidates, and were overturned by electoral fraud favoring Republicans. If you want to imply that we get the government we deserve, then you only have the rather weak form of the argument that says we elected a government prior to those elections that didn't care to pursue and remedy electoral fraud.
Don't get me wrong; there is a frighteningly significant number of Americans who still support "mister 26%". Indeed, the only reason that electoral fraud is a viable tactic is that the country was so evenly split in previous elections. But what if the election were held today, after almost 3 years of a unitary executive who is almost completely unaccountable to the People or it's Congress? If the People were voting for anything, it was what was apparent to them from the first four years of the Bush presidency, before Gonzales' USA firings, before the exposure of warrantless wiretaps, before the Plame outing, before the "surge", before Katrina, before the Military Commissions Act, and before the SCHIP veto. I could go on, obviously.
Just because our previous elections have been contentious doe not mean that the system is not broken, or that it has not been compromised by corrupt interests. The Rovean Culture War is not a sign of a healthy democratic republic.
Did you know that The TCG/TCPA specifications create a technical definition of the "owner" of device? It could be the manufacturer, the reseller, a sysadmin, a user, or someone the user loans the machine to. It all depends on who "takes ownership" (also technically defined in the spec) first. The "owner", in this sense, is the one who gets to specify which signing keys are needed to sign code that the owner wants to allow to run. This can include vendor keys, and even a user's own signing key.
Whether TC is considered "evil" always seems to depend on differences between who uses the device, and who "owns" it in the TC sense. If the TC "owner" matches the consumer who bought the device, there's little problem. But if the TC "owner" is actually the vendor of the device, users can get the shaft if the "owner" elects to restrict native capabilities of the device.
The case of enterprise sysadmins taking "ownership" of company devices away from users is a borderline case that most people can go along with. After all, the device is company property on loan to employee users.
Commander: "Alright, men. We've developed a way to generate a transmit power requiring nothing but sunlight! What should we do with it?"
Officer: "Send it as far out of people's as possible, so that we can turn it off on them whenever we want! Say, to orbit?"
Brilliant! You've just taken the most democratizing and resilient aspect of solar (and wind/thermal) - distributed generation - and centralized it.
Seriously, what's wrong with just producing better panels, and sending them to people//on Earth//, so that maybe we won't NEED so much damn military intervention, both because we don't need to fight for their oil, and they don't need to fight to protect it?
Less blood for oil, more solar panels for oil.
And think - you wouldn't even need to pay an arm and a leg to launch them into orbit. I realize surface sunlight isn't as plentiful as in an unobstructed orbit, but wouldn't the expense saved in launching mass into orbit make for a lot more panels, spread out to a lot more people, which could recoup the investment a lot faster?
Licensing: Second Life has released its client under the GPL, and has claimed that it will release its server code under the GPL as well. This means I can host my own private 3D world on my own server. Metaplace claims its clients will be open source, but remains silent on its server. Multiverse's client and server are proprietary. The client is gratis, but the server is only gratis for non-commercial use. Commercial use can be licensed flat-fee or through revenue sharing.
Geography: Second Life has one world map (at least until the server source is released), whereas Metaplace and Multiverse are designed to allow users to create spatially separate environments (though SL approximates this with "private islands"). Metaplace and SL allows users to connect spaces with portals.
Hosting: Second Life charges users at least US$10/mo to "own" "land" they host, in addition to market prices for particular parcels. Metaplace encourages users to create their own spaces free of charge until traffic exceeds a certain threshold, at which they begin charging hosting fees. Multiverse allows users to host their own worlds on their own hardware and networks using their proprietary server software.
Only Multiverse gives you the freedom to self-host (and keep backups), but it does so at the cost of the freedom to modify and redistribute the software. Second Life gives you the software freedom for the client (and claims to be releasing the server GPL soon, as well), but you are currently limited to subscribing to create a "private" environment on their servers only (which, afaik, you cannot even make backups of). Metaplace will host your private, low-traffic environment for free, but still won't let you self-host (although backups are undetermined).
There are deal-breakers in all of these, so far as I'm concerned. Second Life is still closest to ideal, I think, since they have made numerous claims in the past that they're going to release their server GPL. If Metaplace's APIs are as open as they're selling, however, they may give Linden Lab a run for it's... er, license, if it turns out to be easier for third parties to reverse-engineer the Metaplace protocols into a FOSS server.
Copy protection (DRM by another name) doesn't "prevent most piracy".
What you want is not a software application, but a website. Run the service on your own systems, that way you can retain control over it, instead of your users. It works for countless applications.
Web services effectively end runs the freedoms advocated by the Free Software movement, and effectively eliminates the piracy problem without resorting to proprietary licensing or futile DRM or copy protection. That's why every business that still operates by resorting to user lock-in is moving to it.
I might sound a bit bitter and hostile here, but them's the facts as I see them. I also don't know if it's feasible to make your particular application a web app, but them's the breaks.
The fight over FISA is not about wiretapping - it's about judicial oversight. You can tap all the god damn lines you want; just get a warrant! FISA even provides secret courts for that, for crying out loud!
So is McConnell arguing that judicial oversight would kill 50% of the executive branch's surveillance capabilities? If so, we have an excellent argument that there's a good reason for that.
If foiling the German plot was a legitimate success, why would you argue that it would be impossible to persuade a judge in a secret court to approve a warrant for it?
"The goal of innovation is to make or save money, and IT should never lose sight of that central fact."
Within the rather thin, anemic context of profit-seeking enterprises, yes.
It's been apparent for years, however, that profit-seeking behavior presents one of the greatest obstructions to innovation, whose purpose is to actually help people (and not just "enterprises") to improve their conditions and lives. From proprietary software and web services EULAs, the DMCA and abuse of its takedown notice systems, incessant pointless copyright extensions, to incompetent patent granting system, you don't have to go far to at least reasonably wonder if "the bottom line" is failing to help innovation more than innovation os failing to help generate profits.
There's a LOT more to life outside the grubbing business world, but judging by the prevalence of people making misleading statements like this, it's easy to forget.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes longer than .01% of your time to switch providers.
'How does Microsoft beat Linux? The same way "you beat any other competitor: You offer good value
He makes some sense here. This is how markets are supposed to work, when competition exists. The existence of a FOSS Operating System does happen to provide competition to the "marketplace". Imagine the shitball we'd be rolling in without FOSS competition (or Mac OS).
But the scope Ballmer and his company operate in is limited. Software isn't just something that "offers value", to be "traded" in a "marketplace". It's something that works better with collaboration than competition. The marketplace can only go so far to produce useful tools when so many people can contribute to their own utility.
Sure, they might "beat" GNU by "offering value" by their own lights. All they are is a profit-seeking enterprise. But as a user, and not a "consumer", of software, I don't care about that. They can monopolize the entire software "marketplace" for all I care. I'll still be using software that grants user freedom, because, unlike Microsoft "products", it exists outside the marketplace entirely. From the narrow parochial market perspective, FOSS is undead. You can take away its marketshare, but you can't kill it.
You can't buy - or sell - freedom, despite its well-established value. You have to fight for it. And mere market "value" is no substitute for freedom.
http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html#footnote2
And retail represents only a quarter of all software development.
Peace is ruining the market for war profiteering!
I don't know that Ubuntu GNU/Linux isn't spreading.
//have// to. The thing installs itself; I just get a postcard every so often.
//precisely// because of the lack of restrictions on what it lets them do, instead of trying to sell and advertise a bunch of crap they don't want, or have to pay more to get if they do want it.
//taken away// instead of given to them, they find ways to make the switch.
I've long since given up trying to advocate a new OS to people who aren't fed up with the one they have. But last week, I heard from a friend of mine who told me his roommate installed it after seeing it on his PC. He installed it after seeing it on his girlfriend's computer. She happens to be my roommate, and she asked me to install it without prompting from me.
I didn't even install two of these systems. I didn't
Aside from that, freedom is worth more than free. I am worth more than beer. Thank you very much.
So he may be right, in the sense that Windows users basically hate freedom (like terrorists! er, no wait...), so they put a low price tag on it. But everyone I know who's installed Gutsy since it's been out has been pretty pleased with it
Perhaps freedom won't sell. But that's because it can only be given away. And as people realize that they're paying to have their freedoms
And again, why is it so important that GNU/Linux "spread"? Just keep it^H^H me free.
"The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."
-- I.J. Good, 1965
Except for those inventions necessary during the period we'll have to wait for the relevant patents, copyrights, and EULAs expire. Or until Free and Open Source Software hackers manage to reverse engineer it without running afoul of the IP minefield that will be saturated around it.
To an industrialist, there are numerous disadvantages to humans. For one, it takes 16+ years to create a new one, you can only work them so many hours a week, they demand benefits, respect, and a come with a whole host of legal requirements to use as employees. Software is trivial to duplicate, easy to produce (and dispose of) new hardware for, is legal to abuse in ways you'd never get away with (for long) with humans, and is property.
Even dumb software workers has enormous economic value.
Now how much you want to bet working people will benefit from them?
Look, I'd love to lose my job to a machine as much as the next slacker. But how are we going to pay the bills?
The good news is that smart software can make for a huge economic boom. the bad news is that everyone working for a living now aren't likely to be included in it.
SomeONE who is free is better than something that is free.
This has long been my difficulty with the name "free software": the subject of the license tends to be software. But the point is the freedom, not of the software, but of the user.
Not free as in beer, but free as in YOU.
My understanding of "RFID" tags is that since they are powered by the energy broadcast by the reader, the tags themselves can't do very much in terms of computation. As a result, they are limited to parroting back a static serial number (though a long one, or part of it) that's determined when the tag is manufactured.
//in infrared ink//. Sure, you'd need fancy infrared optics to read it - but why the hell would you take that chance?
This means that the tags themselves cannot do any encryption at all.
If this is the case, why the hell would anybody want to use it to gain secure access to anything when anybody nearby the tag with an RFID reader can read the serial number and spoof the tag?
This would be like writing your credit card number on the front of your shirt -
Is my understanding flawed, here? Are there newer RFID tags that actually can do crypto (and are people like those in TFA using them)? I may be wrong in any number of ways, so I'm looking for some more solid info.
Ironically, moving all that fuel from Titan to Earth where it could be used would require more fuel than it has. The spent boat shell would then orbit just inside the asteroid belt.
Unless, of course, you were ok with taking shipment in, say, 500 years. By which point, civilization will have either gone extinct, or outlawed burning hydrocarbons entirely.
I don't think I've ever read a summary or an article as vacuous and devoid of substance as this. I keep re-reading sentences and paragraphs trying to figure out what it is he's actually trying to say. It comes out as more of a loosely-related, grammatically correct anagram than an argument.
This guy is not a troll. He's riddled himself with so many bad subtexts and assumptions that he's not even wrong.
Asking about technology policy with all this other stuff going on is like asking:
"But other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
The main purpose of Free and Open Source software licensing is to insure that all of a device's native capabilities are always available to the user.
//not// available to the user in specific circumstances.
//licensing// used, without even considering any code at all.
The main purpose of DRM is to insure that some of a device's native capabilities (eg, the ability to copy bits) are
THAT is why FOSS DRM does not really exist (and why nobody uses Sun's DReaM). It's not about software quality control - it's a flaw in the designed intent of these systems that you can point out based on the
You can't expect to design a "technological protection measure" that one commits a felony to bypass, and then release it under a license that expressly permits them to bypass it.
This isn't a case of: "what does technology do to you?"
It's more like: "what do YOU do with IT?"
This isn't to say that new technologies can't oppress you in new ways when they are forced on you in (eg) employment relationships; just that the core of the problem there isn't technology - it's the employment relationship.
When we are given real control over whether and how to use technology, it's plenty liberating; but putting a pager on a serf just amplifies his subservient condition.
Much of the good that FOSS applications do is in the changes that proprietary vendors have to make in their applications in order to remain competitive.
I'm actually finding that more of my friends are really starting to think about moving over now that Windows (in particular, esp. Vista, but also XP) is starting to become buried by its own limitations (authoritarian updates, security vulnerabilities, etc.) at the same time distros like Ubuntu make desktop usability on a FOSS platform very comfortable.
So the freedom aspect is vital, in the sense that vendors and developers need it in order to have the freedom to produce applications that software markets frame as "competitive". Only when they do can users without a desire to get into the guts really see the benefits, but that doesn't mean user freedom doesn't matter. But as we see shrinking market shares result from growing user freedom, market demands will only force proprietary software (and media) vendors to lock down their applications making them, ironically, more difficult to use and thus less desirable.
We've reached a tipping point where, now that usability of FOSS platforms has matured, licensing serves as a more prominent basis for differentiating software products.
Isn't charging certain users more just because they're making money what we're all up in arms about with Network Neutrality?
"They want to use my posts fer free, but I ain't gonna let 'em."
-- USPS director Ed Whitacre
"It's not a tube you can just dump something on. It's a series of BIG TRUCKS!"
-- US Senator Ted Stevens
con: you would punish (only) lawful users.
pro: single point of failure for the rest of us. Break once, hack anywhere.
Like anti-spam measures, filtering systems will probably only work well
* This is not a war. Constitutionally, Congress reserves the right to declare war, and they have not. the "AUMF" is not a formal declaration of war. No other circumstances stipulated in the Constitution authorize the suspension of Habeas Corpus.
* The 2000 and 2004 elections both elected the Democratic candidates, and were overturned by electoral fraud favoring Republicans. If you want to imply that we get the government we deserve, then you only have the rather weak form of the argument that says we elected a government prior to those elections that didn't care to pursue and remedy electoral fraud.
Don't get me wrong; there is a frighteningly significant number of Americans who still support "mister 26%". Indeed, the only reason that electoral fraud is a viable tactic is that the country was so evenly split in previous elections. But what if the election were held today, after almost 3 years of a unitary executive who is almost completely unaccountable to the People or it's Congress? If the People were voting for anything, it was what was apparent to them from the first four years of the Bush presidency, before Gonzales' USA firings, before the exposure of warrantless wiretaps, before the Plame outing, before the "surge", before Katrina, before the Military Commissions Act, and before the SCHIP veto. I could go on, obviously.
Just because our previous elections have been contentious doe not mean that the system is not broken, or that it has not been compromised by corrupt interests. The Rovean Culture War is not a sign of a healthy democratic republic.
Did you know that The TCG/TCPA specifications create a technical definition of the "owner" of device? It could be the manufacturer, the reseller, a sysadmin, a user, or someone the user loans the machine to. It all depends on who "takes ownership" (also technically defined in the spec) first. The "owner", in this sense, is the one who gets to specify which signing keys are needed to sign code that the owner wants to allow to run. This can include vendor keys, and even a user's own signing key.
Whether TC is considered "evil" always seems to depend on differences between who uses the device, and who "owns" it in the TC sense. If the TC "owner" matches the consumer who bought the device, there's little problem. But if the TC "owner" is actually the vendor of the device, users can get the shaft if the "owner" elects to restrict native capabilities of the device.
The case of enterprise sysadmins taking "ownership" of company devices away from users is a borderline case that most people can go along with. After all, the device is company property on loan to employee users.
More here:
http://n8o.r30.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/blog:trustedcomputingnotaryinabox
Commander: "Alright, men. We've developed a way to generate a transmit power requiring nothing but sunlight! What should we do with it?"
//on Earth//, so that maybe we won't NEED so much damn military intervention, both because we don't need to fight for their oil, and they don't need to fight to protect it?
Officer: "Send it as far out of people's as possible, so that we can turn it off on them whenever we want! Say, to orbit?"
Brilliant! You've just taken the most democratizing and resilient aspect of solar (and wind/thermal) - distributed generation - and centralized it.
Seriously, what's wrong with just producing better panels, and sending them to people
Less blood for oil, more solar panels for oil.
And think - you wouldn't even need to pay an arm and a leg to launch them into orbit. I realize surface sunlight isn't as plentiful as in an unobstructed orbit, but wouldn't the expense saved in launching mass into orbit make for a lot more panels, spread out to a lot more people, which could recoup the investment a lot faster?
Only Multiverse gives you the freedom to self-host (and keep backups), but it does so at the cost of the freedom to modify and redistribute the software. Second Life gives you the software freedom for the client (and claims to be releasing the server GPL soon, as well), but you are currently limited to subscribing to create a "private" environment on their servers only (which, afaik, you cannot even make backups of). Metaplace will host your private, low-traffic environment for free, but still won't let you self-host (although backups are undetermined).
There are deal-breakers in all of these, so far as I'm concerned. Second Life is still closest to ideal, I think, since they have made numerous claims in the past that they're going to release their server GPL. If Metaplace's APIs are as open as they're selling, however, they may give Linden Lab a run for it's... er, license, if it turns out to be easier for third parties to reverse-engineer the Metaplace protocols into a FOSS server.
Copy protection (DRM by another name) doesn't "prevent most piracy".
What you want is not a software application, but a website. Run the service on your own systems, that way you can retain control over it, instead of your users. It works for countless applications.
Web services effectively end runs the freedoms advocated by the Free Software movement, and effectively eliminates the piracy problem without resorting to proprietary licensing or futile DRM or copy protection. That's why every business that still operates by resorting to user lock-in is moving to it.
I might sound a bit bitter and hostile here, but them's the facts as I see them. I also don't know if it's feasible to make your particular application a web app, but them's the breaks.
The fight over FISA is not about wiretapping - it's about judicial oversight. You can tap all the god damn lines you want; just get a warrant! FISA even provides secret courts for that, for crying out loud!
So is McConnell arguing that judicial oversight would kill 50% of the executive branch's surveillance capabilities? If so, we have an excellent argument that there's a good reason for that.
If foiling the German plot was a legitimate success, why would you argue that it would be impossible to persuade a judge in a secret court to approve a warrant for it?
ROX Filer
It's freaking fast, responsive, intuitive (similar to the Mac OS Finder), and hackable.
It's so fast, I've used it to replace some menus I used to use, in some ways.
"The goal of innovation is to make or save money, and IT should never lose sight of that central fact."
Within the rather thin, anemic context of profit-seeking enterprises, yes.
It's been apparent for years, however, that profit-seeking behavior presents one of the greatest obstructions to innovation, whose purpose is to actually help people (and not just "enterprises") to improve their conditions and lives. From proprietary software and web services EULAs, the DMCA and abuse of its takedown notice systems, incessant pointless copyright extensions, to incompetent patent granting system, you don't have to go far to at least reasonably wonder if "the bottom line" is failing to help innovation more than innovation os failing to help generate profits.
There's a LOT more to life outside the grubbing business world, but judging by the prevalence of people making misleading statements like this, it's easy to forget.